The Red Pill

September 29, 2003, 10:22 a.m.
Spy Games
Was it really a secret that Joe Wilson's wife worked for the CIA?

It's the top story in the Washington Post this morning as well as in many other media outlets. Who leaked the fact that the wife of Joseph C. Wilson IV worked for the CIA?

What also might be worth asking: "Who didn't know?"

I believe I was the first to publicly question the credibility of Mr. Wilson, a retired diplomat sent to Niger to look into reports that Saddam Hussein had attempted to purchase yellowcake uranium for his nuclear-weapons program.

On July 6, Mr. Wilson wrote an op-ed for the New York Times in which he said: "I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."

On July 11, I wrote a piece for NRO arguing that Mr. Wilson had no basis for that conclusion — and that his political leanings and associations (not disclosed by the Times and others journalists interviewing him) cast serious doubt on his objectivity.

On July 14, Robert Novak wrote a column in the Post and other newspapers naming Mr. Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA operative.

That wasn't news to me. I had been told that — but not by anyone working in the White House. Rather, I learned it from someone who formerly worked in the government and he mentioned it in an offhand manner, leading me to infer it was something that insiders were well aware of.

I chose not to include it (I wrote a second NRO piece on this issue on July 18) because it didn't seem particularly relevant to the question of whether or not Mr. Wilson should be regarded as a disinterested professional who had done a thorough investigation into Saddam's alleged attempts to purchase uranium in Africa.

What did appear relevant could easily be found in what the CIA would call "open sources." For example, Mr. Wilson had long been a bitter critic of the current administration, writing in such left-wing publications as The Nation that under President Bush, "America has entered one of it periods of historical madness" and had "imperial ambitions."

What's more, he was affiliated with the pro-Saudi Middle East Institute and he had recently been the keynote speaker for the Education for Peace in Iraq Center, a far-Left group that opposed not only the U.S. military intervention in Iraq but also the sanctions and the no-fly zones that protected Iraqi Kurds and Shias from being slaughtered by Saddam.

Mr. Wilson is now saying (on C-SPAN this morning, for example) that he opposed military action in Iraq because he didn't believe Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and he foresaw the possibility of a difficult occupation. In fact, prior to the U.S. invasion, Mr. Wilson told ABC's Dave Marash that if American troops were sent into Iraq, Saddam might "use a biological weapon in a battle that we might have. For example, if we're taking Baghdad or we're trying to take, in ground-to-ground, hand-to-hand combat."

Equally, important and also overlooked: Mr. Wilson had no apparent background or skill as an investigator. As Mr. Wilson himself acknowledged, his so-called investigation was nothing more than "eight days drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people" at the U.S. embassy in Niger. Based on those conversations, he concluded that "it was highly doubtful that any [sale of uranium from Niger to Iraq] had ever taken place."

That's hardly the same as disproving what British intelligence believed — and continues to believe: that Saddam Hussein was actively attempting to purchase uranium from somewhere in Africa. (Whether Saddam succeeded or not isn't the point; were Saddam attempting to make such purchases it would suggest that his nuclear-weapons-development program was active and ongoing.)

For some reason, this background and these questions have been consistently omitted in the Establishment media's reporting on Mr. Wilson and his charges.

There also remains this intriguing question: Was it primarily due to the fact that Mr. Wilson's wife worked for the CIA that he received the Niger assignment?

Mr. Wilson has said that his mission came about following a request from Vice President Cheney. But it appears that if Mr. Cheney made the request at all, he made it of the CIA and did not know Mr. Wilson and certainly did not specify that he wanted Mr. Wilson put on the case.

It has to be seen as puzzling that the agency would deal with an inquiry from the White House on a sensitive national-security matter by sending a retired, Bush-bashing diplomat with no investigative experience. Or didn't the CIA bother to look into Mr. Wilson's background?

If that's what passes for tradecraft in Langley, we're in more trouble than any of us have realized.

Clifford D. May, a former New York Times foreign correspondent, is president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism.

Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff doesn't support Clark

Hugh Shelton, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks, has some harsh words for a fellow former general. The Los Altos (Calif.) Town Crier reports on Shelton's appearance at a local college:

"What do you think of General Wesley Clark and would you support him as a presidential candidate," was the question put to him by moderator Dick Henning, assuming that all military men stood in support of each other. General Shelton took a drink of water and Henning said, "I noticed you took a drink on that one!"

"That question makes me wish it were vodka," said Shelton. "I've known Wes for a long time. I will tell you the reason he came out of Europe early had to do with integrity and character issues, things that are very near and dear to my heart. I'm not going to say whether I'm a Republican or a Democrat. I'll just say Wes won't get my vote."

Yet another example of Left-wing media bias

WSJ OpinionJournal
Israeli soldiers entering a Gaza "refugee camp" came under fire yesterday. When they returned fire, a tank shell killed an unarmed 15-year-old and also wounded some of the gunmen. Reuters tries to blame President Bush, headlining the story: "Israel Troops Kill Gaza Youth After Bush UN Speech."

Once again, Reuters missed an opportunity to practice journalism honestly, and that's very disappointing.

Moore lies from the Left
From the WSJ OpinionJournal

We generally ignore the horrid Michael Moore, but this seems worth mentioning. On his Web site, the dumpy documentarian, who of late has been plumping for Wesley Clark, makes the following claim:

My wife and I were invited over to a neighbor's home 12 days ago where Clark told those gathered that certain people, acting on behalf of the Bush administration, called him immediately after the attacks on September 11th and asked him to go on TV to tell the country that Saddam Hussein was "involved" in the attacks. He asked them for proof, but they couldn't provide any. He refused their request.

We suppose it's possible that Clark actually said this in front of Moore, but it seems more likely that Moore is recycling an old lie, embellishing it with the claim that he heard Clark say it in person. As we noted in June, the Angry Left, led by former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, had been spreading this canard, based on an ambiguous comment Clark made on NBC's "Meet the Press." Clark subsequently issued a clarification, saying he had received no such call from the White House (hey, the guy claims Karl Rove won't even return his phone calls, for heaven's sake!), but the call had come from "a Middle East think tank outside the country."

Last week the Toronto Star reported the caller had stepped forward and identified himself. He is Thomas Hecht of Montreal, founder of the Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies in Israel. "Hecht said he called Clark either Sept. 12 or Sept. 13--not the morning of the attacks, as the former general said--but he merely passed on information he had received from Israel which drew a purported link," the Star reports. Hecht added: "I don't know why I would be confused with the White House. I don't even have white paint on my house."

Who's claiming who is unpatriotic?

Democrats spend an awful lot of time talking about patriotism. For a generation--since becoming the anti-Vietnam War party, really--Dems have been on the defensive on the topic. When a Republican criticizes a Democrat's position on a matter pertaining to national security or policies involving patriotic symbols, the Democrat usually protests: Stop questioning my patriotism! But we're hard-pressed to think of any example in which a Republican politician has actually called a Democrat unpatriotic.

On the theory that the best defense is a good offense, some Democrats have started pre-emptively wrapping themselves in the flag. Unlike Republicans, they actually do level charges of unpatriotism. Thus peevish peacenik Howard Dean: "John Ashcroft is not a patriot." And here he was at last night's debate (of which The Wall Street Journal was a co-sponsor):

The biggest issue in this campaign is the question of patriotism and democracy. I am tired of having John Ashcroft and Dick Cheney and Jerry Falwell and Rush Limbaugh lay a claim to patriotism and lay a claim to the American flag. That flag belongs to every single one of us. And I am tired of having our democracy hijacked by the right wing of this country.

Now first of all, Jerry Falwell? What century is Dean living in? We guess he's playing to the elderly vote, for Falwell hasn't been a major force in Republican politics since the early 1980s. In any case, he hardly fits as an example of someone "laying a claim to patriotism," seeing as how he was last seen two years ago suggesting that Sept. 11 was God's punishment for America.

As for Dean, let's stipulate that he is indeed a patriot and that he has every right to wrap himself in the flag. Is going around bragging about what a patriot he is, while impugning the patriotism of his opponents, really the best way of expressing his patriotism? Besides, whatever you may think of John Ashcroft, calling him unpatriotic is obviously and laughably false, like calling Howard Dean phlegmatic.

Also invoking patriotism last night was the new kid on the block, Gen. Wesley Clark:

If I am president, we are going to build on a new kind of American patriotism. We are going to reach out to people and bring them together based on a concept of public service and contribution to the public good, the protection of our liberties, the right to speak out.

Hmm, public service, public good, liberty, free expression: The elements of Clark's "new kind of patriotism" seem indistinguishable from the old kind. So what is Clark getting at? The New Republic's Peter Beinart argues that it's all an effort to obscure differences over policy:

Much of the Democratic base still doesn't take national security seriously. Sure, Democrats know that most Americans don't trust the party to keep them safe. But they deny that this distrust has anything to do with prevailing Democratic ideology. The party, they reassure themselves, merely needs a tougher image.

And so Democrats keep trying to find new, ever more Rambo-like personas to proclaim essentially the same message. First, there was John Kerry, whose Vietnam heroism supposedly inoculated him against GOP attacks, his incoherent Iraq position notwithstanding. Now, there is General Clark. Maybe Clark does indeed have a proactive, coherent national security message. But, with his Kerry-esque, have-it-both-ways position on Iraq, he certainly hasn't articulated that message on the stump. And many of the Democrats who cheered Clark's entrance into the race don't particularly care; for them, Clark's résumé is the message. Once again, the Democrats are trying to solve an ideological problem with a biographical solution. It didn't work for decorated World War II flying ace George McGovern; it didn't work for Vietnam triple-amputee Max Cleland. And it won't work next fall. The voters--shocking as it may seem--actually care what the parties believe.

And what do the Democrats believe? Well, last night Dean responded to a criticism from Dick Gephardt on Medicare by saying: "We need to remember that the enemy here is George Bush, not each other." Great patriot though Howard Dean may be, it strikes us as misguided for him to begin his "enemies list" not with Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein but with the president of the United States.

Hillary Gets Tough

The junior senator from New York may be surprising some people with what she has to say about Saddam and weapons of mass destruction.
by Fred Barnes
09/24/2003 2:30:00 PM

Fred Barnes, executive editor

PRESIDENT BUSH has a surprising defender of his contention that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction--Democratic Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York. "The intelligence from Bush 1 to Clinton to Bush 2 was consistent" in concluding Saddam had chemical and biological weapons and was trying to develop a nuclear capability, Clinton said this morning. And Saddam's expulsion of weapons inspectors and "the behavior" of his regime "pointed to a continuing effort" to produce WMD, she added.

The senator said she did her own "due diligence" by attending classified briefings on Capitol Hill and at the White House and Pentagon and also by consulting national security officials from the Clinton administration whom she trusts. "To a person, they all agreed with the consensus of the intelligence" that Saddam had WMD.

Clinton isn't normally a defender of the Bush administration. And on other issues, especially Bush's handling of postwar Iraq, she was highly critical. But she agreed, with qualifications, that preemptive military action may be necessary in certain cases, as Bush has argued was the case with Iraq.

Clinton's comments came during an appearance before dozens of reporters at a Wednesday breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor. She had no trouble brushing aside questions about her own plans, if any, of running for president in 2004 or later, and she declined to assess other Democratic candidates or discuss any role she had in creating the candidacy of General Wesley Clark. Clinton simply reiterated that she is not running in 2004 but that her "overriding goal . . . is to elect a Democratic president."

But reporters did not give up easily. She was asked if she might not be interested in returning to the White House "some day." "That's not what I'm thinking about," she said. But couldn't she foresee running for president at some point? "No," Clinton answered.

On preemption--attacking an enemy before he attacks you--Clinton said the president shouldn't have announced it as a doctrine. "It's a strategy, it's a choice, it's not a doctrine," she insisted. But she said it would be justified in certain circumstances, citing a possible terrorist attack or proliferation of WMD.

If WMD are not found in Iraq, she said this would suggest a huge intelligence problem. And a probe would be needed to find what sources were being relied on and why the United States was "so misled, so wrong."

Clinton passed up the opportunity to defend the charges of Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy that the war in Iraq was a "fraud" cooked up in Texas by the Bush administration and that the president has been bribing foreign leaders to help out in Iraq. Instead she defended Kennedy himself, not his accusations. "I respect Senator Kennedy as much as any one of my colleagues. I respect his opinion . . . He has every right to express his opinion."

And she declined to discuss any similarities between Republican dislike of President Clinton and Democratic "hatred" of Bush. "I don't think that's a useful exercise," she said.


Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.

Wesley McClellan
Democrats consider an antiwar general--just like in 1864.

BY RUSH LIMBAUGH
Thursday, September 25, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT

The mainstream media and inside-the-Beltway crowd are very excited about their new favorite presidential candidate, retired general Wesley Clark. The soft-on-national-security Democrats want to persuade us that, well, they're not really antiwar. They're just opposed to any war when the commander in chief is a Republican. You know, not enough coalition building, postwar planning, U.N. consulting and so forth. Never mind that Bill Clinton launched cruise missiles into Sudan and Iraq, and invaded Haiti, with little concern for international niceties and postwar consequences. And he did so with the unequivocal support of today's naysayers.

In Gen. Clark, the Democrats have a credentialed warrior who graduated first in his class at West Point, fought in Vietnam, received a fourth star and led NATO forces against Slobodan Milosevic. Now, that's quite a résumé. But let there be no mistake. It doesn't take much to realize that Gen. Clark is no Dwight Eisenhower, an image Democrats desperately hope his candidacy invokes. He's more like another aspiring officer, Union Civil War general George McClellan.

Gen. McClellan graduated from West Point, second in his class. Also a trained engineer, he was decorated for his "zeal, gallantry, and ability" in constructing roads and bridges over routes for the marching army during the Mexican War. McClellan had much charisma. He was considered a great administrator who reorganized the Union army into a mighty fighting machine.
But, you say, McClellan was an indecisive general who feared using his forces. As NATO chief, Gen. Clark, on the other hand, urged his Pentagon bosses to let him introduce ground troops into the war against Serbia, and he even was willing to use military force to stop the Russians from occupying an airport at Pristina, Kosovo.

But Gen. Clark was badly wrong on both counts. If he had not been overruled by his superior, there would have been unnecessary casualties resulting from the deployment of ground troops. And if his subordinate, British Gen. Sir Michael Jackson, had not refused Gen. Clark's order to confront the Russian troops--who wound up cooperating with NATO peacekeeping efforts--the outcome could have been disastrous.

And Gen. Clark is, in fact, indecisive. As a CNN commentator, he was a harsh critic of the war against Iraq. More recently, he has joined the chorus of liberals accusing the president of misleading America about Iraq's "imminent" use of weapons of mass destruction--even though the president never said such a thing. Yet in response to a question last week, Gen. Clark said he likely would have voted for the October 2002 joint congressional resolution authorizing military force against Iraq. In another twist, the next day he said he would have voted against it.

Gen. Clark also can't decide if ending genocide is a legitimate basis for U.S. military intervention. In 1994, while nearly one million Rwandans were being slaughtered, Gen. Clark advised President Clinton against America's intervention, despite the U.N.'s unwillingness to stop the holocaust. But Gen. Clark speaks glowingly of NATO's success in stopping Milosevic's ethnic cleansing, for which Mr. Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. And now, he dismisses the liberation of nearly 25 million Iraqis from Saddam Hussein's murderous rule as a Bush foreign-policy failure.

Even on seemingly simple matters, Gen. Clark is of two minds. One day he said he would not participate in a debate with his fellow Democrat presidential contenders, only to accept the offer soon thereafter.

McClellan's big ego won him the nickname "The Young Napoleon." After he was relieved of duty, he decided to run for president. In 1864, he was the Democrat nominee against Abraham Lincoln. Gen. Clark also does not suffer from low self-esteem. Newsweek reports that when his entreaties to Bush presidential adviser Karl Rove went unanswered, Gen. Clark decided to become both a Democrat and a presidential aspirant.
McClellan was also spiteful of his military and civilian leaders. He actively worked to undermine the Union's top general, Winfield Scott, eventually replacing him. He also was disrespectful of civilian leadership. In some ways, Gen. Clark was no different. He reportedly circumvented both Secretary of Defense William Cohen and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Henry Shelton on numerous occasions in speaking directly to the media and the president. In fact, the situation got so bad that Gen. Clark was relieved of his NATO position several months before his term ended, and in a major snub, neither Mr. Cohen nor Gen. Shelton attended his retirement ceremony.

There was also a peculiar side to McClellan. Without provocation, from time to time he would announce that he had no intention of becoming a dictator. And, to be honest, there's something odd about Gen. Clark's personality.

In June on NBC's "Meet the Press," Gen. Clark charged that the White House had hyped intelligence about Iraq. When asked to back up his claim, Gen. Clark said he had received a call at home pleading with him to connect the 9/11 terrorist attacks to Saddam Hussein. Later, on Fox's "Hannity & Colmes," when pressed to reveal the source, he said it was "a fellow in Canada who is part of a Middle Eastern think tank." There never was a White House call or pressure.

None of this seems to bother the antiwar Democrats, who believe they've found their great military hope. They cite a recent Newsweek poll showing Gen. Clark leading among Democrats, with 14% of support, followed by Howard Dean and Joe Lieberman with 12%. But their hope is unfounded. The poll has a 3% margin of error, making the results unremarkable. And about 40% of Democrats don't even recognize Gen. Clark's name.

Just as Gen. McClellan lost to Abraham Lincoln, Gen. Clark will lose to George W. Bush, should the Democrats nominate him.

Mr. Limbaugh is a nationally syndicated radio talk show host.

Clark is a Bush man! So, why is he a Dem?

Clark praised Reagan for improving the military:

"We were really helped when President Ronald Reagan came in. I remember non-commissioned officers who were going to retire and they re-enlisted because they believed in President Reagan."

Clark continued: "That's the kind of President Ronald Reagan was. He helped our country win the Cold War. He put it behind us in a way no one ever believed would be possible. He was truly a great American leader. And those of us in the Armed Forces loved him, respected him, and tremendously admired him for his great leadership."

And...

During extended remarks delivered at the Pulaski County GOP Lincoln Day Dinner in Little Rock, Arkansas on May 11, 2001, General Clark declared: "And I'm very glad we've got the great team in office, men like Colin Powell, Don Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Paul O'Neill - people I know very well - our president George W. Bush. We need them there."

And ...

Clark on President George Bush: "President George Bush had the courage and the vision... and we will always be grateful to President George Bush for that tremendous leadership and statesmanship."

And ...

Clark on American military involvement overseas:

"Do you ever ask why it is that these people in these other countries can't solve their own problems without the United States sending its troops over there? And do you ever ask why it is the Europeans, the people that make the Mercedes and the BMW's that got so much money can't put some of that money in their own defense programs and they need us to do their defense for them?"

Wesley Clark flip-flops on Iraq already.
WSJ OpinionJournal

Last Thursday Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark said he "probably" would have voted in favor of the congressional resolution authorizing the liberation of Iraq. But on Friday, as the Associated Press reports, he said: "Let's make one thing real clear, I would never have voted for this war."

So Clark is pro-war on Thursdays and antiwar on Fridays. And that's just in September. On Mondays in October, it turns out, he favors a rush to war. In the Oct. 14, 2002, issue of Time, Clark said the U.S. should "take the time to plan, organize and do the whole job the right way. This will only take a few more weeks, and it's important." Had President Bush followed Clark's advice, America and its allies would have liberated Iraq by Thanksgiving, not dawdled until the spring.

Some, including the left-wing media watchdog group that styles itself Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, accuse Clark of being inconsistent. Clark's defenders will no doubt argue that this charge is unfair and smacks of religious bigotry. As Slate notes, Clark is Catholic and has a Jewish father. Is it "inconsistent" to eat meat on Thursday and fish on Friday, or to spend Saturday at the synagogue and Sunday watching football?

Seriously, though, why is Clark's disordered thinking on Iraq big news to begin with? After all, in 1991 Bill Clinton took a similarly weaselly position on the Gulf War, saying: "I guess I would have voted with the majority if it was a close vote. But I agree with the arguments the minority made." Yet when Clinton ran for president, no one much cared.

My Economic Policy
California needs someone to terminate taxes.

BY ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER
Wednesday, September 24, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT

I have often said that the two people who have most profoundly impacted my thinking on economics are Milton Friedman and Adam Smith. At Christmas I sometimes annoy some of my more liberal Hollywood friends by sending them a gift of Mr. Friedman's classic economic primer, "Free to Choose." What I learned from Messrs. Friedman and Smith is a lesson that every political leader should never forget: that when the heavy fist of government becomes too overbearing and intrusive, it stifles the unlimited wealth creation process of a free people operating under a free enterprise system.

And that is the essence of the economic and fiscal crisis that confronts the state of California today. Over the past five years our state budget has grown nearly three times the pace of inflation. Our debt burden has risen by more than the other 49 states combined. The matrix of onerous regulations we impose on property owners and businesses has made the cost of doing business in California almost twice as high as in neighboring states. Our tax rates have become among the highest in the nation.

And perhaps worst of all our governor, Gray Davis, has created a counterproductive culture in Sacramento where businesses and entrepreneurs that dare make a profit are treated as if they are enemies of the state. Mr. Davis says he wants jobs, but he has done everything possible to chase away job creators. Thanks to the economic policies of this administration, for the first time in California history more native-born Americans are leaving this state than are moving here. No one would confuse the destructive economic policies of Gov. Davis and Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante with the pro-growth ideas of Milton Friedman or Adam Smith.

It was not always like this in the Golden State. When I moved to California, as a penniless immigrant from Austria with a pretty rough time of it speaking English, this state was the promised land for anyone who wanted to work hard to get ahead in life. My own dreams fortunately came true in this great state. I became Mr. Universe; I became a successful businessman. And even though some people say I still speak with a slight accent, I have reached the top of the acting profession. (I shouldn't advertise that too loudly or Gov. Davis will probably try to raise my taxes again.)
For immigrants like me, California is the modern-day symbol of the American melting pot in action. The combination of the rich diversity of immigrant talent from around the world and California's home grown brain-power converted our economy into the high technology, the international trade, and, of course, the entertainment capital of the world. We now have a $1-trillion GDP. Our economy in the 1980s and 1990s, the pre-Davis era, grew about 20% faster than the economies of the other 49 states. We were the nation's trendsetters. It used to be said, until recently, that as goes California, so goes the nation. If that were true today, we would all be going to the poor house.

Can California regain its glory days? Will those same boundless opportunities that greeted me in California be there for my wife Maria and our four children? I am confident that they will--that California will regain its status as a high-octane growth economy that is the envy of the nation and the world again.

I believe this is true even though today California finds itself combating our worst financial and economic crisis since the Great Depression. It is true even though Gov. Davis has steered our state from a $12-billion surplus into a $38-billion budget-ditch. We have borrowed so much in recent years that our bond rating has been downgraded three times in the last three years and is now judged only a little bit higher than junk-bond status.

So how can I be optimistic about California given all of these bleak developments in our state? Because our economic problems are not a failure of our people--they result from a resounding breakdown of our political leadership in Sacramento.

It is self-evident to most taxpaying Californians that Gray Davis is not up to the task at hand. Gov. Davis is too beholden to moneyed special interest groups to pull us out of this ditch. The Cato Institute recently gave Mr. Davis a grade of "F" for his fiscal mismanagement and ranked him the second worst governor in America. The folks at the Small Business Survival Committee recently declared that thanks to Mr. Davis's anti-business rules, regulations, taxes, and litigation policies, California now ranks second to last among the 50 states in its receptivity to small businesses. Every day that Gov. Davis stays in office, we slip $29 million further into debt.

Meanwhile, Lt. Gov. Bustamante, Gov. Davis's aspiring successor, is promising Californians: "Gray Davis--the Sequel." He recently admitted that he wants to revive the state economy by raising several more billion dollars of taxes on California's high-income individuals and businesses. This endless litany of taxing schemes by Messrs. Davis and Bustamante reminds me of the androids that I fight in the "Terminator" movies, which I keep shooting dead, but keep coming back to life. If Mr. Bustamante's tax policies are implemented, we may soon be asking the last business person to leave California to please turn off the lights.

My plan to rescue the economy in California is based on the opposite set of values: I want to slash the cost of doing business in California; I want to unburden businesses from regulations that strangle economic growth; I want to bring taxes down to levels competitive with our neighboring states. Within three years, I want business groups to trumpet the fact that California is once again one of the best places in the country to do business.

To accomplish this, I believe that four sets of policies are vital and urgent.
• First, on taxes, I believe that not only should we not raise tax rates on anyone in California, but we have to reduce taxes that make our state uncompetitive. I married a Kennedy and I have always believed that President John F. Kennedy was absolutely right when he said in 1962 that "when taxes are too high, there will never be enough jobs or enough revenues to balance the budget." Our California tax system, as Arthur Laffer recently told me, seems designed to make rich people in California poorer, not to make poor people richer. By restructuring our tax system, I am convinced we can create more businesses and jobs, and that is the best way to re-balance our budget.

• Second, the California state budget should not grow faster than the California family budget. We need to put teeth into a spending limit law through a constitutional amendment that caps state budget growth. I have asked the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association to lead a task force to bring good spending limit ideas to me. If we had a strong spending limit in the 1990s, the state would have a budget surplus today. California does not have a taxing problem, it has a spending problem. I will also create savings from outmoded and inefficient government agencies. It's time to live by the basic rule of good business behavior that you can't spend money that you don't have.

• Next, the worker's compensation system needs an overhaul. When I have asked business people around the state what is restraining their ability to expand here, they cite high taxes and unbearable workers' compensation costs. Businesses in California pay workers' compensation costs that are more than double other states.

• Fourth, I am a fanatic about school reform. To attract world-class, 21st-century businesses, we need a world-class education system. I will maintain the state's testing program and bring school authority and spending closer to students, parents and local taxpayers and take it away from Sacramento bureaucrats. If schools are systematically underperforming, we will expand choice options for parents with charter schools and enforce public school choice provisions in the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

Our state will prosper again when we commit ourselves in California to "Free to Choose" economics. This means removing, one by one, the innumerable impediments to growth--excessive taxes, regulations, and deficit-spending. If we do this we will bring California back as the untarnished Golden State.

Mr. Schwarzenegger is an actor, businessman and candidate for governor in California.

From Laura Ingraham's web site, here is a chilling observation made more than 200 years ago by Scottish historian and jurist Alexander Fraser Tytler, in his book The Decline and Fall of the Athenian Empire:

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: "From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage."

The Bush Boom - From The Wall Street Journal

Commentary
By Brian S. Wesbury, 9/15/03

President Bush has sounded upbeat about the economy of late: and he should. His tax cuts and Fed rate cuts are proving naysayers wrong. Not only did the economy grow at a stronger than expected 3.1% rate during the wartime second quarter, but the third and fourth quarters are on track for what could be 6.0% real GDP growth.

Retail sales show a 12.1% annualized increase in the June-August period. Housing starts are at a 17-year high, new and existing home sales have set new records this year, and disposable personal income is up an annualized 9.4% in the past three months. Productivity growth in the non-farm business sector expanded at an astounding 6.8% in the second quarter, while spending on computers and peripheral equipment jumped 57.5% at an annualized rate. The future looks just as bright....

Under the radar screen, high tech is making a serious comeback. ... Even in the services sector -- which many thought immune to efficiency gains -- productivity is rising. With it, incomes and profits will rise, setting the stage for a strong economy and equity market in the coming election year. ...Yet these productivity gains have created at least one problem. Gains in efficiency are one factor undermining job growth in this recovery when compared with those in the past.

In late August, the AFL-CIO issued a press release titled "U.S. Workers Struggle in Worst Job Slump Since Great Depression." They said this with a straight face even though, at that time, the unemployment rate was 6.2%. In the Depression it was above 20% and in the early 1980s, at the height of union membership, unemployment was 10.8%. ... While manufacturing output has held steady as a share of GDP, manufacturing employment has fallen from 25% of all jobs in 1970 to 11% today. ...

... creative solutions are allowing small businesses to succeed despite extraordinary obstacles. In fact, they are creating jobs while large businesses are eliminating them. We know this because there is a big divergence between the two surveys of employment run by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. According to the Establishment Survey, non-farm payroll jobs fell by 93,000 in August, creating a total job loss of 437,000 for the first eight months of 2003. ...

The BLS also collects data directly from households ... This data is used to calculate the unemployment rate, which fell to 6.1% in August from 6.2% in July. Interestingly, the Household Survey shows that 1.186 million new jobs have been created this year. ...

In the end, the jobs picture isn't as good as it could be, but not as bad as demagogues or some data suggest. Virtually every sector of the economy is booming today, especially high-tech. Weak job growth is an anomaly and cannot last.

With the capital gains tax rate lower than at any time since 1941 and dividend tax rates cut by 60%, the 2003 Bush tax cuts have stimulated venture capital investment, mergers and acquisition activity, and the stock market. ... So while partisans will continue to produce pessimistic analyses, there should be no doubt that this economy is gathering momentum. The strength of economic activity will surprise many, just as it did in the early '80s following the Reagan tax cuts. George W. Bush should get the credit this time.

For Entire Article Please Visit : http://www.wsj.com (Subscription Required)

Here's one for the people who think Bush is bumbling. This is Gray Davis answering the question, "What is your vision for the State?". The man obviously believes in little green space men ...

"My vision is to make the most diverse state on earth, and we have people from every planet on the earth in this state. We have the sons and daughters of every, of people from every planet, of every country on earth," he said.

Clinton's General

By Jed Babbin
Published 9/16/2003 12:04:00 AM


Loose Canons


Is a Howard Dean-Wesley Clark ticket the Dem dream team for '04? The two have met, and Dean has publicly asked Clark to join the race, if not yet his ticket. Clark is about to announce that he will run for president, and an alliance with Dean seems illogical. Why would a four-star general who is banking on his military record want to link up with a man like Dean who has the needle pegged on the whackometer? All you need to know is that Clark -- whatever else he may be -- is a member of Team Clinton.

It's redundant to say more to prove Howard Dean's unfitness for the presidency than he has already said himself. His vitriolic attacks on President Bush are not just McGovernism, they are Michael Mooreism. In a recent Dem gabfest, he said that we shouldn't take sides in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. He sticks to the line that the Iraq campaign has made us less secure, not more, and was a diversion from the war against terrorism. He would beg the U.N. for 50,000 foreign troops to join ours in Iraq. If we elect Dean, we might as well hand the keys to the Oval Office to Kofi Annan and eliminate the middle man. Maybe they would start renting out the Lincoln Bedroom again.

Dean is too shrewd a pol to think that he could win in '04 with "hate Bush" as his only claim to office. That's why he is pushing the former NATO commander to run for president. In Dean's mind, Clark would be a perfect balance to him as a #2 on the Dean ticket. But Dean should know where the General's loyalties lie, and they're not with him. Clark is, above all else, a member in good standing of Team Clinton. Which means Dean is toast if Clark can have any say in it. And he will.

For months, Clark has been teasing the media about his possible candidacy, but hasn't gotten past that Dan Quayle-like deer in the headlights look he gets every time he's asked an unexpected question. We know he's for "reproductive rights," against private ownership of assault weapons, and was strongly against the Iraq campaign. There is precious little else we know about the man. Because he may announce his candidacy as soon as tomorrow, it's time to learn more.

When I mentioned to a few sources that I was interested in Clark, I began receiving what soon became a flood of e-mails all of which said that Clark was a faux-soldier, a pretty face, the General from Central Casting, and not too smart. The other common theme was that as a commander, he knew little about how to fight, and had to be bailed out of bad decisions almost every day. Some of that is true. Most of it is not.

People who know him assure me Clark is brilliant, and his personal courage is unquestionable. Another Rhodes Scholar from Arkansas, Clark was first in his 1966 class at West Point. He won a Silver Star in Vietnam, which is only a couple of steps down from the Medal of Honor. He's an intense man with a tremendous work ethic. One senior Air Force officer guessed that Clark must have not gotten more than four or five hours of sleep during the Kosovo campaign. That's the good Clark.

The other Clark is the Friend of Bill, a man with a Jimmy Carter-like personality. Clark is a micro-manager of the worst sort. He distrusts his subordinates and injects himself into little decisions so much that he loses track of the big picture. He trusts his superiors even less. That's what got him fired from NATO.

Ever since Clark and Lil' Billy got together (which apparently happened in 1968, in their overlapping months at Oxford) Clark has been a FOB. Years later, when the army had made Clark a two-star, it had no future plans for him. But the Clintons did, and put him in line for three- and four-star jobs, culminating in the NATO command.

Clark and his wife are good friends with the Clintons, but that didn't save him from being fired from the SACEUR -- Supreme Allied Commander, Europe job. Clark was fired not by the Clintons, but by then Defense Secretary Bill Cohen. Clark got cross-wise with Cohen for routinely going to Clinton around both Cohen and then-Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Hugh Shelton. He did this all the time both indirectly -- through his pal Madeleine the Short -- and directly on the phone and in person with Clinton. Clark was such a publicity hound, that Cohen once ordered a subordinate, "Tell Clark to get his f#$%^&g face off television." Cohen, no small ego himself, thought Clark was hogging the camera.

Clark was fired because of his overweening ego and because he -- like so many others -- misjudged Clinton. He might have thought he could get away with what he was doing going around Cohen and Shelton, that Lil' Billy would protect him. So Clark was fired and to no one's surprise (except perhaps Clark's) Clinton didn't protect him. Now, the Clintons are using Clark again.

Clark wants the presidential nomination and the Clinton team -- who never act without clear orders from Billy and Hilly -- are lining up to get it for him, or at least use him to deny it to Dean. According to U.S. News & World Report's "Washington Whispers" by Paul Bedard, "Many of Clark's team in waiting are Clintonistas, like the former president's handyman Bruce Lindsey, scandal spokesman Mark Fabiani, and maybe even ex-Deputy Chief of Staff Harold Ickes, who's close to New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton." With a team like that behind him, Clark isn't aiming to play second banana. (Unless Hillary runs in '04, which is pretty unlikely. A Clinton-Clark ticket? I wonder how many ashtrays the general has had tossed at his head?)

As I said a couple of weeks ago, the Clintons are fighting against the Dean candidacy because they recognize that if Dean is nominated -- and goes down like McGovern did -- it will take a decade or more for America to again take the Dems seriously. That would mean Hillary would never make it back to Pennsylvania Avenue. Clark's job is to keep the Dems from following Dean off the McGovernik cliff. But how will he do that, given his positions?

Clark isn't clear on that many issues, and he may yet cleave to the center. But Clark is pro-abortion, against the Bush tax cuts, and opposed to the expansion of law enforcement powers in the "PATRIOT Act." Clark opposed the Iraq campaign, and has said again and again that the Iraq campaign was an "elective" war and that "we went into Iraq under false pretenses." He thinks we now have to "establish legitimacy" by getting the U.N.'s full endorsement (which means turning Iraq over to Kofi, Dominique, and the rest of the U.N. clown show). No wonder he gets along so well with Madeleine.

Clarks' solution to the war on terrorism is pure Clintonism. About a month after 9-11, Clark gave a speech in which he said, "Our best protection is not going to build a wall around America. It's not going to be to create a missile-defense impenetrable shield. It's going to be, instead, to create a community of common values and shared responsibilities and shared interests in which nations and people get along. That really is ultimately the only protection." Or he can lead the world in a chorus of "Kumbaya."

Clark will leap over the sure-losers among the Dem candidates by sundown on the day he announces. According to a CNN poll, he would be #5 of ten immediately. He'd be ahead of the Breck Girl, Al, Carol (even with her NOW endorsement) and Dennis the Menace but behind Kerry, Lieberman, Gephardt and Dean. Still, I don't see how it's possible for a military man who isn't a proven die-hard leftie to get the Fonda-McGovern party's nomination.

Clark won't want to run as anyone's Number Two Boy, far less any likely loser such as Dean. But that's the catch. After gaining credibility in a primary run, Clark would be established as a national political figure in a way he will never be otherwise. Simply to keep his prominence, he might take a #2 slot at the Demo convention, especially if they make a big publicity splash drafting him. And if he is someone's #2, and they lose, it leaves him in competition with Miz Hillary in '08.

Which is the point the Clintons lose control over Clark. He is enough of his own man to want the prize, and not settle twice for second place. What Clark doesn't realize that he won't -- ever -- become such a luminary that the Hollywoodenhead fundraising stars and the others the Dems rely on will defect from Hillary to him. Forget it, general. They'll use you and suck air out of your bubble whenever it pleases them. Sooner or later -- and I bet sooner -- Clark will join the rest of those who have been used and discarded by the Clintons.

What Makes The Bush Haters So Mad?

First, it was how he got the job. Now it's how much he's doing with it
By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER
Bill Moyers may have his politics, but his deferential demeanor and almost avuncular television style made him the Mr. Rogers of American politics. So when he leaves his neighborhood to go to a "Take Back America" rally and denounces George W. Bush's "government of, by and for the ruling corporate class," leading a "right-wing wrecking crew" engaged in "a deliberate, intentional destruction of the United States way of governing," you know that something is going on.

That something is the unhinging of the Democratic Party. Democrats are seized with a loathing for President Bush — a contempt and disdain giving way to a hatred that is near pathological — unlike any since they had Richard Nixon to kick around. An otherwise reasonable man, Julian Bond of the N.A.A.C.P., speaks of Bush's staffing his Administration with "the Taliban wing of American politics." Harold Meyerson, editor at large of The American Prospect, devotes a 3,000-word article to explaining why Bush is the most dangerous President in all of American history — his only rival being Jefferson Davis.


The puzzle is where this depth of feeling comes from. Bush's manner is not particularly aggressive. He has been involved in no great scandals, Watergate or otherwise. He is, indeed, not the kind of politician who radiates heat. Yet his every word and gesture generate heat — a fury and bitterness that animate the Democratic primary electorate and explain precisely why Howard Dean has had such an explosive rise. More than any other candidate, Dean has understood the depth of this primal anti-Bush feeling and has tapped into it.

Whence the anger? It begins of course with the "stolen" election of 2000 and the perception of Bush's illegitimacy. But that is only half the story. An illegitimate President winning a stolen election would be tolerable if he were just a figurehead, a placeholder, the kind of weak, moderate Republican that Democrats (and indeed many Republicans) thought George Bush would be, judging from his undistinguished record and tepid 2000 campaign. Bush's great crime is that he is the illegitimate President who became consequential — revolutionizing American foreign policy, reshaping economic policy and dominating the political scene ever since his emergence as the post-9/11 war President.

Before that, Bush could be written off as an accident, a transitional figure, a kind of four-year Gerald Ford. And then came 9/11. Bush took charge, declared war, and sent the country into battle twice, each time bringing down enemy regimes with stunning swiftness. In Afghanistan, Bush rode a popular tide; Iraq, however, was a singular act of presidential will.

That will, like it or not, has remade American foreign policy. The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy is the subtitle of a new book by two not very sympathetic scholars, Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay. The book is titled America Unbound. The story of the past two years could just as well be titled Bush Unbound. The President's unilateral assertion of U.S. power has redefined America's role in the world. Here was Bush breaking every liberal idol: the ABM Treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, deference to the U.N., subservience to the "international community." It was an astonishing performance that left the world reeling and the Democrats seething. The pretender had not just seized the throne. He was acting like a king. Nay, an emperor.

On the domestic front, more shock. Democrats understand that the Bush tax cuts make structural changes that will long outlive him. Like the Reagan cuts, they will starve the government of revenue for years to come. Add to that the Patriot Act and its (perceived) assault on fundamental American civil liberties, and Bush the Usurper becomes more than just consequential. He becomes demonic.

The current complaint is that Bush is a deceiver, misleading the country into a war, after which there turned out to be no weapons of mass destruction. But it is hard to credit the deception charge when every intelligence agency on the planet thought Iraq had these weapons and, indeed, when the weapons there still remain unaccounted for. Moreover, this is a post-facto rationale. Sure, the aftermath of the Iraq war has made it easier to frontally attack Bush. But the loathing long predates it. It started in Florida and has been deepening ever since Bush seized the post-9/11 moment to change the direction of the country and make himself a President of note.

Which is why the Democratic candidates are scrambling desperately to out-Dean Dean. Their constituency is seized with a fever, and will nominate whichever candidate feeds it best. Political fevers are a dangerous thing, however. The Democrats last came down with one in 1972--and lost 49 states.

From Slate:

Pious Bias

Lies and the lying liars who attribute them to the other party.
By William Saletan
Updated Monday, September 15, 2003, at 3:28 PM PT


I have a message for my liberal friends, relatives, and colleagues: If you think Republicans play dirty and Democrats don't, open your other eye.

I've been hearing this complaint everywhere I go. It seems to be the emerging centerpiece of the Democratic campaign message in 2004. Exhibit A is George W. Bush's victory in the court fight over the 2000 Florida recount. Exhibit B is the ongoing attempt by the Republican governor and Republican legislature of Texas to redraw that state's congressional districts. Exhibit C is the recall of Gov. Gray Davis, D-Calif.

The complaints are spreading and becoming more shrill. At last Tuesday's debate among the Democratic presidential candidates, Carol Moseley Braun said Bush "was not elected by the American people." Al Sharpton added, "We are witnessing a nonmilitary civil war. It started with the recount in Florida, it went to the redistricting in Texas, now it's the [recall] in California. … It's a rejection of the American people."

On Saturday, at a Democratic steak fry in Iowa, several presidential candidates stood behind Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, as he charged, "Bush stole the election. … We know what the Republican strategy is: suppress the vote. … Look what they did in Florida. Look what they're trying to do in Texas. Look what they're trying to do in California." Former President Bill Clinton told the crowd that in 2000, five justices of the Supreme Court "thought it was time for the minority to have the White House, they stopped counting votes in Florida, and they just gave it to them." Clinton said Republicans "believe in government by ideology, enemies, and attack. We believe in government by experiment, evidence, and argument."

Really? Let's look at the record.

In Florida, Al Gore originally asked for a recount only in counties in which he thought Democrats would gain votes. Moreover, to be precise, he wasn't for "counting" more ballots; he was for reinterpreting already-counted ballots until he came out ahead. Gore's lawyer, David Boies, argued that ballots should be interpreted as votes for Bush or Gore based on "the intent of the voter, not how the voter manifests his or her intent"—in other words, without rules. Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., a Gore surrogate, actually claimed, "The punch cards were wrong." Gore eventually moderated his position, but not until he had to.

In Texas, Republicans seeking to redraw congressional districts in the third year of the decade are violating custom but not law. On Friday, a panel of federal judges dismissed a lawsuit by Democrats claiming that the GOP's redistricting tactics violated the Voting Rights Act. As for the 11 Democratic state senators who fled to New Mexico to prevent the majority from gathering a quorum, I can only imagine the cries of outrage I'd be hearing from my liberal friends if those were Republicans thwarting a Democratic legislature.

Many Democrats have questioned Bush's legitimacy because he lost the nationwide popular vote. It doesn't seem to bother them that this principle—the right of the majority to get like-minded representation, regardless of which party wins jurisdiction by jurisdiction—is exactly the principle they deny in Texas. Gore lost the Electoral College while winning a 48 percent plurality of the vote nationwide. Texas Republicans lost a majority of the state's congressional seats in 2002 while winning 56 percent of the vote statewide.

In California, the recall process is authorized by the state constitution. More than 1.3 million California voters signed petitions calling for this recall. Maybe that's because Davis got a lower percentage of the vote statewide in 2002 than Bush got nationwide in 2000. Or maybe it's because 63 percent of likely California voters disapprove of Davis' performance in office (down from 72 percent in August). And before you complain about Republicans using sneaky tactics to oust an honestly elected governor, let's hear your defense of the $7 million Davis spent in last year's Republican gubernatorial primary to deprive general-election voters of a moderate Republican alternative.

Are Republicans nasty? Do they refuse to accept election defeats? Do they subvert respect for democracy? If so, they have no monopoly on these vices. They aren't the ones claiming that our current president "was not elected by the American people." They aren't the ones declaring "a nonmilitary civil war." And it was Clinton, not a Republican former president, who asserted at the Iowa steak fry that the other party "tried to put more arsenic in the water."

A day after Clinton leveled that charge, ABC's This Week aired a delicious exchange between George Stephanopoulos and Howard Dean aboard a Dean campaign van. Stephanopoulos asked Dean whether it was true, as rival candidate Dick Gephardt alleged, that Dean had supported $270 billion in Medicare cuts advocated by Newt Gingrich in 1995. Dean said it was "very unlikely." Then Stephanopoulos showed Dean newspaper clips backing up the allegation. "It's pretty clear that you said you would accept a 7 to 10 percent cut in the rate of growth of Medicare," said Stephanopoulos. "Oh!" Dean interjected, raising his eyebrows. "Cutting the rate of growth! That's much different."

Excuse me, but wasn't that difference exactly what Clinton deliberately blurred in his 1996 campaign? Didn't he beat Bob Dole by accusing Dole and Gingrich of cutting Medicare?

I'm not excusing the games Republicans play. But by projecting all evil onto Republicans, Democrats spread the same political disease: the notion that you don't have to be wary of lying or cheating unless the other side is doing it. Lying and cheating don't belong to Republicans or Democrats. We're all susceptible, and we're all guilty.

Sure, some people are more guilty than others. But if that's your obsession, I commend to you the words of my colleague, Jack Shafer: If you're interested in which wing lies more, you're probably not very interested in the truth.

This is overdue, but Tom asked me some questions about the CA Recall.

So what do Californians in general think about this recall? I've heard
opinions from elsewhere, but not really what most Californians think. Will
there be a large turnout or do a lot of people think it's stupid and will
stay home? And I just heard on the radio that, let's say Arnie got elected,
democrats could turn right around and recall him!


Well, I think a lot of people think that the recall is not really justified
in the case of Gray Davis. It's supposed to be a last resort when other
means (impeachment) either don't work or can't be used, so the expectation
is that something really bad, but not quite illegal, has been committed.

However, ever since this Progressive amendment was made to the CA State
constitution, every Governor has been the subject of a recall attempt. This
is just the first to succeed.

Now that the recall is going to happen, most people are ok with it. No,
Californians won't be staying home. This is an important decision.

It's kind of scary that 12% (I think that's the number I heard) of the
electorate can bring about a recall (in the majority of states, the rep-dem
split is about 50-50) and that then some minority of the electorate can
again elect a governor (since only a plurality is needed to win).


It's not 12% of the electorate that's required to bring a recall. It's 12%
of the number of people who voted in the election in question. In this case,
that's about 8 million people who voted in the 2002 election (CA has about
35 million people). So they needed slightly over 800,000 people to sign.
They got over 2 million.

BTW, Davis won the election with 35% of the vote. Bill Simon had 32%. With 8
million voters that's only about 240,000 votes. Not a resounding victory.

And why don't they split the cost of this recall (is it 60 million?)
between all of the prospective candidates (instead of just 3500)? Or maybe
the winner (if it's other than Davis) should have to pay for the cost of it
if elected? Or maybe the losers should have to split it? How many people
live in CA? I suppose your share is a buck or two.


Yep, about $2 each of the 35 million residents of CA. Once the recall is
started, this is just like any other election (or, it's supposed to be - at
least from an implementation standpoint). The fees charged and the costs are
the same as for any other election.

This says more about CNN and Amanpour to me than anything else. How can anything coming from either still be considered unbiased journalism? More like biased liberal agenda promotion.

I think the truth is that with actual competition CNN was forced to alter it's news reporting to gain ratings rather than the usual unabashed liberal bias that Amanpour has become accustomed to.

Said Amanpour: "I think the press was muzzled, and I think the press self-muzzled. I'm sorry to say, but certainly television and, perhaps, to a certain extent, my station was intimidated by the administration and its foot soldiers at Fox News. And it did, in fact, put a climate of fear and self-censorship, in my view, in terms of the kind of broadcast work we did."

A Fox News spokeswonman said: "It's better to be viewed as a foot soldier for Bush than spokeswoman for al-Qaeda."

Arafat is spoiling the chance for peace yet again ...
The missed opportunity

September 12, 2003

WASHINGTON -- Abba Eban once famously said that the ``Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.'' The fall of moderate Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas -- systematically destroyed by Yasser Arafat -- represents a spectacularly missed opportunity.

Abbas wanted to end the terror and cash in on the American promise of an independent Palestinian state. Arafat, whose unswerving objective is a Palestinian state built on the ruins of Israel and who will not put down the gun until he gets it, undermined Abbas from the very beginning. He now has chosen a puppet as his new prime minister.

For 56 years, every time the Palestinians were offered the possibility of a state side-by-side with Israel, they chose rejection and violence.

In 1947, the United Nations offered them the first Palestinian state in history. Led by Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem who had spent the war years in Berlin as a supporter of Hitler, they rejected the offer, made war, and ended up with a vast Palestinian diaspora.

In 1978, the Camp David accords between Egypt and Israel offered the Palestinians a five-year period of autonomy, during which negotiations for final status would be conducted. They might have had their own state 20 years ago. They rejected the offer -- and the treaty -- out of hand.

Precisely 10 years ago this Saturday, the Oslo accord was signed, bringing Arafat and the PLO back to Palestine for what was supposed to be a historic reconciliation with Israel. Rather than making peace and establishing new Palestinian institutions, Arafat used the next decade to turn the Palestinian territories into an armed camp -- a ``trojan horse,'' as Palestinian moderate Faisal Husseini openly admitted, for renewed war on Israel.

Abbas was lucky to lose only his job. At previous hinge points in Middle Eastern history, those advocating compromise and peace met a harsher fate. Jordan's King Abdullah, grandfather of King Hussein, was assassinated in 1951. Three months after Anwar Sadat addressed the Israeli Knesset, one of his top advisers, Youssef Sebai, editor of the al-Ahram newspaper, was assassinated in Cyprus. The moderate intellectual Dr. Issam Sartawi was assassinated in Portugal in 1983.

Abbas' fall is only the latest chapter in this tragic story of the Palestinians' repeated decision to refuse the dignity of independence if it meant accepting Israel. Every peace plan, every road map, every truce is bound to fail until the Palestinians make a historic collective decision to accept half a loaf and build their state within it.

What should the United States do now? The editorialists are issuing the usual knee-jerk call for the Bush administration to intensify its efforts in the peace process.

What peace process? Intensify efforts with whom? With Arafat -- who is behind the terror, who destroyed Abbas, who will never sign a peace treaty and whose commitment to war-until-victory is as enduring as was Ho Chi Minh's and Mao Zedong's?

The United States went a very long way toward the Palestinians by issuing the road map and the guarantee of statehood if they dismantled the terror apparatus, stopped the murderous incitement, and began the process of reconciliation. Abbas appeared ready to take that road. Which is why Arafat brought him down.

The fundamental principle of U.S. policy now must be to prove that Abbas was right. That means no negotiations with Arafat or with any new prime minister beholden to him. That means supporting Israel in its war on terror. And that means not only supporting military responses to atrocities such as the double suicide bombings on Tuesday -- responses such as the expulsion of Arafat -- it also means reconsidering the administration's puzzling opposition to the Israeli security fence.

The fence is a uniquely effective way to stop suicide bombing. We know that because not a single Palestinian suicide bomber has come out of Gaza, where there already is a fence.

The fence not only will save lives by preventing suicide attacks, it will change the strategic equation by neutralizing the terror weapon. Without that card to play, the Palestinians will have an incentive to rethink the Abbas option and to renew the tentative step that he represented of settling with the Jews by dividing the land.

If the fence is built, yes, some Palestinians will be cut off from their fields. On the other hand, if the fence is not built, innocent people on the other side will be blown to bits. Which of these two misfortunes is the more morally compelling?

When the Palestinians finally retire Arafat and find their new Abbas, the fence can come down. In the meantime, a barrier to terror is not just a strategic but a moral imperative.

The Fairness Doctrine raises it's ugly head...

The Stop-Rush Campaign - Why do Republicans want to muzzle Limbaugh?

Friday, September 12, 2003 12:01 a.m.

Republicans love to complain that they don't get a fair shake from the elites running the nation's airwaves and newspapers. Which has us wondering why they're helping their political opponents muzzle the likes of Rush Limbaugh.
Ever since the Federal Communications Commission's June decision to allow broadcast TV owners to own a few more stations, liberals have been channeling George Orwell--claiming Big Brother broadcasters are a "threat to democracy" that will stifle "diversity of view." With the aid of many Republicans, they've already blocked the new rules in the House and may pass a resolution on Monday to do the same in the Senate.

We've addressed the substance of this issue several times, but the truth is that this crusade has little to do with the merits. Anyone who channel-surfs or roams the Internet knows America isn't suffering from any lack of news sources. What's really driving the politicians is the desire for revenge against their media enemies.

On the left, this means returning to the days before deregulation opened the airwaves to the populist political right. Liberals know what has happened since the FCC abandoned the "Fairness Doctrine" in 1987. That rule required radio and TV stations to provide "balanced" news coverage. In practice, it discouraged stations from touching controversial subjects, so that in 1980 there were a mere 75 talk radio stations.
Today, thanks to the end of that doctrine, there are 1,300 talk radio stations. But to the horror of the political left, the hosts who have prospered on radio are the likes of Don Imus, Laura Schlessinger and Sean Hannity. The most popular of them all is Rush Limbaugh, no doubt because of his humor and optimism, with 20 million listeners a week.

Meanwhile, because cable and satellite aren't overregulated the way broadcasters are, we've seen successes like Rupert Murdoch's Fox News. The cable channel has blown past CNN in the ratings in just seven years, and its different take on the news drives liberals up the wall. So obsessed are they with Fox that Al Gore and friends are trying to finance their own liberal cable network.

The only reason these new media voices have succeeded is because people want to hear them. There's no public clamor for the top-down regulation Congress wants, beyond the crowd that donates during National Public Radio pledge week. Americans like their media choices and would rather not go back to the days when Walter Cronkite was their main, scintillating news source.

Liberals, on the other hand, are almost transparent in their aim to do precisely that. During July's House floor debate, Michigan Democrat John Dingell explained that once they roll back the FCC ownership expansion liberals can then move to reverse another recent FCC decision to allow companies to own TV stations and newspapers in the same market. They may then go to town on New York Representative Maurice Hinchey's proposal to revive the Fairness Doctrine and complicate life for both Fox and Rush.

What's amazing is how oblivious Republicans are to this stop-Rush game. So eager are Senators Trent Lott and Kay Bailey Hutchison to paste a defeat on their local media enemies that they're willing to punish all media companies. For their part, House Republicans have fallen for the lobbying of local TV and newspapers that want Congressional protection from takeover bids; Members are too frightened by what kind of coverage they'll get next election to just say no.
At least the White House seems to understand the stakes, and President Bush has suggested he'll veto any bill that rolls back the FCC rules. But House Republicans are said to be about 40 votes short of the 146 or so needed to sustain a veto. If Republicans can't rally behind their President on something so clearly in their own interest, they deserve to suffer the bias of Dan Rather and Katie Couric.

And, hopeless as this point might be, they might also consider that standing up for free-market principles and deregulation is one reason they came to Washington in the first place.

OpinionJournal - John Fund's Political Diary:

The Anti-Dean
Why Hillary opposes the Democratic front-runner.

Tuesday, September 2, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT

While Hillary Clinton swears she isn't running for president, she certainly isn't happy about Howard Dean becoming the Democratic frontrunner. The Clintons--along with Terry McAuliffe, their hand-picked chairman of the Democratic National Committee--could become some of the biggest behind-the-scenes obstacles to Mr. Dean's insurgent candidacy.

The fevered speculation last week that Hillary, seeing polls showing softening support for President Bush, just might make a last-minute parachute entry into the 2004 race was based on poor reading of the tea leaves. The evidence was the fact that several e-mail postings on Sen. Hillary Clinton's Web site urged her to run now and the news that she is meeting with political strategists about her future. Then it turned out that the meeting was one of a series she routinely holds and Mrs. Clinton herself told reporters on Friday: "I am absolutely ruling it out."

Some of the media speculation about a Hillary run is generated by potential Democratic candidates who aren't running in 2004. Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic consultant who worked on President Clinton's 1996 re-election campaign, told the Associated Press "There are those in my party who might like to see her go, so she can get knocked off [by Mr. Bush], opening up a different field in 2008." He added that "so long as she's in the way, anybody who wants to run [in 2008] can't consider it."

Similarly, it's clear that many of allies and supporters of Bill and Hillary Clinton don't want Howard Dean to be the party's 2004 standard bearer. Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, dismissed Mr. Dean's fiery speeches against the Bush White House by asking, "Do we want to vent or to govern?" Al From, the founder of the moderate DLC, was instrumental in promoting Mr. Clinton as a candidate back in 1992. He now says that Mr. Dean belongs to the party's "McGovern-Mondale wing" and that he would repeat their failed candidacies by being swamped in the popular vote. The Clintons may not be keen on a Democrat winning the White House in 2004, but a Bush blowout might weaken the Democratic Party for 2008 when Mrs. Clinton is expected to run.

But Clinton supporters have other reasons to be leery of a Dean candidacy. In June, the Drudge Report noted that Mr. Dean had confided to associates that he intended to change the leadership of the Democratic National Committee if he became the party's nominee. A Dean adviser told Drudge that "it is important . . .to mark a new beginning, cut ties from the past." Mr. Dean feels that Mr. McAuliffe, who served as Mr. Clinton's finance chairman in the 1996 election, has not performed well under pressure and was the architect of last year's disastrous off-year election results in which the Democrats became the first party out of power to lose seats in a mid-term election in over 60 years. Mr. McAuliffe is so controversial among Democratic activists that recently he has not been signing the patry's fund-raising mail. A no-name deputy now signs the direct mail appeals for funds. Mr. McAuliffe still has the confidence of Bill and Hillary Clinton, but his circle of admirers beyond that is limited.

Joe Trippi, Mr. Dean's campaign manager, disputed the Drudge account saying "No one from the Dean campaign leaked anything to Drudge. This report is like a National Enquirer headline." Doesn't sound like an unequivocal denial to me. Mr. McAuliffe has gone out of his way not to criticize Mr. Dean since the Drudge item, but privately is aware of the fact that Mr. Dean is the only one of the Democratic candidates who is hostile to his remaining as chairman.

Of course, among average voters the reasons for Mr. Dean's popularity have little to do with his strained relations with the Clinton wing of the party. Activists are simply not excited by the current field of nine candidates. Sen. John Kerry is too aloof. Rep. Richard Gephardt has run before and lost. Sen. John Edwards is too untested. Sen. Joe Lieberman backed the war in Iraq, a black mark with any serious anti-Bush Democrat. Howard Dean is the improbable beneficiary of this dissatisfaction because his fiery anti-Bush speeches convey the image of an outsider and a straight-shooter, exactly the kind of stance that propelled Sen. John McCain into serious contention for the 2000 GOP presidential nomination.

Many of the same pundits who ignored Mr. Dean's long-shot candidacy for so long now seem convinced he is leading an unstoppable juggernaut. "Right now, Dean is in the driver's seat. I'm almost ready to say that Dean has the ticket to Boston as the challenger Democrat," says pollster John Zogby, whose latest survey shows Mr. Dean leading Sen. Kerry by more than two to one in New Hampshire, the nation's first primary state. "He is running away with this election if somebody doesn't stop him," says Morton Kondracke of the Fox News Channel.

This is all twaddle. Mr. Dean hasn't been seriously tested in debates or had his first campaign crisis. Watch this Thursday's Democratic debate in New Mexico as all of his rivals gang up on him. Mr. Dean's problem is that he may have peaked too early. His March performance on NBC's "Meet the Press" showed he can wilt and contradict himself when subjected to a constant barrage of criticism. Many of the people who are showing up at Dean fundraisers aren't completely sure of why they like him, beyond the fact that they see him as the most vociferously anti-Bush candidate in the race. Michael Wolff, the liberal media columnist for New York magazine, wrote about a Dean fundraiser he attended recently in Manhattan that was filled with names he knew. "Howard Dean was being embraced by my people," he wrote. But "you had the undercurrent, the ultimate upset scenario, on the back breath of the room. Howard Dean was nothing so much as Gene McCarthy, and everyone here was really waiting for Bobby Kennedy, who, of course, was Hillary. It's in the air."

Anti-Bush partisans may be having their joy ride with Howard Dean, but it's clear they are secretly pining for Hillary. Once they are absolutely convinced she won't answer their calls, I have no doubt many of them will grow tired and skeptical of Mr. Dean. That doesn't mean he can't win the nomination, just that the obstacles blocking his way--including the hostility of Team Clinton--will likely remain.

Another crazy leftist idea

Politicians call for children's vote

A group of cross-party politicians in the German Bundestag has called for the introduction of a children's vote. With the "voting right from birth", parents should be able to vote on behalf of their children. The group said their aim was to attract more attention to children's issues: "It is unfair that more than 5 percent of Germany's citizens cannot vote". The group's draft petition which was presented on Thursday calls for the possibility for parents to vote in the name of their children until they reach the age of 18 and that parents should talk to their children about election decisions as soon as they reach an appropriate age. Critics say these propositions are naive. "Many parents have a completely different opinion in politics than their children", Irmingard Schewe-Gerigk from the Greens said.