Larry Miller, A Tale of Two Selfish Men:

In the collective sense, it's good for our country to be selfish, oh, maybe right about now, by saying, "Thanks just the same, but we'd really rather not wait around to be murdered, so we're going to stop you before you can."

2002 is SO last year!

Book awards

Dave Barry calls it a "wary" year.

Tobacco Road Fogey to Charles Rangel:

They are not bargaining chips in your cheap, rhetorical, political game.

One of them is my kid.

I'll give him to my country, even for tawdry and divisive people like you have become in the past fifty years, Congressman, because this country is worth fighting for and dying for.

But I'll never forgive your efforts to cheapen the value of that gift, Congressman.

Steven DenBeste :

What they don't seem to have realized is that Bush is the anti-Clinton. Clinton was ephemeral; Clinton distracted easily. Clinton took the short view and was concerned with the day-to-day. One of the distinguishing features of foreign policy under the Bush administration has been its consistency and the extent to which it is inexorable. Once Bush seems to have picked a direction, it is very hard to make him veer off, and that is what all these people are trying to make him do. Christopher himself was Secretary of State under Clinton, and seems to be trying to advocate that Bush become as distractible as Clinton was. It's hard to believe that anyone in the White House gives a tinker's damn for what Christopher thinks. (And having it printed in the NYTimes probably didn't help any.)

David Frum is more optimistic than Bill Quick.:

serious and important work was being done in four separate areas--and all of them are about to pay off. First, order was restored to Afghanistan. For all the questions about whether the United States has done enough to stabilize Afghanistan, there's no doubt at all that the world's wildest country has become freer and safer than ever before, and that it has ceased to be a base of operations for al-Qaeda and other Islamic extremists.

Second, the United States and Great Britain have built themselves an advanced new network of bases and facilities in the Middle East and Central Asia. The most important is the huge new airbase--as large as Washington's Dulles International Airport--put up in less than a year in Qatar. Thanks to the Qatar base, the U.S. coalition is no longer dependent on the Prince Sultan Airbase in Saudi Arabia, which means the Saudis have lost their veto over Western military actions in the Persian Gulf.

Third, 2002 was the year that the Bush administration committed itself to fostering democracy in the Arab world. In June, President Bush delivered his important speech calling for a new and accountable Palestinian leadership. That speech announced a new approach not only to the Arab-Israeli dispute, but to the more general problem of violence and extremism in the Arab world. And it implied that the goal of intervention in Iraq would be bigger than the mere toppling of a dictator: The goal would be the creation of an Arab alternative, a new regime that demonstrated that an Arab state that turned to law and liberty and peace could deliver better results for its people than sheiks, mullahs, and presidents-for-life.

Fourth and last, 2002 was a year in which no major terrorist attacks occurred in the West. It's too early to say that the war on terror is being won. But it can be said that police and intelligence work is disrupting the terrorist networks and thwarting their plans. For most of us, this last is the most important success of all.

Glenn notes the quiet (in the right way) New Year's Eve and comments:

And people were right to be defiant. They're still out there, and they still want to kill us. But when New Year's passes without incident (reportedly with a bigger crowd at Times Square than at the millennium celebrations), and when Islamists are the butt of late-night jokes, the terrorists have lost another round.

Bill also comments.

Predictions for 2003 from National Review, Tim Blair (I especially like Time's man of the year 2003), Jay Manifold, Kevin McGeehee (escaped Sacramentan), and a roundup of bloggers by John Hawkins.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Just a few remnants from last year:
Will Vehrs:

Here’s what Margaret Carlson of Time magazine had to say in February about Enron’s Sherron Watkins, the woman who would become Time’s Co-Person of the Year for 2002:

"She didn't blow that whistle loud enough for anyone who wasn't on the take to hear it. So I don't know, there's going to be no movie made about her. And she kept a paper trail. She showed some moral indignation to her colleagues, but did nothing to help the people who were going to lose money."

Heh.
Andrew Sullivan and again on the winners and losers of 2002.

North Korea

Glenn writes about North Korea and US hyperpower.
I say let the UN take care of it. Pull out of South Korea. Just say, "hey guys, YOU fix it."
More.

John Hawkins
I've posted this before, but it's still appropos:

If we actually did kick back in our hammocks for a ten-year rest the Middle East would explode, Taiwan would get swallowed by China and France and Germany would probably be at each other's throats again. Hell, if we took twenty years off it wouldn't surprise me to look at a map and see nothing but a giant swath of China red covering all of Europe, skulls & crossbones covering all of Africa, and nothing but a green patch with the words 'Forbidden Zone' where the Middle East used to be. We're the only thing keeping the planet from reverting back to an early 1800's style plunder, war, and rampage philosophy.

If you want put it in perspective, it's like we're the guy who ended up being the designated driver for the planet.
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. We wouldn't take over the world if every nation begged us too. Our ancestors came to America in the first place to GET AWAY from everyone else in the world and it's very easy for us in this age of global communications to understand why.

Anna on being the world's policeman.

Steven on the NorKs.

What they're trying to do right now is to create panic. They are in deep trouble and their clock is ticking. Given that they actually are running out of time (and fuel oil, and food, and damned near everything else) then it is clear that it's to their advantage to try to make everyone else feel as if time is running out with as many provocations as they possibly can come up with. I believe that the cessation of fuel oil shipments is what set this crisis off; North Korea may well grind to a halt soon from simple inability to generate energy. As their fuel supplies dwindle, they are trying to force rapid movement by us; they are trying to make us feel as much urgency as I believe that they feel.

In actuality, there is no rush, relatively speaking. We can't ignore the situation for years, but we do not need to start negotiations in the next few days and finish them in a few weeks.
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I believe that the best course of action is to refuse to even talk to them until they ratchet down the hysteria. If I'm right and they are actually running out of time, then either they'll end up preparing for war (which we would be able to detect) or else they'll back down, which I think is more likely. I think what we're seeing is a manifestation of their panic. As bad as the situation there is for us, it has to be remembered that it is vastly worse for them in every regard. They are looking at catastrophe.
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As long as we remain strong and patient and apparently unafraid and unimpressed, and as long as we refuse to even negotiate with them (so that they cannot even deliver their demands) then it leaves them alone, screaming into the wind, growing increasingly frustrated as their situation deteriorates. Eventually they'll give up on what they're doing now and try something else, and then we'll see.

As strange as it may sound, time is actually on our side. The actions of the North Korean government right now are all aimed at trying to convince us otherwise, and the Bush administration quite correctly isn't falling for it. When Powell says that there is no crisis, he's quite correct: North Korea has a crisis. We do not, and we can't allow them to make their crisis ours too.

Bill wants to nuke the plants and pull out of SoKo. I like it.

Via Instantman, Tony Woodlief:

Well, since you asked, we aren't the world's policeman, until the world goes and gets itself in another bind, usually involving the Germans directly or indirectly, and requiring some sort of rescue of the French, during which they will try to overcharge us for amenities. Come the wet-ass hour, to quote Al Pacino, we are everybody's daddy. So no, the Europeans don't want us involved, because they are too busy having fun pretending, now that we've defeated the U.S.S.R., that somehow they can manage their own safety without actually having armies, and while selling technology and weapons to terrorists and communist China. About the time they have their fat heads in a noose, made of rope they've sold at EU-subsidized prices to their executioners, then they'll start carping about how isolationist and hard-hearted we are.
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So to answer your question, no, we aren't the world's policeman, but when there are people out there who want to kill me and my children, and they are actively seeking the means to do so, then my personal philosophy is that you kill them and everything within a ten-mile radius of them, post freaking haste. And if the U.N. doesn't like it, they can pack their louse-filled bags and hold their busy little seminars on gender inequality and structural racism on somebody else's dime. Since you asked, I mean.

2002 In Review

Poll on Idiotarian of the Year So many choices!

Bill Quick checks out NROs predictions for 2002.

Religion stories of the year... what's missing?

The 50 most loathsome people of 2002.
I don't think Gov Gray made it, though.

Top Weird Stories of the Year.

Best and worst in Washington.

2002 in Review, Pete duPont:

Passing fast-track trade legislation was a triumph, but steel tariffs, a bloated increase in farm subsidies, and the McCain-Feingold assault on free speech were policy errors. The U.S. Supreme Court may correct the last, but Mr. Bush will have to undo the first two before he leaves the presidency.
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Trent Lott's racially offensive remarks at Strom Thurmond's birthday party have to lead the stupidity list. Also on that list is the Florida statute requiring mothers who wish to give a child up for adoption and cannot identify the father to publish in the newspapers each week for four consecutive weeks the names, dates and locations of every sexual encounter that might have led to the pregnancy.
[!]
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The silliest of 2002 begins with a convicted Florida sex offender who fled to Bangor, Maine, in February and spent three freezing nights in the woods avoiding capture. The resulting frostbite cost him a few toes, so he threatened to sue the detective who failed to arrest him in time to avoid the damage. "If he had done his job properly I wouldn't be in the condition that I'm in right now," Harvey Taylor said. "I would have been in jail that very same day."
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Meanwhile across the pond, the bureaucracy of the European Union goes about its Monty Python-like business as the Ministry of Silly Rules, decreeing just how many vegetable lumps a sauce may contain before it is classified as a vegetable instead of a sauce. Regulation 288/97 decrees the sauce is a vegetable if more than 20% of its content by weight fails to pass "through a metal wire sieve with an aperture of five millimeters, after rinsing in water of a temperature of 20C [68 degrees]." Why have such an inane rule? It turns out if a product is classified as a vegetable instead of a sauce, the tariff on its importation rises from 20% to as much as 288%. No wonder the EU bureaucracy loves it.

Mark Steyn is a bit pessimistic:

We do not yet know how this latest twist in the Clinton saga will play out in the Democratic presidential race, but, putting aside the conspiracy theorists who say Bill and Hill have to stay married so they can’t testify against each other, the wedding of Teflon Willie and Silicon Demi would be like one of those old European dynastic unions, formally sealing the relationship between the Dems and Hollywood, just when both parties, if they had any sense, should be figuring out that they ought to be seeing less of each other. Like Sean Penn holding press conferences in Baghdad, there are times when the Dems could use fewer celebrities. Far fewer.
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In its own shrivelled way, Trent Lott’s self-inflicted wound sums up the last year. The Republicans underperform. But ultimately the Democrats always manage to underperform more. Furthermore, the Dems’ key interest groups, whether African-Americans or Celebrity-Americans, seem to be working overtime to keep the party looking at best irrelevant or at worst deeply trivial. What happened in November is that a small but critical sliver of the electorate decided the Democrats weren’t credible on the big issue of the day. This is very true. The Dems’ lack of credibility is laughable — so laughable, so ridiculous, so pathetic that it’s very conveniently obscured how the administration’s own credibility on this issue diminishes month by month.
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In his State of the Union address last January, identifying Iraq, Iran and North Korea as the ‘axis of evil’, the President warned that ‘time is running out’. Well, someone evidently jammed a big ol’ sausage in the hourglass, because it stopped running out round about August and, indeed, much of the sand seems to have run back in again.
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On its face, this is very difficult to explain, though a lot of us go to a lot of trouble trying to. The endless postponement of the Iraqi D-Day, now as routinely rolled over as those Soviet five-year plans, is all part of some cunning Bush ‘rope-a-dope’ strategy. So is Colin Powell’s recent statement that the administration isn’t looking for regime change in Baghdad. So is the ongoing mantra of ‘the Saudis are our friends, no matter how many of us they kill’.
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The connection between Saudi ‘charitable giving’ and terrorism is well known. The most benign explanation is that the Princess is an idiot, and Americans are dead in part because of her idiocy. The wife of the Secretary of State and the mother of the President have no business comforting a stooge of their country’s enemies.

Meanwhile, the alternative explanation to ‘rope-a-dope’ is that the Pentagon needed time to replenish stocks. This was just about believable last spring. By late November, when senior officials were allegedly leaking to the press that they might need another year just to make sure they were really fully absolutely replenished, it was looking a whole lot less plausible.
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Obviously, a war on terror is not like a war on Japan: it’s not just about the battles, but also the battles that never take place. One assumes that al-Qa’eda have tried to pull off another attack on US soil but at some border post or ticket counter or rental-car agency they’ve been stymied.
....
weaponised laxatives aside, from their inability to hit anything other than the softest of targets — from Bali to Tunisia — it seems reasonable to conclude that al-Qa’eda’s freedom of manoeuvre has been drastically curtailed.
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It’s hard not to feel that this year has been a lucky escape — except for the dead in Bali, in Moscow, in Kenya et al. It seems unlikely that the West can make it through another 12 months without something happening somewhere.