Fossil Freak's News and Views (Part 2)

2003-03-04T08:33:00.000-08:00

Europe and the War.

Mark Steyn, Death wish.

Lileks on George Clooney (the Schmuck) and teaching peace to 2-1/2 year olds.

Five Lessons from Iraq. (Paul Johnson)

E.Nough, why Iraq?

2003-02-28T08:18:00.000-08:00

France Who?
Krauthammer:

That is a serious challenge. It requires a serious response. We need to demonstrate that there is a price to be paid for undermining the United States on a matter of supreme national interest.

First, as soon as the dust settles in Iraq, we should push for an expansion of the Security Council -- with India and Japan as new permanent members -- to dilute France's disproportionate and anachronistic influence.

Second, there should be no role for France in Iraq, either during the war, should France change its mind, or after it. No peacekeeping. No oil contracts. And France should be last in line for loan repayment, after Russia. Russia, after all, simply has opposed our policy. It did not try to mobilize the world against us.

2003-02-27T07:36:00.000-08:00

Rest in Peace, Mrrogers!

A comment on this at Dailypundit:

The god these savages worship is small, petty, ignorant, thin-skinned, petulant, self-absorbed and insecure, and they are fanatically eager to die- and to kill- in his service.
Posted by Dave D. at February 2, 2003 10:57 AM

And this from Donald Sensing:

I haven't read or heard any commentary about the most penetrating quote in the president's SOTU speech Tuesday night. It's this one, that came in the penultimate paragraph:

The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world; it is God's gift to humanity.
That sentence defines the chasm between the West generally, including America specifically, and Islam generally, including Arabic Islam specifically.

[Donald verbalizes something I've been thinking. Our God is a loving God who wants freedom, friends, theirs is a demanding god who only wants slaves. Ours wants to be loved, theirs wants to be feared.]

2003-02-26T08:30:00.000-08:00

David Frum:

Much commentary everywhere on the 30th anniversary of America’s most bitterly disputed Supreme Court decision. I have little to add, except this one thought: It’s worth pausing to consider just how long 30 years is in the life of the law. Brown v. Board of Education was bitterly controversial in its day. But by the time it turned 30, it was accepted almost unanimously. Ditto for the hotly contested decisions of the New Deal courts: by 1968, those once impassioned debates were ancient history. It’s a good bet that if a court decision cannot get itself accepted in three decades, it will never get itself accepted.

Which is pretty ironic, since the main defense that legal philosophers make of highly activist decisions like Roe is that even if they are not justified by the text of the Constitution, they somehow express society’s emerging moral consensus. But what if that moral consensus fails to emerge? Isn’t the inability of a society to digest a highly activist judicial decision in itself a powerful indicator that the decision must be wrong?

"warheads"

2003-02-25T15:11:00.000-08:00

Heston shoots back at Clooney:

The Left Coast Report believes if the guy keeps talking, he'll end up where he belongs - right next to Alec Baldwin on Hollywood Squares.

Ouch, that's gotta hurt.

2003-02-24T08:31:00.000-08:00

Deborah Orin, Dim Dems Playing Politics:

If you support Bush on Iraq and he wins, you gain zip," explained a Democratic strategist. "If you support him and he loses, you lose along with him. But if you oppose him and things go bad, you stand to be a big winner."

That is both breathtaking and revolting.

At a time when U.S. troops seem headed in harm's way, this strategist - and several other Democrats who are disgusted with their own party - suggest some Dems are calculating they could gain politically if there are body bags.

2003-02-23T17:23:00.000-08:00

Lileks, Jan. 29:

The line that clarified everything: I have a message for the brave and oppressed people of Iraq: Your enemy is not surrounding your country – your enemy is ruling your country. And the day he and his regime are removed from power will be the day of your liberation.

It brought to mind Susan Sarandon’s ad, in which she argues against a military effort to depose Saddam. “What,” she asks, “has Iraq done to us?”

Aside from shoot at our pilots, and attempt to kill an ex-President, I’ll grant that they’ve done no more to us than Hitler did to the US in the 30s. But that’s not the point. Sarandon has turned into the very thing her ilk decries: an insular self-satisfied wealthy Westerner who couldn’t care less what happens in other countries, as long as no Americans get a nick.

I don’t believe this war is being fought because Saddam kills his own people. Saddam is a particularly egregious example of a common tyrant; he stands out because he rules a land with great strategic importance, and because his particular brand of megalomaniacal sociopathy makes him an unpredictable actor. It’s not the torture, the war against Iran, the war against Kuwait, the destruction of the oil fields, the gassing of his own people, the starvation of his people to divert resources for palaces and mosques designed to make Robin Leach swoon. It’s the torture and the wars and the oil-field fires and the gassing and the starvation and the palaces and the big grinning fark-you to the terms that ended the last war. Oh, and also the germs, and the gas, and the rockets, and the nukes. And more, which I expect we’ll learn after Powell’s appearance before the UN.
...
we had this: If this is not evil, then evil has no name. This will occasion another round of eye-rolling among those who are less worried about the 200,000 than they are about the role Bush played in downing Wellstone’s plane, but even in European capitals some learned men may have felt a twinge in that empty socket where their conscience once resided.
...
Defeating Iraq isn’t the camel’s nose in the tent - it’s the camel’s head in the bed of every other Arab leader.

2003-02-21T15:56:00.000-08:00

Dawn Olsen:

I can see it now, the liberals were sipping their sour grapes while listening to Bush's speech and instead of "listening" they were remarking on how the VP has no neck and the Speaker has no neck, what a bunch of fatties those two are. Oh wait, that was what I was saying. No what the Left heard was "blah, blah, blah, Taxes,blah, blah,blah, Destroy the Environment, blah, blah, blah WAR FOR OIL."

Gee, that's funny, cause what I heard was a man, who only 3 years ago I wanted to burn in effigy, give an excellently delivered speech that was both heartfelt, principled, passionate and sincere, but also RIGHT ON with what I think this country needs.
...
Let's not forget Israel. Does anyone REALLY think that Middle East is going to decide on it's own that they need to embrace their Semite brothers of Israel, unless we force them to do so?

Well that right there is the crux of this post, those who live in a dream world are also the same ones who think that the Conservatives of this country are Evil incarnate. They hear nothing, they see nothing and worst of all THEY DO NOTHING.

Don't call me a liberal. You can call me a middle of the road conservative who was converted over time, BY LISTENING, READING, FILTERING ENDLESS PILES OF PROPAGANDA BY THE LEFT, and most of all watching the way the Conservatives conduct themselves, compared to the way the Liberals conduct themselves.

Hilary is pathetic. Lieberman is a talking head with NO ORIGINAL IDEAS OR IDEALS. I am fed up with the entire Democrat party. They are embarassing. Their behavior is outrageous. They all remind me of middle managers at the most mismanaged company on earth.

2003-02-21T09:25:00.000-08:00

Warning to the Donks:

I am a dyed-in-the-wool Republican-hater, coming from a long line of Democratic Party supporters, and YOU ARE LOSING ME. I am a white, not-quite-40 mother of three who lives in the suburbs, and YOU ARE LOSING ME. I care about Education, Social Welfare, and the Environment, and YOU ARE LOSING ME.

You have become the Haven of Celebrities; you elect self-righteous, power-hungry hypocrites like Hillary; and your current pool of 2004 front-runners reads like a Who's Who list from Losers R Us. But that's not the worst of it. You don't seem to understand that the vast majority of Americans support the War against Iraq. That we see the quibbling re: the UN Resolutions for what it is. You cannot see the threat that Iraq poses? Where have you been for the last decade? The best you can come up with is parodying the damn French and demanding 'more proof'.
...
You can oppose, but you do not propose. You have no new ideas, no leadership. You come off as a bunch of politically-correct, dithering wannabes. I read more good ideas in one day surfing the blogs than you can formulate in a year. It makes me sick.

2003-02-20T13:22:00.000-08:00

Lee Harris, Presidential Goodness:

This policy of the tried-and-untrue, as it might be called, is nowhere more apparent than in the tricky matter of helping the Third World. Here the liberal party line is that the way to help the Third World is to curb both American power and American wealth, as if by making us less well off we could automatically improve the standard of living of those less fortunate. But this is nonsense, though of late it has become a kind of canonical nonsense through the agency of the Kyoto Treaty. If the whole of the United States were to disappear tomorrow in a catastrophic earthquake like a second Atlantis, it would not materially benefit a single suffering man, woman, or child anywhere on our planet.

2003-02-20T07:00:00.000-08:00

Mark Steyn:

The new Universal Theory, to which 99% of Saturday's speakers and placards enthusiastically subscribed, is that, whatever the problem, American imperialist cowboy aggression is to blame. In fact, it's not so different from the old Universal Theory, in that the international Zionist conspiracy is assumed to be behind the scenes controlling the cowboys: Bush is a "puppet of Jewry," just like Churchill was -- notwithstanding the fact that America's Jews voted overwhelmingly for Gore.
...
How far are the "peace" crowd prepared to go? Well, they've stopped talking about their little pet cause of the Nineties, East Timor, ever since the guys who blew up that Bali nightclub and whoever's putting together those "Osama" audio tapes started listing support for East Timor's independence as one of the Islamist grievances against the West. But why be surprised? In fall 2001, being pro-gay and pro-feminist didn't stop the left defending an Afghan regime that disenfranchised women and executed homosexuals. Yet these are the same fellows who insist that a secular regime like Iraq's would never make common cause with Islamic fundamentalists, apparently requiring a higher degree of intellectual coherence of Saddam than of themselves.
...
Well, so be it. If everybody thought like Saturday's marchers, it would be curtains for all of us. But we're not quite there yet, and reality will be breaking in very soon. Saying that Bush is the real "weapon of mass destruction" is awful cute the first nine or ten thousand times, but only if you live in Toronto or Paris or Madrid. Viewed by an Iraqi from the reality of Basra, it's pathetic.

2003-02-19T08:11:00.000-08:00

Justene Adamec blogs about Recall Davis.

2003-02-18T10:32:00.000-08:00

Jacob Golbitz:

It's beginning to seem like an emerging theme of 2003 is a race to irrelevance between the United Nations and the European Union. Right now it looks a little close to call.

2003-02-12T08:16:00.000-08:00

I knew I'd gotten frustrated... there are so many stupid people... but I didn't know it had been 12 days!

DenBeste says our differences with the Axis of Weasels may be cultural.

2003-01-31T07:33:00.000-08:00

Christopher Hitchens, on cowboys (via Instapundit):

To have had three planeloads of kidnapped civilians crashed into urban centers might have brought out a touch of the cowboy even in Adlai Stevenson. But Bush waited almost five weeks before launching any sort of retaliatory strike. And we have impressive agreement among all sources to the effect that he spent much of that time in consultation. A cowboy surely would have wanted to do something dramatic and impulsive (such as to blow up at least an aspirin-factory in Sudan) in order to beat the chest and show he wasn't to be messed with. But it turns out that refined Parisians are keener on such "unilateral" gestures—putting a bomb onboard the Rainbow Warrior, invading Rwanda on the side of the killers, dispatching French troops to the Ivory Coast without a by-your-leave, building a reactor for Saddam Hussein, and all the rest of it.

2003-01-28T15:44:00.000-08:00

Amy Welborn has many entries on abortion:

The fact is, my husband and I, our four children, his three siblings, and their combined eight children all owe our lives to the fact that the famous Supreme Court decision did not come until 1973 (and its British equivalent until 1967). For all 17 of us are descended from two unwanted pregnancies -- two pregnancies that produced two hasty marriages, some happiness, rather more sadness, and, eventually, two divorces. And I have to say, boy am I glad that those pregnancies -- dismaying and unexpected as they were, entailing the compromises that they did for those involved -- weren't tidied up in a clinic so that the young mothers in question could "get on with their lives." You, gentle reader, would have been deprived of nothing more than my editorial voice. I, and 16 kinsfolk, would have been robbed of everything.

My biological mother was in kind of a hard place when I was born, with two small children and my father off to war, and she considered going to Tijuana for an abortion, but my Mom stopped her. Thus, 5 children, almost 8 grandchildren depend on that stroke of luck. Thank goodness Roe v. Wade wasn't law in 1944!

Also, I had German measles when I was pregnant with the oldest and could have had an abortion in Illinois for that reason. We're all glad I didn't!

2003-01-28T10:09:00.000-08:00

VodkaPundit:

French soldiers and ships helped bring us victory in our Revolution. French farmers gave us brie and crème fraîche and the wines of Burgundy and Bordeaux. French thinkers gave us Voltaire and Victor Hugo. France stands second to only the United Kingdom as the European nation contributing most to Western Civilization.

But after WWI, France went as bad as potato salad left out at a sunny summer picnic.

Aw, c'mon, VP, tell us how you REALLY feel.

2003-01-27T17:47:00.000-08:00

Guest essay at Dean Esmay on Michigan.

Poll on tax rates.

Tacitus:
Useful Idiots (via Instantman, of course)

Mark Steyn on the Lessons of the Falklands.

Trent Telenko, more failures of the Clinton administration.

2003-01-27T07:57:00.000-08:00

Instantman:

In the words of Power Line:
[T]he anti-Chavez, pro-freedom rally by Cuban-Americans and others in Miami was likely larger than any of yesterday's antiwar rallies. How much coverage did it get in your local newspaper?
That says something about the limited appeal of the antiwar movement. And about what the mainstream press considers news, and what it doesn't.

2003-01-26T20:09:00.000-08:00

Tucker Carlson's advice to Dems (so that they don't have to have the American people lose big so they can win...):

[T]hey ought to rediscover their sense of humor. Liberals used to be funny. They edited magazines like National Lampoon. They had a claim on cool. Then something happened. They became sour and earnest and neurotic about secondhand smoke. The Democratic Party became the that's-not-funny-young-man party, the party of no fun.

2003-01-26T11:03:00.000-08:00

Iberian Notes:

What I find amazing are all the educated, intelligent people who are perfectly willing to believe that mobile phones fry their brains, that Monsanto is trying to take over the world, that the CIA or the Mafia or the Teamsters killed Kennedy, that there's a conspiracy between the government, the referees, and some obscure figures with "muchos intereses" to screw FC Barcelona out of the League again this year, that opening the window when it's hot outside is bad for you, that you can catch a cold if the wind blows on you, that crystals have a lot of power and so do pyramids and that everyone has an energy field (and that mine is negative), that feng fuckin' shui is something more than a millenarian superstition, that electric power lines give off radiation, that there are people out there who pay untold sums of money to watch snuff movies, that there are Satanic cults sacrificing babies infiltrating our nursery schools, that it's possible to lose weight without eating less, exercising more, or both, that AIDS is a plot by the federal government to exterminate blacks or gays or both, that the CIA was running drugs from Nicaragua into the USA to fund the contras, that you can learn a foreign language by paying thousands of dollars and sitting at a computer terminal, that the US Army had hit squads to kill deserters in Vietnam, that O.J.'s son was the one who really did it, or that this whole war thing is a devilish plot cooked up between the oil companies, the Pentagon, the arms manufacturers, Dick Cheney, and the Bavarian Fuckin' Illuminati, yet they are unwilling to believe that there are governments and organizations out there that are working together with the goal of destroying everything that we all cherish about our Western society and that maybe we ought to take action against them now while we still can rather than wait until we can't anymore.

2003-01-26T07:32:00.000-08:00

Cowboys and weasels.

Juan Gato:

Notice, carefully there, what the US was supposed to learn from September 11th. Not that we were at war. Not that there are a bunch of toedick fuckwads who want to kill us. No, the US was supposed to learn humility. All that supposed European sympathy was a front for a smug, "That'll learn 'em. Sad it had to be like that, but that'll learn 'em."

2003-01-25T08:00:00.000-08:00

Why Feminism is AWOL about Islam:

“But look more deeply into the matter, and you realize that the sound of feminist silence about the savage fundamentalist Muslim oppression of women has its own perverse logic. The silence is a direct outgrowth of the way feminist theory has developed in recent years. Now mired in self-righteous sentimentalism, multicultural nonjudgmentalism, and internationalist utopianism, feminism has lost the language to make the universalist moral claims of equal dignity and individual freedom that once rendered it so compelling. No wonder that most Americans, trying to deal with the realities of a post-9/11 world, are paying feminists no mind.'

2003-01-24T20:46:00.000-08:00

Nope, they never learn.

Wesley Dabney on Donks, Clintoon, and NorK.

It's all right to offend Catholics but not Muslims.

Midwest Conservative Journal:

Around here, "to gephardt" means to take both sides of every issue, sometimes at the same time.

2003-01-24T09:29:00.000-08:00

Steyn is still worried.

. One of the peculiarities of this conflict is that we right-wing crazies are now the idealists and the Left are the realpolitik cynics. I mentioned the other week John Pilger’s pitiful performance on Australian TV, where he couldn’t seem to grapple with the idea that al-Qa’eda had blown up Bali in part because of the West’s support for East Timor. Last weekend’s marchers were effectively consigning another of their sometime pet causes, the Kurds, to the garbage can. Anti-Americanism trumps all. Tough luck, Kurds. John le Carré claims he would ‘love’ to see Saddam’s downfall, but he’s not prepared to do anything to make it happen, and so, if left to him, it never will.

Conversely, we on the Right have been the ones arguing that the peoples of the Middle East deserve their freedom. This isn’t because we’re starry-eyed, but because, being hard-hearted right-wingers, we understand that there’s no alternative. As long as the Arab states are such comprehensive failures, their leaders will have a vested interest in making sure their wretched subjects remain mired in a grievance culture that blames that failure on others — i.e., us.
...
If the Left were really as progressive as they claim to be, these [Democratic Kurds] are the fellows they’d be talking up. Instead, the ‘peace’ crowd’s committed to keeping the Iraqi people in a prison state of arbitrary barbarism.
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This phoney war began round about the time of Abdullah’s last non-starter of a peace plan — the Palestinian one. It has been a dispiriting period for Bush backers, who don’t understand why he allowed himself to lose control of the timetable. It has been incredibly damaging in all but the most narrow partisan sense (November’s elections). But we can forgive Bush the phoney war as long as it’s followed by a blitzkrieg (might as well stick with the Bushitler talk). The US has to hit Iraq hard — not by killing civilians but by killing Saddam and a big chunk of his acolytes.