Posted 3/1/2003 10:07:10 PM by Edward Driscoll
YOU DON'T SAY! E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post writes, "whatever the cause may be, the fact is that the link between liberalism and patriotism is not as automatic in the public mind now as it was in FDR's day. In the wake of 9/11, that's a genuine problem for liberals." FDR's day was almost sixty years ago. And liberals haven't been perceived as being patriotic beginning with George McGovern, thirty years ago. Besides, it's ever so hard to combine patriotism and postmodernism. UPDATE: No sooner did I write this, then I came across this essay on Blogcritics, which pretty much proves Dionne's point.

Posted 3/1/2003 09:49:14 PM by Edward Driscoll
RECKLESS ABANDON: That's how Redskins owner Dan Snyder is diving into free agency.

Posted 3/1/2003 09:46:31 PM by Edward Driscoll
IS THE SIERRA CLUB RACIST? That's the provocative title to a post on the Townhall.com Blog by Jennifer Roberts.

Posted 3/1/2003 09:42:20 PM by Edward Driscoll
TALKING TURKEY: What does Turkey's decision on Saturday not to allow US troops (at least for now) mean? Steven Den Beste has two excellent essays on the topic, here and here. UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds (not surprisingly) has more.

Posted 2/27/2003 09:48:52 PM by Edward Driscoll
SORRY FOR THE LACK OF POSTING, but between getting an article completed for Vintage Guitar magazine, and coordinating with the contractors remodeling Stately Ed Manor (sorry Glenn), the Blog suffered today.

Posted 2/27/2003 09:46:06 PM by Edward Driscoll
HOLY FLASHBACK, BATMAN! I think we have our first use of the Q-word for the upcoming war in Iraq. It's yet to start, but CNN is already worrying that it could become “another quagmire.” No word yet on whether or not the Brutal Iraqi Winter (TM) will be a factor.

Posted 2/27/2003 12:12:42 AM by Edward Driscoll
PRO-WAR DEMOCRATS: It took a while, but it's nice to see a couple of high-ranking Democrats finally come to their senses:

Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle was ablaze with war fever. Daschle said: "This is a time to send Saddam Hussein as clear a message as we know how to send that we will not tolerate the broken promises and the tremendous acceleration of development of weapons that we've seen time and time again in Iraq." [Former] Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said, "Month after month, we have given Iraq chance after chance to move from confrontation to cooperation, and we have explored and exhausted every diplomatic action. We will see now whether force can persuade Iraq's misguided leaders to reverse course and to accept at long last the need to abide by the rule of law and the will of the world."

Oh wait, that was in 1998. Nevermind.

Posted 2/26/2003 11:19:58 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE THIRD WAVE: Dennis Prager writes that the world is facing three possible futures. My heart's on door number three, but it's definitely got its work cut out for it.

Posted 2/26/2003 10:44:57 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE FIVE O'CLOCK FOLLIES: Today's Hans Blix headline reads, "Blix: No Sign of Iraq Decision to Disarm" Yesterday's was: "Blix Says Iraq Signals New Cooperation" This is the sort of hypocrisy that M*A*S*H poked fun at every week 30 years ago. Why do today's left not care when they see it in repeated? (And yes, I know the answer.)

Posted 2/26/2003 10:36:07 PM by Edward Driscoll
McCARTHY WITHOUT (too many) APOLOGIES: In a vintage, old-school style G-File (old-school meaning, the kind of stuff he regularly wrote two or three years ago), Jonah Goldberg looks at Joe McCarthy from the vantage point of fifty years of history:

Senator Joe McCarthy was a lout, generally speaking. But he was on the right side of history and, in a broad sense, of morality as well. If, in some sort of parallel-universe exercise, the same number of (now proven) Soviet-Communist spies, collaborators, sympathizers, and the like were somehow switched to Nazis, and McCarthy went after them with the same vehemence as he went after Reds, Joe McCarthy might well have universities and foundations named after him today. Just imagine if a ring of Nazi party members were found to be working in Hollywood, never mind the State Department, taking money from Berlin to advance the Nazi cause. Does anyone really think "McCarthyism" would still be denounced as an unmitigated evil, often put at the front of the parade of horribles alongside Hitlerism and Stalinism?

Read the whole thing--there's too much good stuff for me to quote here. I suspect that Jonah's largely preaching to the choir, but I love the email that he received about this essay.

Posted 2/26/2003 10:20:42 PM by Edward Driscoll
QUOTE OF THE DAY:

"When I opened the Internet cafe, my friends thought I was crazy," said Latifa, 33. "But it's been in business about two months now, and it has already paid for itself."

Kabul has an Internet cafe. Think about that for a few minutes. (Because of all of the posting I've been doing over these past few months about Iraq, I reflexively typed "Baghdad" at first, instead of Kabul. But with a little luck, hopefully Baghdad will have as equally an open and non-censored place where ordinary people can surf the Web by next year as its neighbor to the east.)

Posted 2/26/2003 10:15:36 PM by Edward Driscoll
PRE AND POST-WAR: Andrew Sullivan on the morality of ousting Saddam, and what comes afterwards.

Posted 2/26/2003 10:10:43 PM by Edward Driscoll
NICHOLAS STIX HAS AN INTERESTING essay on the continuing relevance of the Cold War's containment and domino theories.

Posted 2/26/2003 05:23:50 PM by Edward Driscoll
IT'S JUST A LITTLE BIT OF HISTORY REPEATING: Dave Kopel checks out the parallels between the Democratic candidates in 2004, and compares them to their lineup in 1972. Talk about back to the future:

National Journal columnist Chuck Todd suggests that the current Democratic Presidential slate resembles the field from 1972. John Kerry is the "seasoned front-runner" (like Maine Senator Ed Muskie); Gephardt is the labor favorite (like Hubert Humphrey); Dean the darling of the anti-war Left (like McGovern); Lieberman is the lone hawk (like Washington Senator Henry Jackson); Mosley-Braun is the purely symbolic female black candidate (like Shirley Chisholm). But the best parallel is Al Charlatan and George Wallace. Todd delicately writes that "No one thought Wallace could win the Democratic nomination, but everyone in the field believed he would be a key factor in certain primary states." I would put the comparison a little more directly: Like Wallace, Sharpton is an excellent orator and race-baiting demagogue who--despite claiming to fight for the little guy--appeals to the most paranoid and racist instincts of poorly-educated Democratic primary voters, especially in the South and Northeast. The National Journal forgot to come up with a modern parallel for Sam Yorty--the Democratic Mayor of Los Angeles, whose Presidential campaign attracted no visible support (except for an endorsement from the Manchester Union-Leader). I predict that Dennis Kucinich has everything it takes to be the Sam Yorty of 2004.

More proof that it's Morning in America. It's also proof that the Democrats are now the party "standing athwart history and yelling stop", as Jonah Goldberg notes in his recent syndicated column:

In 1950, Lionel Trilling famously wrote, "In the United States at this time, liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is plain nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation." That may not have been entirely true then, and it may not be entirely fair to say the same of liberalism today, but the comparison is apt. Liberalism has become reactionary. Its ideas amount to standing pat and breeding fear of change. Al Gore's central budgetary idea was a "lockbox" and his chief priorities were to fight changes to Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and affirmative action. The most popular word in the left's vocabulary is "stop": Stop the war, stop free trade, stop biotechnology, stop Bush, stop the world because they want to get off. As a political conservative, I see nothing wrong with saying stop -if you have a viable alternative to what it is you want to stop. Take the war for example. Most of the anti-war speakers at recent protests took the position that Iraq should comply with the U.N. resolution, but they also opposed war and sanctions. In other words, they oppose just for the sake of opposing.

Just ask Sheryl Crow.

Posted 2/26/2003 04:18:36 PM by Edward Driscoll
ADVANTAGE ED! Back on Monday, I linked to Peggy Noonan's essay, comparing Clinton and Carter with Ike and Nixon and wrote:

Richard Nixon...continues to grow in stature. (Which isn't to say that I think Nixon was a great president--just the opposite. But add Noonan's take on how he acted during the Bay of Pigs to his resignation in the face of impeachment, and choice to not fight an ugly protracted and divisive battle after having lost a razor-thin election to Kennedy. Carter, Clinton and Gore continue to make Nixon look classier in retrospect. And that's quite an accomplishment.)

Today on his Web site, Rush Limbaugh writes (or maybe it's a transcript of his radio show):

Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter have actively slammed Bush, to the point where Carter accepted that Nobel Peace Prize knowing it was given to him not for merit, but as a "kick in the leg" to Bush. I want you to read Peggy Noonan's latest Wall Street Journal column contrasting the behavior of two leading "anti-war" executives with what JFK faced after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. That disaster could've been juicy fodder for JFK's 1960 opponent, former Vice President Richard Nixon, or for JFK's predecessor in the big chair, General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Instead, Nixon and Ike stood by Kennedy's side, because that meant standing with America. That's the same reason Nixon didn't contest the '60 election vote where dead people voted in Chicago, and he lost by about half a percentage point. The Democrats have sunk below even the man they revile most! Amazing.

(Emphasis mine.) Hey, you heard it hear first, folks, on the EBD network.

Posted 2/26/2003 10:58:00 AM by Edward Driscoll
STEELERS RELEASE KORDELL STEWART, "the enigmatic quarterback who led them to two AFC title games but perplexed them with his inconsistency", AP reports. AP adds, "Arizona, New Orleans, Baltimore, Carolina and Chicago might be among the teams interested in signing Stewart", and I believe Dallas's Jerry Jones is also fascinated by Stewart's abilities as well.

Posted 2/26/2003 10:37:24 AM by Edward Driscoll
GROUND ZERO, TEN YEARS AGO: Today is the tenth anniversary of the first attack on New York's World Trade Center. Byron York looks at Bill Clinton's response to that bombing, which--although no one would know it at the time--demonstrated his priorities as a newly elected president, just as President Bush's response would demonstrate his. UPDATE: The Technoptimist has some thoughts--and several links.

Posted 2/26/2003 10:31:18 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE FRENCH=FREDO:Dennis Miller, speaking about the French, says, "You'd better gas up the dinghy and go fishing with Fredo, because you are dead to me." I love it.

Posted 2/26/2003 10:21:27 AM by Edward Driscoll
ANTI-WAR=ANTI-BUSH: Andrew Sullivan nails it:

By far the most depressing aspect of the debate over war to disarm Saddam has been how it has swiftly adopted the contours of the culture war. There is a solid and passionate base among many blue-staters that opposes this war at least in part because they oppose George W. Bush.

These photos of Sheryl Crow, happily visiting the troops in a war zone in 1996, prove his point. They also prove these points, as well.

Posted 2/26/2003 10:11:49 AM by Edward Driscoll
VOICES OF IRAQIS: Why is the anti-war movement silencing them?

Posted 2/26/2003 12:00:58 AM by Edward Driscoll
DON'T BELIEVE THE HYPE surrounding the 2004 Democratic presidential candidates, says Patrick Ruffini. Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan says there's one big reason why George W. Bush is smiling when he looks to 2004: Al Sharpton. Sullivan writes:

Suddenly, in American domestic politics, it's the 1980s all over again. Faced with a gung-ho cowboy president, who's cutting taxes and pursuing an aggressive foreign policy, the Democrats have gone wobbly at the top and left at the bottom. Terrified of being on the wrong side of a war on terror, most of the Democratic leadership gave the president a complete pass in waging war against Iraq, leading to their slaughter at the last Congressional elections. Meanwhile, the core of the party has veered left - into the anti-war movement, an increasingly paranoid anti-Bush movement, more and more convinced that America is in the grip of a right-wing political and media cabal. And then just as the president's ratings drifted upward into the low 60s, things got even worse for the opposition. A new specter now faces the Democrats: Al Sharpton. Sharpton is the inheritor of Jesse Jackson's wing of the Democrats: an African-American street preacher turned racial activist who rose to prominence in the 1980s by championing a young black woman's claims of gang-rape. Those claims turned out to have been fabricated, and in 1987, Sharpton was convicted of defaming one of the alleged rapists. In the 1990s, Sharpton - with his huge girth, dandy clothes and extremely important hair - played New York's racial politics to the hilt. In 1995, he demonized a Jewish shop-keeper in Harlem, helping incite the racially motivated murder of seven of the shop's workers. He has been convicted of tax evasion and non-payment of rent. But his gutter style of racial politics has won him a devoted following and considerable clout in New York City Democratic politics. A a weapon in American politics, race still works. More worrying for the Democrats, Sharpton has shown no compunction in taking his racial grievances out on the party itself - leading to the bitter and complete defeat of the last Democratic candidate for mayor in New York City. He may not have much chance of winning anything outright, in other words. But he's a proven and effective spoiler.

It's waaaaaay too soon to say this with any certainty, but there's a very good chance that it's Morning in America for George W. Bush. Unlike his father, who inherited an astoundingly robust economy that was coming to the end of its (to coin a phrase) seven fat years and whose long overdue, and extremely mild recession occurred just as he was running for reelection, Bush 43's timing could be spot-on perfect: a quick victory in Iraq, followed by overwhelming proof that Hussein really was the Stalin-like tyrant he's been accussed of being all these years, followed by a long overdue rally in the stock market, and several years of growth whose peak coincides perfectly for Bush's reelection, made all the easier because of Al Sharpton's corrosive presence, either in some prominent role with the Democrats, or as Sullivan speculates, a third party, Nader-like spoiler. This is all pure speculation on my part, and a lot could happen to make 2004 a very, very different scenario. But Bush is in the driver's seat here. Fortunately, he knows it. And unlike his father, he knows what to do with it.

Posted 2/25/2003 02:57:38 PM by Edward Driscoll
GREAT LINE: Writing about Dennis Kucinich, one of the many Democrats currently running for president, Eric Olsen says, "If I have to pick a disgraced former mayor from Ohio, I'll take Jerry Springer."

Posted 2/25/2003 02:34:33 PM by Edward Driscoll
SAME OL' BLIX: Headline on AP: "Blix Says Iraq Signals New Cooperation" Meanwhile, Iraq moved missiles within range of US forces in Kuwait, prompting this headline: "Western Jets Attack Five Missile Systems in Iraq" Was that the signal for new cooperation by Iraq?

Posted 2/25/2003 02:17:32 PM by Edward Driscoll
CONVERSATIONS WITH A MASTER CRAFTSMAN OF MOVIES: My latest review is now up on Blogcritics.

Posted 2/24/2003 10:39:16 PM by Edward Driscoll
"THAT DECISION IS OURS": I suspect that the quote highlighted by Andrew Sullivan will be all over the Blogosphere on Tuesday:

A senior diplomat from another council member said his government ... was told not to anguish over whether to vote for war. "You are not going to decide whether there is war in Iraq or not," the diplomat said U.S. officials told him. "That decision is ours, and we have already made it. It is already final. The only question now is whether the council will go along with it or not."

Sullivan, (who writes, "that's some brinkmanship". No kiddding!), is the first of what should be lots of people examining that quote's implications.

Posted 2/24/2003 05:32:35 PM by Edward Driscoll
WELL, THAT DIDN'T LAST TOO LONG, DID IT? Rosie O'Donnell, October, 2001:

Talkshow host and ardent Democratic activist Rosie O'Donnell stunned Los Angeles radio listeners Thursday morning by declaring she's changed her opinion of President Bush. "I love him now!" O'Donnell told KRLA-AM's Dennis Prager. O'Donnell said she even got to Yankee Stadium an hour early for a World Series game so that she could videotape Bush! 'I brought a videocamera and my six year old son and no security so that my son could see the president," said O'Donnell. "We left at 6 o'clock in order to do that. And since September 11, I have had nothing but accolades for the job he has done for this nation... I am in full support of the President." O'Donnell added: "Honey, I love him now! He is our President. We are at war."

Rosie O'Donnell, February, 2003, via Drudge Report "coming soon" blurb:

ROSIE O'DONNELL SAYS NO TO WAR: 'THIS IS NOT THE AMERICAN WAY... WE ARE NOT THE TERRORISTS. WE DO NOT MEET TERROR WITH MORE TERROR... WAR IS WRONG. KILLING IS WRONG. HAVE WE NOT LEARNED YET?'

The whiplash from these flip-flops can really cause a headache!

Posted 2/24/2003 04:39:19 PM by Edward Driscoll
MICHAEL MEDVED IS PRAISING TED TURNER. No, really!

Posted 2/24/2003 04:26:48 PM by Edward Driscoll
IRONY CAN BE PRETTY IRONIC SOMETIMES: Reason's Hit & Run blog notes that "in the wake of Knopf severing ties with the discredited historian, Soft Skull Press will be publishing a revised edition of Arming America in October 2003." Yes, Michael Bellesiles' new publisher is named Soft Skull. Perfect.

Posted 2/24/2003 03:35:49 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE ANTI-IKES: Peggy Noonan writes that two ex-presidents (two guesses as to who they are) "could learn from Eisenhower and the Bay of Pigs". And...from Richard Nixon, who continues to grow in stature. (Which isn't to say that I think Nixon was a great president--just the opposite. But add Noonan's take on how he acted during the Bay of Pigs to his resignation in the face of impeachment, and choice to not fight an ugly protracted and divisive battle after having lost a razor-thin election to Kennedy. Carter, Clinton and Gore continue to make Nixon look classier in retrospect. And that's quite an accomplishment.)

Posted 2/24/2003 02:49:28 PM by Edward Driscoll
I WAS GOING TO QUOTE select paragraphs from this essay by Mark Goldblatt on antiwar protesters, but everytime I found one that I liked, another paragraph seemed to jump up and say, "quote me too!". So simply read the whole thing.

Posted 2/24/2003 02:18:21 PM by Edward Driscoll
DISARMING HISTORY: Joyce Lee Malcolm, writing in Reason examines how "an award-winning scholar twisted the truth about America’s gun culture -- and almost got away with it". A detailed timeline of how Michael Bellesiles was ultimately exposed is also included. This paragraph is also instructive:

In June 2002, when the soundness of his scholarship had become so suspect that the National Endowment for the Humanities stripped its name from his Newberry Library fellowship, Bellesiles told a British reporter that the move "reawakened the ghosts of McCarthyism." He described it as a "political decision that should send chills through academics everywhere and is clearly intended as a warning to any scholar who dares to work on a controversial topic."

James Lileks, call your office.

Posted 2/24/2003 01:00:50 PM by Edward Driscoll
MISSING THE POINT: Duke University will be launching an Axis of Evil film festival, showing films from Iraq, North Korea and Iran, and rogue states such as Cuba, Syria and Libya. Check out this quote by Ariel Dorfman, a professor of literature and Latin American studies at Duke University:

"I'd urge everyone who believes in cultural dialogue -- and particularly those who don't -- to come and submerge themselves in these works of art from the very places that some in the United States would like to bomb out of sight and out of existence".

Oh--I guess I missed the part where President Bush said he was going to obliterate Cuba with nuclear weapons. (Heck, we may be removing the nukes from many of our missiles.) And then there's this statement by Negar Mottahedeh, assistant professor of literature at Duke:

We know how Bush sees 'the Axis of Evil.' How does someone from within that Axis see his or her own everyday life?"

Given state-controlled censorship by many of these countries, how do we really know how these filmmakers "see his or her own everyday life?" But they're probably deeply envious of the freedoms that most Americans take for granted, such as the freedom to both make movies and protest your government, and the freedom to make movies free of government interference. And the freedom to keep at least some of the profits from your work. By the way--nice use of quotation marks by Reuters. And nice of Reuters to list a film series about largely enslaved film makers under their "Oddly Enough" category. (Link via James Russell.)

Posted 2/24/2003 12:10:50 PM by Edward Driscoll
WHEN IN DOUBT, BACK THE MAN WITH THE MOUSTACHE. It really is the left's foreign policy, isn't it?

Posted 2/24/2003 11:53:28 AM by Edward Driscoll
A SIMPLE QUESTION--and a good one--asked by Andrew Sullivan.

Posted 2/24/2003 10:47:23 AM by Edward Driscoll
BACK TO THE FUTURE: The US is considering replacing the nuclear warheads on some Minuteman III missiles with conventional warheads, that could be used to strike states like Iraq and North Korea on short notice:

The weapon would give the United States the ability to attack targets thousands of miles away with precision-guided, conventional high explosives in minutes, military officials said. Because of the missiles' speed, they would be able to pierce current air defenses and avoid putting American pilots at risk, they added. Replacing nuclear warheads with conventional weapons on some of the nation's globe-girdling missiles is a proposal that is barely on the drawing board. The Air Force Space Command in Colorado Springs will begin formally exploring the idea of converting some Minuteman III missiles this fall in a two-year review the military calls an "analysis of alternatives." But senior Air Force and Pentagon officials are seriously weighing the proposal as part of a larger rethinking of the kind of deterrence and long-range attack weapons the military will need in the security environment that followed the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Now that's my kind of bunker buster!