Hit Me With It One More Time: Giscard on EU Constitution

A lot of people who worry or wonder about where EU democratic ideas are going can look at two stories in today's Financial Times to get a good inkling. In the first, Giscard D'Estaing, one of the primary authors of the EU Constitution soundly thrashed last year in two referendums in France and Holland, makes the following plea:

" France should reconsider the issue - either through a second referendum or a parliamentary vote - after next year's presidential elections."

Let's see, if we change the rules and have a parliamentary vote....Yeah, that's the ticket! We have a corrupt elite that the public despises, we can trust those crooks to vote the Constitution even against the wishes of the voting public! And another immortal line gives evidence that majorities are not that impressive:

"It is not France that has said no. It is 55 per centof the French people - 45per cent of the French people said yes,"

If this sounds wacky, you just don't know the EU and its cadres of faceless unaccountable bureaumeisters. Look at Montenegro, forced to have a 55% majority in order to break away from the Serbian Yugoslav facade. Guess a majority is not enough any more for Europe. Special circumstances.

"There are 16 out of 25 countries that have ratified the European constitution. That's to say there's a qualified majority. There is an agreed text. The concern now is the modalities of adopting it," says Giscard.

Just massage the electorate. And if you think it is simply because egomaniac Giscard is the author of much of the EU text and wants to go down in history as a sort of pseudo-Charlemagne, well, yesss, just like his successor, Chirac, this fellow Giscard[whom I actually met while I was American Vice Consul in Lyon and he was a mere Finance Minister] does have delusions of grandeur. Just like his native pays! But read on:

Nicolas Sarkozy, president of the ruling UMP party and a strong contender in next year's presidential elections, has already suggested a modified treaty could be adopted by parliament.

Like Sodom and Gomorrah, mutatis mutandis, French elites are probably going to get that pesky EU Constitution passed in France, so that somehow the French can predictably claim to be the REAL founders of an EU Superstate. What's missing, besides sanity?

Tony Blair, UK prime minister, had lost a historic opportunity to win a British referendum on the constitutional treaty. "The British will not approve the constitutional treaty. We know it," he said. "I think that for Great Britain we need to find a special arrangement resembling that which applied to the euro."

He hoped the UK would remain in the EU even ifit did not adopt a revived constitution.

"I think the British system of government isthe most competent in Europe. I have seen how British diplomacy functions and the financial systemin the City. All that gives the impression that theBritish system is the best, or at least one of the best, in Europe," he said.

Ah, the Brits! And then there are the Germans [I was once told that Giscard himself is of German heritage, but elaborately faked aristocratic French lineage in his grasping climb of the French elite "montagne."

The former French president also had high praise for Angela Merkel, the German chancellor.

"I am impressed by the new tone and the new method of Europe's new generation, as represented by Mrs Merkel, which is less strident, less personal, more balanced and works hard on the substance of problems. I hope there will be such leaders in France and Great Britain," he said.

I wonder what he thinks of her predecessor, the ignominious failure Schroeder, now the cushy Chairman of a Russian-German gas pipeline consortium that will ship natural gas west on the bottom of the Baltic Sea from Kaliningrad [formerly Koenigsburg] to Germany without crossing Poland. How's about that for Drang nach Westen?

Gibson Replaces Vargas/Woodruff on World News Tonight

I sure cannot say that I saw this one coming. Charlie Gibson is replacing Elizabeth Vargas and Bob Woodruff on World News Tonight as the Westin family continues to surprise network news viewers again and again.

Back in the day when I did consulting for ABC News, I had a one-on-one with Av Westin, father of David Westin who made the announcement of Gibson's replacing the young duo today. I worked with Tom Capra, son of the famous Hollywood director Frank, and was mainly seconded to 20/20, but Tom had set up much of the WNT mise-en-scene and intro, and also was Executive Producer of WNT before moving on to other pastures. So I for a short time was privy to some of the backstairs gossip of ABC newsies.

But I genuinely liked Elizabeth Vargas when I moved to Chicago in 1991 and she was one of the anchors on the local CBS affiliate evening news. Lots of Irish charm [Her mom's of Cooney heritage] and Latin charm, come to think of it. I wavered between CBS and ABC recently when Bob Schieffer replaced Jabba the Hut, and when Schieffer began bad-mouthing GWB [they just can't help it, the Heyward legacy] went to WNT almost permanently.

Gibson has a news-lite vibe about him. He may have interviewed "Kofi Annan, Tony Blair, the late Yasir Arafat, and Nelson Mandela" as the PR flack puts it, but except for Blair, these are not A-List references.

Diane Sawyer would have been my choice, but since nobody asked me.....

A Plague on the House

Even the New York Times cannot maintain silence on the bribery/extortion case against Democratic Rep. Jefferson of the most corrupt city in the US and Canada.

I wrote a couple of blogs early this year on the strange silence of the MSM concerning Jefferson [and House ETHBICS Cte. member Hollohan] while TV and news outlets railed against "Republican corruption" and the Dem blogosphere [or rather the ultra-left crazies on the lunatic fringe of the Dem blogosphere] went ballistic when the WaPo Ombudsman implied that there were indications that the Dems were crooks too. [The WaPo had to shut down its blogsite as the equipment couldn't handle the obscene toxic sludge heaved and spewed by the vomit-crew on the angry left, if I recall].

Those who can recall remember Rep. Rostenkowski of Ill. going to jail back when the Dems were in power. And Bobby Baker way back when. And Jimmy Carter's pal who said "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The Dems will become as corrupt as the Repubs have with Cunningham and DeLay, given the opportunity. Or more so. I know, I worked for the Dems. They mean well, but they cut corners all the time, because their ethical and moral relativism makes them even LESS liable to behave well than the occasionally morality-influenced Repubs.

Da Vinci Code Limps In Behind Passion of Christ

Despite all the hoopla and the gushing of publicists, the poorly-reviewed hoax-saga BO was behind Mel Gibson's foreign language epic that opened in 700 fewer theaters. But the DVC will do well internationally and I am awaiting the pirated version from my Venezuela connection any day now!

In the USA, DVC came out $9 million ahead of Ice Age: The Meltdown and $11.5 ahead of Chronicles of Narnia, so it is not a colossal failure---except at Tomatometer HQ where it limps in dead last among the current 10 flicks out there, 2 points behind RV, at a lowly 22% of positive ratings by reviewers.

So around 78% of experienced reviewers believe DVC is a rotten tomato.

Oops, I forgot to mention---only 9% of the Tomatometer's "Cream of the Crop," that is, major movie reviewers in national publications with an acknowledged top rank among their peers, believe DVC is worth $10 of your money.

Should get good word of mouth, don't you think?

Condi at BC: You Go, Girl!

Apropos of 2008 and all the speculation on how good it might be for the Republicans to lose the House of Representatives in 2006 so that a certifiable political lightweight like Nancy Pelosi could give the American people a dose of Democratic-Party-style Donkey-Kong governance, Condoleeza Rice demonstrated at Boston College why she would be a good running mate to a John McCain [or perhaps even at the top of the ticket, if she emerges a front-runner in polling a couple of years from now].

As empty as Pelosi's head may be, Rice's is full:

Rice said she understands why students and faculty planned to protest, and she embraced their right to object even as she defended the war in Iraq.

"People have the right to protest, but I hope when they protest they realize also that people now have a right to protest in Baghdad and Kabul, and that's a very big breakthrough for the international community," Rice said Monday before the BC commencement.

"I think it's just fine for people to protest as long as they do so in a way that doesn't try to have a monopoly on the conversation[my emphasis],"

That might be a hard concept to swallow for the Kim Jung Il/Stalinist Angry Leftoids who screech that the MSM leans to the right because it actually presents the elected Administration's point of view, even if only to cheap-shot the GWB point of view.

This weekend, Pravda-editor Huffington was on C-Span explaining how "America" supported her ultra-left nomenklatura on her eponymous rant-sheet. While the three other panelists tried to avoid her arm-waving gesticulations, the Chief-Screecher embarrassed even Frank Rich, who rarely gets overtaken on the left lane, by her silly LA POV---even New Yorkers cringe when they hear the Hollyweird intonations strongly suggestive of collective psychosis emanating from southern Cal.
On the sane side of the spectrum, Condi

drew scattered applause when she discussed what she called a "commitment to reason," or an obligation to test and challenge their own views.

"There is nothing wrong with holding an opinion and holding it passionately," Rice said, "but at those times when you are absolutely sure you're right, go find someone who disagrees."

What a concept! Let's draft that woman for Prez in '08!

Signs of Brainpower in Dem Foreign Policy Circles?

Former Dems like myself remember when the Democrats did possess and profess a real foreign policy, way back before Clinton's "we wanna be loved" hyperlegalistic political rectitude and Jimmy Carter's feckless summiteering at Camp David combined with his general incompetence domestically and across the foreign policy board, which earned him a dubious Nobel Prize. BTW, Carter in a sense brought the debacle of Iran to the world stage when a brain-dead feminist leftoid named Patricia headed the Human Rights Bureau of the State Department and wrote "NO!!!" with her lipstick across a paper advocating the sale of rubber bullets to the Shah's Police Depts. This was in line with Jimmy's girlie-man self-righteous ninnification of foreign policy, unparalleled since Wilson's debacle in failing to get the US into the League of Nations after Versailles [which coincidentally, got this eff-up Prez a dubious Nobel Peace Prize like his eff-up successor Jimmy Carter]. Subsequently, the Shah's police killed about 400 students with non-rubber bullets---the bazaaris threw up their hands in frustration, the mullahs moved forward as a semi-sane alternative, yadda, yadda, yadda.

So insane mid-level State Dept civil servants can have influence, though almost never for good, if they are political appointees with an idiotic agenda.

But I digress.

Jackson Diehl points out that the Democratic Party is not completely dominated by girlie men like Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and John Murtha [never mind the few ultra-left insaniacs like Rangel and Conyers and Waters and Boxer].

Though you'd never know it from surfing the Internet, there exists in the Democratic Party a substantial body of politicians and policymakers who believe the U.S. mission in Iraq must be sustained until it succeeds; who want to intensify American attempts to spread democracy in the greater Middle East; and who think that the Army needs to be expanded to fight a long war against Islamic extremism.

So there are non Self-Destructive Democrats alive and well among the rubble of the rock-throwing rabble?

No, I'm not talking about House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who wants to quickly abandon Iraq, regardless of the consequences; or Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, who recently issued a "Democratic Plan to Protect America and Restore Our Leadership in the World" that does not include the word "democracy."

We know all about the "America First" Know-Nothing Left and how it dominates discourse on a daily basis among the cocoon-dwellers of the NYT left and the LAT screech-screamers with a Hollyweird megaphone substance-abuser cokehead attytood, but what about people actually elected to office in non-goofy constituencies?

This is about a coalition of mostly younger foreign affairs professionals who held mid-level positions at the State Department and the National Security Council during the Clinton administration and who have spent the past several years formulating a distinctly Democratic response to the post-Sept. 11 era -- as opposed to a one-dimensional critique of President Bush or Iraq. Now they are beginning to gravitate toward some of the centrist Democrats who -- unlike Pelosi or Reid -- might actually emerge as serious presidential candidates in 2008, such as former Virginia governor Mark Warner, Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh and Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack.

As a Rumsfeld-despising independent with strong cultural biases toward conservatism, but a political soft spot for constructive diplomacy, I want to read a centrist book:

This month they published a fascinating book that lays out what the foreign policy of a winning campaign by one of those Democrats -- or perhaps Hillary Clinton -- could look like. Sponsored by the Progressive Policy Institute, which is an outgrowth of the Clinton-friendly Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), it's called "With All Our Might: A Progressive Strategy for Defeating Jihadism and Defending Liberty."

Like most of its authors, editor Will Marshall, a DLC founder who now heads the policy institute, sees himself as reviving the foreign policy of Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy, who formulated the Democratic response to the totalitarian menace of communism. Jihadism, Marshall says, requires a similar exercise of intellectual muscle. "Democrats have always been at our best when we have defended democratic values against illiberal ideologies," Marshall told me last week. "When we do that we can appeal to a broader public, not only at home but globally."

As Marshall sees it, the rapidly sinking popularity of Bush and the Republican Congress provides Democrats with "their first real opportunity since 9/11 to make the case on national security." The paradox is that Bush has appropriated some of the central themes of the Truman-Kennedy foreign policy -- above all, the emphasis on the global promotion of freedom. Bush has poisoned grass-roots Democratic support for democracy promotion: The book quotes a German Marshall Fund survey showing that Democrats now oppose it by 50 to 43 percent, while Republicans favor it by a margin of 76 to 19.

So Democrats have to start by "reclaiming our own ground," Marshall says. His book proposes two important ways to do that. First, Democrats can clean up the crimes perpetrated by the Bush administration at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and the CIA's secret prisons, and restore America's reputation as the world's foremost defender of human rights. They can also end Bush's cynical policy of demanding democracy from enemy regimes such as Iran and Syria while tolerating the continued autocracy of such friends as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. In an essay laying out a "grand strategy for the Middle East," former NSC official Kenneth M. Pollack proposes that a Democratic administration take a simple but crucial step that Bush has eschewed: directly linking the $2 billion in annual U.S. aid to Egypt to the implementation of "a long term plan for political and economic changes."

Okay, but every modern Egyptologist knows that pressure on Egypt without pressure on Israel is useless, especially if we can't even get Iraq back up off the canvas to keep on punching until the end of the fifteenth round. And Pollack is a cryto-Israeli lobby asset, so will any linkage ever take place?

Pollack and his fellow Democrats acknowledge, no liberal policy in the Middle East will work if Iraq fails. While Democrats differ over whether the invasion was right, notes an introduction by Marshall and Jeremy Rosner, both national interests and national honor demand that "we not abandon the Iraqi people to chaos and sectarian violence."

"The fact that President Bush and his team have mismanaged virtually every aspect of postwar reconstruction does not justify an immediate or precipitous withdrawal," they say. "Instead we should rally the American people for an extended and robust security and reconstruction presence."

Are those Democrats talking? Yes, indeed: Marshall's group also has ideas on how Democrats can build stronger ties to the Republican-dominated military, revitalize NATO and the United Nations, and reverse Bush's tax cuts in order to modernize and expand the Army. Don't be surprised if, after all the Internet noise fades away, such ideas are at the center of the next presidential campaign.

I certainly hope so, because the closest thing to a foreign policy thought-process emanating from the HuffNPuff end of the ultra-left sounds just like his capitalist ethnic kin in South Korea to North Korean tyrant Kim Jung-Il---abject quavering feminized submissiveness begging forgiveness for our material success and wishing to pay reparations for daring to defending ourselves against a worldwide terrorist conspiracy.

Maybe South Korea should send Jimmy Carter up to Pyongyang to get another promise of a nuclear "freeze" as the supplicant ex-Prez did in 1994 with such astounding success that the North Korean arsenal is going to approach a couple dozen soon.

But again I digress.

Is It Just Chirac, or Is France Terminally Ungovernable?

Charles De Gaulle once said that it is impossible to govern a nation with 500 different kinds of cheese, or four hundred ways to make an omelette, or something. Now a French book wonders if France's current stagnation results simply because Chirac is an ancient fraud and mountebank, or does the problem lie deeper?
The Financial Times has a book review:

In The Tragedy of the President, France's literary sensation of the season, Franz-Olivier Giesbert, makes a powerful case that Jacques Chirac's 11-year presidency has been a disaster. The veteran journalist argues that one man's personal tragedy is now ending in political tragedy for his nation. Mr Chirac's failure to tackle France's deep-seated problems has left his country demoralised, disoriented and fearful of the future. The 73-year-old president, now imprisoned in miserable isolation in the Elys?e palace, has come to personify the decline of France and the political impotence of its leadership.

But the alarming question indirectly raised (although never answered) by Giesbert's book is whether any other president could have done better. Is French society reformable? Or is it, as Mr Chirac appears to have concluded through brutal experience, fatally resistant to change? Perhaps all that can be hoped for – as the neighbouring British once believed – is the orderly management of decline.

Welcome Back, Muammer and Hanoi

Is neo-conservatism receding into last decade's news even before the end of this decade? A piece in today's Financial Times examines the Recessional [apologies to Kipling] that GWB and company are undertaking as his second administration wanes.

Neo-conservatism has many tenets, some of which are disputed. But its core principle is a rejection of therealist school of foreign policy that deals with regimes as they are. According to the neo-cons, a regime's outward behaviour is dictated by its internal character. The goal of foreign policy should be to transform - rather than accommodate - regimes that do not share America's freedom-loving goals.

That was known as the Tarnoff Doctrine early on in the Clinton Administration, and it was hooted off the stage by the very people who later came up with Wilsonian democratization as the US foreign policy goal---sort of matching the aggressive foreign policy with a figleaf justification. But now Realpolitik returns:

Last week's deals with Libya and Vietnam do not meet that basic criterion since all that has changed is their outward behaviour - Vietnam wants to engage in more trade and investment and Libya is co-operating in counter-terrorism. Both countries, like Iran and North Korea, remain dictatorships. Indeed both countries continue to be governed by the same regimes that originally turned them into pariahs - in Libya's case the same person. Neither shows any sign, rhetorical or otherwise, of embracing liberal democracy.

The new realism ensues from a recent revised manifesto of Bush aims and goals.

The difference can be seen inMr Bush's first National Security Strategy, published in 2002, which promised an aggressive campaign of democratisation (as well as the controversial doctrine of military pre-emption). In the second NSS document, issued two months ago, democracy promotion was just one among a number of competing foreign policy goals. Without quite admitting to it, the Bush administration implicitly concedes that the rapid democratisation of Iraq has created more problems than it has solved.

The dancing may have stopped, but the melody lingers on:

Yet the battle between realists and idealists is not fully played out - and America being America, it never will be. Outside the administration the two are being synthesised into mushy amalgams, such as "realistic Wilsonianism". Within it, however, there is an unresolved debate over whether to negotiate directly with Iran on its nuclear programme or to give priority to removing Tehran's mullahs.

On this, the Bush administration has been sending conflicting signals: last week Condoleezza Rice, US secretary of state, backed the diplomatic efforts of America's three main European partners. The previous month, Mr Bolton, now US ambassador to the United Nations, shot down the same proposal. That tussle will probably continue.

Looks like the Condification of US foreign policy may be moving out ahead of the Bolton-Wolfowitz crew in the sculling on the Potomac. But the FT's DC chief Edward Luce has a final word to the mullahs:

Iran, meanwhile, which has better claims to being a democracy than either Libya or Vietnam, can reflect on one thing: you can be a pariah in US eyes, you can even get the better of it in conflict. But when, as they probably will, America's priorities change, it may, on pragmatic grounds, happily welcome you back into the fold - even if you have nuclear weapons. Just ask Pakistan.

Dems Plant Seeds of Self-Destruction

The Wall Street Journal has a good overview of the possible effects of an ultra-left takeover of the Democratic party platform will do to its presidential prospects in '08 and it's not good news if past is precedent.

Meanwhile, it has a good take on the speech by McCain last week in the capitol of the Bush-Derangement-Syndrome [along with LA]:

Rude college kids and left-wing professors are hardly a new story. But the ugliness of the New School crowd toward Mr. McCain reveals the peculiar rage that now animates so many on the political left. Dozens of faculty and students turned their back on the Senator, others booed and heckled, and a senior invited to speak threw out her prepared remarks and mocked their invited guest as he sat nearby. Some 1,200 had signed petitions asking that Mr. McCain be disinvited.
"The Senator does not reflect the ideals upon which this university was founded," said senior Jean Sara Rohe, which makes us wonder what ideals, and manners, she learned at home. "I am young and though I don't possess the wisdom that time affords us, I do know that preemptive war is dangerous. And I know that despite all the havoc that my country has wrought overseas in my name, Osama bin Laden still has not been found, nor have those weapons of mass destruction."

Speaking of "havoc," Ms. Rohe spoke only blocks from the site of the former World Trade Center. The Senator who spent years in the Hanoi Hilton reacted with admirable restraint to these insults, and readers who want to see his remarks can find them posted here.

Mr. McCain was invited to the New School by its president, former Democratic Senator and Congressional Medal of Honor winner Robert Kerrey. When Mr. Kerrey spoke, he was also heckled, with someone shouting, "You're a war criminal!" It'd be comforting to dismiss all this as mere Manhattan derangement, but these passions have become common in liberal media and Web precincts and are spilling into national politics.

Victims of mass-psychosis on the left may rule in the MSM and NYC/LA, but what about the Heartland?

We doubt all of this will help Democrats with the larger electorate, which whatever its doubts about Iraq does not want a precipitous surrender. Americans haven't trusted a liberal Democrat with the White House during wartime since Vietnam, which is when the seeds of the current antiwar rage were planted. The great mistake that leading Democrats and anti-Communist liberals made during Vietnam was not speaking up against a left that was demanding retreat and sneering at our war heroes. Will any Democrat speak up now?

Ironically, the situation in Iraq now improves day-by-day, and US policy might be ultimately successful, although the MSM is heavily invested in a US defeat and will likely call any outcome a loss for the US.

As Thomas Sowell put it so well, the Fourth Estate is a Fifth Column in the USA.

Fourth Estate is USA's Fifth Column

Despite the avalanche of negavity the electronic and print MSM spew on an hourly basis about how soon the World Will End [About ten years, says Internet inventor Al Gore, who also discovered Global Warming] and about when the Americans will gain their Dearly Beloved status[clue: who cares except mindless media morons & their groupies?], there is hope, as Michael Barone outlines in a US News & World Report article.

Just like the homeless seem to multiply whenever Republicans are elected President, the world is on its last legs after years of Republican mismanagement---Oops, facts say otherwise!

Just as faux-economist Paul Krugboy keeps telling the far-left cocoon of NYT readers concerning the next depression [ he's called six out of the last zero over two decades, by one count], the hallucinating free thinkers are sure that things have never been worse.

But the Cocoon dwellers, who call people outside its fuzzy borders "bubble people," are thriving just as almost everyone else is on a rising tide of prosperity. Except, of course, for the know-it-alls in that repository of world knowledge, the Eurozone! Europe is stagnating, largely because it has adopted the policies the NYT cocoonites want adopted by the USA!:

First, economic growth. In 2005, as in 2004, the world economy grew by about 5 percent, according to the International Monetary Fund, and the IMF projects similar growth for several years to come. This is faster growth than in all but a few peak years in the 1980s and 1990s, and it's in vivid contrast to the long periods of stagnation or contraction in history. The great engine of this growth is, of course, the United States, which produces more than one fifth of world economic product and whose gross domestic product has been growing at around 4 percent--4.8 percent in the latest quarter. Other engines are China and India, each with about a sixth of the world's people, and with economic growth of 10 and 8 percent, respectively. But other areas are growing, too: eastern Europe (5 percent), Russia (6 percent), East Asia (5 percent), Latin America (4 percent), even the Middle East (6 percent) and sub-Saharan Africa (5.5 percent).

Free-market benefits. Lagging behind is the euro area (1 percent) and the rest of western Europe (2 percent). Lesson: Sclerotic welfare states produce mass unemployment and stifle initiative and innovation. In contrast, the Chinese and Indian growth rates show how freeing up an economy produces rapid growth, and the continued contrast between the United States and Europe makes the same point. Free-market economic growth is enabling millions of people to rise out of poverty every year, even more than the experts expect. As the IMF writes, "The momentum and resilience of the global economy in 2005 continued to exceed expectations."

Gosh, how counterintuitive is that!?! But the NYT Cocoon depends on great and widely-respected world thinkers like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad [who] said in his recent letter to President Bush,

"Liberalism and western-style democracy have not been able to help realize the ideals of humanity. Today those two concepts have failed." That's obviously nonsense, of course. Free markets and democracy are chalking up one ringing achievement after another--as we can see from the surge in world economic growth and the reduction of armed conflict--while the Islamists can achieve their goals only through oppression and slaughter. Yes, they can inflict severe damage on us by asymmetric warfare, as they did on September 11, and we must continue to take determined action to prevent them from doing so again. Yes, a nuclear Iran is a severe threat. But we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that, in most important respects, our civilization is performing splendidly.

Oh Yeah? Ask Maureen Dowd! She'll straighten you out on that real quick!
But aren't we also living in times of record strife?

Actually, no. Just the opposite. The Human Security Centre of the University of British Columbia has been keeping track of armed conflicts since World War II. It reports that the number of genocides and violent conflicts dropped rapidly after the end of the Cold War and that in 2005 the number of armed conflicts was down 40 percent from 1992. Wars have also become less deadly: The average number of people killed per conflict per year in 1950 was 38,000; in 2002 it was just 600. The conflict in Iraq has not significantly changed that picture. American casualties are orders of magnitude lower than in the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam, and precision weapons have enabled us to vastly reduce the civilian death toll.

Well, I guess I had better take what the Chicken Little Leftoids shriek and moan and whimper and whinge and whine and screech and generally hyperventilate on an hourly basis with a grain of salt, maybe?
"Not with a bang, but a million bee-stings," said T.S. Eliot!

Amnesty is "Plural Bananas"

Mark Steyn customarily devotes his Sunday Chicago STimes column to the prevailing insanity in the Halls of Congress. Today's piece is no exception.

"From the Washington Times: "The Senate voted yesterday to allow illegal aliens to collect Social Security benefits based on past illegal employment."
Well, I think that's the kind of moderate compromise "comprehensive immigration reform" package all Americans can support, don't you?

Some mean-spirited extremist House Republicans had proposed that illegal aliens should only receive 75 percent of the benefits to which they're illegally entitled for having broken the law.

On the other hand, President Bush had proposed that illegal aliens should also be able to collect Social Security benefits for any work they'd done in Mexico (assuming, for the purposes of argument, there is any work to be done in Mexico).

On the other other hand, Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) had added earmarks to the bill proposing that the family of Mohamed Atta should be entitled to receive survivor benefits plus an American Airlines pilot's pension based on past illegal employment flying jets over the northeast corridor on Tuesday mornings in late 2001.

Fortunately, the world's greatest deliberative body was able to agree on this sensible moderate compromise.

Meanwhile, from the Associated Press:

"Mexico warned Tuesday it would file lawsuits in U.S. courts if National Guard troops detain migrants on the border."

On what basis? Posse Comitatus? It's unconstitutional to use the U.S. military against foreign nationals before they've had a chance to break into the country and become fine upstanding members of the Undocumented-American community?

Or is Mexico taking legal action on the broader grounds that in America it's now illegal to enforce the law? Which, given that Senate bill, is a not unreasonable supposition.

Whatever. Under the new "comprehensive immigration reform" bill (Posse Como Estas?), a posse of National Guardsmen will be stationed in the Arizona desert but only as Wal-Mart greeters to escort members of the Illegal-American community to the nearest Social Security office to register for benefits backdated to 1973.

Meanwhile, Sen. John McCain, in a quintessentially McCainiac contribution to the debate, angrily denied that the Senate legislation was an "amnesty." "Call it a banana if you want to," he told his fellow world's greatest deliberators. "To call the process that we require under this legislation amnesty frankly distorts the debate and it's an unfair interpretation of it."

He has a point. Technically, an "amnesty" only involves pardoning a person for a crime rather than, as this moderate compromise legislation does, pardoning him for a crime and also giving him a cash bonus for committing it. In fact, having skimmed my Webster's, I can't seem to find a word that does cover what the Senate is proposing, it having never previously occurred to any other society in the course of human history. Whether or not, as McCain says, we should call it a singular banana, it's certainly plural bananas.

The senator raises an interesting point. In Confucius' Analects, there's a moment when Zi-lu swings by and says, "Sir, the Prince of Wei is waiting for you to conduct his state affairs. What would you do first?" And Confucius say, "It must be the rectification of characters." By "characters," he doesn't mean lovable characters like Arlen Specter and Trent Lott, but "characters" in the Chinese-language sense -- i.e., words. Confucius means that, if the words you're using aren't correct, it becomes impossible to conduct public policy. If you're misusing language, your legislation will be false -- or, as Confucius puts it, your "tortures and penalties will not be just right." When the "torture and penalty" for breaking U.S. law over many years is that you get a big check from the U.S. government, that would seem to be an almost parodic confirmation of Confucius' point.

This is not an "immigration" issue. "Immigration" is when you go into a U.S. government office and there's a hundred people filling in paperwork to live in America, and there are a couple of Slovaks, couple of Bangladeshis, couple of New Zealanders, couple of Botswanans, couple of this, couple of that. Assimilation is not in doubt because, if you're a lonely Slovak in Des Moines, it's extremely difficult to stay unassimilated.

This is not an "illegal immigration" issue. That's when one of the Slovaks or Botswanans gets tired of waiting in line for 12 years and comes in anyway, and lives and works here and doesn't pay any taxes, so the money he earns gets sluiced around the neighborhood supermarket and gas station and topless bar and the rest of the local economy, instead of being given to Trent and Arlen and Co. to toss into the great sucking maw of the federal budget.

But a "worker class" drawn overwhelmingly from a neighboring jurisdiction with another language and ancient claims on your territory and whose people now send so much money back home in the form of "remittances" that it's Mexico's largest source of foreign income (bigger than oil or tourism) is not "immigration" at all, but a vast experiment in societal transformation. Indeed, given the international track record of bilingual societies and neighboring jurisdictions with territorial claims, it's not much of an experiment so much as a safe bet on political instability.

By some counts, up to 5 percent of the U.S. population is now "undocumented." Why? In part because American business is so over-regulated that there is a compelling economic logic to the employment of illegals. In essence, a chunk of the American economy has seceded from the Union. But, even if you succeeded in re-annexing it, a large-scale "guest worker" class entirely drawn from one particular demographic has been a recipe for disaster everywhere it's been tried. Fiji, for example, comprises native Fijians and ethnic Indians brought in as indentured workers by the British. If memory serves, currently 46.2 percent are native Fijians and 48.6 percent are Indo-Fijians. In 1987, the first Indian-majority government came to power. A month later, Col. Sitiveni Rabuka staged the first of his two coups.

Don't worry, I'm not predicting any coups just yet. But, even in relatively peaceful bicultural societies, politics becomes tribal: loyalists vs. nationalists in Northern Ireland, separatists vs. federalists in Quebec.

Sometimes the differences are huge -- as between, say, anything-goes pothead bisexual Dutch swingers and anti-gay anti-drugs anti-prostitution Muslim immigrants in the Netherlands. But sometimes the differences can be comparatively modest and still destabilizing. Pointing out that America has a young fast-growing Hispanic population and an aging non-Hispanic population, the Washington Post's Bob Samuelson wrote that "we face a future of unnecessarily heightened political and economic conflict."

The key words are "unnecessarily heightened." In Europe, the political class sowed the seeds of massive social upheaval for the most short-sighted of reasons. If America's political class wants to do the same, it could at least have the integrity to discuss the issue in honest terms.

Authentically Inauthentic Climate of Fear

Al Gore's movie has opened in LA and, from the left, received predictable raves and talk about a "New Al Gore." So when I turned on the C-Span2 and saw a panel of four at the Washington Convention Center Book Fair, I was surprised to hear a movie review.

Who else but Arianna HuffNPuff, waving her arms about Gore's "sensational" opening in LA meaning an "authentic" Democrat had now come on the national scene.

Coming from someone whose husband is invisible, if he even exists, and who was a right-wing harridan before she moved to the Left Coast and became a left-wing fishwife, "authentic" is not the first word that comes to mind in any context. Recently, if memory serves, she was caught visiting an enviro conference being chauffered in an SUV, which ties her with Barbara Boxer, who gave an enviro sound-bite several hundred feet from her Senate office in DC before hopping back into a giant SUV for a trip back a couple hundred yards to Home Base.

The judgment of the arm-waving legal immigrant from Greece reflected the fractured politics of her native homeland. She practically screeched out Hillary Clinton's name as representing inauthentic triangulation ["which America is so fed up with"] and gushed over authentic Al Gore, who has switched from inventor of the Internet to inventor of the Global Warming Issue. I guess the "earth tones" of his 2000 run for the roses went deep into the very fiber of his being. Remember the "New Al Gore," who preceded the "New New Al Gore?" Now perhaps, the third new Al Gore is the charm?

Arianna's hysteria emanates from her involvement in the ultra-left pantings on the HuffNPuff postings which proclaim several times a day, Hillary is wicked, GWB is already toast [just as Reagan was in '86 and Clinton in '94, as those with minimal attention-spans remember].

Actually, Pat Buchanan, the object of AH shriek/screech, was kind of defended by Frank Rich, who despite his foibles has a better grasp of America than the San Andreas mindset of the new new new Arianna [whose book on Maria Callas published under her maiden name is on my wife's bookshelf].

Even Andrew Sullivan, the supple and slippery polymorphously perverse "conservative" made more sense than AH on this panel. His musings on Ronald Reagan seemed more authentic than anything except the genuinely insane rantings of Huffington.

AH is authentically nuts, and a female Chuck Shumer in her zeal to propagate her insane egoism.

Autistic Marxists Boo McCain

Solipsism explains the drivel linked to the HuffNPuff post written by a brave New School pre-adolescent who was so very brave to "speak truth to power" as the latest agitprop mumbojumbo puts it at the New School where McCain gave a Commencenment Address to the graduating Marxists.

As the useful idiot agitprop kiddie corps displayed their usual bad manners, these prospective spineless cowards of the left dissed two real war heroes. The leftist bimbo now exults in her new celebrity, as if what she did were courageous.

This generation of brainwashed ninnies resembles my deceased aunt/cousin who worked at the New School off and on in administrative capacities for decades. She lived just down the block in Greenwich Village and during my last visit in the early '80's treated us to a lengthy deconstruction of Richard Nixon, not for Watergate but for his unjust persecution of Alger Hiss, falsely accused she maintained of being a traitor by the evil Republicans. [Hiss was later proved a traitor by Czech and KGB files opened after the fall of the USSR] This woman later transposed her demented hatred to Rudy Giuliani, whom she called the worst mayor in NYC history!

I guess just being in proximity of the New School breeds traitorous and stupid thoughts.

Of course, the menagerie of twits on the left will congratulate the half-wit speaker until she fades into the obscurity she deserves.

I think in 2008, if McCain is still up and at 'em for the Presidency, he can do reruns of these invidious vipers booing him and get a lot of mileage from the independent centrists and the religious right.

Salon Politics: Mad, Barking Mad

Made a short trip to Salon through a site pass to visit their political opinion section. Sort of the bar scene in Star Wars transposed to politics: the exhibit of political specimens included a hate-piece by Garrison Keillor on Catholicism, intemperate headlines employing the word "desperate" twice and "arrogant" once in the ten columns displayed.

Like one of those crime museums, traitors like Juan Cole and Sidney Blumenthal had their exhibits exhaling their hatred of America and anything socially responsible. Cole put in a good word for Islamic terrorists, which just may get him that chair at Yale. The Ivy League is where the major offenders are incarcerated!

Oh well, guess that pay-for-view site will continue to gull self-hating liberals to a multiplex toxic-waste dump for the mind.

Le Corbeau Outs Self

The Financial Times is indispensable for providing US readers with details of another French scandal, since the France-loving MSM [which adores Chirac and PM Villepin for dissing the MSM's bete noire, GWB]studiously neglects news like the indictment of Chirac's bagman Charles Pasqua, a former Interior Minister, for taking money in the Oil-For-Food scandal.

The inference that can be drawn is that Saddam's long-time pal Chirac was getting payoffs from Iraqi oil money for opposing the US invasion of Iraq, and is getting support from the US MSM, which has become delirious in its Bush-Derangement-Syndrome efforts to defeat the democracy project in Iraq. To pin a defeat on GWB in the MSM cocoon would make a perceived US failure in Iraq worth its demonizing the entire effort. Which makes them allies of UbL, but enough of logical thinking, this is the international left we are talking about, and there's no fault on the left, as former SDSers like myself remember.

So Chirac is a peculating fraud, no news there. But "corbeau" or "crow" is French slang for anonymous accusations of criminal activity and one of Chirac's allies, a certain M. Gergorin, is now exposed as being le corbeau in passing on accusations which France's fop PM Villepin, the clothes-horsey backstabber who knifed Colin Powell in the UN three years ago, gaining him induction into the MSM Hall of Fame reserved for those who stymie GWB in any way, shape or form, then employed to stab opponent Nicolas Sarkozy. Sarkozy, a real Mensch, if that's possible in the girlie-man poof-riddled French political elites, actually strongly opposes riots in France's cities and towns!

Now Sarkozy is head of the UMP, which is the only bulwark against the election of a Socialist president, who will take France further to the left than spineless degenerate Chirac has allowed it to wander. Chirac, of course, supports spineless degenerate de Villepin as his successor, as befits a complete failure who wishes to impose an even worse failure than himself as a gift for posterity.

But the word "corbeau" deserves to become a part of American newpaper slang, as most of the MSM grist for their GWB-bashing mill comes from anonymous "sources" whose allegations, like those of the "secret prisons," are never proven, but get the MSM scammer a Pulitzer Prize, like girlie-man Dana Milbank---oops, I meant manly-girl Dana Priest! So hard to separate the girls from the boys, as Dominique de Villepin can probably attest from his perch in the eyries of French elite poofdom.

So I wonder who the corbeau may be who sqawks and croaks in Dana Whoever's ear?

Da VincI: Agin it and Agin Those Agin It!

Weird Nigel Andrews's Scottish contrarianism suffuses almost all his movie reviews in the Financial Times, but he now becomes bipolar in contrarianizing both the movie Da Vinci Code and those who believe it's a load of bovine fecal material. He doesn't like Tom Hanks, he really doesn't like the French gamine Tautou and he really, really does like Ian McKellam---so I imagine he must have been one of John Gielgud's fans as well, and perhaps one of his young acolytes, judging from Andrews's consistent stances against anything smacking of the values that made western civ great in the first place.

Bob Shrum Advises Blair's Eminence Grise

The Economist has an interesting article that the legendary "Shrum Effect" might be in the process of being exported to the UK, namely by the PM-in-waiting Gordon Brown, Chancellor of the Exchequer and impatient successor-in-waiting to Tony Blair.

It appears that Brown has adopted Al Gore's notoriously unsuccessful tack of distancing himself from Bill Clinton, by ignoring Tony Blair's centrist New Labour policies and pining for "the past," which means Labour's inglorious record of minority party until Blair led it to moderation and 10 Downing Street.

Shrum's habit of heaving to port every chance he gets will predictably get David Cameron the PM portfolio for the Conservatives, unless Brown wises up soon.

Link to the Economist article for lotsa laffs at Gore and Shrum's expense.

Chirac and His Degringolade

The Economist has a summary of the French political scene which manages to neglect the news that President Chirac's bagman, former Interior Minister Charles Pasqua, has been indicted in the Oil-For-Food scandal. The Economist sums up the entire squalid French political hierarchy thus:

The electorate veers between indifference and repulsion. Talk to ordinary voters far from the Paris elite, and the overwhelming reaction is nausea. A Paris-Match poll last week suggested that the Clearstream affair ranked only tenth among subjects of conversation; top was petrol prices. 'For the electorate, the affair confirms the view that the political class is a separate caste that does not apply to itself the rules it applies to others,' comments Dominique Reyni?, a political scientist at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques.

The big loser besides the discredited buffoon Chirac is his silly Prime Minister, who has never won an election for any office, but whose pretensions are Napoleonic in envergure.

For the time being, Mr Chirac declares confidence in his enfeebled prime minister. But pressure is building among restless UMP deputies, fearful for their jobs after the election next year. Mr Chirac dislikes reacting in the middle of a storm. Yet when the country is distracted by the soccer World Cup this summer, a switch of prime ministers cannot be ruled out.

Mr. Sarkozy is unlikely to take the doomed poisoned chalice of the PM job in the last year of a presidency repudiated by the French electorate. The socialists have an excellent chance to pick up the presidency if they select the new phenom on the left, Segolene Royal, but politics in France is always rife with self-destruction, so there is a chance the Socialists will implode before selecting their candidate.
And in the bowels of the infrastructure of France lurks the Phantom of the Opera---

the far-right National Front. Its leader, Jean-Marie le Pen, has long played on disaffection with the elite as much as on xenophobic nationalism. Over the past month, according to a TNS-Sofr?s poll, his popularity has jumped by four points to 18%—his best rating since 1996.

That might not seem high, but given the volatile banlieues and the intense disaffection of the electorate for the political elites---could Gen. Boulanger be the solution? Le viellard on horseback!

Baltimore: Crime to Go to Baseball Game

If you have any questions about why Baltimore MD is one of the most crime-ridden racist urban ratholes in North America, read how a couple of baseball fans were treated by a so-called police officer.

I will bet you the ultra-left tabloid Baltimore Sun won't even carry the story, especially because the black female police officer is sure to get off without a reprimand, and this urban sewer will remain bleak testimony to decades of Democratic Party misrule in the city and state of Maryland.

I hope that Republican candidate for Senate Steele wins the November election.

I am Da Vine, Where is Da Vinci?

The New York Times A.O. Scott is the latest reviewer to damn the DV Code with the faintest of praise:

Ron Howard's adaptation of Dan Brown's best-selling primer on how not to write an English sentence, arrives trailing more than its share of theological and historical disputation.

The arguments about the movie and the book that inspired it have not been going on for millennia — it only feels that way — but part of Columbia Pictures' ingenious marketing strategy has been to encourage months of debate and speculation while not allowing anyone to see the picture until the very last minute. Thus we have had a flood of think pieces on everything from Jesus and Mary Magdalene's prenuptial agreement to the secret recipes of Opus Dei, and vexed, urgent questions have been raised: Is Christianity a conspiracy? Is "The Da Vinci Code" a dangerous, anti-Christian hoax? What's up with Tom Hanks's hair?

Luckily I lack the learning to address the first two questions. As for the third, well, it's long, and so is the movie. "The Da Vinci Code," which opened the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday, is one of the few screen versions of a book that may take longer to watch than to read. (Curiously enough Mr. Howard accomplished a similar feat with "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" a few years back.)

To their credit the director and his screenwriter, Akiva Goldsman (who collaborated with Mr. Howard on "Cinderella Man" and "A Beautiful Mind"), have streamlined Mr. Brown's story and refrained from trying to capture his, um, prose style. "Almost inconceivably, the gun into which she was now staring was clutched in the pale hand of an enormous albino with long white hair." Such language — note the exquisite "almost" and the fastidious tucking of the "which" after the preposition — can live only on the page.

A.O. has a lot of fun with this review:

In spite of some talk (a good deal less than in the book) about the divine feminine, chalices and blades, and the spiritual power of sexual connection, not even a glimmer of eroticism flickers between the two stars. Perhaps it's just as well. When a cryptographer and a symbologist get together, it usually ends in tears.

A reader review sums up the entire viewing experience:

Phenomenally bad film with director, writer and actors all guilty. I am reeling, having just been Hollywoodized. This film drags and drags and ends not a moment too soon. Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou mail it in, while Bettany and McKellen ham it up. Director Ron Howard takes zero chances. Everything that makes the book interesting, if not well-written, is absent from this stationary lump of a movie, which is about as controversial as vanilla.

Guess a boycott would not be necessary if the first forty reviews on the RottenTomatometer are going to be typical---19% favorable.