Politics

Quote of the Day

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Peggy Noonan in the WSJ:

I do not feel America is right to attempt to help spread democracy in the world because it is our way and therefore the right way. Nor do I think America should attempt to encourage it because we are Western and feel everyone should be Western. Not everyone should be Western, and not everything we do as a culture, a people or an international force is right.

Rather, we have a national-security obligation to foster democracy in the world because democracy tends to be the most peaceful form of government. Democracies tend to be slower than dictatorships to take up arms, to cross borders and attempt to subdue neighbors, to fight wars. They are on balance less likely to wreak violence upon the world because democracies are composed of voters many of whom are parents, especially mothers, who do not wish to see their sons go to war. Democracy is not only idealistic, it is practical.

(via Instapundit)

Joke of the Day

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The World Court, an organization with neither legitimacy nor accountability, condemned Israel, a democratic country, for building a security fence that is saving lives every day. The Court’s head judge wrote:

. . . “The wall … cannot be justified by military exigencies or by the requirements of national security or public order.

“The construction … constitutes breaches by Israel of its obligations under applicable international humanitarian law. Israel is under an obligation … to dismantle forthwith the structure,” he said.

Where does this head judge, who is so concerned about humanitarian and legal obligations, come from? From China, a country ruled by an unelected clique of mass-murderers that lacks legitimacy and accountability and treats its citizens like ants in an ant farm.

It should long ago have become obvious, to anyone who has a clue, that the principal role of “international organizations” like the World Court is as weapons against the U.S. and Israel and other democracies that assert their right to defend themselves. These are the same organizations to which John Kerry and his political allies on the Left would grant increased resources and legitimacy. Bush, whatever his flaws, at least understands who our enemies are. The Democrats won’t be ready for national leadership again until they wise up in this area, and stop pandering to the idiots for whom it is always 1968.

Falsifying Reagan

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John Coumarianos points out a flagrant example of historical revisionism about Ronald Reagan. Steven Den Beste comments at length.

“The New Defeatism”

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In a column that was overshadowed by Reagan’s death, Victor Davis Hanson counsels optimism, while expressing pessimism about the attitude and behavior of our press and intellectual elites (including conservatives). Kurdistan is a democratic model, we are succeeding militarily, there have been no mass-terror attacks against us since 9/11. Yet the elites’ attitude is one of defeatism, mingled, on the Left, with the selective exploitation of negative news for cheap political advantage:

Our Real Dilemma. We do have a grave problem in this country, but it is not the plan for Iraq, the neoconservatives, or targeting Saddam. Face it: This present generation of leaders at home would never have made it to Normandy Beach. They would instead have called off the advance to hold hearings on Pearl Harbor, cast around blame for the Japanese internment, sued over the light armor and guns of Sherman tanks, apologized for bombing German civilians, and recalled General Eisenhower to Washington to explain the rough treatment of Axis prisoners.

We are becoming a crazed culture of cheap criticism and pious moralizing, and in our self-absorption may well lose what we inherited from a better generation. Our groaning and hissing elite indulges itself, while better but forgotten folks risk their lives on our behalf in pretty horrible places.

Judging from our newspapers, we seem to care little about the soldiers while they are alive and fighting, but we suddenly put their names on our screens and speak up when a dozen err or die. And, in the latter case, our concern is not out of respect for their sacrifice but more likely a protest against what we don’t like done in our name. So ABC’s Nightline reads the names of the fallen from Iraq, but not those from the less controversial Afghanistan, because ideological purity — not remembering the departed per se — is once again the real aim.

Hanson tells us to suck it up and muddle through, and he is right. His comments make me regret very much that Ronald Reagan is no longer around and that Margaret Thatcher is no longer an active participant in public life. We have nobody to replace them.

Political Benchmarks

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One problem with political campaigns is a lot like a problem with mutual-fund performance measurement: it’s common practice only to compare candidates against the competition rather than versus absolute standards. So a mutual fund that loses money for customers may be called good if it loses less money than other funds do, or less than do market indices like the S&P 500.

Similarly, journalists often seem more interested in the competitive aspects of campaigns than they do in substantial questions about candidates’ characters and ideas.

I can understand this selective performance-framing when it’s done by fund companies, because they want to show their products in the best light possible. I can even understand why some financial journalists follow the same line to avoid discussing funds’ absolute rates of return or alternative investments. The publications these journos work for usually accept fund advertising, after all.

But why do political journalists who are unaffiliated with the campaigns they cover do it? Why do they so often ask Candidate X only about how his positions compare to those of Candidate Y, and not about the intellectual and moral justifications for those positions? A good example of this was the treatment that journos, even some politically conservative op-ed writers, gave to Senator Lieberman. They tended to treat him as an honorable conservative because he supports the war and has reasonable (as they see it) positions on a number of issues.

But Lieberman is also the guy who, as Al Gore’s VP candidate in 2000, repudiated his earlier conservative positions (on school choice, racial preferences, etc.) and began parroting the Demo Left’s party line. His doing so clearly had nothing to do with principle and everything to do with opportunism.

And now that the national mood, particularly on defense, has shifted in a more conservative direction, Lieberman (before he dropped out of the race) was again sounding like one of the most conservative Democrats. Yet journalists by and large ignored his troubling inconsistency — that’s the nicest term for it — and concentrated instead on his standing in the horse race.

I don’t mean to single out Lieberman; most of the other presidential candidates are worse (I rate Bush higher because of his competent war leadership — an empirical fact, IMO — as well as his relative consistency and more libertarian orientation). My question is why we should take seriously evaluations of presidential candidates that are typically framed exclusively in terms of other candidates. To be blunt about it, by any normal standard most of these guys are liars and phonies. But it’s one thing to say that X is less bad than A, B and C (which is how most voters probably think about it), and quite another to pretend, as the press so often does, that candidates like Sharpton and Dean, much less Lieberman, can be taken seriously on their personal and intellectual merits.

(Robert Samuelson’s discussion of press complicity in dishonest political arguments is worth reading in this regard.)