From the WSJ Opinion Archives
Terror
Hits Europe
At least 186 people are dead in "a series of co-ordinated bomb attacks
on Madrid's commuter train system," CNN reports. Spanish officials say
ETA, a Basque terrorist group, perpetrated the bombing. Most English-language
news outlets insist on using the euphemism "separatist group," but
let's be clear what that means: Like the Palestinian Arabs, ETA claims the Basques
live under "foreign occupation" and thus are entitled to murder innocent
people.
Don't look at us, says one Basque leader: "Arnaldo Otegi, leader of banned radical political party Batasuna, said he did not believe ETA was responsible for the attacks," CNN reports. "The attacks, he said, could have been 'an operation by sectors of the Arab resistance.' " It is true, as the Associated Press notes, that "many al-Qaida linked terrorists were captured in, or believed to have operated out of, Spain."
United Press International enumerates some reasons to suspect al Qaeda:
First, ETA generally warns Spanish authorities moments before launching their attacks in which civilians are likely to be harmed. This, obviously, was not the case on Thursday.
Second, ETA traditionally targets representatives of the government or the administration, such as policemen, the military, magistrates or even journalists who oppose them.
Third, ETA customarily selects "symbolic" targets, such as military barracks and administrative buildings. Although ETA's largest attack to date was in 1987 against a supermarket in Barcelona that killed 21 people, this was the exception rather than the norm.
Fourth, ETA always claims its attacks. Following any ETA bombing, ETA militants call in a claim to Spanish authorities. This failed to happen this time.
Fifth, ETA has never in the past carried out multiple attacks. According to some sources, at least 10 bombs were detonated almost simultaneously on Thursday.
On the other hand, these murderous attacks bear the traditional hallmark of al-Qaida: multiple bombs detonating a few seconds apart and programmed to cause the largest possible number of human casualties.
Spain has been a stalwart supporter of America's war on terror, including the liberation of Iraq. Or as John Kerry would say, it's been part of a "fraudulent coalition."
Desperation
Time Already?
Hey, John Kerry finally said something that wasn't nuanced! After a speech in
Chicago, Kerry said this to a supporter: "Let me tell you, we've just begun
to fight. We're going to keep pounding. These guys are the most crooked, you
know, lying group I've ever seen. It's scary."
Oh yeah? Well at least they're not haughty and French-looking!
We're actually not sure it was Kerry, rather than his interlocutor, who said "It's scary," but in either case it plays right into the stereotypes of liberals as wimps. You can almost imagine tough-guy Kerry installing night lights in the presidential bedroom to ward off the right-wing monsters.
Blogger John Ellis contrasts Kerry's comments with Bill Clinton's 1996 acceptance speech:
First, let us consider how to proceed. Again I say the question is no longer who's to blame, but what to do.
I believe that Bob Dole and Jack Kemp and Ross Perot love our country, and they have worked hard to serve it. It is legitimate, even necessary, to compare our record with theirs, our proposals for the future with theirs. And I expect them to make a vigorous effort to do the same.
But I will not attack. I will not attack them personally or permit others to do it in this party if I can prevent it.
My fellow Americans, this must be--this must be a campaign of ideas, not a campaign of insults. The American people deserve it.
We cite this not to praise Clinton, who proved quite capable of fighting dirty when the need arose. But it's telling that Kerry is running such a grubby little campaign whereas Clinton took the high road eight years ago. In 1996 Clinton was running from a position of strength; the tenor of Kerry's campaign tells us he's in a position of weakness, this week's polls notwithstanding. James Lileks puts the Kerry outburst in perspective:
People say all sorts of things in elections. The underlings and infantry fire the cheap shots, and let the big dogs lope along the high road. But when the top officials of the party start slinging the slander, we've entered a different era. And no one seems to notice, because the story becomes the charge, not the nature of the accusation.
Accusing one's opponent of treason is a personal attack. Al Gore accused Bush of "betraying this country." Reasonable people could say he misled the country, or misruled the country, and make the argument to support the assertion, but "betrayed" is a word that has a special quality when talking about the President of the United States. I've heard General Wesley Clark question the President's patriotism, and insist that his religious beliefs were misguided, because the Democratic Party is the party that truly hews to Christian doctrines. . . . And of course we heard Governor Dean insert the "Bush was warned" meme into the body politic.
There's nothing comparable on the other side. Nothing. I mean, the Bush team runs an ad that has a second of 9/11 footage, and his opponents pitch a carefully staged fit--because that's all they have.
Indeed. Kerry can't very well wage a "campaign of ideas" when he has no ideas other than to raise taxes (the topic of the speech that preceded his "crooked, lying" remark). Actually, let's amend that: Kerry can't campaign on ideas because he's on every side of just about every issue. It calls to mind Groucho Marx: "Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others."
It appears that Kerry, like Howard Dean, is all hate and no cattle. This was fine during the primary campaign, when candidates could assume, not without reason, that they were facing an electorate blinded by its loathing for the president. But this stuff is going to get very tiresome over the next eight months.
Who
Is Karen Kwiatkowski?
She's the author of an article Salon
hypes as "The New Pentagon Papers." (Blogress Ana
Marie Cox, who is witty even though left-wing, had the best take on this:
Kwiatkowski's account "will undoubtedly surprise the three or four Salon
readers who don't already believe that 'neoconservative agenda bearers . . .
suppress[ed] and distort[ed] . . . intelligence analysis [to] promulgate what were
in fact falsehoods.' " Ted Kennedy has also cited Kwiatkowski, a retired
Air Force intelligence officer, as an authority in a recent speech attacking
the White House for liberating Iraq.
Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Max Boot suggests Kwiatkowski is also something of a right-wing crank:
Since her retirement in March 2003, she has become a prolific contributor to isolationist publications like the American Conservative, Pat Buchanan's magazine, and lewrockwell.com, an ultra-libertarian website. Pretty much all her work is devoted to uncovering "neoconservative warmongers" who have supposedly taken over U.S. foreign policy.
She is not subtle in denouncing "Dickie Cheney, Richie Perle and Dougie Feith" (as well as, occasionally, "my pal, Max Boot"), whose "neoconservative philosophy is hateful to humanity, anti-American, statist and anti-free trade." (Anti-free trade?) She thinks the United States is a "maturing fascist state." And she predicts a dire fate for those who led us into the Iraq war: "Some folks on the Pentagon's E-ring may be sitting beside Hussein in the war crimes tribunals."
Hey, how come she doesn't say "Maxie Boot"? But we digress. Here's a further bit of evidence that the left has embraced reactionary isolationism: The Washington Times reports that John Kerry is mulling a campaign visit to Iraq, which would make him "the first presidential candidate to visit a war zone since the failed bid of Sen. George S. McGovern":
In September 1971, Mr. McGovern, the liberal South Dakota senator, visited South Vietnam, where he declared President Nixon's policy a "glaring failure" and called for a complete withdrawal of U.S. forces.
The Times quotes Ed Gillespie, chairman of the Republican National Committee: "Senator Kerry says he either needs to go himself or send a delegation to learn more about the situation in Iraq so he can form his policy positions, and yet for the past six months, he's been criticizing the president's policy. Now we know his criticism is uninformed." One wonders, too, why he'd be trying to ape McGovern, whose presidential campaign set records for futility. Is he trying to shore up his support in Massachusetts and the District of Columbia?
Can
Someone Remind Us Where He Served Again?
From a Boston Globe profile of John Kerry's daughters: "Both women say
Vietnam was a large presence in the Kerry household. There were the war photos
on the desk and the visits to the veterans' memorial in Washington, where they
would run their fingers over the etched names of their father's comrades. In
1991, John Kerry took them to Vietnam to show them where he served."
This
Just In
"Ferraro Still Only Female VP Selection"--headline, Associated Press,
March 10, 2004
The
Statesman Speaks
Yasser Arafat, who John Kerry thinks was a "statesman" in 1995, "yesterday
mourned the death of the "martyr" who masterminded the hijacking of a cruise
ship in which a wheelchair-bound American tourist was shot dead and his body
dumped overboard," London's Daily Telegraph reports:
Mr Arafat risked provoking American anger by issuing a statement hailing Abbas, the leader of a splinter group called the Palestinian Liberation Front, as a national hero.
"President Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leadership, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation and the Palestinian National Authority, mourn the martyr leader Abu al Abbas, former PLO Executive Committee Member and the Secretary-General of the PLF," it said. "The Palestinian leadership mourns him as a distinguished fighter and a national leader who devoted his life to serve his own people and his homeland."
Arafat won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1994.
Quantifying
the Roe Effect--II
In honor of the National Day of Appreciation for Abortion Providers, blogger
Donald Crankshaw spent yesterday working out an estimate of the Roe effect on
the Electoral College. He offers this disclaimer:
Any statistician can point out the multitude of problems in this analysis: taking one year to be representative for an entire three decades (which ignores changes in demographics and abortion laws), assuming the rate for teenage girls is representative of the rate for all women, not accounting for population migration, etc. A lot of these would be solved if someone could point me to a simple listing of the number of abortions received by the residents of each state since Roe v. Wade.
Still, his back-of-the-envelope calculations are intriguing. Had there been no abortion, he reckons, it would produce the following shifts in the Electoral College:
+4 votes: California
+2 votes: New York
+1 vote: Connecticut, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey
-1 vote: Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas
This is a net change of eight electoral votes in favor of states Al Gore won in 2000. Gore was only three electoral votes shy of victory, so if Crankshaw's estimates are anywhere close to being correct, the Roe effect produced enough of a shift to change the outcome of the 2000 election--and this is assuming a Bush victory in Florida, which the Roe effect's absence would have made less likely.
In other words, it may be that the Democrats are right when they say the Supreme Court handed the presidency to George W. Bush. They're just wrong about which case did the job: not Bush v. Gore but Roe v. Wade.
More
Roe Effects?
"Whether they keep working, quit or go part time, many women are choosing
to have three children--large families by today's standards," USA Today
reports. "American women have an average of two children (2.013 to be exact)
and had fewer than two just 15 years ago. During most of the 1970s and 1980s,
women averaged 1.7 to 1.9."
This may be yet another manifestation of the Roe effect (and a product of the expansion of reproductive choice more generally). If we suppose that a woman's childbearing decisions are a function of her values, and that a mother has a significant influence on her children's values, then the lower birthrates of the 1970s and '80s (which were made possible by legal, cultural and technological changes) would actually cause higher birthrates today. Because of the women who a generation ago exercised their right to choose not to bear children, there are fewer similarly inclined women of childbearing age today.
London's Daily Telegraph reports that "teenagers want to turn back the moral clock and are more reactionary than their parents, according to new research":
A survey of 5,000 young people, average age 15, found that most thought the Government should be tougher on under-age sex and abortion on demand as well as on bogus asylum seekers. . . .
Their views on abortion contrast sharply with those of their parents, the generation born in the early 1960s whose views tend to be more liberal.
Two thirds of adults think abortion on demand is justified, for example, compared with just a third of youngsters, according to a recent British Social Attitudes Survey.
Could it be that their views contrast not with those of their parents but with those of oldsters who didn't become parents because of abortion on demand?
Revenge
of the Nerds
"Fertility Discovery Excites Scientists"--headline, Calgary (Alberta)
Herald, March 11
It
Must Get Lonely on That Island
"Hawaii Researcher Fertilizes Rabbit Eggs"--headline, Associated Press,
March 9
Do
Computers Get Bacteria Too?
"Internet Blamed in Spread of Syphilis Among Gays"--headline, Reuters,
March 11
What
Would We Do Without Experts?
"Age Estimates Fallible, Admit Experts"--Telegraph (Calcutta, India),
March 11
Not
Too Brite--CXXXVI
"A Masonic initiation ritual ended in tragedy when a man was shot in the
head and killed with a gun thought to contain blanks," Reuters reports
from New York.
Oddly Enough!
(For an explanation of the "Not Too Brite" series, click here.)
Saved
by Zero
"Former President Clinton said Tuesday he has no plans to seek another
elected office, preferring to remain in private life because having one Clinton
in politics is 'probably more than enough,' " the Associated Press
reports.
Hmm, if one Clinton in politics is "more than enough," what number would be optimal?
(Elizabeth Crowley helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Carl Sherer, Jennifer Ray, Michael Segal, Aaron Amerman, Monty Krieger, Barak Moore, Jerome Marcus, William Schultz, Michael Zukerman, Edward Hildebrand, Sid Norton, Erik Moy, David Witkon, Ami Avivi, Cesar Canizales, Ethel Fenig, Edward Morrissey, Chris Stetsko, Charlie Gaylord, Tom Linehan, Mark Schulze, Glade Roper, Michael Morley, Ed Lasky, Henry Hanks, Walter Rosenfeld, David Worley, Laura Wood, Sol Cranfill, Dan Calabrese, Rosanne Klass, Stuart Creque, Ed Burns, Jeffrey Hoyt, David McGinley, Kim Leonard, Matt Maynard, Rod Pennington, Karen Bashore, Jim Downs, Joe Deltoro, Andrew Robinson, Keith Phillips, Barb Sagraves, Julie Beck, Paul Siebenshuh, Michael Hatzimichalis, Andy Hefty and Michael Britton. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)
Today on OpinionJournal:
- Therese Raphael: The Oil-for-Food program was corrupt. The U.N. owes the Iraqis--and Congress--an explanation.
- Peggy Noonan: John Kerry stars in "Airplane," George W. Bush in "The Happy Warrior."
- Stephen Pollard: OK, it ain't over till the fat lady sings. But this is ridiculous!
