The 14th Colony

Before Alberta puts its tarsands oil on a slow boat to China

2012-01-29T07:06:00.006-06:00

Any Canadian wondering how it is that President Obama's job approval average for his third year rated second-from-bottom in the Gallup archives among presidential junior years, need wonder no longer. If a president of the United States cannot bring himself simply to permit a pipeline carrying cheaper, steadier fuel from a friendly neighbour, at no cost to the taxpayer and generating a modest boom to boot in economic activity and jobs, then all that's left is to hang on in there 'til he can be put out of our misery sometime around January 20th of 2013.
　
The average American pulled at random from a Tulsa, Oklahoma Walmart and made president-for-a-day not only would have approved the Keystone XL pipeline project, he'd have wondered why there was any question about it at all. The Keystone XL line is what is called a no-brainer, a win-win, as uncomplicated a proposition as any president can expect to have dumped on his desk. The reader will pardon me if these points have been rehearsed overmuch already, but they bear repeating:

The pipeline would have shifted some part of America's oil importation from the sort of characters who threaten to shut the Strait of Hormuz and precipitate a global energy crisis, half-way around the world, to a sort-of cousin-nation directly over the border. It would have taken the thumb that much off the windpipe, to invoke the old Suez formulation, and given America that much more insurance against a crisis. Besides which, this cousin-nation in question happens to carry on a deal of trade with the United States, so that not all of the exported dollars for that imported oil would have been lost to the American economy. 　

The pipeline would have helped depress the price of oil in America by the increase in supply and availability, and by cutting the transportation overhead. It's Obama policies like declining the pipeline or banning new offshore oil production for seven years -- announced once the November '10 elections were safely past, undoing an opening of the offshore to exploration announced eight months before the vote -- that have helped push the price of a gallon of gas to slightly more than double what Obama "inherited," to borrow his preferred usage. 　

The pipeline would have cost not a thin dime to the taxpayer, being one of those private enterprises which Obama daily damns and menaces and punishes. One almost wonders if that counts as a strike against it to Obama's way of thinking: two years ago Obama put up $2 billion that America didn't have for offshore drilling -- in Brazil -- so demonstrably he's got it in him to support big oil projects, at least where government money is involved and American oil is not.

And then there are the jobs involved in building a pipeline so ambitious as to amount to a transcontinental highway of sorts. In the mind of Barack Obama, unemployment insurance is where the jobs are; not in any great private project to connect Alberta and Texas with the fuel to move and do things. Obama made the point explicit in December: "However many jobs might be generated by a Keystone pipeline, they're going to be a lot fewer than the jobs that are created by extending the payroll tax cut and extending unemployment insurance." There's the Age of Obama in a sentence, if ever I saw it. They ought to make a campaign slogan of it. "Obama - He's for the dole."

The story is of course that Obama's concern was for "health and safety," and something called "the Ogallala aquifier" in Nebraska, and that the three years of State Department study on the project were inadequate, and indeed that the Keystone pipeline now in operation wasn't proof enough of the "healthiness and safety" of the thing. There may even be people in the world who truly believe that was the reasoning. Some of the less credulous types have it that Obama's prohibitionism was a sop to the hard-Left environmentalist interest groups, which is fine as far as it goes, only it lets on that Obama is something apart from the hard-Left himself, when I think the inquiring mind will find that the larger part of Obama's deleterious policymaking is down to his own unworkable, alien, doctrinaire leftism.

At the risk of presuming to offer unsolicited advice to the prime minister and government of Canada, I'd say don't sign any papers on that east-west pipeline to serve China just yet. It happens that there's an election in America in a matter of months, and it happens also that the other side in this election are the sort who could conceivably approve the Keystone XL among their early orders of business.

I decline to say that America makes mistakes, but it does occasionally have accidents, and it had one of those one day in November of 2008. Now, it could conceivably be that America will vote for four more years of this, or anyway that the vote could be split by a serious third-party challenge allowing Obama to slip through to a second term with a plurality, but that very expression, "four more years of this," and the way it sounds to American ears, inclines against it. So before you put your tarsands oil on a slow boat to China, maybe see how that election turns out.

The war on the Irenes of America

2011-08-04T22:44:00.002-05:00

On what accounting does a 67 year-old grandmother in Kansas called Irene, perched on some town square with an Uncle Sam top hat and miniature American flags duct-taped to her Dollar General lawn chair, become "anti-American", a "terrorist", a "suicide bomber", a "hostage-taker", a "hijacker", an "extremist", "dangerous", a "threat", and a "Salafist/Wahabbist/Hezbollah-ist/Taliban"? On the accounting of your garden-variety leftist commentator and elected Democrat, if the magic-markered posterboard that Irene is holding reads some variation of "Stop the Spending!"

I'm no head-shrinker, but over the years I have given this sort of thing a deal of thought and so I will try my hand at diagnosing the leftist impulse for war against the Irenes of America, following the lead of MSNBC, which brought in a psychologist and psychotherapist to diagnose the psychological disruptions that MSNBC imagines must explain this "dangerous" phenomenon of Tea Party insistence on cutting spending.

Now, the first point to be made is that there is nothing remotely extreme or disturbed about concern for goverment spending when in four years under President Obama, America will have added $7 trillion to its national debt, after taking two and a quarter centuries and 43 presidencies to add the other $10 trillion. That MSNBC head-shrinker -- besides finding parallels between the Tea Partiers and the Norwegian shooter/bomber who killed a hundred innocents -- diagnosed the Tea Partiers as "delusional. But my best assessment is that the delusion in this is to be found much more in the notion that we can go most of the way to doubling the national debt in just four years, and carry on spending still more indefinitely.

The second point to be gotten out of the way is that these elites and leftists (if there's a distinction anymore) who have discovered "terrorism" and "anti-Americanism" in the decent, law-abiding, hard-working, salt-of-the-earth, backbone-of-the-nation folk of America, are the same elites and leftists who have no interest whatever in fighting the actual enemies of America who actively want us all dead and burning in hell. The Left and the elite who damn decent folks within their own borders as "the Hezbollah wing of the Republican Party" have nothing but sympathies and excuses and apologies for the actual Hezbollah and like Islamic terrorists and fascists and eliminationists, and the greatest shock in all this is seeing them use "Hezbollah" as an epithet. But that's as may be. Onto the amateur head-shrinking.

The easy diagnosis is desperation, and that makes a fine start. Then there's the less psychiatric easy explanation: the dearth of intellectual rigor and the reliance on cribbing the arguments and even the verbatim coinages of other, more original commentators and politicos. So some highly overrated New York Times columnist types up some line about the Tea Party being "the Hezbollah wing of the Republican Party", and the next thing you know it's being aped by every leftist hack who thought "Bushitler" was clever circa 2003.

Also, the old-line press corrodes the Left and enables their extreme and extraordinary public pronouncements. The press subjects Republicans and conservatives to the most merciless scrutiny and skepticism, while any Democrat and leftist in America can be assured they will never be called out in the mainstream for contradicting themselves or fudging and fabricating their figures or making outlandish claims about their enemies. They do it because they know they'll get away with it, and over time they lose sense even of where the line is drawn.

And because politics is religion to the Left, there can be no vice in advancing the leftist cause. To be a leftist and an elite in the 21st Century is to be post-Christian, and when it is politics that takes the place of religion, the descent into ends-justify-means-ism must surely follow. Say and do whatever can be gotten away with, if it is necessary for the cause. So if it is necessary for the leftist cause that the Tea Party be repudiated and ruined, and if that means biscuit-baking grandmothers must be demonized by the nation's leaders as America-hating terrorists, well, the ends justify the means.

But why accuse the Tea Partiers of "anti-Americanism" of all things? When the Left and the elite aren't busy accusing the Tea Partiers of trying to blow up the country, they're scorning them for their earnest, childlike, rah-rah-sis-boom-bah patriotism. The America-haters claim may be explicable in some part by the conservative theory of leftist "projection", i.e., much of what leftists accuse their enemies of is in fact what's in their own hearts. So the Left reflexively accuses conservatives of, say, staging phony, "astro-turf" protests, because that's just the sort of thing they get up to, with their "Rules for Radicals" seminars and their college courses on activism and their paid labor-union rent-a-mobs bussed in from out of state. And if the Left is motivated by contempt for America then that's just the motivation that they'll project onto their opposition. Projection may explain some part of the leftist accusations of anti-Americanism in the flag-waving, flag-wearing Tea Partiers of all people, but I'd guess there's something more semantic at play.

The American conservative's patriotism is for the nation and not the government; the leftist's equivalent to patriotism is more or less the contrary. The conservative trusts that a nation of individuals pursuing what's best for themselves and their loved ones can only be the happier, richer, and freer nation; the leftist starts with a disdain for the average man and distrusts him to make the "right choices" for himself if left to his own devices, and sees the state as the font of all things good, the rightful distributor of wealth, the patron of the approved and scourge of the unapproved, and as the teacher of the nation, correcting its unenlightened history and base nature.

Well, if you're the sort of person who imagines that the good in the country is reposed in its government, then you're liable to regard the Tea Party and its rearguard action to roll back the cost and reach of government as a dagger at the heart of all that's right and good. Only, the very most foundational principle of the United States is freedom from government, of restricting and restraining the state. Which is why a lot of statists damning limited-government Tea Partiers as "anti-American" is the world turned upside down.

The Adoration of The Obama

2011-05-07T11:57:00.004-05:00

I wouldn’t have felt compelled to add my own blot of ink to the metric tons already dumped on the subject of the killing of Osama bin Laden, except that we are now coming to Day Seven in one of the most unbecoming spectacles I’ve yet seen out of even Barack Obama.

Some part of me can’t blame Obama and the Obama-adulating old-line press for their interminable Glory Tour, because of course the hunt for Osama bin Laden is just about the only thing that’s not gone from bad to worse in the Age of Obama. Indeed, the fact they’re all making so very much of this, for so very long, is final proof that Obama has no other success to show for his two years and three months as president. By this point in his presidency, George W. Bush had led America in the tearing down of two of the very worst regimes on earth since the Second World War, and the implanting of decent, democratic systems in their place, making 50 million Muslims free citizens for the first times in their histories.

And that’s the trouble with this Adoration of The Obama, as much as anything else: the bin Laden operation was a sort-of SWAT team swoop on a man who hadn’t been out of the house in half a decade; the Afghan and Iraq wars were earth-quaking re-makings of ancient and malignant whole nations. There is no perspective in this bin Laden affair whatever, for the obvious reason that Obama and all that the press had invested in him are on course for a historic repudiation in 2012, and so he’s desperate for a shot in the arm.

America is today losing in Afghanistan, and the killing of Osama bin Laden does nothing to arrest or reverse even that, much less every other blessed thing that’s gone the wrong way. America is losing also in Libya, which is a war without a cause and which no-one even dreamt of until the moment we learned we were at war, Obama having decided to take us to war in that country the night before. And I will spare the reader a recapitulation of all those other troubles, and let it suffice to say only that the share of Americans on food stamps stands today AT 14 PERCENT.

One could go on, but it’s all been said ad nauseam already so I’ll endeavor to make a point or two that have been under-made or not made at all:

*There’s a reason some of us Bush-nostalgia-ists have lamented that Bush and his administration have not been more credited in the bin Laden mission, and it goes beyond the usual reasons -- the intelligence trail that ended at bin Laden’s bedroom a week ago, began with Bush's “enhanced interrogations” including at “black sites”, and progressed with the interrogation of al-Qaeda captured in Iraq; the CIA team on the ground in Pakistan that tracked bin Laden the rest of the way was instituted under President Bush; and the Navy SEALs team that did the deed in the end was part of the Joint Special Operations Command which had been denounced in the Bush years as “Dick Cheney’s assassination ring”; and so on. The deeper reason we whine that Obama is credited with the bin Laden operation single-handed, and Bush mocked, is that Obama damned all of this as senator and candidate, and then outlawed some part of it as president, and so one cannot but fear that the bin Laden operation was the cashing in of investments that have not been kept up since the day Barack Obama moved into the White House.

*The man most responsible for the 9/11 attacks and their success was in fact not Osama bin Laden but Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and of course Obama wanted him granted the rights and protections of a U.S. citizen, in an open-ended civilian trial in New York City, in which the United States itself and especially the Bush Administration would have wound up in the dock at least as much as the enemy leader responsible for the worst attack on America in its history. Obama suspended for two years the military commission case against KSM, in which Mohammed had already pleaded guilty. If it had been up to Obama, that civilian trial would be ongoing even now, but blessedly it was not up to Obama, and the Congress intervened to deny funding for any such abominable thing.

*The Greeks and Romans were great ones for warning leaders and the sycophants who stroke them, and so it’s not for nothing that so many of the best words to describe Barack Obama generally and in this instance especially come to us from the classical languages: narcissism, hubris, vanity, etc. Had Obama been a man, and honorable and meek, he’d simply have authorized some functionary to break the news of bin Laden’s death, as for instance President Bush did on the occasion of the capture of Saddam Hussein, instead of calling a televised address for 10:30 Eastern on Sunday night to announce the news personally and peppered with the personal pronouns (for which Obama was an hour late, as ever, while the nation panicked at what emergency must be warranted by such an extraordinary development), and then giving a blockbuster, blow-by-blow interview for Sunday evening TV, staging an event at Ground Zero, accepting a presidential jersey at Fort Campbell, etc. Had Obama been the breed of man who truly does great and heroic things, he’d have gone about his business and let other folks talk about heroism and greatness if they cared to. But Barack Obama is not that kind of man; he is the kind of man who will fly very high and in the end be brought very low, like in those Greek myths and Roman cautions.

No way to fight a war

2011-03-21T12:33:00.004-05:00

Seeing as how we’re at war in a Mideastern Muslim nation which to my knowledge we've not intervened in militarily for a quarter-century, it might be worth blowing the cobwebs off this blog, which was for its first three years a repository mostly of military news and analysis. This just seems to me to be no way to fight a war:

1. One day in March, we woke up with no conception that we’d be at war in some godforsaken, basket-case country called Libya; as of suppertime, we were at war. Up until the moment that the war vote came down in the United Nations Security Council, there was not the first hint that America was going to war.

The President and Commander-in-Chief who was ordering the United States Armed Forces into this new war had not given the faintest indication that he had been headed toward war, because until the moment he decided on war, he in fact wasn’t headed to war. If the silence had been to preserve some operational secrecy and element of surprise, that would be one thing, but the reason we had no inkling that we’d be at war on that day in March was that the Commander-in-Chief himself had no conception of it and had done none of those things that any other president of the United States would have done to prepare his forces and brace his nation for a military campaign.

2. To broadcast that we’ll bomb a bit for a few days and then quit is to tell the enemy to just hang in there. Anyone plucked at random from a Tulsa, Oklahoma Walmart would understand that implicitly, and yet Obama has made this same mistake twice now as commander-in-chief of the greatest armed force the world has ever seen, the first time being his declaration on the occasion of his Afghan faux-surge order, that he’d start hauling out come hell or high water 18 months later. The very Commandant of the Marine Corps reported that the date-certain for withdrawal was “giving sustenance” to the enemy, and yet here is Obama duplicating his mistake and announcing that his campaign will last “days, not weeks” -- i.e., just hang in there for a few days, Moammar; there’ll be some smoke and noise, but keep your head down and it’ll be over before you know it. The way to go about it is to set objectives and to declare that the campaign will last for as long as it takes to achieve those objectives.

3. I am sympathetic to the argument from history and necessity that a president and commander-in-chief needn’t always seek and receive Congressional authorization for an act of war before the bombs start flying, but in those cases where he must act first and ask later, he had darn well better get that authorization after the fact, and of course Barack Obama has not so much as suggested that Congress authorize his new Libyan War. Oh, yes, and Obama lectured the last president on the Constitutional requirement for Congressional authorization of acts of war, despite that President Bush had authorizations for both of his wars from a Republican House and Democrat Senate.

4. There is not the faintest, nascent notion of a mission, beyond "protecting civilians" -- from tens of thousands of feet up. We’re lobbing some bombs for a few days. At what, who knows? To what end, who knows? And what next, who knows?

5. The time for no-fly zones was two to three weeks before the no-fly zone vote at the UN. I'd have supported a no-fly zone over Libya at that time, and I’m compelled to support it now, but now it’s a dollar short and a more than a day late. There was a time, a couple weeks before the intervention, when the Gaddafi regime had lost effective control over most of the nation to the rebels; at that time Gaddafi’s only prospect was importing mercenaries and outside help to prop himself up and try to push back the ascendant rebels. And at that time a no-fly zone and naval blockade would have gone a long way toward denying Gaddafi the means of saving himself.

Wars aren’t won by air power alone, but air power may in fact have been decisive at that stage of what became the Libyan Civil War, in guaranteeing rebel gains on the ground and in preempting Gaddafi’s counteroffensive.

But by the time the no-fly zone was agreed to at the UN Security Council and the first British and French warplanes lifted off to enforce it, Gaddafi already had his mercenaries and outside support, and had pushed the rebels back to not much more than Benghazi, which is Libya’s second city but nothing to compare with the rest of the country.

The British Prime Minister was calling for a no-fly zone at the time when it might have made the difference, and so indeed was Sarah Palin, but Obama was disengaged as ever on the rolling Arab revolts, caught flat-footed by each and every development and following the now-familiar pattern of silence, then flailing and incoherence, then calls for the inevitable and the faits-accompli, and finally self-congratulation. Four days before he went to war, Obama played the 61st golf game of his presidency and attended a Beltway soiree, and two days before he went to war he was filling out his March Madness "brackets" for ESPN. We had our chance to do this on the cheap and win the war for the rebels before the bloodshed started in earnest, and we missed it.

6. If we’re lobbing Tomahawks into Libya, then at least one of them had better have Moammar Gaddafi’s name on it, however it may be spelled. Libya is at this point as close to a one-man regime as you’re liable to find -- Gaddafi is dependent for his regime on mercenaries and outside help -- so hit Gaddafi and his regime may very well expire with him, the war may be ended blessedly quickly, the rebels may be spared and untold unlucky civilians besides, and there may just be some outside chance of a decent society emerging in that godforsaken country. There is no telling what atrocities have been committed already or are forming in the mind of a terrorist madman dictator who uses language like “cleanse” in describing what he means to do to a rebel-held city.

President Reagan tried hitting Gaddafi in ’87 because Gaddafi was by that time a known terror-sponsor with the blood of innocent Americans on his hands; today there’s all that plus the immediate humanitarian reasons to argue in favor of a hit on Gaddafi. But as of this writing, the United States government is expressly not targeting the actual culprit in all this, and I’m afraid they really mean it.

7. And another thing: when a commander-in-chief launches a war, the place for him is his White House, and on no account should he be swanning around Rio de Janeiro while the bombs fly. A president of the United States can cancel a prior engagement, and the Rio trip could have waited.

Any story about an author

2011-02-15T09:00:00.009-06:00

I just can’t do it. Try as I might, I cannot sit still for another indulgent, navel-gazing, semi-autobiographical story about a writer. I refer of course to Any Human Heart, from the novel of the same name not a decade ago, adapted for Channel 4 in England in ’10 and duly picked up by PBS for Masterpiece Classic, which was called Masterpiece Theater back when it was worth spoofing on Sesame Street with Cookie Monster. (Incidentally, I fail to see how any nine-year-old book qualifies as a “classic”, but I suppose I ought not be such a dreadful pedant.)

So following is what’s the matter with Any Human Heart; points so obvious as to be gleaned merely from periodically checking in on the first installment.

For a start, the protagonist is an author. When they say “write what you know,” a writer needn’t take them so literally as to write about a writer, who writes and thinks about writing and meets other writers and talks about writing. It’s indulgent, overdone, and plain boring. We -- and I think I speak for nearly all of humanity here -- do not find authors endlessly fascinating or terribly important.

Point Number Two is the “historic sweep of the changing 20th Century”. That was quite a neat little device at one time -- my, how things change, didn’t they wear funny clothes back then, see how world events shaped our hero’s life, didn’t they listen to funny music back then, etc., etc. Indeed, it became a device of the mob movie, from the Godfather movies to Goodfellas to Casino. And that’s precisely the point: it was old when Martin Scorsese did it in a gangster movie in 1995; quit it, already.

Then there was the “protagonist walks home on Cloud Nine after first date with girl of his dreams” scene. That was probably old when Ernest Borgnine did it in Marty circa 1955. Is this really a “masterpiece”, or is it a string of literary and cinematic clichés?

And fourth, as if to answer that last question beyond all doubt, is the “writer with writer’s block stares at blank sheet in typewriter” scene. Was there no-one at the BBC, which is after all the preeminent broadcaster in the world, to observe that it might be wearisome to bludgeon the viewers with a “writer’s block/blank page” scene in which the unmarked paper in the typewriter is actually shown on-screen? Surely the writer’s block scene was clichéd before my time, and it was past old in I Capture The Castle the best part of a decade ago. Maybe those film schools and “creative writing” courses never get around to the class about how the great stories tell new things, and when they must say old things they come up with some novel way of saying them.

Why, yes, I am bitter to see such resources devoted to such cliché-flogging. And it’s a good job I couldn’t stand to watch but a few bits here and there, else this would run 3,000 words and be at least as tedious as the show itself.

Several more predictions for the Age of Obama, and then some

2010-11-30T23:57:00.012-06:00

I'm sufficiently happy with my first fortune-cookie job in February of '09 to undertake a second, with predictions great and small, to wit:

1. The abolition of the light bulb will be repealed. It always was an insanity that the useless "Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007" included a provision to outlaw the incandescant light bulb as of 2012. They're light bulbs: they're harmless, cost a matter of pennies each, and are such a monument to human ingenuity and improvement that the image of the light bulb is used as a symbol of genius inspiration. No American government can possibly be acting as it was intended by the Founders if it is busying itself with the likes of abolishing the light bulb. Now that Republicans are re-taking the House, they will move to repeal the ban before the impossible enforcement of it commences, polls will show at least 70 percent support for repeal, and the ban will necessarily die, if not before Obama leaves office on January 20 of 2013 then very shortly thereafter.

2. This is probably so uncontroversial as to go without saying, but I thought it would only be appropriate to put on the record here that Republicans will hold the House of Representatives and gain the Senate in 2012. The Democrats were only saved in the Senate in 2010 by the fact that the third of the Senate that was up for re-election happened to be Republican seats or sufficiently Democratic seats to have survived a Republican year like 2004, when Republicans held the House, the Senate, and the presidency. The Democrats' margin was made in '06 and '08, which were high-water marks for them, and artificially high, at that, and those seats that took them from minority to majority will be up for grabs in '12 and '14. The next two years will be the last for Democratic control of the Senate for some time.

And the House Democrats affirmed their new status as minority after the midterm elections, when they re-elected Nancy Pelosi to lead them -- Pelosi being the most reviled figure in national politics and government, and one of three architects of the greatest disquiet in American society in at least a generation. It's very much like re-nominating Jimmy Carter to run against Reagan in '84. That lot is not being entrusted with a House majority again anytime soon.

3. Obama will be a one-term president, that much seems assured to me and has all along. His 2008 campaign was a fraud and he is singularly unsuited to the American presidency. The next president of the United States will be whomever is nominated by the Republican Party for 2012, and that is the wild card question. The field for 2012 is as open as any presidential primary in America ever is, and there are maybe a dozen names being bandied about, but I'm prepared now to venture out onto a limb and predict that the next Republican nominee for president and indeed the next president of the United States will be one Rick Perry of Texas.

Yes, my forecast two years ago was for Mark Sanford of South Carolina, but that ought not be held against me: Sanford might even have been the prohibitive favorite today if he hadn't got himself ruined by taking off for Argentina one fine day in 2009 to take up with an Argie gal he liked better than his wife back in SC, which Charles Krauthammer diagnosed as subconscious self-sabotage, in his capacity as a former psychiatrist.

So barring another unscheduled Argentine vacation, Rick Perry it is. Perry is now the longest-serving governor in the second-largest state in the Union. That he is a governor at all is a boon, but he is a particularly successful one. He has kept a balanced budget in a juggernaut state with no state income tax, and between August of '09 and August '10, "half of all the net new jobs created in the United States...were created in Texas," so says the National Review. Perry is solidly conservative and forcefully anti-Obama. He's sufficiently old without his seniority being anything approaching a liability, and he looks the part of president of the United States, for whatever that's worth, and it's not nothing. He's a Methodist, which I count among the "presidential denominations", though after Obama I suspect even a Mormon president would be a relief to the nation. And Rick Perry is a former airman, a Vietnam-era veteran of the United States Air Force. There's a presidential profile for 2012 if I've ever seen one.

Perry is not often counted among the prospective Republican candidates for president, but then John McCain was running third and fourth in the Republican primary polls in October of '07 when I reckoned him for the 2008 Republican nominee, and anyway at this point Perry is arguably better off in the shadows. The nation isn't ready for another presidential race just yet; no need of making everyone sick at the sight of you before it's even time for declarations of candidacy and fundraisers and debates and interviews.

4. The next Republican president, with his Republican Congress, will re-institute America's manned space program. Obama cancelled America's manned space program for the first time since there's been such a thing as manned space flight, not by presiding over the end of the 1970s-vintage shuttle program, which is in fact overdue for retirement and was scheduled to be retired, anyway, but by cancelling the replacement for the shuttle, which was called Constellation.

Constellation was inaugurated under the Bush Administration, and that may be the first clue as to why Obama ordered it cancelled. But the bigger reason seems plain enough to me, which is that Obama has an inveterate hostility to American greatness and to all those things that make for national greatness, including especially domination in rocketry which Obama and the Left like to fret will lead to a "weaponization of space", as if space isn't "weaponized" by military satellites and ballistic missiles already, and as if an American capitulation in space would make space any less "weaponized" by the Chinese and Russians.

Obama cancelled Constellation and with it America's manned space program for the same reason that Neil Armstrong came out of his seclusion along with two other Apollo commanders to oppose that cancellation, pleading that it would put America on "a long downhill slide to mediocrity." If you're the sort of person who takes it as read that America is the problem in the world, that it's a fundamentally wicked and stupid and greedy and abusive nation -- and Obama's personal history gives us every reason to believe that he is precisely that kind of person -- then "a long downhill slide to mediocrity" is the most politically-viable way of neutering and diminishing America, to where it is left to take orders from the more "enlightened" in the world, and no longer has it so good or has any capacity for venturing out into the world in the defense and promotion of its interests and values.

But Obama's red herring that America simply can no longer afford Constellation is an absurdity. At this point Constellation would be costing the United States something over $3 billion a year; Obama's worse-than-useless stimulus ended up at $862 billion, and with about 40 percent of that still unspent, Obama was calling for $266 billion more. Obama never came down against anything because it cost too much; he's against Constellation because he's against an American manned space program. For crying out loud, Obama put $2.5 billion over five years into NASA for the study of "global warming". Besides which, the American taxpayer has invested $9 billion in the program already, and the cancellation itself is supposed to cost $2.5 billion.

When the shuttle program expires and there is no Constellation program to replace it, America will have no heavy capacity for making it out of earth's atmosphere, and will be dependent on Russia for its space business, at $50 million per astronaut just to get to its International Space Station and back. There's $3 billion in the United States budget for a proper space program like America has had since there's been any such thing, and what America cannot afford is to cede space to the Chinese and Russians.

5. Obama-care will not stand. Michael Barone, who is as sober as he is encyclopedic, has called Obama-care the most unpopular major national legislation to be passed since the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, and that led in part to the Civil War. It's a plain bad bill, for a start. Megan McArdle, who is an economist and by no means a Republican partisan, has concluded that Obama-care is "unstable, politically and practically." Quite. When over a hundred companies and institutions need exempting from a national law as just the first phases come into effect, then what you've got hold of is a bad law.

And Obama-care is the only social program ever to be enacted against the will of the people and with not a solitary vote from the minority opposition. Indeed, some 34 Democrats voted against the thing in the House. There was a consensus on Obama-care, both in the nation at large and in Congress, and it was that the bill ought not be passed. In the event, the final bill had to be passed by parliamentary manoeuver to circumvent the 60-percent threshold in the Senate.

The states are about to go into revolt against the mandates in Obama-care. In these midterm elections just passed, Democrats were turned out of the state legislatures in what may be the largest-ever turnover at the state level since the founding of the Republic, with something like 680 seats switching from Democrat to Republican, and those Republican legislatures will become little battlefields in the war against Obama-care. And Obama-care may well be holed below the waterline by the Supreme Court if it strikes down as unconstitutional the "individual mandate" compelling the American people to buy health insurance -- and not some bare-bones health insurance, approximate to liability insurance for cars, but the comprehensive kind, as determined by the Health and Human Services Director and enforced by the IRS. Oh, yes: Obama-care will not stand.

Clinton v. Obama, 2012

2010-10-04T20:45:00.002-05:00

Though I'm not predicting it at this point, a Hillary Clinton insurgency against President Obama doesn't seem so outside the realm of possibility -- not in the Democratic Party. The speculation is occasioned by the remarkable Gallup poll of September '10 finding that just 52 percent -- of Democrats -- would vote to re-nominate Obama for president, to 37 percent for Clinton. In fact there've been quite a lot of one-termers and contested re-nominations on the Democrat side in the six decades since the Second World War.

Clinton of course had two terms, but it has to be said that he was the beneficiary in both his elections of a strong third-party candidacy in Ross Perot that split the anti-Clinton vote and put Clinton in the White House with 43 percent and 49 percent of the popular vote. And a third-party candidacy as substantial as Perot's is not a usual thing historically.

Carter had a serious primary challenge in '80 from Ted Kennedy which might have gone to Kennedy had he not fallen on his face in the 60 Minutes interview when he couldn't answer the question of why he was running, and of course the Chappaquiddick business didn't help. Carter was only weakened the more by that challenge and wound up losing the general election to Reagan so badly that he conceded before the polls had closed on the West Coast.

Johnson finished out the last year of John Kennedy's term and then won a term of his own in '64, but he was counted as a one-term president and eligible for re-election in 1968 when the writing on the wall was so apparent to even him that he announced, "I will not seek, nor will I accept, the nomination" of the Democratic Party. Johnson would have been challenged from his Left by Bobby Kennedy among others, and indeed the Democratic National Convention that year was a circus and the Democrat Party was radicalized and banished from the presidency for seven of the next ten elections.

Kennedy was of course assassinated about three years into his only term, so that example can be left out of consideration.

Which leaves Truman. Truman filled out three-quarters of Franklin Roosevelt's last term and then won a term of his own in '48 but was eligible for a second term in '52, until he lost the Democrat primary in New Hampshire to Estes Kefauver, saw the writing on the wall, and declined to offer for re-election. The Democrats nominated Adelai Stevenson later that year to lose to Eisenhower.

So Bill Clinton is the only proper two-termer the Democrats have had since FDR in the '30s and '40s, and even Clinton needed a historically-anomalous third-party candidacy to give him a push across the finish line.

On the other side in the same period are Bush 43, Bush 41, Reagan, Ford, Nixon, and Eisenhower. Bush 43, Reagan, Nixon, and Eisenhower were all elected to two terms, though Nixon didn't finish out his second. Ford assumed the presidency to fill out that second Nixon term, was challenged seriously in the '76 Republican primary by Reagan, and gave way to the Carter interregnum. But Ford doesn't exactly fit in this scheme on account of he was never elected. Which leaves George H. W. Bush, who was a one-termer and the object of a spirited Republican primary in '92 from Pat Buchanan among others, though Bush 43 suffered from the same Perot phenomenon that aided Clinton.

And that's it: the one-termers and the contested re-nominations have tended to be on the Democrat side in the six decades since the Second World War, and in fact that kind of thing has been the rule rather than the exception with Democrat presidents.

I wrote when Obama clinched the Democrat nomination in June of '08 that "the Democrat Party has made a mistake". That must have looked foolish when Obama won the presidency that November with supermajorities in both houses of Congress, but it was one of the shrewder assessments I've ever made. Obama was unqualified and unprepared for the presidency, his instincts are consistently and suicidally wrong, his ideas are unworkable and alien to the American nation, and he is unusually vain and bitter and arrogant even by the standards of the sort of men who presume to lead the world. Barack Hussein Obama is a plain bad president, and he could only ever have been a bad president.

Obama is already a marginalized, discredited, unheeded, and failed president. He fell further, faster than any president since the advent of polling. His campaign was a fraud, and the more he says and does -- the more he reveals himself truly -- the more abhorrent he is to the American people. I decline to say that the American people make mistakes, but they do sometimes have accidents, and November of 2008 was one for the ages. It will be put right at the first opportunity. The question is whether Obama marks the end of leftism in American national government, and the rebirth of First Principles, for a couple of election cycles, or for a generation.

So Obama is a one-term president, though the details have yet to be written. If he tells the American people that they can't fire him, he quits, or if he takes his chances on a re-election and the Democratic Party does to him as the mob does to a fellow who's outlived his usefulness, then the obvious alternate standard-bearer will be the the one they now know they ought to have nominated in the first place. Only, that assumes Hillary Clinton would want another run at the presidency, but my assumption has always been that Clinton would never run unless she could be confident of winning, and in 2012 she would of course lose: if a party can't re-elect a sitting president, it won't elect a runner-up pleading that she's one of the good ones.

The Great Peasant Revolt, or, the state of the United States, Age of Obama, Year 2

2010-08-31T00:26:00.011-05:00

(Updated and expanded, October 9, '10)

The United States is roiling. This Age of Obama has brought a wrack and upheaval in America beyond what even Obama-bashing right-wing reactionary rednecks like myself had reckoned on.

This is the greatest disquiet in American society in at least a generation, and what is called the mainstream press mostly missed the story, because it's part of the same elite that's looking over the palace balconies at all those uncouth, unlovely commoners in this Great Peasant Revolt.

It does seem that there's an entire class of people who deny or dismiss what President Obama and his Congress have wrought, or else blame the American people for not more joyfully giving their country away and deferring to their elite while it "remakes the nation" unrecognizably. There's a conventional wisdom among the conventional Obama-apologists to explain it all away, invoking the old "it's the economy, stupid" formulation from the 1992 presidential campaign, that if the natives are restless then it's a simple matter of their impatience with the pace of Obama's economic "recovery," which is perceptible mainly to the most partisan Democrats and the press. It is the economy, sure enough, but it's everything else as well.

So here is a pitifully inadequate list of recent news to give some small sense of the state of the United States in the Age of Obama, Year 2. Anyone depending for their news on the news sections of this Chronicle-Herald would be oblivious to all of the following points and more besides.

In just the first year and a half under Obama, the national debt "held by the public" went from $6.3 trillion or $20,000 per American, to $8.8 trillion or $28,000 for every man, woman and child in America -- more debt in 19 months than was accumulated under the first 40 presidencies over 200 years.

In the 19 months since Obama's $862 billion stimulus to "create or save 3 to 4 million jobs," the American economy has lost 2.6 million jobs net.

More Americans have died in Afghanistan in 20 months under Obama and his suicidally-restrictive rules of engagement, than died in seven years under Bush.

The Commandant of the Marine Corps confirmed that Obama's announced date-certain for starting the Afghan withdrawal is giving "sustenance" to the enemy.

The ruinous ramifications of Obama's unread, 2,700-page health-care bill have been coming out every few days, from the very East German requirement that businesses file two "1099" forms for every transaction with another party having dealings amounting to more than $600 a year, to increases in premiums of up to 9 percent, to the outlawing of the cheaper, no-frills prescription plans held by over 3 million seniors.

Obama's mad "Cash for Clunkers" policy of destroying used cars caused a needless and predictable shortage, so that Edmunds.com found the average used car a year later cost $1,800 more.

Obama's allies at the "Business Roundtable" turned on him, its chairman blaming him and his Congress for an "increasingly hostile environment for investment and job creation."

Obama's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is regulating the smaller operators in the New England groundfishery out of business, its Obama-appointed administrator having declared openly her intent to "remove" a "significant fraction of the vessels."

The House of Representatives didn't bother itself with passing a budget for the first time since the Budget Act of 1974, despite that House Democrats have a 77-seat margin and can pass any old thing they please.

The Democratic Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, who was as responsible as any single figure for Obama's unread, 2,300-page finance reform bill, announced that "no-one will know until this is actually in place how it works."

Two Justice Department lawyers testified that Obama's Civil Rights Division is "hostile" to "race-neutral enforcement of the Voting Rights Act."

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement union council voted "no confidence" in the Obama administration, 259 to 0, charging that Obama's ICE director and assistant director "have abandoned the agency's core mission."

When the president of Mexico used the occasion of his address to a joint session of Congress to denounce Arizona's modest and necessary steps against its illegal alien invasion -- which steps are supported by two-thirds of the American people -- the Democratic majority and Obama administration attendees rose in a 20-second standing ovation, after which the Obamas threw him a White House celebrity dance party.

And after Obama's cancellation of America's manned space program, for the first time since there's there's been such a thing as manned space flight, his NASA administrator listed three charges given him by Obama, none of which had anything to do with space, and "perhaps foremost" of which was "to reach out to the Muslim world."

Obama and his Congress have taken things uniformly from bad to worse, and conjured new troubles where none existed. They have replaced the consent of the governed with contempt for the governed, and they do not know better than the American people what's good for them. Obama's campaign was a fraud, and the question being asked now is whether he'll even offer for re-election, or if he'll tell the American people that they can't fire him, he quits. There's a reckoning coming.

Stimulus repudiated

2010-07-17T01:41:00.005-05:00

(Updated August 6, '10.)

America had problems, but too little federal spending was not one of them. President Bush spent too much; President Obama is spending much, much more. Obama and his Congress are fixing problems America doesn't have with solutions America can't afford. And it all started with the $787 billion stimulus -- since revised upward to $862 billion.

Obama's stimulus, by his own measures, has failed. Obama promised his stimulus would "create or save 3 to 4 million jobs over the next two years" -- "90 percent...in the private sector"; it's been nearly a year and a half already, and in that time the American economy has lost 2.6 million jobs net. Obama's advisers projected that unemployment wouldn't hit 8 percent if Obama got his stimulus; Obama got his stimulus, and unemployment went over 10 percent for the first time in a quarter-century. Obama promised his stimulus would "immediately creat[e] jobs"; 16 months later, in June alone, 652,000 Americans became part of the 1.2 million officially "discouraged," giving up even looking for work and dropping out of the labour force altogether.
　
The stimulus was sold as the greatest improvement in America's roads since Eisenhower built the Interstate system, but spending for roads and bridges came to just 3 percent of the final bill.　

Forty-three percent of the bill remains unspent nearly a year and a half after it was passed -- $370 billion as of late-July -- and what is the use of a "stimulus" for "immediately creating jobs" if 43 percent of it is still on the shelf after 17 months?

The bill became too much a cheque-book for the preoccupations of the Democratic Party, and bonus spending on institutions favoured of the Democratic Party, from $39.5 billion for public schools, to $2.4 billion for something called "carbon-capture demonstration projects," to $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts.

Nowhere in the bill was there any bonus spending for some of the most "shovel-ready" of government work in war-time -- defence projects -- and in fact the Obama administration later announced cuts to missile defence and production of the world-beating F-22 stealth fighter, national defence being the solitary area of government spending which Democrats are capable of cutting, never mind that there's a war on.

The bill cost $205 billion more than President Bush spent on the Iraq War in six years.

The bill ran to 1,073 pages, and neither the Congressmen and Senators who passed it nor the president who signed it into law bothered to read the thing.

The usual legislative process was suspended, committee hearings were bypassed, and the Republican minority was shut out. ("I won," President Obama explained. "We won the election. We wrote the bill," House Speaker Pelosi elaborated.)

The bill got exactly 3 of 217 Republican votes in both houses of Congress -- one of which three turned Democrat not long after -- and the final votes were reported by the Associated Press in this newspaper as "a major victory for President Obama."

And that was the least of the press abuses where the stimulus was concerned. The Canadian Press in this newspaper reported in March of last year that if Obama's economics are socialist then "it’s a brand of socialism Americans are behind. Countless public opinion polls suggest that the majority of Americans support both additional stimulus spending as well as government intervention to save insolvent banks." The CP report didn't cite any of those "countless" polls, and at least three major national polls in the days and weeks previous were pointing in quite the opposite direction.

The Rasmussen poll found "just 27 percent of voters nationwide favour passage of a second economic stimulus." The Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found 61 percent were more concerned the government would spend too much than too little in aid of stimulating the economy -- even if spending less would mean a longer recession. And the Gallup/USA Today poll found all of 14 percent saying it would have been better to spend more on the stimulus.

And never mind any "additional stimulus spending": it was only 44 percent who were calling the first stimulus a "good idea" in the Journal/NBC poll even when the bill was passed in February of '09. Five months later, that number was down to 34. And a year after passage, the New York Times/CBS News poll could find only 6 percent to say the stimulus had actually created jobs.

There was ample warning it wouldn't work. Dominic Lawson in the London Times had it right even before the stimulus was law. "Obama is backing the most primitive interpretation of Keynes’s theories: that any form of government spending amounts to an economic stimulus."

And it turned out Obama's crudified Keynesianism was his Plan A, Plan B, and Plan C for the American and global economies. So far from discreetly retiring the stimulus and taking a new direction, Obama mystifyingly claimed "every economist" had concluded the stimulus "did its job," proclaimed this "Recovery Summer," called for $266 billion more stimulus spending, pushed the $26 billion "state aid" bill to supplement the stimulus, and lectured the G-20 nations on following his example and spending their way to prosperity with bottomless boondoggles.　

The best thing at this point would be to cancel as much as is workable of the unspent provisions of the stimulus, and cut the losses. But Obama's Congress has refused to redirect even a fraction of the stimulus allocations to cover an unfunded unemployment benefits extension, so any change of course is going to take a very different government in Washington.

The stimulus was an act of faith in government, and in Barack Obama, and in the end its greatest effect has been on the national debt.

There Will Be Blood has no clothes

2010-06-21T08:33:00.002-05:00

Dreadful. There Will Be Blood is just dreadful. It was based on a novel by Upton Sinclair, so in fairness it could only ever have been dreadful. There Will Be Blood is not about oil or capitalism or California or America, which is a blessing in the sense that if it had been, it would of course have become some "searing indictment" of all those things. What's left is just another Daniel Day-Lewis psychopath picture. Oh, the movie presumes to be about the big things, but oil doesn't make "Daniel Plainview" a psychopath, and neither does America or anything else. I defy anyone to watch that ordeal-by-cinema and then tell me that Daniel Plainview would have been any more decent a human being had he only not got into the oil business; make him poor, make him a subsistence farmer, make him East Indian -- he'd be every bit as much a psychopath. Was it capitalism that compelled Daniel Plainview to bludgeon the helpless pastor to death with a bowling pin? Did America make him do it? Of course not. There Will Be Blood proves nothing more than that the Daniel Day-Lewis character is a psychopath.

It's certainly not an enjoyable movie. In fact it's meant to be unsettling, and there's no fun in watching a movie that's engineered to upset. Heaven forfend that Hollywood in the 21st Century produce a "serious" film that doesn't positively make the viewer despair of living. "Seriousness" in Hollywood since circa 1968 has been measured by unenjoyableness. But if a film isn't enjoyable, then it had better achieve something fairly important, and There Will Be Blood is pointless.

It is of course presented with the affectations of the "sweeping historical epic" and "indictment of American society" or "portrait of the evils of oil" or some such rot. And the elite swallowed it as always. Eight Oscar nominations, including Best Picture? Best film of the 2000s, according to several prominent publications? Ah, well: this would have been 2007-8, when all those same elites were falling head-over-heels for another fancy nullity, this one running for president of the United States. They were unanimous about him, too. Uniformly worshipful and uniformly wrong. It was reassuring to read at Box Office Mojo that despite the shower of accolades and awards, coinciding with its run in theaters, There Will Be Blood at the time of this writing worked out to Number 1,429 in all-time domestic box office receipts. You might say The Dark Knight drank There Will Be Blood's milkshake.

Oh, the picture is shot well, and I even think the cinematic style is impressive and will no doubt be aped transparently until something even trendier comes along. And Daniel Day-Lewis is a fine actor, especially if you find indulgent bombast becoming in an actor. Though there must be a million actors who could have played a more real Daniel Plainview in a more true portrait, but because they haven't been in the right place at the right time or they didn't attend the right school or they don't know the right people, they toil in oblivion. But presentation and style don't make a movie great any more than they make a president worth carving into Mount Rushmore.

The critics who raved over it and the industry insiders who voted to award it were responding to the "great film" trappings and elite prejudice-affirmation in the picture. The Wikipedia entry on There Will Be Blood helpfully notes that the industry didn't cotton to the script: "the studios didn't think it had the scope of a major picture." The studios had it right the first time. And there you have it: strip away the "great film" affectations, and those same industry insiders who later placed There Will Be Blood at the pinnacle of human achievement dismissed the self-same film as pointless.

And when a "jury" of the American Film Institute inserts the most turgid rote-leftist ideology into a single-paragraph assessment of a movie, then one gets the idea that the politics of the film figured more than a little in the support for it by the establishment. AFI pronounced There Will Be Blood "a true meditation on America." Only if you imagine a cartoonish psychopath to be a precis for America, which of course is precisely how America is caricatured by radical, hard-Left America-haters, of which the American film industry has more than a few.

More from the AFI "jury": "The film drills down into the dark heart of capitalism, where domination, not gain, is the ultimate goal." Again, the only thing that film "drills down into" is the "dark heart" of a cartoonish psychopath. Now I can say with confidence that anyone associated with the writing of those words makes at least ten times my annual income, and very probably more than that. But in their parallel universe, the decadent elites are the noble crusaders against the "dark heart of capitalism", and some impoverished nobody variously shivering and sweating in a cheap apartment at a malfunctioning laptop would be part of the "system" that needs tearing down, if those elites believe in all the "right" things and that nobody is an unreconstructed believer in the goodness and greatness of America.

The Daniel Day-Lewis character is a caricature -- unreal, unbelievable, and unhinged -- and There Will Be Blood is a pantomime. I have no doubt that leftist elites imagine "Daniel Plainview", and the corrupt pastor character, to be representative of oil-men, businessmen, pastors, and Americans more generally, and the universally congratulatory reviews of those elites say as much. But the leftist elite deals in caricatures. They know nothing of business or Christianity or indeed of America: they have set themselves apart from the reality of the world and are interested only in stereotypes and caricatures to affirm them in their ignorance and prejudice and contempt.

What the leftist elites mean by "challenging our assumptions" is of course "challenging your assumptions". They're not iconoclasts; they mean to replace your icons with their own. The salt-of-the-earth, all-American folks who actually do things are the ones to be pilloried, scorned, and damned, while all the hatreds of the elite are stroked and sanctified, even as they preach reverently about "challenging our assumptions" and "afflicting the comfortable", etc, etc. ad nauseam. There's no-one more self-righteous than a godless leftist elite.

If they were capable of seeing the movie clearly, those elites would instantly recognize it to be so bufoonish that it could not possibly be a serious or understanding portrait. What do they tell you in Creative Writing 101, about the danger in single dimensions? Villains without redeeming characteristics and flawless heroes make for not only an unreal story but also a tedious one. Some conventions are useful, and that's one of them: any story that relies on this kind of Soviet poster cartoonery won't hold up, and makes a dreadful, dreary picture even on the first showing.

It might have been the better way, to dispense with the weighty and solemn self-seriousness of the movie and come at it as a burlesque. A very slight tweaking could have made a joke of the picture. "I drink your milkshake" is a great line, and would have made a good departure point for reworking the movie as a comic enterprise. In fact, that line and the Daniel Day-Lewis character were taken up by Saturday Night Live at the time, and formed the basis for an entire sketch. An English film team especially might have concluded that the script was too cartoonish to be a properly serious film, and played up the cartoonish elements to make a romp of it. But these dreary movie-makers wanted to make a "big", "serious", "important" film. And when a caricature isn't put up to make the audience laugh, then it'll surely make them groan. So if it's not a roaring spoof, the Daniel Day-Lewis character can only be a psychopath. If that character isn't someone's idea of a joke, then all that's left is psychopathy.

Try this on. Give "Daniel Plainview" a dog. Make it a little one, and sweet, and with a silly, cutesy name. Then have Plainview dote on the little dog with equal force to his abuse for human beings. And then tweak the script and direction very slightly, so that Daniel Day-Lewis comes off more mad than malevolent. Every menacing word and turn of the head goes from disturbing to hysterical. When it can be said of a movie that a little tweaking could convert it from "sweeping epic" and "indictment of society" to comic romp, then what you've got hold of is a not a serious picture.

The bias of The Chronicle-Herald, or, the job description of Canadian Press "Editor-in-Chief"

2010-06-01T20:59:00.019-05:00

(UPDATE: Expanded since first posted. A chapter and part of the introduction from an over-long and long-overdue post which I'm far from finishing, in lieu of the rest of it. I'm afraid this can't be of much interest for a general readership, but it needs putting on the record.)

Obama and the 2009 NATO summit according to The Chronicle-Herald.

This was the solitary example offered by Scott White, the "Editor-in-Chief" of Canada's newswire monopoly, as proof that "virtually all" of the news in a little Chronicle-Herald Opinions page article of mine had "been reported", presumably by his Canadian Press or by the Associated Press in the United States, which is sluiced through the Canadian Press under an absolutely typical Canadian arrangement whereby an Upper Canadian outfit headquartered in Toronto is granted exclusive rights to distribute a superior American product to its captive market in the provincial hinterlands like Nova Scotia. They call it "Confederation".

Now, if you'll be good enough to bear with me, in my little op-ed I concerned myself with the coverage of Obama's first 100 days in The Chronicle-Herald specifically, which is why my very second sentence read, "If all a person knew of Barack Obama's first 100 days as president was what he read of them in this newspaper, it would seem to be a very charmed young presidency." In case that and the other references in the article weren't clear enough, I explained again in my reply to an accusatory e-mail from this Editor-in-Chief of Canada's newswire monopoly that "I read the paper every day. The paper I write for, The Chronicle-Herald. I know what it has reported on Obama and what it hasn't." And I was referring to points of scrutiny and skepticism, which is why the summation of my list in the article -- which I'd have thought was fairly obviously a list of points -- read, "Why should these points, and many more like them, have to be made by some obscure contributor to The Herald's Opinions section?" Again, if my little article wasn't clear enough, I continued in my reply to this man's e-mail, "Anyone who depended for their coverage of the Obama administration on that newspaper would have been oblivious to those points and many more."

Whereupon the Editor-in-Chief of Canada's newswire monopoly carried right on declaring that "virtually all of the stories" I cited "have been reported", period, and I was pronounced "wrong" -- only this time it was in print on The Herald's Opinions page. Now, I've had published negative feedback since a few months after I started writing little letters to the editor. Most of it angry, much of it nasty, and some of it personal. And not only letters, but quite lot of 800-word op-eds, too. I've always appreciated that it came with the territory, and after I finished reading The Herald that morning, I shrugged and had a fried bologna sandwich. But this needs revisiting. I know The Chronicle-Herald; I've read every awful edition for seven years, and I've made my own awful contributions to it for about as long. Not to claim I read The Herald front-to-back, you understand, but enough to know it all too well. I see how The Herald cherry-picks the news, and I mean to show it.

I've been meaning for some time to document some part of the near-daily abuses of The Chronicle-Herald, in what its "News Director" and editors choose to print, and at least as much in what they determine their readers needn't be exposed to. Those conspicuous omissions -- the "sins of omission", as Matt Drudge has called them. And so I might as well start from what is for me the beginning. I've made a thorough search of the very useful Herald Archive for the period of Obama's first 100 days, and this is what I've come up with.

I made the points in my little op-ed that Obama had failed in his first NATO summit to rally the allies to muster their troops for Afghanistan, and that he and his party had claimed such support would have been forthcoming -- that some mythical European cavalry would have ridden over the hill to save the day -- if only the president of the United States had been less cowboy and more Continental, i.e., if only George W. Bush had been replaced by a president exactly like Barack Obama. Then I asked rhetorically why these points and many more like them had to be made on the Opinions page of The Chronicle-Herald. But according to the very Editor-in-Chief of the national newswire monopoly, all of this had apparently been made quite clear in the coverage which I had somehow overlooked at the time, and particularly in a Canadian Press dispatch from a correspondent who'd been sent specially to Strasbourg in France to cover the summit.

And lo and behold, there was in fact a Canadian Press dispatch datelined Strasbourg, in the April 4, 2009 edition of The Chronicle-Herald, under the Herald headline of "NATO faces new challenge; Afghan law which curbs women's rights makes mission tough sell".

I read the CP report elsewhere, and in fact it did get around to the only practical business of the NATO summit -- in paragraphs 26 and 27. Paragraph 26: "Several European countries made a show of announcing more support for the Afghan mission on Friday, but the numbers were small." A fine bit of reporting, even if it did come at paragraph 26. Better late than never. Only, that paragraph never appeared in The Chronicle-Herald.

Paragraph 27: "Britain said it would add 'mid to high hundreds' to the 8,000 troops it has in Afghanistan. France promised more police trainers and civilian aid, and Belgium said it will add 65 soldiers and two more F-16 fighter jets." Another fine bit of reporting, even if it never did get around to that other point in my little op-ed, that Obama and his party had sworn Europe would put up and pitch in if only the president were less like Bush and more like Obama. But half is better than none. Only, that paragraph never appeared in The Chronicle-Herald.

I repeat: that entire passage of two paragraphs never appeared in The Chronicle-Herald. The Herald version was abridged to 564 words. Of course, the Editor-in-Chief of Canada's newswire monopoly wouldn't have known that the dispatch of his man in Strasbourg hadn't made it in one piece to the readers of The Chronicle-Herald, and clearly he didn't heed the explanations in my article itself and in my reply to his e-mail, that I was referring to the coverage in The Chronicle-Herald specifically and that my concern was not so much stories covered as points made. But the Editor-in-Chief of Canada's newswire monopoly pronounced against some nobody contributor to the Opinions page of a Nova Scotia newspaper, by name and in print, and brandishing his fancy title and invoking his office, despite that the one bit of evidence he offered for his case never appeared in the newspaper in question, denying the plain meaning of that nobody's words, and despite that to this day, that nobody has declined out of professional courtesy and Christian decency to name him or his reporters in print, where more people than a few might actually read it.

Of course, there was more coverage of the NATO summit in The Chronicle-Herald than that Canadian Press dispatch. The Herald ran an Associated Press report datelined Strasbourg on everything you ever wanted to know about Anders Fogh Rasmussen, headlined "Dane chosen as new NATO boss". (NATO "boss"? Anyone who knew anything about the office of NATO secretary-general would never refer to him as the "boss".) And The Herald devoted an entire news item to an AP report on the protests against the NATO summit, headlined "Police quell protesters' first try".

Finally the Herald Archive turned up an Associated Press story, also datelined Strasbourg and published on the same day as the aforementioned Canadian Press report, under the optimistic Herald headline, "Obama pitching for help today". In all the news sections of the Chronicle-Herald, in all the reports making any mention on the 2009 NATO summit, a single sentence in a single story was the closest The Herald came to reporting Obama's failure:

"But the European public has no stomach for more intense military involvement by their nations. So Obama is unlikely to get additional help in the way of either major combat troops or new deployments to the toughest areas of the fighting in southern and eastern Afghanistan." That's a good start at reporting, or at least it would have been. Beside the fact that this was not a report of what had been but a reporter's expectation of what would be, and was discountable as such -- Obama was still "pitching for help today", after all -- and beside the fact that the blame for Europe's resistance to throwing in with us was put on "the European public" -- acquitting Obama -- even that much was negated by the preceding paragraph, which was the most inexplicable Pollyanna-ism: "Obama seems likely to win fresh commitments at Saturday's 60th anniversary NATO summit. He can expect more civilian aid and small troop increases for training Afghan forces and providing security for upcoming elections." ("Obama seems likely to win fresh commitments"! Gimme an O! Gimme a B! ....)

And that was it. A single sentence in a single story, indicating only that Obama was "unlikely to get additional help", preceded by a preemptive acquittal of Obama for any shortcomings plus some cheerleading that Obama "seems likely to win fresh commitments" which gave precisely the contrary impression, under a Herald headline of "Obama pitching for help today" which gave no hint of Obama's imminent failure, and without recalling the claims of Obama and his party that it'd be different if only a man like Obama were in the White House. The question of combat troops for Afghanistan was the one and only story of any practical significance in the 2009 NATO summit. And this was the first NATO summit since the 9/11 attacks and the start of the Afghan mission at which the president of the United States was not George W. Bush. "NATO tells Obama 'no' on Afghanistan; New president, no 'change'" ought to have been the headline, the lead paragraph, and the bulk of the story.

Nowhere in the news sections of The Chronicle-Herald was there any final report that NATO had told Obama "no", and nowhere in The Herald's news sections was the point in my op-ed made, that Obama and his party had sworn for at least half a decade that "our European allies" would have been wading into the melee with us, to spill their blood and treasure by our side, and fight and die for our cause in Afghanistan, but for that "cowboy" Bush and his "unilateralism" which was "alienating our allies" and all the rest. Now the Continentals had their very dream candidate for president of the United States, and still they declined to fight. The 2009 NATO summit was the final repudiation of six years of theorizing and politicking by Obama himself, his party, and indeed also the international press. Is is remarkable that all that didn't warrant a mention somewhere in the news sections of The Chronicle-Herald, and was left to me over on the Opinions page.

But it was worse than that. The Herald carried an Associated Press report at about this time, unrelated to the NATO summit, which mentioned a new allied commitment for Afghanistan and positively went out of its way to credit Obama personally for it: "Australia plans to add 450 soldiers, increasing its force to about 1,550, Prime Minister Rudd announced Wednesday, saying Obama persuaded him to increase the deployment during discussions last week." Now, Australia is of course not a NATO member nation, it's certainly not one of "our European allies", and in fact it and New Zealand were the lone Western nations to stand with America in Vietnam, so this is something apart from the NATO summit story, but here was the AP in The Chronicle-Herald crediting Obama personally with an allied commitment of 450 troops, while there was no corresponding report in that same paper of Obama's corresponding failure of persuasion with those European allies who were the foot-draggers, and the ones in need of persuasion according to Obama and his crowd themselves.

(That AP report included the only reference I could turn up in the Herald Archive over Obama's first 100 days to Britain's disappearing-ink commitment of 700 extra troops, promised at the NATO summit, to be withdrawn again after a few months. But Britain is America's greatest ally and foul-weather friend, whose support was so taken for granted that it was discounted when the president was named Bush, so that's also in a different category from what is meant by "our European allies".)
Indeed, the AP dispatch reported "the United States and other NATO countries now have some 70,000 soldiers in Afghanistan -- a record level." Anyone would think from reading that AP report that the Obama ally-rallying was going swimmingly. But how much of the increase to 70,000 came from those "other NATO countries"? So far from reporting Obama's failure, that AP dispatch in The Herald actually left just the contrary impression.

And it was worse than even that. Not one month before the NATO summit, The Chronicle-Herald reproduced an Associated Press report which referred to "President Barack Obama's policy to bring more European allies on board to fight the Taliban-led insurgency," and added to that bit of fantasy this bit of editorializing: "Biden said the Obama administration will be keen to engage NATO allies in global security discussions, marking a departure from the last eight years when Washington often was on a go-it-alone course that upset its European allies."

So The Chronicle-Herald was quite happy to report that it was "Obama's policy to bring more European allies on board to fight the Taliban-led insurgency", but when, a matter of weeks later, that was shown to be less "policy" than "fantasy" -- or if it was a "policy" then it was shown to be a failed one -- The Herald declined to make the point. And The Herald was happy to pass off as matter-of-fact newswire copy that it was the Bush administration's alleged "go-it-alone course that upset its European allies", but when, just weeks later, it was finally proved that those "European allies" hadn't been "upset" so much as unwilling and unable, and it turned out that supposed presidential "go-it-alone-ism" hadn't entered into it, The Herald again declined to make the point.

Doctor Who and the British imperial impulse

2010-04-26T17:20:00.006-05:00

Surely I can't be the first to make this point, but I'm not typically an appreciator of science-fiction and I managed to mostly avoid Doctor Who until a matter of months ago, and the question is screaming out at me: Is not Doctor Who in some part a science-fiction stand-in for the British Empire? If you strip away the science-fiction elements of it, are you not left with a fellow who seems very much like a typical Englishman, venturing far and wide, encountering all sorts of exotic tribes, and saving the world?

Sometime between the world wars, the Empire fell out of fashion with the British elite; after the second war, the progressives who were elected to erect Britain's dismal welfare state couldn't wait to evacuate the Empire, which incidentally led to a very predictable civil war between what became Pakistan and India; and by the 21st Century, any British elite calling himself "conflicted" about the Empire, instead of condemning it absolutely, would no doubt be suspected of crypto-imperialism and black-balled. As if a half-millennium of British history was all just a terrible mistake. Niall Ferguson, a few years back, advanced an apologetic sort of defense of the Empire, along the lines of, the Empire was redeemed in the end by the fact that Britain drained itself and its Empire defeating aggression and fascism in the world wars. But even that is a defensive argument, and a far cry from what was generally accepted until living memory, which is that the Empire was a mostly noble enterprise that made Britain great and elevated all Britain's possessions at the same time.

That is to say, the Empire is right out in Britain today, or at the very least it's out among the sort of people who make television shows for the BBC. And so I can't help thinking that Doctor Who is the sort of thing you'd wind up with if you were cut from the same cloth as Rudyard Kipling and Chinese Gordon and Cecil Rhodes -- you shared their impulse for adventurism and exoticism and world-saving -- but at the same time, you accepted every one of the nostrums of the 21st Century British elite, with all its political correctness and cultural relativism and pacifism and the rest of it.

(On that pacifism point: I suppose the sort of people who make television shows for the BBC couldn't very well arm The Doctor with some Time Lord equivalent to the Brown Bess or the Lee-Enfield Mk III, so they've given him a "sonic screwdriver" which conveniently does nearly anything he needs it to do in any given situation. They've created The Doctor as a pacifist of sorts, though apparently with some blood on his hands from the great and final Time War between his own race and the Daleks. One can't fault the makers of the show for keeping their hero's hands clean, and it is a family show, after all, but I have to say, it's easy to be a pacifist when the villains are imaginary and some ingenious and fantastical science-fiction story-writing can save the day.)

In the show, The Doctor has taken it upon himself to tirelessly and thanklessly patrol and save the universe; Rudyard Kipling called it "taking up the white man's burden". The Doctor encounters alien races and civilizations across time and space, some war-like and some peaceable, and all exotic and fascinating; so today it's the "Ood" or "Zocci", where in centuries past it might have been the Narragansetts or Hottentots of whom accounts were written and pictures drawn.

And for all the ecumenical effort in Doctor Who -- rendering the Earth as just one fairly inconsequential civilized planet in a universe full of them, preferring to treat all of humanity together rather than as individual nations or groups, etc. -- it is as parochial and England-centric (I use the terms affectionately) as any old imperialist ever was, rolling his cricket pitch someplace in India. The Doctor is the last of an alien race called Time Lords, and yet he seems uncannily like an Englishman, even unto the point of caricature in the current and excellent incarnation, played by Matt Smith, with his bow-tie and tweed jacket, and eating fried fish and custard. Take even the pairing in this current and excellent series: The Doctor a seeming Englishman in tweed with his plucky red-headed Scottish lieutenant, venturing far and wide and saving the universe. If anyone had proposed that as a formula for a story of the British Empire, it'd have been rejected as hackneyed.

The Doctor's time machine/space ship, the TARDIS, has assumed the form of the British blue police box, and if those blue police boxes were any more British, George Formby would have sung a song about them.

The only human enterprise capable of monitoring and combatting extra-terrestrial intervention in earthly affairs is called Torchwood, which is a covert agency of the British government -- established by Queen Victoria herself, it turns out. (And one can't help noticing that this Torchwood bears some resemblance to MI5 or MI6, or maybe Room 40 in the First World War or Bletchley Park in the Second.)

I expect I could go on, if I knew more about this show which is still new to me, but suffice it to say Doctor Who looks to me like it owes almost as much to Rudyard Kipling as to H. G. Wells. And so I can't help thinking, even after decades of institutionalized self-loathing and self-flagellating, the Empire's in 'em still.

Less a "historic victory" than a Pyrrhic one

2010-03-25T05:11:00.002-05:00

President Obama and his Democratic Congress have made history, only not the kind they have in mind. They have become the only president and Congress to enact a leviathan social program altering the life of every American -- against the wishes of those American people, over the threatened opposition of three-fourths of the state legislatures, with not a solitary vote from the minority opposition, and by arcane parliamentary maneuver.
　
When it comes to pass that a Republican unknown wins the special election for U.S. Senate in religiously-Democratic Massachusetts, to replace Ted Kennedy, no less, and after vowing daily to be the 41st vote to kill the Democrats' health-care bills, then it may well and truly be said that the American people do not want this "comprehensive health-care reform."
　
A month after the Massachusetts comeuppance, the CNN poll found just 25 percent of Americans supported the Democrats' health-care bills, to 73 percent who wanted Congress to either start from scratch or quit health-care altogether. And yet within a month of that, House Democrats voted to make the 2,700-page Senate bill the law of the land, and passed a "reconciliation" bill which actually builds on the Senate monstrosity and annexes the entirety of the student loan system to the federal government while they're at it.
　
Three days before the House vote, Obama's job approval rating went net negative in the Gallup poll for the first time, and Congress' approval hit 16 percent, just two points up from the lowest recorded in 36 years of Gallup polling on the question. The day before the vote, the Rasmussen poll of likely voters put Obama's job approval rating at 43 percent; it took five years for George W. Bush to fall so low.

By the time the House vote was called, 38 of the 50 state legislatures had indicated an intent to challenge the new law. And on the day of the vote, the only bipartisanship was in opposition to the new law: 34 House Democrats joined every Republican in voting "nay."

That looks less like a "historic victory" than a Pyrrhic one.
　
The undeniable good that is done by this "reform" could have been written up in a relative few pages and passed with wide margins and popular support the best part of a year ago, and the legitimate, hard-case uninsured could have been accommodated for a fraction of the $1.2 trillion that Obama and his Congress blew on their worse-than-useless stimulus and omnibus bills alone, without upsetting the system for the 80 percent who call themselves satisfied with their health-care as-is. This "comprehensive health-care reform" is something quite apart from help for folks who've fallen through the cracks and a curbing of the odd insurance industry abuse.
　
Obama's own chief actuary for Medicare and Medicaid Services had to report that the Senate bill would raise the price of health-care in America by $234 billion in ten years, that its savings "may be unrealistic," and that there was "a very serious risk" of its new insurance scheme becoming "unsustainable."
　
The Congressional Budget Office ruled the Senate bill would drive the cost of health-insurance premiums "10 percent to 13 percent higher in 2016 than...under current law," that it would lead employers to dump 5 million Americans net from their current coverage, and that even a decade after passage, it would leave 16 million Americans uninsured still, plus 8 million uninsured illegals.
　
The new law includes something called the "individual mandate" -- a legal requirement to buy federally-approved, comprehensive health-insurance, enforceable by the IRS -- which is probably unconstitutional and certainly unpopular, and which Obama attacked Hillary Clinton for proposing in the Democratic presidential primaries.
　
The new law establishes 159 new bureaucracies of all sorts, and hires 16,500 new IRS agents to police the new regime of taxes, regulations, and mandates.
　
The new law is supposed to be paid for by something like $500 billion in new taxes over ten years, plus another $500 billion in cuts to Medicare. And the accounting of the bills is as fraudulent as Enron's. Over $200 billion in spending was moved out of the bills, to be passed separately in what is called the "doctor fix," so as not to be counted in the official Congressional Budget Office scorings, and ten years of tax increases and spending cuts are counted against six years of benefits.
　
And nowhere in those thousands of pages is there any attempt at the obvious, common-sense reforms like opening the health-insurance companies to competition from out of state, enabling bare-bones insurance policies, or restraining the tort lawyers who make practicing medicine in America a legal hazard.

House Democrats passed the Senate bill only on the understanding that their "reconciliation" bill would then be passed in the Senate by 50-percent-plus-one budget reconciliation, to circumvent the Senate's 60-percent threshold, which is without precedent for legislation of this nature and scale, and which is the sort of thing Obama and his party denounced as affront to American democracy until they came to see it as a neat trick for getting their way.
　
It's not until 2014 and later that the new law goes fully into effect; there will be national elections this November and in November of 2012. By having it all their own way, against the national will and around the legislative rules, Obama and his Congress have only hastened the day when a very different government sits in Washington. The Left in America may never be entrusted with such unchecked power again for a generation.

--A slightly earlier version of this published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia

More indulgence and incompetence of the Canadian Press Washington bureau (and Chronicle-Herald)

2010-03-10T20:01:00.011-06:00

(There aren't enough hours in the day for my duties as self-appointed watchdog of the Canadian Press Washington bureau, so this post will have to be a shorter one.)

Any parody I could come up with could hardly be any more caricaturish than the actual dispatches of Lee-Anne Goodman, the lone American correspondent of the lone Canadian newswire service. March 9, top story, national news, Halifax Chronicle-Herald: "Palin's family sought medical care in Canada; Gosh darnit: Ex-governor's claim about 1960s prompts scrutiny, ridicule."

By the time that dispatch of the Canadian Press Washington bureau appeared in The Herald, it had long since been mooted thoroughly. The Associated Press had interviewed Sarah Palin's father for a report on the subject the day before, and explained everything: "There was no road out of there [Skagway, Alaska, where Palin lived at the time].... The ferry schedule was very erratic. ... The plane schedule was very erratic. ... We had no doctor in Skagway. ... We much preferred to use our facilities because my insurance didn't cover anything in Whitehorse. And even though they have socialized medicine, I still had to pay the bill, being an American citizen."

So the scandal was a faux-scandal and the story was a non-story, and had been demonstrated as such long before it got into print, in news and opinion outlets including the very Associated Press, which is sluiced through the Canadian Press under an absolutely typical Canadian scheme whereby the Upper Canadian monopoly headquartered in Toronto is granted exclusive rights to distribute the superior American product to its hostage market in the provincial hinterlands like Nova Scotia. But that AP report with the facts of the story from Palin's father never appeared in The Chronicle-Herald.

To print the Associated Press report would have been to repudiate not only the Canadian Press Washington bureau, but The Chronicle-Herald which promoted the CP story to the top of its national news and joined in on the sneering ("gosh darnit"), and whose editorial cartoonist rendered the junk report as his latest anti-Palin cartoon the following day. The Canadian Press Washington bureau story was sustainable only in the absence of the facts. Palin had only related the anecdote to demonstrate her closeness to Canada, there was not the slightest hypocrisy in it, and to make a top-story scandal out of it necessitated an obliviousness to the facts, if not also a smugness, elite prejudice, and an inordinate and obsessive malice for Sarah Palin.

It's one of the features of the Canadian Press Washington bureau, documented here many times before, that it is typically familiar with only the leftist line on any given story, and quite oblivious to the other half of the story. So for instance, when the Left picks up on a hoax that a Palin rally attendee called out "Kill him" when the subject of Barack Obama was raised, the Canadian Press Washington bureau will credulously repeat that hoax, even seven months after it's been comprehensively debunked by the Secret Service. That's perfectly fine in a person who just doesn't much care to be confronted by conservatism, and a leftist does have the luxury in the 21st Century of passing her life without ever really being exposed to conservatism except as a caricature and object of scorn, while we conservatives are confronted by leftism when we go through our public schools and our universities, or every time we try to sign into our online e-mail accounts and are greeted with an unsolicited "In the News" box of selected "mainstream" headlines, or when we try to watch Comedy Central with its daily recitations of Democrat Party talking points delivered in the style of glib, too-cool-for-school, pop comics. But the obliviousness to the conservative side of the story does become a problem in a person who's elevated to the post of lone American correspondent for the lone Canadian newswire service, covering what is after all a profoundly conservative country.

The junk reporting on Sarah Palin came just four days after the latest Canadian Press Washington bureau effort in its service as defender of the president of the United States against unkindnesses. The March 5 dispatch was headlined in The Chronicle-Herald, "Senior Republican: Obama like The Joker." That "senior Republican" was some "finance director" of the Repulican National Committee whom I'd never heard of, and his supposed outrage was an internal RNC Powerpoint presentation which used the ubiquitous Obama-as-The-Joker photo.

That's news at the Washington bureau of the Canadian Press and in The Chronicle-Herald of Halifax, Nova Scotia, which counted the story as "World" news. But here is some of what was not counted as news -- a partial list of developments dominating American politics in the day or two before that report ran:

-Suspicion by even House Democrats that Obama's promise, and the Senate Democrats' assurance, that the Senate health-care bill would be "fixed" through budget reconciliation if it's passed as-is by the House, would become just another of Obama's broken promises, that he would simply sign the bill into law and declare victory, and the Senate Democrats would conveniently discover some compelling reason against reconciliation which somehow never occurred to them earlier.
-Suspicion that Obama's appointment of Scott Matheson to a federal appellate court was influenced by the fact that Matheson's brother Jim is a Democrat Congressman who voted "no" on the health-care bill in November, and who Obama was at that moment inviting to the White House to be persuaded to change his vote to "yes".
-The recalling of quotes by Candidate Obama and Senator Obama denouncing the sort of thing he's now proposing as president, to enact his health-care monstrosity against the will of the people by 50-percent-plus-one parliamentary device.
-Charlie Rangel, the Democrat Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, forced to surrender his chairmanship in light of Ethics Committee findings in its investigation of him for corruption; Democrat Congressman Pete Stark lasts just a day as replacement chairman, on account of his being a hateful, deranged radical, most recently famous for telling a conservative constituent at a town hall meeting that he wasn't "worth wasting the urine." (That incident also unreported in the CP and Herald.)
-Democrat Congressman Eric Massa announces his retirement after the Ethics Committee is informed of allegations he had "made unwanted advances toward a junior male staffer."
-Democrat Congressman Bill Delahunt becomes the lastest in a long parade of veteran Democrats announcing their retirement as of the end of this Congress, avoiding a re-election campaign in what promises to be a very unkind November for Democrats.

But none of that qualified as news at the Canadian Press Washington bureau or The Chronicle-Herald. Instead we were given a report scrutinizing some unknown finance director of the Republican National Committee for an internal committee Powerpoint presentation. All those serious stories, involving the governing party and government policies, in just the day or two before the Canadian Press Washington bureau passed them over for its unknown-Republican-functionary-calls-Obama-The-Joker story. The Eric Massa story exploded to a new order of magnitude on March 8 and was the biggest thing in American politics on the 8th and 9th, and has carried over into the 10th, but still the name "Eric Massa" appears nowhere in The Chronicle-Herald. The Massa story combines a Democrat sexual harrassment scandal with Democrat allegations of abuse of power against fellow Democrats. And yet when some unknown back-bencher from the Republican minority opposition called out "You lie" during Obama's partisan, hectoring health-care address to a joint session of Congress, which was itself a gratuitous abuse of the office of president, The Herald ran half a dozen reports calling the powerless Republican nobody to task, one of them from the CP Washington bureau.

The dispatches of the Canadian Press Washington bureau ought to make the CP's "Editor-in-Chief" cringe. But he presides over a monopoly: there is no alternative newswire service in Canada, and the CP's network of client news outlets are a captive market that'll take what they're given. And the journalistic offenses of his Washington bureau only flatter the prejudices of a Toronto elite: all the junk reporting, all the scrutiny of the powerless and stroking of the powerful, all the conspicuous neglect of big stories and disproportionate elevation of trifles in their place, all the obliviousness to at least half the story -- the effect of it all is uniformly to scorn conservatives and congratulate leftists, so it must be very difficult indeed for any Toronto bigwig to see the problem in it. And anyway, if the Canadian Press truly were "serious about the news", it would never have posted a hysterically-partisan glorified gossip columnist to Washington as its sole American correspondent in the first place.

(Much more on the Canadian Press Washington bureau here, here, here, here, and here.)

The revolt against "remaking the nation"

2010-03-04T19:02:00.011-06:00

"No peace in health reform; Obama vows to continue despite Republicans," a Chronicle-Herald headline read. But President Obama's problem isn't the Republican Party so much as the American people: Not two days before that Associated Press report ran, a CNN poll was released showing just 25 percent of Americans supported the Democrats' health-care bills, to 73 percent who wanted Congress to either start from scratch or quit health-care altogether.

And when it comes to pass that a Republican unknown wins the special election for U.S. Senate in religiously-Democratic Massachusetts, to replace Ted Kennedy, no less, and after vowing daily to be the 41st vote to kill the Democrats' health-care bills, then it may well and truly be said that the American people do not want this "comprehensive health-care reform," which was the centrepiece of Obama's project to "remake the nation."

Obama's problem isn't "misinformation," or "the venal tone of the arguments against reform," as the Canadian Press reported matter-of-factly in this newspaper. It isn't that "Republicans continue health care scare tactics," as the Herald headline on one Associated Press story had it. And the public outrage isn't "town hall nonsense," as another Herald headline editorialized on one of many contemptuous Canadian Press reports (like "U.S. racists direct hateful messages at Obama," painting the "teabagging protests" as crypto-racist) scrutinizing the powerless minority opposition, and the American people saying their piece in the town squares and town halls, instead of the unchecked president and his super-majorities.

Even after the health-care bills had been repudiated by Ted Kennedy's old voters, the Canadian Press in this paper persisted in describing them as "legislation that would have provided millions of Americans with health insurance," but surely if that was all there was to it, then the bills would have become law long since with wide margins and popular support. Obama's problem is that his "comprehensive health-care reform" is comprehensively abominable, and the people plain don't want it.

After the Massachusetts comeuppance, Obama himself briefly conceded, "some of the provisions that got snuck in might have violated that pledge" that "if you want to keep the health insurance you got, you can keep it, that you’re not going to have anybody getting in between you and your doctor in your decision making." So those "Republican scare tactics" weren't so "misinformed" after all.

The very "chief actuary" for Medicare and Medicaid Services had to report in December that the Senate bill would raise the price of health-care in America by $234 billion in ten years, that its supposed savings "may be unrealistic," and that there was "a very serious risk" of its proposed new insurance scheme becoming "unsustainable."

The health-care bills include something called the "individual mandate" -- a legal requirement to buy government-approved, comprehensive health insurance, enforceable by the IRS -- which is probably unconstitutional and certainly unpopular, and which Obama attacked Hillary Clinton for proposing in the Democratic presidential primaries.

The bills are supposed to be paid for by something like $500 billion in new taxes over ten years, plus another $500 billion in cuts to Medicare. And the accounting of the bills is as fraudulent as Enron's. Over $200 billion in spending was moved out of the bills, to be passed separately in what is called the "doctor fix," so as not to be counted in the official Congressional Budget Office scorings of the bills, and ten years of tax increases and spending cuts are counted against six years of benefits.

The bills are as bad for what they don't do as for what they do. Nowhere in those 2,000-plus pages each do they institute the obvious, common-sense reforms like opening the health insurance companies to competition from out of state, enabling bare-bones insurance policies, or restraining the tort lawyers who make practicing medicine in America a legal hazard.

Not to mention that the "50 million uninsured" boil down to something closer to 15 million legitimate, hard cases, which could have been accommodated for a fraction of the $1.2 trillion that Obama and his Congress blew on their worse-than-useless stimulus and omnibus bills alone, without upsetting the system for the other 289 million Americans. Indeed, 80 percent of Americans in a September Gallup poll were satisfied with their health-care as-is, which makes a good start on explaining the resistance to any system-wide overhaul.

Democrats now propose to enact the 2,700-page Senate bill without putting it to a vote in the House, "deeming" it passed by "self-executing rule." It is absolutely without precedent for legislation of this scale, if not also an Article I, Section 7 violation of the Constitution. The understanding is that the monstrosity would then be "fixed" in the Senate by 50-percent-plus-one budget reconciliation, to circumvent the Senate's 60-percent threshold -- also without precedent for legislation of this scale. So to bring their Frankenstein's monster to life, Obama and his Congress are perfectly prepared not only to spurn the express will of the American people, but also to suspend the legislative process of American democracy.

Fourteen months into this "Age of Obama," Obama and his Congress have been reduced to "remaking the nation" by arcane parliamentary maneuver. It's been apparent for the better part of a year now, outside the alternative universe of the elite, monopolistic newswires and newspapers: Obama and his Congress are in collapse, and the American people are in revolt.

The indulgence and incompetence of the Canadian Press Washington bureau

2010-02-13T22:55:00.021-06:00

It's been a while since anybody at Canada's newswire monopoly has tried to call the law down on me, wipe my little website from the internet, or otherwise try to stifle some nobody who presumed to call them out on their abuses for once, so I thought I'd update my documentation of the abuses of the Canadian Press Washington bureau. (In this installment: "Selectivity and Sarah Palin", "Junk reporting and Tea Parties", "Sneering and Scott Brown", and "Incompetence and the filibuster")

Selectivity and Sarah Palin.

So. The Washington bureau of the Canadian Press can cite American polling after all. In just this past couple weeks it's reported on polls showing the unfitness for office of a conservative Republican, Sarah Palin, and the apparent wild popularity of a liberal Democrat government policy, to allow open homosexuality in the fighting forces. Judging by the Canadian Press Washington bureau, the American people must be repudiating conservatives and champing at the bit for their leftist government to "remake the nation", and this Age of Obama must be going swimmingly.

I almost thought, from the past half year or so, that it might be CP policy to never cite American polls. American polls have been unrelentingly bad news for the president and Congress of the United States, their governing party and nearly everything they hold dear, since sometime in the summer of '09, which might be the sort of thing a person would mention if she were, say, the sole American correspondent for the sole Canadian newswire service. And yet that half-year's worth of dismal news for the actual president and Congress, and their project to "remake the nation", seems never to have made it into the dispatches of the Canadian Press Washington bureau. (I surveyed some of those poll findings as of August in a Chronicle-Herald Opinions piece that was a better predictor of the following half-year of American politics than anything that appeared in the Canadian Press or the Herald World News section in that time.)

The February 13 dispatch of the Canadian Press Washington bureau was built entirely around a poll: "Poll: Palin not viable 2012 contender." I could have told you as much, without the aid of any poll and long before February of 2010. In fact, I did, here. But if Sarah Palin is a complete no-hoper for president, and considering that she's never held national public office, then how does the Canadian Press Washington bureau justify devoting such an extraordinary, prolific body of reportage to scrutinizing her, even unto the point of abusing its position with an entire report scorning her powerless 18 year-old daughter? (I wrote on that piece here; it ought never have been published in the news sections of the newspapers of Canada, and might even have been grounds for reassignment at a more serious news agency than the Canadian Press under Scott White.)

Lee-Anne Goodman, February 13, 2010: "New polls suggest the majority of Americans -- including conservatives -- have no confidence she's got what it takes to make it to the Oval Office. A Washington Post/ABC News poll suggests only 37 per cent of Americans have a favorable impression of Palin -- an all-time low. Fifty-five per cent view her unfavourably -- an all-time high."

The lowest ever! The highest ever! The chapter-and-verse on the poor Palin numbers went on for several paragraphs. Incidentally, "all-time" may not be the best usage for polling history covering only the 18 months since Sarah Palin has been known beyond Alaska. And a low approval rating will often correspond with a high disapproval rating, so it's not some confluence of especially bad luck that an "all-time low" positive impression would coincide with an "all-time high" unfavorable one, as if those are two completely independent findings. In any case, all the Palin-polling in the world counts for nothing, because Sarah Palin holds no public office, has never held national office, and was never going to be Republican nominee for president anytime soon.

(UPDATE, Feb. 16: Now here's a poll on electability -- not for some office-less punching bag, but the actual, sitting president and Congress of the United States. CNN, February 16: "44 percent of registered voters say Obama deserves re-election, with 52 percent saying the president does not deserve a second term. ... 34 percent feel that current federal lawmakers deserve re-election. ... That's the lowest number ever recorded for that question in a CNN survey. ... 51 percent feel their member of Congress should be re-elected -- also an all-time low in CNN polling." And that usage of "all-time low" refers to a period of longer than 18 months, including the last two midterm election years when control of both houses of Congress changed hands. But that's not the sort of thing that qualifies for news at the Canadian Press Washington bureau, which reported in January that Diane Sawyer's questioning Obama on the prospect of a one-term presidency "seems a premature topic of conversation".)

The Canadian Press Washington bureau had only just invoked a Gallup poll a week and a half earlier, in aid of a report claiming, "U.S. military wants to lift ban on gay serving openly."

Lee-Anne Goodman, February 3, 2010: "A Gallup poll taken last spring suggest the vast majority of Americans are opposed to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, even conservatives and weekly church-goers."

Now, that same Gallup poll in July of '09 found that Obama's job approval rating ranked "10th among the 12 post-World War II presidents at this point in their tenures," and he's been stuck at or near the bottom in the Gallup poll archives for the most part since. Considering that the Canadian Press Washington bureau could barely type "Bush" without gratuitously appending "wildly unpopular" or "one of the most unpopular presidents in U.S. history" (as it happens, Bush worked out to be 7th in overall job approval of the 11 completed presidencies so far in the the Gallup poll), anyone might have thought that half a year's worth of bottom-of-the-heap presidential polling would rate a mention at the Canadian Press Washington bureau. But no. Indeed, when the CP Washington bureau brought up the subject of Obama's polls in September, it was to report -- twice in the same article -- that he was still a hit in Canada, without a hint of how he was faring in the one country where a president's public approval actually counts for anything.

But the Canadian Press Washington bureau got around to that. A passing reference, developed no further, to Obama's "sagging approval ratings" -- in late January, after Obama's gal had already lost "Ted Kennedy's seat" in religiously-Democratic Massachusetts, two-and-a-half months after Obama's men had lost gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia, both of which Obama had carried exactly a year before, and six months after Gallup first reported that Obama was down to 10th of the 12 presidencies since the advent of the Gallup presidential job approval rating. And Obama's approval rating wasn't "sagging"; that's just more aping of hackneyed newswire cliches, and too euphemistic to be descriptive. Obama's approval was scraping the basement floor, and had been for half a year before that glancing admission in the direction of reality.

The CP took the same line as the AP had taken a day or two earlier, explaining away Obama's troubles as public upset over high unemployment and so on, don't you know. Then the Canadian Press Washington bureau added a specious claim that part of Obama's difficulty was his "escalation" of the Afghan War. But Afghanistan is at this time one of the few issues where Obama scores a net-positive approval rating, but you see, the CP Washington bureau reported back in its heady days of covering the ascension of Obama that he had "pledged to peacefully end America's two unpopular wars." Of course, by that point the Iraq War had been won and the American withdrawal agreed by the U.S. and Iraqi governments, and as for Afghanistan, what Obama had pledged was precisely to escalate the war. It may be Obama's lone kept promise. For now, anyway. (Incidentally, how on earth can a war be "peacefully ended"? Wars are won or lost, or very occasionally stalemated; there is no painless alternative of "peacefully ended".) So when the CP Washington bureau blames Afghanistan for Obama's troubles, it says much more about the CP Washington bureau and the leftist elite than about American public opinion. The day may come when Obama falls down on Afghanistan, but at this point it's one of the few areas where he's still above water. Anyway, the jobs line does make a good start on explaining Obama's troubles, but it's more excuse-making than reporting.

To that end, and lest anyone imagine that there might not have been anything else worth mentioning in the Gallup poll, I offer these shock findings from Gallup, released five days after the open-homosexuality-in-the-military story invoking the Gallup poll, and a week and a half after Obama's State of the Union address, with its attendant "bump" in presidential approval. Gallup, February 8, 2010:
-more Americans disapprove than approve of Obama on six issues out of nine
-approval on the deficit down to 32 percent, with 64 percent disapproving
-approval on the economy at 36 percent to 61 percent
-approval on health-care at 36 percent to 60 percent
-approval among independents down to 24 percent on the deficit, 29 percent on the economy, and 24 percent on health-care

And Gallup's sample is "all adults", which is typically the most sympathetic to the Left. So Obama was underwater on six issues of nine, just a year in, with every elite on earth sheltering and flattering him, in the most friendly polling sample, and just after his first official SOTU address commandeering American primetime television for an hour and a half. The high unemployment is just the start of it; Obama's bigger problem is that the American people don't much agree with him, though you'd never guess it from reading the Canadian Press Washington bureau.

But back to this latest entry in the isn't-Sarah-Palin-just-the-worst series of the Canadian Press Washington bureau. When I made the case last May that the CP Washington bureau was excessively and obsessively scrutinizing Sarah Palin, the very "Editor-in-Chief" of the national newswire monopoly involved himself and justified every bit of the coverage on the grounds that Palin had been "touted" as a presidential nominee. As I wrote at the time, I do not accept that being "touted" as a putative nominee for president of the United States in 2012 or 2016 or 2020 warrants regular and uniformly-critical coverage in the newpapers of Canada in 2009, but that is the publicly-stated Canadian Press rationale for its excessive and obsessive scrutiny of Sarah Palin, and now the very headline on a dispatch of the Canadian Press itself informs us that Palin is not a "viable contender". The Canadian Press has defeated its own only stated justification for its Sarah Palin vendetta.

The Canadian Press Washington bureau devotes exquisite detail to those poor poll findings for Sarah Palin, but the Palin numbers are the irrelevant consolation of a leftist elite existing in denial of the historic collapse of Obama and his project to "remake the nation". Those Gallup numbers I sketched summarily above actually bear on the state and direction of American politics and government and on actual policies actually being pursued by the actual government of the United States, and they are positively calamitous for Obama and his agenda. They are also not even intimated anywhere in the dispatches of the lone Washington correspondent of the lone Canadian newswire service. How is anyone better off for their newspaper being turned upside down into an escape from reality? -- and worse, a denial of reality?

Incidentally, the sample of that Washington Post/ABC News poll was 32 percent Democrat to 23 percent Republican. Now, at the Democrats' high-water-mark election of 2008, the exit polling showed voters split 39 percent Democrat to 32 percent Republican. In other words, the WaPo/ABC poll assumes Democrats are at a greater advantage today -- after even Massachusetts has voted Republican -- than at the moment of the Democrats' best showing in a generation. Small wonder the Canadian Press Washington bureau was so enthralled by that poll. The WaPo/ABC poll is as delusional and divorced from reality as the Canadian Press Washington bureau.

What do you call it when a writer cites only those polls that affirm her own prejudices, and conspicuously ignores more than half a year of relentlessly contrary polling? Opinion journalism? Delusional? The Canadian Press calls it "the news".

Junk reporting and Tea Parties.

It was the same with the Tea Parties, which became the defining political movement of 2009. They began in February but to my knowledge the Canadian Press Washington bureau didn't get around to mentioning them until May, and then it was only to sneer and to demonize, even declining to call them by their obvious and proper name, preferring instead to repeat the pornographic leftist taunt "teabagging protests".

To the Canadian Press Washington bureau, the defining movement of American politics in 2009 was just another clump of rednecks, only "ostensibly" concerned with policy, and in fact crypto-racist enemies of the state, to be demonized in the CP Washington bureau series on the theme. One of the early entries in the series was actually headlined "U.S. racists direct hateful messages at Obama". (I documented some of this at the time, here and here.) A single, serious report on the Tea Parties would have painted the most descriptive and predictive picture of American current events in 2009 and beyond, but the Canadian Press Washington bureau deals too much in the crudest caricatures of the average American to have been capable of understanding the Tea Partiers as anything other than latter-day lynch mobs, which is bad enough in any Canadian elite, but considerably more problematic in the sole Canadian newswire correspondent in America.

One of the reports in that Canadian Press Washington bureau series, supposedly uncovering murderous racism behind the opposition to Obama, repeated the claim -- found in a single book -- that death threats to the president had risen some "400 per cent" since Obama took office. What was that they taught in J-school about needing at least two sources for a claim? It turned out the claim was bogus. That "400 percent" was off by just about 400 percent.

The very Director of the Secret Service, Mark Sullivan, testified to Congress in December that "the threats right now ... is the same level as it has been for the previous two presidents at this point in their administrations. ... I have heard a number out there that the threat is up by 400 percent. ... I'm not sure where that number came from."

I know where it ended up, among other places: in my newspaper's World News, from the Canadian Press in Washington. Just more junk reporting from the Canadian Press Washington bureau, reproduced in the newspapers of Canada as fact, in aid of a storyline putting Obama up on the cross and turning the protesting American citizen into a suspect, and the record never corrected.

Earlier in its "Obama opposition nothing more than vicious, murderous racism" (not an actual headline, but it might as well have been) series, the Canadian Press Washington bureau reported on an imaginary death threat against Obama at a Sarah Palin rally -- seven months after it had been debunked by the Secret Service. (I documented the case at the time here.) Crap CP Washington bureau reporting, never corrected, repeated and amplified across Canada through the CP's monopoly network.

The implication in those Canadian Press Washington bureau reports was that the opposition to Barack Obama was illegitimate, and indeed, that is precisely the assumption of a 21st Century leftist elite. The assumption is that conservatism must necessarily be the result of ignorance, "intolerance" (in the political sense, not the dictionary sense), racial hatred, greed, stupidity, etc., while leftism in the same assumption isn't so much an ideology as the obvious conclusions of educated, intelligent people of good will. That is the worldview of a 21st Century leftist elite, and it is the worldview of the Canadian Press Washington bureau, which is a problem, because the worldview is bollocks, and because it precludes any possibility of impartiality, particularly in reporting on the Western world's most profoundly conservative and anti-elitist nation.

Sneering and Scott Brown.

The Canadian Press Washington bureau also reduced newly-elected Republican Senator Scott Brown to the sneer "onetime pin-up boy". Apropos of nothing. I suppose it wasn't absolutely necessary to mention Brown's 30 years' service in the National Guard or rank of Lieutenant Colonel, his three terms as a state senator or three terms as state rep, his law practice, etc., etc., and another CP Washington bureau report on the same general subject did at least acknowledge he'd been a state senator. But "pin-up boy" alludes to Brown's posing for an issue of Cosmopolitan magazine 28 years earlier -- at age 22. That's the sort of thing you get when you send a gossip columnist to cover Washington.

The gratuitous "pin-up boy" slight was common on the bitter Left, as in "pin-up boy for the teabaggers" (Huffington Post), and among the kind of people who write things like, "GOP Nazi Pin-Up Boy Exploits Voters' Frustration." The only instance of "pin-up boy" or "pinup boy" I could find anywhere in the Associated Press was in a quote from a bitter leftist who said she voted for the Democrat Coakley "to make sure the pinup boy doesn't get into office." At the Canadian Press Washington bureau, the bitter leftist is the one writing the newswire copy.

Incompetence and the filibuster.

And apart from the gross bias of the Canadian Press Washington bureau, there's the question of basic competence. Following is the CP Washington bureau's definition of the filibuster. I repeat, this is the definition of filibuster by the Washington bureau for Canada's newswire monopoly, and not a junior high social studies presentation: "The filibuster, a Senate rule that is a peculiarity of American politics, essentially gives the minority party the power to stop any legislation dead in its tracks".

That looks to me very much like a political science definition by someone with absolutely no aptitude for political science:
1. The filibuster is not peculiar to the United States. The U.S. Senate filibuster may be an extreme form of the phenomenon, but the filibuster is found in the Westminster systems including even the Ontario Legislative Assembly, which I was given to believe the Canadian Press Washington bureau was supposed to know something about.
2. The filibuster is not a "rule". It is pursuant to a Senate rule, and we even refer to the "filibuster rule", but the filibuster is a procedure or mechanism, or maneuver or tactic, not a "rule". Calling the filibuster a "rule" is subliterate.
3. It is not "the minority party" that is empowered by the filibuster, but any combination of senators totaling at least 41 percent. A couple weeks after that CP report ran, Senators Blanche Lincoln and Ben Nelson -- Democrats both -- joined Republicans in filibustering the confirmation of Obama's radical nominee for National Labor Relations Board.
4. And this business of "stopping any legislation dead in its tracks" could hardly be more crude. The filibuster blocks bills from being put to a vote. Before a bill can be voted on in the Senate, it must pass a cloture motion with at least 60 percent -- "cloture" referring to the closing of debate -- and that's where the filibuster comes in.

So if the Canadian Press wanted a one-line definition for the U.S. Senate filibuster which didn't look like it was written by an uninterested junior high schooler, it might have gone something like, "a parliamentary procedure whereby a minority of at least 41 percent can block legislation from coming to a vote." The CP's definition of filibuster is like defining a tank as "essentially a metal thingy that army men ride in", only not as accurate. That definition is an embarrassment, or it ought to be. Shouldn't a firm grounding in political science, not to mention war and economics, be a job requirement for anyone posted as the lone Washington correspondent for the lone Canadian newswire service? The average concerned citizen or letter-to-the-editor-writer could do at least as well, and very probably a sight better. Whatever credentials and cirricula vitae and contacts can these elites have that count for more than knowledge and accuracy and the capacity to present a complete story?

All of which is why Fox News -- which the Canadian Press Washington bureau has referred to as the "notoriously right-wing Fox News" -- recently became briefly the highest rated channel of any kind in all American cable television. Fox News is the antidote to the elite press that holds the American people in contempt, refuses to scrutinize the president and Congress so long as they are Democrats, and shuts out at least half the story. Fox News now has more viewers at 3 AM than CNN has in primetime. FNC's 3 AM ET comedy Red Eye -- which the press and government of Canada pathetically waged war against a year ago -- is now beating each of CNN's primetime heavyweights in the 25-54 demographic.

But that's just another telling snapshot of the nation that you'll never read in the Canadian Press Washington bureau, incapable as it is of reflecting reality in a conservative nation, and presenting instead a kind of delusional alternative universe of "the world as it ought to be" according to Canadian leftist elites. Anyone would be further ahead knowing nothing at all than reading the coverage of the Canadian Press Washington bureau and imagining it to bear any resemblance to reality. For over a year in this Age of Obama, the Canadian Press has been silent on the scandals of the Obama administration, the abuses of the Democratic Congress, the historic collapse of Obama and his Congress, and the tectonic shifts of the American people. Anyone depending for their coverage of American current events on the Canadian Press would have been oblivious to the great, relentless rightward realignment of the nation over the past year, and would have been nonplussed by the unthinkable Democratic defeats, which would have appeared to them to be quite without explanation. The Canadian Press Washington bureau belongs on the opinions pages or else not in the newspapers at all.

(Much more on the Canadian Press Washington bureau here, here, here, and here.)

The Chronicle-Herald editorial's Barack Obama problem

2009-12-03T00:14:00.008-06:00

(UPDATE, Jan. 5, '10: Expanded.)

The Halifax Chronicle-Herald's editorial has been a more reliable rubber-stamp for the doings of the Obama Administration even than a lot of Congressional Democrats, and it's past time someone said peep about it. I've declined to write publicly on the Herald editorial in all these years because I'm barely acquainted with a fellow on the editorial board and because Herald editorials have in past been mostly fair and responsible, even when I haven't much agreed with them.

But The Herald is today a monopoly. Its unsigned editorials are the editorials of the largest newspaper in Canada's four Atlantic provinces, the sole province-wide paper in Nova Scotia, and now the only paper in the largest city north of Boston and east of Quebec City. And not long after The Herald saw off its only competition in Halifax, it fell head-over-heels in love with a man called Barack.

I suppose it was November when it was confirmed for me that the Herald editorial's Obama-boosting was something pathological. The occasion was the mad Obama decision to grant the rights and protections of an American citizen to the enemy leader responsible for the worst attack in American history. Of course the Herald editorial ruled emphatically that Obama had taken "the correct course", as if this was some long-overdue, desperately-needed, obvious measure, instead of a gratuitous prostration before the enemy, absolutely without precedent anywhere on earth, that came out of the clear blue sky one day and had never occurred to anyone before sometime in 2009. The editorial also dismissed the naysayers, who happen to be the great majority, with a fair bit of ignorance of the issue thrown in for good measure, as is typically the case when the Herald editorial wades into American affairs. But that much was all in a day's work for The Chronicle-Herald -- the least reliable outlet in the English-speaking world for news having anything at all to do with Barack Obama; it was the rest of the editorial that crossed into a demonstration of blindest love for Barack Obama.

At the same time as the Obama Administration decided to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four co-conspirators in civilian court like any American accused of a common crime, they also ruled that five much lesser terrorist figures be tried by the military commissions crafted by the Bush Administration and Democratic Congress, and approved by the very Supreme Court. Now, among those five sent to the military tribunals happened to be one Omar Khadr, who has some legalistic link to Canada and became an instant cause celebre among the entirety of the Canadian elite and left, if there's a distinction. In Canada Khadr is near-universally assumed to be a pitiful, blameless waif clutching a Mickey Mouse (literally), particularly among the kind of Canadians who are also head-over-heels for Barack Obama. So I just assumed the Herald editorial would at least register some polite complaint that the terror leader was being given the rights and protections of an American citizen, while the supposed Canadian innocent was busted down to military court. But no. The Herald editorial actually contorted itself to stalwartly defend both contradictory decisions -- to treat the enemy leader as a U.S. citizen, and to deny that same treatment to the pip-squeak kid believed by Canadians to have done nothing at all.

Now, there is no sensible way of reconciling those two extremes. It's as capricious a decision as has ever been made by any democratic government, and is the kind of arbitrariness one finds in rulers who claim a divine right. The Obama Administration's only given rationale was that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was responsible for an attack on civilians, so he was being tried in civilian court, while the others were alleged to be responsible for military attacks and so were being tried in the military system, but of course a civilian massacre is if anything many times worse than an attack on armed forces in a war zone, and anyway, Khalid Sheik Mohammed's 9/11 attacks were also against the Pentagon, the very headquarters of the United States Armed Forces. So that day, in that editorial of The Chronicle-Herald, it finally became beyond dispute that the sole organizing principle in Herald editorials concerning Barack Obama was their irrational allegience to Obama, in absolutely all he does, all he says, and all that is done and said under the name of his administration.

And so when Obama announced his "surgelet" for Afghanistan, as when he has announced anything at all of any import, the only question was how obsequious the Herald editorial on the subject would be. Of course the editorial would take the view that Obama was responsible and wise, plotting just the right course in just the right measure. Well, where other observers found Obama to be hesitatingly hedging his bets in search of a third way between the hard realities, the Herald editorial pronounced him "courageous". Where other commentators found Obama's speech dispiriting when it needed to be rousing, the Herald editorial decided he was duly "sombre".

As if that weren't enough, a little later in another installment on the same subject, the Herald editorial went one better, actually going so far as to explicitly compare Obama to the greatest president of them all, the man who was prepared to rend the nation and precipitate the bloodiest war in its history, and spill the blood of 600,000 Americans to do what was right. These are the actual words of the December 13 Chronicle-Herald editorial: "Like Abraham Lincoln, President Obama is clearly among the latter. He serves the cause of world peace by using force against those who are bound to violence." Ugh. You see why I say the Herald editorial is in love. And it's always so unbecoming when comfortable middle-aged men fall head-over-heels. Of course, for anyone who has a clue about Lincoln as he was -- and not as he's conveniently recalled by a latter-day elite Canadian newspaper editorialist with his head in the clouds singing, "Obama: say it softly, it's almost like praying" -- the very fact that the Herald editorial glorifies Barack Obama unto the heavens is the first clue that Obama is no Lincoln. The Halifax elite of Lincoln's day were as anti-Lincoln as any Confederate raider; their inheritors today are the ones invoking Lincoln to justify the elite conventional wisdom of their time. If Obama were remotely like Lincoln, the Herald editorial would presently be denouncing him as a warmonger and shredder of civil liberties and "all international law".

If the case for the Herald editorial's Barack Obama problem hasn't been made sufficiently, the December 30 editorial on the attempted Christmas Day terror bombing may clear up any lingering doubt. The sole reference to Obama was in praise of him: "U.S. president Barack Obama has wisely asked for a thorough review...." Now, by December 30 there had accumulated a pile of indictments against Obama and his administration on this score, and yet the Herald editorial was actually applauding Obama for his "wisdom" in requesting a review.

That "wisely" really was gratuitous; even if the editorial found it necessary to document that Obama had requested a review, just how much "wisdom" does it take for a politician to do the most usual, unimaginitive, cheap, and reactive thing possible, ordering a "review" after his government has made a complete pig's breakfast of things? "Wisdom" would have been revoking the would-be bomber's visa and monitoring him after he became known to the U.S. government as a jihadi; not upholding the visa, letting the man onto a U.S.-bound flight with a bomb in his pants, then when the fuse misfired and the civilian passengers detained him, turning him over to domestic law enforcement and granting him a lawyer on the taxpayer's tab without pumping him for information on other planned attacks, while your administration assures the people that "the system worked."

It gets worse when one appreciates that even openly pro-Obama American newspaper editorials were absolutely scathing of Obama on this same point. From the same day and on the same subject as that Herald editorial, the editorial of the New York Daily News: "What the public was left with was a never-to-be-repeated case study in crisis management. It's time to get a grip, Mr. President. ... Obama's description of Abdumutallab as an 'isolated extremist' was remarkable and disturbing. The radicalized young Nigerian is nothing of the sort. ... In a similarly distant fashion, the President ordered up a 'review'...." Again, that was the editorial of a pro-Obama American paper, on the same day and subject as the Herald editorial blindly and pathetically claiming "wisdom" in Obama's handling of the attempted bombing.

Yes, blinder love hath no man than The Chronicle-Herald's editorial for Barack Obama. It's about to the point that if Obama announced his intention to destroy America's nuclear arsenal by detonating it over Halifax, the Herald editorial could be expected to applaud in its accustomed judicious tone that "this is the correct course". But what upset my stomach was a casual cynicism in defense of Obama in the editorial on Obama's Afghan surgelet. I determined there was no virtue in holding my fire any longer on an editorial board capable of that kind of rationalizing.

That Herald editorial of December 3 concocted an argument out of thinnest air, excusing Obama for his withdrawal date, which the same editorial acknowledged in the same paragraph was "wholly unrealistic". The editorial calls it "triangulation", which would be bad enough, but that's a misuse of the old Dick Morris term of art from the 1990s, which is a point that takes more knowledge of American politics and history than is possessed by Canadian newspaper editorial boards. In fact the editorial is clearly implying this is something worse than "triangulation": a lie.

The editorial calls Obama's withdrawal date "wholly unrealistic", then proceeds to argue that this unrealism is necessary to "give the war-weary American public something to look forward to." You can almost see the Herald editorialist patting the heads of those "war-weary American public". Give 'em "something to look forward to" -- something "wholly unrealistic". That'll hold 'em. What do you call it when something "wholly unrealistic" is promised, to give people "something to look forward to"? Not Dick Morris' "triangulation".

It is patronizing, skin-crawlingly cynical, and unworthy of an argument in defense of the war. If this anonymous Herald editorialist and his readers are so very clever as to plainly see that Obama's withdrawal date is "wholly unrealistic", then why shouldn't the American people be capable of seeing the very same thing? The implication is that the American people lack the editorialist's level of understanding, and can be told a little white lie to hold them for a while. And this is supposed to be in support of the war effort. Well, like the anonymous Herald editorial-writer, I am a supporter of the war, but apparently unlike that masked man, I also respect and revere the American people, and it does seem to me that if you mean to ask the American people to sustain a war effort, you owe it to them to tell them what you know to be true, as far as you can know it.

Following is the offending passage:

Anonymous Chronicle-Herald editorial-writer: "Where Mr. Obama was less
convincing was in imposing a strict timetable on the deployment, subject, of
course, to the situation on the ground at that time. The president envisions
U.S. troops beginning to withdraw by July 2011, which is even before Canada’s
firm pullout date of December 2011. At this rate, we could hitch a ride home
early.
"While the deadline is wholly unrealistic, it is the kind of triangulation Mr. Obama feels he must engage in. First, he must give the war-weary American public something to look forward to. Second, he must impose a benchmark for self-sufficiency on the corrupt Afghan government. Third, he must give his generals a sense of urgency."

Now take that last point, or rather that last imagining. That is both an unearned credit to Obama and an undeserved offense to the generals prosecuting Obama's war. The editorial of the largest newspaper on Canada's east coast is actually arguing that Obama offered a "wholly unrealistic" withdrawal date to "give his generals a sense of urgency". For a start, if it's plain even to Herald editorial-writer that Obama's deadline is "wholly unrealistic", then isn't it just possible that the generals would know that better than anyone? And I know all too well that The Chronicle-Herald guards its gates against news and opinion that may be upsetting to elite Canadian Obama-adulators, but surely even the Herald editorial board got the news that Obama took three months to order three-quarters of the reinforcements requested by his hand-picked general, in order to do the job Obama gave him in March. During which time, 116 American soldiers died in Afghanistan. It is Obama who's been lacking the "sense of urgency", not the generals on the ground who are daily prosecuting his war without the men they tell him they need for the job.

And if the anonymous editorial-writer wanted to come up with three rationales to justify this Obama withdrawal date which even the editorialist couldn't support, then how about the most obvious one, namely that Obama's own majority party is against his surgelet. If you're fishing for justifications for setting a withdrawal date just a year after your reinforcements get into place, why not that the majority party is against sending them at all, and may be more inclined to let it pass if there's reason to think it'll be reversed before long? That most obvious point was not made in the Herald editorial, while two cynical, patronizing, and frankly imaginary rationales did make it into the final draft.

Now, as one who's been reading Herald editorials for many years, I recall that the Herald editorial takes a very dim view of Rush Limbaugh, and as those people who take a dim view of Rush Limbaugh are invariably people who never listen to him, I'd bet good money that the Herald editorialist didn't hear Limbaugh's definitive argument against Obama's announced withdrawal date, so I will paraphrase it here.

The Limbaugh argument imagines that it had been an al Qaeda or Taliban leader speaking on Afghanistan, instead of Obama. The speech goes on at some length about the al Qaeda/Taliban plans for sending thousands of reinforcements into Afghanistan, the necessity of the mission, etc., etc. Then this al Qaeda/Taliban leader announces that after 18 months, they'll start their withdrawal. Now how do you suppose we would take that? Would we dwell on the first bit, or the bit about the withdrawal starting in 18 months? Of course, we'd take that as an admission of defeat, and buck ourselves up that if we can just hang on in there for another 18 months, we'll have seen the enemy off.

Well, then, now we have some idea of how the enemy will have taken Obama's Afghanistan address, with its talk of withdrawals in 18 months. It took Rush Limbaugh to make that point, but Herald editorialists would never to listen to such a "boor".

What's more, I think the Herald editorial has the wrong end of the stick altogether on Obama's withdrawal date. The editorial assumes he's just saying it; that Obama has set this date purely for public consumption, knowing full well it's unrealistic, and will push on after that time if that's what's called for. That kind of deliberate dishonesty would be a scandal of the first order, but it assumes Obama will prosecute this war come hell or high water. I suppose we won't know for sure until we get there, but what possible reason has Obama given for assuming such a thing? If Obama is as committed to this fight as the Herald editorial imagines him to be, then why is he sending 30,000 reinforcements when he was asked for 40,000, and why did it take him three months to sign off on even that many?

Obama has been a true-believing leftist all his life, as far to the left as any man who's even gotten onto a major-party presidential ticket in the United States. His associations are all far-left. His voting record in his brief time as U.S. senator earned him the "most liberal" ranking of the 100 senators -- one of whom is a self-described "socialist". His entire candidacy in the Democratic primaries was built on his being the least unelectable of the anti-war radicals. He talks even now of nuclear disarmament, referring not to Iran, but the United States. And in this very Afghanistan address in which he used "I" some 45 times, he uttered the word "victory" not once.

If America is going to win this Afghan War, it won't be made easier by half-measures -- sending 30,000 reinforcements when the generals ask for 40,000, restricting the rules of engagement, taking three months to order reinforcements, then announcing they'll be withdrawn starting one year after they've arrived, etc. My prayer is that American troops are allowed and enabled to do their job in Afghanistan, that the Pakistani government sees our common enemy as an urgent threat to itself and fully does its part in the war against them, and that the casualties are held down not only to spare the lives of good men, but to hold off the majority Democrats in their natural retreat, until the American people have the chance to turf them out of office and give power to the men with the stomachs to win wars.

It does seem to me that the editorial board of The Chronicle-Herald, like the rest of Canada's elite, fell head-over-heels for Barack Obama at some point in 2008, and hasn't seen him clearly since. They imagine him to be everything and anything they wish for him to be, and freely ascribe to him rationales and intents and characteristics that can only be divined by smitten adulators. And they take it as their purpose to defend and advocate for whatever contorted, convoluted decree happens to be arrived at by any functionary coming under the banner of Obama's administration. When Germany's Der Spiegel produces the most comprehensive and damning indictment of Obama's Afghan War policy, while the Herald editorial persists in its love affair, even unto the point of inventing imaginary rationales to justify what it acknowledges is "wholly unrealistic" and making Obama out to be the Lincoln of our times, then Joseph Howe must be turning in his grave.

I can only hope for the day when The Chronicle-Herald's editorial becomes capable of any dissention from Barack Obama's every deed and utterance, or The Herald's monopoly over us is broken. Nothing was ever improved by becoming a monopoly, and since it became last man standing in the newspaper business, The Herald has gone too far along the way to a miserable wad of glorified toilet paper.

Obama's mad Mohammed decision

2009-11-28T07:17:00.004-06:00

The 9/11 attacks killed 2,973 innocents, and were intended to kill many times more. Those two quarter-mile-high World Trade Center towers during working hours amounted to the densest concentration of humanity anywhere on earth -- 50,000 people stacked in two buildings just a couple hundred feet per side each. The third plane which smashed into the Pentagon was meant to decapitate the United States military, and the fourth plane which was crashed by its passengers was bound for either the White House or the Capitol, to decapitate the United States government.

It takes a special kind of madness to extend the rights and protections of American citizens to the enemy leader who planned those attacks, more murderous than even the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the worst in American history.

Within days of the Obama Administration's decision to bring the professed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, to a New York City civilian courtroom for "his day in court," a CNN poll found the American people were against it, 64 percent to 34 percent. The pollster called the decision "universally unpopular -- even a majority of Democrats and liberals say that he should be tried by military authorities." Then Obama's job approval rating fell below the 50-percent waterline for the first time in the Quinnipiac and Gallup polls.

Those real people from the real world understand the fundamental thing, that the 9/11 attacks were no "crime." A "crime" is smashing a storefront window, or mugging and stabbing a passerby who takes a wrong turn down a dark alley. The 9/11 attacks were an act of war and a terror atrocity.

And though you'd never guess it from the Mohammed decision, the Obama Administration does occasionally show signs they know there's a war on. This same Obama Administration has if anything increased the unmanned aerial strikes on enemy targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan. If information comes over the transom that some worthwhile enemy is holed up in an open spot, then a drone gets airborne, locates the target, and unceremoniously drops a Hellfire missile or a JDAM on his head.

Those enemy belligerents are not arrested and read their rights under the Constitution and laws of the United States, then flown to New York for their taxpayer-funded legal representation and their day in court. They're summarily blown to kingdom come, along with any poor innocent souls unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, because this is war, not some law enforcement operation. And in war, when an enemy is captured and given trial, there is a centuries-old mechanism for dealing with him: military tribunal.

All the way back in 2001, the Bush Administration created a system of military commissions precisely to deal with the likes of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, but the commissions were immediately challenged in court by leftist legal activists who've never met an enemy of the United States they didn't like. The activists managed to obstruct the commissions in their good work until 2008, when after two Supreme Court rulings, the Bush Administration and the Democratic Congress finalized a military commissions system which passed muster with the Supreme Court and the notions of the decadent 21st Century.

The Obama Administration and its hardier water-carriers who imagine that civilian trials for the likes of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed are only right and proper, insist that of course Mohammed will be found guilty and put to death, and on the off-chance he isn't, why, we'll just re-arrest him on the spot, come up with some new charge, and try, try again until we get the verdict we want. But if this trial is so predetermined, and the system may simply be gamed until we have our way, then why on earth can we not dispense with the pretense and leave Mohammed's case with the special military commissions, where he was on course to plead guilty and have his "martyrdom" by execution until Obama suspended the process?

How might American civilian law have to be compromised in order for this Mohammed case to be heard at all in a civilian courtroom? Until now, it never occurred to U.S. agents to treat Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as they would an American citizen accused of a cooking up illicit whiskey or some such thing: he wasn't read his rights, for a start, and he happens to have been the primary subject of that practise called waterboarding. Unless some exception is made, those kinds of things would be grounds for tossing the case out in the civilian system. And how might national security be compromised if and when Mohammed demands discovery -- placing the raw military intelligence to do with his case in his hands?

Of course the United States can defend its greatest city against terror attacks made more likely by a high-profile trial of the 9/11 mastermind just blocks from Ground Zero, but why should it have to? Why should New Yorkers be given new reason to fear? Why should the Armed Forces and law enforcement be given a new threat to defend against? Why should the American taxpayer have to put up $75 million for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's "day in court," and endure his harangues for however long it takes to come to the end of this ghastly process?

This is not the will of the American people. There's a reckoning coming, and Obama's mad Mohammed decision is just another milestone along the road to it.

The war they can't get right

2009-11-07T20:01:00.002-06:00

I made the mistake of watching James David Robenalt's presentation on his new book The Harding Affair -- Love and Espionage During the Great War, carried on C-SPAN's Book TV, and it was problematic enough to prompt this post.

Now, for my sins, I am an obsessive student of the First World War. The gateway drug of the Second World War having become too mild for me, I moved onto the harder stuff. Garand M-1s wouldn't do it for me anymore, so I graduated to water-cooled Vickers-Maxim heavy machine guns. And it is the bane of anyone who knows anything at all about the First World War that it is very probably the war most freely pronounced-upon by people who are so far out of their depth on the subject, they wouldn't know a pikelhaube from a piccolo if they sat on one.

Unless the work is by the likes of Hew Strachan or Paul Johnson, or John Keegan or Victor Davis Hanson, it's a good policy to avoid 21st Century perspectives on the First World War. They're too often worse than useless. Your typical History Channel "In the Classrom" early-morning documentary which bears on the First World War will make some blithe assertion like that the generals thought trench warfare was a fine idea, and would make a great plan for winning the war. That's the kind of I-think-it-therefore-it-must-be-so-and-there's-no-need-of-checking-it that gets written up, passed through a layer or two of editors, and then passed off as a TV documentary on the First World War.

(That example is legitimate, by the way, though to save my life I couldn't think of the title of the thing. And in case you're wondering, the trenches were nowhere in the plans for the First World War; trench warfare was what happened when the lines stopped moving, and there was nowhere to hide from anti-personnel artillery shelling, long-range, high-powered rifle fire, and sweeping machine gun fire. The trenches weren't some general's idea for winning the war, they were a desperate resort to keep men alive. They weren't planned at all, they just happened when men were faced with the choice of digging a hole or not seeing the next sunrise.)

So I should have known better than to see what this James David Robenalt had to say on the subject. But I'm a sucker for C-SPAN's Book TV, so I watched a bit and promptly had my instincts confirmed by this novel piece of reasoning:

James David Robenalt: "When [then-President] Woodrow Wilson asked for
war, he says it's a war to make the world safe for democracy. And the
reason he says that is he believes democracies are inherently more stable
and less likely to go to war. [So far, so good.]

"[Then-Senator Warren G.] Harding disagrees. He thinks --
and how's this for a modern theme? -- he says, and you can find his
speech on the Senate floor, 'It's none of our business, to go tell somebody
else what government they should have. We should take care
of ourselves, and we really shouldn't be involved in regime change.'
[I take it that wasn't Harding's exact phraseology, which apparently
can be found somewhere on the Senate floor.]

"Now, who was right in that debate? History will tell
you. But I can tell you this: Russia became a democracy, for
about six months, and Wilson recognized them immediately, and he was
joyful. And six months later the Bolsheviks take over. [So
"Russia became a democracy", and the next thing you know, "the Bolsheviks take
over". And it's all the fault of that darn Wilson and his darn
democracy.] And you have Lenin and Stalin, and you know, what
happened in Russia.

"The Kaiser eventually abdicates. Germany becomes a democracy.
But they weren't ready for it. It was a weak democracy: the Weimar
Republic. Naziism comes about, Hitler comes about. [Another
straight line: "Germany becomes a democracy" then "Hitler comes about".]

"So it's a great debate about who was right in that debate about
regime-change. But it's a modern theme. I mean, it's the issue of
Iraq, revisited." [Just in case you hadn't worked out that he was talking about Iraq all along.]

So there you have it. The history of the 20th Century, according to James David Robenalt. Or, James David Robenalt's entry for most buffoonish argument ever made having to do with the First World War and its aftermath, being that it was democracy that gave us the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

According to this line of reasoning, Germany wasn't "ready for democracy" in 1919, though it demonstrably was ready for democracy in 1945, and if only we hadn't insisted on democracy for Germany 26 years "too soon", there'd have been no Hitler and no Second World War. Of course, several generations now, from the 1930s on, have blamed Hitler and the war on the less-than-total victory in the First World War, the ruinous, humiliating, and impossible reparations in the Treaty of Versailles, and the war costs and economic collapse. But James David Robenalt has a different idea: it was the democracy that did it.

And, according to this line, those Communists who'd been attempting revolution in Russia for decades before 1917 and finally had the complete societal collapse they needed to seize power, only managed it because Russia had "become a democracy" for "about six months" in 1917. I have to say, this Russia point looks to me like it goes beyond mere specious argument, to inventing an alternate history which may more conveniently be shoehorned into a potshot against the democracy project of the Iraq War. At what point in the First World War, and in what conceivable sense, did Russia "become a democracy"? That could only refer to what is called the Russian "Provisional Government" of 1917, but no elections were held and the whole business was chaos from start to finish.

And even if Russia had "become a democracy", the argument here goes that, if only the czar had stayed on and showed 'em who's the master, and Wilson hadn't got his "democracy", those Bolshies would never have gotten their little experiment off the ground. Just think, the Robenalt argument goes: no Soviet Union, no Stalin, no Cold War, if only Russia hadn't "become a democracy" for "about six months" in 1917.

Again, since just about the time of the Russian Revolution, it has been understood that the imposition of Communism in that country had everything to do with the mass national revulsion against the old system which had brought the nation to utter ruin, even unto starvation. The strain of the war brought things to breaking point, and the situation was seized on by the Communist faction called the Bolsheviks. And by "old system" I refer to the czarist regime of decades and centuries previous, not some half-imaginary six-month "democracy" in 1917.

I would dearly love to see Christopher Hitchens, who happens to be an authority also of the Bolshevik Revolution, take his rapier to that it-was-all-democracy's-fault line of historical argument.

Now I am no head-shrinker, but I don't think head-shrinking credentials are requisite in order to diagnose the condition of which that argument is a symptom. I'd reckon that it would never have occurred to James David Robenalt to argue that democracy caused the Soviet Empire and Third Reich, before the Iraq War. And I'd reckon that James David Robenalt altogether despises that war and the arguments for it -- particularly the argument that the democratizaion of Iraq sets the model for reform in the region which is our only hope for settling this business once and for all, and that democractization turns enemy to ally -- or if not an affirmative ally then at least a mostly-decent state not routinely invading some neighbor or gassing some unloved domestic minority or fostering hostile alliances or building up unconventional arsenals for the next big dust-up.

I'm just old enough, in fact, to remember a time when that kind or argument was much more likely to be found on the Left than on the Right. But then came 9/11, and the man whom history handed the decision of what was to be done about it happened to be George W. Bush. In what may be the sole deviation of President Bush from Candidate Bush, George W. Bush became arguably the greatest practicing believer in the democracy-makes-peace argument since 1919, and inarguably since 1945. I had my own Road-to-Damascus at about the same time, and became a zealous convert myself, at least for the duration of this war. And for a naive moment I assumed that the elite and the Left, if there's a distinction, would at the very least not oppose that democratization cause. But no. Because democratization necessarily meant war and occupation, and because it had become U.S. policy, and not only that but Bush Administration policy, the elite and the Left turned in one motion to positively demonizing democratization -- condemning it in such terms that anyone might have thought Bush wasn't trying to democratize Iraq but reinstitute slavery -- as if democratization were some grievous historic sin.

And after several years of that, the likes of James David Robenalt comes along and concocts the novel argument that Iraq-style democratization brought the Nazis in Germany and the Soviets in Russia, and all that followed. Funny that no-one thought to make that argument in the 90-odd years since the end of the First World War. And it's hardly as if the rise of Naziism and the rise of Bolshevism haven't been much speculated on in that time.

This book of James David Robenalt is supposed to be about a love affair involving Warren G. Harding, which ought to win some award for wringing 416 pages out of possibly the world's least-interesting historical love affair. But anti-Iraq-War-ism radicalizes, drives to extremes of argument, and infects even the driest historical romance. I won't pronounce on the rest of the book -- though I have to say I got a distinct whiff of German-sympathizing off this Robenalt -- because there's no way I'd look at 416 pages of this, much less pay to look at it.

Still more problems with the Canadian Press Washington bureau

2009-09-24T11:23:00.010-05:00

The way Obama's Afghan policy is being reported, anyone might think this was September of 2008 rather than September '09, when Barack Obama was Candidate Obama rather than President Obama, and an observer and critic of U.S. war policy rather than the commander-in-chief who ordered it.

The Chronicle-Herald's top World News story for September 17 was from the Canadian Press Washington bureau and credulously headlined "Obama: U.S. needs clear strategy for Afghan mission."

Lee-Anne Goodman: "President Barack Obama said Thursday the U.S. has yet to decide on the best strategy for the ongoing conflict and won't send any more soldiers there until it does."

That is undoubtedly what Obama said in September. But he had said something else entirely just a month earlier, on August 17.

Obama, August 2009: "I announced a new, comprehensive strategy in March. ... This strategy acknowledges that military power alone will not win this war."

"Our new strategy has a clear mission and defined goals: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda and its extremist allies."

"In the months since, we have begun to put this comprehensive strategy into action."

So Obama announced a new Afghan War "strategy", ordered 21,000 new troops to Afghanistan in aid of that strategy, and things got worse than they've yet been. Obama then pretended the current failing strategy wasn't his and that he'd never order troops into battle without a proper plan, and hoped no-one would notice. And sure enough, no-one at the Canadian Press Washington bureau or The Chronicle-Herald did notice.

The Canadian Press Washington bureau repeated Obama's claims credulously, without so much as a hint that they were belied by Obama's own words of just weeks before, on that "new strategy" of his, with its "clear mission" and "defined goals", and which had been "put into action" "in the months since" March.

Obama, September 2009, quoted in the Canadian Press: "'We have lacked as clear of a strategy and a mission as is necessary in order to meet our overriding objective, which is to dismantle and disrupt and destroy al-Qaida,' Obama said."

"'There is no immediate decision pending on resources, because one of the things I'm absolutely clear about is you have to get the strategy right and then make determinations about resources,' he said.

'You don't make determinations about sending young men and women into battle without having absolute clarity about what the strategy is going to be.'"

And this was fully half a year after Obama had proclaimed, "Today, I am announcing a comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. This marks the conclusion of a careful policy review that I ordered as soon as I took office."

Lee-Anne Goodman: "The original goal of the mission - to seek out and destroy the forces behind the 9-11 attacks eight years ago - is all but a distant memory, thanks in part to the absence of a clear course of action, Obama suggested."

If that's the case, then who, pray tell, may be responsible for this "absence of a clear course of action," considering again that Obama was only the month before championing his "clear mission" and "defined goals" which had been "put into action" "in the months since" March?

The Canadian Press Washington bureau worked in two references to Obama's popularity -- in Canada.

Lee-Anne Goodman: "a president who remains wildly popular in Canada" and "a president who enjoys unprecedented popularity in Canada."

No doubt. But then, Canadians don't live under Obama's administration and Congress, and don't get a vote on them. So two unquantified assertions of Obama's great popularity in Canada, and not one mention of his standing in the only country where that matters. (In case you're wondering, it's not good. The September Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found Obama falling to 41% job approval among independents.)

The people cannot afford a press whose object is to flatter Obama and taunt his opponents, oblivious to his actual policies and their actual consequences, happily obliging of his political tricks, and enabling him to say and do as he pleases without the fear of being called to account to keep him honest.

The press is now colluding with Obama in his shrugging off of responsibility for his very war policy, pretending with him that his policies aren't his if they aren't working, and allowing him a license and blamelessness.

When it comes to the current president of the United States and his Congressional supermajorities, The Chronicle-Herald and the Canadian Press aren't so much news outlets as a kind of support group for leftist elites -- an imaginary "world as it ought to be" according to leftist elites, where they play make-believe that the "good guys" can do no wrong and everything's OK.

Reality is at least beginning to intrude among some of the more serious on the Left. By September 22, the leftist Guardian newspaper in England was running an opinion piece headlined "Obama the impotent," and the leftist New Republic magazine in the States published an important piece titled "Job One: The only way Obama can pull his presidency back from the brink."

But reality was still safely at bay in The Chronicle-Herald and the Canadian Press. On that same day, the top of The Herald's World News read "Obama a talk show pro." Another dispatch of the Canadian Press Washington bureau, featuring a large color photo of Obama laughing it up with David Letterman. As even two of the most pro-Obama outlets in America and Britain were worrying aloud about Obama's collapse, The Herald and the CP were still running the most unserious, frivolous fluff as if the honeymoon had never ended, oblivious to the disaster gathering all around.

(The Canadian Press Washington bureau in that piece identified Fox News as "notoriously right-wing." Well, then, America must like its cable news "notoriously right-wing": As of September, Fox News was drawing nearly twice as many viewers as CNN and MSNBC combined. All 10 of the top 10 shows on cable news, and 13 of the top 15, were Fox News shows. Even FNC's 3 AM Eastern "Red Eye" drew more viewers than MSNBC's breakfast show. Fox News is "notorious" and "right-wing" to Canadian leftist elites; to the American people, it's the last outpost of the Fourth Estate in television news.)

Further down on that same September 22 World News page, The Herald did manage to scrutinize the president of the United States -- the last one -- and a now-canceled U.S. policy: "Study: CIA's harsh methods counterproductive," an Associated Press story on a "paper which scrutinizes the techniques used by the CIA under the Bush administration through the lens of neurobiology."

On or about that same day, the same Associated Press which came up with the "neurobiological study" story put up a couple pieces allowing some of the bad news reality into its Obama coverage -- "SPIN METER: $2 trillion in health savings? Where?" and "Tough political realities quiet youth 'Obamamania'" -- but for some reason those never made it into The Chronicle-Herald.

Not Herald News section material, really. There's scarcely any less news to be had on the Opinions page, and there's a sight more honesty there.

(Much more on the Canadian Press Washington bureau here, here, and here.)

Another problem with the Canadian Press Washington bureau

2009-08-20T18:10:00.025-05:00

Here's the latest entry, reproduced in The Chronicle-Herald "World News" section under the subheadline, "Frank talk skewers town hall nonsense." Such is the license of a Herald "World News" editor, that they may insert their elite prejudices into the very newswire copy headlines.

Lee-Anne Goodman: "The ever-outspoken Barney Franks, the chairman of the House financial services committee, minced no words Tuesday night at a town hall meeting in Massachusetts when someone likened Obama’s health care plans to 'Nazi policy.'
'On what planet do you spend most of your time?' Franks replied to the woman as constituents cheered and applauded.
Franks assailed her for carrying a photograph of the president defaced to look like Adolf Hitler — the type of sign that’s been seen among Obama opponents since the so-called tea bag protests in April."

Might as well start with the name. It's "Frank", not "Franks".

"So-called tea bag protests." Yes, "so called" by leftists who hold the protestors in contempt. The protests are more officially called "tea parties", as in the Boston Tea Party protesting King George III's taxation. "Tea bag" refers to a pornographic leftist taunt against the protestors. And the tea parties started in February, not April, and for that matter they've never really let up yet.

And that gal at the townhall with the sacrilegious "defaced" Obama photo is known to have been from the LaRouche Youth. Even the Washington Post saw fit to report it. LaRouche-ites are avowedly not conservative, much less Republican. But the Canadian Press Washington bureau is evidently content to let its readers assume this was just another dastardly doing of those beastly Republicans.

Lee-Anne Goodman: "Franks’s 'mad as hell' moment, captured by CNN cameras, went viral on Wednesday, showing up on countless websites, blogs and Facebook walls and met largely with celebration."

No doubt that was cause for "celebration" among the CP Washington bureau's kind of people. A big committee chairman in a government with practically unchecked power, berating a law-abiding citizen who's completely shut out of power. Prop up the powerful, tear down the powerless. It's the Canadian Press way in the Age of Obama.

The Canadian Press Washington bureau is getting to be a regular watchdog against American citizens exercising their free speech to compare their government to Naziism, which in any event is one of the more hackneyed and less effective lines of argument in public affairs. But there was a time when the Fourth Estate was more wary of unchecked government than of law-abiding citizens saying their piece in the town squares and town halls.

The Senate Majority Leader has called the protestors "evil-mongers". The Speaker of the House claimed they were "carrying swastikas", then she and her House Majority Leader added that the protestors' actions were "simply un-American". An Arkansas Democrat Senator had already called the protestors "un-American", before recanting for fear of her political skin. And a Washington state Democrat Congressman accused the protestors of "brownshirt tactics".

It ought to be a little discomfiting to appreciate that those are the public pronouncements of people holding all the power, about people who are completely shut out of power. A Fourth Estate would be alarmed at such a prospect; it certainly wouldn't throw in with the government in lording over the people. But the Canadian Press Washington bureau finds "celebration" that the big-government bigwig has denounced the insufferable peasant, and put her right back down in her place.

Lee-Anne Goodman: "But there’s another potential option, something called budget reconciliation. That would allow Democrats to push the bill through with only 51 votes."

Quite right. Only, there is that niggling point that reconciliation is to be used for budgetary matters, not a governmentalization of American health-care opposed by majorities of the American people. From no less an authority than the inventor of the reconciliation mechanism, Sen. Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia: "I oppose using the budget reconciliation process to pass health care reform and climate change legislation. ... As one of the authors of the reconciliation process, I can tell you that the ironclad parliamentary procedures it authorizes were never intended for this purpose."

Lee-Anne Goodman: "It could have been the Nazi comparisons. Perhaps it was recent remarks from top Republicans that they’d support no health care reform bill. Or it could just be spent reserves of patience following weeks of misinformation about death panels and health insurance for illegal aliens."

Take just that very last point. "Misinformation about ... health insurance for illegal aliens." When Obama and his lot talk about covering the "46 million uninsured" (or "as many as 50 million uninsured Americans," in the preferred formulation of the CP Washington bureau), they're necessarily including 9-10 million legal immigrants and illegal aliens who are counted in that figure. The National Institute for Health Care Management reckons that 5.6 million of the 46 million uninsured are illegal aliens. So insuring those "46 million uninsured" necessarily involves covering millions of illegal aliens included in the figure. It's no "misinformation"; it's Census Bureau statistics and NIHCM estimates.

And since that CP dispatch was published, it's come out that no less an authority than the Congressional Research Service has determined that "H.R. 3200 [the House health-care bill] does not contain any restrictions on noncitzens—whether legally or illegally present, or in the United States temporarily or permanently.”

Of course Obama and his party must claim their health-care "reform" won't cover illegal aliens -- they know even their own side would never swallow such a thing. But there was a time when those people who fancy themselves reporters would have had some skepticism and scrutiny for a president's political tricks and fibs, and not just credulously ape his self-serving rhetoric like some party-organ stenographers.

As for those "top Republicans" saying "they'd support no health care reform bill," that's a neat way of blaming the Democrat crack-up on a Republican minority so small it's in no position to influence much of anything, one way or another.

The Left lost any credibility in blaming Republicans for their failings as of June 30, 2009, when Democrats officially hit the magic 60-vote threshold in the Senate. If the Democrats -- by themselves, without a single Republican vote -- were agreed on this health-care "reform", it'd be passed already. They have the supermajorities in both houses of Congress to do anything they please -- short of overriding a presidential veto, amending the Constitution, or removing a president -- all by themselves, without a single Republican vote.

As of June 30, any Congressional obstruction of Obama's agenda must by definition be the result of balking by Democrats. To imply that Republicans are the obstructionists in this is purest partisan ax-grinding, dependent on ignorance of the numbers and workings of the United States Congress.

And those "top Republicans", whoever they are, are with the people. An August Rasmussen poll found 54% would prefer no health-care reform at all, to anything this president and Congress are likely to come up with. That number shot up to 66% among independent voters. But polls aren't making it into the dispatches of the CP Washington bureau like they used to, now that they've become relentlessly bad news for Obama and his project to "remake the nation."

The Canadian Press Washington bureau was happy to report after just a couple months of the Obama presidency that "Americans are still giving President Barack Obama high marks"; where are the CP Washington bureau dispatches on Obama's marks now that his job approval rating ranks "10th among the 12 post-World War II presidents at this point in their tenures"?

The CP Washington bureau has referred matter-of-factly to the Bush era as "eight years of unpopular Republican rule under President George W. Bush" -- undaunted by the facts that there had been "Republican rule" for just four of Bush's eight years, or that Bush was quite popular enough to be re-elected president and to see his party gain seats in a midterm election for only the third time in the century and a half since the Civil War.

Indeed, it was practically de rigeur in the dispatches of the CP Washington bureau to append any reference to President Bush with "wildly unpopular" or "one of the most unpopular presidents in U.S. history" -- undaunted by the facts that what was being referred to was not "U.S. history" so much as "polling history", or that even within the history of polling, Bush ranked overall 7th of the 11 presidents since the advent of the Gallup presidential job approval rating in the 1940s.

Well, that "unpopular" Bush was scoring higher job approval ratings than Obama at the same points in their presidencies by late July -- even before Bush's response to the 9/11 attacks had his approval rating hitting 90%. This latest CP Washington dispatch was published on August 20; on that day, Obama's job approval was just about 5 points lower than Bush's had been on the same date in 2001, in the average of all the polls at Real Clear Politics. And Bush had a contested election and a hostile press and popular culture working against him. As to Obama's Democratic supermajorities in Congress, the Real Clear Politics average had the Congressional job approval rating on August 20 at 30%. So when will we read in the Canadian Press about this "unpopular Democratic rule under President Barack Obama"?

And that's the real story in all this, whether the Obama Administration and the Democratic Congress -- and the press that shelters and flatters them -- face up to it, or just carry on whistling past the graveyard. They've got their presidency and Congressional supermajorities still, but they've lost the people. All they've got are Democrats, and on a bad day they don't have all of those. The ground has shifted under their feet, and in record time. They've abused what the people granted them, and the people have turned. Now all that's left is a naked push to get their way until their hourglass runs out.

(Much more on the Canadian Press Washington bureau here and here.)

America's conservatism not melting for Obama

2009-08-20T00:28:00.010-05:00

Conservative nation: Gallup polling as of August 2009 showed "self-identified conservatives outnumber self-identified liberals in all 50 states of the Union," by statistically-significant margins in all states but three. Graphic from Gallup.com.

America is a fundamentally conservative nation, and the most un-conservative of American presidents has thus far not shifted America's conservatism so much as reinforced it. President Obama has run up against D.H. Lawrence's observation on "the essential American soul": "It has never yet melted."

At the six-month mark of Obama's presidency, the USA Today/Gallup poll ranked his job approval rating "10th among the 12 post-World War II presidents at this point in their tenures."

By late July and early August, the average of all the current polling at Real Clear Politics showed Obama's job approval dipping into the 53rd percentile. Obama was down to his baseline of 53 per cent which had voted to make him president nine months earlier.

And it mostly gets worse from the job approval ratings. Disapproval of Obama on health-care hit 52 per cent in the August Quinnipiac poll, with 39 per cent approving.

Obama's $787 billion "stimulus" had become such an anathema by June that the Rasmussen poll found a plurality actually wanted the unspent provisions "canceled," 45-36 per cent. Only 34 per cent in the July Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll were calling the stimulus a "good idea."
Even after several days of press enthusing over Obama's "wildly popular" cash-for-clunkers handout, 54 per cent opposed extending the program in an August Rasmussen poll, with just 33 per cent in support. The press was apparently using some alternate definition of "popular."

And 65 per cent opposed Obama's intended closure of the Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention camp in the June USA Today/Gallup poll, with only 18 per cent accepting Obama's claim that Guantanamo "has weakened American national security."

So far in this "Age of Obama," the Gallup poll has registered an upswing in even the more controversial conservatism in America. In March, Americans placed economic growth ahead of "environmental protection," 51-42 per cent: a reversal from 42-49 per cent in 2008 and the worst showing for environmentalism in the quarter-century of Gallup polling on the question.

In April, Gallup recorded a new low in support for a handgun ban: 29 per cent. Which is half the 60 per cent that favoured the ban when Gallup began polling the question -- in the late 1950s.

In May, Gallup found pro-lifers outnumbering pro-choicers 51-45 per cent: a reversal from 44-50 per cent in '08 and "the first time a majority of U.S. adults have identified themselves as pro-life since Gallup began asking this question in 1995."

In June, Gallup's ideology survey showed conservatives unmoved, at 40 per cent "conservative" to 21 per cent "liberal." That breakdown was 40-19 per cent in 2004, when President Bush and Republican majorities in both houses of Congress were re-elected.

Then a July Gallup poll made it explicit: Americans reported becoming more conservative in their politics, 39-18 per cent. The nation is actually more conservative in Obama's first year than it was in Bush's last.

Then there are the unforgiving tendencies of American democracy. In the century and a half since the Civil War, the party holding the presidency has lost seats in every mid-term Congressional election but three.

In the past four decades, the very longest any party has held the White House and both houses of Congress is four years. By election day in November of next year, Democrats will have controlled both houses of Congress for four years and the White House for two.

Congress' job approval rating in the Real Clear Politics average recently went below 30 per cent. And the Rasmussen "who do you trust" survey which had Democrats leading Republicans on ten issues out of ten before the election, had been turned upside-down nine months later, with Republicans leading Democrats on eight issues out of ten.

So it's not the wildest guess that Republicans will gain in the midterm elections of November next year. Which doesn't necessarily mean they'll form majorities in one or both houses of Congress: the Democrat advantage in the 435-member House is 78 seats, and it typically takes more than a single election to dislodge so many incumbents. But Republicans should have a stronger hand after the midterms, and should be better able to tie Obama's hands in the second half of his presidency.

Obama and his Congress are up against a clock. They're unlikely to see such supermajorities past November of next year, and the closer to the fall of 2010 they come, the more fearful they'll have to be of pushing the trickier items on their agenda -- like legalizing 11 million illegal aliens while the unemployment rate is around 10 per cent and governments can't cover their liabilities as it is. Not to mention the unforseeable events that distract and preoccupy a government, or blow it off its intended course altogether.

Polls are not static, of course, and neither are they elections. It's better to hold the power and lose the polls than vice-versa. But there has to be some significance in polling that's this soft, this soon.

Fraudulently campaigning on the likes of "a net spending cut," and proclaiming oneself the "change" when the system has crashed just a month and a half before election day, can go a long way to winning votes -- once. But it did nothing to alter the fact of America's conservatism. America is a fundamentally conservative nation that's got itself a radicalized leftist national government, and that discrepancy will have to be resolved somehow or other, sooner or later.

Andrew W. Smith, published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia

The problem with the Canadian Press Washington bureau

2009-05-26T15:31:00.043-05:00

(Expanded from an addendum to an earlier post. This will be a long one. Update: Now even longer.)

I saw an outrage and I said my piece, on this obscure website. Whether anyone read it, and what reaction they had to it, was entirely up to them. I had my say, and anyone else could have theirs, and all was right with the world, so I thought.

But it seems Canada's monopolistic newswire agency was sicced on me, an Upper Canadian law firm called in, a boss at the newspaper I write for brought into it, and efforts made to purge my words from the public record. All to no avail, of course, but I don't much appreciate the sentiment. I will not back down from what I wrote; I will back it up, in detail. And I won't be cowed, least of all by Canadian bigwigs.

I'm a great believer in the idea of a Fourth Estate. What is the use of a free press, if it props up the powerful and tears down the powerless? The press turned from "speaking truth to power" -- which in practice meant that when a sparrow fell to the ground, they blamed Bush -- to being incapable of skepticism and scrutiny of Congressional supermajorities and an executive branch annexing ever-greater swaths of society, in what is the most powerful government on earth. And instead of questioning the powerful, they have been practically persecuting the powerless minority.

In the newspaper I read every day -- The Chronicle-Herald of Halifax, Nova Scotia -- the foremost exponent of all that was the one-woman Washington bureau of the one Canadian newswire service, Lee-Anne Goodman. I held my tongue for half a year. I hate naming names and hurting feelings, when I might make my point just as easily without being so personal. But then one week in May I read a hit-piece on Bristol Palin -- a powerless 18 year old girl -- by Lee-Ann Goodman, and I came to feel she had forfeited any courtesy of having her feelings spared.

I think Lee-Anne Goodman is a fine writer, and would make a cracking gossip columnist. Which is not some backhanded compliment: I've read too many gossip columns to be in a position to hold the profession in contempt. Or, if Lee-Anne Goodman's dispatches ran under the "Opinions" banner, I'd have little to say on this. I wish her all the best and would never dream of bringing trouble down on her head. But Lee-Anne Goodman has represented anyone who's caught her eye in any way she's pleased, and had her words reproduced in the newspapers of Canada, called The News. So some nobody called her out on some unread website. And what I wrote stands.

Following is a compilation of my notes of the past half year on what's wrong with the Washington bureau of the Canadian Press:

David Halton.
When I watched The National on CBC years ago, the senior Washington correspondent was a man called David Halton. I can't remember a time when David Halton didn't look old. David Halton had covered the serious goings-on of Ottawa, London, and Moscow before becoming the CBC's man in Washington. He'd got in the middle of wars and uprisings in the field. He knew American politics and government, and war and economics, backwards and forwards, upside-down and sideways. He gathered the facts as he found them, without regard to which party or politician was helped or hurt. And I expected nothing less for the elephant of Canada's elephant-mouse relationship, and the capital of the greatest nation the world has ever seen. That's looking long ago and far away today.

And that's not an indictment of Lee-Anne Goodman; it's an indictment of the Canadian Press.

Bias and bad reporting.

Lee-Anne Goodman: "It's certainly hard to imagine Bush, in fact, immediately after winning the contested 2000 election, reaching out to his rivals in the Democratic party or to liberals in general in an effort to end the petty partisanship that so often paralyzes Capitol Hill."

It happens that I was following American politics and government at the time in question, all the way back in 2000 and '01, and I seem to recall some "reaching out":

Two weeks after Bush's inauguration, he invited "Democrat lion" Ted Kennedy and several others of the Kennedy clan to the White House to watch 13 Days, the movie on John Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis. One of the invitees had accused Bush of "stealing the election," and Ted Kennedy later accused Bush of "poisoning" Americans, among many other nefarious things. Then when Ted Kennedy was hospitalized in 2008, Bush called Kennedy's wife and told her to "take care of my friend."
Even before Bush's inauguration, he invited one of the most liberal members of Congress, George Miller, to Texas to discuss his No Child Left Behind Act. Miller helped shepherd the bill though the House, rewriting much of Bush's draft more to his liking. Miller later threatened to impeach Bush.
Also before Bush's inauguration, he asked George McGovern -- 1972 Democrat presidential nominee and furthest-left major-party presidential candidate until that time -- to stay on as U.S. Representative to the UN Food and Agriculture Program. McGovern later urged Bush's impeachment.
Within five months of Bush's inauguration, he appointed Norman Mineta -- Democrat Congressman and Clinton Commerce Secretary -- as Transportation Secretary. Mineta later endorsed Barack Obama in the Democrat primaries.

So Bush did reach out to Democrats, and look where it got him. Then as Bush walked out of the White House, Canadians read in their newspapers that he hadn't been the "reaching out" kind.

Lee-Anne Goodman (March 11, '09): "'It's really hard to argue that this isn't a fundamental transformation of our economy to look more like European-style socialism,' Pence concluded. If so, it’s a brand of socialism Americans are behind. Countless public opinion polls suggest that the majority of Americans support both additional stimulus spending as well as government intervention to save insolvent banks."

I picked up a bit of a bug for polls in "Social Sciences Statistics" class and follow American polling fairly closely, and I was aware of no torrent of polls in the days and weeks before the piece was published that showed Americans clamoring for more Obama boondoggles. Just the opposite, in fact:

Rasmussen Reports Poll, released March 11, '09. "Just 27% of voters nationwide favor passage of a second economic stimulus package. The latest Rasmussen Reports nationwide telephone survey found that 55% are opposed and 19% are not sure."
NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll, conducted February 26-March 1, '09. "Which of the following concerns you more -- that the federal government will spend too MUCH money to try to boost the economy and as a result will drive up the budget deficit, OR, that the federal government will spend too LITTLE money to try to boost the economy and as a result the recession will be longer?" "Spend too much": 61%; "Spend too little": 29%.
USA Today/Gallup Poll, conducted February 20-22, '09. "Regardless of whether you favor or oppose the economic stimulus bill that Congress passed, do you think it would have been better for the government to spend more money to stimulate the economy, better for the government to spend less money, or is the amount of spending in the bill about right?" "Better to spend more": 14%; "Better to spend less": 41%.
Ibid. "In thinking about the trade-offs between spending government money to improve the economy versus adding considerable amounts of money to the federal debt, which do you think is the greater risk: spending too little to improve the economy or adding too much to the federal debt?" "Spending too little": 37%; "Adding too much to debt": 59%.

So at least three major national polls predating the dispatch exactly contradict the reported presumption that "countless public opinion polls" -- not one of which was cited -- showed "the great majority of Americans" calling for "additional stimulus spending". And this was a central point in the argument that if Obama is socialist, then Americans are all for socialism. That the report was making an argument at all should have got it booted from the News section.

From Lee-Anne Goodman's post-election coverage: "Some of those slated to be in attendance reportedly believe the Republican party's resounding defeat this election was due to its failure to embrace with enough vigour its socially conservative ideals. This despite a series of recent studies that suggest Americans are becoming more socially progressive and aren't concerned with issues like same-sex marriage and abortion."

You'd never know it from that report, but gay marriage bans were actually on the ballot on election day in three states -- two of which voted at the same time to make Barack Obama president -- and passed in all three. Which brings the total of states outlawing gay marriage to 30.

Lee-Anne Goodman: "Twin crises of the economy and Iraq figured to take center stage Wednesday, Day One for the new administration."

Ten days after that was written, provincial elections were held in Iraq: Over 14,000 candidates ran for over 400 seats, Iraqi forces managed the security, and the day passed without a single attack anywhere in the country.

By the time President Obama took office, casualties for both American troops and Iraqi civilians were the lowest since the invasion, and the Status of Forces Agreement determining the U.S. presence in Iraq had been finalized. By election day in '08, Iraq had long since been neutralized even as a political issue.

The Iraq War was won and the American withdrawal underway before Barack Obama saw the inside of the White House. To call Iraq a "crisis" in January of 2009, a person would have to be absolutely oblivious to the developments of the previous year and a half. In fairness to Lee-Anne Goodman, her "crisis" passage was lifted -- legally, of course -- in whole from an Associated Press story. But anyone with any understanding of Iraq beyond the anti-war cliches would have caught the absurdity instantly, and not reproduced it as a lead.

Lee-Anne Goodman: "On top of everything else, the president-elect must also begin extricating the United States from the unpopular war in Iraq."

Again, the U.S.-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement had been finalized already: The "extrication" of the United States from Iraq had not only begun, it had been agreed by both nations, in some detail.

Lee-Anne Goodman: "Obama was the first president in U.S. history to mention the word "Muslim" in an inaugural address, and he did it as his predecessor and the man despised by the Arab world, George W. Bush, looked on."

As a point of fact, Afghanistan is part of the Muslim world, but not the Arab world. The same for Pakistan, and Iran, and all but 20 percent of Islam globally. I'd guess the intent was to report that Bush was "despised" in those countries as well as all the rest, but by using "Arab world" as synonynmous with "Muslim world", they were left out.

And if was absolutely necessary to make a point about President Bush and Muslims in this Obama inauguration coverage, it might have been a more historically significant one, like: "the man who brought down two of the very worst regimes in half a century and made 50-60 million Muslims in two Muslim nations free citizens for the first time in their histories."

Indeed, if it had been up to Senator Obama, the 28 million Muslims of Iraq would have been abandoned in 2007 to their civil war and ethnic cleansing, their new democracy allowed to disintegrate, swaths of their country forfeited to Iran and al Qaeda, and the democratic reform of the Muslim world repudiated. But he mentioned "Muslim" in his inaugural address.

Lee-Anne Goodman: "Others argued that if Obama doesn’t strongly support a Palestinian state, he won’t enjoy any more successes in the Muslim world than Bush did."

But President Bush "strongly supported a Palestinian state". He broke with previous administrations in calling for the establishment of a Palestinian state as part of his "road map for peace", a year and a half into his presidency. He wanted this Palestinian state up and running by sometime in 2005.

Lee-Anne Goodman: "Among the measures Obama is looking at overturning is a proposal that cuts funding to women’s groups that counsel abortion in developing countries and reversing a ban on stem-cell research funding."

That "ban on stem-cell research funding" was nothing of the kind. Bush was the first president to devote federal funds to stem cell research, including embryonic stem cell research using pre-existing lines. The ban was limited to federal funding for embryonic stem cell research which destroyed new human embryos. And there was no prohibition against states and private entities funding embryo-destructive research to their hearts' content.

Bush's executive order on stem cell research was seven and a half years old by this point, and had been painstakingly explained by the president himself in his only primetime television address before the 9/11 attacks.

Lee-Anne Goodman: "Eight years of blunders by George W. Bush" and "eight years of unpopular Republican rule under President George W. Bush."

However did President Bush manage to get himself re-elected after his first four years, if his presidency was "eight years" of unbroken "blundering" and "unpopular rule"? Was it a very obscure point that Bush's approval rating hit a record 90% after the 9/11 attacks? Even a year and a half after 9/11, his approval was at 70%. His re-election was the first in four presidential cycles in which a candidate for president won an absolute majority of votes. And Bush is one of just three presidents since the Civil War to see their party gain Congressional seats in a midterm election, and the only Republican president ever to add seats in an off-year.

And as for those eight unbroken years of "Republican rule", Democrats controlled the Senate for four of Bush's eight years, and the House for two. There was "Republican rule" for just half of Bush's presidency; the other half was what is called in the United States "divided government".

These problematic points are of a kind. They're the errors of a person exposed only to information that comes with a Democratic National Committee seal at the top. They're errors from ideological certitude and partisan acrimony so deep, one cannot allow that there is any right in the other side, or any good in it, and can see no faults or failings in one's own beloved "good guys". It's fine for opinion journalism, but opinion journalism is what it is, and it belongs in the Opinions section with the rest of us ax-grinders.

Obama adulation.
In her coverage of Barack Obama, Lee-Anne Goodman has been indistinguishable from a wide-eyed Obama volunteer (with gratuitous slights against President Bush, plus one against Prime Minister Harper):

"A stern and steady Barack Obama addressed the nation" -- "a nation still basking in the glow of his victory."

"Roosevelt ruled with calm assurance" and "a presidential Obama sounded a similar tone."

"His professorial remarks about the economy were in striking contrast to the string of malapropisms and nervous chuckles that often characterized many of his predecessor’s appearances before the national media. George W. Bush stammered and stumbled his way through many of his news conferences."

"He added he was grateful that Bush, one of the most unpopular presidents in U.S. history, has invited Obama and his wife, Michelle, to the White House on Monday."

"The president-elect went off-topic only once, smiling broadly when asked about his children, Malia and Sasha, and their impending acquisition of a puppy — a promise he delivered in Tuesday’s soaring election-night acceptance speech."

"A friendly and relaxed Obama, flashing his trademark smile."

"The Lincoln symbolism is powerful. ... The man who came to be known as the Great Emancipator was also a lanky Illinois politician with a gift for oratory when he became president."

"The celebrations reflect a country that's been in the grips of Obama fever since he made history in November."

"The star who shone the brightest was the man who sang nary a note -- Barack Obama, who enthralled a crowd of 500,000 with a brief message of hope."

"Millions cheered the apparent arrival of a new age of political idealism."

"The new president took on the formidable task of undoing the damage of his predecessor’s administration."

"[Obama's Ottawa visit is] sure to be a trip that will make any other presidential visit in recent memory seem like an exercise in watching paint dry."

"Since his historic election, Obama has set aside partisanship and stressed his willingness to consult and work with people from both ends of the political spectrum. Harper's intense partisanship, on the other hand, has almost cost him his career."

"Few presidents in recent memory, in fact, have burst out of the starting gates with as much speed and vigour as Obama."

(Update: I neglected the best one. "Hot item on the hustings; physical charms, fetching policies - women say Obama's got it all", from just a couple weeks before election day. Applying the same principle to the wife, there was: "Trendsetting first lady; Vogue cover establishes her as style icon of modern day". And this, from long after the shine was off it: "Obama a talk show pro".)

That's not reporting, it's knickers-tossing. It's one thing to document quotations and so on showing enthusiasm for Barack Obama -- and Lee-Anne Goodman has done plenty of that, too -- but these are the words of the "reporter". There's a place for that sort of thing, and it's someplace other than the News sections.

Opinion journalism.

Lee-Anne Goodman is not a reporter so much as a species of opinion journalist. Which would be peachy, except that her dispatches are not presented as opinion journalism; they're the sole Washington coverage of a monopolistic national newswire service.

The dispatches of the Washington bureau of the Canadian Press are typically traceable to the Associated Press versions, scoops in American news and opinion outlets, open-source quotations and factoids, TV appearances by newsmakers, etc. I recognize the methods because it's the sort of thing I do -- in writing op-eds.

The AP is invariably the first to get a story up, and for reasons I've never fully accepted, it is considered perfectly fine for any news outlet having an arrangement with the AP to lift the AP's content, without attribution. If I tried that on even once, I'd be branded a "plagiarist" and would never work as a writer again.

So, the AP reports: "The plan would effectively end a feud between automakers and statehouses over emission standards." Then Lee-Anne Goodman for the CP reports: "Most importantly from a Canadian perspective, the plan effectively ends a feud between the Big Three automakers and state legislatures over emission standards as the car companies get the single national standard they've been seeking."

A good deal of these dispatches are Canadian-content reproductions of the AP reports. That's no indictment against Lee-Anne Goodman per se: It's the way things are done in the moribund 21st Century news business. But it's not original reporting.

The "Sarah Palin didn't know Africa was a continent" piece was a roundup of rumors in Newsweek, the LA Times, and The New York Times.

The "American reporters are so ignorant of Canada" piece was a rumination on the American coverage of Obama's Ottawa visit, in the AP, cable news, and blogs, plus a line from The Tonight Show. The "Dijongate" piece was a rumination on Sean Hannity's making sport of Barack Obama for wanting Dijon mustard on a cheeseburger, and some blogger's speculation that MSNBC had tried hiding the Dijon business from its viewers, plus excerpts from Obama's The Audacity of Hope.

(Update: I wrote that the Canadian Press Washington bureau found those couple conservatives making sport of Obama's choice of mustard, but what looks more likely is that some American news outlet did the finding, and that was what was found by the CP Washington bureau. The original report, or anyway one of them, may have been a Washington Post online item posted on the morning of May 7, '09 and headlined "Obama Burger Firestorm Still Raging". That WaPo online report made no claim that conservatives generally were preoccupied with Obama's mustard; that angle was more original to the CP Washington bureau. So, even less original reporting than first thought. And worse: one of those couple conservatives was misrepresented by the CP report, and called it "a new low" in bias.)

The Bristol Palin hit-piece was built on Palin's appearances on TV chat shows: "Palin made the rounds of the American talk-show circuit on Wednesday morning." The same for the "Cheney slags Powell" piece: "On Sunday, [Cheney] was back in the spotlight again, this time on CBS's 'Face The Nation,' but even veteran host Bob Schieffer was taken aback to hear Cheney slag Colin Powell."

That's all very well -- it's the kind of thing I do for my little op-eds -- but that's the point: It's op-ed writing, not original reporting.

From Lee-Anne Goodman's "Dijongate" story: "The United States is in the midst of a devastating recession, mired in two overseas wars and grappling with a swine flu outbreak, but conservative critics are assailing President Barack Obama on another pressing issue: his choice of burger topping."

That's the lead to an opinion piece -- an article that takes sides, makes an argument, repudiates one side and vindicates the other.

That piece was unworthy of the Canadian newswire daily dispatch from Washington, not least because it was untrue. I check the conservative clearing houses daily, and I had seen exactly one reference to L'Affaire Dijon that day, in one post of 25 on HotAir.com -- where the verdict was: "As for me, well, this is about as much of a non-story as it can get."

Amen. This was simply not something American conservatism was exercised about. America's conservatives are positively fit to be tied, about spending, and taxing, and terrorist detainees, and Iranian-North Korean nukes, and Afghan-Pakistan instability, and federal annexation of the private sector, and arbitrary federal suspension of contract law and bankruptcy law, and illegal aliens, and activist judges, and missile defense, and the F-22 program, etc., etc., etc. But Lee-Anne Goodman reported for Canada that America's conservatives weren't bothered about all that; it was Obama's fancy mustard that had them jumping up and down. It was an egregious misrepresentation. And it seems to have worked: Two weeks later The Chronicle-Herald was leading a Sunday editorial in defense of Michael Ignatieff with the Lee-Anne Goodman/CP angle on "Dijongate".

What possible purpose did that story serve? It was unnewsworthy and untrue, but it certainly made "Obama's conservative critics" look like fools, so my bet is that was the idea. But then, why did it run as the Canadian Press dispatch from Washington in the World News section of my newspaper?

There are terms for this: "opinion journalism", "op-eds", "columns" -- even "news columns", if you want a pretense of reporterly credibility about it. So let it be identified to the readers as opinion journalism. Presenting it in the newspapers of Canada as The News is a fraud and an abuse of the readers.

Gossip columnist.
Before the Washington job, this was more Lee-Anne Goodman's beat: "Reporters Victoria Ahearn and Lee-Anne Goodman discuss Pete Doherty's nose bleed." Somebody's got to do it. She was an entertainment reporter. No doubt that sort of thing gets the most readers. And there's nothing remotely wrong with it: I'd be quite keen to know about this Pete Doherty nosebleed myself. "Enquiring minds" and all that.

I'm given to know that Lee-Anne Goodman had done more before the Washington job than report on the likes of Pete Doherty's nosebleed. I never imagined or stated otherwise.

But it's no idle point. If the Canadian Press promoted its defense reporter to the Washington posting, one might reasonably expect to see dispatches on, say, missile defense -- Obama's cuts to missile defense, Obama's possible changes to the missile shield deployment in Eastern Europe, the effect on Obama's missile defense policy of the Iranian and North Korean ballistic missile test-launches, etc. And if a reporter is posted to Washington whose aptitudes and experience run more toward arts and entertainment and celebrity gossip, one might expect to see, say, scuttlebutt on the Palins. Less war and economics, more "dishing". The dilettante angle on Washington.

Like this late entry: "U.S. politicians embracing Twitter, sometimes with embarrassing results."

(Update: Some examples of how the Canadian Press Washington bureau has been turned into a gossip-shop: "Rekers latest anti-gay activist to be snared by gay sex scandal in U.S.", "Former Bush campaign chariman says he's gay", "Hole in one spotless image", on Tiger Woods' infidelity -- credit to The Chronicle-Herald for that corny headline.)

Or take Lee-Anne Goodman's "Cheney slags Powell" piece, which was as straight as they come from the CP Washington bureau. The Associated Press version made no such characterization, and in no objective sense had Dick Cheney done any "slagging". Cheney only said he took Colin Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama as a sign he'd left the Republican Party, and that, "If I had to choose in terms of being a Republican, I'd go with Rush Limbaugh." After all, Limbaugh is an actual conservative, while Powell advocated for the furthest-left major-party presidential candidate in American history. "Cheney slag[s] Colin Powell" is the gossip columnist's angle and phraseology. And it was no throwaway line: it became the basis for the headline in The Chronicle-Herald.

Again, that's not an indictment of Lee-Anne Goodman so much as the Canadian Press. And now I come to my reason for taking this up in the first place.

Now, Sarah Palin ran for vice president; Joe Biden actually is vice president. Time was, the actual vice president of the United States would have gotten the scrutiny of the press, not the loser who returned to the ranch a world away from Washington. And this particular actual vice president happens to be a gaffe-factory and a boob. It's hardly as if Biden has kept a low profile, or sailed through his first four months as VP without missing a beat. But the actual vice president of the United States hasn't got much mention in the Washington dispatches of the Canadian Press; it's the Republican governor of Alaska -- and her family -- they've been onto.

The CP line is that Sarah Palin "has been touted as a future Republican presidential candidate." In another 3 or 7 or 11 years, Sarah Palin may be one of at least half a dozen Republicans running for the party's presidential nomination, so even her in-laws have been scrutinized, instead of those politicians who won actual elections and hold actual power in the here and now.

Two days after the presidential election, Lee-Anne Goodman recycled malicious rumors against Sarah Palin planted in the American press by anti-Palin political operatives. It was 650 words of purest gossip. The Herald promoted it on the front page.

The first line claimed, "Sarah Palin wasn't aware that Africa was a continent." That ought to have looked like a bridge too far even to the journalist class with their bottomless disdain for the capabilities of Sarah Palin, and in fact it turned out some of their credulous reporting on this was built on a hoax.

Then in the space of a few weeks in April and May, I counted three full-length dispatches on Sarah Palin and/or her family from Lee-Anne Goodman. They were as uniformly negative as the coverage of Obama was uniformly positive. In April, there was a story to do with some Palin nominee in Alaska who wasn't much enamored of homosexuality, which went into some detail on the "hillbilly" governor's "family and political theatrics that would do Jerry Springer proud," like "the arrest and indictment of her sister-in-law on break-and-enter charges" and "the sordid revelations of her daughter’s ex-boyfriend."

What tore it for me came in May. Lee-Anne Goodman devoted an entire article to Sarah Palin's 18 year old daughter, Bristol: "a decidedly curious poster girl for the cause of teenage abstinence." It was a hit-piece. A hit-piece on a powerless 18 year old girl. A girl was being ridiculed and sneered at for promoting abstinence after having a baby, in a Canadian Press dispatch from Washington on the World News page of my newspaper.

Lee-Anne Goodman lead with, "Do as she says, not as she does." There was even a gotcha quote from the girl's past: "Palin is encouraging adolescent girls to resist pre-marital sex entirely. This despite her remarks shortly after Tripp's birth that convincing teens to avoid having sex was 'not realistic at all.'"

I had never seen anything out of the CP Washington bureau along the lines of, "Obama's first two major bills alone cost nearly twice as much as was spent on Iraq in six years. This despite his remarks during the election campaign that 'what I've done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut.'" A powerless teenager had been subjected to a level of skepticism and scrutiny from which the current president of the United States had been sheltered.

Bristol Palin's appearance on TV chat shows was not newsworthy in the first place; not for American newspapers and much less for Canadian ones. She holds no office, she's not seeking office, and she doesn't even talk politics. And I've never seen anything on the wires ridiculing the Clinton first daughter Chelsea -- even during the '08 presidential primaries when she was a grown woman actively campaigning for her mother and hinting at ambitions for national politics.

Lee-Anne Goodman has gone out of her way to run down Sarah Palin -- and her family. It's indulgent, it's gossipy, it's malicious, and it's a sick fixation. Lee-Anne Goodman does have plenty of company in that, among the political and journalist classes, but when the likes of Andrew Sullivan takes his hatchet to the Palins, it's not reprinted in newspapers across Canada under banners reading "News".

One more thing.

On the occasion of Obama's Ottawa visit, Lee-Anne Goodman took the American press to task for their ignorance of Canada. (I noted the piece mostly for the line, "The deliciously snarky Wonkette.com, the blog that dishes on D.C." There's a sentence that would never have been uttered by David Halton.) Fair enough, though those American journalists had the excuse that Canada wasn't their beat. But if insufficient knowledge of Canada among Americans gets Canadians exercised, then this is the sort of thing that does me, from Lee-Anne Goodman's post-election coverage: "Even in the Republican stronghold of Texas, people were basking in the post-election glow," which was demonstrated with a quote from a screenwriter in Austin.

This must be an obscure point among Canadians, but Austin is a notorious Democratic Party bastion. "Keep Austin Weird," as the bumper sticker says. And I'd guess "screenwriter" is a majority-Democrat profession. Show me a cattle-rancher "basking in the post-election glow" of Barack Obama, and I'd be impressed.

And another thing.

If Lee-Anne Goodman's dispatches came marked "opinion", my argument here would lose its thunder. But the Canadian Press insists on keeping up this pretense that they're just tellin' it like it is, and bristles at any suggestion to the contrary. Until the 20th Century, newspapers typically wore their prejudices on their sleeves. There's honesty in that, and square-dealing with the readers.

But until those pigs fly, and as long as I see these abuses, I intend to call them out. I won't take it down or take it back, and I won't be cowed.

(A second, shorter installment here.)

Torturing Churchill

2009-05-14T20:30:00.008-05:00

Winston Churchill's old bones must be writhing in their tomb. The suicide-pact Left has appropriated Churchill in their cause for a Terrorists' Bill of Rights.

President Obama has cast himself as following in the footsteps of his antithesis Churchill. In the unwatched prime-time press conference on the occasion of his 100th day as president, Obama told this howler: "London was being bombed to smithereens and had 200 or so detainees. And Churchill said, 'We don't torture.'" Obama considers waterboarding to be torture, so we're left to suppose from this that waterboarding would have been too strong stuff for Churchill.

Can anyone who knows anything of Churchill seriously believe he would have had the slightest misgiving about dousing -- under supervision of a doctor -- three known terrorists, to make them talk and save innocent lives? Terrorists who want us all dead and burning in hell, who observe no law of war, and who target civilians primarily?

Churchill, the man who ordered area bombings of German population centers with incendiary explosives intended specifically to create sucking, all-consuming firestorms, for vengeance and the destruction of German national will?

Churchill, who was prepared to turn the English Channel into a lake of fire if the Germans crossed it? Churchill, who was prepared to meet the Germans with mustard gas if they set foot on the shores of England?

Churchill, who had 16 captured German spies hanged? Churchill, who opposed the Nuremberg war crimes tribunals and ordered his SAS to assassinate wanted German officers before the preening lawyers had them "arrested"?

Churchill's daughter said it: "He would have done anything to win the war, and I daresay he had to do some pretty rough things, but they didn't unman him."

The kookery seems to have originated with the hysterical blogger called Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan's blog on Palin family conspiracy theories was apparently read by the president of the United States, who really ought to have better things to do. President Obama then credulously shared his new Sullivan's Fairy Tale with the world in his 100th day celebratory prime-time presser, about the Blitz and the 200 detainees and Churchill's supposedly saying "we don't torture."

Only, it was more like 500 detainees, and nowhere in Churchill's millions of recorded words was any such sappiness ever expressed. Churchill was on record as opposing torture for British citizen convicts, but enemy spies in war were another matter. And of course, a lot hangs on what is meant by "torture": I daresay Churchill wouldn't have ordered roughness for its own sake; but if a captured enemy was outside the law of war and had valuable intelligence, it would not have been a good time for him.

Under Churchill, captured German spies and SS officers were beaten, starved, drugged, deprived of sleep, threatened with hanging, and forced to betray their homeland as double-agents.

The irony is that Barack Obama's Kenyan grandfather claimed to have been tortured by British forces during Churchill's second premiership. Hussein Onyango Obama was involved in the Kikuyu Central Association which sparked the Mau Mau Rebellion of the early 1950s. He was detained for two years and allegedly tortured for information on the rebellion.

Barack Obama's "Granny Sarah" Onyango claims British forces whipped Obama's grandfather "every morning and evening 'til he confessed," "squeeze[d] his testicles with parallel metallic rods," and "pierced his nails and buttocks with a sharp pin, with his hands and legs tied together with his head facing down."

The British certainly killed over 10,000 rebels, detained about 70,000, and had official sanction for rough treatment where warranted -- while Churchill was Prime Minister.

Anyone who throws around "war criminal" to describe President Bush or others in his administration would have also to brand Churchill a "war criminal," many times over. The same for Democrat Presidents Roosevelt and Truman. If you didn't like George W. Bush, you'd have hated Winston S. Churchill.

Churchill was an anachronistic, arch conservative, an Anglo-Saxon imperialist, a Zionist, the foremost advocate in the English-speaking world for the utility of force in international relations, and a brutal war-master. Churchill was also the greatest figure of the 20th Century.

If decadent, historically-illiterate leftists are going to fight for the rights of terrorists, to take up the cause of sparing terrorists from unpleasantness as a righteous moral crusade of our time, they have the luxury for now to be so suicidal. But let none of them claim Churchill as a champion of their cause. The historical revisionism of Churchill as some limp-wristed, weak-stomached, bleeding-heart coddler of the enemy in war is something like the vegetarian who imagines that dogs don't actually like meat.

Churchill gave as good as he got, and then some: "We will mete out to them the measure, and more than the measure, that they have meted out to us." And don't you forget it.

Obama's first 100 days and all the news that's fit to print

2009-05-08T22:34:00.008-05:00

Will Rogers famously pleaded that all he knew was what he read in the papers. If all a person knew of Barack Obama's first 100 days as president was what he read of them in this newspaper, it would seem to be a very charmed young presidency.

Chronicle-Herald space was cleared recently for an urgent Associated Press dispatch from Washington, headlined "Obamas pick Portuguese water dog." Not original reporting, of course, but an AP rephrasing of a White House-arranged scoop in the Washington Post online.

That was followed by a crack Canadian Press report, drawn from such gumshoe news-gathering as reading the Huffington Post, on the "hillbilly" Republican governor of Alaska: Her "family and political theatrics that would do Jerry Springer proud," like "the arrest and indictment of her sister-in-law on break-and-enter charges" and "the sordid revelations of her daughter’s ex-boyfriend."

The Portuguese water dog and Alaskan "hillbillies" news beats apparently leave little time for anything remotely skeptical of the president of the United States. And they wonder why folks aren't buying the papers like they used to.

So here is a small selection of news on the most powerful man on earth which has been deemed by the gatekeepers to be unfit to print:

Obama's first two major bills alone, the "stimulus" and "omnibus," cost nearly twice as much as was spent on Iraq over six years -- $1.2 trillion vs. $657 billion.

Obama abandoned his campaign promise of "a net spending cut," his first annual deficit -- not counting bailouts -- being three times the worst deficit under President Bush.

Obama's objective in his first G-20 summit -- commitments to spending our way to prosperity with massive stimulus boondoggles across the G-20 -- was rejected out of hand.

Obama's objective in his first NATO summit -- commitments to combat troops for Afghanistan from "our European allies," which Obama and his party imagined were ready and willing to fight if only someone "enlightened" like him were running things -- was predictably refused, with some more European non-combat contingents offered as a token.

Obama's Defence Department announced cuts of $1.4 billion to missile defence, the day after North Korea test-fired its long-range, multi-stage ballistic missile.

Obama's economics were criticized by Warren Buffett, whose endorsement had been candidate Obama's highest economics credential.

Obama reversed the free trade Bush policy that had allowed about 100 Mexican tractor-trailers into the United States, which excuse the Mexican government immediately exploited to levy tariffs on 90 American goods amounting to $2.4 billion in U.S. exports.

Obama's "tax cuts for 95 percent" turned out to mean $13 a week from June-December, to be clawed back to $8 a week in January -- as compared with President Bush's 2008 tax rebates of $600-1200 plus $300 per child, which were notably scoffed at during the election campaign by Michelle Obama.

Obama's campaign promise of a $3,000-per-employee tax credit for businesses that hired new workers -- repeated ad nauseam for weeks before the election -- was discreetly retired even before inauguration day.

Obama abandoned his campaign promise that "lobbyists won't work in my White House," waiving his no-lobbyist executive order or conveniently redefining his appointees' past lobbying work to allow 30 lobbyists into his administration.

Obama abandoned his campaign promise to reform earmarks, signing the omnibus bill which contained 8,816 of them.

Obama took more money from AIG than any other politician in 2008 -- over $100,000 -- and signed into law the provision guaranteeing the AIG bonuses which later had him in front of the cameras "shaking with outrage" and siccing the pitchfork crowd on law-abiding citizens who had fulfilled their end of a contract and had their payment upheld by Obama's own legislation.

Why should these points, and many more like them, have to be made by some obscure contributor to The Herald's Opinions section?

Fox News Channel is the butt of jokes and the target of attacks like no other media outlet in the English-speaking world, not least by people who fancy themselves the guardians of a free press. But Fox News is today the lone television news service in the English-speaking world capable of serious skepticism and scrutiny of the sitting president and Congress of the United States.

Fox News is also the second most-watched channel in all American cable television. It long ago became by far the most-watched cable news channel; more Americans watched Fox News than CNN and MSNBC combined in every time slot from 6 AM to midnight in April. Now, while The New York Times is $1.3 billion in debt, Fox has expanded its operations with a business channel and a juggernaut internet presence.

There's a lesson there, though Fox News will be just as well pleased if the impeccably "mainstream" news business remains clueless about it.

The people need a Fourth Estate, not yet another adulator of Barack Obama, yet another smearer of Sarah Palin, yet another patrician editor to keep out anything disagreeable to progressive sensibilities, yet another laptop-and-latte journalism-schooler to spit on everything predating 1968. And they wonder why the news business has come on hard times.

Andrew W. Smith, Published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia

(The addendum to this post, on Lee-Anne Goodman and the Canadian Press, has been expanded into a fairly lengthy post of its own, here.)

Note: I've been given to understand the "Obamas pick Portuguese water dog" story came from the AP, not the CP, so I've amended the attribution, but the report was unmistakably attributed to the Canadian Press in Washington where I read and saved it, in The Chronicle-Herald online. All I know is what I read in the paper.

Canada's war on Red Eye

2009-03-24T12:55:00.008-05:00

When Lt.-Gen. Andrew Leslie, "Canadian Forces chief of land staff", testified to Parliament that the entire Canadian Forces "would need a year-long break from operations after the mission in Afghanistan winds down in 2011," Greg Gutfeld's reaction on Fox News' comedy Red Eye was, "The Canadian military wants to take a breather, to do some yoga, paint landscapes, run on the beach in gorgeous white capri pants."

That's funny stuff. And it's not hard to see the humor in a national military "taking a year off" -- or at least it's not hard if you have any conception of a vigorous national defense. And anyway, it was a one-liner in a one-off cable show at 3 AM Eastern; a secure, confident nation wouldn't take any notice of it.

But in the great Canadian tradition, a silly comedy segment at 3 in the morning on American cable TV became the subject of national outrage, condemnations and demands of apology from the Minister of Defence, front-page newswire stories, editorial cartoons, demands of retaliation, calls for censorship, and general smug, contemptuous America-bashing ("ignorant Americans", etc., etc.) -- the "we are all Canadians in the Age of Obama" having apparently worn off just two months in.

Gutfeld's first question, "Isn't this the perfect time to invade this ridiculous country? They have no army," ought to have been a clue to outraged Canadians that the whole thing was a laugh. But then, Canadian newspaper editorialists actually write earnest editorials accepting as fact that the United States is planning to annex Canadian water supplies, so maybe such an obvious joke was lost on them.

For the record, Red Eye is completely silly -- not serious news or commentary -- and Greg Gutfeld's Red Eye persona on political matters is a caricature of the "Ugly American". IT'S ALL A JOKE.

Gutfeld and most Americans, it is true, do not take Canada seriously as a power in the world or as a country with any national martial vigor. So if that is the Canadian complaint with this 3 AM Eastern cable show, at least it wouldn't be a mischaracterization of Red Eye and American opinion. And when the overwhelming majority of Canadians want to withdraw their couple thousand troops from Afghanistan before the war is won and blithely conclude "we can't win," and when Canada's opinion leaders deliver daily homilies on how Canada must reject such militarism and return to "peacekeeping", and when the Canadian Forces brass says the military needs a year off, and when the national armed forces excises the word "armed" from its very name -- then good luck defending Canada against the charge it's lost any vigorous martial impulse.

But if the issue is the troops themselves, neither Greg Gutfeld nor any American that I've ever heard would think to disparage the great courage and sacrifice of any soldiers fighting alongside their own. The individual Canadian soldiers who have served in Afghanistan are heroes all. They deserve all the honor of the American heroes fighting in the same valorous cause.

Those Canadian soldiers carry their weight and then some, but they are only a handful, and they are in the service of an elite and population that have absolutely no stomach for a fight, so when the chief of land staff of the Canadian Forces is actually reporting to the Canadian Parliament that the military needs a year off, that is a separate issue entirely from the honor of Afghanistan veterans, and eminently worthy of a joke.

To react to a segment on a show like Red Eye with such a national furor is humorless, petty, thin-skinned in the extreme, diminishing of the nation, not to mention clueless about the cause of the offense. It's all a joke, Canadians. Actual, original, politically-incorrect humor; not shrill Democrat Party talking points couched as comedy, like The Daily Show, and not strained-peas comedy for the arthritic set who take up the prime column space for a hero's wage in Canadian newspapers, like The Royal Canadian Air Farce.

The irony is that the reaction has actually affirmed the premise of the joke.

The unbecoming, pathetic, self-defeating Obama cult of personality

2009-03-04T01:37:00.007-06:00

I always was an admirer of President Bush, but it never occurred to me to utter a sentiment like, "I pledge to be a servant to our president," as Demi Moore vowed to President Obama; or to glorify the man in idealized portrait posters, like the Soviet-style iconography of Barack Obama; or to appropriate Christ, like the mother of Denzel Washington on the occasion of Obama's inauguration: "He came to lead us to the original design of what we are supposed to do on this earth"; or to chant the leader's name in unison with masses of fellow-travellers, like the crowd on Parliament Hill for Obama's Ottawa visit chanted "O-ba-ma."

A hysterical cult of personality -- formerly a feature of totalitarian societies -- has attended the ascent of Obama. It is unbecoming of a democratic society, it is certainly pathetic, and it may even prove to be self-defeating.

Time was, corporations subscribed to the business sense neatly summed up by basketball player-turned-sportswear mogul, Michael Jordan: "Republicans buy sneakers too." But that was before the "Age of Obama."

Pepsi launched a campaign asking, "What would you say to the man who is about to refresh America?" sponsored one of the inaugural balls, and was on hand for the pre-inaugural festivites with Pepsi paraphenalia reading "Hope" and "Change." Not traditionally what folks have been looking for in a pop company.

CBS amended its famous eye logo to look like the logo of the Obama campaign, in promos for its "Yes We Can Monday" lineup. ShopNBC hawked a "CHANGE HOPE BELIEVE OBAMA" throw blanket, with jumbo jacquard portrait of the dear leader himself, for $47 -- MSRP $49.99.

And BeaverTails Canada Inc. made a household name of itself by adding a Nutella "O" to its signature Beaver Tail and calling it the "Obama Tail."

But the most disgusting specimens of Obama personality cultism have to be the performances in praise of Obama by children. There's the "Obama Kids" with "We're Gonna Change the World": "Obama's gonna change it. Obama's gonna lead 'em." Etc, etc.

And the "Obama Youth - Junior Fraternity Regiment," who performed a martial drill, in fatigues. They marched and chanted, "Alpha, Omega. Alpha, Omega," which typically refers to God. They then recited "Because of Obama" personal statements, and punctuated some choreography and Obama campaign sloganeering with shouts of "Yes We Can!" Finally they recited features of the Obama health-care plan, and closed with a shout of "O!"

Then there's the news. 2008 marked the very fag-end of the long process by which the post-Second World War professionally-impartial press finally became unabashed agents of the Democrat Party.

And nowhere moreso than in this country. The Canadian Press -- with only the most saccharine praise for Obama and only the shrillest scorn for Bush -- became indistinguishable from a wide-eyed Obama volunteer:

"The star who shone the brightest was the man who sang nary a note — Barack Obama, who enthralled a crowd of 500,000 with a brief message of hope."

"A stern and steady Barack Obama addressed the nation" -- "a nation still basking in the glow of his victory." "His professorial remarks about the economy were in striking contrast to the string of malapropisms and nervous chuckles that often characterized many of his predecessor's appearances." "Roosevelt ruled with calm assurance" and "a presidential Obama sounded a similar tone."

After "the dying days of George W. Bush’s wildly unpopular presidency" -- those "eight years of blunders by George W. Bush" and "eight years of unpopular Republican rule" (no explanation as to how a president supposed to be "blundering" and "unpopular" for eight full years managed to get himself re-elected after the first four) -- "the new president took on the formidable task of undoing the damage of his predecessor’s administration." And so on, ad nauseum, in every dispatch of the Obama news service of the Canadian Press.

There are a few Obama supporters who recognize that things have gotten a little out of hand, but they invariably hasten to add that Barack Obama himself has done his gosh-darndest to disabuse his followers of this notion he's a latter-day messiah. If so, he's done an entirely ineffectual job.

And where did all this begin if not with Obama himself? Adopting "Hope" as a campaign slogan. Or thundering down at the rapturous masses, on the subject of his own ascendancy, "I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when ... the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." Or claiming a "righteous wind" for his campaign, which surely would never have been received quite so gleefully had it been claimed by a certain other president of the United States.

So, a president has become a celebrity and a fad, and those things have a way of looking very old once they're not quite so new. The press have become the boy who cried wolf, and no-one will believe they're just reporting the facts the next time. And impossible expectations have been raised, and it won't be so easy to plead for patience or ask forgiveness for failings when you've promised the moon and the stars.

Andrew W. Smith, Published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia

Obama v. Lincoln, Churchill et al.

2009-02-12T07:40:00.008-06:00

This latter-day adoration of Lincoln by Barack Obama, and his worshipful party and press, is flummoxing. Not to put too fine a point on it, but if you didn't like George W. Bush, you'd have hated Abraham Lincoln. Look at the anti-war, surrender-ist Democrat Party platform of 1864, and the fire-and-brimstone indictments against Lincoln and the Union cause by the "Copperhead" Democrats and their many allies in the "international community" of the time, and you'd think you were reading the war against President Bush translated into Victorian. The 21st Century Left -- with Obama as their new philosopher-king -- are the very reincarnation of those 19th Century Lincoln-haters. It is the "neo-con warmongers" who are the legitimate heirs of Lincoln and his war to save the Union and free the slaves.

Following is a representative specimen of the Obama-as-Lincoln genre, this one from the Obama-ist Canadian Press newswire service, and specifically Lee-Anne Goodman, the swooning bobbysoxer whose reporting belongs in Tiger Beat: "Lincoln, Obama’s political hero, also figured prominently during the day’s events.... The man who came to be known as the Great Emancipator was also a lanky Illinois politician with a gift for oratory when he became president." Oh, well then: Both lanky, both associated with Illinois, both politicians, and both handy at public speaking. What matter if they would have been on opposing sides of the major issues of the day at least as often as not? Why, did you know they both enjoyed pie? Clear a space on Mount Rushmore!

Roosevelt and Kennedy are idolized in the popular culture and press, but I find both of them to have been miserable presidents, and I'm sure that would have been my assesment at the time, so I could not in good conscience try to co-opt their hero-status today. (Roosevelt much more than Kennedy, incidentally. Roosevelt saw the United States and its government as his personal fiefdom, extended the Great Depression by seven years, and was almost uniformly wrong in his many disagreements with Churchill; whereas Kennedy was at least for across-the-board tax cuts and a strong, anti-Communist defense. Kennedy's problem was his remarkable knack for doing exactly the wrong thing, from the Berlin Wall to Cuba to Vietnam to Iraq.)

But the Left has this "thing" about celebrities and hero-figures, and just can't help themselves. A historical figure's hero-status will trump any pesky 180-degree disagreements of worldview for the Left, and they invariably try to claim inheritance of any celebrated hero-figure, including the ones from the Right.

And, for absolutely anyone who is on the Left in this 21st Century and presumes to carry the mantle of Churchill, may lightening strike them. You'd have been baying for Churchill's blood had you been alive in his time. Churchill is today understood to be the greatest statesman of the 20th Century, so there are plenty of pretenders who want to wrap themselves in the Churchill flag. But if you are still on the Left after the 9/11 attacks, then had this been the 1930s, you may be assured that you would have considered Churchill a reckless, dangerous, vile warmonger and imperialist, completely devoid of humanity, and you have no right ever claiming Churchill as a spiritual ally.

You may be assured that Churchill was an arch conservative, an English imperialist, a Zionist, and the foremost advocate in the English-speaking world for the efficacy of force in international relations; In other words, you leftists would have hated his ever-living guts and wished earnestly for his untimely demise. And it says something about Churchill's worldview that he is so indisputably the greatest statesman of the 20th Century, and absolutely towers over his more leftward contemporaries, Roosevelt chief among them. It's as George Orwell said of Rudyard Kipling: He holds up, while his leftist contemporaries become unreadably dated, because his brutal, natural conservatism brought him closest to understanding the world as it actually is and will be. Or, as Margaret Thatcher explained, "The facts of life are conservative."

"Turning in their graves" is the right expression. Poor Messrs. Lincoln and Churchill, appropriated to promote politicians and causes they would have fought against tooth-and-nail, by people who would have torn them down and subverted their efforts at every turn.

Another unfunny comedy documentary

2009-02-02T05:30:00.010-06:00

Leave it to PBS to make a 6-hour documentary series on comedy, and step all over the punchlines with their accustomed axe-grinding. Make 'Em Laugh: The Funny Business of America is the suitably-lame title for a politicized Baby Boomer's Canon of Comedy.

There can be few things more insufferable than unfunny comics putting on their serious faces and haranguing America about how important they are, how "courageous" and "dangerous" they are, and how they're leading all us lesser mortals to a more enlightened plane by "making us uncomfortable with institutions we've become comfortable with."

How "courageous" or "dangerous" is it for Chris Rock to make fun of white folks in the 21st Century? Making fun of Muslims could get a fellow killed; making fun of American WASPs fetches tens of millions of dollars, uniformly-fawning press, and international celebrity status.

And what does it say about the sort of comedy venerated by the PBS documentary-makers, that the only time anyone watches the stuff is on tedious documentaries, where some Boomer producers and directors patch together old clips and contemporary interviews with a lot of self-righteous comedy-retirees, preening about how outrageous and important they were?

No-one today is watching Your Show of Shows. No-one watches Laugh In. No-one will watch the Daily Show or Colbert Report once they're retired, any more than anyone watched Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher as of the day after it was cancelled.

Even Saturday Night Live -- by far America's oldest running TV comedy institution -- has a best-before date: Reruns go back only about half a decade. Try watching an episode from the '70s or '80s or early-'90s: Nothing in American society is any more dated than an episode of SNL. A fellow might laugh at a 30-second clip of "Wookin' Pa Nub" from 1981, but would he care to sit through the entire 90-minute episode it appeared in?

And yet Monty Python's Flying Circus -- 40 years old this year -- is still being broadcast, in primetime. So the problem is not that comedy just gets stale: only trendy, weak comedy goes bad. And the species of comedy venerated most by PBS is that trendy, weak stuff -- fleeting pop culture mediocrity.

"Whoever's in power, you go after them," one comedy authority explains. Ha. Democrats had controlled both houses of Congress for two years, and the comics went after Sarah Palin. Barack Obama is President of the United States, and still they're going after the last president: SNL's Weekend Update of February 7 made exactly one, skirting reference to Obama's flailing, and the punchline was, "That's your mistake? The last guy broke the world." No doubt the good folks at Weekend Update were hungover on the previous Sunday, and couldn't reasonably be expected to have noticed the provincial elections in Iraq: Over 14,000 candidates ran for over 400 seats, Iraqi forces managed the security, and the day passed without a single attack anywhere in the country. (The good thing about Seth Myers anchoring Weekend Update, incidentally, is no Seth Myers in the sketches. The bad thing is that he is clearly aping Jon Stewart and has reduced Weekend Update to an unfunny Saturday installment of the Daily Show. That Lorne Michaels allows Seth Myers to anchor Weekend Update is an injustice to tens of thousands of funnier Americans.)

Comics take on the institutions, sure enough: Institutions that they helped tear down decades ago. What these comfortable revolutionaries can never seem to get through their heads is that they are the establishment now. Who are the TV executives and movie producers in 2009? Who are the newspaper and magazine editors and publishers? The college professors? Senior bureaucrats? Baby Boomers, Democrats, and 1968-vintage Hippie Lefties to a man. But still these fearless self-professing iconoclasts shake their fists at The Man, who either passed on sometime in the 20th Century or is attached to an oxygen tank in an assisted living facility. For the Baby Boomers and their younger disciples, it will forever be 1968, they will forever be raging insurgents, and the enemy will forever be Eisenhower's America with its Levittown and Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Even when it's 2009 and the epitome of establishment is Hugh Hefner.

None of these comics are ever made to be "uncomfortable". None of the "institutions" they're "comfortable" with are ever assaulted. If they truly meant what they said about the importance of making one uncomfortable with institutions, then the first bubble they'd prick would be their own. No-one could be any more pompous, more pretentious, more sanctimonious, more dogmatic, more monolithic, more in thrall to celebrity and power -- provided it's sufficiently leftist -- than the kind of pop culture establishment honored by PBS in this waste of National Endowment for the Arts taxpayer dollars.

NB: I make an honorable exemption from this diatribe for Carol Burnett and her like. They were only out to be funny, they were, and they hold up.

Three predictions for the Age of Obama

2009-01-24T02:16:00.003-06:00

1. Fox News will go from strength to strength as the as the lone TV news outlet on earth not prostrating itself at the feet of the Dear Leader. Rush Limbaugh and the universe of conservative talk radio following in his wake will do quite nicely for themselves, for the same reasons. And maybe new, as yet unimagined conservative outlets will spring up, while pro-Democrat institutions like the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and Minneapolis Star-Tribune are thrashing about to keep their heads above water.

The pie has been sliced too thinly on one side, and barely at all on the other: practically the entirety of American news and entertainment media are Democrats, catering to the American and foreign elite; while the rest of the country is offered only a handful of alternatives. So some of the elite media will have to go by the wayside, and Fox News et al. will see their stock rise, if for no other reason than supply and demand.

2. Republicans will gain in the midterm elections of 2010. Which doesn't necessarily mean they will form a majority in either house of Congress, but a fellow could count on one hand the number of times American voters have rewarded the majority party in off-year elections in which that party held all the levers in Washington.

But what is more, institutional Democrat Party power goes well beyond the White House and supermajorities in the House and Senate. Democrats dominate the federal bureaucracy and most of the judiciary nationwide; Democrats maintain a stranglehold on American education -- K-12 and post-secondary; Democrats produce every jot of news in America save for Fox; and Democrats monopolize the sympathies of every American film producer, TV executive, writer and director, actor, and pop singer. In fact, it's considerably quicker to name the American institutions which are not dominated by Democrats: The United States Armed Forces, and churches. So it's not the most far-fetched forecast that by 2010, Americans will be in the mood again for a multiparty democratic society.

3. Sarah Pailn is a force to be reckoned with, but it's far too early to assume she'll bear the standard for Republicans in 2012. She has staked out a promising angle already, by refusing for her state the unheard of spending splurge which Obama assures us is the only way out. If the Bank of Obama adds $1-2 trillion a year to the national debt, cuts checks for every pet project in every municipality in America, and redefines "tax cuts" as welfare for people who pay no federal income tax -- after which the question arises of where did all that money go and what on earth have we got to show for it -- then an anti-spending reformist governor may become considerably more attractive.

But the list is long, and Palin is at this point damaged goods -- only partly her own doing, and largely the result of a "mainstream" press, which set out on a search-and-destroy mission for her the moment they noticed her addition to the McCain ticket had moved Barack Obama into second place in the September polling.

Chris Matthews is much more than an Obama idolator and Kennedy royalist; he is also capable of useful and neutral observations, one of which is that Americans typically vote for an "antidote" to the previous president. If that's right -- and obviously Obama represents "CHANGE" and "the other", exotic Euro-socialism and New Age social-engineering, and statist experimentation -- then a decent bet for next POTUS may be a boring old white-bread all-American limited government sort, of which there's quite a lot in the Republican Party.

There's Tim Pawlenty, governor of Minnesota, and Mitt Romney, former governor of Massachusetts. (As an aside, the election of Barack Hussein Obama as president of the United States has instantly rendered Mitt Romney's Mormonism mainstream.) Even Rudy Giuliani ought never be counted out. But the man to watch may just turn out to be Mark Sanford, governor of South Carolina. He has been unusually vocal nationally for a governor of South Carolina, and is clearly crafting an identity for himself as an anti-spending, deficit-hawk, limited-government, managerial executive. He would be able to come at Obama in 2012 as the anti-Obama, with as much credibility as anyone I'm aware of. So, for my third and most speculative prediction: Sanford in 2012. (Bonus fourth and still more speculative prediction: Sanford-Palin in 2012.)

How the Annie Moses Band saved Christmas music

2008-12-26T02:46:00.013-06:00

We've been letting down our end. Great music has been contributed to our canon of Christmas carols for more than half a millennium, including a profusion of what may be called "American Songbook" Christmas music in the 20th Century.

But then the 1960s mutated into the late '60s, and the American Songbook was closed -- its Christmas chapters with it. Oh, Paul McCartney gamely ponied up with "Wonderful Christmastime" in 1981, and George Michael, then of Wham!, added "Last Christmas" in 1984, which is of course a typical lovesong only incidentally set at Christmas. But "Last Chrismas" is at least a good tune, which is much more than can be said for that dismal and unmusical hectoring of the same year called "Do They Know It's Christmas?"

Then there are the honorable mentions for attempted contribution to the Christmas carol canon -- songs that may prove to be durable, but may just as easily turn out to be near-misses. Like "Grown Up Christmas List", by the impressive David Foster and introduced by Natalie Cole in 1990. That may be a little too grown-up, and can have the effect of letting the 7-Up out of one's Christmas punch. Maybe a judicious revision of the lyrics could "jolly it up", as Frank Sinatra asked Hugh Martin to do with the lyrics to "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas", thus transforming it from forgotten 1940s film soundtrack fodder, to third-most performed Christmas song of the past half-decade.

"Mary Did You Know?", by a relative unknown called Mark Lowry, again in 1984, is very much in the same line: Impressive, but a bit of a downer. A nitpicker may make the case that an ancient carol like the "Coventry Carol" is a bit of a downer too, and that's a hit even after half a millennium. But the "Coventry Carol" is modal -- unless my music PhD brother says otherwise -- with those progressions which resolve in twist endings of brighter notes and chords.

So, what we're left with is old chestnuts -- some of them half a millennium old, some of them half a century old -- and not so much from the mostly useless last couple of generations.

And then, sometime about Christmas of 2008, some kids step onto a stage someplace in America and announce that they're the Annie Moses Band. They call their idiosyncratic genre "chamber-pop", which is as good a denomination as I can think of, though a little too close to "chamber-pot" for my comfort. But that's as may be.

It turns out that none of them are called Annie Moses. They're Wolavers, Annie Moses being a great-grandmother. I needn't attempt a band biography here; people who know exponentially more about it have supplied those online and in print. But suffice it to say it's a family troupe, with the two parents and some six kids. The kids, though they come off as pretty grown up by now, are virtuosos of the various stringed instruments, as well as formidable singers. The father is a composer and pianist, the mother a lyricist and vocalist.

And it is no music promoter's sloganeering to say that they make a top-tier, international-class chamber music string ensemble, and a convincing contemporary Country band, in the course of the same set.

Of particular note are the original carols "Bethlehem, House of Bread" and "Red, White & Blue Christmas". The latter may have found itself more at home in a nation bristling to march into the belly of the beast, than a nation which recently elected some glib kid Chicago politician as Commander-in-Chief. "Red, White & Blue Christmas" may be just about seven years too late. But it is the closest thing I am aware of -- musically -- to an American Songbook Christmas carol in this past half-century, and the closest lyrically to the Second World War era's pop music for fightin'.

"Bethlehem, House of Bread" might as well be an updating of a haunting "mystery play" hymn of the 15th Century.

Their arrangement of "O Come, O Come Emmanuel" finds the sympathetic jazz/impressionist-classical chords implied in the melody.

And their "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" is, as some unidentified musicologist wrote of the jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal's 1990s excursions, "large open voicings and bravura-laden playing."

The Annie Moses Band are clearly passionate Evangelical Christians and take-no-prisoners American patriots (bless their hearts). Not to mention they're a large, intact family. So America's own brand of upper-class twits -- the self-appointed elite, the new snobs, the smarmy and the snarky who set their clocks by Jon Stewart -- will of course be wont to sneer.

But the great majority of what is called the music "industry" these days ought to listen to this Annie Moses Band, and despair. If they live to be 100, they will never be the musicians these kids are, or the composers the parents are.

If the Annie Moses Band never played another lick, it could be justly said of them that they were as good as and better than any musicians of their time, and that they contributed as much music worthy of the Christmas canon in one album as the entire music industry has put up in decades.

A politician, not a pope

2008-11-22T03:09:00.005-06:00

The press, including especially the Canadian Press reproduced in this venerable newspaper, have disgraced themselves. They have gone well past their accustomed bias and entered the giddy teeny-bopper genre of Tiger Beat magazine, cooing over the world's biggest celebrity and snarking about how beastly those few people who don't care for him are. Repeating malicious false rumours about Sarah Palin passes for front page newswire copy these days.

If the press are going to cover Barack Obama like the Vatican Information Service covers the pope, then the news of his fallibility will have to be found in the opinion pages.

Maybe the biggest surprise to come out of November 4 is that voter turnout was barely any better for Barack Obama's election than for George W. Bush's re-election. For the best part of a year the talk has been of a near-holy movement of the masses to "vote for change and hope." And yet, an American University study finds that voter turnout was "at most, one percentage point higher" in '08 than in '04: between 60.7 and 61.7 percent. Not far off of Canada's allegedly abysmal turnout in October of 59.1 percent.

With everything in the world going for him, and the gold-standard Gallup Poll on election eve showing him winning by 11 points, Barack Obama topped out at 52.7 percent, with over 66.5 million votes. Not earth-shakingly better than President Bush's '04 numbers of 50.7 percent and over 62 million votes.

Even as they elected the very most leftist major-party candidate for president at least since McGovern in 1972 and arguably in all American history, only 22 percent of voters admitted to being "liberal." 34 percent identified themselves as "conservative." A practically identical ideological break-down to 21-34 in '04, when it was Republicans who ran the tables.

Though you'd never know it from the Canadian Press "election coverage" that "Americans are becoming more socially progressive and aren't concerned with issues like same-sex marriage," gay marriage bans were actually on the ballot in three states on election day, and passed everywhere: libertarian Arizona, Obama-swinging Florida, and libertine California. Which brings the total of states outlawing gay marriage to 30, in case anyone at the CP has their note pad out.

And as most voters were electing Barack Obama, they were also rejecting four of five environmentalist ballot initiatives.

Obama's ascendance was greeted by votes of non-confidence from the markets, and a throwing down of the gauntlet by a hostile power. The Dow Jones Industrials set a new record for post-election day crashes, down 486 points, as compared with 151 points up the day after Bush's re-election in '04. The panic continued on Thursday with another 443 point decline, until $1.2 trillion in American wealth had disappeared, and only let up on Friday when Obama hinted at reconsidering his tax hikes. And within hours of the vote, Russia announced its intention to deploy ballistic missiles to its NATO borders, answering Obama's willingness to capitulate on missile defense with an "or else."

If all these admittedly secondary points can be sloughed off by Obama's many partisans as nothing to be bothered about, then they might at least give a thought to the tiny possibility that the election of Barack Obama has been the sale of a bill of goods.

Obama blitzed America's televisions with promises of "tax cuts for 95 percent" and "jumpstarting our economy." But he promises to raise the maximum capital gains rate by 10 percent at a time when investors have already fled the markets. He denounced John McCain for his plan to cut corporate tax rates by 10 percent, even as combined corporate rates in the United States rank second-highest among the 30 OECD nations. He promises to cut the taxes of the 40 percent of earners who pay nothing in income tax, and to raise taxes on the top earners, when America's top 10 percent presently pay 71 percent of federal income taxes, and the top 1 percent alone bear 40 percent of the burden. And he threatens to build walls against international trade as the global economy totters on the brink.

Obama swore to lead America to energy independence within a decade. But he threatened to bankrupt America's coal industry and to make electrical rates "necessarily skyrocket," for the cause of "healing the planet." And he shares his party's doctrinaire hostility to oil drilling and nuclear power.

Obama presumed to be the one to get Osama bin Laden, win Afghanistan once and for all, and maybe wade into Pakistan to boot. But he fought the policy that won the war in Iraq. He built his very candidacy on retreating from a winnable war in the heart of enemy territory and abandoning the people to their civil war and genocide. He has no military experience, no executive experience, and until a matter of months ago he hardly pronounced on military affairs except to condemn American efforts. He pledged to limit new weapons systems and missile defense while America's chief enemy in the world builds its first nuclear warhead. And he leads a majority party which threatens to cut military spending by a quarter in the midst of a global war.

Obama decided he was a moderate the day after he clinched the Democrat nomination in June. But he wanted driver's licenses for illegal aliens. He couldn't bring himself to support a measure compelling doctors to save viable babies born alive despite an attempted abortion. He backed a gun ban struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. And he pledges to abolish the secret ballot in union votes.

President-elect Obama got himself over the top, with every variable breaking in his favour and presenting himself as a Barack Obama who did not exist just months ago. It may be a tough act to keep up.

Andrew W. Smith, Published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia

Kinder, gentler lending and the Panic of '08, Part II

2008-10-28T00:49:00.008-05:00

There is a Canadian notion that America is the land of unfettered capitalism, where government dares not intrude in the natural course of economic events, and declines to police even the more bandit-like of business behavior. It is commonly found on college campuses, the CBC, etc., and I believed it myself once. But it turns out that there is a positively Canadian level of government intervention in the economy even in the post-Reagan United States, and particularly in mortgages and financing.

Far from hesitating to intervene in the economy for the protection of the poor and the destitute, the U.S. government has been overriding normal business practise in order to put poor folks into $100,000 homes, and effectively guaranteeing the gamble with taxpayer dollars. It is that massive government intervention which is at the root of this financial crisis -- not some pro-business deregulation, but affordable housing affirmative action.

It's bad form to be so partisan, but a disservice has been done to that unloveable bunch called Republicans, and in the spirit of this newspaper's mission statement about wrong not thriving unopposed, the record ought to be set straight. Republicans are being blamed for policies they never supported, while the very Democrats who championed the disaster are sought out for guidance. It is blaming the fire on the fireman, and entrusting the fire department to the arsonist.

And the blame ought not be put on either the borrowers or the lenders, who were only taking advantage of a perfectly legal -- and encouraged -- government-ordained system. That irresponsible borrowing and lending was precisely what the federal government had intended.

The federal government under President Clinton in the good-timing 1990s directed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to take on what would become $1 trillion in dodgy mortgages, and to spread the risk among other financial institutions, in order to meet their federal mandates for affordable housing.

Because Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were creatures of the federal government, any financial outfit was happy to have their liability on its books, the assumption being that, if the bottom dropped out, the U.S. Treasury would be good for any paper with "Fannie" or "Freddie" on it. The reward may have been privatized, but the risk was socialized, in a perverse inversion of the principle behind trusting the market to make the best decisions.

Such deregulation as there was in this area had to do with an old chestnut from President Roosevelt's New Deal called the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which was repealed in 1999. That was a deregulation, sure enough, and one supported by Republicans, as well as President Clinton and Congressional Democrats. But allowing the combining of commercial and investment banking services as the Europeans do enabled neither subprime lending nor the over-leveraged securitizing that spread the subprime risk far and wide. The chief effect of Glass-Steagall's repeal here, in fact, has been to allow the formation of the few major financial institutions that are still standing.

President Clinton himself was not always so enthusiastic about this social engineering through government-mandated lending. Clinton in 1994 -- like President Bush in 2003 and Congressional Republicans in 2005-6 -- tried to fix the Fannie and Freddie problem while it was still fixable. Clinton's own account of what became of those attempted reforms may be the last word, as it is a noteworthy thing when Bill Clinton feels compelled to point a finger at his own side: "I think the responsibility that the Democrats have may rest more in resisting any efforts by Republicans in the Congress or by me when I was president, to put some standards and tighten up a little on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac."

When it is occasionally conceded that Republicans opposed this mortgage monkey-business all along, the argument goes that they must be to blame nonetheless, because they controlled both houses of Congress for four of President Bush's eight years. It looks good on paper, but it's not the way things work in practise in the United States Senate.

Democrats have controlled the Senate for half of Bush's presidency, and the House for a quarter. And for the four years from '03 to '07 in which Democrats were minorities in both houses of Congress, they were never fewer than 45 percent of the Senate -- four seats to spare over the 41 percent necessary to effectively kill presidential initiatives and Congressional legislation. The Democratic minority's ability to deny cloture motions alone was enough to block reforms from consideration by the full Senate.

If all the keys to Washington are to be handed to this crowd who were still cheerleading for Fannie and Freddie as late as July, and who are even now blaming some imaginary deregulation for the failings in government direction of the housing and financial sectors, then it is difficult to see how the wreck can be put right before it has landed the advanced economies in a protracted contraction.

One day, the history of subprime lending and the Panic of '08 will be written, and it will bear little resemblance to the first draft, with all its "blame Bush" and "Republican deregulation" and "collapse of capitalism" boilerplate. It had precious little to do with President Bush or pro-business deregulation or even capitalism itself. It was government mandates to put poor folks into homes they could not afford, and effective government guarantees to financial firms for playing along with the racket, to bail them out at taxpayers' expense when the whole crazy social engineering project came crashing down.

Andrew W. Smith, Published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia

An '04 Hummer in 2024

2008-10-13T21:46:00.008-05:00

I take it a little personally when I read "eight dark years of George W. Bush"* and like lines, from some Democrats in this country and more than a few foreigners -- the kind of people who fantasize that earth-shaking defense and foreign policy decisions could possibly be expalined by the prospect of a few new oil contracts for old friends, or that a nation with 11 million illegal aliens could possibly be a "police state". (No self-respecting actual police state would ever abide even a few hundred illegals, surely.) I feel about the "eight dark years" business much the same way as I feel about the annual denunciations of Christmas displays and music in stores: I actually get a kick out of animated plush snowmen singing Christmas carols in the Wal-Mart seasonal section, even in October.

I've had the privilege of living in "Bush's America" for about six of Bush's eight years, in a state which voted to re-elect President Bush in 77 of its 77 counties, and it's been the happiest time of my life yet. I hope to be here for many administrations to come, and whatever problems I may have with those administrations, I like to think I'll never get carried away with my disagreements and take them out on this country, or condemn an entire era because of them.

It may seem a long way off from here, but over all the crisis and chaos since the bursting of the tech bubble and 9/11 attacks which ended our holiday from history, it was only last year that the Dow was setting records at over 14,000 points, the U.S. jobs market was setting records for longest unbroken string of gains at 52 months, and the average Bush era unemployment rate was better than the Clinton average of 5.2 percent. Even now, new World Bank numbers show that President Bush is leaving office with an economy 19 percent larger than he inherited.

It's worth bearing in mind that by almost any measure, the whole of the 1970s was a much more miserable time than we've ever seen since: Vietnam draft and defeat, Watergate melodrama and the only presidential resignation in American history, runaway inflation plus slow growth "stagflation", Soviet ascendancy, the first energy crisis, gas lines and the first defeat of the American car by Japanese imports, inner city lawlessness, counter-cultural chaos, etc.

And yet, since sometime in the early '90s, the 1970s has been the focus of much of the nostalgia in American popular culture. When bellbottoms first reappeared in the early to mid '90s, I hoped it might be a short-lived fad. It wasn't. When Austin Powers and Boogie Nights were released, I hoped the '70s nostalgia would be succeeded soon enough by '80s nostalgia in film. I'm still waiting for my retro '80s movies. When That '70s Show was launched, they also tried out a That '80s Show; The '70s show became a hit, and the '80s show was promptly put to pasture. And has VH1 not made two 10-hour series reliving the '70s? 1970s nostalgia has now lasted much longer than the actual decade of the 1970s.

So clearly, the papers and textbooks are missing something, when they're not wrong entirely. And if you are one of those people who believes that everything's just awful and has been since sometime in January of 2001, see if you feel quite the same way in 20 years' time, if not much sooner. An '04 Hummer in 2024 will look like a '56 Chevy in 1976. The War in the Desert from '03 to '07 will look in 2027 like the final few years of the Cold War look to us today. For that matter, take The Sopranos, or Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings, or 300 or The Dark Knight, or even Borat; There'll be "2000s nostalgia" before you know it, and the old refrains of "eight dark years" will look like the hyper-partisan hysteria that they always were

*Direct quote from Canadian news director.

How kinder, gentler lending caused the Panic of '08

2008-10-01T03:43:00.006-05:00

Today it's called "subprime lending," or, if you're of a more Marxist bent, "predatory lending." But back before the bubble burst, it was called "affordable housing." Today it's called "greed" and "corruption," but until the bottom fell out it was progress for "minorities and the poor."

Sloganeering has been a handy stand-in for understanding of this credit crisis. "Crony capitalism," "neocons," "politics of greed," and on and on. That may have been good enough for Soviet poster printers, but it does nothing to explain exactly what happened.

Between 2000 and 2006, the average home price in the United States rose by some 93 percent. It was the good times for that mania of these first years of the 21st Century: house-flipping. A fixer-upper might be bought for $100,000, renovated for $35,000, and re-sold for $200,000. But it was all too far, too fast. Inflation at that rate was insupportable, and the painful but necessary correction started in 2006.

In the boom years of '00 to '06, a fellow who found himself unable to manage his mortgage payments might simply put his house up for sale, and sell it within a few months for considerably more than he had paid for it. And the lender which had approved that bad mortgage was not much bothered by the borrower being a bad risk, so long as there was an out -- a quick turnaround in a market that could only go up.

But then, interest rates returned to more realistic levels. And the other side in the bargain -- the people who buy homes -- decided that home prices were getting to be higher than home values. Buying slowed, and the music stopped in the musical chairs game of moving from home to better home. New home construction slowed. Existing home prices deflated. Then the bad risk borrowers were back on the hook, and started defaulting. And finally the lenders and securitizers found themselves holding "bad paper."

It may fairly be said that conservatives had no problem at all with sellers and lenders playing the housing game and getting rich quick. And until 2007, the Bush Administration often touted the record numbers of home owners, and the new stake in America for millions which that homeownership represented. But there was nothing very conservative or capitalistic about lending to bad risks in the first place. That was a policy of progressives, leftists, and Democrats.

It all started with President Carter's Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, revised and enhanced in 1995 under President Clinton. The progressive set urged and mandated lax lending practices, particularly through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- the two formerly quasi-governmental lending houses which accounted for the largest share of American mortgage holdings. The idea was to open homeownership to the sort of people who had traditionally been shut out of it, for the now clearly sensible reason that they were unlikely to meet their mortgage payments. Bad risks. Or, according to the CRA's supporters, "minorities and the poor."

The election-season fever-dream, that subprime lending was some Bush Administration/John McCain "neocon" ponzi scheme, is perverse. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are no friends of conservatives and Republicans. Their address books and campaign contributions skew in the other direction. And as it happens, the Bush Administration proposed that Fannie and Freddie be subject to "the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis," all of five years ago, in September of 2003.

This has been the way. The Administration tried to open domestic oil drilling in 2001 and 2005, when limited supply first started driving oil prices into troubling territory. The Administration made a Quixotic run at reforming Social Security in 2005, trying to move younger Americans off of Social Security dependence before the Baby Boomer retirement tab came due.

And cranky old John McCain was about the most vicious critic of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in American public life. In 2005, McCain co-sponsored the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act, and assailed Fannie and Freddie as monstrosities, exposing the market and the taxpayer to untold risk.

But all these measures were blocked in Congress by a certain party which considers it a Golden Rule that any and every utterance and action by the president and his party must necessarily be wrong, stupid, and bad. The 2003 Bush Administration attempt to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was received by the Fannie and Freddie Party as an assault on the poor, and on the good work of those two progressive friends of the little guy. Fannie and Freddie were "not facing any kind of financial crisis,'' and ''the more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.'' That, according to the now-Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.

The true indictment against the Bush Administration is that they failed to fight and win those political battles, not that they didn't see the trainwrecks coming, or that they supported the status quo. They saw the problems clearly enough. But their proposed fixes were pronounced "dead on arrival," in the words of a Senate Majority Leader, and the Administration invariably dropped the issue and returned to fighting wars, or other more immediate concerns.

The Panic of '08 was not the product of some scam to take from the poor and give to the rich; it was the end result of government-directed "kinder, gentler" lending that spiralled into the stratosphere when it combined with low interest rates and the housing boom. But what's done is done. Now all that's left is to absorb the bad debt and restrict the bad risks -- as the U.S. government is doing -- and let America get back to business. And save the musty Socialist rhetoric for the museums.

Andrew W. Smith

Published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia

The lighthouse tower and the boutique city

2008-09-13T17:30:00.010-05:00

Crude sketch of Halifax "Lighthouse Tower" skyscraper, here proposed. (I never said I was an architect. Or an artist. So lay off.)

Halifax, Nova Scotia is becoming a boutique city. It is by far the largest North American center north of Boston and east of Quebec City, and has the makings of a world class city, even if not of the first or second tiers. But the unholy alliance of Nova Scotia politics -- radical environmentalists and anti-capitalists, with anti-change traditionalists -- is seeing to it that Halifax remains a fossilized provincial port settlement of small shops, heritage buildings, summer tourists, and views of the ocean unobstructed by human development.

The irony is that if it's sea-views and trees a fellow wants, he'll find little else almost anywhere in Nova Scotia outside of Halifax. It's hardly as if under-developed land is scarce in Nova Scotia. We've got all the rocks and trees and rotting timbers we can stand. Halifax is supposed to be a city, and the largest in its big neighborhood; it is only proper for such a center to have all those things that serious cities have.

The usual suspects who constitute Nova Scotia's anti-development alliance are two quite divergent groups: Tradition-minded heritage types, and "transgressive" environmentalist types. Both are positively acrophobic. The mere mention of skyscrapers sends them into conniptions. The traditionalists detest the clash of 21st Century against 18th and 19th Century, and the pinkos see steel and concrete as the Devil's work, and try to persuade themselves that the future belongs to stripped-down structures closer to their ideal of squatting in the bushes.

This is approximately the same alliance which joined forces to oppose the legalization of Sunday shopping until recently: Traditionalists who believe in the idea of a Lord's Day, and radicals who would defend any law prohibiting commerce, for any reason at all. A similar alliance blocked offshore drilling which might have rescued a lot of coastal communities from their perpetual poverty: tradition-minded fishermen who were made to believe that an oil rig would kill their livelihood, plus environmentalists and anti-capitalists who believe that extraction of resources from the earth is a kind of sin against God, or "Gaia".

These two groups, who would probably quite dislike one another if forced to live together for half a day, are allied again on the issue of building things in the city. They're against it.

The thought occurs that the buildings which are today cherished as near-sacred relics, were once current, or "modern" in their time. No doubt someone lamented the raising of these new-fangled buildings, when the centuries-old things were first built.

And no doubt someone lamented the clearing of the trees which made the city possible in the first place, including the lots on which these very Halifax environmentalists make their homes today, or the lots for their coffee shops or vegan restaurants or transgressive art galleries. But you've got to break some eggs to bake a cake. So the evergreens came down, the buildings went up, and there were still plenty of trees to be had in the big old world.

But it gets worse. The twist is that the leftists who oppose development in the city core also oppose development in the suburbs. Where all the people are supposed to go is a good question, and the rarely-spoken answer is that these leftists want considerably fewer of us human beings treading the earth, "despoiling" it and going about our "unsustainable" ways.

Nova Scotia's trendy enviromentalists are positively hateful toward suburbs and their dwellers. The going thing among Nova Scotia's elites generally is to regard suburbs as selfish, wasteful, monotonous and conformist, apartheidist, fearful of poverty and "the other", even doomed by high gas prices -- as if gas prices can never come down, or as if the people who can afford suburban homes and SUVs in the first place are going to be priced back down to apartment/pedestrian lifestyles by an extra dollar a day for their commute.

A September opinion editorial in Halifax's Chronicle-Herald actually sought to atone for the author's "guilty pleasures" of living in the suburbs. Living in freesanding homes in pleasant neighborhoods near the city is something which most functional folks either enjoy or aspire to; it is not something to condemn as a sort of sin. It is perverse to see comfortable, happy homes as sinful and disgusting, and not the sort of thinking one finds in bold, world-beating societies.

And another thing. There are some internal inconsistencies with the anti-skyscraper/anti-suburbs line of argument. This new Left extolls the virtues of apartment dwelling, since it leaves a "smaller footprint" or some gobbledygook, as if humans were a scourge to be contained as restrictively as possible. But that of course is precisely the effect of a skyscraper: The most efficient concentration of people and services. Skyscrapers are stacked upward instead of spread outward, to use a single lot instead of several city blocks. So this smaller footprint business could as easily argue in favor of skyscrapers as in favor of the sardine lifestyles of apartment dwellers. Not to mention the inconsistency of advocating apartment living while denouncing the sameness of the suburbs as some abomination. What could be more "cookie-cutter" than blocks of apartments? They're small cubes in big cubes.

And like the Marxists who were so certain since the mid-19th Century that capitalism was on the cusp of collapse, today's anti-skyscraper/suburbs set is sure that skyscrapers and suburbs are about to be washed away by a tidal wave of history. But skyscrapers are sprouting like bamboo shoots from Dubai to Shanghai. And suburbs will remain as long as they are what they always have been: a pleasant and convenient place to live for real people in the real world.

The environmentalist/anti-development crowd live in a parallel universe, where business demands and even human nature don't exist. They have the luxury of imagining that their toaster plugs are "killing the earth", and of sitting in judgement on the decent folks who go about their lives and produce the things that make our existence possible and comfortable. Alone, they may not be able to make the difference, but with their allies on the crusty, change-hating side, they make a near invincible bloc in Nova Scotia. The person who peels the traditionalists from the radicals will have solved the riddle, and allowed Halifax to grow and be the city it is supposed to be.

My own not-so-modest proposal is that Halifax get itself a spectacular, signature skyscraper. One that will tower over the rest of the skyline, and become an immediately identifiable icon for Halifax, the province, and even the region. A point of pride for the people. As well as herald a new era, in which Halifax welcomes development as a city in its position must. Something to break the old deadlock and make development a good word in Halifax again. The proposal is a stylized lighthouse tower. Six-sided and tapered toward the top like the old white wooden lighthouses which dot the shores. With an impressive steel and glass top, like the old lighthouse cupolas. And with spectacular lights at night. It is supposed to be a lighthouse, after all.

Military records and picking presidents

2008-07-01T21:30:00.012-05:00

This back and forth on the role of military service in evaluating presidential candidates has gotten to be needlessly convoluted. Can it not be agreed simply that the military service of a candidate for public office, or the lack thereof, is something for voters to take into account? A lack of service is not necessarily a disqualifier, and a military record isn't a "Get Into Office Free" card; just as a military record is undeniably a valuable thing to have in government and in life generally, and can reflect well on questions of character. It is something to be taken into account -- one of many considerations in a vote for Leader of the Free World.

In John McCain's case, it is not so much the mere fact that he served that inspires confidence, but that he went far above and beyond the call of duty, enduring imprisonment and torture for some five and a half years in that hellish North Vietnam POW camp called the Hanoi Hilton -- without breaking or turning against the country he was suffering for.

And while we're on the subject, the new pro-Obama argument that John McCain's resume isn't suffiently "executive" or (bizarrely) "war-time" for the presidency is a strange fight for Obama supporters to pick: Barack Obama has exactly zero "executive" and "war-time" experience, and precious little experience of any other type for that matter. Obama is the political equivalent of a newsreader, an average TV anchor who reads whatever the telepromter shows, and has little to offer when the scrolling stops. So if John McCain's resume doesn't pass presidential muster for the Gen. Clarks of the world, then what are they seeing in Barack Obama's slender resume that has been lost on the rest of us?

Obama observations

2008-06-06T00:31:00.009-05:00

The Democratic Party has made a mistake. In choosing Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton for their presidential nominee, Democrats have got themselves one of the very most radical, under-qualified, America-disdaining, elitist, empty-suited, almost cult-leader-like major party candidates ever to run for president.

It's bad enough that pathetic sycophants like Oprah Winfrey call him "The One", or that idiot celebrities line up to make cultish videos in worship to him, or that Soviet-style poster artists make Stalinesque portraits of him -- all completely sincere, and without irony. What is worse is that Obama himself, and his wife, clearly believe these most lunatic fantasies of Obama's most deranged supporters.

The Obamas are remarkable in American political history not because they use messianic language, but because they speak in messianic terms about themselves. Many presidents and candidates for president have used messianic language -- the Bushes, Reagan, Kennedy, etc. -- but they did so in speaking about America and its role in the world and history. The Obamas don't think enough of America to speak of it in messianic terms, but they evidently think enough of "The One" to apply the messiah rhetoric to him.

It goes beyond the vacuous, New Age-y "We are the change we have been waiting for" and one-word slogans of "Hope" and "Change", as if "change" must necessarily mean "improvement". This remark by Michelle Obama in February was a perfect exposition of a totalitarian, messianic vision: "Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed." This is not the language of politics and government in a healthy representative democracy; It is the language of the Bible Gospels appropriated in the service of radical left politics and the deification of an empty-suit politician from Chicago.

The Wright/Pfleger/Ayers revelations may be old news by now, but they led to one of the most unusual developments of this primary campaign: The likely Democrat nominee lost the great majority of those primaries which came AFTER he had become the likely nominee. It was those revelations that brought Obama down to earth, and had they emerged earlier, when he was winning the delegates that made him the frontrunner, he might well be angling for the vice presidential spot today.

But if Republicans have any sense at all, and I believe that they do have some, they will make an affirmative argument for John McCain but also a devastating argument against Barack Obama, that does not focus on Obama's attachments to anti-American, crackpot, racist radicals, but only takes them as a reference point. Obama's real problem may not be that he's had long associations with radicals, so much as that his own most candid statements reveal that he truly does come from their rarified corner of the political universe after all.

There was Obama's San Fransisco fundraiser remark in April that demonstrated his disdain for Bible-believing, Second Amendment-supporting Americans. And this recent remark from Obama is a ready-made campaign ad against him: "We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times…and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK. That’s not leadership. That’s not going to happen." What sort of candidate for president even thinks of determining the caloric intakes or room temperatures of Americans, let alone determining such things according to foreign resentments? The sort of candidate who cannot possibly win a national election in America.

Plus which, Barack Obama is a gaffe factory. It is only because he is the favored candidate of the press that he has not already been destroyed by his appalling stupidity like poor Dan Quayle was for misspelling "potato". It must be nice to be Barack Obama and sleep assured that the main press will voluntarily sit on the stories that hurt you, and push the stories that hurt your opposition. But this is not the bad old days of Walter Cronkite's one-man show. There has been an exponential proliferation in the voices heard in American public life today, and the friendlies in the press can't save Obama from himself forever.

If President Bush had miscounted the number of states in the Union, as Barack Obama has -- twice -- it would surely be known to all 6 billion people on earth by now. But Obama has been above blasphemous ridicule for such trifles as failing to remember the number of U.S. states. Or claiming that the Iraq War had taken America's Arabic translators away from the Afghan War, when Afghans do not speak Arabic. Or holding out the 1961 summit meeting between President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev as an example of the successful negotiating he intends to pursue, when the Soviets followed it by building the Berlin Wall and placing nuclear ballistic missiles in Cuba, and when Kennedy himself immediately acknowledged that the summit was a disaster. Or claiming that Roosevelt and Truman negotiated with America's enemies, when they took the hardest line possible against our enemies and expressly rejected negotiation, in their demand of "unconditional surrender".

On many of those issues that are primary ones for a president and commander-in-chief of the United States, Barack Obama's head is as empty as his rhetoric, and the Walter Cronkites can't always cover for him in an age when a free YouTube video can be seen by millions in a day.

Americans distrust a cult, and that is what Barack Obama's core supporters are. Americans abhor deification, and that is what Obama's candidacy does. Americans have little patience for seeing no evil in the world except within the United States, and that is what Obama's worldview shows. And the American people positively hate being told how to live their lives -- especially in the service of ideological pieties and international opinion -- and that is what Obama's policies amount to.

Add to that Obama's index-card resume and stunning ignorance, and Barack Obama is looking very much like a man who will never be president of the United States.

Counting electoral votes in April

2008-04-25T16:06:00.005-05:00

Other things being equal, a decent Democratic nominee for president might have expected a reasonably comfortable walk to the White House in 2008. But then the Republican Party nominated the one Republican born for running nationally in the peculiar circumstances of 2008, and Democrats got stuck in a protracted "civil war" for their party's leadership, with a radicalized base making demands of its nominee which leave him or her little room for maneuver.

U.S. presidential campaigns are won and lost in the individual state battles, so it is the state-level polling that best tells the future, and we dreary political science-types have a game of calculating electoral votes based on those state polls.

In the "election-gaming" between de-facto Republican nominee John McCain and the leading Democrat candidate Barack Obama, McCain is bidding fair to collect 260 of the 270 electoral votes needed to claim the presidency. And McCain polls very respectably against Obama in another ten states, any one or two of which would put him over the top.

Some of the states that any Democrat for president must carry in order to win are cool to Obama, notably Pennsylvania and Michigan. Those are states which Republicans expect to lose even in a good year, but McCain is showing surprisingly well there in polls pitting him against Barack Obama. Against Hillary Clinton, the prospect of those states remaining in the Democrat column improves.

And that is certainly the pitch that the Clinton campaign is making to the Democrat superdelegates even now. It is a compelling argument, but following it may be to exchange one set of problems for another. It may well amount to Democrat Party elites overturning Barack Obama's majorities in the popular vote and delegate allocation. Obama supporters would be fit to be tied if their votes were effectively vetoed by some party big-wigs in favour of Hillary Clinton, whom they don't much care for as it is.

The schizophrenic Democrat Party primary system, as much as anything else, has led to this state of affairs. Results are allocated by an ultra-democratic proportional representation scheme, then subjected to an anti-democratic veto by party elites. The effect is that an even match in the primaries and caucuses will yield no clear winner, and the superdelegate wildcard will give a close-running loser reason to carry on in hopes of a last-minute reprieve.

A solution has been proposed, of course: split the difference and put both Obama and Clinton on the Democrat ticket. But a shocking WNBC/Marist College poll of April 9 found that a ticket with Clinton and Obama -- in either combination -- would lose to a speculative John McCain-Condoleeza Rice ticket...in overwhelmingly Democratic New York state. If that poll is even remotely close to accurate, it would indicate that Obama and Clinton could be weaker together than individually.

And would either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama be prepared to carry the other's coat, and tie themselves to the other's fate? What if this Obama-Clinton ticket lost the election, or won but managed an unsuccessful single term? There would be little to be gained for either of the two by playing second fiddle, and quite a lot of risk. Still, plenty of primary opponents have wound up as general election running-mates, so it is a possibility, and the Clinton campaign has publicly raised the prospect of sharing a ticket, with Clinton at the top, naturally.

The superdelegates must surely be pondering these days whether Obama would bring debilitating liabilities to a general election, weaknesses that have not been probed much in the primary process. The Democrat Party of 2008 is to the left of its bearing in 1992, '96, or 2000, and consequently Hillary Clinton could hardly campaign by branding Barack Obama as "too liberal" or "too leftist". That would be a stick in the eye of the party base she needs in order to win.

But Obama was rated by the notoriously nonpartisan National Journal the "most liberal" of the 100 U.S. Senators in 2007, further left even than the self-described Socialist Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. That is all well and good in the Democrat Party caucuses of 2008, but not so much for a presidential election in what is the Western world's most conservative nation.

Which is not to say that there is no trouble in paradise on the Republican side. The latest twist has been the prospective third-party candidacy of Bob Barr. Barr is a former Republican Congressman who would never be mistaken for charismatic, most famous for his role as a Congressional prosecutor in the Clinton impeachment trial of 1999. But Barr has now abandoned the Republicans for the Libertarian Party, and threatens a vanity campaign as its presidential candidate.

Without reliable polling on Barr, or an electorate that is even aware of him, it is impossible to know what if any effect on the election he might have, but Democrats must be hoping he plays the Kamikaze against McCain, siphoning just enough potential McCain voters to make the difference in a close state or two.

There are still almost seven long months 'til Election Day. In a fraction of that time, Hillary Clinton went from presumed presidential nominee to underdog in a Democrat race that has already lasted over two months longer than anticipated. So, in American national politics as in life generally, anything can happen and it usually does.

The Revenge of the Sith and the politics of George Lucas

2008-04-07T21:34:00.011-05:00

I'm no authority on Star Wars, or much more than a casual watcher, but I don't think I'm going too far out on a limb to declare Revenge of the Sith the best of the three Star Wars "prequels", by far. Revenge of the Sith premiered in 2005, about half-way through President Bush's two terms as a war-time president.

A single line from the film crossed into the politics of the time. The Anakin Skywalker character has by this point in the film gone over to the "Dark Side" and will be fully transformed into the evil force of nature, Darth Vader, a matter of hours later. He is about to face his mentor, Obi Wan Kenobe, in an epic duel to the death, or close enough to death. And then Anakin/Darth Vader declares to Obi Wan, "If you're not with me, then you're my enemy."

Now, George Lucas was the writer, director, and executive producer of the film. There is no possibility that Lucas was not responsible for that line. And there is no possibility that he was unaware that the line was effectively identical to a remark made famous thoughout the world by President Bush in 2001, just days after the 9/11 attacks: "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists."

Lucas could only have intended the line as a political statement, and seeing as how Darth Vader is an icon of evil in Star Wars and in the popular culture, a not very complimentary one to President Bush.

Fine. George Lucas is free in America to imply that his war-time president is evil, in the course of a science-fiction fantasy that adds several more tiers to the towering Lucas fortune. But the way President Bush is regarded in history will be unrecognizable from how he is often viewed today, and from how he was seen by George Lucas in 2005. And some years from now, when viewers recoil from hearing one of the most famous quotations of a past war president -- who was moving heaven and earth to keep the nation safe in the wake of the worst attack in its history -- put into the mouth of an evil movie villain, that gratuitous line will be a blemish on an otherwise fine film, and on Lucas himself.

There are undoubtedly those who think that the President's remark really was evil or more probably overly-simplistic, deserving of condemnation and scorn, but why exactly was it wrong to warn that failing to help thwart an attack would be effectively to enable it? This isn't a disagreement over the rate of increase in the HUD budget.

The Wikipedia entry on "You're either with us, or against us" includes a helpful list of comparable quotations by some other famous figures including Jesus, George Orwell, writing in defense of the Allied war effort in 1942, and even Hillary Clinton, in exactly the same context and on exactly the same date as the Bush quote.

George Lucas is notorious for re-editing and re-releasing the Star Wars films -- like Handel revised The Messiah for new performances -- and it is not inconceivable that he might someday reconsider equating President Bush with one of the most iconic villains in movie history, and find a way to amend that line in a future edition of Revenge of the Sith.

Then the only problem with the movie will be the bland dialogue.

Don't count Chinese chickens before they're hatched

2008-03-29T06:12:00.007-05:00

I once heard a U.S. Postal Service worker, while waiting on some unlucky customer, preach for all the world to hear that it was "a matter of when, not if" America was overtaken by China .

But before we start learning Mandarin and hanging portraits of Chairman Mao in every public place, it might be worth considering a second opinion.

The same sort of prophesies were made in the 1980s and into the '90s, when the coming colossus was supposed to be Japan. Or Germany. Or in the 1970s, when the Soviet Union was supposed to have been winning the Cold War.

Today’s visions of a Chinese future got some clarification late last year, when the World Bank reported what may qualify as the world’s biggest accounting error. It found that “the size of China’s economy is overestimated by some 40 percent based on most current measures....” That overestimation was a ballyhooed factoid in more than a few forecasts of Chinese ascendancy and American decline.

It must be said that China is a great power already, and has been for some time. China began its double-digit annual growth in the 1980s; it was a foreign policy obsession in Washington in the 1970s; it has been a nuclear power since 1964; it has had a space program since 1956; it held American-led forces to the 38th Parallel in Korea in the early 1950s; and it has been one of only five permanent members of the Security Council since the UN's founding in 1945.

So China has been a leading power in the world for 60 years. But it is a long way from there to global hegemony. And China is a big country with problems to match.

The numbers show much more than an unstoppable sprint to global domination. China ’s economy is now second only to America ’s, but U.S. GDP is still twice China ’s, and equal to the second, third, and fourth largest economies combined. China is awash in cash -- enough to help finance U.S. debt -- yet mainland China’s market capitalization is not very much higher than tiny Hong Kong’s, and only about a quarter of America’s.

Many Chinese cities – Beijing , Shanghai , Guangzhou -- are truly impressive, even evocative of some futuristic science fiction film. But outside the favored urban centres, China remains profoundly impoverished. 800 to 900 million of China 's 1,300 million souls are peasants, and nearly half the Chinese people live on less than $2 a day.

China ’s success has been largely propped atop its exports to the West, and China produces those exports to Western designs, in Western factories, for Western consumers. The Chinese export economy is an enormous branch plant. And branch plants are derivative and dependent. Taiwan was once the West’s preferred branch plant location. India could easily be our next, or even Vietnam. What happens to Chinese growth then?

And the fear of dependence on China should be mutual. China has precious little natural resources for its size. Even the Chinese staple of soy beans has to be imported, largely from the United States.

China is also getting old. As a predictable consequence of the Communists' forced one-child-per-couple policy, every generation is twice the size of its children’s generation. China 's ratio of retirees to workers hit 1:3 in 2003. So it's not for nothing that China-watchers often say " China will get old before it gets rich."

America, meanwhile, has increased its fertility rate to the highest in 35 years, reaching the "replacement rate" in 2006 for the first time since 1972.

And the one-child policy has had another consequence. The male-to-female ratio in China has already become imbalanced, at 6:5, and it is difficult to see how that trend can be anything but problematic.

The fantasies of a Chinese-dominated world are in some part a product of resentment and contempt for America. And though it may be appealing to certain people to imagine a world in which Washington takes orders from Beijing, such a world would be appreciably less free, less democratic, less humanitarian, even less environmentally-friendly.

The recent satellite shoot-downs may put things into some perspective. When China decided to shoot down a satellite in 2007, it did so unannounced and at an altitude that put the thousands of shards into the paths of other satellites and spacecraft. When the United States decided to shoot down a satellite in February, it informed the affected governments directly, then the international press, and it smashed the satellite at just the altitude to cause the debris to be incinerated in re-entering the atmosphere.

A crass assessment would call both powers bulls in china shops, so to speak, but clearly there is a bad way and a better way of going about being a superpower.

China has been a top-tier global power for some time already, and it has room to grow. But to conjure the future and see China in anything like the role America now plays is wildly speculative and takes far too little account of China’s gargantuan problems.

The kind of nation that denies its citizens the right to have children as they wish, or to worship as they wish, let alone to vote, is not the sort of nation that can hope to compete over the long term with the boundless creativity and energy, the self-correction and dynamism, of the great free societies.

Andrew W. Smith

Published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia

Presidential predictions

2008-03-17T13:14:00.006-05:00

My amateur prognostication last October -- when John McCain was polling third among Republicans and his campaign was in debt -- was that McCain was the Republicans' strongest candidate, and that winning the Republican nomination would be the harder part for him: If John McCain won the Republican nomination, he would be most likely to win the presidency.

That seems about right today, now that John McCain has in fact become the Republican nominee and Democrats have managed the impossible and turned a broadly favorable political situation with no real policy disagreements into a civil war and the longest primary fight since 1968.

The latest poll averages at Real Clear Politics show John McCain edging out both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, by 0.5 percent and 1.2 percent respectively.

I would expect McCain to "close hard" in the last days before the election. McCain is the safe vote. He has no real liabilities in experience, credibility, partisanship, corruption, plausibility, or likeability.

I would also expect the economic/financial picture to be brighter by Election Day. The numbers may worsen in the current quarter and possibly into the next, but unemployment is still very healthy, at 4.8 percent, and the economy was still growing in the last quarters for which we have statistics -- 0.6 percent in Q4 and 4.9 percent in Q3. The problems so far have been related to the mortgage crisis and the high cost of a barrel of oil. But the stimulus package should help offset the oil inflation, and federal mechanisms are right now being brought to bear on the financial dislocation. Even some of the analysts preaching recession are looking for better numbers by the third quarter.

Iraq is a won war, though it could still be lost, and today the Iraq issue is not the vote-loser for Republicans that it was just a year and a half ago. What is more, Iraq became America's showdown with international jihadism and al Qaeda, and America won. John McCain can be expected to make that point forcefully and repeatedly.

Democrats have become the anti-war party, which historically has shut them out of the White House. Democrats became the anti-war party in 1968 and lost seven of the next ten presidential elections; they became the anti-war party in 1864 and didn't elect a two-term president until 1916. Americans do not elect pacifists, or those who can't take their own country's side in a war, as president.

McCain's age may be an issue, but 71 isn't as old as it used to be, and a solid, young vice presidential pick should mitigate any age concens, plus McCain should be able to make a virtue of necessity with his age, like Reagan did in 1984 especially.

And McCain will be the only candidate in November who fits the presidential "profile". John McCain is an old male WASP (not "Anglo-Saxon" per se in McCain's case, but Protestant British Isles), Episcopalian, which happens to be the most common denomination among presidents, and even named "John", which happens to be the second-most common name among presidents. McCain matches the profile of 42 of the 43 presidents of the United States (the Irish Catholic John Kennedy being the one real exception to the "profile" rule).

I do think a black man or a white woman could become president of the United States, incidentally, but that it would more likely be a conservative woman or conservative black man, not the Clinton and Obama types.

Much ink has been spilled on the subject of the President's low approval ratings, but the lesser-told other side to that story is that the Democrat-controlled Congress has consistently had approval ratings of about ten points lower than the President's for nearly a year now. And all the talk about Democrats out-fundraising Republicans in the presidential race has neglected the fact that Republicans have been winning the fundraising battle of the National Committees.

Plus which, Democrats have no strategists and organizers -- to my knowledge, at least -- to equal Ken Melhman or Karl Rove, both of whom have started advising the McCain campaign. Rove is a towering intellectual of American politics and government, and understands every heartbeat.

And at this point there are no apparent spoilers -- third party vanity candidates who siphon enough votes from one of the big two to throw the election result. The only third party character with a hat in the ring thus far is Ralph Nader, who could only possibly take votes from Democrats, but who is of course unlikely to manage much more than half a percent or so of the national vote.

So there is one man's forecast. I do think the race will be close, that the campaign against Hillary Clinton would differ from the campaign against Barack Obama, and that there are any number of unforeseeable events that could alter the landscape radically, including even attacks in America or overseas. But based on everything I know now, and everything I can foresee, John McCain is the most likely next president of the United States.

The New York Times: Rooting against America's economy since November 2000

2008-03-16T16:31:00.004-05:00

"Sharp Drop in Jobs Adds to Grim Picture of Economy" read the March 7 headline in The New York Times.

That "sharp drop" to which The Times refers was 63,000 for the month of February, which is undeniably unwelcome news, at least for those of us who want to see America moving from strength to strength.

But what was The New York Times reporting for the record 52 consecutive months of job growth that ended just this January? The four years and four months in which the U.S. economy created a net 8.3 million jobs?

The Times can take pride in having predicted this downturn. Indeed, The New York Times has anticipated hard economic times nearly every month since sometime around November, 2000.

When the Labor Department reported last November 3 that the U.S. economy had gained 166,000 jobs in October, The New York Times demurred. "Despite Gain in Jobs Data, Wall Street Is Skeptical". At The Times, "despite" is always a good sort of way to start a headline reporting good news.

128,000 jobs were added in August of 2006, but The Times had the cold water ready for that. The September 2 story was headlined "Jobs and Wages Increased Modestly Last Month", and began, "Job growth seems to be reaching its peak," just in case the poor reader was getting carried away with all the wet blanket-wrapped good news.

The Labor report for July of 2006 found an increase of 113,000 jobs. The August 5 New York Times headline? "Job Growth Slackened Last Month".

And what would The Times do if jobs grew at such a pace that it would be impossible to deny the improvement without losing all credibility? Like a quarter of a million jobs added in a single month?

The jobs report of March 10, 2006 was a blockbuster. In February, the U.S. economy had added 243,000 jobs. So, The New York Times avoided adjectives altogether. " U.S. Says Employers Added 243,000 Jobs in February". Note that "U.S. Says", as if the numbers might be in dispute, or are just one opinion on the subject.

It only got worse from there. The Times actually found a way to turn an explosion of 243,000 jobs in a month into a troubling development, within the first paragraph: "...igniting concerns among many Wall Street economists that higher wages could fuel inflation and increase expectations that the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates further."

In fact, only five of the article's 23 paragraphs were upbeat, and the piece was peppered with lines like, "But the increase in wages was greeted with some furrowed brows." Including at The New York Times, apparently.

The Times even managed to work in a little global warming-ism among the economic data. "January's average temperature of 39.5 degrees was the highest ever recorded." What that has to do with the price of tea in China is unclear, but The Times does have the world's temperature to worry about as well as the negative ramifications of a quarter million fewer jobless Americans.
Give credit where it's due. In 2005, when the United States was busy adding 2 million jobs and there were no national elections for The Times to worry about, the headline writers were good enough to toss the optimists a bone: "Creation of Jobs Surged in April, and Income Rose".

But on May 7, The Times editorial writers calmed their excitable scribes. "If April's numbers are the start of a new upward trend, great. But it's too soon to tell. Policy makers must be especially mindful that the economy has been at this juncture before, and then failed to deliver on its promise."

October 9, 2004: Labor Department reports 96,000 new jobs in September; New York Times reports "Growth of Jobs for Last Month Seen as Sluggish". You'll have to forgive The Times for that one -- you can't have good news getting through at election time.

And as the 52-month job expansion was beginning in August of 2003, The Times headlined "Not Much Job Growth, but Mediocre May Look Good in 2004".

So, at The New York Times, a loss of 63,000 is "sharp" and a gain of 128,000 is "modest"; 96,000 is "sluggish", 113,000 is "slack", and the less said about 243,000, the better.

Play down the good news, play up the bad. That's how The Times makes the news fit to print. Unless of course The Times supports the president of the day, in which case, reverse those rules exactly.

Now The New York Times has that slowdown they've been dreaming of since the last boom began in President Bush's first term, and just in time for a presidential election, too. Better hope the stimulus package doesn't work. But even if it does work, The Times can always say it's only made things worse. An election season would be no time to start acknowledging good news.

It's not for nothing that The Times' circulation and advertising taken the same direction as its writers and editors have been wishing on America 's economy. The bad news is that among those stragglers who still worship at The Times' Gothic nameplate are almost the entirety of the English-speaking world's journalist class, amplifying the axe-grinding of The New York Times in newsrooms from Houston to Halifax .

Surge success and anti-war assumptions

2008-01-13T20:37:00.000-06:00

The last-ditch American drive to win the war in Iraq -- the "surge" policy -- finally took full effect on June 15 of last year. By the end of the year, Iraqi civilian deaths were a quarter of the body count 12 months earlier. Between May and September, U.S. military deaths were halved; By year's end, the death toll had been cut by another two-thirds, to the lowest monthly losses in nearly four years and the second-lowest of the entire war.

American military and civilian leaders have thus far declined to declare even a limited victory, having learned the hard way how fragile victory in the Middle East can be. But the numbers speak for themselves.

No war supporter will deny that the war has taken too long and cost too much, that implanting democracy in the wreck of a Mideastern nightmare tyranny was not exactly like shooting fish in a barrel, or that the desire of all sides for an early draw-down of Western troops in fact enabled the insurgency. But if we war supporters had to re-think the war, some of the anti-war side's assumptions of the past several years are not above re-thinking, as well.

The leaders who are blamed for everything that ever went wrong in Iraq have gotten no credit for the quick and clean invasion or the eleventh-hour pacification, but what about the Congressmen and Senators who authorized and supported the war when it was popular, then opposed and undermined it once that became the popular thing? How should history remember the sort of politicians who do whatever is most convenient at any given time?

The Weapons of Mass Destruction rationale for the war was no "lie." If it was, then the Clinton Administration were liars, too; anti-war foreign leaders like former French President Jacques Chirac were liars, too; and Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Al Gore were liars, too. They all said the same things about Saddam Hussein's WMD threat that the Bush Administration did. The Hussein government actually used WMDs on ten known occasions, after all.

And there were many other grounds for the war named in the joint resolution of the U.S. Congress that authorized the use of force in Iraq. The failure to find WMD stockpiles does nothing to diminish the numerous other justifications for the war. Saddam Hussein ensured that no-one would ever want for good reasons to dismantle his dictatorship.

The United States has not grabbed Iraq's oil. If former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan wrote recently that the war was "largely about oil," he was referring to his own idiosyncratic view, as he explained: "I was not saying that that's the Administration's motive. ... I'm just saying that if somebody asked me, 'Are we fortunate in taking out Saddam?' I would say it was essential. ... I have never heard [Bush and Cheney] basically say, 'We've got to protect the oil supplies of the world,' but that would have been my motive."

Hysterical figures like 655,000 or 1.2 million civilian dead are impossibly high and based on spurious polling and methodology. The most widely-accepted tally has been by Iraq Body Count, which is an anti-war outfit with no interest in diminishing the numbers. That puts the total civilian deaths since March of 2003 at 80,000-88,000. Saddam Hussein's enforcers killed more Iraqi Kurds in a single "Anfal" campaign.

The worst killer of Iraqi civilians remains Saddam Hussein. By far. Human Rights Watch has concluded that Hussein had 100,000 Kurds killed in 1988 alone, and that 290,000 Iraqi civilians in all "disappeared" during Hussein's 23-year tyranny. Which does not include hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed in the pointless 8-year Iran-Iraq War, launched by Saddam Hussein.

So concern for Iraqi civilians can as easily argue in favour of the war to end the Saddam Hussein nightmare, and in favour of the continuing surge against the jihadists and death squads which target civilians.

The Iraqi-al Qaeda connection cited as cause for war in Congress' Iraq resolution has been branded another "lie," but again, even the Clinton Administration was convinced half a decade before the war that al Qaeda and the Hussein government were allied. The Clinton Justice Department's 1998 indictment against Osama bin Laden found that al Qaeda had agreed to "work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq...on particular projects, specifically including weapons development."

And if the pre-war relationship was not extensive enough, no less an al Qaeda authority than Osama bin Laden later called Baghdad the "epicentre of jihad" and "capital of the Caliphate." A more recent Iraq assesment by bin Laden, however, is that "the darkness has become pitch black." Al Qaeda is being routed on its self-described central front in the global war. Pounded and harrassed militarily, and repudiated by practically every sect and tribe of the Iraqi people.

As for the surge's skeptics, the policy has largely separated the insurgency from the Iraqi people, decimated the insurgents, and secured the population. It has taken more American troops, more time and money, riskier tactics, and a final revulsion of the Iraqi people against the jihadists and militants. But a miracle was worked in a matter of months.

It has always been the case that ultimate failure in Iraq would color the entire enterprise as wrong and hopeless. But the other side of the coin is that a lasting fix would re-cast the war in a favourable light, as a worthy cause, and one for which the sacrifice was not in vain.

Andrew W. Smith, Tulsa, Oklahoma and Cape Sable Island, Nova Scotia

Published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia

Saturday Night Live conservatives

2008-01-05T02:40:00.000-06:00

By the time Dennis Miller had his own show on HBO in the late 1990s, he had established himself as pro-death penalty, at least. His HBO show was even the soap-box for a memorably strident defense of American capitalism: "Coming to America and complaining about the capitalism is like walking onto a baseball field and complaining that nobody's playing soccer." But Miller always threw in enough standard fare to defy labelling as a conservative -- like devoting an entire show to "what's wrong with Republicans?" and appealing to Arianna Huffington, of all people, for insight on the subject. Then, in 2004, Miller "came out" on The Tonight Show in the most unabashedly pro-Bush apologia. He later explained that he'd long had some conservative leanings, but that it was after the 9/11 attacks that he "turned the corner" and became more decidedly conservative, with the usual qualifier that he wasn't so conservative on those pesky "social issues". And today he is an impressive conservative commentator, Bush defender, and Rudy Giuliani advocate.

In 1996, Norm MacDonald became the leading Bob Dole impressionist, and when he signed off his last SNL newscast before the presidential election with "Vote for Bob Dole," it seemed more to do with becoming the leading impressionist of a president of the United States than a function of sincere support for Dole's principles. MacDonald appeared on a Comedy Central "year in review" special not long after the 2004 election with a short stand-up act that hit John Kerry's campaign from the sort of angle only a Kerry skeptic would see, but still, nothing declarative. Well, now it turns out that Norm MacDonald is something of a conservative, and a long-time John McCain supporter.

Sometime in the mid '90s, before Reagan nostalgia had spread beyond conservatives, Dana Carvey gave an interview on Later with Bob Costas in which he recalled President Reagan's reaction to his attempted assassination. It was highly sentimental, with the sort of sympathy and admiration quite unlikely in anyone who opposed Reagan's presidency. Carvey's George H. W. Bush impression was a bit of a sensation in the early '90s and earned him a relationship with the actual George H. W. Bush, and there was no concealing Carvey's affection for him. Then in 2003, Carvey actually appeared with Arnold Schwarzeneggar in his first campaign for governor of California, with some "take no prisoners" attacks on the Democrat governor and lieutenant governor.

Adam Sandler signed an open letter in defense of Israel during the 2006 summer war against Hezbollah. Not very Hollywood of him, but impeccable leftists can leave the reservation on a single issue now and then. But it turns out that he's a committed Giuliani supporter, as well as donor, and possibly even a public advocate.

And then there's Victoria Jackson, who has even been known to turn up on The 700 Club. A lifelong devout evangelical Christian and longtime conservative.

This is probably not a complete list, and because SNL has had so many seasons and casts, there would have to be a fair chance, as a matter of statistics, that some of that mountain of SNL alumni would be political conservatives. But one need only watch Comedy Central for any length of time to see that professional comedy and shrilly-partisan stock leftism are twin worlds in America. At least the monopoly is broken.

The Iran NIE: Resetting the nuclear clock, not stopping it

2007-12-21T06:35:00.000-06:00

December 6, 2007

The new U.S. National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear development has itself hit like an atomic bomb of sorts.

The NIE's most immediate implication is that U.S. military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities are not in the offing. Not because the NIE claims Iran will not go nuclear, but because it claims Iran is at least two years away from enriching uranium enough to build a bomb. The military option will only ever be a last resort, and a period of at least two years is outside the "red line" for last resorts.

The 2005 NIE found that Iran could produce enough highly enriched uranium for a weapon "early-to-mid next decade," and "by the end of this decade" at the earliest; the new NIE foresees Iran crossing that weaponization threshold "during the 2010-2015 time frame," with an earliest possible date of "late 2009." So both forecasts agree on timelines, and the nearest point-of-no-return is now only two years out.

The good news is that, if the report is correct, we have a window of opportunity for non-military solutions to the Iran problem.

If the NIE is correct, we need not worry for now about air strikes harming innocents or alienating the pro-Western people of Iran. We need not worry for now about an Iranian retaliation to air strikes, whether upsetting the newfound peace in Iraq, targeting Western soldiers in the region, driving the price of oil even higher, or unleashing terror attacks against Israeli or Western civilians.

And most importantly, if the NIE is correct, we need not worry for now about Iran announcing the detonation of the world's first Islamist nuclear bomb.

The bad news is that National Intelligence Estimates are notoriously faulty. They don't call them "estimates" for nothing.

The catalogue of flawed U.S. intelligence in the past two decades includes the failure to envision the fall of the Soviet Union, the underestimation of Iraq's WMD capabilities before the 1991 Gulf War, the overestimation of those same capabilities before the 2003 Iraq War, and the failure to anticipate the 9/11 attacks and the current global war.

So there is no particular reason, without the benefit of hindsight, to believe that this NIE is some final word in accuracy and analysis. Especially as it neglects Iran's work on heavy water and longer-range ballistic missiles. But, as of now, the new NIE is the best we've got. It is the most current assessment of the U.S. intelligence agencies on the central intelligence question of the time.

The NIE finds that Iran suspended its nuclear program in 2003, and even Israeli officials skeptical of the report agree on that point. 2003 of course coincides with the war to end the Saddam Hussein regime, just across the border from Iran, and largely as a result of Iraq's WMD defiance. President Bush had recently declared Iran part of an "Axis of Evil," along with Iraq, so Iran may have feared that it was next up on the hit list. And Libya was persuaded by Saddam Hussein's example to abandon its WMD program; Iran may have drawn a similar lesson.

But that was 2003. A lot has happened since. Iraq is in hand today, but by the start of this year there was a real possibility of an American withdrawal and defeat there. If American victory in Iraq deterred WMD development, then the prospect of American defeat was presumably having the opposite effect, and by 2005, Iran had resumed its uranium enrichment.

Bizarrely, the NIE credits "international scrutiny and pressure" for Iran's nuclear freeze in fall, 2003, but there had been no such international efforts by the fall of '03. What there had been was the recent example of regime-change in Iraq.

The NIE also finds that Iran has not restarted its nuclear weapons program since 2003, and it is on this point that the Israelis, the NIE's critics, and the 2005 NIE, disagree. The Iranians themselves boast that they are enriching uranium in thousands of centrifuges -- as would be necessary for building a bomb -- and the NIE does not disagree, except to claim that the enrichment is going slowly. So the finding that Iran's "nuclear weapons program" has been halted, but that its uranium enrichment continues, may be splitting hairs. The uranium enrichment would be the biggest part of a weapons program.

The report of slow progress on Iran's nuclear development has been readily received as a defeat for the United States or the Bush Administration. But U.S. and Administration policy is that Iran must not have nuclear weapons. In any less poisonous political environment, a finding that the policy is being realized might even be treated as a small victory, if not a new vindication of the Iraq intervention.

The danger of the NIE is that it will be abused by the Iran appeasers as proof the Islamic Republic is as pure as the driven snow, and give them an excuse for dropping the diplomatic pressure on Iran, let alone even the feeblest threat of military action. The NIE confirms that Iran continues enriching uranium, which is the stuff nuclear weapons are made of, and predicts Iran could have the bomb in as little as two years. But the NIE also allows that the West has time -- not to carry on as usual, but to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear Islamist theocracy, by non-military means. If we do not use this time to halt Iran's nuclear drive diplomatically, we will sooner or later be back to bracing for the military option.

Published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia

Andrew Smith / Andrew W. Smith, Tulsa, Oklahoma and Cape Sable Island, Nova Scotia

Metropolis, 80 years on

2007-11-10T15:55:00.000-06:00

2007 makes 80 years since the premiere of Fritz Lang's epic of science fiction futurism, Metropolis.

Metropolis marks a sort of intersection: It came out of the cauldron of interwar Germany, launched an entire genre of film, and was one of the last great silent pictures, released on the cusp of the "talkie" age which began in earnest with The Jazz Singer later in the same year.

That futurism can contain so much medievalism may be a measure of the irresistible and sometimes fatal pull on the German imagination of the Dark Ages. In the same film, we see both a remarkably prescient projection of a videophone, and a Grim Reaper and skeletal chorus right out of a Black Death-era manuscript. The evocation of the Middle Ages in this brave new world is one of the features that makes Metropolis so compelling, though one wonders if it wasn’t so much a clever juxtaposition as the product of a mentality so fixated on the Gothic that even a film set in 2026 ends up playing out Medieval fantasies.

Metropolis itself is New York City circa 1924 -- when Lang first saw New York for himself -- only bigger and taller and with a few more architecturally audacious edifices here and there. That remains arguably the most striking and familiar image from the film: the Metropolis cityscape, with the skyscraping towers so fantastically high that the ground is almost forgotten, the ant-like traffic bustling in every direction and on multiple levels, and the planes buzzing not far above the higher tiers of traffic.

On the petty but pesky matter of Metropolis’ planes. The tiny biplanes and prop planes in the film were soon to be museum pieces even in 1927, and aircraft evolution had been so fast and furious in that time, it beggars belief that anyone of the time would envision planes a century hence as being exactly like whatever was current. A small point, admittedly, but these things do, as they say, take one out of the movie.

The film does avoid some of the usual pitfalls of futuristic science fiction, especially the unfortunate tendency to outfit the characters in tinfoil jumpsuits and metallic beehive wigs. The costuming, as the aircraft and automobiles, is mainly typical of the time the film was made: slacks and shirts, neckties, suit jackets, hair short and parted on the sides, etc. In fact, only two decades away from the 2026 setting for the film, it seems there was either shrewdness or at least dumb luck in those costuming and props decisions, as the difference between 1927 and 2026 is liable to be less than the difference between 2026 and a 1920s filmmaker's vision of 2026.

It is duly noted that Metropolis is a specimen of German cinematic expressionism, and perhaps that should dull one’s criticisms, but "expressionism" shouldn’t become an excuse for every flaw in the work.

The "plight of the workers" gimmicks particularly are cartoonish, as in the opening scene of the subterranean workers changing shifts, trudging unnaturally slowly and in mechanical lock step, as a signal to us benighted viewers that these are some decidedly non-unionized working conditions. Some silly stunts are tolerable in the name of expressionism. But even the miserable slaves who built Egypt’s pyramids were presumably permitted to trudge in their own gaits. And at that, if the laborers must walk unnaturally to make a point of their enslavement, why not have them walk faster rather than at a snail’s pace which no self-respecting slave-overseer would abide? It’s ridiculous and unnecessary direction and diminishes the film.

And that points to a bigger problem with the film. Why, in this advanced, mechanized future world, are human beings necessary for such menial tasks as mechanically turning dials? In a world in which so much else has been automated – even programmable androids invented -- one might imagine that the task of turning dials would have been sorted out as well. But that of course would have undermined the point of the film, which was to comment on the plight of labor and some class apartheid.

Being a silent film, Metropolis tends toward the hammier school of acting -- overwrought expressions and gestures, etc. -- but that’s a forgivable and indeed charming feature of the era, when such visual embellishments compensated for the silence.

As Maria, Brigette Helm is frankly a little boring. But as "Machine-Maria" -- the android given Maria’s characteristics by its mad scientist inventor, Rotwang -- she’s positively possessed, at times wild and at other times coldly manipulative, with a sinister smirk and an exuberant nihilism. Her Machine-Maria performance ranks with the very best in silent film. Incidentally, Helm’s look is one that seems to have appealed quite specifically to Germans of the era.

Alfred Abel plays Metropolis’ master, Joh Fredersen, and can be something of a show-stealer. More subtle for the most part than typical silent-era actors, and conveys the sort of control and cynicism that one might imagine in a master of this future city of 60 million.

Among Metropolis’ anachronisms is its quite sincere invocation of Christianity. The film is filled with Christian allusions and symbolism, and not for purposes of irony, scorn, or villanization, as would tend to be the case in any nonreligious film of the past several decades. When the hero Freder, son of Joh Fredersen, finds himself in the laboring bowels of the city and witnesses a worker die in service to one of the machines, his point of reference is the human sacrifice culture of Molechism condemned in the Old Testament, and he envisions the factory scene as a stylized Biblical one of ancient Ammonites throwing themselves to the furnace as sacrifices to Molech. It takes some considerable familiarity with the Bible, not to mention an assumption of audience acquaintance with Scripture, to instinctively allude to such a thing as Molechism.

The heroine is named Maria, and is a rapturous John the Baptist-figure/Social Gospel preacher/labor organizer who calls subversive meetings in the catacombs below the city, festooned with crosses. Maria recounts the Old Testament story of the Tower of Babel, but appropriates it as a class struggle "legend". In the passed-over Biblical account, the man-as-god thinking behind the tower was a blasphemous affront to God, whereas in Maria’s legend, the problem with the tower is the conscription of dumb labor to build it and the lack of understanding between that labor and the designers.

Maria points the people to their messiah, or to use the film’s preferred term, "mediator", who happens to be the son of Metropolis’ lord. Only son, at that. And in case we missed anything, this mediator’s head is illuminated as in a medieval icon. He is supposed to be the "heart" that allows the "head" and the "hands" to communicate, which is evidently very important and which, we are given to know from the first frames of the picture, is the moral of the story.

There’s also a cathedral, Scripture passages, the fulfillment of Revelation prophesies, even a burning at the stake, etc., with characteristically Teutonic Medieval embellishments. Christianity comes in many forms, and Metropolis’ Christianity is more along the lines of what was called "Social Gospel", quite Biblically literate, and more accommodative than radical. A Continental Social Democrat’s Christianity, which itself is becoming a bit anachronistic today even in Europe.

The unionist economics of the film is blessedly outmoded today, dated and almost other-worldly, like a debate on women’s suffrage. Speaking of the womenfolk, the workforce of 2026 Metropolis is uniformly male, which, like that ancient biplane and prop plane, was not long for this world even when the film was made. We learn that there are women in Metropolis’ laboring class, and children, but they apparently keep to their housing.

The time of the film’s making must be of some significance. 1927 precedes by a couple years our dating for the Great Depression, when this kind of Marx-inspired art would become even more typical. But Germany is another case. It’s sometimes said that Germany was the first country into the depression and the first out of it, and by 1927, while to the west of Germany were boom-times and happy days, Germany was already an economic basket case, thanks especially to the war, the post-war carving-up of valuable German territory, and Germany’s ruinous Reparations burden. So no doubt all that gave the film some currency and import, as a generation drowning in economic depression is liable to go for a movie that shows economics as some cruel machine, complete with a villain and scapegoat at the controls.

Like so much leftish advocacy art, Metropolis manages to miss the pending cataclysm that was gathering all around it in interwar Germany, and imagines instead some dystopia that would never materialize, in this case a caste system slavery. Not only did the coming slide toward fascism and war elude the filmmakers, but Lang’s then-wife and his Metropolis co-writer would later become quite an enthusiastic Nazi herself, which probably wasn’t much of a stretch. Maybe 1927 was still too early for the specter of fascism and the next global conflagration to have appeared to anyone, although Mussolini had established his Fascist government in Italy some five years earlier.

As politics and as science fiction futurism, Metropolis was no prophet. And as storytelling, it’s less compelling than some of Lang’s other work, like the Dr. Mabuse films. It is as art that Metropolis is magic. So many scenes, like the one in which the diabolical scientist Rotwang merges Maria with his android "Machine-Man" in his fantastical laboratory, with music at least as inspired as the concept itself, are as close to perfection as can be found in any silent film. So many touches, like setting Rotwang’s space-age lab in an ancient hovel in the shadows of Metropolis’ towers, are the stuff of truly great stories.

Metropolis is a tour de force, and legitimately the landmark cinematic achievement which its advocates claim it to be. Just don’t mind the quirks.

(The Murnau Foundation has done an exquisite job of making Metropolis presentable in its old age, being as faithful to the partly-lost original as possible, and adding a brilliant rendering of the original orchestral score by Gottfried Huppertz. The Murnau restoration is distributed in North America by Kino.)

Iran and the power of the presidency

2007-10-12T06:43:00.000-05:00

(Published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia)

Although France's new leadership has been more hawkish in its Iran pronouncements than the Bush Administration, which has yet to go further than the perfunctory "all options are on the table" statements, speculation has grown that a U.S. attack on Iran may be only a matter of months away.

And not for nothing. Iraq has gone from a boil to a simmer for the first time since the explosion in civil strife after February of 2006, allowing attention to turn elsewhere. Four years of European diplomacy have done absolutely nothing to dissuade Iran from going nuclear. And Iran is increasingly, if indirectly, killing Western troops and sabotaging the new democracies of the Middle East. All potentially pointing to an armed confrontation with Iran. But with an anti-war Congress that has already signaled opposition to action against Iran, is there even a possibility of such a thing?

It was not so many years ago that another "lame duck" president, facing a hostile Congress and a United Nations Security Council veto, launched an air war. In March of 1999, President Bill Clinton had 22 months remaining in his final term. Both houses of Congress were vehemently opposed to the Administration, so much so that the House of Representatives had recently made Clinton only the second president to be impeached. Russia, on the Security Council, was certain to veto any resolution for action against Russia's "little brothers," the Serbs.

Nonetheless, invoking the support of NATO, Clinton waged a 78-day air war on Serbia over the issue of Kosovo, and by the time the bombs stopped dropping, Congress had done as it usually does and capitulated to the Commander-in-Chief, funding the operations with money to spare.

This was the trend through the 1990s. It is mistaken for a placid period, but the military missions came one after another: Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, plus many strikes on Iraq, attacks against Afghanistan and Sudan, and a major show of force off Taiwan. All while the United States Armed Forces was being hacked to half its 1992 size, leaving a rump of the Cold War army that would have to improvise and take up the new war against Islamic fascism as of 2001. Congress might as well have stayed home. The Clinton Administration ordered half a dozen military actions citing UN resolutions or NATO support, but without the advance approval of Congress, and often over Congressional opposition.

The Bush Administration, for all the Iraq resolution rejections at the UN Security Council, did seek and receive prior Congressional consent for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, in the 2001 and 2002 "Authorization for Use of Military Force" resolutions, on top of the standing Iraq Liberation Act of 1998.

Of course, the aerial campaigns of the 1990s are an order of magnitude or two down from the full-scale, "boots-on-the-ground," regime-changing wars of today, but it is mainly '90s-style air strikes that are being considered for Iran.

The most pertinent U.S. law in the Iran case may be the 1973 War Powers Act. It was passed by a radicalized post-Vietnam Congress, overriding a veto by President Richard Nixon, and was intended to restrict the role of Commander-in-Chief. But it actually codified the principle that a president can order military action without Congressional authorization, requiring only that the president seek approval within 60 days -- assuming the operation has lasted that long -- and report to Congress within 48 hours.

Presidents since Nixon have tended to take a dim view of the War Powers Act -- Clinton called it "constitutionally defective" -- but it remains the most explicit expression in law of the Congressional view on war powers.

If all this is a sullying of the U.S. Constitution, it is one with a long and respectable pedigree. The United States has used military force a couple hundred times in its couple of centuries; the majority of those deployments have lacked Congressional consent, and only five times has Congress actually declared war as per the Constitution. The subordination of Congress, in its current form, started with President Harry Truman in 1950, and subsequent administrations have entrenched the practice of committing U.S. forces first and asking for permission later, if at all.

Part of the rationale for this is legitimate enough: The necessity of immediate action or an element of surprise. Conducting public hearings, debates, and votes on a military mission for weeks or months beforehand does let the cat out of the bag. But the motivations are also less noble. Congresses are often hostile to the executive branch and likely to automatically refuse approval for "the president's war," administrations tend to view Congress as a second-rate institution on matters of war and peace, and Congresses can be divided, not to mention loath to claim responsibility for risky missions. So presidents often invoke the fullest interpretation of the Commander-in-Chief mantle, and order an operation unilaterally, Congress notwithstanding.

We would be getting ahead of ourselves to assume there will necessarily be an Iran attack. The sabres have yet to be rattled by the Bush Administration, after all. But the question is effectively the President's to decide. He will order strikes on Iran or not, and his lame duck status, the disposition of Congress, and the vetoes on the UN Security Council will have much less to do with it than his judgement of the costs of action and inaction.

Andrew W. Smith/Andrew Smith, Tulsa, Oklahoma and Cape Sable Island, Nova Scotia

The John McCain long shot

2007-10-09T02:17:00.001-05:00

Republicans have won seven of the past ten presidential elections. Two of the three lost elections came when the Republican base considered the candidate unsatisfactorily conservative on domestic issues, and a substantial third party candidacy was mounted. Both times the Democrat won with less than 50 percent of the vote. The years were 1992 and 1996. The Democrat, Bill Clinton, won in 1992 with only 43 percent of the popular vote, and in 1996 with 49 percent.

These points are reappearing in light of a new poll by Rasmussen Reports (which predicted the last presidential election more accurately than any other national poll) and recent remarks from some of the more conservative quarters of American politics, including James Dobson.

The Rasmussen poll shows that, in a presidential contest between Hillary Clinton on the Democrat side and Rudy Giuliani on the Republican side, and if a third party candidate enters the race who is more conservative on domestic issues than Giuliani, Clinton wins, but with only 46 percent of the popular vote. That is a remarkable finding: It necessarily means that 54 percent of voters are signaling they would vote, but could not vote for Hillary Clinton. A candidate who can unite those 54 percent, or at least 51 percent of the anti-Clinton vote, would be the likely bet for next president of the United States.

Which brings us to the conservative base. James Dobson is no official spokesman for the base, but I feel I know him specifically and the base generally enough to say that Dobson makes a reasonable representation of the beliefs and voting patterns of devout Christian and traditionally-minded core conservatives. Dobson appeared on Hannity and Colmes on October 8, and made the starkest pronouncement I have yet heard that under no circumstances will he vote for Rudy Giuliani. Like-minded activists have been threatening to support a third party challenge -- albeit a kamikaze one -- if Giuliani wins the presidential nomination of the Republican Party, or if the nomination goes to one of the other Republicans whose domestic policy conservatism is doubted by the base.

Adding this to the Rasmussen poll, the picture is clearing, that Hillary Clinton cannot command the support of half the voters of America, and that the Republican Party can only take advantage of that fact by nominating a candidate who first satisfies the base on domestic issues.

Incidentally, defense and foreign policy do not enter into this: The main Republican candidates are unified on the "beyond the water's edge" policies.

Successful strategists like Karl Rove drew a conclusion -- though it was no doubt taken from much more than the experiences of '92 and '96 -- that Republicans lose nationally when their base is unenthused, and that motivating the base goes most of the way toward national electoral victory. Most Americans are not Republican, but most Americans are conservative, and to the extent the Republican Party is the conservative party, it stands to attract the most votes in most elections. No doubt the thought is occurring to those strategists today, that this hard-learned lesson may be lost if a strong but less-reliably conservative candidate on dometic policy wins the Republican nomination.

It may be debatable as to whether John McCain qualifies as a top-tier candidate at this point, considering his current ranking in the Republican race. But it was only one presidential cycle ago that John Kerry went from sub-McCain levels to presidential nominee at the very end of the primary process, and McCain has compared better against Hillary Clinton than some of the now-more popular Republican contenders.

The Powerline blog on October 7 made what to me ranks as the shrewdist observation on McCain's standing with the Rebublican base: He is disliked by many Republicans for many reasons dating back many years, but he is a conservative, and would in fact be much easier to cast a vote for than Giuliani or Romney, for the conservative base. He has managed to be a bad Republican, but a better conservative than Giuliani and Romney, who are good Republicans but have spottier conservative credentials.

And there is another, probably sillier point. 43 of the 43 presidents of the United States have been male, and 42 of those 43 have been what is called in America "WASP". That is a very resilient tendency of history. Of the candidates with national appeal in both parties, there are precious few who satisfy that "historical tendency" test. One is John McCain.

It is a long shot today, certainly, but John McCain just might make a more likely "next president of the United States" than the top two candidates in each party. It may be that his greatest challenge is not winning the general election, but winning the Republican primary. The core conservative activists now voicing their concerns about the front-runners -- Giuliani and Romney -- are sounding a warning that can still be heeded. And they are allowing McCain an opening. He would have to mount the kind of rare comeback that John Kerry made after the Iowa caucuses in 2004, but that is a recent demonstration that it can be done.

The Iran conundrum - "Inaction could be catastrophic, and anything less than the most finely-calibrated action could be calamitous as well"

2007-09-23T10:57:00.000-05:00

There has been a real reluctance in the West's confrontation with Iran, and the reasons go beyond the most superficial ones -- the burden of existing commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq or the usual dissent within the West on how best to proceed.

Making matters murkier is that Iran is such a formidable nation. Territorially vast, more populous than Aghanistan and Iraq combined, with the world's second-largest crude oil reserves at a time when oil is an especially good thing to have. Iran has a sophisticated and dedicated military, and sustained a brutal war with Iraq lasting eight years and costing 300,000 Iranian lives, a scant two decades ago. It has a unique language and Persian core population, and an ancient culture with imperial traditions of regional domination. Not to mention, the more permanent parts of the Iranian government are at the same time fanatically anti-Western and constitutionally unconstrained.

The hesitation in dealing with Iran more forcefully also comes from an understanding that the Iranian people are some of the most Western-oriented and savvy in the region, perfectly capable of managing their own affairs in a decent, democratic fashion. It is tragic that a nation which might as easily be a great friend and ally, has ended up one of our most challenging threats. That Iran would become the first modern Islamic theocracy is itself a sad irony: Islamic government ought to be a poor fit for Iran, with its tradition of secular government reaching back some two-and-a-half thousand years.

So there is a sober respect and indeed fear of what Iran would be capable of in retaliation for military strikes on its nuclear production, and a worry that even limited Western air strikes could stir some nationalist reaction and make enemies of the otherwise pro-Western Iranian people. Those have made good arguments against the military option.

What has changed in the past months is the addition to the old equation of a new realization, that Iran is on the attack already: increasingly, without provocation, and with near-impunity.

As of August, about half the attacks on Coalition forces in Iraq have been Iranian-supported. Iran is shelling Iraqi Kurdish territory and threatening invasion. It is arming, training, and funding Iraqi insurgents as well as arming the Taliban in Afghanistan, and its weaponry is the most advanced in the insurgents' arsenals. Iran has even flooded southern Iraq with bogus voters to boost support for its client parties. Hezbollah, Iran's terrorist arm, threatens Israel and subverts Lebanon's democracy. Iran props up Hamas in Gaza and sponsors Islamic Jihad. Even the forces of the genocidal, rogue government of Sudan are considered worthy of training and support by the Iranian theocracy. Iran could probably do worse, but it is wreaking havoc enough already.

At the behest of the Iraqi government, the United States started diplomatic discussions with Iran, reportedly limited to the subject of Iraqi stability. But since those talks began, Iran has actually increased its efforts to sabotage Iraqi peace and democracy, doing little to vindicate the faith in diplomacy for dealing with Iran.

A widely-circulated September 2 report in The Times of London claimed that U.S. plans for a possible Iran attack were to strike not only Iran's nuclear facilities but also its military. Such reports appear with some frequency and are impossible to verify, but this particular story does have the advantage of squaring with some of what can be known. The Iranian military has made itself an active enemy in Iraq especially, it would be very capable of retaliation after any attack, and it is the theocrats' defenders against a popular uprising. All arguments for targeting Iran's military as well as its nuclear capacity in any Iran hit.

Then there is U.S. Executive Order 13224. The Washington Post broke a story last month of the Bush administration’s intention to name Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps a "specially designated global terrorist entity." It would be an extraordinary move. Classifying an official force of a nation state as a terrorist organization is without precedent. But the suit certainly fits. The Revolutionary Guard and its elite, expeditionary Quds Force are the outfits responsible for aiding Iraqi insurgents, the Taliban, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad.

The Executive Order would squeeze the Revolutionary Guard's substantial international financing. Section 6 of the Order could conceivably also lay a legal foundation for military action against the Guard, but at the very least, the terrorist designation would be a signal of seriousness from Washington.

Another possible indication of new seriousness was noted by the veteran commentator Arnaud de Borchgrave. When the new French President Nicolas Sarkozy made his remarkable and blunt foreign policy speech recently, warning that the consequences of diplomacy without results would be "an Iranian bomb or the bombing of Iran," it was shortly after Sarkozy had met with President Bush.

It is a reasonable guess that the Administration has been focused on Iraq, and informed that Iran is not yet at the point of no return in its nuclear project, so it has been enough for now to encourage the domestic opposition to Iran's theocracy, experiment with the diplomatic and economic measures, and hope for some development to intervene before military strikes become necessary, all the while planning and preparing for the military contingencies.

The Iran case is a conundrum. A dangerous enemy with a friendly population that defies clear prescriptions. Inaction could be catastrophic, and anything less than the most finely-calibrated action could be calamitous as well. But the Iranian assault is making things very slightly clearer as the days pass. Action against Iran can only become more likely as Iran continues in its genocidal rhetoric, doomsday-minded drive for the bomb, and now the region-wide offensive against the West it has launched despite our best efforts to decline the fight.

Andrew W. Smith, Tulsa, Oklahoma and Cape Sable Island, Nova Scotia

Published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia

The uncouthness of Churchill

2007-09-05T02:51:00.000-05:00

Citing Winston Churchill as a way of disparaging contemporary leaders is common enough, but what rankles is that it is so often done by people with the sparsest of knowledge of Churchill. People with only a vague sense of the man use their own preferences and prejudices to fill the gaps in their knowledge, and use their imaginary Churchill as a bludgeon against whatever it is they're trying to discredit.

This time the offender was a panelist on Fox News' Red Eye, which is much more cutting-edge and entertaining than one would imagine a news channel comedy show to be. President Bush has given a series of interviews for a new book, excerpts of which were published recently. Apparently Bush was interviewed with his feet on his desk, eating low-fat hot dogs (which I happen to enjoy myself, incidentally), and chomping an unlit cigar. A panelist offered that this was quite unstatesmanlike, remarking that he couldn't picture Winston Churchill giving an interview in such an unbecoming state. The only humor in the line was the unintended irony: Churchill would have been as uncouth as Bush and worse.

Churchill regularly dictated even great speeches while soaking naked in his tub, smoking cigars, and drinking. He once famously met President Roosevelt in a state of undress. So criticize a president all you want for putting his feet up or eating hot dogs during an interview, but don't say it's un-Churchill-like.

One almighty push in Iraq

2007-08-05T06:15:00.000-05:00

Two days after the last of 28,000 American reinforcements had arrived in Iraq, the independent war correspondent Michael Yon e-mailed a brief dispatch, observing, "This is a very serious offensive kicking off in Iraq. ... Nobody that I am seeing realizes just how big this is." Five days later, Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno explained, "We are beyond a surge of forces, and we are now into a surge of operations."

No-one would guess it from the war coverage or the pronouncements of U.S. congressmen, but what is underway is the largest Coalition offensive since the end of major combat operations in 2003. The 11th-hour operational surge, officially named Phantom Thunder, was launched without notice or fanfare, on the same day as the U.S. Armed Forces announced the troop surge complete: June 15.

Iraq being the dominant issue in American public life, the biggest offensive in four years might at least be known to the American people, not just to obsessive followers of military matters. But Phantom Thunder has had less coverage and discussion than the "DC Madam" case. War coverage reliably recounts Coalition and civilian casualties, but not enemy body counts; and whatever explosion the insurgents intended for the evening news that day, but not Coalition operations, much less Coalition successes.

Phantom Thunder is a sort of re-invasion of nearly all Iraq's trouble areas, the insurgent strongholds in Baghdad and the "Baghdad belts" stretching into four surrounding provinces. The objective is to kill, capture, or scare off the insurgents -- mainly al Qaeda in Iraq and the Shiite "Mahdi Army" militia -- and occupy their territory long after, denying them the opportunity to return. This supported by new efforts to strangle insurgent supply lines, as by closing traffic on the Tigris River and policing a double-cordon around Baghdad itself.

In past, when the Coalition has moved in, many insurgents have simply moved on. So these attacks are simultaneous, to help end the unwinnable game of insurgent "whack-a-mole," and the Iraqi Army has occupied some of the more likely destinations for insurgents on the lam.

The cutting edge in Congressional critiques of the war is the "withdraw and fight" school, which declares the policy begun in earnest only weeks ago a failure, and advances an alternative which ironically is precisely the pre-surge policy associated with former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The critics recall that policy as "gross mismanagement of the war," but proceed to endorse its principles: a "small footprint," or minimal American presence, an emphasis on training Iraqi troops, and shepherding American soldiers on bases isolated in safe areas, with limited excursions into trouble spots.

That happens to be the story of the first four years in Iraq. It made good sense as a way of limiting Western involvement and promptly passing power to the new government and Iraqi people, and it may even be a fine idea again if Iraq is successfully pacified. But four years of that very policy did not pacify Iraq, and the surge policy is a recognition of that.

Calling for training the locals at this point is a bit like saying Microsoft ought to try making operating systems. The president made training for Iraqi forces a staple of his re-election campaign three years ago, and the Coalition has done quite a lot of it, to the point that the Iraqi Army is today as large as Britain's.

And as for holding down troop levels and holing up on safe bases, that left territory effectively unoccupied, so that blocks and quarters and cities fell to the insurgents. The new policy puts American soldiers on the streets, and in greater force, to take back and hold territory, and to make the GIs a fixture in the communities.

This is Gen. David Petraeus' counterinsurgency philosophy, drawn from French Algerian Gen. David Galula, that the civilian population can never be an ally -- giving life-saving information or war-winning intelligence -- if they live in fear of the enemy. Once the people are convinced that the Coalition is serious about driving out, and keeping out, the insurgents, then the good information pours in.

There will be a draw down, both in numbers and in mission. There will have to be. The idea was never to run a protracted policing operation on sweltering foreign city streets, but to hand off to a democratic Iraqi government. All sides want a draw down, including the Administration that ordered the increased deployments and expanded operations. It was in part the Administration's desire for a homecoming once the initial mission was complete that wound up enabling the insurgency, as street-level occupation was forgone, allowing insurgents an opening.

The issue now is what is to be done before that inevitable draw down: Complete the first concerted effort to pacify Iraq in four years, or call the whole thing off before the results are even in, and let the chips fall where they may.

It just might be that the soldiers win on the ground, in one almighty push, while the press and politcal class oppose not only their deployment but their cause, and deny any prospect of victory.

Andrew W. Smith, Tulsa, Oklahoma and Cape Sable Island, Nova Scotia

Published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia

Before this history is set in stone...

2007-06-27T00:05:00.000-05:00

"I am heartsick when I think of the mismanagement of our army.... There never was such a shambling, half-and-half set of incapables collected in one government before or since the world began."

That was the hard judgement of a United States Senator on the conduct of the war by the U.S. Administration; only, the senator was Maine's William Pitt Fessenden, the war was the American Civil War, and the Administration was President Abraham Lincoln's. History has been much kinder than the distinguished senator from Maine to Lincoln and his men.

George H.W. Bush was booted from the White House after a single term, derided as a loser: "Stick a fork in him, he's done," etc. In the 1990s he was recalled as a failure for not "rolling on to Baghdad" and "finishing the job" in Iraq, and soulless for abandoning Iraq's Shiites to Saddam Hussein's bloody enforcers. Yet today he is venerated as the wise statesman, prudently averting the hornet's nest of Iraq, and his former detractors are liable to say, "I always liked him." Evidently not enough Americans truly did "always" like him, or he would have had that second term.

Harry Truman is today as uncontroversial a past president as any, and recently ranked seventh-greatest. In his last year in the Oval Office, however, Truman scored the lowest presidential approval rating yet registered by the Gallup Poll: 22 percent. The Korean War, which was truly Truman's war, launched without even consulting Congress, cost 2.8 million lives all 'round, only to end in stalemate. International Communism made its greatest advances under Truman's watch. And the man now beloved and admired by partisans on both sides was unwanted as a candidate in 1952 by his own party.

Even Winston Churchill was famously tossed out on his ear by British voters while the Second World War was still unfinished, informed that he was no longer Prime Minister while representing his country at the war's last summit meeting. He was largely responsible for such catastrophes and debacles as the Gallipoli campaign in the First World War and the Norway expedition in the second. Detested in the 1930s as a blinkered imperialist and warmonger, his career to 1939 earned the biography title, A Study in Failure. And today Churchill is universally understood to be certainly the greatest statesman of the 20th Century, and one of the great figures in all history.

The initial conventional wisdom in these cases proved to be passing. Some distance and subsequent developments changed the perspective entirely. On Iraq, the conventional wisdom has been written and re-written several times already; there is no reason to believe it must necessarily be fixed where it stands today.

At the time of the 1991 Gulf War, the conventional wisdom was that the war was won, Saddam Hussein defeated. That wisdom shifted as the 1990s progressed, and the troubles and military skirmishes with Saddam Hussein continued, to the thinking that the war had been aborted half-finished. By 2005, the conventional wisdom had undergone a third revolution, to the current certainty that removing Saddam Hussein's regime and replacing it with a democracy was wrong, and Iraq ought to be left to its own devices.

So if the past 16 years are anything to go by, and if the conventional wisdom in its present incarnation is heeded and Iraq is abandoned to the jihadists and Iranian proxies, we can expect a new conventional wisdom to form sooner or later, that leaving Iraq was disasterous, and why, oh, why did we not stay on and finish the job when we had the chance?

Iraq and conceivably also Afghanistan may indeed take a dishonourable place in history even after the dust has settled and partisan passions have dimmed, and the leadership may remain villains and scoundrels even in their obituaries. Vietnam and the Johnson and Nixon Administrations are the obvious cases in point, although even there, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon have benefitted somewhat from more recent reappraisals. But the Vietnam War cost 54,000 more American lives than Iraq has, lasted eight years longer, was fought by a draft army instead of volunteer professionals, lacked the context of the 9/11 attacks, and of course ended in defeat. And no, Iraq and Afghanistan are not lost just yet.

"The government has conceived the war wrongly from the start, and no-one has more misconceived it than the Prime Minister himself." The sentiment has been repeated countless times in the past few years on the prosecution of the present wars, but those were the words of British MP Aneurin Bevan in 1942, three years into the Second World War. Even "the good war," the valiant, brilliant, unstoppable crusade, seemed in the darker hours much more like a disaster and a lost cause. The view from the middle of a war is not the clearest.

Andrew W. Smith / Andrew Smith, Tulsa, Oklahoma and Cape Sable Island, Nova Scotia

Published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia