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Mark Steyn’s Sun-Times column juxtaposes changing light bulbs and voting for defeat in Iraq.
… In Khartoum, Tehran, Moscow and elsewhere, the world’s mischief-makers have reached their own conclusions about how much serious “work” America is prepared to do.
Charles Krauthammer gives his Yeltsin send-off.
… Yeltsin is not the first great revolutionary to have failed at building something new. Nonetheless, it is worth remembering what he did achieve. He brought down not just a party, a regime, and an empire, but an idea. Communism today survives only in the lunatic kingdom of North Korea, in Fidel Castro’s personal satrapy and in the minds of such political imbeciles as Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, who can sustain his socialist airs only as long as he sits on $65 oil.
Outside of college English departments, no sane person takes Marxism seriously. Certainly not Putin and his KGB cronies. In the end, Yeltsin succeeded only in midwifing Russia’s transition from totalitarianism to authoritarianism with the briefest of stops for democracy—a far more modest advance than he (and we) had hoped, but still significant. And for which the Russian people—and the rest of the world spared the depredations of a malevolent empire—should forever be grateful.
Couple of good posts from Power Line.
WSJ and then Amity Shlaes at Bloomberg News with more on Wolfowitz. You will not believe the World Bank Ms. Shlaes shows us.
The Captain gets us up to date on some of Jimmy Carter’s benefactors. The Captain quotes Alan Dershowitz.
… Recent disclosures of Carter’s extensive financial connections to Arab oil money, particularly from Saudi Arabia, had deeply shaken my belief in his integrity. When I was first told that he received a monetary reward in the name of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahayan, and kept the money, even after Harvard returned money from the same source because of its anti-Semitic history, I simply did not believe it. How could a man of such apparent integrity enrich himself with dirty money from so dirty a source? And let there be no mistake about how dirty the Zayed Foundation is. I know because I was involved, in a small way, in helping to persuade Harvard University to return more than $2 million that the financially strapped Divinity School received from this source. Initially, I was reluctant to put pressure on Harvard to turn back money for the Divinity School, but then a student at the Divinity School, Rachael Lea Fish showed me the facts. …
And if you’re wondering what to think about Tenet’s book, the Captain posts on one of Tenet’s critics, Michael Scheuer.
… Scheuer offers this contemptuous evaluation of Tenet as CIA chief:
‘Still, he may have been the ideal CIA leader for Clinton and Bush — denigrating good intelligence to sate the former’s cowardly pacifism and accepting bad intelligence to please the latter’s Wilsonian militarism.’
And now Tenet can sell the American public what it wants to hear.
Shorts from National Review.
John Tierney gives us the verdict for Dr. Hurwitz.
Want to clean up the environment? You must industrialize.
While the modern environmental movement often portrays capitalist industrial societies as the world’s biggest pollution problem, Forbes notes something interesting about the top-25 cleanest cities in the world: Most of them are in wealthy industrialized democracies. Turns out, all that industrialization created wealth which, in turn, buys the things (mass transit, especially) and pays for the policies that create a cleaner environment. …
Taxes around the world from Greg Mankiw.