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John Stossel’s column gets the lead again with “Freedom and Benevolence.”
I interviewed Michael Moore recently for an upcoming “20/20″ special on health care. It’s refreshing to interview a leftist who proudly admits he’s a leftist. He told me that government should provide “food care” as well as health care and that big government would work if only the right people were in charge.
Moore added, “I watch your show and I know where you are coming from. … “
He knows I defend limited government, so he tried to explain why I was wrong. He began in a revealing way:
“I gotta believe that, even though I know you’re very much for the individual determining his own destiny, you also have a heart.”
Notice his smuggled premise in the words “even though.” In Moore’s mind, someone who favors individual freedom doesn’t care about his fellow human beings. If I have a heart, it’s in spite of my belief in freedom and autonomy for everyone.
Doesn’t it stand to reason that someone who wants everyone to be free of tyranny does so partly because he cares about others? …
Tony Blankley looks at the senate in “Chamber of Shame.”
… But if al Qaeda can plausibly claim they drove America out of Iraq (just as they drove the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan), they will gain literally millions of new adherents in their struggle to destroy America and the West. We will then pay in blood, treasure and future wars vastly more than we are paying today to manage and eventually win our struggle in Iraq.
Our staying power, unflinching persistence in the face of adversity, muscular capacity to impose order on chaos and eventual slaughtering of terrorists who are trying to drive us out will do more to win the “hearts and minds” of potentially radical Islamists around the world than all the little sermons about our belief in Islam as the religion of peace. As bin Laden once famously observed — people follow the strong horse.
We have two choices: Use our vast resources to prove we are the strong horse or get ready to be taken to the glue factory. …
Theodore Dalrymple who was here last week reviewing a book by Walter Laqueur writes on the uncomfortable choices facing Brits.
… A friend who met me at the airport said something that must by now be true of many ordinary British people. Just as we used to wonder, on meeting Germans of a certain age, what they had done during World War II, so she wondered, when she found herself next to a young Muslim on a bus or a train, what he thought of the various bombings perpetrated by his co-religionists and whether he might be a bomber. She found herself looking for the nearest exit, as we are all enjoined to do by flight attendants before the plane takes off, in case of the need for swift exit.
There are reasonable grounds for suspicion, of course. Surveys — for whatever they are worth — show a surprising, and horrifying, degree of sympathy, if not outright support, for the bombers on the part of the young Muslim population of Britain. They show that a large number of Muslims in Britain want the implementation of Sharia law and think that murdering British Jews is justified simply because they are Jews. And when an atrocity is perpetrated by a Muslim, they evince no passion remotely comparable to that aroused by, say, the work of Salman Rushdie. …
Jonah Goldberg has fun with Live Earth.
… if fans had somehow missed the global-warming story entirely, imagine how befuddled they must have felt while listening to Dave Matthews sing the glories of cloth diapers. And, assuming they didn’t hit the mute button when Czech supermodel Petra Nemcova came to the stage, one wonders what any climate-change ingenues might have made of her remarks. The model, who nearly was killed in Thailand by the 2004 tsunami, explained that she “didn’t feel hate toward nature†because of the tsunami. “I felt nature was screaming for help.â€
It’s nice that Nemcova didn’t want to blame the messenger, but it’s hard to feel a similar reluctance about Live Earth’s impresario in chief. Former Vice President Al Gore recently penned a book in which he rails against the current “assault on reason†by the evil forces of Earth-hating right-wingery. He repeatedly invokes science as if it’s his exclusive property. But the soft paganism on display in Nemcova’s faith-based assertion that a suboceanic earthquake was the result of Mother Nature sending us a message is typical of greenhouse gasbaggery. Gore talks about the dysfunction of political discourse today. But when it comes to global warming, he and his acolytes insist that the time for debate is over. In other words, Gore’s ideal discourse would involve only discussion about how best to follow through on his prescriptions. …
Rich Lowry posts on part of McCain’s problem.
One of the problems with senators as presidential candidates is that they usually have never run anything, so they are not well-suited for an executive role. That seems to have been part of the problem with McCain. …
Yesterday Kathleen Parker took on marijuana laws. Today Debra Saunders illuminates sentencing inequities in crack/cocaine laws that weigh heavily on African Americans. She wanders too much, but readers can see some of the problems.
When Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, it wrongly included language that meted out a mandatory minimum sentence of five years for dealing 5 grams of crack cocaine, yet the same five-year mandatory minimum sentence for dealing 100 times that amount, or 500 grams, of powder cocaine. Thus the bill codified a racially unjust divide. The U.S. Sentencing Commission found that in 2000 some 84.7 percent of federal crack offenders were black, while only 5.6 percent were white.
Everyone in Washington knows that the law is unfair — obscenely unfair. The U.S. Sentencing Commission has made four recommendations to curb the sentencing inequity. Alas, for the past two decades, Democrats and Republicans have cravenly set out to out-posture each other in toughness in the war on drugs. So Washington either voted against or ignored the Sentencing Commission’s recommendations. …
American Thinker notes NY Times bonds have rating cut. Yesterday we claimed not to indulge in schadenfreude. We lied. We do enjoy it when the Times gets what it so richly deserves.
Lileks is here.