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Mark Steyn uses yesterday’s Bush speech to pull up his Sun-Times column from 2003′s 40th anniversary of Kennedy’s death. This is particularly timely since many Dems wish to change the government in Iraq. Mr. Steyn is wise enough to remind us how that worked once before in a place called Viet Nam.
On Saturday, America remembered the day it’s never forgotten: Nov. 22, 1963. Everyone, as they say, can recall where they were when they heard the news that Kennedy was shot. Even if you weren’t born, you can recall it: the motorcade, Walter Cronkite removing his spectacles, LBJ taking the oath of office, all the scenes replayed a million times in untold documentaries and feature films.
History is selective. We remember moments, and, because that moment in Dallas blazes so vividly, everything around it fades to a gray blur. So here, from the archives, is an alternative 40th anniversary from November 1963:
8 a.m. Nov. 2: Troops enter a Catholic church in Saigon and arrest two men. They’re tossed into the back of an armored personnel carrier and driven up the road a little ways to a railroad crossing. The M-113 stops, the pair are riddled with bullets and their mutilated corpses taken to staff HQ for inspection by the army’s commanders. One of the deceased is Ngo Dinh Diem, the president of South Vietnam. The other is Ngo Dinh Nhu, his brother and chief adviser.
Back in the White House, President Kennedy gets the cable and is stunned. When Washington had given tacit approval to the coup, the deal was that Diem was supposed to be offered asylum in the United States. But something had gone wrong. I use “gone wrong” in the debased sense in which a drug deal that turns into a double murder is said to have “gone wrong.”
Kennedy had known Diem for the best part of a decade. If he felt bad about his part in the murder of an ally, he didn’t feel bad for long: Within three weeks, he too was dead. Looked at coolly, there seems something faintly ridiculous about cooing dreamily over the one brief shining moment of a slain head of state who only a month earlier had set in motion the events leading to the slaying of another head of state. The noble ideals of Camelot did not extend to the State Department or the CIA. …
The Captain posts on the Dems who thought they were in the cat bird seat just a few months ago.
Democrats figured that the August recess would give them plenty of opportunity to raise the heat on Republicans to force a withdrawal date from Iraq. They could return to their home districts, stoke some demonstrations, and return with new momentum after Labor Day to push for retreat. Unfortunately, events have intervened, and now Democrats have to regroup to avoid looking like defeatists while the military effort has started producing successes: …
Wall Street Journal editorial illuminates the environmentalist’s war against energy independence.
Just about everyone claims the U.S. must urgently become “energy independent,” yet at the same time just about every policy that may actually serve that goal is met with environmentalist opposition. That contradiction has impeded the Bush Administration’s attempts to increase domestic energy production. And even the modest progress so far may be blocked because litigation is driving the conflict out of politics and into the courts.
To see this trend at work, look north to Alaska, where lawsuits are blocking an offshore drilling program. …
… The public interest in this case is domestic energy. The U.S. is one of the only countries in the world that chooses to lock up its natural resources. Since 2003, the Administration and Congress have lifted the federal moratoria on a few select areas of the Outer Continental Shelf. The Beaufort basin, which is estimated to hold 27.2 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 8.2 billion barrels of recoverable oil, was one of those. A successful exploratory program could open a new frontier of energy.
That public purpose is what drives the greens bonkers, so they’re trying to create a legal backstop to prevent any Administration from doing what President Bush has done. The Shell case shows that even a long and expensive effort to address every conceivable concern can still be undone by lawsuits. If anyone wants to know why we’re still “dependent on foreign oil,” this is it.
New Editor posts on Hillsdale College prof who speculates why the academy is anti-American.
… Celebrating foreign cultures and rejecting America are two sides of the same multicultural coin; it is the way American multiculturalists demonstrate their own multicultural sophistication to each other. From their perspective, the most anti-American Americans are the most educated Americans. …
John Fund tells us about a new special interest group.
Which special interest has suddenly become a major new player in presidential politics, giving more than $4.1 million in the first half of this year? You’d probably be surprised to learn it was academics. Professors and others in the education-industrial complex gave more money to federal candidates than people working in the oil, pharmaceutical or computer industries. Naturally, over 75% of their money has gone to Democrats. …
Claudia Rosett blogs on the prospects for a UN whistle blower.
UN “Ethics†– Round three. In which UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (your tax dollars pay for at least 22% of everything he does) fails the Ethics test, and the UN outdoes even itself for new highwater marks of hypocrisy. Now the case of the fired whistleblower from the UN Development Program is being handed over, in effect, to some of the very folks on whom he blew the whistle. At the UN, this is called an “independent†review. …
Peter Wehner in Contentions shows the opportunity the GOP has if they can climb down from the earmark express.
… The 2006 mid-term election was viewed by many commentators as an enormous set-back for the GOP. While the results were about typical for a second mid-term election for the presidential party in power, they did not usher in days of wine and roses for Republicans, who trail Democrats on the generic ballot and in fund-raising. But Republicans have an opportunity. The anger that was directed toward the GOP is now being re-directed toward Democrats, who are finding that governing is more difficult than merely opposing. This may allow President Bush and Republicans to define themselves against the failures of the 110th Congress, just as Bill Clinton was able to define himself against the mistakes of Newt Gingrich (recall the government shut-down).
The congressional GOP is in desperate need of re-branding after years in power, when the fires of reform dimmed and died. The party now has an opening, one growing larger by the month. Once-cocky Democrats must wonder how things have come undone quite so fast.
Contention’s Michael Totten also provides important background to the brutal al Qaeda attack last week against the Iraqi Yezidis.
Hundreds of Iraqi Yezidis, members of an ancient religious sect heavily influenced by Persian Zoroastrianism, were murdered last week in the most deadly terrorist attack in the world since September 11, 2001. Fuel tankers packed with explosives were ignited in a refugee camp near the town of Kahtaniya, just outside the Kurdish autonomous region. Officials say the death toll has surpassed 500. The American military says this is the handiwork of al Qaeda. They’re probably right: this has their fingerprints all over it.
John Tierney asks if there’s anything good about men.
What percentage of your ancestors were men?
No, it’s not 50 percent, as I’ll explain shortly. But first let me credit the source, Roy F. Baumeister, who answered that question – and a lot of other ones – in an address on Friday at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association in San Francisco. I recommend reading the whole speech: “Is There Anything Good About Men?â€
As you might expect, he did find something good to say about men, but the speech wasn’t an apologia for the gender, or a whine about the abuse heaped on men. Rather, it was a shrewd and provocative look at the motivational differences between men and women – and at some of the topics (like the gender imbalance on science faculties) that got Larry Summers in so much trouble at Harvard. Dr. Baumeister, a prominent social psychologist who teaches at Florida State University, began by asking gender warriors to go home. …
The Captain with another post. This on the nanny state’s regs about trees. They are modern day Druids.
Bette Midler has long championed environmentalist causes, but apparently that didn’t stop her from cutting down 230 trees on her Hawaiian property. The state will fine The Compost Queen $6500 for removing the trees and grading a road without the proper permits: …
Mark weighs in at the Corner.