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Mark Steyn covers her new health plan with, “Bend Over for Nurse Hillary.”
… Last week freedom took another hit. Hillary Rodham Clinton unveiled her new health care plan. Unlike her old health care plan, which took longer to read than most cancers take to kill you, this one’s instant and painless – just a spoonful of government sugar to help the medicine go down. From now on, everyone in America will have to have health insurance.
Hooray!And, if you don’t, it will be illegal for you to hold a job.
Er, hang on, where’s that in the Constitution? It’s perfectly fine to employ legions of the undocumented from Mexico, but if you employ a fit 26-year-old American with no health insurance either you or he or both of you will be breaking the law? …
… Do you remember the so-called “government surplus†of a few years ago? Bill Clinton gave a speech in which he said, yes, sure, he could return the money to taxpayers but that we “might not spend it the right way.†The American political class has decided that they know better than you the “right way†to make health care decisions. Oh, don’t worry, you’re still fully competent to make decisions on what car you drive and what movie you want to rent at Blockbuster.
For the moment.
But when it comes to the grownup stuff, best to leave that to Nurse Hillary.
Charles Krauthammer on the Israeli raid in Syria.
… This is an extremely high-stakes game. The time window is narrow. In probably less than two years, Ahmadinejad will have the bomb.
The world is not quite ready to acquiesce. The new president of France has declared a nuclear Iran ” unacceptable.” The French foreign minister warned that “it is necessary to prepare for the worst” — and “the worst, it’s war, sir.”
Which makes it all the more urgent that powerful sanctions be slapped on the Iranian regime. Sanctions will not stop Ahmadinejad. But there are others in the Iranian elite who might stop him and the nuclear program before the volcano explodes. These rival elites may be radical, but they are not suicidal. And they believe, with reason, that whatever damage Ahmadinejad’s apocalyptic folly may inflict upon the region and the world, on Crusader and Jew, on infidel and believer, the one certain result of such an eruption is Iran’s Islamic republic buried under the ash.
John Fund thinks Ted Stevens might be gone soon.
Bill Kristol finds hypocrites at Columbia.
… Actually, this is a liberal university president at his stupidest. As Powerline‘s Scott Johnson put it, “Columbia’s prattle about free speech may be a tale told by an idiot, but it signifies something. And President Bollinger is a fool who is not excused from the dishonor he brings to his institution and his fellow citizens by the fact that he doesn’t know what he is doing.” …
VDH Corner post on the same subject.
… Still, if one examines the recent shameful treatment of Chermerinsky at Irvine, Summers at Davis, and the idea of inviting a terrorist to Columbia, the lowest common denominator is not even politics, but stupidity on the part of university administrators, who blunder into decisions, then give sanctimonious lectures about free speech, a topic they have rarely have studied and know nothing about, and then usually cave when reminded of how embarrassing they’ve become.
All this is just another reminder how divorced from our common culture and workplace academics have become, and how little respect the public accords them. Proof?
The replacement for the gender-insensitive Summers apparently will be Gov. Schwarzenegger-who fought serial accusations of groping in his first gubernatorial campaign and was once sued for sexual harassment.
James Taranto gets in his Columbia licks.
… If the U.S. military executed homosexuals instead of merely discharging them, perhaps Bollinger would welcome ROTC back to Columbia.
Jeff Jacoby says Dems are afraid of MoveOn.
… The only Democratic presidential candidate unafraid to tell off MoveOn was Senator Joseph Biden. Queried on “Meet the Press,” he replied forthrightly: “I don’t buy into that. This is an honorable guy. He’s telling the truth.”
So this is what the Democrats’ leading lights have been reduced to — wobbling and weaving for fear of offending the hyperventilators in far left field. Do Clinton, Edwards, and Obama really have no idea of the esteem in which most Americans hold military officers like Petraeus? (From Gallup: “The military remains the top-rated institution of Americans, with 73% saying they have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in it. . . . HMOs, big business, and Congress earn the least amount of confidence.”) Did they learn nothing from the “botched joke” that ended John F. Kerry’s presidential hopes once and for all? Is retaining MoveOn’s good will so important to them that they will look the other way even when the integrity of a distinguished American general is recklessly trashed?
“If you are not tough enough to repudiate a scurrilous, outrageous ad such as that, then I don’t know how you are tough enough to be president of the United States.” So said an indignant Senator John McCain the other day. You don’t have to be a Republican to feel the same way.
Ken Burns has a new series starting tonight. We have two reviews from the WSJ.
Brendan Miniter was published first.
… The film makes clear that World War II was a “necessary war” in which the U.S. was unquestionably on the right side, but one that nonetheless came at a steep price. And that price, as in every bloody military conflict, was paid in two ways. Families at home suffered from the loss of their loved ones. And those on the front lines witnessed–even meted out–brutality they never would have imagined before the war. For example, one U.S. Marine–to the horror of his comrades–robbed a wounded Japanese soldier, using a knife to pry loose his gold teeth.
Asked about a line in the film that revealed this theme early on, Mr. Burns recited it from memory before it could be completely read to him: “The Second World War brought out the best and the worst in a generation–and blurred the two so that they became at times almost indistinguishable.” “The War” isn’t aimed as a commentary on the global war on terror or the war in Iraq–production on it began before 9/11–but Mr. Burns told me that he thinks the timing is good. “It agitates the questions about war” that should arise from viewing the reality that is armed human conflict.
Dorothy Rabinowitz showed up this weekend.
… As history, the series is inarguably valuable not only for its treatment of battles nowadays comparatively unknown, like Salerno and Anzio, but also as potential instruction for the fearfully large population of television-watching 20-somethings — or older — not quite sure whether it was the Chinese or the Italians who bombed Pearl Harbor. The astounding narrative of the Bataan Death March, told by a long-embittered survivor, Glenn Frazier, isn’t exactly boring history, of which there is, in fact, none in these 15 hours — hours which include, in extensive treatment, the internment of Japanese-Americans, segregation of the military, and the crimes of Nazism.
Mr. Burns has made it clear in various interviews that one of his prime intentions in this series, was to undo the notion of World War II as “the good war.” Or, as he told a Newsweek reporter this week, with some abandon, it was time to “just unwrap the bloodless, gallant myth of the Second World War. . . .” Here Mr. Burns has shown himself prone to some mythmaking of his own — specifically the myth that there prevails, in our times, some notion that World War II was bloodless. Americans knew it was not in 1945, and they know plenty more about the war now, as they know, too, that it was not all gallantry and victories. It requires a certain willed distance from reality to believe — despite all the documentaries on the war’s bloody toll, its needless battles and misbegotten strategies, which air regularly on television — that a benighted America is in need today of a rescuer to save it from its illusions about the war.
Mr. Burns’s zealous effort to eradicate any hint of a “good war” aura has come at a cost to his series. Thanks to its scope and ambition, and above all to Americans introduced here — those who went to war and survived to speak for themselves and the others whose lives spoke for them — it is nonetheless a profound and moving work.
The Economist reports on the high tech search for Steve Fosset.
Jonah Goldberg starts the humor section with a Dan Rather piece.
In 2004, at the height of the Dan Rather Memogate story, I wrote in National Review: “Across the media universe the questions pour out: Why is Dan Rather doing this to himself? Why does he drag this out? Why won’t he just come clean? Why would he let this happen in the first place? Why is CBS standing by him? Why … why … why?
“There is only one plausible answer: Ours is a just and decent God.”
Well, God has not forsaken us. Dan Rather seems divinely inspired to crash more times than a Kennedy driving home from an office party. The multimillionaire semi-retired newsman is suing for $70 million, $1 million for every year he’s been alive since he was 5 years old. Which is fitting, because that’s what he sounds like. The gist of his lawsuit is that CBS used him as a “scapegoat” in the Memogate story to “pacify the White House.” The swelled-headed former anchor, who used to brag incessantly about his toughness and independence, also whines in his suit that the network forced him to apologize under duress when “no apology from him was warranted,” and that the former managing editor of CBS News “was not responsible for any such errors.” …