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John Fund says maybe the Dems will drop the Armenian bill. John also comments on good GOP showing in Mass.
… Another GOP House member noted that then-House Speaker Denny Hastert “did the right thing” in 2000 when he pulled the resolution from the floor despite promises he had made to the Armenian community that it would come to a vote. …
(Hastert pulled the bill in 2000 upon a Bill Clinton request. Bush made the same request of Pelosi Tuesday and she refused. An interesting and telling juxtaposition, especially since in 2000 we weren’t even at war with tens of thousands of our troops at risk.) – Pckrhd
John Stossel will be on ABC’s 20/20 tomorrow with a segment on global warming.
Since Mark Steyn is on the front lines, he can describe our country as in the midst of a “cold civil war.”
… A year before this next election in the U.S., the common space required for civil debate and civilized disagreement has shriveled to a very thin sliver of ground. Politics requires a minimum of shared assumptions. To compete you have to be playing the same game: you can’t thwack the ball back and forth if one of you thinks he’s playing baseball and the other fellow thinks he’s playing badminton. Likewise, if you want to discuss the best way forward in the war on terror, you can’t do that if the guy you’re talking to doesn’t believe there is a war on terror, only a racket cooked up by the Bushitler and the rest of the Halliburton stooges as a pretext to tear up the constitution.
Americans do not agree on the basic meaning of the last seven years. If you drive around an Ivy League college town — home to the nation’s best and brightest, allegedly — you notice a wide range of bumper stickers, from the anticipatory (“01/20/09″ — the day of liberation from the Bush tyranny) to the profane (“Buck Fush”) to the myopically self-indulgent (“Regime Change Begins At Home”) to the exhibitionist paranoid (“9/11 Was An Inside Job”). Let’s assume, as polls suggest, that next year’s presidential election is pretty open: might be a Democrat, might be a Republican. Suppose it’s another 50/50 election with a narrow GOP victory dependent on the electoral college votes of one closely divided state. It’s not hard to foresee those stickered Dems concluding that the system has now been entirely delegitimized. …
Daniel Henninger’s Thursday column does a good job summarizing Gen. Sanchez’s Jeremiad. Pickerhead’s favorites are those directed at the media.
The media. “It seems that as long as you get a front-page story there is little or no regard for the ‘collateral damage’ you will cause. Personal reputations have no value and you report with total impunity and are rarely held accountable for unethical conduct. . . . You assume that you are correct and on the moral high ground.”
“The speculative and often uninformed initial reporting that characterizes our media appears to be rapidly becoming the standard of the industry.” “Tactically insignificant events have become strategic defeats.” And: “The death knell of your ethics has been enabled by your parent organizations who have chosen to align themselves with political agendas. What is clear to me is that you are perpetuating the corrosive partisan politics that is destroying our country and killing our service members who are at war.”
Christopher Hitchens makes the case for the Anglosphere in City Journal. He starts with an Arthur Conan Doyle visit to the US in the 1890′s.
Doyle’s visit coincided with the height of this anti-British feeling, and at a dinner in his honor in Detroit he had this to say:
You Americans have lived up to now within your own palings, and know nothing of the real world outside. But now your land is filled up, and you will be compelled to mix more with the other nations. When you do so you will find that there is only one which can at all understand your ways and your aspirations, or will have the least sympathy. That is the mother country which you are now so fond of insulting. She is an Empire, and you will soon be an Empire also, and only then will you understand each other, and you will realize that you have only one real friend in the world.
After Detroit, Doyle spent Thanksgiving with Kipling and his American wife, Carrie, in Brattleboro, Vermont. It is of unquantifiable elements such as this that the Anglo-American story, or the English-speaking story, is composed.
Jonathan Gurwitz writes a good column on the Dem attack on Limbaugh.
Neal Boortz notices a campus protest you’d like.
Times, UK reports possible home price collapse in Britain.
James Taranto notes problems for Iraqi undertakers.
Corner posts on new blog by editors of NY Times. Good start for the humor section.