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Mugabe has sealed his doom with one sentence. He has mocked the world’s scribes with, ”How can a ballpoint fight [against] a gun?” How is that for one of Jimmy Carter’s guys?
Robert Mugabe gave warning yesterday that he would not cede power if he loses next week’s election to the Opposition in his most explicit statement yet of his refusal to respect the result.
State-controlled media reported his comments to supporters at an election rally, the latest in a series of increasingly menacing threats as Zimbabwe counts down to the June 27 presidential run-off poll. Mr Mugabe’s military-backed regime has been carrying out a campaign of violence aimed at wiping out the opposition vote.
“We fought for this country, and a lot of blood was shed,” Mr Mugabe told his supporters. “We are not going to give up our country because of a mere X. How can a ballpoint fight with a gun?” …
David Warren with good advice; “Beware the Experts.”
… “Scientists” (i.e. of the species mentioned above), who cannot predict the weather the day after tomorrow with any certainty, are nevertheless certain that they understand what it will be like over the next hundred years, and remain untroubled that all their previous long-term predictions failed, including those which might have been got right by flipping a coin. (For instance, the world has been getting cooler, not warmer, for the last few years.)
But their message to ABC News is unambiguous: “The world will end unless you do as we say!”
This is not an actual quote from any of them, but rather, a fair summation of them all. It is also, by coincidence, the standard message to earth from space aliens in all the classic science fiction movies. I would myself be inclined to take the space aliens more seriously.
We turn now to Europe, where the little electorate of Ireland found itself voting in a referendum this week on the future of the Lisbon Treaty. …
Shorts from John Fund.
Barack Obama has sent a clear but unmistakable response to the pressure he’s been getting to put Hillary Clinton on his ticket as the vice presidential nominee. Yesterday, his campaign named Patti Solis Doyle, the former Clinton campaign manager who was fired in February and has not spoken to Mrs. Clinton since, as the chief of staff who will help guide whomever he picks as his running mate.
A major Clinton fundraiser told the New York Observer he considered the move “the biggest f— you I have ever seen in politics.” According to the unnamed Clinton donor, “Clinton loyalists view [Ms. Doyle] with deep suspicion and believe that she is shopping around a book deal and acted as a background source for an extremely harsh Vanity Fair piece about Bill Clinton.” …
John Yoo in WSJ writes on the Supreme decision on GITMO.
Last week’s Supreme Court decision in Boumediene v. Bush has been painted as a stinging rebuke of the administration’s antiterrorism policies. From the celebrations on most U.S. editorial pages, one might think that the court had stopped a dictator from trampling civil liberties. Boumediene did anything but. The 5-4 ruling is judicial imperialism of the highest order.
Boumediene should finally put to rest the popular myth that right-wing conservatives dominate the Supreme Court. Academics used to complain about the Rehnquist Court’s “activism” for striking down minor federal laws on issues such as whether states are immune from damage lawsuits, or if Congress could ban handguns in school. Justice Anthony Kennedy — joined by the liberal bloc of Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer — saves his claims of judicial supremacy for the truly momentous: striking down a wartime statute, agreed upon by the president and large majorities of Congress, while hostilities are ongoing, no less.
First out the window went precedent. Under the writ of habeas corpus, Americans (and aliens on our territory) can challenge the legality of their detentions before a federal judge. Until Boumediene, the Supreme Court had never allowed an alien who was captured fighting against the U.S. to use our courts to challenge his detention. …
Christopher Hitchens is after folks like Pat Buchanan who want to revise WWII history.
Is there any one shared principle or assumption on which our political consensus rests, any value judgment on which we are all essentially agreed? Apart from abstractions such as a general belief in democracy, one would probably get the widest measure of agreement for the proposition that the second world war was a “good war” and one well worth fighting. And if we possess one indelible image of political immorality and cowardice, it is surely the dismal tap-tap-tap of Neville Chamberlain’s umbrella as he turned from signing the Czechs away to Adolf Hitler at Munich. He hoped by this humiliation to avert war, but he was fated to bring his countrymen war on top of humiliation. To the conventional wisdom add the titanic figure of Winston Churchill as the emblem of oratorical defiance and the Horatius who, until American power could be mobilized and deployed, alone barred the bridge to the forces of unalloyed evil. When those forces lay finally defeated, their ghastly handiwork was uncovered to a world that mistakenly thought it had already “supped full of horrors.” The stark evidence of the Final Solution has ever since been enough to dispel most doubts about, say, the wisdom or morality of carpet-bombing German cities.
Historical scholarship has nevertheless offered various sorts of revisionist interpretation of all this. Niall Ferguson, for one, has proposed looking at the two world wars as a single conflict, punctuated only by a long and ominous armistice. British conservative historians like Alan Clark and John Charmley have criticized Churchill for building his career on war, for ignoring openings to peace and for eventually allowing the British Empire to be squandered and broken up. But Pat Buchanan, twice a candidate for the Republican nomination and in 2000 the standard-bearer for the Reform Party who ignited a memorable “chad” row in Florida, has now condensed all the antiwar arguments into one. His case, made in his recently released “Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War,” is as follows:
That Germany was faced with encirclement and injustice in both 1914 and 1939.
Britain in both years ought to have stayed out of quarrels on the European mainland.
That Winston Churchill was the principal British warmonger on both occasions.
The United States was needlessly dragged into war on both occasions.
That the principal beneficiaries of this were Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong.
That the Holocaust of European Jewry was as much the consequence of an avoidable war as it was of Nazi racism.
Buchanan does not need to close his book with an invocation of a dying West, as if to summarize this long recital of Spenglerian doomsaying. He’s already opened with the statement, “All about us we can see clearly now that the West is passing away.” …
David Harsanyi on Mark Steyn’s “hate speech” trial in Canada.
Canada has a lot to answer for: Rush, Celine Dion, Barenaked Ladies, Tom Green and Howie Mandel, to name a few. But its latest transgression is serious.
In certain parts of Europe, “hate speech” already is a criminal act. When the late journalist and author Oriana Fallaci wrote books critical of Islam in 2002, she was sued in France. Later, Swiss and Italian judges ordered her to stand trial for “defaming Islam.”
In France, Brigitte Bardot — the former film starlet turned animal rights activist — has been convicted five times of “inciting racial hatred.” In one instance, her crime was writing a letter to French officials, objecting to the ritual slaughter of sheep by Muslims.
Sheep to the slaughter, sadly, is a perfect analogy for European states that allow Muslim activist groups — which rarely object to the near-complete lack of freedom of expression in the Islamic world — to dictate what is and isn’t tolerable speech.
But Canada?
The Mark Steyn affair is the most disturbing demonstration of the creeping authoritarianism of political correctness — not only because of Canada’s geographical proximity but also its moral proximity. …