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We’re very long today so as to include Weekly Standard comparative biographies of Frederick Douglass and one of Pickings favorites - Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Sorry, but at least the weekend is upon us.
Manchester Guardian columnist with praise for things Bush got right.
Jimmy Carter was cheered when he visited Newcastle with Jim Callaghan. Bill Clinton was lauded in Northern Ireland. But it is more usual, at least with more consequential holders of the office, for American presidents to be told by European demonstrators to go home.
The postwar history of our continent would be different and less benign if the United States had heeded that message. His office, and the system of collective security from which we benefit, would be justification enough to welcome President Bush’s visit to London this week. But there is an additional reason peculiar to the Bush presidency. For all Bush’s verbal infelicity, diplomatic brusqueness, negligence in planning for post-Saddam Iraq, and insouciance regarding standards of due process when prosecuting the war on terror, the world is a safer place for the influence he has exercised.
When Bush ran for president in 2000 he was an isolationist advocate of scaling back America’s overseas commitments. But after 9/11, he was right in not interpreting the attack as confirmation that America was stirring up trouble for itself. The theocratic barbarism responsible for the attack on the Twin Towers was driven not by what America and its allies had done, but by what we represented. In the words of Osama bin Laden, illegitimately appropriating for himself the mantel of Islam, “every Muslim, the minute he can start differentiating, carries hate toward Americans, Jew, and Christians”. …
Ann Coulter comments on Supreme interference in war-making.
After reading Justice Anthony Kennedy’s recent majority opinion in Boumediene v. Bush, I feel like I need to install a “1984″-style Big Brother camera in my home so Justice Kennedy can keep an eye on everything I do.
Until last week, the law had been that there were some places in the world where American courts had no jurisdiction. For example, U.S. courts had no jurisdiction over non-citizens who have never set foot in the United States.
But now, even aliens get special constitutional privileges merely for being caught on a battlefield trying to kill Americans. I think I prefer Canada’s system of giving preference to non-citizens who have skills and assets.
If Justice Kennedy can review the procedures for detaining enemy combatants trying to kill Americans in the middle of a war, no place is safe. It’s only a matter of time before the Supreme Court steps in to overrule Randy, Paula and Simon. … (For the uninitiated, they would be American Idol judges)
David Warren writes on the EU view of the election.
People abroad, who do not like the United States, and do not wish her well, overwhelmingly support Barack Obama for president. This is clear enough from the polls in Europe, and the desultory remarks of unfriendly statesmen around the world. Alas, anti-Americanism is so rife that Obama enjoys overwhelming support in almost every country. His opponent, John McCain, would only stand a chance in the U.S., Afghanistan, and Iraq. And maybe Poland.
The issue is important, for practical reasons, quite beyond the pleasure it would give Bush-haters to watch an Obama inauguration. From the disordered way he has run his campaign, from the list of key supporters he has had to abandon, from his remarkably ignorant statements on foreign policy, and much else besides when away from his teleprompter, it does not follow that Obama would make a bad president. Miracles have happened in history, weak characters turned out to be strong when it counted, and many frightening challenges (one thinks of the 13th-century Mongol threat to Europe) suddenly evaporated. It is unwise to bank on miracles, however.
What does follow is that, should he become president, Barack Obama, and by extension the United States, will be severely tested. The tyrants of this world are not governed by gooey, feel-good notions about “change we can believe in.” A president who strikes them as naive, indecisive, and poorly briefed, will soon be given the opportunity to prove otherwise. Leaders of Iran and North Korea — of China, for that matter, even Russia — will be eager to learn just how far they can get with the new guy, and his unimpressive advisers. They will try things on that they would not think of trying on John McCain. …
Jonah Goldberg covers the Steyn trial in Canada.
Mark Steyn, my friend, colleague, and arguably the most talented political writer working today, is on trial for thought crimes.
Steyn — a one-man media empire based in New Hampshire — was published a few years ago in Maclean’s. Now the magazine and its editors are in the dock before the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal on the charge that they violated a provincial hate-speech law by running the work of a hate-monger, namely Mark Steyn. A similar prosecution is pending before the national version of this kangaroo court, the Canadian Human Rights Commission.
Not that the facts are relevant to the charges, but here’s what happened. Maclean’s ran an excerpt from Steyn’s bestseller, America Alone.
The Canadian Islamic Congress took offense. It charged in its complaint that the magazine was “flagrantly Islamophobic” and “subjects Canadian Muslims to hatred and contempt.” It was particularly scandalized by Steyn’s argument that rising birthrates among Muslims in Europe will force non-Muslims there to come to “an accommodation with their radicalized Islamic compatriots.” …
Corner Post by Michael Novak on the media’s role trashing the economy.
Why has so much of the media accepted the deep recession story when the data is so mixed? The most plausible explanation is that many are motivated by political bias.
Economist John Lott and I studied thousands of economic news stories written over the past 30 years or so, and found that coverage tended to be far more negative when there was a Republican in the White House as there is now.
The bias has an easy explanation. Yale University economist Ray Fair has shown that a weak economy hurts the incumbent party. If a Democratic-leaning press can convince everyone that the economy is in recession, then it can influence the election.
Our analysis indicates that the treatment of the economy would be much different if there were a Democrat in the White House today. If so, then the headline of each bad piece of news would be, more accurately, “Economy Hovering Above Recession.”
But instead of that, we get doom and gloom.
Pickerhead has been surprised at the stunning ignorance Obama has displayed at times. For example, the story of an uncle who liberated Auschwitz, which of course, is in Poland, a country never visited by American troops. Now Power Line posts on additional Obama errors.
Speaking in unscripted environments on important issues, Barack Obama betrays a troubling lack of knowledge. He does not appear to know what he’s talking about. In his interview with ABC’s Jake Tapper earlier this week, for example, Obama advocated an approach to combating terrorism that is supposedly more attuned to legal issues than the Bush administration’s:
It is my firm belief that we can track terrorists, we can crack down on threats against the United States. But we can do so within the constraints of our Constitution. Let’s take the example of Guantanamo. What we know is that in previous terrorist attacks, for example, the first attack against the World Trade Center, we were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial. They are currently in U.S. prisons, incapacitated.
Andrew McCarthy (the lead prosecutor of the perpetrators of the 1993 WTC attack) comments:
This is a remarkably ignorant account of the American experience with jihadism. In point of fact, while the government managed to prosecute many people responsible for the 1993 WTC bombing, many also escaped prosecution because of the limits on civilian criminal prosecution. Some who contributed to the attack, like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, continued to operate freely because they were beyond the system’s capacity to apprehend. Abdul Rahman Yasin was released prematurely because there was not sufficient evidence to hold him — he fled to Iraq, where he was harbored for a decade (and has never been apprehended).
McCarthy discusses the subsequent terrorist attacks on Americans and American assets during the Clinton administration culminating in the 9/11 attack at the outset of the Bush administration. He notes the futility of the law enforcement approach to combating terrorism. But Obama’s comments fall short on additional factual grounds as well. …
The Weekly Standard compares the lives of two freedom fighters, Fredrick Douglass and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
Seeing Europe for the first time, a young Somali woman was dazzled by its order and cleanliness and its ingenious efficiency. It was “like a movie.” Düsseldorf “looked like geometry class, or physics, where everything was in straight lines and had to be perfect and precise.”
The buses in Holland were “sleek and clean; their doors opened by themselves.” She was spooked by their “eerie punctuality.” Policemen were courteous and helpful, not ominous. Garbage collection was an elaborate minuet performed by citizens–”you had to put the garbage containers out at the proper time, in the proper way. Brown was for organic waste; green was for plastic; and newspapers were something else entirely, some other time”–and government, which, if you did your part, “came the next morning and whisked it all away for recycling.”
Her first weekend in the Netherlands, this newcomer, who had lived in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and Kenya, stayed with the cousin of a friend. Her hostess walked her around the neighborhood.
All the houses were alike, and all the same color, laid out in rows like neat little cakes warm from the oven. They were all new homes with flouncy white lace curtains, and the grass in front was all green and mown evenly, to the same height, like a neat haircut. In Nairobi, except in the rich estates, colors were garish and houses were completely anarchic–a mansion, a half-built shanty hut, a vacant lot all jumbled together–so this, too, was new to me.
It was 1992, and this young woman, transiting Europe en route to Canada and a forced marriage to a distant cousin, had bolted to Holland almost on the spur of the moment after hearing of its lenient policies toward asylum seekers. Her wide-eyed wonder at her surroundings calls to mind a passage from a much earlier memoir in which a young man recounted his own experience of stepping into a new world.
In September 1838, a newly escaped slave walked the streets of New Bedford, Massachusetts. A product of the plantations of Talbot County, Maryland, and the shipyards of Baltimore, this young man marveled at the display of wealth and industry, at the mighty ships and granite warehouses. He noticed, too, that
almost every body seemed to be at work, but noiselessly so, compared with what I had been accustomed to in Baltimore. There were no loud songs heard from those engaged in loading and unloading ships. I heard no deep oaths or horrid curses on the laborer. I saw no whipping of men; but all seemed to go smoothly on. Every man appeared to understand his work, and went at it with a sober, yet cheerful earnestness, which betokened the deep interest which he felt in what he was doing, as well as a sense of his own dignity as a man. To me this looked exceedingly strange.
Proceeding from the wharves to explore the town, he would remember,
Every thing looked clean, new, and beautiful. I saw few or no dilapidated houses, with poverty-stricken inmates; no half-naked children and bare-footed women, such as I had been accustomed to see in Hillsborough, Easton, St. Michael’s, and Baltimore. The people looked more able, stronger, healthier, and happier, than those of Maryland. I was for once made glad by a view of extreme wealth, without being saddened by seeing extreme poverty. But the most astonishing as well as the most interesting thing to me was the condition of the colored people, a great many of whom, like myself, had escaped thither as a refuge from the hunters of men. I found many, who had not been seven years out of their chains, living in finer houses, and evidently enjoying more of the comforts of life, than the average of slaveholders in Maryland.
Born a little over 150 years apart, Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) and Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) both had the experience, on the threshold of adulthood–he was 20, she 22–of fleeing the culture they’d grown up in and entering another. For both, it was a run toward freedom. In each case, a short train ride and a name change to foil pursuers were the fateful turning points in a remarkable life they would recount in bestselling memoirs. …