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Today’s Pickings examines in detail the case in favor of profiling. It started with Tunku Varadarajan and Bret Stephens who both wrote on the subject. Then David Warren showed up with a fascinating piece that wandered around some before making some very good points. (That’s kinda his style. Isn’t it?) Later David Harsanyi hopped on. To set the tone, we start with Roger Simon who wishes to call a spade a spade.
And, by the way, this coming weekend the NY Times Magazine has a nicely balanced look at the Florida race for U. S. Senate between Crist and Rubio. At 8,000 words it’s too long for us here, so if you want to read it you must follow this link. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magazine/10florida-t.html?ref=magazine&pagewanted=print
Roger Simon blogs about the effectiveness of the euphemisms currently circulating.
…Not that the “War on Terror” is an accurate appellation in the first place. “Man-caused disasters” is actually a euphemism of a euphemism, because the “War on Terror” itself has no real meaning. Terror is a method, not an end or a place. Fighting a “War on Terror” is like fighting a War on Cannons or Airplanes. Meaningless.
But we all know that the “War on Terror” is actually a euphemism for the “War on Radical Islam.” But nobody says it. Nobody official anyway. (Bush did say something like that once in a speech, as I recall, but was quickly shouted down by the nabobs of political correctness.) …
…I know there are those who thought that this soft-pedaling of this war would calm down the Islamic world and make things go away, but by now events have shown them to be wrong. From Sana’a to Somalia, from Detroit to Ft. Hood, and most importantly on the streets of Tehran, things have by now, if anything, heated up, morphing to new, and often more complicated, locations.
Yet still we dare not speak the name of the War on Radical Islam. Still we fear to offend. Perhaps we need a new euphemism. For now I would suggest the “War on Ourselves.” It looks to be becoming dangerously successful.
David Warren discusses political correctness related to smoking and stereotyping. This article may be hazardous for liberal sensibilities (or insensibilities, as it were).
…But there is hope. Conditions have now got so bad, from the 99 per cent of damage that is inflicted not by terrorists but by the cumbersome bureaucracies responding to them (100 per cent in this case), that we are now reading “mainstream” articles about how the Israelis handle airport security — with total success, against much greater threats, at lower cost, with no flight delays.
This is encouraging: people are actually discussing what works. I did notice several of the articles, though well-researched in other respects, carefully avoided mentioning the key element in the Israeli security strategy, which is: open ethnic, religious, demographic, and behavioural profiling.
It is not something anyone wants to do. It is just something that has to be done if we are going to avoid being slaughtered by terrorists.
And though we may not yet be talking about the issue directly, the cracks are appearing in the wall of political correctitude, which means it might eventually come down. …
Tunku Varadarajan’s article on security and politics is full of interesting points from beginning to end. Here are a few highlights:
…Next, make it more cumbersome for people in countries like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to get a U.S. visa, and institute an immediate review of all visas issued to males under 40 from the 14 countries. Revoke all those that don’t pass a “smell test.” As Abdulmutallab demonstrated, a U.S. visa is a precious al Qaeda asset. …
…We have to create—increasingly—two classes of traveler, those that get normal checks and those that are subject to intensive checks. Inevitably, this will open up fissures, but these are fissures we must learn to live with. As Melik Kaylan wrote recently, ” the world will likely undergo a period of de-integration or rather a new kind of integration in which mutually sympathetic cultures grow actively closer while others get slowly excluded.” Eventually, if the pressure is applied long enough, the innocent majority in the watch-list countries will decide that it is in their own interest to root out the radical Islamists. … It is likely that certain countries will not get off the list for decades, which may mean that they don’t care enough, or are just too ramshackle and corrupt, to get their house in order. …
…To conclude, there are three under-acknowledged factors involved here, all of them cultural in character (and our culture inclines us to overlook them). First, when the White House and Congress are in Democratic hands, a slight and silent sense goes out over all the bureaucracy that national security is not all that important or interesting. Second: Bureaucracies reward inertia and do not punish ignorance. They are also—no news here—deeply compartmentalized. Three: Every educated American under the age of about 40 has been indoctrinated into the view that the worst thing imaginable is to be judgmental, because to make a judgment is, per se, to be intolerant.
Put all these together and you have a society almost perfectly unable to discern deadly threats to its existence—a society in which, it would appear, profiling people is more odious than mass murder.
In the WSJ, Bret Stephens looks at the political correctness that is incapacitating the nation’s security.
When does a civilization become incompetent? I’ve been mulling the question in a number of contexts over the last year, including our inability to put a stop to Somali piracy, detain a terrorist who can neither be charged nor released, think rationally about climate change, or rebuild Ground Zero in an acceptable time frame. …
…a civilization becomes incompetent not only when it fails to learn the lessons of its past, but also when it becomes crippled by them. …
…we reject profiling on the commendable grounds that human beings ought not to be treated as statistical probabilities. But at some point, the failure to profile puts innocent lives recklessly at risk. We also abhor waterboarding for the eminently decent reason that it borders on torture. But there are worse things than waterboarding—like allowing another 9/11 to unfold because we recoil at the means necessary to prevent it. …
…Put simply, we do not acquit ourselves morally by trying to abstain from a choice of evils. We just allow the nearest evil to make the choice for us.
David Harsanyi once again shows how to make a joke and a point at the same time.
When comedian Joan Rivers was booted off a flight from Costa Rica to Newark this past weekend, it was not because she had perpetrated crimes against the human appearance. Rather, it was because she was a potential security risk. …
…Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the crotch bomber, was, according to the president, an “isolated extremist” — which is true, if he means the extremism is isolated to a few million people.
Then, Obama went on to talk about the “crushing poverty” of Yemen, insinuating that neediness was a root of man-caused disasters — though the underwear bomber came from a wealthy and educated family and the “crushing poverty” of Haiti has yet to compel those nation’s young men to stuff explosives down their pants. …
Karl Rove gives the skinny on Obama’s fat budget.
After President Obama devoted much of 2009 to health care and global warming—two issues far down Americans’ list of concerns—the White House says he will pivot to jobs and deficit reduction in his State of the Union speech in a few weeks. The White House is considering dramatic gestures, perhaps announcing a spending freeze or even a 2% or 3% reduction in nondefense spending.
But Americans shouldn’t be misled by the election year ploy: Mr. Obama rigged the game by giving himself plenty of room to look tough on spending. He did that by increasing discretionary domestic spending for the last half of fiscal year 2009 by 8% and then increasing it another 12% for fiscal year 2010.
So discretionary domestic spending now stands at $536 billion, up nearly 24% from President George W. Bush’s last full year budget in fiscal 2008 of $433.6 billion. That’s a huge spending surge, even for a profligate liberal like Mr. Obama. The $102 billion spending increase doesn’t even count the $787 billion stimulus package, of which $534 billion remains unspent. …
Stephen Spruiel posts a depressing chart in the Corner. It’s about the number of people working for governments.
Jonah Goldberg, in USA Today, comments on liberal aspirations.
…”Leftward ho!” Alter proclaimed.
A little more than a year later, we surely have been hoing leftward. But it already seems as if the American people are sick of it. The 2009 off-year elections might not have been a repudiation of Obama, but they were definitely not an embrace of Obamaism. Meanwhile, by nearly 2 to 1, Americans say the country is on the wrong track. Obama’s approval ratings have slumped severely. Independent voters have abandoned the Democrats. The only populist fervor out there is fueling the anti-tax, pro-limited government, “Tea Party” movement, which is now more popular than either the GOP or the Democrats. Even last spring, when anti-Wall Street fervor was justifiably high, more Americans viewed “big government” as a bigger threat to the country than “big business.”
Obama’s signature domestic policy goal, health care reform, is decidedly unpopular with a majority of Americans. And a Rasmussen Reports poll last week finds that 70% of respondents either support waterboarding the Christmas bomber suspect or are unsure whether we should. Only 30% subscribe to Obama’s position. And that’s after an unsuccessful terrorist attack. …
In Forbes, Joel Kotkin discusses the economic and demographic woes of blue states.
…Other key sectors are also flailing. Political influence in Washington will not stem the flow of high-wage trading jobs away from the Mercantile Exchange to decentralized electronic exchanges. Nor can it reverse the deteriorating state fiscal crisis caused by weak economies and exacerbated by insanely high pensions and out of control spending policies. Late last month Moody’s and S&P downgraded the debt ranking for the State of Illinois. Of course, such fiscal malaise is not limited to Chicago or Illinois. True blue California has an even worse debt rating. New York, another blue bastion, is also just about out of cash. …
…Other blue bastions have been shedding jobs as well, both during the recession and over the whole decade. Beyond Chicago and Detroit, the biggest losses among the mega-regions have taken place in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles-Long Beach and Boston. Big money can still be made in Silicon Valley, Hollywood or around the academic economy of Boston, but in terms of overall jobs, the past decade has been dismal for these regions. Meanwhile, the consistent big gainers have been–besides Houston–Dallas and Washington, D.C., the one place money really does seem to grow on trees. Even Miami, Phoenix and San Bernardino-Riverside, in California, boast more jobs today than in 2000, despite significant setbacks in the recent recession.
These trends coincide with continuing shifts in demographics. The recession may have slowed the pace of net migration, but the essential pattern has remained in place. People continue to leave places like New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles for more affordable, economically viable regions like Houston, Dallas, Austin and San Antonio. Overall, the big winners in net migration have been predominately conservative states like Texas–with over 800,000 net new migrants–notes demographer Wendell Cox. In what Cox calls “the decade of the South,” 90% of all net migration went to southern states. …
Yesterday we had much about intellectuals and the way they think. This from the Corner is a piece of that.
… I’ve seen a lot of “Worst Quote” features on other right-leaning sites, featuring howlers from the President, Pelosi, Evan Thomas, Chris Matthews, Andrea Mitchell, Whoopi Goldberg.
All of them leave out what was to me the most chilling quote, uttered by one Ruth Bader Ginsburg in response to a New York Times Magazine question about lack of Medicaid funding for abortions:”Yes, the ruling about that surprised me. [Harris v. McRae—in 1980 the court upheld the Hyde Amendment, which forbids the use of Medicaid for abortions.] Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.” …
For an idea of how cold it has been around the world, we have some of the weather related headlines from Drudge.