Click on WORD or PDF for full content
The current norm for government bureaucracy guarantees too many people producing too little results, and lots of politics and irrational rules thrown in that waste money and resources. David Warren comments on a WaPo series on the nation’s intelligence bureaucracy.
…Indeed, with a much smaller security establishment (even proportionally), and much less invasive techniques, the Israelis have a far better record for stopping terrorists dead in their tracks. And this, only because they shamelessly profile their lethal enemies.
When “politically correct” attitudes prevail, we get not only vast bureaucracy, but also, the real bad guys slipping through highly visible cracks. …
…Moreover, at the very top, intelligence findings, such as they are, take the back seat to political calculation. Every major U.S. intelligence finding over the last decade, including “weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,” has been dead wrong. In turn, the celebrated, very public 2007 finding that the Iranians had given up their nuclear weapons program, was delivered for no other plausible purpose than to cut the legs out from under President Bush before he started another war. …
…In other words, truth is seldom among leading criteria in the final assessment of this “intelligence” ocean; for bureaucracies have other priorities, the chiefmost being their own survival and growth. …
Michael Barone notes some changes in opinion regarding a military strike on Iran.
…I read three recent articles saying there’s an increasing chance that the United States — or Israel — might well bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities. One was by Time’s Joe Klein, who has been a harsh critic of George W. Bush’s military policies and a skeptic about action against Iran. The other was by self-described centrist Walter Russell Mead in his ever-fascinating American Interest blog. …
…Klein thinks President Obama is still dead set against bombing Iran. Mead is not so sure. He thinks Obama is motivated by a Wilsonian desire for “the construction of a liberal and orderly world.” Or “the European Union built up to a global scale.” A successful Iranian nuclear program, in Mead’s view, would be “the complete, utter and historic destruction” of Obama’s long-term goals of a non-nuclear world and a cooperative international order.
This may sound far-fetched. But recall that Woodrow Wilson was re-elected in 1916 on the slogan “He kept us out of war.” Then in 1917 he went to war and quickly built the most stringent wartime state — with private businesses nationalized and political dissenters jailed — in modern American history. A Wilsonian desire for international order is not inconsistent with aggressive military action. Sometimes the two are compatible. …
We need to restore our special relationship with the UK, writes Paul Johnson in Forbes. Whether it was Forbes’ editors or Paul Johnson, the title of this item, “Is President Obama Anti-British?” is woefully misplaced; might as well ask if the Pope is Catholic, or if the bear dumps in the forest. It is obvious he is anti-British which is of a piece of some of his other stupidities. His defenders say he picked up this opinion from his father’s experiences with colonial era Kenya. If the president was not so ignorant, he could pause to ponder the history of the British anti-slavery crusade that brought an end to an institution that had been part of human history since the beginnings of time; or at least since Moby Dick was a minnow. Perhaps slavery would have ended without Wilberforce and the English abolitionists. But they deserve much credit and the whole country does too. It is without doubt one of the noblest efforts in history. To have a jerk in the White House who ignores the special relationship with our great friends and allies is almost too much to bear.
…The friendly relationship between our two countries has huge benefits for both sides, which is why it has lasted so long. Whenever the U.S. has felt that taking strong action–especially military action–is in its national interest, Britain has always taken America’s side. Britain is the first, the last and usually the only truly dependable ally the U.S. has. This was true during the immediate post-WWII period, the Berlin blockade and the Korean War. It was also true throughout the Cold War and its aftermath. It has been particularly true during the struggle with Islamic terrorism.
The U.S. judged that it was its right to intervene militarily in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Britain has given the U.S. 100% backing–politically, diplomatically and on the ground. Its involvement is highly unpopular among British voters. If Mr. Obama and the government he heads are publicly seen as anti-British and acting deliberately against British interests, the demand for the withdrawal of British military support could easily–and quickly–become irresistible. I trust the President will ponder this risk before he next indulges in his anti-British insinuations.
First John Fund warned us, now Charles Krauthammer looks at the liberals’ plans for the upcoming lame-duck session.
…As John Fund reports in the Wall Street Journal, Sens. Jay Rockefeller, Kent Conrad and Tom Harkin are already looking forward to what they might get passed in a lame-duck session. Among the major items being considered are card check, budget-balancing through major tax hikes, and climate-change legislation involving heavy carbon taxes and regulation.
Card check, which effectively abolishes the secret ballot in the workplace, is the fondest wish of a union movement to which Obama is highly beholden. Major tax hikes, possibly including a value-added tax, will undoubtedly be included in the recommendations of the president’s debt commission, which conveniently reports by Dec. 1. And carbon taxes would be the newest version of the cap-and-trade legislation that has repeatedly failed to pass the current Congress — but enough dead men walking in a lame-duck session might switch and vote to put it over the top. …
Daniel Foster also blogs on the subject.
…Here’s John Fund riffing on Mike Allen to that end:
“Mike Allen of Politico.com reports one reason President Obama failed to mention climate change legislation during his recent, Oval Office speech on the Gulf oil spill was that he wants to pass a modest energy bill this summer, then add carbon taxes or regulations in a conference committee with the House, most likely during a lame-duck session. The result would be a climate bill vastly more ambitious, and costly for American consumers and taxpayers, than moderate “Blue Dogs” in the House would support on the campaign trail. “We have a lot of wiggle room in conference,” a House Democratic aide told the trade publication Environment & Energy Daily last month. …”
David Harsanyi thinks we can pass on a second beer summit.
…Let me suggest one lesson the nation might take from the Breitbart/Sherrod story: Let’s take a breather from any more national dialoguing on the issue of race. Please.
After all, can anyone recall the last productive conversation on the topic? Whenever we hear about race in politics these days, it’s typically being wielded as a weapon to smear entire political movements, de-legitimatize a genuine national debate, and ratchet up anger over imaginary slights. …
Since he’s on vacation, we went to the files to find a rollicking good piece from the Bush/Kerry campaign. Mark Steyn has a flair for taking liberals’ absurd policies to their logical, and frightening, conclusions.
… There are legitimate differences of opinion about the war, but they don’t include Kerry’s silly debater’s points. On the one hand, the Tora borer drones that Bush “outsourced” the search for Osama bin Laden to the Afghans, though at the time he supported it (“It is the best way to protect our troops,” he said in December 2001. “I think we have been doing this pretty effectively.”). But, on the other, he claims he’s going to outsource Iraq to the French and the Germans, though neither of them wants anything to do with it. …
…So this is no time to vote for Europhile delusions. The Continental health and welfare systems John Kerry so admires are, in fact, part of the reason those societies are dying. As for Canada, yes, under socialized health care, prescription drugs are cheaper, medical treatment’s cheaper, life is cheaper. After much stonewalling, the Province of Quebec’s Health Department announced this week that in the last year some 600 Quebecers had died from C. difficile, a bacterium acquired in hospital. In other words, if, say, Bill Clinton had gone for his heart bypass to the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, he would have had the surgery, woken up the next day swimming in diarrhea and then died. It’s a bacterium caused by inattention to hygiene — by unionized, unsackable cleaners who don’t clean properly; by harassed overstretched hospital staff who don’t bother washing their hands as often as they should. So 600 people have been killed by the filthy squalor of disease-ridden government hospitals. That’s the official number. Unofficially, if you’re over 65, the hospitals will save face and attribute your death at their hands to “old age” or some such and then “lose” the relevant medical records. Quebec’s health system is a lot less healthy than, for example, Iraq’s.
One thousand Americans are killed in 18 months in Iraq, and it’s a quagmire. One thousand Quebecers are killed by insufficient hand-washing in their filthy, decrepit health care system, and kindly progressive Americans can’t wait to bring it south of the border. If one has to die for a cause, bringing liberty to the Middle East is a nobler venture and a better bet than government health care.
In the Boston Globe, Joshua Green thinks its time we got President Bush back. Not those. This time we get the pick of the litter.
…another potent political force — one who raised no money and has no PAC — could still win the nomination were he inclined to pursue it: Jeb Bush is the candidate hiding in plain sight. The brother and son of presidents stepped back from elected politics after his second term as Florida governor ended three years ago. At 57, he’s in his prime. …
…Bush, on the other hand, has a solid conservative record that wasn’t amassed in Washington and broad appeal in a critical state; for a party conspicuously lacking a positive agenda, he’s also known as an ideas guy. Bush hasn’t followed the Tea Partiers to the political fringes — he opposed Arizona’s racial profiling law, for instance — but neither has he ignored them. …