December 16, 2007

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Mark Steyn has more comments on the folks who think we should have no children.

This is the time of year, as Hillary Rodham Clinton once put it, when Christians celebrate “the birth of a homeless child” – or, in Al Gore’s words, “a homeless woman gave birth to a homeless child.”

Just for the record, Jesus wasn’t “homeless.” He had a perfectly nice home back in Nazareth. But he happened to be born in Bethlehem. It was census time, and Joseph was obliged to schlep halfway across the country to register in the town of his birth. Which is such an absurdly bureaucratic overregulatory cockamamie Big Government nightmare that it’s surely only a matter of time before Massachusetts or California reintroduce it. …

… Last year I wrote a book on demographic decline and became a big demography bore, and it’s tempting just to do an annual December audit on the demographic weakness of what we used to call Christendom. Today, in the corporate headquarters of the Christian faith, Pope Benedict looks out of his window at a city where children’s voices are rarer and rarer. Italy has one of the lowest birth rates in Europe. Go to a big rural family wedding: lots of aunts, uncles, grandmas, grandpas but ever fewer bambinos. The International Herald Tribune last week carried the latest update on the remorseless geriatrification: On the Miss Italia beauty pageant, the median age of the co-hosts was 70; the country is second only to Sweden in the proportion of its population over 85, and has the fewest citizens under 15. Etc.

So in post-Catholic Italy there is no miracle of a child this Christmas – unless you count the 70 percent of Italians between the ages of 20 and 30 who still live at home, the world’s oldest teenagers still trudging up the stairs to the room they slept in as a child even as they approach their fourth decade. That’s worth bearing in mind if you’re an American gal heading to Rome on vacation: When that cool 29-year-old with the Mediterranean charm in the singles bar asks you back to his pad for a nightcap, it’ll be his mom and dad’s place. …

Bill Kristol says the Iowa dems might be giving us all a present soon.

…First there was Bill Clinton, campaigning for his wife in Iowa, claiming falsely–manifestly and provably–that he had “opposed Iraq from the beginning.” Can’t we move on from rewriting history for the self-aggrandizement of the perennially needy former president?

Then there was the Hillary campaign press release attacking Obama for saying he hadn’t spent his whole life planning to run for president (unlike some other candidates). No! Das Hillary Apparat unearthed one Iis Darmawan, 63, “Senator Obama’s kindergarten teacher [in Indonesia].” She recalled that little Barack had written an essay in kindergarten, “I Want to Become President.” Gotcha!

This is not a joke. The Clinton campaign put out a press release on December 2 trumpeting this discovery. One notes, with open-mouthed wonder, the brazenness of Hillary Clinton’s criticizing someone else for ambition. One marvels at the mind-boggling triviality of this particular nugget mined by the legendary Clinton research operation. One also, incidentally, asks: Do kids actually write “essays” in kindergarten? About becoming president of the United States? In Jakarta? Can’t we move on from ridiculous Clintonian attacks?…

… It will be good for the country to be able to move on, sooner rather than later, from the Clintons and their brand of politics. If the Democratic primary electorate brings this about, THE WEEKLY STANDARD will be first to say something we are not accustomed to saying to the Democratic party–thank you.

 

Peggy Noonan with a good column on Iowa events.

What is happening in Iowa is no longer boring but big, and may prove huge.

The Republican race looks–at the moment–to be determined primarily by one thing, the question of religious faith. In my lifetime faith has been a significant issue in presidential politics, but not the sole determinative one. Is that changing? If it is, it is not progress. …

… I wonder if our old friend Ronald Reagan could rise in this party, this environment. Not a regular churchgoer, said he experienced God riding his horse at the ranch, divorced, relaxed about the faiths of his friends and aides, or about its absence. He was a believing Christian, but he spent his adulthood in relativist Hollywood, and had a father who belonged to what some saw, and even see, as the Catholic cult. I’m just not sure he’d be pure enough to make it in this party. I’m not sure he’d be considered good enough. …

… A thought on the presence of Bill Clinton. He is showing up all over in Iowa and New Hampshire, speaking, shaking hands, drawing crowds. But when he speaks, he has a tendency to speak about himself. It’s all, always, me-me-me in his gigantic bullying neediness. Still, he’s there, and he’s a draw, and the plan was that his presence would boost his wife’s fortunes. The way it was supposed to work, the logic, was this: People miss Bill. They miss the ’90s. They miss the pre-9/11 world. So they’ll love seeing him back in the White House. So they’ll vote for Hillary. Because she’ll bring him. “Two for the price of one.”

It appears not to be working. Might it be that they don’t miss Bill as much as everyone thought? That they don’t actually want Bill back in the White House?

Maybe. But maybe it’s this. Maybe they’d love to have him back in the White House. Maybe they just don’t want him to bring her. Maybe they miss the Cuckoo’s Nest and they’d love having Jack Nicholson’s McMurphy running through the halls. Maybe they just don’t miss Nurse Ratched. Does she have to come? …

 

Abe Greenwald thinks Slick Willie has lost his touch.

… Last night, in an interview with Charlie Rose, Bill Clinton grew red-faced and tense as he grasped to defend his wife. He complained that Senator Barack Obama has garnered media support, as if to suggest good press is the Clinton clan’s exclusive entitlement.

Clinton tried to be elusive about trashing Obama for his lack of experience, but the bitterness was front and center. …

 

George Will thinks it would be a good idea to paralyze the Federal Election Commission.

… The six-person FEC — three members from each party — enforces the rules it writes about how Americans are permitted to participate in politics. You thought the First Amendment said enough about that participation? Silly you.

The FEC’s policing powers may soon be splendidly paralyzed. Three current FEC members, two Democrats and one Republican, are recess appointees whose terms will end in a few days when this session of Congress ends — unless they are confirmed to full six-year terms.

Four Senate Democrats decided to block the Republican, Hans von Spakovsky. Republicans have responded: “All three or none.” If this standoff persists until Congress adjourns, the three recess appointments will expire and the FEC will have just two members — a Republican vacancy has existed since April. If so, the commission will be prohibited from official actions, including the disbursement of funds for presidential candidates seeking taxpayer financing.

Democrats oppose von Spakovsky partly because when he served in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department he overruled staffers in the voting section who wanted to block a Georgia law requiring voters to present a government-issued ID before voting, as Americans do before boarding airplanes, entering many buildings, renting movies, etc. Von Spakovsky’s critics say the law is a way of suppressing voting by poor, mostly minority, citizens. Eighty percent of Americans — racists all? — favor such laws. The Supreme Court probably will settle the issue in a case concerning Indiana‘s voter ID law. …

 

Michael Barone with a short on the GOP wins last week.

… The minority party often does well in special elections; a voter knows that his vote will not determine which party controls the House. The fact that Democrat Nikki Tsongas won by only 51 to 45 percent in the very seriously contested race in October in Massachusetts 5 (a 57-to-41 John Kerry district in 2004) was bad news for Democrats. This week’s results were not bad news for Republicans. Yes, Latta ran 4 points behind Bush’s 2004 percentage, but that’s not as much as the 6 points Tsongas ran behind Kerry’s 2004 percentage. To me this suggests that the low job approval rating for Congress poses more problems for Democrats than for Republicans in 2008.

 

Howard Fineman’s views on the campaign so far.

Sen. Hillary Clinton’s campaign is teetering on the brink, no matter what the meaningless national horserace numbers say. The notion that she has a post-Iowa “firewall” in New Hampshire is a fantasy, and she is in danger of losing all four early contests, including Nevada and South Carolina – probably to Sen. Barack Obama, who is now, in momentum terms, the Democratic frontrunner.

On the Republican side, meanwhile, the race is shaping up in an even more unexpected way: a contest between two former Northern moderates (Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney) for the right to take on a Southern Baptist preacher, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who believes in the inerrancy of Scripture but not in Darwinian evolution. …

 

The Captain notices more fabrication from Clinton. He also posts on USAspending.gov and defends the CIA against some of its critics.

… I have had a lot of criticism for the intel community, but in this case they have a real grievance. For three years after the 9/11 attacks, they got overwhelming criticism for their inability to “connect the dots” and stop the terrorist attack before it started. Some of that criticism was justified, but a lot of it related more to bureaucratic hurdles in allowing communication between law enforcement and intelligence agents, as well as interagency barriers that had long stood in the way of cooperative intelligence. Instead of addressing these issues, the 9/11 Commission surfed that wave of recrimination to establishing even more bureaucratic obstacles rather than streamlining intelligence.

The failure to connect the dots came from bureaucratic interference. Failure to collect dots came from a lack of resources and poor prioritization. In the case of the former, America demanded a much more robust effort to collect intel that could prevent another 9/11. The administration and its agencies responded with aggressive tactics that have prevented dozens of attacks and identified hundreds of terrorists abroad. For six years, despite the bloodthirsty appetites of our enemies, we have not suffered another attack on our soil, and not even one against our diplomatic or military assets around the world, save in Iraq.

What have we done to celebrate that success? We have newspapers like the New York Times exposing the programs that have kept us safe and that have identified and caught major terrorists before they could strike. We have people in Congress like Nancy Pelosi screaming for prosecutions against the agents and the administration for efforts she personally witnessed and to which she never objected until years later. …

 

 

NY Post editors defend Steyn.

… Of course, a ban on opinions – even disagreeable ones – is the very antithesis of the Western tradition of free speech and freedom of the press.

Indeed, this whole process of dragging Steyn and the magazine before two separate human-rights bodies for the “crime” of expressing an opinion is a good illustration of precisely what he was talking about. …

 

Division of Labour points to evidence polar bears will be able to take care of themselves.

 

Borowitz and Scrappleface are here too. Andy says Clinton revealed Obama was a bed wetter at 3 years old.