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David Warren, our favorite Canadian, comments on the Great White Fleet and American power.
… Our children today are taught in school, when they are taught any history at all, that Imperialism “was” an unmitigated evil. Alas, this is an unmitigated lie, and it is to European Imperialism that not only we, but formerly subject peoples, owe lives much longer and less painful than those of our ancestors. For in addition to free trade, and the rule of law at sea, the fleets carried with them ideas, and technology — most significantly, certain principles of hygiene which, more even than the discoveries and techniques of modern medicine, contributed everywhere to longevity, prosperity, and health.
Imperialism is a mixed blessing for both conqueror and conquered, and the whole story is of course complex. It is not an avoidable subject. Notwithstanding the fond dreams of the willfully naive, war will remain a recurring feature of human history. And the power relations upon which war and peace alike are structured have always been with us, and will continue — so long as we are humans formed into large societies. And should we cease to be that, we only return to the conditions of the jungle.
Through the 20th century, the power of America grew and grew. A decade after the Great White Fleet’s circumnavigation, the entry of the U.S. into the First World War confirmed her status as one of the great powers. Her contribution to the Second World War was decisive, over both Atlantic and Pacific. Through the Cold War she provided the shield for the West, and all western allies, against the advance of Soviet Communism. And when that enemy collapsed, from its own internal contradictions, America emerged as the world’s “hyperpower” — a superpower with no plausible rival, whether military, economic, or social. …
Shorts from John Fund.
Howard Kurtz has overview of Clinton coverage.
After weeks of bad news, Hillary Clinton and her strategists hoped that winning the endorsement of Iowa’s largest newspaper last weekend might produce a modest bump in their media coverage.
But on Sunday morning, they awoke to upbeat headlines about their chief Democratic rival: “Obama Showing New Confidence With Iowa Sprint,” said the New York Times. “Obama Is Hitting His Stride in Iowa,” said the Los Angeles Times. And on Monday, Clinton aides were so upset about a contentious “Today” show interview that one complained to the show’s producer.
Clinton’s senior advisers have grown convinced that the media deck is stacked against them, that their candidate is drawing far harsher scrutiny than Barack Obama. And at least some journalists agree. …
Jonah Goldberg has his take on the Clinton campaign.
The most enjoyable aspect of watching the HMS Hillary take on water is the prospect that Bill – and his cult of personality – will go down with the ship, too.
Bill Clinton has been stumping for his wife on the Iowa hustings, framing the election as a referendum on his tenure as president. Last month in Muscatine (during the same speech in which he falsely claimed to have opposed the Iraq war from the beginning), he told the assembled Democrats that HMS Hillary could transport America “back to the future.”
Last summer, when he first started hawking Hillary like a door-to-door salesman, he told a crowd: “I know some people say, Look at them. They’re old. They’re sort of yesterday’s news.’ …
“Well,” Slick Willie said, grinning, “yesterday’s news was pretty good.”
Indeed, Hillary’s entire campaign has been grounded in her experience in the Clinton administration of the 1990s, even though that experience mostly involves designing a failed health-care plan and unsuccessfully hectoring her husband to move to the left. Still, as New York Times editorial writer Adam Cohen noted in a column last week, it was her decision to make the choice between her and Barack Obama a “referendum on a decade.”
So if Hillary Clinton loses the race for the nomination – heck, even if she just loses the Iowa caucuses – I hope to see this headline somewhere, perhaps in the New York Post: “America to Clinton(s): We’re Just Not That Into You.” …
John Stossel with more of his interview with Ron Paul.
Walter Williams explains how our schools have become so bad.
… How do we get out of this mess of abysmal student performance? Presidential hopeful Barack Obama has proposed an $18 billion increase in federal education programs. That’s the typical knee-jerk response — more money. Let’s delve a bit, asking whether higher educational expenditures explain why secondary school students in 32 industrialized countries are better at math and science than ours. In 2004, the U.S. spent about $9,938 per secondary school student. More money might explain why Swiss and Norwegian students do better than ours because they, respectively, spent $12,176 and $11,109 per student. But what about Finland ($7,441) and South Korea ($6,761), which scored first and second in math literacy? What about the Slovak Republic ($2,744) and Hungary ($3,692), as well as other nations whose education expenditures are a fraction of ours and whose students have greater math and science literacy than ours? …
Michael Lewis says it’s time college football players were paid.
… College football’s best trick play is its pretense that it has nothing to do with money, that it’s simply an extension of the university’s mission to educate its students. Were the public to view college football as mainly a business, it might start asking questions. For instance: why are these enterprises that have nothing to do with education and everything to do with profits exempt from paying taxes? Or why don’t they pay their employees?
This is maybe the oddest aspect of the college football business. Everyone associated with it is getting rich except the people whose labor creates the value. At this moment there are thousands of big-time college football players, many of whom are black and poor. They perform for the intense pleasure of millions of rabid college football fans, many of whom are rich and white. The world’s most enthusiastic racially integrated marketplace is waiting to happen.
But between buyer and seller sits the National Collegiate Athletic Association, to ensure that the universities it polices keep all the money for themselves — to make sure that the rich white folk do not slip so much as a free chicken sandwich under the table to the poor black kids. The poor black kids put up with it because they find it all but impossible to pursue N.F.L. careers unless they play at least three years in college. Less than one percent actually sign professional football contracts and, of those, an infinitesimal fraction ever make serious money. But their hope is eternal, and their ignorance exploitable.
Put that way the arrangement sounds like simple theft; but up close, inside the university, it apparently feels like high principle. …