Download Full Content – Printable Pickings
Christopher Hitchens remembers more about Bosnia in Tuzla Tall Tales.
… Yet this is only to underline the YouTube version of events and the farcical or stupid or Howard Wolfson (take your pick) aspects of the story. But here is the historical rather than personal aspect, which is what you should keep your eye on. Note the date of Sen. Clinton’s visit to Tuzla. She went there in March 1996. By that time, the critical and tragic phase of the Bosnia war was effectively over, as was the greater part of her husband’s first term. What had happened in the interim? In particular, what had happened to the 1992 promise, four years earlier, that genocide in Bosnia would be opposed by a Clinton administration?
In the event, President Bill Clinton had not found it convenient to keep this promise. Let me quote from Sally Bedell Smith’s admirable book on the happy couple, For Love of Politics:
Taking the advice of Al Gore and National Security Advisor Tony Lake, Bill agreed to a proposal to bomb Serbian military positions while helping the Muslims acquire weapons to defend themselves—the fulfillment of a pledge he had made during the 1992 campaign. But instead of pushing European leaders, he directed Secretary of State Warren Christopher merely to consult with them. When they balked at the plan, Bill quickly retreated, creating a “perception of drift.” The key factor in Bill’s policy reversal was Hillary, who was said to have “deep misgivings” and viewed the situation as “a Vietnam that would compromise health-care reform.” The United States took no further action in Bosnia, and the “ethnic cleansing” by the Serbs was to continue for four more years, resulting in the deaths of more than 250,000 people.
I can personally witness to the truth of this, too. I can remember, first, one of the Clintons’ closest personal advisers—Sidney Blumenthal—referring with acid contempt to Warren Christopher as “a blend of Pontius Pilate with Ichabod Crane.” I can remember, second, a meeting with Clinton’s then-Secretary of Defense Les Aspin at the British Embassy. When I challenged him on the sellout of the Bosnians, he drew me aside and told me that he had asked the White House for permission to land his own plane at Sarajevo airport, if only as a gesture of reassurance that the United States had not forgotten its commitments. The response from the happy couple was unambiguous: He was to do no such thing, lest it distract attention from the first lady’s health care “initiative.” …
The Captain says the Bosnian girl from Hillary’s adventure has surfaced.
Gabriel Schoenfeld writes on the real intelligence failure of W’s administration.
… In 2004, Congress radically reshuffled U.S. intelligence, creating a new intelligence “czar” — the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) — whose office, the ODNI, would assume many of the coordinating functions that had formerly been in the hands of the CIA.
This shift was intensely controversial. One of the most frequent criticisms was that grafting a new bureaucracy on top of an already dysfunctional system would only compound existing problems. Four years later, how is the ODNI faring?
As with any secret agency, we do not know what we do not know about the achievements of the ODNI. Its greatest successes may be hidden from view, and the fact that the United States has not been hit by a second Sept. 11 might well be credited to its efforts. By the same token, we do not know all of its failures, although some dramatic ones have already come into sight.
The most significant of these is the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of last November, which stated flatly in the first sentence of its declassified summary that Iran had halted its nuclear-weapons program. This was deeply misleading. As the NIE summary acknowledged only in a footnote, the most important element of that program — uranium enrichment — was proceeding at full tilt. In February, Mike McConnell, the current DNI, disavowed the document, acknowledging that it should have been handled differently. But by that time the damage to America’s Iran policy — and to the ODNI’s own credibility — had already been done. …
So, you wondered, how is Mark Steyn doing in his “Human Rights Commission” trial in Canada? The answer comes from his latest in Macleans titled, “Kangaroo Court is now in Session.”
“If anything I said above upsets you, please lodge a complaint with the Canadian Human Rights Commission,” Kevin Baker advised his readers the other day. “You pay nothing. Filing is risk-free.” The National Post columnist had penned a gloriously insensitive opening paragraph suggesting that Ontario’s polygamous welfare deadbeats collecting individual dole handouts for each of their wives might like to corral their better halves (better eighths?) into a Muslim curling team. Mr. Baker proposed this because he’s decided he wants a slice of the human rights action, such as yours truly and Maclean’s have been enjoying these last three or four months. “I want to be a free-speech martyr, too. Give me some of that CHRC hate-speech love.” The big bucks are in getting your ass sued off for “flagrant Islamophobia.”
As Mr. Baker sees it, before I became the metaphorical Nelson Mandela metaphorically tasered into metaphorical submission by the metaphorical Gestapo of the sadly non-metaphorical Canadian Human Rights Commission, I was an amusing fellow prancing gaily through the flotsam and jetsam of the culture, twittering merrily on such weighty topics as Princess Margaret, Liza Minnelli and John Ralston Saul’s pre-viceregal fondness for the nude beaches of the Côte d’Azur. Ah, those were the days. As they say in Casablanca, I remember it as if it were yesterday. Liza wore black, John Ralston Saul wore, er, nothing. But I’ve put that flesh-coloured see-through thong away. When the CHRC thought police march out, I’ll wear it again, even if he won’t.
While the career benefits of free-speech martyrdom are perhaps not quite as lucrative as Kevin Baker assumes, I do take a quiet satisfaction in knowing that, publicity-wise, the last three months have been the worst in the entire existence of the “human rights” commissions. When news of the lawsuit against Maclean’s broke in early December, those who spoke up for the right of privately owned magazines to determine their own content were what one might call (Casablanca again) the usual suspects: George Jonas, Barbara Amiel, David Warren. No disrespect to my eminent comrades, but I had the vague feeling we might end up holding the big capacity-only free-speech rally in my Honda Civic. For a while, there was more interest abroad than at home, with the New York Post, the Australian, The Economist and the BBC taking up the story, while the Toronto Star et al. stayed silent. But then Liberal MP Keith Martin embraced the cause and proposed abolishing the grotesquely mismanaged Section 13 of the Human Rights Code, and the Canadian Association of Journalists and PEN Canada (i.e., all the CanCon lefties, and headed by nude playboy John Ralston Saul to boot) decided to sign on. The Globe And Mail eventually came out against the speech police, and so did CBC colossi Rex Murphy and Rick Mercer, and even Noam Chomsky. And by the time the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal was obliged (after a court motion filed by Maclean’s) to open its doors to the press and public, the presiding judge Athanios Hajdis uttered words rarely heard in the Canadian “human rights” biz: “Nice to see you all,” he offered the crowd. “More of an interest than there was before.” …
Bill Kristol says as good as McCain’s biography is, it’s not enough.
… But here’s something for the McCain campaign to remember: Democracies don’t always elect the man who has done the most for his country.
Consider our last four presidential elections. If voters had simply looked at the biographies of the major-party candidates, they would have chosen George H. W. Bush in 1992, Bob Dole in 1996, Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004. Instead, they rejected four veterans who served in wartime (and who also had considerable experience in public life) for Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, who had lesser résumés, both civilian and military. …
However, Dean Barnett shows the difficulties the left has attacking McCain.
LAST THURSDAY, A controversy erupted in the blogosphere. Like most controversies that start in the blogosphere and die there as opposed to gaining a second and more meaningful life in the mainstream media, the entire affair was a tempest in a virtual teapot. But this incident was a particularly pregnant one, as it revealed the difficulties the left will have in developing a coherent attack against John McCain. It also highlighted Barack Obama’s most significant weakness in a match against Senator McCain. …
Clark Neily of the Institute for Justice demonstrates the need for eternal vigilance.
Imagine you were a state legislator and some folks asked you to pass a law making it a crime to give advice about paint colors and throw pillows without a license. And imagine they told you that the only people qualified to place large pieces of furniture in a room are those who have gotten a college degree in interior design, completed a two-year apprenticeship, and passed a national licensing exam. And by the way, it is criminally misleading for people who practice interior design to use that term without government permission.
You might stare at them incredulously for a moment, then look down at your calendar and say, “Oh, I get it — April Fool!” Right? Wrong.
These folks represent the American Society of Interior Designers (ASID), an industry group whose members have waged a 30-year, multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign to legislate their competitors out of business. And those absurd restrictions on advice about paint selection, throw pillows and furniture placement represent the actual fruits of lobbying in places like Alabama, Nevada and Illinois, where ASID and its local affiliates have peddled their snake-oil mantra that “Every decision an interior designer makes affects life safety and quality of life.” …
American.Com reviews book on Middle Class Millionaires.
When people think of the “rich,†they might imagine billionaire plutocrats presiding over yacht fleets. Reality shows have made these folks appear remarkably prevalent. Lost in our obsession with the extremely rich, though, is another trend: over the past two decades, the ranks of the somewhat rich have also exploded. Indeed, the 8.4 million American households—some 7.6 percent of all U.S. households—with a net worth between $1 million and $10 million comprise one of the fastest growing demographics in the country.
“The rich are different from you and me,†F. Scott Fitzgerald once said. But according to The Middle-Class Millionaire (Doubleday, 240 pp., $23.95), by Russ Alan Prince and Lewis Schiff, these working-rich households are not so different from the rest of us, at least in their stated values. “Overwhelmingly, these millionaire households are headed by people raised in ordinary middle-class homes,†Prince and Schiff write. “Through their lifestyle choices and spending decisions, they wield influence in the overall economy in support of the same middle-class values and concerns they were raised with: security, health, self-betterment, family, and community.†Predominantly small business owners or principals in professional partnerships, these millionaires “have achieved the American dream the American way.†…