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Bill McGurn, former chief speech writer for George W., shares a story of Bush and a grieving mother.
This Thursday morn, Julie McPhillips will awake to the great hope that is Christmas Day. And amid her joy for the Savior born of woman in a Bethlehem stable, she will offer two prayers.
The first will be for her son, Lt. Brian McPhillips, killed in action in April 2003 as the First Marine Division fought its way into Baghdad. The other will be for the man on whose orders Lt. McPhillips was sent to Iraq: George W. Bush.
You see, Julie McPhillips knows a side of the president that never seems to make it into the newspapers. Since a meeting in the Oval Office a few years back, the two have exchanged letters, many written in the president’s hand. Through the sadness that binds them together, they look eye to eye and let their hearts do the talking. …
Turns out there is a controlling legal authority – a horse’s ass. Corner post by John Hood.
David Warren waxes philosophical.
… In the coming year, the sesquicentennial of the publication of the Origin of Species, and bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth, we will be constantly reminded of this “patron saint” of modern atheism and antinomianism. Our liberal political and academic establishments will celebrate the triumph of one of their “great liberators” over the troglodyte religious types.
I do not finally condemn the late Darwin himself, a reasonably honest man and fine student of natural history. The authors of so many of the world’s governing plausible ideas were likewise reasonably honest, intelligent men — teased, by some plausible hunch, into forgetfulness of the paradoxical, in a universe where the plausible is often the deadly enemy of the truth.
By contrast, the idea that God could not only make this world (by whatever means infinitely beyond our comprehension), but people it with creatures of His love; that He could take upon Himself the garment of human flesh, in the cause of our redemption — that His angels might appear in the hills by Bethlehem to announce something beyond human comprehension — this is all quite implausible. Yet, what if it is true?
David Harsanyi does not.
What is a rational American to do during tumultuous economic times? Well, you get sloshed.
The Mayo Clinic tells us that “high levels of stress, anxiety or emotional pain can lead some people to drink alcohol to block out the turmoil.” So, predictably, the sale of spirits, beer and wine have risen as the Dow Jones has tanked.
Drinking can be fun. …
Tunku Varadarajan reacts to the “heroics” of the Arab shoe hurler.
… The Arabs, who once upon a time boasted Averroes and Avicenna, are now reduced to eulogizing a boorish act of agitprop as a heroic achievement. America gave us Martin Luther King; South Africa gave us Mandela; India gave us Gandhi; the Arab world gives us … Muntader-al-Zaidi. A people who invented the zero are now reduced, themselves, to zero. Only a people who live under the boots of their rulers celebrate the throwing of a shoe at a guest.
Muntader’s Arab celebrants have fellow-travelers in the West, of course–chiefly among the anti-Bush mass on the left; but the latter’s reaction to the shoe-throwing has been one of vitriolic glee, not self-congratulatory jubilation. The Western liberal’s hatred of Bush is an ideological hatred; it may be as potent as the hatred of Bush in Arab breasts, but at least it is a hatred that has its origins in the mind, in differences of opinion. The Arab reaction, by contrast, has been damningly, disturbingly emotional and visceral. A vast swath of people, from Morocco to Iraq, have found cultural and tribal, even civilizational, catharsis in a 20-second display of theater comprising the hurling of shoes–and of that most beloved of Arab epithets, “dog.”
It makes one want to yelp: Is this the best they can do? Is this how their heroism is now defined? To me–to many–this is alarming proof of the depth of Arab impotence, of the Lilliputian self-image that drives Muslim Arabs to take to terrorism, to assault that which they cannot comprehend. The irony that has been lost on them is the fact that in the entire Arab world, only in Bushified Iraq could such an act of protest be possible. …
John O’Sullivan thinks Sarah Palin compares favorably to Margaret Thatcher.
… Though regularly pronounced sick, dying, dead, cremated and scattered at sea, Mrs. Palin is still amazingly around. She has survived more media assassination attempts than Fidel Castro has survived real ones (Cuban official figure: 638). In her case, one particular method of assassination is especially popular — namely, the desperate assertion that, in addition to her other handicaps, she is “no Margaret Thatcher.”
Very few express this view in a calm or considered manner. Some employ profanity. Most claim to be conservative admirers of Mrs. Thatcher. Others admit they had always disliked the former British prime minister until someone compared her to “Sarracuda” — at which point they suddenly realized Mrs. Thatcher must have been absolutely brilliant (at least by comparison).
Inevitably, Lloyd Bentsen’s famous put-down of Dan Quayle in the 1988 vice-presidential debate is resurrected, such as by Paul Waugh (in the London Evening Standard) and Marie Cocco (in the Washington Post): “Newsflash! Governor, You’re No Maggie Thatcher,” sneered Mr. Waugh. Added Ms. Coco, “now we know Sarah Palin is no Margaret Thatcher — and no Dan Quayle either!”
Jolly, rib-tickling stuff. But, as it happens, I know Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher is a friend of mine. And as a matter of fact, Margaret Thatcher and Sarah Palin have a great deal in common. …
Mark Steyn’s Corner posts.
Thomas Sowell with thoughts on the depression made by FDR.
… Let’s start at square one, with the stock market crash in October 1929. Was this what led to massive unemployment?
Official government statistics suggest otherwise. So do new statistics on unemployment by two current scholars, Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway, in their book “Out of Work.”
The Vedder and Gallaway statistics allow us to follow unemployment month by month. They put the unemployment rate at 5 percent in November 1929, a month after the stock market crash. It hit 9 percent in December— but then began a generally downward trend, subsiding to 6.3 percent in June 1930.
That was when the Smoot-Hawley tariffs were passed, against the advice of economists across the country, who warned of dire consequences.
Five months after the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, the unemployment rate hit double digits for the first time in the 1930s.
This was more than a year after the stock market crash. Moreover, the unemployment rate rose to even higher levels under both Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt, both of whom intervened in the economy on an unprecedented scale. …
We could fill Pickings with NY Times stupid stuff. Gordon Chang spots one.
Dogless shepherd uses wolf picture to control flock of sheep. Metro, UK with the story.