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Peter Wehner says Pelosi has morphed into Baghdad Bob.
… Nancy Pelosi, leader of the Democrats in the House of Representatives, has become our Baghdad Bob. And what a spectacle it is. Jihadists in Iraq are testifying to their own failures. At the same time, the Speaker of the House seems to have a deep ideological investment in ours.
Christopher Hitchens is not as polite to the Archbishop as Mr. Warren was yesterday
… And just look at how casually this sheep-faced English cleric throws away the work of centuries of civilization:
[A]n approach to law which simply said “there’s one law for everybody and that’s all there is to be said, and anything else that commands your loyalty or allegiance is completely irrelevant in the processes of the courts”—I think that’s a bit of a danger.
In the midst of this dismal verbiage and euphemism, the plain statement—”There’s one law for everybody and that’s all there is to be said”—still stands out like a diamond in a dunghill. It stands out precisely because it is said simply, and because its essential grandeur is intelligible to everybody. Its principles ought to be just as intelligible and accessible to those who don’t yet speak English, in just the same way as the great Lord Mansfield once ruled that, wherever someone might have been born, and whatever he had been through, he could not be subject to slavery once he had set foot on English soil. Simple enough? For the women who are the principal prey of the sharia system, it is often only when they are shipped or flown to Britain that their true miseries begin. This modern disgrace is deepened and extended by a fatuous cleric who, presiding over an increasingly emaciated and schismatic and irrelevant church, nonetheless maintains that any faith is better than none at all.
John O’Sullivan has a defense (sort of) of the Canterbury Fool.
… At about the time Rowan Williams was named for the ancient See of Canterbury, a friend who’d known and admired the new archbishop well at Oxford told me he was alarmed by the news. “He is a fine teacher, a very scrupulous theologian and a pious man,” said my friend. “But he lacks political skills and everyday common sense – which today are essential qualities in a successful archbishop.”
He went on to predict that Anglicanism would be convulsed in rows that would deeply distress his old friend.
That was a safe bet: The worldwide Anglican Communion was already embroiled in painful disputes between progressives and traditionalists over women priests, gay marriage and the authority of the biblical tradition.
Alas, in the course of persuading both sides not to push their disputes to the point of breaking up Anglicanism, Rowan Williams as primate (first bishop among equals), has repeatedly turned the other cheek – and repeatedly got slapped by both sides. More, he has shown a genius for putting his foot in it with ill-judged public statements – for instance, that terrorists “can have serious moral goals” or that Western market transactions might be “acts of aggression” against the world’s poor – that then require several rounds of further explanation. …
Debra Saunders has Canterbury comments.
… It’s not only Our Betters in Europe who, in the name of political correctness, become apologists for polygamists. In 2005, then-Canada Prime Minister Paul Martin commissioned a $150,000 study to debunk the notion that same-sex marriages could lead to legalized polygamy — only to watch the three law professors on the panel recommend that Canada repeal its anti-polygamy law. Because: “The parties most likely to suffer from this rule are the left-behind wives.”
If secular Western nations had bedrock values, maybe there would be no need to worry about Values Creep. But when, as the honor-violence report noted, even women’s activists defend female genital mutilation, it’s clear that the only absolute in liberal societies is doubt.
Up against fanatics with barbaric ideologies, we are outgunned. We don’t even care if they want to hurt us.
“If you had a map of the U.K. showing the location of Islamist groups — or terrorist cells — and you had another map showing the incidence of honor-based violence and you overlaid them, you would find that they were a mirror,” noted Nazir Afzal, the Crown prosecutor on honor-based violence.
It makes you wonder if Western nations have a death wish.
Mark Helprin, who’s been very quiet lately, stirs from his lair in Charlottesville to slay some talk-show dragons.
What a kerfuffle! Half a dozen talk-radio hosts whose major talent is that, like hairdressers, they can talk all day long to one client after another as they snip, have decided that the presumptive Republican nominee does not hew sufficiently close to their gospel.
As anyone who has listened to them knows, the depth of their thought is truly Oprah-like. And if a great institution of the left can weigh-in as it does in the choice of a nominee, why not its fraternal twins on the right? It doesn’t matter that Mitt Romney, suddenly their Reagan, became a conservative in a flash of light sometime last year, or that their other champion, a populist theocrat, is in many ways as conservative as Vladimir Lenin. The task is to stop the devil McCain.
As a mere print person whose words are not electrified and shot through walls, automobiles, pine trees, and brains, I realize that what I write in the bloody ink of a dying industry may be irrelevant. But from my antiquated perspective, something is very wrong.
Ostracism following tests of “right thinking” is a specialty of the left. …
We’ll do a little nuance here as Thomas Sowell defends journalists, and entertaining talk-show hosts, who have not yet climbed on the McCain bandwagon. His example is not to the point, but an interesting history lesson nonetheless.
… The carnage of the First World War was a shock from which a whole generation never recovered. Millions of soldiers on both sides were killed. A whole continent was devastated and millions of civilians were starving amid the ruins. Surely it was a humane and noble desire to want to avoid a repetition of that.
So when Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times of London, decided to filter the news, in the interest of peace, that was understandable.
Rather than print news that could rekindle animosities among nations that had fought in the First World War, Dawson filtered dispatches from his own foreign correspondents in Germany to remove negative reports of what the Nazis were doing.
Some of The Times’ correspondents complained at the deletions and rewriting of what they had written, and some resigned in protest. They apparently understood that their role was to report the facts as they saw them, not cater to some hope or agenda.
We now know in retrospect that The Times’ use of its great influence to promote the interests of peace had the opposite effect.
It downplayed the dangers of Hitler, thus contributing to Britain’s belated awakening to those dangers, and its vacillating responses — factors which emboldened Hitler to launch the Second World War.
It was not just that Dawson guessed wrong. More fundamentally, he misunderstood a journalist’s role and the betrayal involved when he went beyond that role, even for a noble cause.
David Brooks says neither of the Dems is going to govern as they campaign. Should we be surprised?
There’s a big difference between the Republican and Democratic campaigns: The Republicans have split on policy grounds; the Democrats haven’t. There’s been a Republican divide between center and right, yet no Democratic divide between center and left.
But when you think about it, the Democratic policy unity is a mirage. If the Democrats actually win the White House, the tensions would resurface with a vengeance.
The first big rift would involve Iraq. Both Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have seductively hinted that they would withdraw almost all U.S. troops within 12 to 16 months. But if either of them actually did that, he or she would instantly make Iraq the consuming partisan fight of their presidency.
There would be private but powerful opposition from Arab leaders, who would fear a return to 2006 chaos. There would be irate opposition from important sections of the military, who would feel that the U.S. was squandering the gains of the previous year. A Democratic president with few military credentials would confront outraged and highly photogenic colonels screaming betrayal. …
Dick Morris show us how to follow the Clinton money.
… Foreigners are not allowed to contribute to presidential campaigns. But Bill’s 1996 campaign was accused of taking funds from the Chinese government passed through James Riady and through Al Gore’s visit to a Buddhist temple.
The Emir of Dubai must be smarting from the rejection of his efforts to take over security for key American ports and one can easily imagine that a desire for political acceptance by the next president may have been behind his generosity to Bill Clinton over this decade. Dubai has been gobbling up U.S. businesses. It recently bought a 20 percent stake in Nasdaq, Barney’s, Loehmann’s, it bought the Essex House Hotel, a 4 percent stake in Chrysler, a $5 million stake in MGM Mirage. In other words, Dubai is here to stay and may need help and permission for further investments from the federal government. Is it too much of a leap to speculate that the Emir might want to protect his investment by buying out Bill so that he can lend much needed cash to Hillary at a crucial moment in her campaign?
Especially at a time when Dubai and other foreign sovereign wealth funds are seeking to buy significant shares of cash-poor American banks, the major infusion of money into the Clinton campaign from the Middle East could become an important campaign issue.
Hillary and Bill could clear all this up by simply releasing the details of their personal finances as it was once customary for candidates to do. …
Post from Breakthrough Blog on the opposition to the $2,500 car.
Car A gets a fuel efficiency of 46 miles per gallon. Car B gets about 50 miles per gallon. Car A is called the Toyota Prius and is hailed by environmentalists as a step towards solving global warming. Car B, a new car called the Tata Nano unveiled by an Indian company, is reviled by environmentalists as disastrous for global warming. The New York Times devotes an entire editorial condemning the Tata Nano. Columnist and author Tom Friedman calls for the Tata Nano to be “taxed like crazy.” The reason for this extreme criticism? The Tata Nano is cheap – very cheap. It is a revolutionary new car design that will cost only about $2,500 and will bring car ownership within reach of millions of new people in the developing world.
The environmentalists’ hypocrisy is breathtaking. How can anything be criticized simply for being affordable? Tomorrow, if college education is made more accessible and affordable in India, will the New York Times denounce it on the grounds that college graduates tend to earn more and buy more consumer goods and hence enlarge their environmental “footprint”? The attitude of many environmentalists today is not unlike that of the Duke of Wellington at the dawn of the railroad era, who criticized the railways on the grounds that they would “only encourage the common people to move about needlessly.” …