In France, they're arresting conductors--literally.
Brian M. Carney gives us an amusing look at the French. In this episode we find that the cultural paragons of Old Europe are employing musical protectionism by not employing foreign musicians. It seems that many a town in France can afford to pay imported orchestras but not home-grown ones. And that just doesn't sit well with the French unions.
Take the plunge, save the planet.
P.J. O'Rourke has a bit of fun telling us why he likes riding the train to work, even though it costs us all $52 billion, not counting cotton candy and plush toys.
Muslim women seize the chance to claim their rights.
Daniel Henninger writes about the emancipation of women in the Middle East, specifically in Kuwait. In a region where half the population has been suppressed for years, there is now a growing demand for full inclusion into the political life of Arab society. If such a thing comes to pass it will bring the Arab world a step closer to the modern one where all people have a say in how they are governed.
K. E. Grubbs Jr. reviews Hugh Hewitt's new book, "Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That's Changing Your World" in this essay from The American Spectator. Hewitt compares the new technology of the Internet to the reformation which changed the face of Europe during the sixteenth century.
Here is a great column by Charles Krauthammer in which he takes a look at the new, and probably very temporary, humility of the left.
With the re-election of George W. Bush it became clear to many people around the globe, and particularly in the Middle East, that for the time being America would continue to press for liberty in places where it has yet to reach. President Bush said very publicly that America would stand with the people who yearned for freedom, and everyone knew he meant it. Thus we now see the flowering of freedom in an area where it has been previously absent.
This movement for freedom is still very new and there are still those who wish for it to fail, but there can be little doubt about the hopes of many in the Middle East for a better life which freedom brings. In Lebanon, in Kuwait, in Iraq and in Iran the people are finally making their voices heard after decades of being silenced. And what they want is freedom from dictatorship and tyranny.
This presents a serious intellectual problem for The Angry Left. They pinned their hopes on their hatred for George W. Bush, America and all things Republican. They argued that Iraq was a "quagmire" and that 100,000 American body bags would return hence. They, and some paleo-conservatives, said that the people of the Middle East would never want democracy and freedom because it was incompatible with their culture. On MSNBC, Janeane Garofalo, the personification of the ignorant and arrogant Hollywood Left, called the inked fingers of Republicans showing solidarity with Iraqi voters "Disgusting" and offered a Nazi salute as an alternative. All of these individuals have now been proven spectacularly wrong. And while it may still take many years to bring freedom to the Middle East, with the inevitable bumps and setbacks along the way, there is little doubt that the people there want it.
What will the left do about this? If history is any guide, after a short interval of grudging acceptance they will pretend not to have noticed how wrong they have been, change the subject and start complaining again in the hope that the next time won't be a repeat of all the times that went before.
Will Vietnam be the next Iraq?
The winds of freedom are reaching beyond the Middle East as Claudia Rosett writes in The Wall Street Journal. In this article she takes us back to Vietnam where dissidents such as Nguyen Dan Que still hope for an end to communist tyranny.
Rather leaves his anchor chair.
Dan Rather is off the air. Courage.
But if you are reading this, as Jim Geraghty of the National Review points out, you probably haven't watched the CBS evening news in years and don't care about it all that much. People who are interested in knowing what's going on in the world and who want more than a two minute summary are going elsewhere for their information. Dan's typical audience member, on the other hand, has to turn up their hearing aid in order to get the dumbed-down, liberal version of the news right before the denture commercials come on. This is not the demographic of the future, and that explains why the network news shows are bleeding audience.
The younger generations of news enthusiasts have formed a different set of habits regarding information that revolve around the emerging new media. If you are of a certain age or younger, you are getting your news from cable, talk radio and the Internet; not from Dan the Dinosaur. And so as Dan slips into the sunset, so does The Elite Media Monoculture. Sure they still have more viewers for now than anyone else. But their numbers are on the way down, while new media is still on the way up. Eventually it will be the new media which will have larger numbers. It is only a matter of time. So say goodnight Dan.
Witness the economic power of lower marginal tax-rate incentives.
Larry Kudlow, one of my favorite contemporary economists, lays out some of the recent numbers for the American economy. And as usual, the doom and gloom crowd is wrong again. Jobs, productivity and growth are all on the upswing. Once again, supply-side tax cuts and free market capitalism create a dynamic and growing economy. But don't expect the The Elite Media Monoculture to notice it, or to report it on the evening news.
Sorting out the teenage sass.
Victor Davis Hanson argues that our relationship with Old Europe is like that between a parent and an unruly teenager. Lots of angst, complaining and acting out combined with implicit dependency, lack of maturity and the unwillingness to accept responsibility for one's actions. Perhaps we need a time out.
I didn't watch the Oscars, but George Neumayr did. And in this essay he makes some interesting points about the failure of Hollywood to make art as it once did. There was a time when Hollywood knew how to make a great film which would move an audience. But how often does that happen now? Not very, I would say. The elites in the entertainment world have forgotten that art should reflect reality rather than try to re-shape it according to some strange political agenda. True art is a mirror, not a sledgehammer.
Chicago's mayor doesn't have a theory of governance. He just likes to solve problems.
Here is an interesting article by Joseph Epstein on the Daley dynasty in Chicago. Mr. Epstein does not take a particularly strong position on the question of whether big city politics can ever change from what it is, which is perhaps answer enough. But for those not from the windy city, this is an informative look at Chicago. I grew up here and for most of that time a Daley has been in charge of things. And while the city continues to be reliably Democratic, it is less ideological than it is simply pragmatic. If you live here you know how things get done in big city government and that someone is always getting paid; it's just a question of who and how much.
Gerald and Natalie Sirkin write in this article on how the environmental movement and the EPA have perpetrated a vast and deadly fraud on the world. In their quest to demonize DDT based on junk-science and political correctness, they have condemned millions in the third world to death from the deadly diseases carried by insects such as mosquitoes. Of course they're just a bunch of brown people out there who never had a latte at Starbucks and who don't vote Democratic so it's no big deal. Right?
Mark Steyn offers up a few thoughts on the President's trip to Europe and reminds us that the problems which they face are largely their own fault. The President had a few words to say to them about anti-semitism and the war on terrorism. No doubt the leaders of Old Europe were not happy to be reminded of how weak and irrelevant they have become on the world stage. Their creaking socialist welfare systems have brought their economies to their knees and atrophied their military forces. That we pay attention to them at all is really a matter of good manners rather than necessity.
Heather MacDonald reports that there is a major dust-up going on between Susan Estrich and liberal LA Times editor Michael Kinsley. It seems that little Ms Estrich has been stamping her feet demanding that the LA Times publish more women on its editorial pages in order to get the "woman's perspective." This of course assumes that there can be one, and only one, woman's perspective. And we all know which side of the intellectual debate little Ms Estrich is going to come down on. Never mind the assumption that all women must therefore think alike and that as a result we only need to ask one woman what she thinks about any given subject and that therefore no others need be published. The fact is that little Ms Estrich has no use for opinions other than her own and will ignore any woman who does not tow the liberal party line and parrot the agenda of which she approves. I almost feel sorry for Mr. Kinsley, liberal though he is. Perhaps he can give Larry Summers a call for support.
The left is out of ideas
Martin Peretz of The New Republic writes this essay in which he looks at the intellectual exhaustion of the left. Because Mr. Peretz is a liberal he gets a few things wrong in this article. His views on the free market and capitalism are part of the reason that the left is in trouble. But his larger point is correct. Political movements need intellectual fuel in order to have and keep momentum. Politics is, after all, the application of philosophy to the ordering of society through law and custom. Without ideas, a political system cannot hope to survive or to thrive. Today's intellectual ferment is not found on the left but on the right. It is the conservatives in America who have built a network of think-tanks, authors, public and private institutions and individuals where ideas are constantly developed and discussed. It has been a very long process, but the political right is now where one looks to find real intellectual debate and discussion.
The left, on the other hand, still clings to the outdated ideas of 19th century socialist writers. We get plenty of Janeane Garofalos' and Michael Moores', but no serious public or academic intellectuals are to be seen. Ideas and books are few and far between and rarely discussed by Democrats. We know what the Angry Left is against; we know that Howard Dean "hates Republicans and everything they stand for." But when questioned about what they are for, we get only gauzy generalities about 'social justice' or the complaints of a thousand special interest splinter groups who have in common only their hate of capitalism and limited government and their ever-present desire to re-distribute income which they did not earn.
The ideas of socialism have been discredited everywhere and thus the Angry Left has no unifying theory to replace their old one. They are rudderless on a wide sea, blaming everyone but themselves for their unwillingness to choose a new direction in which to sail.
Two articles on an unpleasant subject
Roger Kimball offers a few items on the continuing story of Ward Churchill. Mr. Kimball argues that Churchill is but a symptom of a much deeper disease which has overtaken the modern American university. The Angry Left has made academia its home and has transformed it from an institution of learning and scholarship into one of political indoctrination. Thus it is now all but impossible to find any ideas on the modern college campus which might challenge liberal-leftist orthodoxy. Universities are now re-education camps which attempt to spread the doctrines of the left to the next generation of students. Ideas, debate and intellectual curiosity are things of the past which stand in the way of the Great Socialist Utopia that the left still dreams of bringing to pass.
And Mr. Kimball also takes a look at the many connections within leftist groups and how they are funding all of this to make sure it continues. The amount of money which is dumped into the leftist rat hole is not small by any measure. The task of brainwashing the young is well funded indeed.
Lawrence Henry asks what happened to the labor unions. His answer is that they were left in the dust by people who founded the world of hi-tech companies in silicon valley and elsewhere. These are the places where people wear jeans and sneakers and work 65 hour weeks as a matter of course. By the time the unions knew what was happening, it was too late for them to do anything about it.
In this essay David Hogberg runs down some of the arguments that Democrats are using to tell us why we do not need Social Security reform. Of course, no sane person will trust the Democrats with their money as they will steal it and spend it the first chance they get. That's why we need to keep as much as possible out of their hands and in private accounts where they can't get at it.
We don't need Modernism and Post-Modernism anymore.
Daniel Henninger argues that modern art is dead. In fact it died a long time ago, it's just that most Americans haven't noticed it, and for art that is the problem. When artists abandoned the traditional purpose behind art, the pursuit of truth and beauty, they set art on the path of eventual irrelevance. Now most Americans ignore the comings and goings of the most recent fads in art and rightly so. Art has become political and in so doing has ceased to be art at all. If art is to have a rebirth in the 21st century, artists will have to return to a rational understanding of what art is and why it is important. Art should speak to the universal in Man. It should hold up a vision of what life is about and the importance and meaning of human existence.
Politicizing the science of global warming.
The editors at The Wall Street Journal take a look at the politicization of science in the name of environmentalism. In this case we dwell a bit on the Kyoto "treaty" and the junk science behind it. For there is plenty of reason to doubt the contention of the global warming fanatics that Man, and only Man, is responsible for climate change on the Earth. Never mind that climate change has been occurring as long as the Earth itself has existed and that fluctuations in temperature can be explained by pointing at the energy output of the sun, rather than at human activity. But none of this matters to the environmentalists who hold their views with the same ferocity as religious fanatics and who demand that heretics be punished for questioning the received wisdom of the age.
Nonie Darwish laments that so many Muslims in America are silent when it comes to the brutality and human rights abuses in their countries of origin. And it should be no surprise as so many of them actually want to bring that brutality and backwards savagery to America in the form of mediaeval Islamic religious law. Changing that part of the world and getting rid of the barbarian influence of radical Islamism can't come too soon.
Or maybe the MSM is just suffering from freedom envy.
Peggy Noonan ruminates for a bit on the importance of blogs and how they are changing the debate in the country. The Elite Media Monoculture has complained, rather loudly, that the lack of editors is what's wrong with blogs. Well, its one of the things they complain about anyway. But Noonan points out that it is this fact which gives blogs their individual voice and point of view as well as their willingness to cover stories which the MSM does not. Good reading as always from Peggy Noonan.
Feminist complainers, not Larry Summers, owe women an apology.
Ruth Wisse of Harvard offers the view that feminists have placed a straightjacket of political correctness over the academic freedom that once existed in the American university. The search for ideas and truth has been replaced by the search for reactionary conservative traitors who fail to tow the party line with the desired amount of enthusiasm. Meanwhile real questions of interest are dealt with elsewhere thus rendering the academy irrelevant in the search for knowledge.
Patrick O’Hannigan argues that what The Angry Left really fears is that freedom is indeed the aspiration of most people around the world, except perhaps for the French. And if this is the case, then George W. Bush is right and they are wrong. For you cannot get to The Great Socialist Utopia if most of the people around the world really want American style freedom and democracy, or at least something like it. For Socialism what you need is a lot of people who think big government is the bees knees, not folks who want jeans, pizza, cell phones and nice cars with CD players. And in general when we look around the world we find that Freedom sells better than Socialism when people have a chance to choose for themselves. Selling Socialism requires explaining to people why it is better to stand in line for hours to get stale bread from the government bread store rather than going to Dominick's and selecting from a hundred different varieties. Elites don't get this, but many regular people do.
Patrick Hynes examines the roll of blogs in this article from The American Spectator. The big story this past year has been the ability of blogs to take on The Elite Media Monoculture by exposing the lies and fabrications to which they have become addicted in their rage and hate of George Bush and all things Republican. But blogs are also becoming a useful tool for the spread of ideas to specific groups who may not be politically active and who may not read political blogs on a regular basis. The use of blogs which target lifestyle groups that also intersect with specific political issues of interest to them may well be an important development in future campaigns.
James Bowman takes a look at some of the Marxist terminology still in use by the leaders of today's dinosaur party, the Democrats. What it reveals is a wealth of underlying false assumptions about how the world works and the place different kinds of people have in it. To Marxists and Democrats, everything is a struggle of class relationships, and the Revolution which will bring The Great Socialist Utopia is inevitable. Thus anyone who disagrees or acts to bring about a different system, say capitalism, is deemed a fascist reactionary and is targeted for destruction by the self-congratulatory elites who always know better than the knuckle-dragging proletariat.
And over at Democratic Underground the usual suspects are very unhappy that the Iraqi people are not still under the boot of Saddam. For them the real crime is that their freedom came at the hands of George W. BushHitlerCo. Black helicopters are hovering over shanties all over liberal-land at this very moment. And while there were some more sensible voices urging clear thinking, the Stalinists in charge made sure that their posts were removed from the historical record so that no one's thinking would be contaminated with impure thoughts. Posts like these:
If you want to cheer on a bunch zealots who stone gays and beat women or power-mad fascists, then go over to Pat Robertson's or the neo-Nazi's website. It's that kind of anti-democratic Democratic thinking that is turning the DNC into the minority party everywhere.
If what happened today in Iraq is screwing up the world, then we've got to figure out how to screw it up faster. Maybe if we could screw up mainland "company town" China their workers could have real unions and be able to bargin for better conditions. Let's screw up Iran next. After their wars women are enough of a majority there they might could elect some feminists.
Why does Bush say he wants to spread freedom around the world? If that's what American's want to here, then let's get out in front of it and complain from the cutting edge that the conservatives are too slow. Tell people that if they want to make sure its done right then who better than the party of Jefferson and Wilson and Roosevelt.
This short-sighted "the enemy of my political oponent is my friend" obsession is not only going to alienate voters, it's going to destroy an otherwise great opportunity to spread democracy around the world.
Fox News reports on the turnout in the Iraqi elections. Ted (hic) Kennedy must be thinking up some new things to complain about right now. It must really suck to be a Democrat these days.
Bush is one of a long, distinguished line.
Jonah Goldberg asks the question, "Is George W. Bush a revolutionary?" And just what do we mean by the term when we use it? The word has been used for many things and in this essay we look at the view that the promotion of liberty around the world has practical and beneficial effects for us here at home.
Donald Luskin breaks down some of the numbers concerning Social Security reform. And as always, the left and The Elite Media Monoculture demonstrate that math is not their strongest subject.
What we need is a global standard.
In The National Review, Dennis Boyles reminds us of why we want the UN out of the US and why "human rights" organizations are nothing of the sort and care only about abusing America for wanting to defend itself. And we also learn in this article about the UN aid official who liked to be called "Your Excellency" while allowing thousands of Ethiopians to die of starvation. The word corrupt hardly covers the mess over at the UN. But somehow the moral sewer has escaped the notice of The Elite Media Monoculture. Could there be a double standard I wonder?
Mark Steyn has a bit of fun at the expense of confused Democrats and shows that they have become the thing they claimed to oppose. Just think of Klansman Robert Byrd standing in the door of the State Department blocking Condi Rice from getting in and you have the appropriate visual image of just where the Democrats have arrived in their quest to stop President Bush from being President. The Democrats are angry while the rest of us are laughing at their increasingly hysterical antics. They are acting like powerless losers and everyone knows it but them.
Also from The Scotsman, Nicholas Christian writes that a CIA report predicts dire consequences for the European Union due to expanding welfare state spending combined with demographic changes that are already well underway. It's not really new information of course, but it does appear in a European news outlet. Personally, I think the writing is on the wall for Old Europe and at this point a collapse is all but inevitable because the Europeans don't seem inclined to do anything to fix their problems while they still have the chance. At this point it would be painful to make radical changes in their economic systems and they just don't want to go that way. And so instead we will witness the long decline of Old Europe as it rusts into irrelevance.
Reporter Susan Bell of The Scotsman reports that, just as we all have come to suspect, the French are a bunch of prissy party-poopers who are no fun at all. Things must be getting really bad if they can't even get up the enthusiasm for a national strike against whatever-it-is that's bothering them this time.
The decline of the norm.
Jonah Goldberg takes us on a fascinating historical tour of liberalism's relationship with the doctrine of pragmatism. In this essay he traces the route by which Oliver Wendell Holmes' "reasonable man" was replaced by Janeane Garofalo and Michael Moore screeching from the balcony.
Will the GOP have the courage, at last, to change the face of government?
In this article from The Wall Street Journal, Paul Gigot offers his views on which issues the GOP should aim for in the next few years. The major areas that can be addressed reflect the idea of an 'ownership society' as the President has been saying. To control costs in areas such as health care and Social Security requires the re-introduction of market forces. These free market forces would bring costs back into line while expanding the total wealth of the country. And putting a leash on the lawyers and activist judges wouldn't be a bad idea either if we want to keep our economy moving. It is critical that the Republicans solve some of these big issues because a chance such as this does not come around every day. The Republicans are now the party of ideas and it's time to put some of them into action.
Here you can find the text and video of the inaugural address of the President. Having read it I have to say it is perhaps one of the most visionary speeches heard since Ronald Reagan. And it is fitting that it stresses the same theme, liberty, that was also a favorite of President Reagan. But the ideas in this speech go further by pointing out that liberty is the common wish of people everywhere, and that the spread of liberty has very practical and beneficial consequences to everyone's security and well-being.
America will abandon the realpolitic which has been in fashion for so long and with limited success, and replace it with a pro-active policy which will encourage the spread of freedom to all corners of the globe. It is easy to see that the greatest dangers around the world today come from nations which are not free and run by those who wish only for a greater accumulation of power to themselves and from fanatical groups that desire the power of guns and bombs rather than the consent of free people.
William Voegeli writes this extensive essay for The Claremont Institute in which he asks some very interesting questions about where the Democrats have been and where they are going, if anywhere, in the future. Just what do Democrats believe anyway? What, as Rand would say, are their axioms and how do they shape the actions of Democrats in ethics and policy?
The answer that Voegeli offers is that the problems from which the Democrats suffer have deep historical and philosophical roots going back to the last century. And it is one of the basic assumptions of Democrats that one cannot place any intellectual limits on problems needing to be solved and thus there is no limit to the size of a government dedicated to solving each and every one of them using your taxpayer dollars to do so.
It's both sad and amusing at the same time. Democrats just can't let go of the fiction that somehow the election was stolen from them by evil and sinister Republicans. Their whole argument can be summed up by the phrase, "But the exit polls said so!!" They just can't let go of the moonbat conspiracy theories. But the exit polls were flawed in their methodology and have been discounted. Even CNN has reported on the story.
Heather Mac Donald writes this lengthy article for City Journal in which she argues that we have allowed political correctness to seriously undermine our ability to get information from captured Islamofascists. Terrorists are not covered by the Geneva convention and for good reason since they seek to undermine every rule of civilization. The terrorists themselves have chosen not to conduct themselves according to the rules of war. Thus they are not subject to the ordinary protections which would apply otherwise. We need to take off the gloves when dealing with them. They are not going to cooperate with our interrogators unless we are allowed to use forceful methods of getting information out of them. As Heather Mac Donald shows, the PC methods just don't work with bloodthirsty killers bent on destruction.
After the Dan Rather scandal, American journalism will never be the same.
Peggy Noonan takes a look at the historical context of Rathergate and finds that because The Elite Media Monoculture lost its monopoly on information control, we now live in a better and more informed world than we once did. And this is undoubtedly true. Americans now have choice where before they had only one viewpoint offered to them. And when people have choices, they often take them.
Social Security reform will lead to party divisions, but not for the Republicans.
Brendan Miniter argues that the Republicans are more united on the issue of Social Security reform than the Democrats are and that we can expect to see at least some Democrats cross the isle when the time comes to vote.
And here, dear friends, is the nail in the coffin. Leftists everywhere were hoping against hope that those documents might still be real. Well, they're not even "Fake but Accurate." Far from it. Here is an excerpt from the report's appendix which says it all.
The following is a summary of the information provided to the Panel by Peter Tytell relating to the typestyle of the four documents aired on the September 8 Segment (the "Killian documents") and the typestyle of the previously released Texas Air National Guard ("TexANG") document containing a superscript "th" that was featured on the September 10 CBS Evening News (the "Superscript Exemplar") .'
Tytell concluded, for the reasons described below, that (i) the relevant portion of the Superscript Exemplar was produced on an Olympia manual typewriter, (ii) the Killian documents were not produced on an Olympia manual typewriter, and (iii) the Killian documents were produced on a computer in Times New Roman typestyle . Tytell acknowledged that deterioration in the Killian documents from the copying and downloading process made the comparison of typestyles "to some extent a subjective call." However, he believed the differences were sufficiently significant to conclude that the Killian documents were not produced on a typewriter in the early 1970s and therefore were not authentic...
The Killian Documents Were Likely Produced On A Computer
Tytell concluded that the Killian documents were produced in a typestyle that closely resembles Times New Roman, a typestyle that he explained was not available on standard typewriters in the early 1970s.6 Tytell explained to the Panel that although the typestyle of the Killian documents has certain similarities with the "Press Roman" typestyle on the IBM Selectric Composer typewriter that was available in the early 1970s, there are enough significant differences in his opinion to conclude that the Killian documents were not produced by an IBM Selectric Composer. The basis for his conclusion is summarized below.
According to Tytell, the Killian documents are proportionally spaced and therefore could not have been produced by monospaced typewriters, which constituted a substantial majority of the typewriters available in the early 1970s.
Here you can read CBS's own story covering the fraud that they perpetrated four months ago in the hope of unseating a President they hate: George W. Bush. They blame the "zeal" to get the story first, but fail to note why this particular story resulted in such a large amount of zeal when other stories, such as the one about the Swift Boat Vets resulted in no zeal whatsoever. I wonder why there would be a difference. Hmmmmm...
If you want to download the complete report from CBS on the scandal involving those fabricated documents you can do so here. It certainly took them long enough. I suspect there will be some interesting reading, but we already know from the excerpts that have been published that CBS is trying to put the best face they can on what is obviously a mortal blow to their credibility. And we can say with certainty that they are still in denial mode because there will be no acknowledgment of the bias that got them into this mess in the first place.
