James Taranto, "Best of the Web" @ the Wall Street Journal
Several readers sent us this link with the suggestion that we file it under "Bottom Stories of the Day," but we actually found it oddly interesting. The New York Observer has tracked down Michael Dukakis, the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee, and asked him to weigh in on today's politics:
It was around this very moment 20 years ago, the summer when Oliver North told Congress he was "authorized to do everything that I did" and Reagan fatigue took hold, that Mr. Dukakis, then the 53-year-old governor of Massachusetts, emerged at the head of a crowded Democratic presidential pack. By the time he was formally nominated in Atlanta the following July, he'd opened a 17-point lead over Vice President George H.W. Bush.
"I can handle this guy," Mr. Dukakis supposedly replied around that time when John Sasso, his consultant in exile, asked to return to the campaign. "You worry about the first 100 days."
So you can understand why the numerous harbingers of a triumphant 2008 for Democrats--George W. Bush's Nixonian approval ratings, polls that show voters favoring a Democratic White House candidate by double-digit margins, the electorate's historical aversion to three-term rule by one party--haven't prompted Mr. Dukakis to begin planning his trip to the 2009 inaugural celebration.
"We're not going to outspend the other guys," he said during an interview in his modest office in the political science department at Northeastern University, where he was the first to arrive (at 7:30 a.m.) on a recent midsummer morning. "We're probably not going to outstrategize them. And some crazy guy will blow up a building with three weeks to go, you know, and then we'll be back in Bush-land again."
. . . that last quote is really creepy. The thought of a massacre on American soil seems to leave Dukakis unmoved, except that he worries it might be harmful to his party's political prospects. But this is of a piece with his insouciant attitude toward the depredations of Willie Horton (a murderer who brutalized a Maryland couple after his release on a Dukakis-approved prison furlough program) and a hypothetical question in a 1988 debate about how he would feel if his own wife were raped and murdered. An important reason Dukakis lost is that he comes across as freakishly bloodless, unable to convey the normal range of human emotion. . . .
Posted by: Mike ||
08/24/2007 12:18 ||
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#1
An important reason Dukakis lost is that he comes across as freakishly bloodless, unable to convey the normal range of human emotion. . . .
For a moment there I thought they were talking about Al Gore.
#6
"We're probably not going to outstrategize them [Trunks]. And some crazy guy will blow up a building with three weeks to go, you know, and then we'll be back in Bush-land again.". . . that last quote is really creepy. The thought of a massacre on American soil seems to leave Dukakis unmoved, except that he worries it might be harmful to his party's political prospects.
It's not just Dukakis; this is the attitude of the whole friggin Democratic Party; party first, America second--they've sold their soul to the devil.
#7
Dukakis still can't get over Willie Horton. The sins of the father are revisited by the son.
Posted by: ed ||
08/24/2007 17:29 Comments ||
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#8
They just don;t get it. If the U.S. being attacked is a bad thing then that means people simply don't trust them with security. If we can't trust the Donks with security why are they even being considered given the state of world affairs?
#10
I suppose they would see another major attack upon US soil as the ultimate vindication of their stance that "killing terrorists only creates more terrorists". What's more strange is that they must all be unaware of the basic principles behind standard pest extermination methods. What do they do, try to "negotiate" with the termites that're eating their homes? Hold "talks" with the cockroaches? Work out "treaties" with the rats and mice?
. . . Some say we're the Roman Empire, but I don't think the soldiers of Rome were known for their kindness, nor the people of Rome for their decency. Some speak of Abu Ghraib, but the humiliation of prisoners there was news because it was American troops acting in a way that was out of the order of things, and apart from tradition. It was weird. And they were busted by other American troops.
You could say soldiers of every country do some good in war beyond fighting, and that is true enough. But this makes me think of the statue I saw once in Vienna, a heroic casting of a Red Army soldier. Quite stirring. The man who showed it to me pleasantly said it had a local nickname, "The Unknown Rapist." There are similar memorials in Estonia and Berlin; they all have the same nickname. My point is not to insult Russian soldiers, who had been born into a world of communism, atheism, and Stalin's institutionalization of brutish ways of being. I only mean to note the stellar reputation of American troops in the same war at the same time. They were good guys.
They're still good.
We should ponder, some day when this is over, what it is we do to grow such men, and women, what exactly goes into the making of them. . . .
Posted by: Mike ||
08/24/2007 06:43 ||
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The Left parties are at it once againtrying to position themselves as ardent nationalists and champions of the country's interests. Over the past three years, ever since they've managed to exert an inordinate amount of influence (not commensurate with their actual strength) on New Delhi's policies, the Left parties have been systematically attempting to portray themselves as a viable, if not only, alternative to the two national parties and their alliances. And the Indo-US nuclear deal, which they say will compromise India's interests and hence should be dumped, has come as another occasion for the Left to flex its muscles, mislead the people of India and seek to emerge as a pan-Indian party that wants to preside over this country's destiny.
But is the Left really capablemorally, ideologically and intellectuallyof protecting and promoting India's interests? An honest answer to this can be sought and found from the Left's track record in Bengal, a state they've ruled, or misruled, for more than three decades now. A dispassionate study of the policies followed by them would reveal that save for a few, like land reforms, the Left has jettisoned and junkedafter publicly admitting that they were 'mistakes'--most of the major ones they had so vociferously advocated and implemented over more than 30 years. Let me list some of these 'follies':
Banished English: Immediately after coming to power, the Left Front in Bengal banished English from primary schools. English was, they said, the language of the hated bourgeois classes and imperialists and was a means of subjugating the poor and keeping them shackled and in a state of economic and social deprivation for eternity. So out went English. This hatred for the English language was not confined to primary school classrooms alone, but ardently followed at the high school, college and university levels. Speaking in that language was, in fact, frowned on and considered politically incorrect or even a display of 'reactionary' behaviour. Thus, generations of Bengalis grew up without any knowledge of English and, as a result, lost out heavily in matters of higher and technical education, employment and other facilities to their counterparts from other states. It was only a few years ago that the Left Front government realised this folly and overturned the policy, re-introducing English at the primary school level. But by then, lakhs of Bengali boys and girls, men and women, had lost out and suffered immeasurably. (The children of the Left leaders, however, had all been educated in English-medium private schools and never had to suffer.) The Left parties have remained totally unapologetic about this 'mistake'; but more than this, it is their sheer nonchalance over having destroyed so many careers and having callously played with (and ruined) the lives of lakhs of men and women that's galling and unpardonable.
Computers, the Left parties had been shouting from the rooftops till even five years ago, were anti-worker and would render lakhs of people jobless. Computerisation was a ploy of the 'capitalist' and 'exploitative' classes to bring workers and employees to ruination. They had even proclaimed it was a neo-imperialist ploy of the USA and the West to subjugate Third World and developing countries. Office automation had to be opposed and the Left launched a shrill, often violent, movement against introduction of computers in offices and establishments; they had even opposed introduction of lessons on computer operations in schools. As a result, while the rest of the world and India marched ahead, Bengal floundered and lagged behind.
Five years ago, the Left, led by Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, discovered the benefits of computers, computerisation, IT and IT-enabled services and sectors and, overcoming its earlier antipathy, zealously launched a drive to promote computerisation and teaching software programming and other related subjects in educational institutions. This was coupled with an overdrive to attract investments in the IT and ITeS sectors in Bengal. But by the time Bengal's Leftists woke up, other states had raced ahead and Bengal is still trying to catch up with them. In the process, the sufferers have been the people of the state in terms of opportunities lost. But no, the Left has never bothered to apologise for this folly. In fact, some rigid and doctrinaire elements in the CPI(M) and its allies still cling to the 'computers are evil, imperial devils' stance.
Business: Even before capturing power in Bengal, the Left parties had launched a virulent campaign against private capital, industrialists and businessmen. 'Tata, Birla go back' was the credo of the Left till very recently. Private capital was evil and industrialists and businessmen were class enemies who had to be obliterated. This policy, aggressively pursued after the Communists captured power in Bengal, resulted in the flight of capital from the state and, consequently, economic downslide and ruin. It was only after two and half decades, in the last leg of Jyoti Basu's tenure, that the Left parties realised the monumental folly of this policy and overturned it to shamelessly start courting industrialists and businessmen, falling over backwards to get them to invest in Bengal. Even American businessmen, or perhaps especially they, will have the red carpet rolled out for them in Bengal today. While it is good that the Communists have realised the utter foolishness in driving away capital and have done a U-turn on that, they've never publicly owned up to this folly and acknowledged responsibility for having brought Bengal to the brink of ruination. Communists, given their supreme arrogance, can't be expected to do such a thing.
Trade Unionisms: Coupled with this anti-private capital idiocy was another dangerous policy actively followed by the Left all these decadespromoting irresponsible and militant trade unionism. Wildcat strikes, bandhs, verbal and physical assaults on owners and their managers, and much more, led to lockouts in industrial units and closure of many commercial establishments. Companies moved their offices out of Bengal. Consequently, lakhs of people were rendered jobless. This policy of encouraging militant trade unionism is being abandoned only now, with Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee leading the lobby within the Left that talks of responsible trade unionism. In fact, Bhattacharjee has gone one step further and has spoken out against the formation of employees' unions in sunrise sectors like IT and ITeS. But many in the Left ranks still swear by workers' rights to go on strikes, make unreasonable demands and rough up their employers if such demands are not met. However, even though these hardliners will soon realise the imprudence of encouraging workers to behave so irresponsibly and militantly, the Left will never acknowledge, leave alone apologise or atone for having encouraged this trend and for having been singularly responsible for closures and lockouts and, consequently, loss of lakhs of jobs in Bengal.
International Institutions: Till not very long ago, institutions like the World Bank, IMF and ADB were anathema to the Left in Bengal. The Communists here were vehemently opposed to taking loans from these 'capitalist' and 'imperialist' institutions which, they dogmatically believed, were out to undermine the country's economy and subvert it to suit US and Western imperialism.
The Left even sought to apply the brakes on the Union Government negotiating loans and aid from these institutions. But of late in Bengal, the ruling communists have realised the irrationality of shunning the World Bank or ADB and have enthusiastically lined up to seek aid from them. It's a different matter that some hardliners in Kerala still pursue the same policy, but they too will come around soon; Communists don't take time to change colours anyway. But a lot of time has already been lost, along with many opportunities. Had the Left in Bengal not reserved such irrational disdain for the World Bank or ADB, a lot of development, especially in infrastructure, could have taken place much earlier. That it hadn't has been Bengal's loss.
Urban Neglect: The Left Front in Bengal had pursued an absurd policy of neglecting Kolkata and refrained from establishing and developing other urban centres in the state. The reason they held out was supposedly ideologicalthat the rural areas required and deserved equal, if not more, attention than Kolkata. As a result of this weird and inexplicable anti-urban policy, Kolkata fell into neglect and slid into becoming perhaps the worst city in the country in terms of infrastructure, civic amenities, entertainment options and even cultural development. This led to the urban elite (the best and the brightest, actually, from all spheres), already reeling from the impact of shrinking economic opportunities (thanks to the Left's pursuit of other policies listed above), hastening their migration from Kolkata. This city, thus, became a cesspool of mediocrity. Kolkata's neglect is the sole reason for its underdevelopment and that's why it still fails to attract the best and the brightest. The Left Front government has, of late, tried to hasten the city's development, but there's a lot of catching up to do with other urban centres in India that have forged ahead.
The collective impact of all these blunders committed by the Left in Bengal was there for all to seea state and people with a lot of potential that sunk into the morass of poverty, despair and hopelessness. A state that was once the leader in the field of industries, commerce, economic development, arts, culture and intellectual development sliding slowly to the bottom of the heap. And it is not the Left parties who brought about such sad devastation that suffered. It is the people of the state who have. And they've suffered terribly. People in the rest of the country should learn from the Bengal experience and deny the Left any room to put its retrograde, myopic and destructive policies into effect.
Getting back to the nuclear deal, though its complex technicalities may appear incomprehensible to most of us, one would rather go by what a person like Dr Manmohan Singh says rather than buy the specious, warped and dogmatic statements spewed by the fire-breathing Left leaders. And if an innately decent and honest person like Dr Singh says India's interests haven't been compromised at all by the deal, that's good enough for me and for most Indians, I'm sure. And what our Prime Minister says has been attested by nuclear experts who are known to be hawks on India's right to develop nuclear weapons.
Why, then, has the Left suddenly upped the ante and wants the deal scrapped?
Its visceral hatred of the USA can't be the sole motivating factor in this opposition. For, had that been the case, the Left would have raved and ranted against the deal right from the day it was proposed two years ago and all through the tumultuous negotiations between India and US. It did not, save for making the customary protesting noises at regular intervals. The Prime Minister's challenge to the Left in the course of an interview to a Kolkata-based newspaper last week couldn't also have angered the Left so much.
The reasons, I suspect, can be found across the border.
That the CPI(M)'s masters in Beijing aren't at all happy with the deal and would love to scupper it is very well-known. Especially since, as it has now been revealed, a similar US-China nuclear deal of 1985 (but ratified by the US Congress a full 13 years later) is heavily loaded against China. China's rulers haven't been able to stomach the fact that not only is India set to sign a nuclear deal with the USA and thus gain a seat at the nuclear high table, but Indians have also been able to wrest better terms from Uncle Sam than the wily Chinese. Thus, while the Indo-US deal includes supply of fuel and India's right to reprocess spent fuel, the agreement with China does not. China has had to accept bilateral inspections by US inspectors while there's no such clause in the Indo-US deal. USA's nuclear deal with China is linked to various external factors like China's relations with Pakistan, its behaviour in Tibet and its non-proliferation record. The Indo-US deal has no such linkages, nor does it provide any role to external agencies to oversee the separation between civilian and military reactors in India, unlike the US-China deal that forced China to allow Australia to attest its separation plan.
Naturally, with the Indian negotiators having done much better with the US than their Chinese counterparts many years ago, the Chinese, their precious egos punctured, have been bristling with rag. But it is not just that. It wouldn't be difficult to imagine, consequently, the rulers in Beijing directing their minions at New Delhi's AK Gopalan Bhavan to suddenly raise the pitch and threaten the Manmohan Singh government with a 'US or us' ultimatum in the hope that New Delhi will develop cold feet and ultimately abandon the deal. That would benefit China the most, because a deepening of Indo-US strategic ties that the nuclear deal would herald would be the biggest stumbling block towards complete Chinese hegemony in South Asia, which is what they fear the nuke deal is engineered to prevent. No wonder, then, that the (state-controlled) media in China has been reveling in the crisis that Beijing's foot soldiers in India have precipitated. And that's reason enough for Indians not to trust the Left, particularly the CPI(M). Not only is their track record in governance extremely poor (as the Bengal experience shows), their commitment to the country's strategic and other interests is also suspect.
Posted by: john frum ||
08/24/2007 00:00 ||
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Ahh.. the city of Calcutta.. that shining example of what decades of communist rule will produce...
Posted by: john frum ||
08/24/2007 8:02 Comments ||
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A black hole?
Posted by: ed ||
08/24/2007 8:06 Comments ||
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History does repeat itself. Never exactly -- there are always enough differences in the details that people who are determined not to learn anything from the past can find an excuse.
But history shows patterns precisely because human beings don't change. Orson Scott Card: Fairly long, but well worth reading
Choice quote
We are right now in the business of saving the world from a Muslim empire that will make Hitler look like an amateur, when it comes to murder and oppression. And yet nobody is telling that true story to the American people.
After months of surreality, the Iraq debate has quite abruptly acquired a relationship to reality. Following the Democratic victory last November, panicked Republican senators began rifling the thesaurus to find exactly the right phrase to express exactly the right nuance to establish exactly the right distance from the president's Iraq policy, while Murtha Democrats searched for exactly the right legislative ruse to force a retreat from Iraq without appearing to do so. In the last month, however, as a consensus has emerged about realities on the ground in Iraq, a reasoned debate has begun. A number of fair-minded observers, both critics and supporters of the war, agree that the surge has yielded considerable military progress, while at the national political level the Maliki government remains a disaster.
The latest report from the battlefield is from Carl Levin, Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a strong Iraq War critic. He returned saying essentially what we have heard from Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution and various liberal congressmen, the latest being Brian Baird, D-Wash.: Al-Qaeda has been seriously set back as Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar, Diyala and other provinces switched from the insurgency to our side.
As critics acknowledge military improvement, the administration is finally beginning to concede the political reality that the Maliki government is hopeless. Bush's own national security adviser had said as much in a leaked memo back in November. I and others have been arguing that for months. And when Levin returned and openly called for the Iraqi Parliament to vote out the Maliki government, the president pointedly refused to contradict him.
This convergence about the actual situation in Baghdad will take some of the drama out the highly anticipated Petraeus moment next month. We know what the general and Ambassador Ryan Crocker are going to say when they testify before Congress because multiple sources have already told us what is happening on the ground.
There will, of course, be the Harry Reids and those on the far left who will deny inconvenient reality. Reid will continue to call the surge a failure, as he has since even before it began. And the left will continue to portray Gen. David Petraeus as an unscrupulous commander quite prepared to send his troops into a hopeless battle in order to advance his political ambitions (although exactly how that works is not clear). But the serious voices will prevail. When the Democratic presidential front-runner concedes that the surge "is working" (albeit very late) against the insurgency, and when Petraeus himself concedes that the surge cannot continue indefinitely, making inevitable a drawdown of troops sometime in the middle of next year, the terms of the Iraq debate become narrow and the policy question simple: What do we do right now -- continue the surge or cut it short and begin withdrawal?
Serious people like Levin argue that with a nonfunctional and sectarian Baghdad government, we can never achieve national reconciliation. Thus the current military successes will prove ephemeral. The problem with this argument is that it confuses long term and short term. In the longer run, there must be a national unity government. But in the shorter term, our assumption that a national unity government is required to pacify the Sunni insurgency turned out to be false. The Sunnis have turned against al-Qaeda and are gradually switching sides in the absence of any oil, federalism or de-Baathification deal coming out of Baghdad. In the interim, the surge is advancing our two immediate objectives in Iraq: (a) to defeat al-Qaeda in Iraq and prevent the emergence of an al-Qaeda mini-state, and (b) to pacify the Sunni insurgency, which began the post-liberation downward spiral of sectarian bloodshed, economic stagnation and aborted reconstruction.
Levin is right that we require a truly national government in Baghdad to obtain our ultimate objective of what O'Hanlon and Pollack call "sustainable stability." The administration had vainly hoped that the surge would provide a window for the Maliki government to reform and become that kind of government. It will not. We should have given up on Maliki long ago and begun to work with other parties in the Iraqi Parliament to bring down the government, yielding either a new coalition of less sectarian parties or, as Pollack has suggested, new elections.
The choice is difficult because replacing the Maliki government will take time and because there is no guarantee of ultimate political success. Nonetheless, continuing the surge while finally trying to change the central government is the most rational choice because the only available alternative is defeat -- a defeat that is not at all inevitable and would be both catastrophic and self-inflicted.
#1
You can gage the potential political effectiveness of GWB's recent VFW remarks by the speed with which the media was able to post stories attempting to debunk him. Less than 12 hours after the VFW speech, breathless articles appeared citing numerous military historians and politicians stating that he got his history wrong about Vietnam, but curiously absent from most of these stories was any detailed analysis of WHY he was wrong, we were left with general and broad humbugging. I suppose, though, time was short, and it's hard to build a convincing lie under such time constraints!
Fact is, the anti-war crowd had the blood of millions of SE Asian people on its hands after Vietnam, and it knows that a bloodbath would likely ensue in Iraq should we pull out prematurely, but they don't care. And that is the instructive element: The Left, who have for 50 years portrayed themselves as having a corner on the human rights market, is more than willing to see a million human beings slaughtered if it will result in America being beaten, shamed and bankrupted. It's sick and twisted.
#2
You can gage the potential political effectiveness of GWB's recent VFW remarks by the speed with which the media was able to post stories attempting to debunk him.
Very good point, gb506. I hadn't made that connection. A happy thought to take with me to my morning nap. :-)
#3
This really puts the donks in a box. Even the Brits get it.
Mr Bushs case is that Americas gravest mistakes in Iraq are behind it, that the counter-insurgency strategy devised by General Petraeus is yielding results, but that the military have a question: Will their elected leaders in Washington pull the rug out from under them just as theyre gaining momentum and changing the dynamic on the ground? For elected leaders, read Democrats. In historical perspective, the Democrats do not come well out of the Vietnam debacle.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
