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| Real reasons the Palestinian Authority opposes a security fence. |
| 11.30.03 (8:03 pm) [edit] |
For one, they work. Every time Israel has used protective fences (in Gaza, for example) with razor wire, radar, cameras and trenches, the PA is impeded from sending their terrorists to kill more Israeli innocents. Putting up a security fence is a huge strategic advantage to Israel.
Another reason why the Israeli security fence is a big deal to the PA is NOT because it is a 'land grab' that defines borders, but because it protects Jerusalem and fortifies a country that the PA-- and most of the Arab world-- refuses to recognize.
The "Palestinian" claim of 'land grab' is fantasy. Most of the fence line follows the so-called "Green Line", the [i]pre-'occupation'[/i] border along the West Bank (which, oh by the way, is actually Israel's promised land in the first place). Globalsecurity.org has estimated that the total amount of "Palestinian" "land" enclosed by the new fence is about 30 paltry square miles.
This part of the fence could be negotiated, but the "Palestinians" want an end to the entire fence. Indeed, they don't want to recognize the fence, because then they'd have to recognize Israel. There is a reason why Arafat continually talks about marching to Jerusalem. "Jerusalem" is not some euphemistic symbol of salvation to the long-suffering "Palestinians", it is their real goal-- to occupy a city that occupies absolutely no place in Islamic history but is absolutely vital to the existece of the Jewish people (and their state).
Once there is no Jerusalem, there is no Israel. A fence makes it that much harder to deny that the Jews are here to stay in the Middle East. It is up to the "Palestinians" to show that they accept Israel, that they accept basic human rights, that they, indeed, love their children more than they hate Israel.
Do the "Palestinians" deserve a state? They were given one 55 years ago, but they didn't want it-- they just wanted Israel out (think about it-- where were the "Palestinian" uprisings for statehood when these Arabs were ruled by the Turks? Or the British?) The Arab world and the "Palestinian" leadership have exploited their own people and blamed Israel for it-- there is no reason that there should be refugee camps anymore, for example-- when it was their failed leadership that created the squalid conditions that "Palestinians" live in.
To give them a state now would be the biggest reward for terrorism in world history.
This is why Israel has always insisted that change must come from within regarding the "Palestinians" before they have their own state. No one, not even the US, can pretend that this dress on a pig is going to change the nature of the pig.
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| An examination of the collective psyche of the Bush haters through their books |
| 11.29.03 (11:46 pm) [edit] |
[b]That Man in the White House
From the December 8, 2003 issue: Reading the Bush bashers. [/b]
by Andrew Ferguson
12/08/2003, Volume 009, Issue 13
Had Enough?
A Handbook for Fighting Back
by James Carville with Jeff Nussbaum
Simon & Schuster, 306 pp., $23
Big Lies
The Right Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth
by Joe Conason
St. Martin's, 245 pp., $24.95
The Lies of George W. Bush
Mastering the Politics of Deception
by David Corn
Crown, 337 pp., $24
Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them
A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right
by Al Franken
Dutton, 377 pp., $24.95
Thieves in High Places
They've Stolen Our Country--and It's Time to Take It Back
by Jim Hightower
Viking, 280 pp., $24.95
The Bush Hater's Handbook
A Guide to the Most Appalling Presidency of the Past 100 Years
by Jack Huberman
Nation, 335 pp., $12.95
Bushwhacked
Life in George W. Bush's America
by Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose
Random House, 347 pp., $24.95
The Great Unraveling
Losing our Way In the New Century
Paul Krugman
Norton, 426 pp., $25.95
SOMETIMES without straining I can remember the long-ago 1990s, when a number of people, including many of my friends--well, including me, to tell the truth--succumbed to what some of us came to call "Billy Bob Gasket Disease." That's not really the name we used, by the way. The real name came from a man who is still living in Arkansas and still intermittently in the public eye down there, and there's no point, at this late date, in dragging him into a discussion of an affliction that he, like most of us, has managed to survive.
Gasket Disease was closely linked to Bill Clinton. The man I call Billy Bob Gasket had been involved in Arkansas politics for thirty years or more. He was used to its homegrown scandals and the mostly harmless diversions enjoyed by members of its ruling class. In this spirit, back in the early 1970s, he became an energetic booster of the young Rhodes Scholar who'd come home from Oxford and Yale with the impressive hair and the glimmering eye and the semi-permanent catch in his voice.
Then, along about Clinton's first term as governor, Gasket noticed something. Bill Clinton was different. He was not just another in the long line of amiable cads and genial roués who had grasped power in Arkansas since Reconstruction. The new governor was, Gasket came to believe, the least principled, sleaziest politician he had ever seen at work. That the lack of principle and sleaziness were lacquered over with twinkly charm and vaguely progressive politics made the situation, for Gasket, all the more maddening.
And maddening is the word. As Clinton was returned again and again to office, Gasket was at first disbelieving, then agog, and finally crazed. Why couldn't his fellow Arkansans see the truth? Why couldn't they penetrate the governor's sheath of bogus empathy and concern to see the creature of seething ambition and power hunger and raw cynicism that writhed so self-evidently beneath? Gasket became a hair-puller, a lapel-grabber, a mid-sentence interrupter, a nut. When, in the late 1980s, national reporters began trickling into the state to look over the promising young governor with national ambitions, their search for knowledgeable Clinton watchers led them inevitably to Gasket, and they found a madman.
Clinton became president. Gasket Disease trailed him like a cloud. It laid waste to Republican ranks in Washington and far beyond, to vast stretches of the country at large--by the end, if I read the polls correctly, roughly a third of all Americans had succumbed. Those who caught the disease didn't just dislike Clinton, as, say, they might have disliked Jimmy Carter. The crux of Gasket Disease was not contempt but unendurable frustration. They could not fathom why everyone else didn't grasp his essential, transparent fraudulence: the phoniness of the lower-lip-bite, the moist insincerity of the smile, the vanity in every tilt of the carefully coifed head. As with syphilis, so with Gasket Disease: Some Republicans recovered, others were driven mad.
And now, according to an increasingly common view, George W. Bush has had the same effect on his political enemies that Bill Clinton had on his. He has driven them crazy; the nuthouse lately vacated by the Clinton-haters has suddenly filled with Bush-haters. Gasket Disease, according to this view, alights without regard to party or ideology--and indeed has become a professional hazard and fact of life for anyone who dares take sides in partisan politics.
IS THERE SOMETHING to this trading-places idea? The steam rising from this year's stack of new books on President Bush suggests that there is. It's true that for sheer fantasy, none of these anti-Bush books contains anything to rival such Clinton-era classics as Terry Reed and John Cummings's "Compromised," which asserted that Clinton had been installed as president on the say-so of Ronald Reagan's CIA director William Casey, or Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's "The Secret Life of Bill Clinton," which implicated Clinton in drug-running and even murder. Still, the anti-Bush books I've been reading through are undeniably . . . overdone. Pick one up, turn it over in your hands, and you can hear, if you listen closely, the faint sound of veins popping.
The new crop of Bush-hating books owe a lot to conservatives in other ways, particularly to the political potboilers that have proved so lucrative in recent years: Michael Savage's "Savage Nation," Sean Hannity's "Let Freedom Ring," Ann Coulter's "Slander," Bill O'Reilly's "The No-Spin Zone"--the list of right-wing bestsellers is long and dispiriting. Like them, the anti-Bush products are not books in the traditional sense. They're tracts, pumped up and inflated to a size sufficient to fit in display racks. In appearance they are indistinguishable from diet books or the oeuvre of Dr. Phil. Chatty and personal, skipping lightly from one subject to the next in brief, easily digestible chapters, interrupted now and then by diagrams or cartoons or pithy sayings helpfully printed in bold, they show no sign of having been written for people who read books. They have found their audience.
AMONG THE MANY TIES that bind them, the authors are unanimous in claiming inspiration from Paul Krugman, a columnist for the New York Times, who, to borrow a term from epidemiology, seems to be Patient Zero in this most recent outbreak of Billy Bob Gasket Disease. You can understand why they revere him so. Unlike most Bush-hating authors--there are volumes out now by a comedian, a media gadfly, a few reporters, a political consultant, a talk-show host--Krugman has a real job, as a salaried economist at Princeton. Ten years ago he started moonlighting, writing charmingly on economic matters for Fortune, Slate, and other general-interest magazines. His well-earned success brought him a regular column on the Times op-ed page. He has recently gathered dozens, though it seems like thousands, of his Times columns and published them under the title "The Great Unraveling."
Every collection of newspaper columns, paced in hiccups of 750 words or less, faces problems of redundancy and continuity. Whether from presumption or laziness, Krugman has made no effort to overcome them. The breathless tone is unrelieved, the repetition dazzling. Right from the start you wonder whether the author, much less a copy editor, has bothered to read the book. On page three, in a new introduction, we learn that "America's radical right now effectively controls the White House, Congress, much of the judiciary, and a good slice of the media." Seven paragraphs later, on page five, we discover that "America's right-wing movement now in effect controls the administration, both houses of Congress, much of the judiciary, and a good slice of the media."
So that must be his thesis--what happens to a country when its right-wingers in effect control the administration, Congress, much of the judiciary, and a good slice of the media. (Wait--did I say that already?) So that must be his thesis. (Oops!) What happens is mayhem. Krugman sees a country in which free speech is disappearing, the poor are paying more taxes than the rich, and religious superstition is supplanting evolution in grade-school curriculums. That none of these things is actually taking place does not dampen his eagerness to spread the word. "This is hard for journalists to deal with," he writes. "They don't want to sound like crazy conspiracy theorists."
Krugman is quite happy to, however--he may not have a choice--and it is this mixture of insouciance and paranoia that make his columns so unpleasant to read; painful, too, for anyone who took pleasure and profit from his earlier stuff in the 1990s. "Together," he writes, "these columns tell a coherent story." They do. Column by column, we watch a talented fellow jettisoning one gift after another--his humor, his prose style, his mental discipline, his taste--in a rush to alert everyone else to the terrible fantasy that grips him. "The Great Unraveling" should be of interest only to sadists and shrinks.
THE BOOKS by Krugman's acolytes may have broader appeal. Their common thesis is most economically summarized in Jim Hightower's "Thieves in High Places"--not in the text itself, which is rendered unreadable by a tumult of exclamation points and sidebars and graphs, but in the book's index:
Bush administration:
agenda to disunite America, 36-37
contaminated food and, 208-9
corporate interests of, 5-9
dangerous policies of, 3-4
early elitist agenda of, 76
And so on, down to "undermining U.S. democracy, 240-43," the book's climax.
The titles of many of the books, too, rely on a single trope, as in Al Franken's self-amused "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them." Why "lies"? Why not "power-crazed" or "corrupt" or "hypocritical"? And "stupid"--what happened to "stupid"? Any competent Bush-hater thinks their man personifies these traits, too, of course. Yet the word "lies" and its variants now, in common parlance, signify them all--a shorthand summary of his every despicable instance of despicableness.
The question is why, and the most obvious possibility is that Bush really is a liar: a liar of astounding dimensions, a liar so vast that his lies overwhelm his standing as oligarch, hypocrite, or idiot. Another possibility suggests a reaction to the Clinton years. Of all the accusations leveled against Clinton, the hardest to refute was that he was a liar. Accusing Bush of the same may thus stand as a rebuttal to Clinton's accusers, since Clinton's lies, we were so often told, were about the trivial matter of an illicit liaison, while Bush's lies are about matters of state. (If only Bush had an illicit liaison to lie about!) As James Carville's ghostwriter cleverly puts it in "Had Enough?", "Democrats lied about something we really like: sex. Republicans lie about something they really like: war and money." Calling Bush a liar is a twofer. It at once underscores the gravity of the present president's misconduct, and it condemns the frivolousness of the previous president's accusers.
[b]There is a strategic benefit as well. If Bush is a liar, the public is off the hook. Every political polemicist thinks of himself as a Tribune of the People. Populist is part of the job description--and part of the self-image. [/b]
The problem for polemicists in attacking a relatively popular president is that the People are implicated as well: Maybe they like him because they're as depraved as he is. Which is unthinkable. (For if the People are evil, what of their Tribune?) Conservatives struggled with this difficulty in the 1990s, when Clinton, despite their well-orchestrated abuse, maintained his popularity through both his terms. "Where's the outrage?" wondered poor Bob Dole, swinging his lamp into musty corners as he wandered the country in 1996. In the deeps of the Lewinsky scandal, William J. Bennett published a book around the same question, "The Death of Outrage." From Where's the Outrage? it is a short hop to What in God's name is wrong with you people? If, on the other hand, the People are being lied to relentlessly, then they don't really know what's going on, and they can't be blamed. They may be chumps, but they're not evil.
In "Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush's America," by Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose, we meet several of these misled Americans--and they're just as colorful and earthy and pathetic as a populist could hope for. [b]No one does populism as ruthlessly as Ivins, a graduate of Smith College and a former reporter for the New York Times, who holds a graduate degree from Columbia. Her political opinions are as reliably left-wing as this pedigree suggests, but she prefers to present herself as one of them spunky Texas gals what's jes full o' sass--the love child of Noam Chomsky and Minnie Pearl. She uses the word "shit" a lot. Her newspaper columns, a slapdash mix of ideological platitudes and mild jocosities, made her famous a few years ago when they were collected in a huge bestseller with the unintentionally funny title, "Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She?" (She can and does!) Incredibly, she has not won a Pulitzer Prize.[/b]
"Bushwhacked" is the best of the Bush-hating books. There is a sameness to the others, from their avenues of attack to their taste in jokes; at least four of them, by my count, reach for the line "It's deja voodoo all over again" to describe the administration's economic policies; the unimaginative Joe Conason, author of "Big Lies," was even desperate enough to use it as a chapter title. (And it wasn't funny the first time.) All rely heavily on the same statistics cribbed from Krugman columns and from precooked studies got out by think tanks such as Citizens for Tax Justice and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. "Bushwhacked" sets itself apart by glossing over the dreary technicalities in favor of original reporting, presumably by Dubose, about all those colorful victims caught in the Bush nightmare.
"This country is not working for most of the people in it," Ivins and Dubose write, which will be news to most of the people in it. It is certainly not working for any of the people in this book. We meet a high-school student with money problems, an environmental activist who's angry, and a single mother with a ghastly job skinning catfish on an assembly line. [b]Their portraits are engaging and sometimes poignant--the stuff of real journalism--until you realize how cheaply Ivins is using these unhappy people as stage props in her larger argument. Their stories are necessary because the argument is so weak. It turns out that no set of facts could ever contradict the anti-Bush thesis; for that matter, any set of facts could be adduced in its support. Bush-hatred, as the philosophers say, is unfalsifiable. [/b]
GEORGE BUSH'S CAREER, like that of most politicians, traces a zigzag, as he first tacks right, then left, then back to the middle, in his endless quest to be loved for as long as possible by as large a group of voters as he can reasonably seduce. A critic might see this as cynicism, but a Bush-hater can't grant even that much. Did Bush--to take one example--sign an extension of unemployment benefits to those without work earlier this year, over the objections of doctrinaire conservatives? Well, yeah. And a pretty big one it was, too. But it is only a minor inconvenience for the authors: "So Dubya [that's George W. Bush] did better than his old man [that's George H.W. Bush] and signed a bill that got some help to some workers. But two million jobs had disappeared since he took office two years earlier."
And Bush's "education reform," the cloyingly titled "No Child Left Behind Act," caressed and nurtured in the ample bosom of Ted Kennedy, reviled by right-wingers and libertarians? It greatly expanded the federal government's role in the nation's public schools, after all, and vastly increased their funding, with special attention given to poor schools, which were asked in return only to test their students more frequently. You would think the haters would be happy.
Yet Ivins and Dubose have discovered that the bill is really designed to be a windfall for big business interests--specifically, companies that publish those standardized tests that schools will be required to use. "Follow the money," they write, inevitably. This larcenous scheme, as described here, is breathtakingly ingenious, slightly confusing, and not terribly efficient, especially if the point was merely to enrich more of Bush's rich friends. (That's what the tax cut was for!) "The idea is to set up strategic partnerships that involve market penetration in schools," write Ivins and Dubose. "Education is all about business."
[b]It should go without saying, but I'll say it anyway: If Bush had refused to sign the education bill, he would have proved himself an uncaring hypocrite, by the standards of Ivins and Dubose. Because he did sign it, however, he has proved himself an oligarch. [u]Bush-hatred adapts itself to any circumstance, fits any set of facts.[/u] "The term compassionate conservative is a bitter joke," they write. "Anybody who tells you different is lying for money." [/b]
SO WE ARE BACK TO LIES--the engine of the Bush dreadnought. Yet what's a lie? It's a straightforward question, and a crucial one for the Bush-haters, but they're confused about the answer. In "The Bush Hater's Handbook," Jack Huberman tries to get to the heart of the matter. "Two lies stand out as the Bush administration's most basic, founding lies, if you will. The first is summed up by the political formula, 'Run center, govern right.'" He goes on: "The Bushies' second basic lie: their pretense that the closest election in history . . . somehow amounted to a mandate for a radical shift to the right."
There are some obvious problems here. For one thing, the lies singled out by Huberman aren't lies, at least as the word is conventionally defined, and it's not at all clear that "Run center, govern right" can be called a "political formula," much less a lie, and it's even less clear that the Bushies ever mounted a pretense that the election was a right-wing mandate, which doesn't seem to be the kind of thing they would make a public pretense about in any case; also, even assuming these two "founding lies" are lies, they're the same lie. Which means there's only one founding lie. Plus, it's not a lie.
Jack Huberman doesn't get us very far. Yet his confusion on the subject of Bush's lies isn't much more severe than that of the other Bush-haters. As author of a book with the title "The Lies of George W. Bush," David Corn should have thought the thing through. There is some evidence he tried. With an admirable, undergraduate earnestness, Corn devotes his preface to a meditation on what constitutes a lie, offering dutiful paraphrases of Machiavelli, Plato, and the inevitable Sissela Bok, author of "Lying." His own book has "an incendiary title," Corn acknowledges, "with an incendiary theme," and sure enough he begins it with two incendiary sentences: "George W. Bush is a liar. He has lied large and small."
This is an arresting opening, in my opinion--a quick strike, building immediate momentum. But then he tries to illuminate Bush's lies by placing them in a historical context: "Most presidents lie." They do? Indeed, "there are many varieties of presidential lies," and fffffffft, the air is leaking from the balloon already.
Corn's partial list of presidential prevaricators doesn't help him regain the momentum. William Henry Harrison said he'd been born in a log cabin. "Not true at all," Corn says. Supporters of President Lincoln told voters he was a country lawyer; in fact, Corn writes, Lincoln was a rich railroad lawyer. Franklin Roosevelt fudged the facts in his effort to lead the United States into World War II. In a speech delivered after dropping the Bomb, Harry Truman called Hiroshima a military base, which was only partially true (apparently there was a big city surrounding it). Bill Clinton "promised an initiative on race relations and never produced one." As a candidate, the first president Bush said: "Read my lips: no new taxes," and then, two years later--well, you know the ugly truth.
DAVID CORN doesn't need any advice from me, but really, this is not the way to stoke an incendiary theme. If presidents have been liars from George Washington to Chester A. Arthur to Bill Clinton, then Corn's title and his opening two sentences, in retrospect, aren't nearly as shocking as they were apparently meant to be, and this in turn raises the fatal suspicion that maybe George W. Bush isn't so bad as the title suggests, either. Corn's definition of "lie" is pretty elastic, after all. Before he finishes his introduction he's expanded the word to include a broken campaign promise, an oversight, an incomplete admission, and a misrepresentation made by one group of people on another person's behalf.
But wait. His cogitations continue. And suddenly we learn: "Comparisons to previous administrations, though, are unimportant." They are? Here a reader can get really confused. The historical context doesn't matter? That can't be right. How come? "Bush is the president the nation has now--at a point when honesty in government is needed as much, if not more, than ever." But surely this is just cant. Undermining government with lies is always wrong, isn't it, whether in George Bush's time or William Henry Harrison's? This is so hard to understand!
[b][i]The form that Corn's confusion takes is important, because it is so widely shared by the Bush-hating books. Through them all runs a chasm separating the language used, which is sustained at the highest pitch, from the events being described, which are often mundane. The technique is usually called hype, and it's an essential feature of politics nowadays, thanks to the influence of television in all its absurdity, but on the page, between book covers, it's harder to shrug off. Corn's particular method, in the body of his book, is to print a Bush lie in bold type, and then to try manfully to expose its falsity in several hundred words. [/b][/i]
A few examples will give you an idea. "I don't get coached," Bush once said. But Corn, through his own reporting and that of others, has discovered that Bush operatives use focus groups to test some of their rhetorical formulations.
THERE'S MORE. Bush, describing Texas in 2000: "We still have no personal income tax." Corn: "An amendment to the state constitution--proposed and approved by a Democrat-controlled legislature before Bush took office--prohibited the imposition of an income tax without a voter referendum. Bush was assuming credit for a policy established before he had arrived."
Bush: "It's time to listen to each other." Corn: "Bush's call for a wide-open and respectful debate with plenty of listening was hokum."
Bush, a month after the September 11 attacks: "[We are] taking every possible step to protect our country from danger." Corn: "Plenty of steps were not taken."
Bush: "My [energy] plan helps people in the short term and long term." Corn: "Most of the plan's proposals, if implemented, would not affect energy markets for years."
Uncle! "This book does not document every single lie," Corn writes. The head swims at the thought of the ones that didn't make the cut.
Sometimes, like the old Washington Generals, the Bush-haters score despite themselves. Bush's failure, in the 2000 campaign, to disclose his drunk driving arrest in 1976, as Franken and others point out, was a breach of faith with supporters who had relied on his good word (and it may have cost him a victory in the popular vote). He has never plausibly answered reasonable questions about his service in the Air National Guard, questions explored at encyclopedic length by Corn and Conason. And the means by which Bush made his personal fortune--mau-mauing the local government of Arlington, Texas, into subsidizing his sports team with taxpayer money, thus quadrupling its value and his profit when it was sold--is a particularly tawdry instance of corporate socialism.
All true, yet all relatively trivial. I myself (if you'll excuse a personal note) have no special affection for George W. Bush, though I voted for him, and I am open to the idea that he is an unusually accomplished liar, though it strikes me as unlikely. [b]Having read through the books of his political enemies, however, and having seen them discharge their heaviest artillery, I am even more open to the idea that he is the recipient of larger amounts of unearned abuse than any president since Abraham Lincoln, with the possible exception of Franklin Roosevelt. Both of whom were liars, as we've seen. [/b]
WHY DO THEY HATE HIM SO? The experience of Billy Bob Gasket is illuminating. Conservatives afflicted with Gasket Disease were called Clinton-haters because their dislike for the president struck other people as out of proportion--a personal reaction inexplicable by the plain facts. It seemed not only beyond reason, but beyond politics. Clinton was the most conservative Democratic president since Grover Cleveland: overseer, among much else, of the 1996 welfare reform, the only significant reversal of the welfare state since its inception. It is unlikely, for the foreseeable future, that American conservatives will have another Democratic president so hospitable to their interests.
In the same way--and always excepting foreign policy, which was utterly transformed by the September 11 attacks and which, in any case, is not the preoccupation of most Bush-hating books--Bush's performance as a policymaker leaves little for his political opposites to complain about, and much to please them: steady increases in the nonmilitary budgets across the government, for the arts and humanities, for disease research, and now, most spectacularly, for government-run health care. Not only does Bush show no appetite to restrain the welfare state, he's been happy to enlarge it in ways that Clinton himself, hindered after 1994 by a hostile Congress, didn't dare.
To explain today's politics it is tempting to cite the old and excellent joke about feuds among college professors: The fights are so furious because the stakes are so low. The slow and stable advance of the federal government is unlikely to be undone by a president of either party, and the frenetic activities of political enthusiasts will redirect it in only the most marginal ways. Yet the joke doesn't really explain Gasket Disease. Bush-haters hate Bush for the least articulable reasons, the visceral kind that never quite rises to the level of rationality. [b]They're often at a loss even to explain who it is they hate--the Yalie plutocrat or the hill-country Bible-thumper? The failed businessman or the cunning Babbitt? The calculating liar or the master of malaprops, the wimp or the caveman, the evil genius or the boob?[/b]
THE BUSH-HATERS know they must scramble for more high-minded reasons to explain themselves, and this year's stack of new books is the unpersuasive product of their efforts. Taken together the books make plain, if only inadvertently, that the cause of our most recent outbreak of Gasket Disease is something much deeper than policy, much deeper even than politics, plunging down and down into the mysteries of cultural identity in fractured America. At the end of "Bushwhacked," Molly Ivins speaks for all Bush-haters when, with typical artlessness, she sums up our present state of affairs: "There is something creepy about what is happening here." But they can't quite put their finger on what it is.
[i]Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard. [/i]
© Copyright 2003, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.
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| How Pope Pius XII Protected Jews |
| 11.29.03 (7:55 pm) [edit] |
[b]How Pius XII Protected Jews[/b]
By Jimmy Akin, Catholic Answers-- http://www.catholic.com
The twentieth century was marked by genocides on an monstrous scale. One of the most terrible was the Holocaust wrought by Nazi Germany, which killed an estimated six million European Jews and almost as many other victims.
During this dark time, the Catholic Church was shepherded by Pope Pius XII, who proved himself an untiring foe of the Nazis, determined to save as many Jewish lives as he could. Yet today Pius XII gets almost no credit for his actions before or during the war.
Anti-Catholic author Dave Hunt writes, "The Vatican had no excuse for its Nazi partnership or for its continued commendation of Hitler on the one hand and its thunderous silence regarding the Jewish question on the other hand. . . . [The popes] continued in the alliance with Hitler until the end of the war, reaping hundreds of millions of dollars in payments from the Nazi government to the Vatican."[1]
Jack Chick, infamous for his anti-Catholic comic books, tells us in Smokescreens, "When World War II ended, the Vatican had egg all over its face. Pope Pius XII, after building the Nazi war machine, saw Hitler losing his battle against Russia, and he immediately jumped to the other side when he saw the handwriting on the wall. . . . Pope Pius XII should have stood before the judges in Nuremberg. His war crimes were worthy of death."[2]
One is tempted simply to dismiss these accusations, so wildly out of touch with reality, as the deluded ravings of persons with no sense of historical truth. This would underestimate the power of such erroneous charges to influence people: Many take these writers at their word.
Stepping out of the nightmare fantasyland of Hunt and Chick and back into sunlight of the real world, we discover that, not only was Pius XII no friend of the Nazis, but that his opposition to them began years before the War, before he was elected to the papacy, when he was still Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the Vatican Secretary of State.
On April 28, 1935, four years before the War even started, Pacelli gave a speech that aroused the attention of the world press. Speaking to an audience of 250,000 pilgrims in Lourdes, France, the future Pius XII stated that the Nazis "are in reality only miserable plagiarists who dress up old errors with new tinsel. It does not make any difference whether they flock to the banners of social revolution, whether they are guided by a false concept of the world and of life, or whether they are possessed by the superstition of a race and blood cult."[3] It was talks like this, in addition to private remarks and numerous notes of protest that Pacelli sent to Berlin in his capacity as Vatican Secretary of State, that earned him a reputation as an enemy of the Nazi party.
The Germans were likewise displeased with the reigning pontiff, Pius XI, who showed himself to be a unrelenting opponent of the new German "ideals"?even writing an entire encyclical, Mit Brennender Sorge (1937), to condemn them. When Pius XI died in 1939, the Nazis abhorred the prospect that Pacelli might be elected his successor.
Dr. Joseph Lichten, a Polish Jew who served as a diplomat and later an official of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League of B?nai B?rith, writes: "Pacelli had obviously established his position clearly, for the Fascist governments of both Italy and Germany spoke out vigorously against the possibility of his election to succeed Pius XI in March of 1939, though the cardinal secretary of state had served as papal nuncio in Germany from 1917 to 1929. . . . The day after his election, the Berlin Morgenpost said: ?The election of cardinal Pacelli is not accepted with favor in Germany because he was always opposed to Nazism and practically determined the policies of the Vatican under his predecessor.? "[4]
Former Israeli diplomat and now Orthodox Jewish Rabbi Pinchas Lapide states that Pius XI "had good reason to make Pacelli the architect of his anti-Nazi policy. Of the forty-four speeches which the Nuncio Pacelli had made on German soil between 1917 and 1929, at least forty contained attacks on Nazism or condemnations of Hitler?s doctrines. . . . Pacelli, who never met the Führer, called it ?neo-Paganism.? "[5]
A few weeks after Pacelli was elected pope, the German Reich?s Chief Security Service issued a then-secret report on the new Pope. Rabbi Lapide provides an excerpt:
"Pacelli has already made himself prominent by his attacks on National Socialism during his tenure as Cardinal Secretary of State, a fact which earned him the hearty approval of the Democratic States during the papal elections. . . . How much Pacelli is celebrated as an ally of the Democracies is especially emphasized in the French Press."[6]
Unfortunately, joy in the election of a strong pope who would continue Pius XI?s defiance of the Nazis was darkened by the ominous political developments in Europe. War finally came on September 1, 1939, when German troops overran Poland. Two days later Britain and France declared war on Germany.
Early in 1940, Hitler made an attempt to prevent the new Pope from maintaining the anti-Nazi stance he had taken before his election. He sent his underling, Joachim von Ribbentrop, to try to dissuade Pius XII from following his predecessor?s policies. "Von Ribbentrop, granted a formal audience on March 11, 1940, went into a lengthy harangue on the invincibility of the Third Reich, the inevitability of a Nazi victory, and the futility of papal alignment with the enemies of the Führer. Pius XII heard von Ribbentrop out politely and impassively. Then he opened an enormous ledger on his desk and, in his perfect German, began to recite a catalogue of the persecutions inflicted by the Third Reich in Poland, listing the date, place, and precise details of each crime. The audience was terminated; the Pope?s position was clearly unshakable."[7]
The Pope secretly worked to save as many Jewish lives as possible from the Nazis, whose extermination campaign began its most intense phase only after the War had started. It is here that the anti-Catholics try to make their hay: Pius XII is charged either with cowardly silence or with outright support of the Nazi extermination of millions of Jews.
Much of the impetus to smear the Vatican regarding World War II came, appropriately enough, from a work of fiction?a stage play called The Deputy, written after the War by a little-known German Protestant playwright named Rolf Hochhuth.
The play appeared in 1963, and it painted a portrait of a pope too timid to speak out publicly against the Nazis. Ironically, even Hochhuth admitted that Pius XII was materially very active in support of the Jews. Historian Robert Graham explains: "Playwright Rolf Hochhuth criticized the Pontiff for his (alleged) silence, but even he admitted that, on the level of action, Pius XII generously aided the Jews to the best of his ability. Today, after a quarter-century of the arbitrary and one-sided presentation offered the public, the word ?silence? has taken on a much wider connotation. It stands also for ?indifference,? ?apathy,? ?inaction,? and, implicitly, for anti-Semitism."[8]
Hochhuth?s fictional image of a silent (though active) pope has been transformed by the anti-Catholic rumor mill into the image of a silent and inactive pope?and by some even into an actively pro-Nazi monster. If there were any truth to the charge that Pius XII was silent, the silence would not have been out of moral cowardice in the face of the Nazis, but because the Pope was waging a subversive, clandestine war against them in an attempt to save Jews.
"The need to refrain from provocative public statements at such delicate moments was fully recognized in Jewish circles. It was in fact the basic rule of all those agencies in wartime Europe who keenly felt the duty to do all that was possible for the victims of Nazi atrocities and in particular for the Jews in proximate danger of deportation to ?an unknown destination.? "[9] The negative consequences of speaking out strongly were only too well known.
"In one tragic instance, the Archbishop of Utrecht was warned by the Nazis not to protest the deportation of Dutch Jews. He spoke out anyway and in retaliation the Catholic Jews of Holland were sent to their death. One of them was the Carmelite philosopher, Edith Stein."[10]
While the armchair quarterbacks of anti-Catholic circles may have wished the Pope to issue, in Axis territory and during wartime, ringing, propagandistic statements against the Nazis, the Pope realized that such was not an option if he were actually to save Jewish lives rather than simply mug for the cameras.
The desire to keep a low profile was expressed by the people Pius XII helped. A Jewish couple from Berlin who had been held in concentration camps but escaped to Spain with the help of Pius XII, stated: "None of us wanted the Pope to take an open stand. We were all fugitives, and fugitives do not wish to be pointed at. The Gestapo would have become more excited and would have intensified its inquisitions. If the Pope had protested, Rome would have become the center of attention. It was better that the Pope said nothing. We all shared this opinion at the time, and this is still our conviction today."[11]
While the U.S., Great Britain, and other countries often refused to allow Jewish refugees to immigrate during the war, the Vatican was issuing tens of thousands of false documents to allow Jews to pass secretly as Christians so they could escape the Nazis. What is more, the financial aid Pius XII helped provide the Jews was very real. Lichten, Lapide, and other Jewish chroniclers record those funds as being in the millions of dollars?dollars even more valuable then than they are now.
In late 1943, Mussolini, who had been at odds with the papacy all through his tenure, was removed from power by the Italians, but Hitler, fearing Italy would negotiate a separate peace with the Allies, invaded, took control, and set up Mussolini again as a puppet ruler. It was in this hour, when the Jews of Rome themselves were threatened?those whom the Pope had the most direct ability to help?that Pius XII really showed his mettle.
Joseph Lichten records that on September 27, 1943, one of the Nazi commanders demanded of the Jewish community in Rome payment of one hundred pounds of gold within thirty-six hours or three hundred Jews would be taken prisoner. When the Jewish Community Council was only able to gather only seventy pounds of gold, they turned to the Vatican.
"In his memoirs, the then Chief Rabbi Zolli of Rome writes that he was sent to the Vatican, where arrangements had already been made to receive him as an ?engineer? called to survey a construction problem so that the Gestapo on watch at the Vatican would not bar his entry. He was met by the Vatican treasurer and secretary of state, who told him that the Holy Father himself had given orders for the deficit to be filled with gold vessels taken from the Treasury."[12]
Pius XII also took a public stance concerning the Jews of Italy: "The Pope spoke out strongly in their defense with the first mass arrests of Jews in 1943, and L?Osservatore Romano carried an article protesting the internment of Jews and the confiscation of their property. The Fascist press came to call the Vatican paper ?a mouthpiece of the Jews.? "[13]
Prior to the Nazi invasion, the Pope had been working hard to get Jews out of Italy by emigration; he now was forced to turn his attention to finding them hiding places. "The Pope sent out the order that religious buildings were to give refuge to Jews, even at the price of great personal sacrifice on the part of their occupants; he released monasteries and convents from the cloister rule forbidding entry into these religious houses to all but a few specified outsiders, so that they could be used as hiding places. Thousands of Jews?the figures run from 4,000 to 7,000?were hidden, fed, clothed, and bedded in the 180 known places of refuge in Vatican City, churches and basilicas, Church administrative buildings, and parish houses. Unknown numbers of Jews were sheltered in Castel Gandolfo, the site of the Pope?s summer residence, private homes, hospitals, and nursing institutions; and the Pope took personal responsibility for the care of the children of Jews deported from Italy."[14]
Rabbi Lapide records that "in Rome we saw a list of 155 convents and monasteries?Italian, French, Spanish, English, American, and also German?mostly extraterritorial property of the Vatican . . . which sheltered throughout the German occupation some 5,000 Jews in Rome. No less than 3,000 Jews found refuge at one time at the Pope?s summer residence at Castel Gandolfo; sixty lived for nine months at the Jesuit Gregorian University, and half a dozen slept in the cellar of the Pontifical Bible Institute."[15]
Notice in particular that the Pope was not merely allowing Jews to be hidden in different church buildings around Rome. He was hiding them in the Vatican itself and in his own summer home, Castel Gandolfo. His success in protecting Italian Jews against the Nazis was remarkable. Lichten records that after the War was over it was determined that only 8,000 Jews were taken from Italy by the Nazis[16] ?far less than in other European countries. In June,1944, Pius XII sent a telegram to Admiral Miklos Horthy, the ruler of Hungary, and was able to halt the planned deportation of 800,000 Jews from that country.
The Pope?s efforts did not go unrecognized by Jewish authorities, even during the War. The Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, Isaac Herzog, sent the Pope a personal message of thanks on February 28, 1944, in which he said: "The people of Israel will never forget what His Holiness and his illustrious delegates, inspired by the eternal principles of religion which form the very foundations of true civilization, are doing for us unfortunate brothers and sisters in the most tragic hour of our history, which is living proof of divine Providence in this world."[17]
Other Jewish leaders chimed in also. Rabbi Safran of Bucharest, Romania, sent a note of thanks to the papal nuncio on April 7, 1944: "It is not easy for us to find the right words to express the warmth and consolation we experienced because of the concern of the supreme pontiff, who offered a large sum to relieve the sufferings of deported Jews. . . . The Jews of Romania will never forget these facts of historic importance."[18]
The Chief Rabbi of Rome, Israel Zolli, also made a statement of thanks: "What the Vatican did will be indelibly and eternally engraved in our hearts. . . . Priests and even high prelates did things that will forever be an honor to Catholicism."[19]
After the war, Zolli became a Catholic and, to honor the Pope for what he had done for the Jews and the role he had played in Zolli?s conversion, took the name "Eugenio"?the Pope?s given name?as his own baptismal name. Zolli stressed that his conversion was for theological reasons, which was certainly true, but the fact that the Pope had worked so hard on behalf of the Jews no doubt played a role in inspiring him to look at the truths of Christianity.
Lapide writes: "When Zolli accepted baptism in 1945 and adopted Pius?s Christian name of Eugene, most Roman Jews were convinced that his conversion was an act of gratitude for wartime succor to Jewish refugees and, repeated denials not withstanding, many are still of his opinion. Thus, Rabbi Barry Dov Schwartz wrote in the summer issue, 1964, of Conservative Judaism: ?Many Jews were persuaded to convert after the war, as a sign of gratitude, to that institution which had saved their lives.? "[20]
In Three Popes and the Jews Lapide estimated the total number of Jews that had been spared as a result of Pius XII?s throwing the Church?s weight into the clandestine struggle to save them. After totaling the numbers of Jews saved in different areas and deducting the numbers saved by other causes, such as the praiseworthy efforts of some European Protestants, "The final number of Jewish lives in whose rescue the Catholic Church had been the instrument is thus at least 700,000 souls, but in all probability it is much closer to . . . 860,000."[21] This is a total larger than all other Jewish relief organizations in Europe, combined, were able to save. Lapide calculated that Pius XII and the Church he headed constituted the most successful Jewish aid organization in all of Europe during the war, dwarfing the Red Cross and all other aid societies.
This fact continued to be recognized when Pius XII died in 1958. Lapide?s book records the eulogies of a number of Jewish leaders concerning the Pope, and far from agreeing with Jack Chick that he deserved death because of his "war crimes," Jewish leaders praised the man highly:[22]
"We share the grief of the world over the death of His Holiness Pius XII. . . . During the ten years of Nazi terror, when our people passed through the horrors of martyrdom, the Pope raised his voice to condemn the persecutors and to commiserate with their victims" (Golda Meir, Israeli representative to the U.N. and future prime minister of Israel).
"With special gratitude we remember all he has done for the persecuted Jews during one of the darkest periods in their entire history? (Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress).
"More than anyone else, we have had the opportunity to appreciate the great kindness, filled with compassion and magnanimity, that the Pope displayed during the terrible years of persecution and terror" (Elio Toaff, Chief Rabbi of Rome, following Rabbi Zolli?s conversion).
Finally, let us conclude with a quotation from Lapide?s record that was not given at the death of Pius XII, but was given after the War by the most well-known Jewish figure of this century, Albert Einstein: "Only the Catholic Church protested against the Hitlerian onslaught on liberty. Up till then I had not been interested in the Church, but today I feel a great admiration for the Church, which alone has had the courage to struggle for spiritual truth and moral liberty."[23]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Dave Hunt, A Woman Rides the Beast (Eugene, Oregon: Harvest House, 1994), 284.
[2] Jack Chick, Smokescreens (China, California: Chick Publications, 1983), 45.
[3] Robert Graham, S.J., ed., Pius XII and the Holocaust (New Rochelle, New York: Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, 1988), 106.
[4] Joseph Lichten, "A Question of Moral Judgement: Pius XII and the Jews," in Graham, 107.
[5] Pinchas E. Lapide, Three Popes and the Jews (New York: Hawthorn, 1967), 118.
[6] Ibid., 121.
[7] Lichten, 107.
[8] Graham, 18.
[9] Ibid., 19.
[10] Lichten, 30.
[11] Ibid., 99.
[12] Ibid., 120.
[13] Ibid., 125.
[14] Ibid., 126.
[15] Lapide, 133.
[16] Lichten, 127.
[17] Graham, 62.
[18] Lichten, 130.
[19] American Jewish Yearbook 1944-1945, 233.
[20] Lapide, 133.
[21] Ibid., 215.
[22] Ibid., 227-228.
[23] Ibid., 251.
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| How France bankrolls America's enemies |
| 11.29.03 (3:18 pm) [edit] |
Additional comment: France has refused to forgive the debt that Iraq owes to it from the Hussein regime. Well, ok. Perhaps the US should demand the 12 billion dollars owed to it by France from World Wars 1 and 2.
[b]Vive le Checkbook
How France bankrolls America's enemies. [/b]
BY MICHAEL GONZALEZ
Saturday, November 29, 2003 12:01 a.m. EST
"Follow the money" is an old adage, and it means that economic interest will eventually explain much human behavior. That France opposed the removal of Saddam Hussein because he owed millions to French banks is proof of this. Less well known, but much more troubling, are key French financial links with other U.S. enemies. They raise the belief that the Franco-American conflict over Iraq was just one slice of the action. For France was not just Baathist Iraq's largest contributor of funds; French banks have financed other odious regimes. They are the No. 1 lenders to Iran and Cuba and past and present U.S. foes such as Somalia, Sudan and Vietnam.
This type of financing is shared by Germany, France's partner. German banks are North Korea's biggest lenders, and Syria's--and Libya's. But France is the most active. In Castro's sizzling gulag, French banks plunked down $549 million in the first trimester this year, a third of all credit to Cuba. The figure for Saddam's Iraq is $415 million. But these pale in comparison with the $2.5 billion that French banks have lent Iran. The figures come from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel, and were interpreted by Iñigo Moré for a Madrid think-tank, the Real Instituto Elcano. As he says, "one could think that Parisian bankers wait for the U.S. to have an international problem before taking out their checkbooks." French banks seem to be almost anywhere U.S. banks are absent. They lend in 57 such countries, and are the main lenders in 23 of those. (His report can be read at http://www.realinstitutoelcan... .) The report offers reasons why Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin really ought to stop using the phrase "our American friends" every time he talks about the U.S.
The policy of offering France as an alternative to the U.S. has had a deeply corrosive effect on the political relationship this year, something that will only increase now that President Bush has enunciated a clear, long-term policy of expanding freedom around the world. And as the banking figures attest, the anti-U.S. French self-image extends beyond politics. Other evidence suggests that it has become deeply embedded in the French psyche and encompasses not just finance and politics but also culture, media and almost every other human activity. France, in all its manifestations, positions itself as an alternative to the U.S., and expects to profit from it. The BIS does not say how profitable or competitive lending to dictators and demagogues has made French banks. But it's worth mulling the chicken and egg question here. As Mr. Moré suggests, perhaps in jest, it could be not that one should follow the money to discover French policy, but that the money has followed French foreign policy.
As with every country, some of France's lending practices can be explained away by its colonial past. It is preponderant in francophone Africa, while the U.K. is Asia's main lender and Spain Latin America's. The past could explain the leading position French banks have in the communist dictatorships and kleptocracies of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. But no colonial linkage could explain Cuba (a colony of Spain), Iraq (Britain), Sudan (Britain) or Somalia (Britain and Italy). There must be something else. Mr. Moré offers that it could be French "universalist thinking." U.S. banks could be restrained by laws against lending to certain countries. This is then where French banks find a niche. Leaving aside the pro/con positions on whether sanctions have proved to be ineffective, at least the policy that produced them is not amoral. The niche explanation points to how pervasive the positioning of France as an alternative to the U.S. has become. As a French banker reminded me recently, his government still asks banks to make loans to further its policy objectives.
That, alas, is what they call "vision" in Paris.
[i]Mr. Gonzalez is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe's editorial page. [/i]
Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc
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| Unlike JFK's war, Bush fights for Iraqi liberty |
| 11.29.03 (1:34 am) [edit] |
[b]Unlike JFK's war, Bush fights for Iraqi liberty [/b]
November 23, 2003
BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
Mark Steyn's website-- http://www.marksteyn.com
On Saturday, America remembered the day it's never forgotten: Nov. 22, 1963. Everyone, as they say, can recall where they were when they heard the news that Kennedy was shot. Even if you weren't born, you can recall it: the motorcade, Walter Cronkite removing his spectacles, LBJ taking the oath of office, all the scenes replayed a million times in untold documentaries and feature films.
History is selective. We remember moments, and, because that moment in Dallas blazes so vividly, everything around it fades to a gray blur. So here, from the archives, is an alternative 40th anniversary from November 1963:
8 a.m. Nov. 2: Troops enter a Catholic church in Saigon and arrest two men. They're tossed into the back of an armored personnel carrier and driven up the road a little ways to a railroad crossing. The M-113 stops, the pair are riddled with bullets and their mutilated corpses taken to staff HQ for inspection by the army's commanders. One of the deceased is Ngo Dinh Diem, the president of South Vietnam. The other is Ngo Dinh Nhu, his brother and chief adviser.
Back in the White House, President Kennedy gets the cable and is stunned. When Washington had given tacit approval to the coup, the deal was that Diem was supposed to be offered asylum in the United States. But something had gone wrong. I use "gone wrong" in the debased sense in which a drug deal that turns into a double murder is said to have "gone wrong."
Kennedy had known Diem for the best part of a decade. If he felt bad about his part in the murder of an ally, he didn't feel bad for long: Within three weeks, he too was dead. Looked at coolly, there seems something faintly ridiculous about cooing dreamily over the one brief shining moment of a slain head of state who only a month earlier had set in motion the events leading to the slaying of another head of state. The noble ideals of Camelot did not extend to the State Department or the CIA.
Unless you're a Vietnam scholar, you won't remember the pros and cons of an anti-Diem coup as argued in Washington through the summer and fall of 1963. They barely made sense at the time, and Kennedy's bewildered reaction to the Buddhist unrest earlier that year sums up the administration's grasp of the situation: "Who are these people?" he said. "Why didn't we know about them before?" "Big Minh," the general who led the coup, lasted two months before he was overthrown by another general. He moved to Thailand, where the American taxpayer picked up his tab, including for some expensive dental work.
But that was the way they did things back then. Find the most promising local client, before Moscow or Paris or Beijing does. As the classic realpolitik line has it, he may be a sonofabitch, but he's our sonofabitch. As I wrote a couple of weeks after 9/11, apropos the House of Saud and President Mubarak, "the inverse is more to the point: he may be our sonofabitch, but he's a sonofabitch." Trying to cherrypick local strongmen is a fool's game.
So, at a time when lazy leftists keep comparing Iraq with Vietnam and artful conservatives have begun comparing Bush with Kennedy, it's worth noting the big difference between the two men and their wars. At the Royal Banqueting House in London last week, George W. Bush gave one of the best presidential speeches of modern times. "Your nation and mine, in the past, have been willing to make a bargain, to tolerate oppression for the sake of stability," he told his British hosts. "Long-standing ties often led us to overlook the faults of local elites. Yet this bargain did not bring stability or make us safe. It merely bought time, while problems festered and ideologies of violence took hold. As recent history has shown, we cannot turn a blind eye to oppression just because the oppression is not in our own backyard. No longer should we think tyranny is benign because it is temporarily convenient. Tyranny is never benign to its victims, and our great democracies should oppose tyranny wherever it is found."
President Bush has repudiated half a century of U.S. policy in the Middle East. The State Department and the CIA no longer sign off on the Coup Of The Month the way they did in JFK's day -- the CIA seems to be too busy covering its posterior to do much of anything, and the State Department evidently feels it's easier living with the old thugs -- Yasser, Assad, the mullahs -- than trying to spot the up-and-coming ones. But the president is right: the "temporary convenience" has long ceased to be so.
In this season of anniversaries, here's another one: the liberation of Grenada, October 1983. When Maurice Bishop deposed Sir Eric Gairy and set up a "People's Revolutionary Government," it was the first ever coup in the British West Indies. Coups breed coups. Bishop in turn was murdered by a dissident faction of his New Jewel Movement, which set up a new Marxist junta. Had the United States not intervened, it's easy to see how the habit might have spread -- to Jamaica, and the Bahamas and St Lucia, and the rest of the English Caribbean.
In reversing Grenada's double-coup, America helped preserve the work of centuries in the region -- the islands' toytown Westminster Parliaments with their wigs and maces and speakers, the quaint symbols of peaceful constitutional evolution that underline the difference between those countries and the likes of Cuba and Haiti. Replacing President Loon E Toon with General Sy Kottik gets you nowhere.
That's especially true given the realities of today's world when ramshackle basket-case states can pick up terrible weapons on the cheap. All that stands between an Islamist nutcase and Pakistan's nukes is General Musharraf and the handful of chaps he trusts. Ultimately, it's not enough -- as the general understands. It's easier to organize a coup than to create the institutions of liberty, but the latter are the only real bulwark against the horrors of the age.
It would be nice to think the so-called "progressives" of the left might find this a worthy project. Instead, in London, they waved their silly placards showing Bush and Blair drenched in blood, even as the real blood of the British consul-general and others had been spilled in Turkey that day.
[b]It's one thing to dislike Bush, it's one thing to hate America. But it's quite another to hate America so much you reflexively take the side of any genocidal psycho who comes along. In their terminal irrelevance, the depraved left has now adopted the old slogan of Cold War realpolitik: like Osama and Mullah Omar, Saddam may be a sonofabitch, but he's their sonofabitch.[/b]
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| Indymedia owes its very existence to those evil corporations. |
| 11.29.03 (12:59 am) [edit] |
[b]The Radical Left's "Cyber-Grapevine"[/b]
By Michael P. Tremoglie
FrontPageMagazine.com | November 26, 2003
In the wake of the anarcho-socialist invasion of Miami to protest the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) meetings, it is important to understand how such events are organized. Independent Media Centers (or IMC or Indymedia) are the ?cyber-grapevine,? the ?CNN,? and the ?Clear Channel,? for just about every lunatic leftist fringe group dedicated to eliminating capitalism from the world. Indymedia is the institution developed so the anarcho-socialists can communicate with each other and coordinate their activities. In fact, no less an authority than Mother Jones magazine paid tribute to IMC in their November 17 edition, observing that, "The global antiwar protests that surprised the world on February 15 grew out of the networks built by years of globalization activism, from Indymedia to the World Social Forum.?
Officially the IMC states ? rather unctuously - that it is ?a network of collectively run media outlets for the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of the truth. We work out of a love and inspiration for people who continue to work for a better world, despite corporate media's distortions and unwillingness to cover the efforts to free humanity. ?
However, as one source who attended an IMC meeting in Seattle told me by email, ?Indymedia is funneling money from foundations like Soros and Ford to be used in their campaigns against democracy, capitalism, and the US government. They are receiving donations from organizations like Mercy Corps. ? .money ?initially donated by Nike and Microsoft for charity in Africa, ( which IMC Brazil) will use for (its own) purposes, without their consent.?? One IMC activist said, ?These companies are either too stupid, or we are not yet considered a big threat to world capitalism!?
If one has any question about the purpose of IMC all one needs to do is read this quote from the Austin Indymedia Center - published November 11,2003. The article - about the FTAA protests - proclaims, ?Miami is the setting for one of the most important mobilizations of the global justice movement since 9/11. In the defiant spirit of Seattle's 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) protests, a broad coalition of grassroots activists, trade unions and non-governmental organizations are planning large-scale demonstrations to derail the trade meetings and map out alternatives to corporate globalization. From anarchists to family farmers, Miami will be overflowing with people who know that another world is possible.? (italics mine)
An article published by the Pittsburgh Indymedia declares the same objective. It states, ?The government expects 20,000 to 100,000 people to attempt to derail the summit and we see no reason to disappoint them?. The diverse range of events already planned include: forums? trainings, a massive outdoor concert by the AFL-CIO, a steelworkers rally, a mass march and rally, a padded contingent to shut down the meetings? There will be a wide variety of tactics employed by groups opposed to the FTAA meetings. Some of these will likely involve the possibility of arrest. ? (italics mine)
[b]Yet, for all its invective about corporatism ? the Great Satan of the anarcho-socialists - it is corporatism that created IMC. Independent Media Centers were conceived during the 1996 Democratic convention in Chicago. However, it was not until 1999 that Indymedia was actually founded in Seattle during the WTO protests. [/b]
The founders were Dan Merkle, a Seattle lawyer and Sheri Herndon a professional protester. Merkle was the ideal person to lead this effort. His law partner, Bob Siegel, is the current president of the Seattle National Lawyers Guild - a communist front organization dating to the 1930?s. Merkle founded other nonprofits in the Seattle area. Merkle and Herndon possessed the finances, organization, expertise, and ideology to create the Seattle IMC.
Donations to Indymedia became tax deductible by using a fiscal sponsor. A fiscal sponsor is an organization - the contributions to which are deductible for federal tax purposes by the donor ? which then funnels the donation to another organization that does not have tax-exempt status. The fiscal sponsor for Indymedia was Jam for Justice ? a Seattle nonprofit established by Merkle. Currently the fiscal sponsor is the IMC of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, which is now a tax-exempt organization.
Ironically, one of IMC?s first donors was the Glaser Foundation. Rob Glaser is the founder of RealNetworks and RealPlayer - a very profitable Internet corporation. So although Indymedia claims to eschew corporations and financiers it is these very institutions to which they owe their existence. He is enamored with Indymedia.
[b]The IMC is, paradoxically, the nexus of capitalist technology wealth and anti-capitalism. Yet, then again maybe it is not so paradoxical. The fact that Indymedia was created and financed by wealthy individuals such as Soros, Glaser, and Merkle is emblematic of the Vanguardism of Lenin. Lenin?s philosophy was that a vanguard of educated, talented people was needed to lead the workers into paradise. Indymedia is part of that vanguard.
The true paradox of the Independent Media Centers is their name. They are not independent although they delude themselves believing they are. Quite the contrary, the IMC?s are indeed very dependent on the leadership of the communists, anti-capitalists, and anti-Americans. People whom Thomas Sowell termed the ?anointed.? People who believe that they are in possession of some special wisdom that will make the world a better place ? if only the rest of us have the good sense to listen to them. [/b]
The people who operate IMC are the modern version of those who created, over a century ago, the International Workingmen?s Association (IWA). The IWA, or First Internationale, was created in London in the late 1800?s. The purpose of this organization was to create a classless and stateless society that would bring happiness and peace to the world.
[b]The results of the efforts of this communist international were the deaths of 100 million people and the poverty of billions. It was a bad idea then, and is a bad idea now. [/b]
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| More Left-wing fallout from the President's trip. |
| 11.28.03 (12:57 pm) [edit] |
According to CNN's Nic Robertson, most residents of Baghdad are not impressed with the President's visit. He interviewed Baghdad residents who thought that his trip was cowardly because he didn't go to the streets of Baghdad and mingle with the people, who hate him because there is no work, no security, ,etc. It was the kind of buzzkill that the left-wing press always uses against Republicans but never uses against the Dems.
For example-- did we see any weeping Rwandans on television when President Clinton refused to intervene and stop genocide? Did we see them pleading for Clinton's help? Or how about Haiti? Did CNN's Nic Robertson interview any of Haitians to see how they felt about Clinton's horrible experiment in nation-building? Or did CNN's Nic Robertson interview any Bosnians to ask them how they felt about being bombed indiscriminately by a unilateralist Clinton?
Of course not.
But amid all of the real problems that exist in Iraq today, these truths are still in play: the Iraqis have the freedom to bitch and complain about their plight in Iraq today, as the Coalition continues to kill the insurgents and as the new government continues to solidify (and as the security forces grow). Whenever you look at pictures of Hussein when he decided to go 'among the people' he had air-tight security around him, and any time an Iraqi would utilize his freedom of speech, Hussein had a rape-room, a torture room, a human shredder, or just a bullet to the back of the head waiting for him.
Bush went to see some troops in Iraq, he didn't go on a state visit to the country. Truman didn't go to Japan on a state visit, it was many years before an American president went to Japan and Germany on state visits. It is an unfair comparison, but one the Left will continue to use.
Part of the problem with the Iraqi people is that they are used to having the government provide. They don't understand freedom, and they don't understand self-reliance. This is true with all former sociaist/communist countries. They don't know how to do anything without the government doing it for them. Yes, there are serious, serious problems in Iraq, but still, just 7 months later, to say that the liberation has failed, ,to call it a quagmire, or to call it Vietnam, is just lazy thinking. Given the level of unfair, ,left-wing world opposition to the US-UK-coalition, including the UN and the EU doing a 180 on everything the profess to support, the liberation of Iraq is a wild success, and the Baathist/terrorist insurgency will be put down.
There can be angry Iraqis all over the place, but all that does is show how free they are, and validate what the US did there. Things are getting better, but it will not happen overnight.
CNN should be ashamed of themselves for their slanted coverage.
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| Thoughts on the President's Thanksgiving surprise trip to Baghdad |
| 11.27.03 (10:19 pm) [edit] |
Although the Other Side will meet the President's secret Thanksgiving Day visit to Baghdad as insincere, because that's how the Left interprets everything (cynically, politically), if you watched the video tape of the event, you could see that the President was almost in tears for a good part of the visit, and the soldiers seemed to be really inspired by it. I think it was nice that he finally got to meet some of the troops that are out there in the Middle East.
Now, of coure, the political ramifications of this cannot be denied, and the Left will easily jump on this as shallow. But it's not, because anything, ,anything the president does is political, good or bad, and can be used by the Other Side as such. Like I've always said, if Bush cured cancer tomorrow, there'd be a leftist sneering something like "I thought the president wouldn't politicize cancer!".
And Bush still has a long, long way to go before he sells his soul to political photo ops the way Bill Clinton did.
The press was in a snit about the event, too, mostly because they didn't know about it. They see themselves as God's messengers, telling us what to think and feel, and so when they get left in the dark, they're not happy. CNN's reporter in Baghdad clearly wasn't happy as, when the news was still breaking, he chimed in to remind viewers that LBJ himself made a surprise visit to the troops once and, to paraphrase, "we all see how that went."
But Iraq isn't like Vietnam for so many reasons, one of them being the fact that a Democrat isn't waging this war. Also, Vietnam was a civil war and a proxy war between the US and the USSR, whereas the old Baghdad regime has no popular support, nor foreign support. Yeah, things certainly are dangerous, certainly are rocky in Iraq-- but the US is firmly in control of the situation. The guerrillas in North Vietnam were part of a standing army funded by the Evil Empire. Former Baathists and foreign fighters and terrorists are not nearly that kind of threat (and we also must remember that our Secretary of Defense, this time, doesn't have an insane war strategy of winning battles and then retreating).
But the press clearly think most Americans are stupid, this is why they have to remind us regarding Bush's inspiring visit to the troops that 'things are bad' in Iraq. No, really? [i]We know[/i] that things in Iraq are bad. [i]We know[/i] that this will take some time. [i]We support[/i] the troops and their sacrifice, which can never be matched, in their defense of this country. [i]We don't[/i] have to be told that Iraq is dangerous.
It's like the press thinks that if it weren't for them we'd be lost. That's also sympomatic of the Left's arrogant posture toward the rank and file in society: you're a nobody and I know better than you how to live your life.
Bush's visit really inspired those troops. No, he couldn't see all of them, Left-wing press. No, he didn't go to Afghanistan, Left-wing press. But it was still something that should have been done, and it was one of the best expressions of gratitude and love of this country I've seen from Dubya since his fine, amazing speech to the country in the days right after 9/11.
God bless the United States, and thank Him for what he has blessed us with.
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| "And lead us not into temptation"-- can God really do that? |
| 11.27.03 (10:15 am) [edit] |
Of course not.
The Lord's prayer in English, the one that we know so well, which occurs in Matthew and Luke in the New Testament, was translated for King Henry VIII. Translated [i]poorly[/i] that is. The line "and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil" has been used by atheists and other anti-Christians (notice how atheists have an obsession only with Christianity, never any other religion like Hinduism or Judaism or Islam) to either show how we, whether we know it or not, are worshipping a God that is sadistic, that likes to play games with his people, or used to simply show how our theology is incongruent.
The translation that should be used, which is closer to the Greek version is "Save us from the time of trial" and then "deliver us from evil."
While English translations of the bible were awesome achievements, there were many, many errors (especially in the King James version).
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| Ariel Sharon eating Palestinian baby political cartoon wins top prize-- IN THE UK |
| 11.27.03 (10:04 am) [edit] |
So much for our sophisticated Euro-friends
(if you link to the article you can see the cartoon, the text of the article appears below).
[b]UK cartoon: Naked Sharon eats babies
Winner of top prize depicts prime minister devouring Palestinian[/b]
Posted: November 27, 2003
1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2003 WorldNetDaily.com
A cartoon that won first prize in Britain depicts Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon eating the head of a Palestinian baby with a burning city in the background.
Published in the Independent newspaper of London, the cartoon was one of 35 entries in the British Political Cartoon Society's annual competition, reported the Israeli daily Haaretz.
The Cartoon of the Year competition is sponsored by the Independent.
The prize-winner depicts Sharon saying: "What's wrong? Have you never seen a politician kissing a baby?"
The cartoonist, Dave Brown, thanked the Israeli embassy in Britain for increasing the cartoon's publicity by its angry reaction.
In January, Shuli Davidovich, the embassy's press secretary, wrote to the British paper: "As Britain commemorates National Holocaust Day, I am shocked that The Independent has chosen to evoke an ancient Jewish stereotype which would not have looked out of place in 'Der Sturmer', and which can unfortunately still be found in many Arabic newspapers.
"The blood-thirsty imagery not only misrepresents the real reason for the IDF's [Israeli Defense Forces] operations in Gaza, but also feeds the hostility toward Israel and the Jewish people which lies at the very core of the Arab-Israeli conflict."
She adds: "One must be extremely careful to draw the line between legitimate criticism and the anti-Semitism that often parades as such."
Political cartoons in the Arab media often depict Jews as hook-nosed schemers seeking world domination.
A political cartoon depicting the Palestinians and Iraqis as victims of crucifixion by the United States was published in the Palestinian Authority's largest daily, Al Quds.
In the cartoon, the figures are nailed to a cross back to back, with the Palestinian bearing the thought, "Brother from Iraq," and the Iraqi, "Relative from Palestine."
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| Like a drunk falling off the wagon, Jimmy can't help but show who he really is. |
| 11.26.03 (10:21 am) [edit] |
17,000 US scientists called the science upon which Kyoto is based "dubious". They asked Bill Clinton not to sign Kyoto (he did anyway). A new study out of Harvard shows that the science used to initially alarm the world about Global Warming isn't accurate, yet when I reference an article in a recent blog which talks about the pitfalls of the Kyoto Treaty, how it is based on 'junk science', this is the charming little comment I got from Jimmytherighteous:
[i]Based on junk science, huh? Is that the special science that doesn't reflect public opinion, but rather relies on proven data? You, being the English major (Free Candy, ha!) should know all about science....[/i]
One would think that Jimmy, who thinks HE knows everything [i]because[/i] he is a 'scientist' would at least acknowledge the debat about Kyoto and offer something from his vast, brilliant mind. But what does he do? Indeed, what is the only thing he is capable of doing? That's right-- running me down personally.
If Jimmy's the fucking expert, why not write a blog that calmly, casually explains why I'm wrong instead of taking the cheapo way out and attacking me. For some reason, Jimmy has always been a bit of a stalker of mine. Think about it-- this guy took the time to put my name in a search engine and find something that-- he thinks-- he can make fun of me about. How much time does this scientist have on his hands???
I get grief on this site as some sort of mean right-winger. BUt if you take a looky-loo at my blogs I don't attack anyone unless they attack me first, and with the Left, attacking someone personally is ALWAYS a legitimate form of debate.
Jimmy, once again you don't argue against me, you just try and slur me.
Uh, for the record folks, if you put my name in a search engine, you'll come across several poems I've written-- most of them when I was in graduate school.
That doesn't mean I'm ashamed of my poems. But I'm not happy with them-- an artist generally is never satisfied with his or her work. And Jimmy, I didn't post "Free Candy", stud, the University of Missouri-St. Louis did. And it was good enough that it was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, which is the poetry award for the literary journals.
That's not tooting my own horn because, like I said, I'm not happy with my poem. But I have no reason to be ashamed of it.
This is an open forum, Jimmy-- you got something worthwhile to say, go ahead and say it. But you're apparently putting your big, gigantic scientific mind to bashing me or making fun of who I am (in addition to calling me fat-- go ahead, folks, just rifle through Jimmy's blogs and you'll see his singular obsession with me).
This is why I always hold a special reserve of hatred for Jimmy-- he is committed to bashing me, nothing more. Even Sammy and Winston are so engrossed in their own fantasy-land politics that they refrain from bashing me like Jimmy.
I also am confident that most of the time the reason why Jimmy attacks me is because I have tha gall to be right most of the time-- and the poor guy doesn't know how to respond.
To paraphrase George Bush, Jimmy-- bring it on. You're a big nothing.
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| There's something for eveyrone in the new Medicare Bill-- even illegal aliens! |
| 11.26.03 (9:30 am) [edit] |
[b]Medicare Plan Includes $1B for Immigrants [/b]
Mon Nov 24, 8:51 PM
WASHINGTON - Border hospitals and those required by law to treat illegal immigrants will receive $1 billion over four years to defray the costs under major health legislation that neared passage by the Senate on Monday.
The provision was part of the Medicare bill, overhauling government health care coverage for the nation's elderly. It appeared headed to President Bush (news - web sites).
Each state would be eligible for reimbursement, but the funding formula is skewed to help border hospitals that frequently treat illegal immigrants.
Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., said cash-strapped hospitals in his state have been forced to scale back services or close their doors. Arizona would get the third-highest amount of money, $160 million, behind only California and Texas.
Federal law requires hospitals to care for anyone who walks through their doors. The costs of such care have forced many hospitals, especially those in border communities, to close their doors or scale back their service.
Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., said the reimbursement would encourage more aliens to cross the border to seek medical care. "If you build an illegal alien entitlement program, they will come," he said last week as the House considered the legislation.
Members of the House and Senate from Arizona, California, Texas and New York introduced legislation earlier this year seeking $1.45 billion in reimbursement funds, but the bill has not seen any progress.
***
Note: here's a thought-- instead of having the attitude that "we can't do anything about illegals, so we must make sure that we increse our medical spending on them" why not work on enforcing the damn immigration laws?
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| Tehran's EU bluff |
| 11.26.03 (9:22 am) [edit] |
[b]Tehran's EU Bluff[/b]
By Peter Brookes
New York Post | November 25, 2003
With $8 billion a year in trade and a deal pending to up that ante even more, the European Union is Iran's largest trading partner. And it appears that the E.U. - led by France, Germany and Britain - may now value those trade privileges over the principle of opposing the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
The U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), reported recently that Iran had secretly manufactured small amounts of highly-enriched uranium and plutonium - violating the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Further, the report noted, Tehran had deliberately hidden the evidence from the IAEA for almost two decades.
The E.U. reaction? It wants to give Iran a chance to put the nuclear genie back in the bottle. Figure the odds of that happening.
Specifically, the European Union opposes a get-tough U.N. resolution on Iran's nuke program, discussed last week at the IAEA meeting in Vienna. (The talks were so divisive; they will continue again this week starting Wednesday.)
Secretary of State Colin Powell warns that the Europeans are being too lenient with the Iranians. He wants Iran's nuclear transgressions referred to the U.N. Security Council for action, including possible economic sanctions.
Clearly, the E.U. has no stomach for another diplomatic showdown on the scale of Iraq for the moment. But if the international community fails to take tough action now against Iran, Tehran will join the nuclear club before you can say "ayatollah."
How? Here's a dirty little secret from the rogue regime playbook: The U.N.'s Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) has a dangerous loophole. Under the guise of a peaceful, civilian nuclear energy program, a state can openly develop - right under the nose of the IAEA - most of what it needs for a nuclear-weapons program. It worked for North Korea and it's working for Iran today.
On this side of the Atlantic, heart palpitations are in order when contemplating nukes in the hands of a regime that is:
* The world's most active state sponsor of terrorism,
* Bent on the destruction of the United States and Israel, and
* Aspiring to dominance in the Persian Gulf.
But E.U. hearts appear unfluttered by all that. The top concern of Europe's leaders seems to be preserving - and expanding - lucrative trade relationships with Tehran.
Iran has the world's third-largest oil reserves. So far, European firms have invested $10.5 billion in those fields. But 50 percent to 70 percent of the profits from those investments - everything the investors don't collect -go directly to Tehran's treasury.
From there, the money funds such nefarious activities as political repression, acquisition of weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, chemical and biological) and terrorism - most often directed against Israel.
But back to Iran's nukes. Only a united international front can contain the mullah's atomic efforts. If we don't address Iran's nuclear ambitions with vigor and verve, we'll end up in the same situation we have today with North Korea, where a nasty regime possesses nasty weapons.
If the international community is serious about preventing the spread of the world's most dangerous weapons, here's what it must do in the short-term:
* The 35-member IAEA should declare Iran in violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and forward the resolution to the U.N. Security Council (UNSC) for action.
* The UNSC should set strong terms for compliance, including no-notice inspections and intrusive monitoring.
* Any Iranian noncompliance should trigger immediate multilateral U.N. economic sanctions.
* The E.U. must freeze its pending trade pact with Iran until Tehran demonstrates - not just promises - that it no longer seeks to become a nuclear power.
If Iran has, indeed, decided to come clean on its "peaceful" (ha!) nuclear program, sanctions and other confrontational moves may not be required - over this issue.
But even so, Iran's trading partners should stop closing their eyes to the deeds that commerce with Iran is supporting, and adjust accordingly. Because giving each other the runaround on Iran, isn't in anyone's in anyone's interest -- except Tehran's.
[i]Peter Brookes, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, is a senior fellow for National Security Affairs at The Heritage Foundation.[/i]
Copyright 2003 Frontpage Magazine-- http://www.frontpagemag.cm
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| Kyoto 101 |
| 11.25.03 (7:12 pm) [edit] |
A very good column asking if the Europeans understand the real economic consequences to implementing Kyoto, a treaty that won't reduce global temps and is based on junk science.
An excerpt:
"For Europe's sclerotic economies, the massive increases in energy prices that would result from strict reductions of "greenhouse gasses" would be devastating. According to a 2002 study of the economic effects on the U.K., depression is a possible outcome of such a move. Between 2008 and 2010, the U.K. could lose up to one million jobs a year. Moreover, the productivity of individual jobs would decrease because of the efficiency reduction (greater cost) of all the other production factors.
Dr. Margo Thorning performed a study about four European countries and estimated that the Kyoto Protocol would have a strong negative impact on the GNP of various nations: a decrease of 5.2 percent for Germany, 5 percent for Spain, 4.5 percent for the U.K., and 3.8 percent for the Netherlands."
That's pretty amazing stuff, isn't it? Read the entire article, "Kyoto 101" here-- http://www.nationalreview.com...
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| Yes, the poor are really in misery thanks to Bush's tax cuts. |
| 11.25.03 (4:09 pm) [edit] |
[b]Bush's Tax Cuts add up to Zero[/b]
BY STEPHEN DINAN
The Washington Times
June 19, 2003
President Bush's two major tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 have removed nearly 4 million taxpayers from the income tax rolls, so that nearly 30 percent of all income-tax filers pay nothing.
Thanks to the 2001 $1.35 trillion tax cut and last month's $350 billion tax cut, 39.6 million families will have no income tax liability in 2003, according to numbers by the Tax Foundation and Citizens for Tax Justice.
Such families owe nothing because they don't earn enough to pay income taxes or because they will have more credits from government programs than they owe in income taxes.
The figures apply even before Congress acts on a bill to provide 6.5 million families, who are already off the tax rolls, with up to another $400 per child, bringing the total per-child tax credit to $1,000. The bill would extend the full $1,000-per-child credit to married couples making up to $150,000, eliminating the eligibility "marriage penalty."
Yesterday, the Senate agreed to a conference to work out differences between the Senate-passed and House-passed tax credit bills. The House bill extends the tax credits for a longer period than the Senate bill.
The number of families that have fallen off the tax rolls has more than doubled since 1980, when there were 18.6 million — about 20 percent of those filing — who had no liability, according to numbers from the Tax Foundation.
"Every bill since at least 1986 has taken a few more million off the rolls," said Chris Edwards, director of fiscal policy at the Cato Institute.
The threshold for filers who have no tax liability has also increased to where a family of four earning nearly $40,000 might well pay no income taxes, depending on the exact situation.
Income transfers happen through two basic credits: the per-child tax credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit. In 1999, the EITC transferred more than $31 billion to low-income families, according to IRS statistics.
But Robert S. McIntyre, director of Citizens for Tax Justice, said the Bush tax cuts haven't done as much for low-income families, though they have done plenty for middle-income families, those in the middle quintile making between $28,000 and $45,000.
More than half of the families dropped from the rolls thanks to the Bush tax cuts — 54 percent — have come from that group. Another 26 percent were in the second-highest quintile, making between $45,000 and $73,000.
The tax cuts caused only about 100,000 families in the lowest quintile, with incomes below $16,000, to drop off the rolls, and just 500,000 families in the second-lowest quintile.
Now, 77 percent of those in the lowest-income quintile have no income tax liability, while 49 percent of those in the $16,000 to $28,000 group don't pay income taxes. And even in the second-highest quintile, 7 percent of those making between $45,000 and $73,000 have no income tax liability.
Mr. Edwards of Cato said the number of families off the rolls has changed the politics of tax cuts.
He said Democrats can no longer call for income-tax cuts for poor families because there are so few who pay, so instead they push for "refundable credits." Such credits, rather than subtracting from a qualifying family's tax liability, pays money to them outright since they owe nothing.
Democrats and some Republicans say the credits are appropriate because low-income individuals do pay many other taxes — "property taxes, sales taxes, payroll taxes, excise taxes, 8 percent of their income," said Rep. Rosa DeLauro, Connecticut Democrat.
She and other Democrats argue that those other taxes are rarely cut, so a transfer through the income tax is one way to compensate. Democrats want the House to accept the Senate bill.
But House Majority Leader Tom DeLay countered with a chart showing that for a single mother of two children making $20,000, her money from the EITC and the child tax credit would actually cover all of her tax liability, including those state and local taxes and the payroll taxes that are designated for Medicare and Social Security funds.
She gets nearly $750 more now than she would have without Mr. Bush's two tax cuts.
The issue splits Republican lawmakers, and the administration seems to have changed its position in the weeks since the initial bill passed.
"This administration recognizes that people who pay income taxes should receive income tax relief, and that when you reach a point where people pay absolutely zero in income taxes, you're being very fair to all income-tax payers," said White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, when first asked about the issue.
But less than two weeks later Mr. Fleischer endorsed the Senate proposal and the concept of redistribution of income through tax law.
"It is the reality of how our tax code works," he said. "The president supports these measures because the president thinks that for people who are struggling to make it from lower income into lower-middle income and into middle income, this is a helpful way to help them to work up the economic ladder."
Senate Republicans overwhelmingly embraced the expanded program, with all but two of them joining Democrats in passing the bill. But House Republican leaders flatly refused to bring up just the Senate bill, with Mr. DeLay simply noting that it "ain't going to happen."
The Texas Republican and others said income-tax cuts should go to those who pay income taxes — a position House conservatives have also embraced.
Conservative House Republicans last week sent a letter to Republican leaders suggesting they change the name of the EITC to LISAP, the Low-Income Subsidy and Assistance Program, and the name of the refundable child tax credit to CRISAP, the Child-Rearing Income Subsidy and Assistance Payment.
"The problem is that welfare payments are being mislabeled as tax rebates," said Rep. Ernest Istook, Oklahoma Republican. "To end the confusion, we should stop putting the 'tax refund' label on government checks that are actually public assistance."
Mr. Istook said beyond the concerns over policy, the IRS has estimated that about a third of the EITC payments — between $8 billion and $12 billion in tax year 1999 — were fraudulent.
The question of tax credits and families falling off the income tax rolls also sparks a philosophical debate about whether that's healthy.
"If a third of Americans don't pay taxes, then they're voting for government that's too big," Mr. Edwards at Cato said.
But Mr. McIntyre said those people have little political clout and are "probably a good counterweight" to those on the other end of the income spectrum clamoring for special exemptions.
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| The Left's tax doctrine: lie,lie,lie,lie,lie,lie, lie. Don't believe the Left-wing hype. |
| 11.25.03 (12:46 pm) [edit] |
The left thinks that somehow any tax cut on the rich is bad, even though 'the rich' hire people to work and dole out income. More than this, though, is their fiction that the tax cut was 'for the rich'. Frankly, it's a bunch of bullshit.
The rich receive the lowest percentage cut in their bracket, and if you look at the chart here-- http://www.taxfoundation.org/... , you'll see that not only do the poor NOT pay any taxes, but they'll also get a handout with the new child exemptions passed, which you can read all about here-- http://www.taxfoundation.org/...
For example, I make about 15,000 a year. Thanks to Bush's tax cut, I get $4,750 in exemptions, plus the standard $3,050 deduction. I have a 15% tax rate, which means I get all of it back.
Let's say you're a family of four making $38,000 a year, definitely working middle class.
Your tax rate, if you file jointly, is 15%. That's $5700. You have two children, so that takes off $2000, plus standard deductions of [i]$9500[/i].
It's just pure 100% liberal bullshit fiction when Winston talks about the poor getting screwed. I'm poor: we don't pay any damn taxes, and I know people who are poorer, [i]with children[/i] who are damn happy about Bush's "for the rich" tax cut.
Either start telling the truth or simply shut up about it.
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| Paul Krugman-- "One Book, Two Very Different Covers" |
| 11.25.03 (12:26 pm) [edit] |
New York Times-- http://www.nytimes.com/auth/l...://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/23/weekinrevi ew/23BIGP.html&OQ=pagewantedQ3Dprin tQ26positionQ3D
[b]One Book, Two Very Different Covers[/b]
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
PAUL KRUGMAN, the liberal economist and columnist for The New York Times Op-Ed Page, has recently urged his fellow liberals to be less civil toward their conservative foes. The British publisher of his latest book, "The Great Unraveling," however, may have taken Mr. Krugman's advice further than he intended.
Unlike the relatively staid cover of the American edition published by W. W. Norton, the British book jacket bears caricatures of President Bush as Frankenstein-like and Vice President Dick Cheney with a Hitler mustache. A dark scrawl on the vice president's forehead reads, "Got Oil?"
Christine Iverson, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, said the cover showed that Mr. Krugman's attacks on the administration had descended into "hate speech."
"It is obvious that his feelings have clouded his objectivity and his ability to discuss the issues in a rational way," she said. "The fact that they are using a much different cover here in the United States is proof that his tactics are offensive to mainstream Americans."
Stuart Proffitt, who published the British edition for the Allen Lane imprint of Penguin Press, said he chose the cover because it seemed appropriate to the book's potential readers in Britain, where Mr. Krugman's name is less known and Mr. Bush is less popular than in the United States.
Catherine J. Mathis, a spokeswoman for The New York Times, said, "The newspaper has no relationship to the British publisher ? we were never even shown the cover."
Mr. Krugman, for his part, said he did not remember seeing the cover until prepublication copies were sent to reviewers. "I think it was intended to be ironic," he said.
The cover images of Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney were borrowed from puppets carried by protesters outside the World Economic Forum in New York in 2002. Mr. Krugman said that he took part in the forum and does not share the protesters' views. He noted that his columns have defended free trade and argued that the administration's war in Iraq was not about oil.
"It is a marketing thing, not a statement," he said. "I should have taken a look at that and said, `What are you doing marketing me as if I am Michael Moore? This is silly.' "
Incivility is one thing, he said, but the book cover "may be undignified, which would be a reason to object."
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| Anti-Semitism in Europe: the EU sees no evil |
| 11.25.03 (11:59 am) [edit] |
[b]E.U. SEES NO EVIL[/b]
Tue Nov 25, 3:53 AM ET
The European Union (news - web sites) is appalled by signs of mounting anti-Semitism on the continent: It just doesn't want those responsible for it identified.
Why else did the E.U. suppress a report on anti-Jewish activity in Europe after the authors concluded that Muslims and pro-Palestinian groups were behind many of the incidents?
According to the Financial Times, the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) decided in February - without telling anyone - not to publish its own 112-page report on anti-Semitism, after deciding that pointing a finger at radical Islamists and pro-Palestinian perpetrators was "inflammatory."
The EUMC's director said only that the study was rejected because its definition of anti-Semitism was "too complicated."
One board member complained because anti-Islam incidents weren't included (but the E.U. has released three reports on anti-Arab attacks since 9/11).
Others complained because the study - the E.U.'s first ever on anti-Jewish activity - also linked the growth of anti-Semitism in Europe to anti-globalization and other left-wing groups.
Apparently, anti-Semitism is only considered a problem by the E.U. worth addressing when it's committed by right-wingers and neo-Nazis.
In fact, the E.U. commissioned the report because of fears that anti-Semitism was on the rise. But it doesn't seem to have anticipated having those fears confirmed - with those responsible firmly, albeit inconveniently, identified.
But burying the study can't hide the anti-Jewish hatred that is sweeping Europe, a problem so serious that French President Jacques Chirac, whose government has long ignored anti-Semitic activity, was forced last week to convene a special cabinet meeting.
It's also true that much of the anti-Semitism in Europe is disguised as anti-Israel agitation - with its defenders insisting that criticism of Israel cannot automatically be considered anti-Semitism.
But as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (news - web sites) said in a recent interview, "You cannot separate them - Israel is treated as a Jewish state." Indeed, he added, "anti-Semitism exists (in Europe), and what pushes it is a collective anti-Semitism that incorporates Israel into this equation."
There can be no denying that anti-Jewish attacks are growing worldwide: The bombing of synagogues in Istanbul and of a Jewish school in Paris are just the latest such incidents.
To deliberately suppress evidence pointing to those responsible, as the E.U. has done, is to be complicit in the crimes.
The link to article-- http://news.yahoo.com/news?tm...
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| There they go again: Libs trying to look like fiscal conservatives |
| 11.25.03 (11:42 am) [edit] |
Teddy Kennedy, who by the way was responsible for creating HMOs in the 1970s, says, of all things, that this bloated big-government medicare drug 'benefit' passed by a sold-out Republican majority is too conservative! That is opens all the doors to privatization, etc. Hmmm, usually if something is privatized, it doesn't cost taxpayers money....
[i]400 billion[/i]?
The NY Times talked about how spending is in style this year. Well, with the Dems spending has always been in style, but since the Republicans are in power AND since the Republicans are acting like the Dems, the liberal establishment now has the 'fiscal conservative' card to play.
It's like Robert Byrd of West Virginia bitching about the cost of reconstruction and the Iraq war at 87 billion, saying that "Congress is not an ATM." Well, except for the undisputed King of Pork, Robert Byrd.
The Republicans open themselves up for attack from fiscally conservative Congressmembers of either party because of their shameful liberal-esque policies. But no liberal should ever decry big government-- they created it.
I hope Bush gets some sense about his ruinous domestic policies, and I hope that we remember that limited government, government at our convenience, a government that operates under the revolutionary principle that freedom can only be hampered by government, as our Founding Fathers intended, is what should be in practice on Capitol Hill.
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| The Clintons' New Front Group |
| 11.25.03 (11:32 am) [edit] |
[b]The Clintons' New Front Group[/b]
By Dick Morris
FrontPageMagazine.com | November 25, 2003
link-- http://www.frontpagemag.com/A...
The Democratic Party's traditional campaign role is being largely taken over by a new group called "Americans Coming Together," which has been launched with two $10 million donations from financier George Soros and Peter B. Lewis, chairman of the Progressive Corporation. The new organization wants to raise $94 million to finance a massive campaign against Bush - all with soft money.
The Democratic Party, which is only allowed to raise hard money (donations limited to $2,000 per person) by the McCain-Feingold law is unable to amass the resources necessary for a national campaign, so it is ceding the main role to Americans Coming Together.
Hypocrisy in American politics at least provides material for humor. How else are we to view the attempts of Democratic Party leaders to circumvent the McCain-Feingold prohibition on the use of soft money in campaigns after their party insisted on its inclusion in the bill?
As the campaign-finance-reform bill went through Congress, Democrats demanded a ban on soft money donations to political parties. They succeeded in including it as the reform's centerpiece.
But it turns out that Republicans are raising twice as much as Democrats are in hard money: $158 million for the GOP vs. $66.5 million for the Democrats. So the Democrats have resorted to a loophole in McCain-Feingold and worked to maximize soft money contributions to phony political committees, allegedly independent of the party apparatus and thus not covered by the soft money ban.
The Democrats have always found hard money hard to come by. In the last election cycle, they financed 56 percent of their campaign costs with soft money while the Republicans used soft money for only 39 percent.
This lastest shift is not a case of matching a Republican move. The GOP has only begun to explore the loophole the Democrats are busy using. It is hypocrisy, plain and simple.
Americans Coming Together, a supposedly independent campaign committee, is reportedly one-third of the way toward its fund-raising goal. Its nominal independence from the Democratic Party, required by McCain-Feingold, is paper-thin.
Harold Ickes, President Bill Clinton's former deputy chief of staff who helped orchestrate the soft money fund-raising that financed the 1996 Clinton campaign, is working closely with Soros to fund Americans Coming Together.
Ickes has not always honored the boundaries between supposedly independent expenditures and political campaigns required by the Federal Elections Commission.
I almost fell through the floor of the White House early in 1996 when I attended a meeting chaired by Ickes of representatives of the political action committees of major American labor unions. Gathered in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, they each recounted their plans for "independent expenditures" against the Republicans in the coming election campaign. The meeting, quite illegal in many ways, represented exactly the kind of co-ordination forbidden by the campaign-finance laws.
Ickes is about as independent of Hillary as Bill is. He is her chief advisor. His photo graces her memoirs. He was her key operative in securing the Senate seat in New York. To pretend that anything he would do is independent of Hillary is like saying that the left hand is independent of the right hand.
One motivation for the Clinton move to circumvent the Democratic Party and establish a lifeboat in the form of Americans Working Together is that they view with alarm Howard Dean's rise to the Democratic nomination.
Dean, upon copping the prize, is likely to fire Terry McAuliffe and take control of the Democratic National Committee. No longer will its coffers be available to the Clintons to use as their private fund, channeling donations to candidates and causes they favor or that favor them.
So, before the hand-over of party power from Clinton to Dean takes place, they are working on s | |
