Dec 6, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses, Dollars & Crosses 2
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton says: “George Bush has no vision for a future that will make America safer and stronger and smarter and richer and better and fairer.”
That’s because, Hillary, George Bush is for the most part implementing your policies: increased government control of health care, including nationalization of the prescription drug industry; increased domestic spending; trade restrictions; internationalism based not on self-defense but on reshaping people (e.g. in Iraq and Afghanistan) who can’t or won’t be reshaped; appeasement of Arab terrorists at the risk of Israel (our only friend in the Middle East); waffling and uncertainty in Iraq; and limitations on free speech called campaign finance reform.
Your intellectual honesty in this regard, Mrs. Clinton, is most definitely appreciated–if not a bit surprising.
Recommended Reading:
Nov 25, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses, Dollars & Crosses 2
From the Weekly Standard:
Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003 that involved training in explosives and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al Qaeda training camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi financial support for al Qaeda–perhaps even for Mohamed Atta–according to a top secret U.S. government memorandum obtained by the Weekly Standard.
The memo, dated October 27, 2003, was sent from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith to Senators Pat Roberts and Jay Rockefeller, the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. It was written in response to a request from the committee as part of its investigation into prewar intelligence claims made by the administration. Intelligence reporting included in the 16-page memo comes from a variety of domestic and foreign agencies, including the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency. Much of the evidence is detailed, conclusive, and corroborated by multiple sources. Some of it is new information obtained in custodial interviews with high-level al Qaeda terrorists and Iraqi officials, and some of it is more than a decade old. The picture that emerges is one of a history of collaboration between two of America’s most determined and dangerous enemies.
More details in the article, which concludes: “[t]here can no longer be any serious argument about whether Saddam Hussein’s Iraq worked with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda to plot against Americans.” See also Edward Jay Epstein’s “Prague Revisited: The evidence of an Iraq/al-Qaida connection hasn’t gone away” on Slate.com.
Cartoon by Cox and Forkum.
Nov 16, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses, Dollars & Crosses 2
Daniel Pipes writes about George Bush’s new commitment to democracy in the Middle East:
‘Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe.’ This sentence, spoken last week by President Bush, is about the most jaw-dropping repudiation of an established bipartisan policy ever made by an American president….
Understanding the rationale behind the old dictator-coddling policy makes clear the radicalism of this new approach. The old way noticed that the populations are usually more anti-American than are the emirs, kings, and presidents. Washington was rightly apprehensive that democracy would bring in more radicalized governments; this is what happened in Iran in 1979, and it nearly happened in Algeria in 1992. It also worried that once the radicals reached power, they would close down the democratic process (what was dubbed ³one man, one vote, one time²).
Mr. Bush¹s confidence in democracy–that despite the ³street¹s² history of extremism and conspiracy-mindedness, it can mature and become a force of moderation and stability–is about to be tested. This process did, in fact, occur in Iran; will it recur elsewhere? The answer will take decades to find out. [NY Sun]
To the contrary, it won’t take decades to find out.
Individual rights, not democracy, is the fundamental in politics; representative government is merely a means to the protection of individual rights and the consequent limitation of the power of government. An attempt to establish majority rule unconstrained by the principle of individual rights is destined to collapse in a power struggle over the reins of power sooner or later–and in the Middle East, there’s no reason to believe it won’t be sooner.
Recommended Reading: Freedom–Not Democracy–for the Arabs in the Middle East and De-mystifying Democracy.
Nov 15, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses, Dollars & Crosses 2
I wrote the following letter to the editor of the New York Sun:
In your editorial [“Moore’s Next Move,” Nov. 14, 2003], you write: “No one can dispute that the Ten Commandments are fundamental to Alabama¹s and our nation¹s law and government.” Yet the Ten Commandments had existed for millennia before anything like the Constitution was envisioned, and for good reason. America is a product of the Enlightenment, until then the most secular era in history and the one that overthrew religion’s hold on politics. John Locke and Enlightenment intellectuals insisted on basing law upon the empirical observation of human nature, not on divine revelations. American government rests on a view of man as sovereign and independent, with the law protecting his freedom from religious authority and his right to pursue his own self-interest. The view that the Ten Commandments undergirds our law and government is simply false.
Recommended Reading: The Ten Commandments vs. America, America: Under Rights or “Under God”? and Bush’s Faith-Based Initiative Against Freedom
Sep 21, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses, Dollars & Crosses 2
Here’s Andrew Sullivan on BBC dishonesty:
This week was the week in which the BBC essentially capitulated in its war against the Blair government. Under cross-examination, the BBC’s reporter, Andrew Gilligan, admitted a series of what might politely be called “errors” in his claim that the British government had inserted fabricated intelligence findings in its now-famous Iraq dossier, compiled before the Iraq war. The whole notion that the government had lied was revealed as invention: “The allegation I intended to make was a spin. I do regret those words–and I shouldn’t have used them.” Isn’t that a big difference? A government putting the best spin on facts to make a case in a democratic society (that’s called politics) and outright deception? Mr. Gilligan also admitted that he wrongly “outed” the late scientist, David Kelly, as the source of some of the material, to members of Parliament. Being pushed into the public realm was the main reason Kelly committed suicide earlier this year.
Related Reading: Saddam Hussein’s Real Ministers of Disinformation Come Out of the Closet
Jul 5, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses, Dollars & Crosses 2
A reader writes:
In your [Dollars and Sense news item] “Libertarians for Dictatorship,” you libel libertarian Rep. Ron Paul as being pro-dictatorship because he [opposed] a symbolic resolution in support of freedom in Hong Kong.
This is misleading, for Ron Paul opposes all symbolic resolutions because he believes it is not just to spend taxpayer money on unconstitutional resolutions. He calls this his “continuing and uncompromising opposition to appropriations not authorized within the enumerated powers of the Constitution.”
Can it be any clearer that libertarians’ preoccupation with nonessentials and disdain for philosophy makes them enemies of freedom?
If Congress has the Constitutional power to declare war, and the power “to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution [its] powers,” then it has a legitimate foreign policy role. Saying that the House has no business passing such a resolution is tantamount to saying that whether or not foreign governments are dictatorships is irrelevant to America’s national security. Whatever “freedom” means to Rep. Paul, it has nothing to do with reality.
