Comparing U.S. President George Bush with Winston Churchill may seem a stretch. Yet there's a parallel -- not with Churchill of the war years, when he was the "free" world's most admired leader, but with Churchill of the 1930s when he stood alone, warning about the rise of Nazism. Then, pacifism was rampant in Britain and Europe. Hitler's aggression was rationalized by wishful thinking. Peace at any price. Except for Churchill. He began warning that the Nazis must be stopped when they occupied the Rhineland in 1936. He urged an alliance of Britain, France and the Soviet Union to stop Hitler's expansion. [Churchill] was called a warmonger, an enemy of peace, reviled in print and in speeches. Few stood with him. History has proven Churchill right.

With the U.S. election entering the home stretch, Bush is under the same sort of attacks for his war on terrorism and Iraq that Churchill endured before WWII. Critics among both Republicans and Democrats worry that America acted alone, without approval of the UN Security Council, and without support of France and Germany. The "war" aspects of Afghanistan and Iraq were so successful that criticism was muted. It's the "peace" and trying to bring democracy to Iraq that has revived critics, who now give Bush the sort of treatment Churchill once received for warning about Hitler. Sen. John Kerry's prime theme is that Bush has made America resented -- especially by France and Germany. What most overlook is that by his war on terrorism, Bush is doing now what Churchill was advocating in the mid-1930s.

More than that, Bush is doing what the UN is supposed to do, but rarely has -- curb tyrannies that threaten security and stability, and which indulge in oppression and human rights abuses. Britain, under Prime Minister Tony Blair, supports America. So does Australia, and countries like Poland, and former communist countries of East Europe. Italy, too. And since the terrorist attack on the school in Beslan, Russia seems ready to join this new alliance against Islamic terror that threatens civilization...Bush's is not the only voice, but his is the loudest. Unlike Churchill, who had no power when he urged Britain and the West to wake up, Bush has power. And the "wakeup call" was 9/11. [Peter Worthington, "Why George Bush is today's Churchill", Toronto Sun, September 28, 2004. Hat Tip: Steve Michaud]

The International Monetary Fund (IMF), meeting this week in Washington, hopes to convince the United States to approve a no-strings-attached foreign aid proposal that includes $465 million to Iran and $90 million to Syria. "Giving money to these known state sponsors of terrorism," says Dr. Andrew Bernstein, senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute, "is akin to giving money to Stalin."

Iran, the spearhead of Islamic totalitarianism and a sworn enemy of the United States, is currently developing nuclear weapons. "Where," Dr. Bernstein asks, "will these no-strings-attached millions go--to finance nuclear bombs that will be used to annihilate Israel and to demolish New York City?"  

"In the 20th century Lenin claimed that the capitalist West would sell communists the rope with which communism would hang it. And because the West lacked the understanding and self-esteem to uphold the ideals of freedom and capitalism, it did repeatedly deal with and appease the communist (and fascist) totalitarians. Today, because of the same lack of understanding and self-esteem, the United States is contemplating not selling the rope with which the religious totalitarians will hang us--but giving it to them for free."

...Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster. Many of the early leaders of the Cuban Revolution favored a democratic or democratic-socialist direction for the new Cuba. But Che was a mainstay of the hardline pro-Soviet faction, and his faction won. Che presided over the Cuban Revolution's first firing squads. He founded Cuba's "labor camp" system—the system that was eventually employed to incarcerate gays, dissidents, and AIDS victims. To get himself killed, and to get a lot of other people killed, was central to Che's imagination. In the famous essay in which he issued his ringing call for "two, three, many Vietnams," he also spoke about martyrdom and managed to compose a number of chilling phrases: "Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become …"— and so on. He was killed in Bolivia in 1967, leading a guerrilla movement that had failed to enlist a single Bolivian peasant. And yet he succeeded in inspiring tens of thousands of middle class Latin-Americans to exit the universities and organize guerrilla insurgencies of their own. And these insurgencies likewise accomplished nothing, except to bring about the death of hundreds of thousands, and to set back the cause of Latin-American democracy—a tragedy on the hugest scale.

The present-day cult of Che—the T-shirts, the bars, the posters—has succeeded in obscuring this dreadful reality. And Walter Salles' movie The Motorcycle Diaries will now take its place at the heart of this cult. It has already received a standing ovation at Robert Redford's Sundance film festival (Redford is the executive producer of The Motorcycle Diaries) and glowing admiration in the press. Che was an enemy of freedom, and yet he has been erected into a symbol of freedom. He helped establish an unjust social system in Cuba and has been erected into a symbol of social justice. He stood for the ancient rigidities of Latin-American thought, in a Marxist-Leninist version, and he has been celebrated as a free-thinker and a rebel... ["The Cult of Che: Don't applaud The Motorcycle Diaries", Paul Berman, Slate]

...Right now a tremendous social struggle is taking place in Cuba. Dissident liberals have demanded fundamental human rights, and the dictatorship has rounded up all but one or two of the dissident leaders and sentenced them to many years in prison. Among those imprisoned leaders is an important Cuban poet and journalist, Raúl Rivero, who is serving a 20-year sentence. In the last couple of years the dissident movement has sprung up in yet another form in Cuba, as a campaign to establish independent libraries, free of state control; and state repression has fallen on this campaign, too.

I wonder if people who stand up to cheer a hagiography of Che Guevara, as the Sundance audience did, will ever give a damn about the oppressed people of Cuba—will ever lift a finger on behalf of the Cuban liberals and dissidents. It's easy in the world of film to make a movie about Che, but who among that cheering audience is going to make a movie about Raúl Rivero?

In the The Weekly Standard, William Kristol writes: Disgraceful: The disgraceful behavior of John Kerry and his team is sufficient grounds for concern about his fitness to be president. (Via InstaPundit)

... Iraqi prime minister Ayad Allawi spoke to a joint meeting of Congress. Sen. Kerry could not be troubled to attend, as a gesture of solidarity and respect. Instead, Kerry said in Ohio that Allawi was here simply to put the "best face on the policy." So much for an impressive speech by perhaps America's single most important ally in the war on terror, the courageous and internationally recognized leader of a nation struggling to achieve democracy against terrorist opposition. But Kerry's rudeness paled beside the comment of his senior adviser, Joe Lockhart, to the Los Angeles Times: "The last thing you want to be seen as is a puppet of the United States, and you can almost see the hand underneath the shirt today moving the lips."

Is Kerry proud that his senior adviser's derisive comment about the leader of free Iraq will now be quoted by terrorists and by enemies of the United States, in Iraq and throughout the Middle East? Is the concept of a loyalty to American interests that transcends partisan politics now beyond the imagination of the Kerry campaign?

John Kerry has decided to pursue a scorched-earth strategy in this campaign. He is prepared to insult allies, hearten enemies, and denigrate efforts to succeed in Iraq. His behavior is deeply irresponsible -- and not even in his own best interest.

There is some chance, after all, that John Kerry will be president in four months. If so, what kind of situation will he have created for himself? France will smile on him, but provide no troops. Those allies that have provided troops, from Britain and Poland and Australia and Japan and elsewhere, will likely recall how Kerry sneered at them, calling them "the coerced and the bribed." The leader of the government in Iraq, upon whom the success of John Kerry's Iraq policy will depend, will have been weakened before his enemies and ours -- and will also remember the insult. Is this really how Kerry wants to go down in history: Willing to say anything to try to get elected, no matter what the damage to the people of Iraq, to American interests, and even to himself?

Here's how Al-Jazeera reported Kerry's comments to the Middle East: Allawi's Congress speech draws flak. First they quote a "regional analyst."

"Iraq is not free nor is it stable. There is nationwide chaos. Its infrastructure has been destroyed and its wealth pillaged and plundered by the US occupation," [Mustafa Bakri, editor of the weekly Egyptian news magazine al-Osboa] told Aljazeera.net.

Then they introduce Kerry's comments:

The most severe criticism, however, came from Kerry, who claimed Allawi's speech was an attempt to put the "best face" on an Iraq campaign that is out of control.

You think al-Sadr and al-Zarqawi smiled when they read that? I do.

What a small, graceless man Kerry is. The nature of adversarial politics in a democratic society makes George W. Bush his opponent. But it was entirely Kerry's choice to expand the field, to put himself on the other side of Allawi and the Iraqi people. Given his frequent boasts that he knows how to reach out to America's allies, it's remarkable how often he feels the need to insult them: Britain, Australia, and now free Iraq. But, because this pampered cipher has floundered for 18 months to find any rationale for his candidacy other than his indestructible belief in his own indispensability, Kerry finds himself a month before the election with no platform to run on other than American defeat. He has decided to co-opt the jihadist death-cult, the Baathist dead-enders, the suicide bombers and other misfits and run as the candidate of American failure. This would be shameful if he weren't so laughably inept at it. ["Kerry's looking for American failure -- and he's it",Sun Times]

The failure of Dan Rather and CBS News to properly check their sources is not merely an isolated incident of partisan politics, says Dr. Andrew Bernstein, senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute. It is representative of a widespread rejection of objectivity within the news media.
       
"No serious thinker any longer believes in a verifiable, objective reality," said one newsman. An article in the Atlantic Monthly concluded that it is "better to admit from the start the inevitable subjectivity of journalism, and then to treat it as a necessary condition." Such mainstream advocates of what is known as the "new journalism" explicitly devalue, even outright repudiate, a rigorous commitment to facts and truth in the news. As a Washington Post editor put it: "The old objectivity really wasn't the way to report."
       
Given such an approach, Bernstein asks, why should reporters bother to verify facts as long as a story is congruent with their political agenda? For example, CBS News still stands by its 1988 story of "combat veterans" confessing to heinous actions in Vietnam even though careful research by an independent writer later demonstrated the utterly fabricated nature of the claims. Why should they bow before the facts? Or why should the New York Times bother to check the truth of the claims made by Jayson Blair? After all, "objectivity really isn't the way to report."
       
The shocking truth, Bernstein concludes, of why major news organizations often do not perform the most elementary tasks of fact checking is that facts are a decidedly secondary consideration to them. Promoting their own subjective view is all that matters. 

President Bush accused his Democratic rival Monday of a pattern of waffling and leaving behind a trail of contradictory of positions on the war in Iraq. "Today my opponent continued his pattern of twisting in the wind," Bush said at a rally in New Hampshire "He apparently woke up this morning and has now decided, no, we should not have invaded Iraq, after just last month saying he would have voted for force even knowing everything we know today." John Kerry, a four-term Massachusetts senator, voted to give Bush authority to wage the war; the presidential hopeful said in August he would have voted that way even had he known there were no banned weapons in Iraq. "Incredibly, he now believes our national security would be stronger with Saddam Hussein in power and not in prison," Bush said. "He's saying he prefers the stability of a dictatorship to the hope and security of democracy. "I couldn't disagree more, and not so long ago, so did my opponent," Bush added, quoting Kerry as saying recently, "Those who believe we are not safer with his capture don't have the judgment to be president or the credibility to be elected president."

Iran on Sunday denounced as "illegal" demands from the U.N. atomic watchdog agency that it freeze all work on uranium enrichment -- technology that can be used for nuclear weapons. Hasan Rowhani, Iran's top nuclear negotiator, also said his country would limit its cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency if the watchdog refers Iran to the U.N Security Council for possible sanctions.

Iran says it has started converting raw uranium into gas for enrichment in defiance of demands set by the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog.

Mr. Rather and his CBS bosses are sticking to their story, despite the growing evidence on the other side, leaving unanswered the biggest question of all: Who perpetrated this apparent fraud on CBS and the American voters? As journalists who sometimes go out on a limb ourselves, we'd have thought Mr. Rather's first recourse would not be to get mad but instead to double- and triple-check his sources.

"If the documents are not what we were led to believe, I'd like to break that story," Rather said in an interview last night. "Any time I'm wrong, I want to be right out front and say, 'Folks, this is what went wrong and how it went wrong.'"

"This is not about me," Rather said before anchoring last night's newscast. "I recognize that those who didn't want the information out and tried to discredit the story are trying to make it about me, and I accept that."

Key states who joined the US-led invasion of Iraq have rejected claims by the United Nations secretary general that the war was illegal. Kofi Annan told the BBC the decision to take action in Iraq contravened the UN charter and should have been made by the Security Council, not unilaterally. But authorities in the UK, Australia, Poland, Bulgaria and Japan said the war was backed by international law. Australian Prime Minister John Howard described the UN as a "paralysed" body. And a former Bush administration aide, Randy Scheunemann, branded Mr Annan's comments "outrageous".

...Randy Scheunemann, a former advisor to US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, accused Mr Annan of trying to influence the outcome of the forthcoming US presidential election. "I think it is outrageous for the secretary general, who ultimately works for the member states, to try and supplant his judgement for the judgement of the member states," he told the BBC. "To do this 51 days before an American election reeks of political interference," Randy Scheunemann said. He said the UN's failure to act in Sudan, and in other areas around the world, was proving that effective multilateralism may be a contradiction in terms. [Iraq war allies rebuff UN chief]