Monthly Archives: August 2003

BBC Takes More Hits

The Hutton Inquiry continues, and today John Scarlett, the chairman of Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee, testified. Scarlett’s testimony was devastating to the BBC. He said that he was responsible for the content of the dossier that was attacked by the BBC; that the claim that the Blair government in general or Alastair Campbell in particular “sexed up” the dossier was false; that there were no disagreements between Campbell and himself »

Condi speaks

Yesterday National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice spoke to the Veterans of Foreign Wars at the group’s convention in San Antonio, Texas. President Bush is himself to address the the VFW in St. Louis later today if I understand the New York Times story correctly. The White House has now posted the text of Rice’s speech, which briefly acknowledges the VFW’s presentation to her of its Dwight David Eisenhower Distinguished Service »

Let’s not send boys to do a man’s job

Reader Fredrik Nyman reinforces the skepticism I expressed yesterday regarding an expanded U.N. role in Iraq or Gaza. Mr. Nyman writies: “Regarding your blog post on getting the UN involved in Iraq and Gaza in order to contribute troops, I agree with your objections. I would also like to ask a question that nobody seems to ask: WHERE would these 75,000 UN troops come from? My understanding is that very »

“U.S. to Send 22 Million Troops to Protect Iraq”

If you’re not familiar with Scrappleface, you should check it out. I think it’s the best satire site on the web, and it has a conservative bent. Here is the above item in full: “The United States will send 22 million troops to Iraq this year to ensure the safety of every Iraqi and every structure in the country. “Dubbed ‘Operation Buddy System’ by Pentagon planners, the idea is to »

Is Bush In Trouble?

John Podhoretz says “No:” “A page-one Washington Post article summed up this week’s conventional wisdom perfectly: “‘The president no longer enjoys the aura of invincibility that surrounded him only a few months ago . . . Democrats especially have re-evaluated his presidency and concluded that, on the issues now dominating the political debate, Bush does not have the upper hand.’ “Only one problem: The article by Dan Balz and Dana »

Specter Spins, the Times Swallows

Yesterday’s New York Times carried this brief correction: “An article on Aug. 10 about the Club for Growth, a conservative political organization, referred erroneously to a comparison between the voting records of Senator Arlen Specter, who has courted the group’s support, and Representative Patrick Toomey, who is challenging him in Pennsylvania’s Republican primary for the Senate. According to ratings in National Journal, Specter’s record is less conservative than Toomey’s.” Behind »

Meeting Mister Lee

I have frequently referred to Minneapolis FM community radio station KFAI in the course of writing about musical subjects on this site. Like several such radio stations around the country, KFAI subsists on the love of its on-air volunteers for the kind of popular music heard nowhere else on the radio dial, as well as on an infantile left-wing politics that the good stations like KFAI at least divorce from »

General Clark for Vice President?

Alan Dowd writing in National Review Online takes a look at General Wesley Clark, who may soon announce his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination. The Democrats, of course, aren’t going to nominate a General for president in any of our lifetimes (when was the last time they did, 1880 with Winfield Scott Hancock in 1880?). But Dowd notes that Clark might be after the number two spot on the »

Missing WMDs in Lebanon?

On May 4, we posted on a Debka File report that before the war started, Iraq shipped its chemical and biological weapons to Syria, which buried them in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley. This story has surfaced again in the World Tribune: “U.S. intelligence suspects Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction have finally been located. “Unfortunately, getting to them will be nearly impossible for the United States and its allies, because the containers »

The guilt that sets you free

Phony guilt — professed in front of a parole board eliciting protestations of feeling guilty over being a white person in Amerika — is the kind of guilt that gives you a license to kill without remorse or repentance and to get out of jail free. Read the sickening story on the release of multiple felony murderer Kathy Boudin on FrontPage: “Portrait of a progressive terrorist.” »

Krugman Truth Squad strikes again

Donald Luskin has inducted our own Rocket Man into the fellowship of the Krugman Truth Squad in his devastating column for National Review Online today: “California’s bleeding…and Krugman comes up lame.” “Lame” doesn’t quite capture Krugman’s condition, but consider Krugman kneecapped by the column. »

Return to sender

No, this one isn’t about Elvis. It’s about the first part of the Real Clear Politics blog posted below, which is also worth reading, although I think its recommendations are misguided. RCP suggests a package-deal under which the U.N. would send 50,000 peace-keepers to Iraq and 25,000 to Gaza in exchange for some unspecified amount of control over policy in both places. Putting aside my objections to any appreciable U.N. »

Civility as a one-way street

The second item in today’s blog from Real Clear Politics concerns a lesson in civility from none other than Minnesota’s Angry Humorist, Garrison Keillor. The Unfunny One offers this lesson by way of explaining why Arnold Schwarzenegger (who seems civil enough to me) is ill-suited to govern California. RCP finds Keillor ill-suited to extol the virtues of civility in light of his tirades against Norm Coleman. After reading this piece, »

“This War Is The Big One”

As usual over the past two years, Tom Friedman gets the story half right: “I have no doubt that the U.S. presence in Iraq is attracting all sorts of terrorists and Islamists to oppose the U.S. I also have no doubt that politicians and intellectuals in the nearby Arab states are rooting against America in Iraq because they want Arabs and the world to believe that the corrupt autocracies that »

Speaking of William Kristol. . .

he and Robert Kagan have written a new Weekly Standard piece advocating the allocation of more troops, money and civilian personnel to Iraq. Kristol and Kagan argue that “this is the time to bite the bullet and pay the price. Next spring, if disaster looms, it will be harder. And it may be too late. . . .Success in Iraq is within our reach. But there are grounds to fear »

The Godfather, Part III

The sequel to The Godfather, Part II centers around the next generation, specifically a son who at first seemed to reject the family business. Instead of staying in New York and writing on behalf of neoconservative causes, he came to Washington and became a mainstream conservative operative and later a genial television pundit, seemingly more at home talking about election strategy than neoconservative philosophy or policy perspectives. Eventually, though, he »

The “Department of Killing It Here”

The pretext for Michael McFaul’s call for new bureaucracies, and the pretext for much of the daffy commentary about Iraq in the past few days, was the successful attack on U.N. headquarters in Iraq. Here, courtesy of Real Clear Pollitics, Mark Steyn provides a needed dose of perspective on that attack. And on the war against terrorism in general. To wit: “The terrorists watch CNN and the BBC and, understandably, »