Monthly Archives: January 2004

It’s the crime, stupid

Heather McDonald has a piece in the New York Post about the efforts of the New York TImes and certain liberal politicians to turn the tragic fatal shooting of a black housing project resident by an NYPD officer into an act of racism. The officer shot the unarmed 19-year-old while patrolling the roof of a Bedford-Stuyvesant housing project late last Saturday night. He and his partner went to open a »

Fanfare for the NEA

I’m not sure whose advice President Bush is listening to on funding the National Endowment for the Arts, but Rocket Man’s post below brings a couple of great songs to mind. First, a word from a man wise in the ways of the world — Merle Haggard: When a President goes through the White House door, An’ does what he says he’ll do. We’ll all be drinkin’ free bubble-ubb, Eatin’ »

Should Conservatives Continue to Support Bush?

The Bush administration will announce today a proposal for the largest increase in spending on the National Endowment for the Arts in twenty years. An administration spokesman says the proposal is “intended to show the administration’s commitment to the arts.” Glenn Reynolds calls this move “incomprehensibly stupid.” I don’t think he’s referring to the funding level of the NEA as much as to the President’s blatant election-year pandering. As fast »

The death cult strikes again

Today’s terror bombing in Jerusalem — on a bus that ran between two hospitals — is the subject of a long report in today’s Jerusalem Post. The article is “10 killed in Jerusalem terror bombing.” »

The value of a life

We have become huge fans of Jerusalem Post editorial page editor Saul Singer. His new book — Confronting Jihad: Israel’s Struggle & The World After 9/11 — collects his mostly war-related Post editorials and columns from the period 1997 to mid-2003. Despite the instant judgment demanded by daily opinion journalism, Singer’s work not only withstands review, it illuminates in retrospect. It is a remarkable book made all the more important »

Death wish

Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook in the Jerusalem Post contend that the world has failed to understand the challenge presented by suicide terror. They write, “The world had assumed that the Palestinian suicide terrorist was facing a dilemma of having to choose between the value of killing Jews and the value of life. Clearly, this is false. Killing Jews is one ‘value.’ Death for deity is itself a value greater »

Our man in Afghanistan reports

Our source on the ground in Afghanistan is a reserve Army major (called to duty from his home in Minneapolis) whom we are inordinately proud to claim as a Power Line reader. He has previously asked us not to disclose his name for security reasons. Today he sent us the following report: First, I have heard of two suicide attacks in Kabul today, one at the UN and one at »

Winter Wonderland Warning

I spent the last few days in Milwaukee; it was snowing in Minnesota when I left Monday morning, and it snowed in Milwaukee most of the time I was there. I got home at the end of the day today and picked up my car; I tuned in to listen to an excellent local radio talk show host, Joe Soucheray. As I left the airport parking ramp, the temperature reading »

The Case For War

Two of today’s huge news stories form an ironic contrast. In England, the Chairman of the British Broadcasting Company resigned after Lord Hutton blasted the BBC for falsely claiming that the Blair administration had “sexed up” the intelligence dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. The BBC’s Director General issued an apology for the network’s false coverage of the issue: “The BBC does accept that certain key allegations reported by »

Saddam’s Oil Pipeline

The Iraqi newspaper al-Mada has obtained documents from the Iraqi oil ministry that purport to identify people who were given contracts to trade in oil under the U.N.’s oil-for-palaces program. Al-Mada has printed a list of the recipients. The Telegraph has the story: Saddam Hussein bribed his way around the world, buying the support of presidents, ministers, legislators, political parties and even Christian churches, according to documents published in Iraq. »

Three candidates, three bubbles?

William Saletan at Slate has been turning out excellent commentary about the Democratic presidential contenders. Here, he describes “Howard Dean’s fatal echo chamber.” Saletan shows how Dean’s campaign is as much about his campaign as it is about anything else. How perfect, then, that the campaign’s defining moment, the point when it went entirely off the rails, occurred as Dean talked to his campaign about his campaign, while America listened. »

The morning after

The best post mortems I’ve seen this morning on the New Hampshire primary come from Real Clear Politics and Hugh Hewitt. At RCP, John McIntyre considers “where we go from here.” He concludes that “Kerry’s in control and he can go for the knockout punch next week, but Dean’s not going away, and Kerry may have a bigger problem in the South and the West than we think. Let’s see »

Vietnam Veterans Against Kerry

In her brief NRO column this morning, Kate O’Beirne notes that “[t]he Vietnam veteran and firefighter I know best would both risk enemy fire and roaring flames to vote against John Kerry. So, I wondered, where are the fully informed veterans who remember Kerry’s lies and smears?” Answering her own question, she has directed us to this valuable new site: Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry. »

Judging from the mail. . .

our readers are eager to take Rocket Man’s proposed walk down memory lane with us, as embarrassing as the trip may be. In that spirit, here is the first piece I wrote for Power Line. It’s about the dishonesty of the Vietnam anti-war movement and the myths upon which it is based. I see, however, that I did not even list the myth of widespread war crimes that was Kerry’s »

Heart of darkness

Jewish World Review carries a review of the new edition of Hitler’s unreleased 1928 sequel to Mein Kampf, previously unavailable in a reliable English edition. The review is by Professor Omer Bartov of Brown University and originally ran in the New Republic: “Did Hitlerism die with Hitler?” Professor Bartov writes: “[W]e still do not seem to have learned a simple crucial lesson that Hitler taught us more definitively than anyone »

Portrait of Saint Teh-RAY-zah

In her column this morning Michelle Malkin takes a timely, sidelong glance at John Kerry through the eyes of his wife, the woman formerly known as Maria Teresa Thierstein Simoes-Ferreira. Michelle first recalls that when she filled the unexpired portion of the term of her deceased husband Senator John Heinz, the then-Mrs. Heinz criticized Republican senatorial candidate Rick Santorum: “The ‘moderate’ Republican Heinz objected to GOP candidate Rick Santorum’s social »

Hutton Inquiry Clears Blair

A leak of the Hutton Report, due out tomorrow, indicates that Lord Hutton will clear Tony Blair’s government of responsibility for the suicide of British arms expert David Kelly. Hutton’s report apparently will focus its criticism on the anti-war BBC and its reporter, Andrew Gilligan, who misrepresented Kelly’s statements on the air. The Kelly inquiry is one of those situations where you kind of have to be there. To us, »