Why John Kerry should not be President.
Friday 29 October 2004 @ 9:27 pm

Why John Kerry should not be President.

One, he is too far to the political left, way too far. He is one of the most extreme liberal Senators. He has a lifetime rating of 92 by the ADA.

Two, he is an internationalist who has and will kowtow to foreign interests to the detriment of our security and our sovereignty.

Three, Kerry portrays himself as a war hero and as an anti-war hero. Switching between the two as suits the politics of the moment. Sometimes maintaining both at the same time.

Four, his nearly 20-year record in the Senate is abysmal. He has authored only 7 bills in 20 years that became law. He could add 4 joint resolutions to bring his total to 11. That’s a whopping average of 0.5 per year, but that isn’t the worst part. Among these 11 that became law included: the naming of a Federal building, a “save the dolphins” measure, a visa grant for one individual, a posthumous medal for a famous athlete, and two measures for “World Population Awareness Week.”

Five, Kerry has a history of meeting with and helping communist regimes. In 1985, shortly after becoming a Senator, Kerry went to Nicaragua on a “fact finding” mission. Kerry came back and began shilling for Ortega. Ortega promised Kerry he would moderate his policies. Ortega used Kerry and then within days hopped on a plane to Moscow to close a $200 million deal with his Soviet bosses. This was not the first time that communists had used Kerry.

Kerry had an illegal meeting with the North Vietnamese communists in Paris in 1970. (There was a second meeting in 1971.) During this time Kerry was still in the Navy reserve and the war in Vietnam was ongoing. Kerry’s meetings with the communists and his protest activities with the VVAW appear to be linked. Kerry supported the communists’ plan for US surrender.

Six, Kerry gave false testimony before the Congress in 1971 claiming that war atrocities were being committed by US soldiers. In his words: “crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.” There were atrocities in Vietnam no doubt, but they were the exception and not the rule. I cannot repeat here the many vile charges claimed by Mr. Kerry. These charges were used against our soldiers. There were POWs who endured extreme torture and did not give the communists what John Kerry gave them for free.

-jweaks

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The End

Terrorists support Kerry
Wednesday 27 October 2004 @ 9:30 am

http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041027-121030-7792r.htm
By Borzou Daragahi
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published October 27, 2004

BAGHDAD — Leaders and supporters of the anti-U.S. insurgency say their attacks in recent weeks have a clear objective: The greater the violence, the greater the chances that President Bush will be defeated on Tuesday and the Americans will go home.

“If the U.S. Army suffered numerous humiliating losses, [Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John] Kerry would emerge as the superman of the American people,” said Mohammad Amin Bashar, a leader of the Muslim Scholars Association, a hard-line clerical group that vocally supports the resistance.

Resistance leader Abu Jalal boasted that the mounting violence had already hurt Mr. Bush’s chances.

“American elections and Iraq are linked tightly together,” he told a Fallujah-based Iraqi reporter. “We’ve got to work to change the election, and we’ve done so. With our strikes, we’ve dragged Bush into the mud.”

Mowafaq Al-Tai, a London-educated architect and intellectual, said different types of resistance fighters have different views of the U.S. election.

The most pro-Kerry, he said, are the former Saddam Hussein loyalists — Ba’ath Party members and others who think Washington might scale back its ambitions for Iraq if Mr. Kerry wins, allowing them to re-enter civic life.

The most pro-Bush, he said, are the foreign extremists. “They prefer Bush, because he’s a provocative figure, and the more they can push people to the extreme, the better for their case.”

Abu Jalal, answering questions submitted to him through the Iraqi journalist, devised a simple formula for how his group’s attacks on American soldiers draw votes from Mr. Bush.

“They say there are 1,100 dead soldiers. That means 1,100 families hold grudges against Bush and hate him. There are 6,000 families whose sons were injured who hate Bush and will not re-elect him.”

But even within the resistance, not all agree that removing Mr. Bush from office would make a difference.

“The nation of infidels is one, and Bush and Kerry are two faces of the same coin,” said Abu Obeida, nom de guerre of a leader of Fallujah’s al-Noor Jihadi regiment. “What is taken by force will be returned only by force, and we don’t care what the results of the elections are.”

Among ordinary Iraqis interested only in a return to peace and stability, there is far less clarity about what the American election might bring. Many, like 35-year-old bank branch manager Sahar Mahmoud, say they are bewildered by media reports about the nuances of polling, swing states and attack ads.

“It’s a very big political game, and something that we are very far from,” he said. “We are very tired people, and we’re just emerging from a big crisis. So we can’t imagine what other people are going through.”

Zeydoon Mohamad Jassem Najar, a biology student at Baghdad University, simply shakes his head as the U.S. politicians argue over his country’s fate.

“It’s like everybody is looking out for their own interests and nobody is looking for the Iraqi people’s interests,” he said. “It’s like a game of personal interests between Bush and the other guy.”

Mr. Bashar, a professor at Baghdad’s Islamic University, said he and many of those who oppose the U.S. presence in Iraq were rooting for Mr. Kerry.

“I think if Kerry wins, he’s going to try to get world support and United Nations involvement,” he said during an interview at Baghdad’s Um al-Qura mosque. “You’ll see a different situation in Iraq if the United Nations is involved.”

But Nazar Judi, a 41-year-old money trader who had his right hand cut off by Saddam Hussein’s security forces nine years ago, is squarely in the Bush camp.

“I prefer Bush over the other guy because he knows Iraq well,” said Mr. Judi, who received a new prosthetic hand from the U.S. Army and was flown to Washington to meet Mr. Bush in person. “I hope he wins his election because he wants to modernize Iraq.”

A photograph of the American president shaking Mr. Judi’s prosthetic hand hangs on the wall of a back room at his Khademiya office. In the front room, however, are portraits of Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the vehemently anti-U.S. Iranian cleric, and his successor, Ali Khamenei, the current theocratic ruler of Iran.

Copyright © 2004 News World Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041027-121030-7792r.htm

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The End

Nicholas Kristof on ‘God and Sex’
Tuesday 26 October 2004 @ 4:51 pm

Mr. Kristof’s column ran in my local paper recently. It made me sad. It is apparent that Mr. Kristof has little knowledge of which he speaks. I don’t have time to write my own critique, but the following response by Albert Mohler sums it up pretty well.

Nicholas Kristof Strikes Again, This Time on ‘God and Sex’
by Albert Mohler
http://www.crosswalk.com/news/weblogs/mohler/?adate=10/26/2004#1292506

Nicholas Kristof is at it again. In his October 23, 2004 column in The New York Times, he begins by asking this question: “So when God made homosexuals who fall deeply, achingly in love with each other, did he goof?” Like the little boy who can’t keep his hand out of the cookie jar, Kristof can’t resist the opportunity to stick his finger in the eyes of America’s evangelical Christians.

Just last year, Kristof decided to write a column in which he argued that evangelical Christians are proof positive that America is deeply anti-intellectual. “The faith in the Virgin Birth reflects the way American Christianity is becoming less intellectual and more mystical over time,” he asserted. Kristof was knocked off of his secularist rocker by research data showing that the vast majority of American Christians believe in the virgin birth, “despite the lack of scientific or historical evidence.”

Kristof is becoming the gold-standard symbol of the cultural elite and media arrogance. Even as he once chided his fellow journalists for their “sneering tone about conservative Christianity itself,” Kristof can’t stop sneering himself. Now, in his column entitled “God and Sex,” he takes his critique to a new level.

Without doubt, Kristof knows that his opening question will be an attention getter. By suggesting that “God made homosexuals who fall deeply, achingly in love with each other,” he stacks the deck for his rhetorical game. When he asks of God, “Did he goof?”, he sets himself up for a condescending dismissal of the Christian church’s historic understanding of scripture.

Furthermore, all this was prompted by Kristof’s outrage that measures opposing gay marriage are on the ballots in eleven states. As he notes, “All may pass; Oregon is the only state where the outcome seems uncertain.” Just as in previous articles Kristof has shared his frustrated incredulity over the fact that a majority of Americans believe in the truth of the virgin birth and reject the theory of evolution, he now wants to rescue conservative, Bible-believing Christians from what he condescendingly sees as an unsophisticated interpretation of the Bible.

Of course, Kristof now poses as an expert in these arguments. As he asserts in his article, “Over the last couple of months, I’ve been researching the question of how the Bible regards homosexuality.” So Kristof has put himself through a self-directed crash course in the Bible and sexuality. Unfortunately, he needed a better teacher.

Why would Kristof care about the Bible in the first place? “I think it’s presumptuous of conservatives to assume that God is on their side,” he avers. “But since Americans are twice as likely to believe in the Devil as in evolution, I also think it’s stupid of liberals to forfeit the religious field.” Be warned, Kristof is not about to “forfeit the religious field.” To the contrary, he now intends to correct what he sees as two thousand years of the church’s misunderstanding.

Just who has Nicholas Kristof been reading? The first “scholar” he mentions is Daniel Helminiak, a professor at the University of West Georgia and author of What the Bible Really Says About Homosexuality. Helminiak, as Kristof notes, argues that the Bible does not really condemn homosexuality at all. Even Kristof thinks this is going a bit too far. “I don’t really buy that,” he commented. But, as Kristof’s column reveals, he has bought more of Helminiak’s argument than he acknowledges.

The homosexual movement has collected an entire corps of “scholars” ready to turn the Bible on its head and argue that the clear scriptural condemnation of homosexuality is just one big unfortunate misunderstanding. Among these pro-homosexual theologians and professors, Helminiak stands on the radical left–and that’s really saying something.

Helminiak argues that if we read the Bible “as it was meant when it was written,” we will understand that “the Bible says almost nothing about homosexuality.” In other words, when the Bible talks about homosexuality, it really isn’t talking about what we now know as homosexuality at all. In order to make such a ludicrous argument, Helminiak must take the Bible apart, arguing that, for example, the clear condemnations of homosexual acts found in the book of Leviticus point only to the fact that Israel was not to participate in various Canaanite religious practices involving same-sex acts. The issue is merely “uncleanness” not immorality, he argues.

Of course, this approach gets rather difficult when one actually looks at the Biblical text. When Helminiak deals with the sin of Sodom for example [Genesis 19:1-11], he argues that the sin of Sodom was inhospitality. He does acknowledge that the sin of Sodom is complicated by homosexual rape, but he argues, “what is at stake here is male-male rape, not merely male-male sex.”

Kristof picks right up on Helminiak’s argument, asserting: “It’s true that the story of Sodom is treated by both modern scholars and by ancient Ezekiel as about hospitality, rather than by homosexuality.” Yet Ezekiel indites Sodom for its sins, both for inhospitality and for committing “abominations” in the sight of God. Of course, the conclusive proof that God punished Sodom for sexual perversion is found in Jude 7, where we are told that Sodom and Gomorrah and the other cities of the plain were destroyed “since they in the same way as these indulged in gross immorality and went after strange flesh.” It’s hard to square the Helminiak-Kristof argument with that clear statement.

Helminiak betrays his real agenda when he shifts from his corrupted and contorted theology to social policy. “Despite it all,” he argues, “the important point is to recognize the difference between real wrong and mere taboo. Though it is not always easy to know the difference, we must not be hardheaded and treat as an ethical issue what is simply a matter of convention. Rather, with openness, intelligence, reasoned judgment, and good will we must continually work together to form a just, high minded and noble society.”

In other words, when all is said and done, a changing social consciousness demands a new interpretation of scripture–whether or not it has anything to do with what the text actually means and has always meant.

Even as he says that he doesn’t “really buy” Helminiak’s argument, Kristof borrows Helminiak’s claim that the Old Testament “can be read as describing gay affairs between David and Jonathan.” Helminiak’s discussion of these passages is particularly perverse, turning the poetic imagery of the Bible into an erotic burlesque. Even so, in perverting the text in this way, Helminiak demonstrates the extent to which the modern homosexual movement has corrupted and perverted our understanding of friendship among men. Given the way Helminiak and his clan read the Bible, when football players exchange slaps on the behind in the midst of a game, they are really playing some kind of homosexual script that is about sex rather than sports. The fact that this is nonsense puts no brakes on the ludicrous arguments Kristof is willing to accept.

When he argues that theologians now accept “that the Bible is big enough to encompass gay relationships and tolerance” he does so entirely on the basis of arguments and proposals made by homosexual advocates in the last several years. He is undeterred and unrestrained by the fact that the Christian church has never understood these texts as he explains them and has always understood them to say precisely the opposite of what he wants them to say.

This is arrogance of an almost breathtaking nature. Turning aside twenty centuries of Christian interpretation, Kristof will celebrate as “scholars” those who do the bidding of the homosexual movement and undermine the authority of scripture.

Eventually, Kristof must deal with the apostle Paul. He does this in two ways, using the arguments common to Helminiak and others to suggest that the apostle Paul either knew nothing about sexual orientation or isn’t actually addressing homosexual acts at all. This requires interpretive calisthenics of the most exaggerated sort. For example, Kristof confronts a passage like Romans 1:18-32, where Paul explicitly points to both male and female homosexuality as evidence of the utter sinfulness of humanity. The apostle minces no words, specifically addressing both homosexual acts and homosexual passion.

This doesn’t set Kristof back at all, and he even boxes himself into a corner by arguing that “the Bible has no unequivocal condemnation of lesbian sex.” As an authority for this point he cites Bernadette Brooten, author of Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism. Brooten, professor of Christian studies at Brandeis University, actually argues the opposite of what Kristof implies. Whereas Kristof asserts that Paul may not have been referring to lesbian sex acts at all, Brooten argues that the Pauline letters are evidence of the ancient world’s condemnation of female same-sex acts and desire. Brooten leads “The Feminist Sexual Ethics Project” at Brandeis, and she envisions “an ethic of sexuality rooted in freedom, mutuality, consent, responsibility, and female (as well as male) pleasure.”

In the end, even Kristof must concede that Paul must have been condemning homosexuality. But, he asks, “Do we really want to make Paul our lawgiver?”

Nicholas Kristof’s latest column is further evidence–as if we needed further evidence–that the secular left knows full well that the most powerful opposition to its pro-homosexual ambitions is the Christian church and its allegiance to the Bible. Even as he begrudgingly concedes that “the traditionalists seem to be basically correct that the Old Testament does condemn at least male anal sex,” he quickly adds, “Jesus never said a word about gays.” He rejects Paul, turns other Biblical passages on their heads, and makes a general mockery out of the serious interpretation of scripture.

Kristof’s ambition is, we must assume, to change public opinion on this issue and to influence conservative Christians to accept the pro-homosexual arguments for the normalization of same-sex acts, same-sex desire, and same-sex marriage. Not likely. America’s Christians, however confused they may be on any number of issues, know enough to realize that it is Kristof, not God, who goofed.

____________________________________________

R. Albert Mohler, Jr. is president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

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The End

Election musings…
Friday 22 October 2004 @ 2:05 pm

Musings…

Kerry’s use of VP Cheney’s daughter during the final debate: Kerry came across as petty and calculating. If it had ended there, it probably would have faded from memory, but the assault of Ms. Cheney continued. Mary Beth Cahill, Kerry campaign manager, said the VP’s daughter was “fair game.” So it wasn’t just a spur of the moment reference by Kerry. Why would Ms. Cheney be fair game? Sure, she supports her father, but she is hardly a public figure. The lowest blow came from John Edwards’ wife Elizabeth who said in response to Lynne Cheney’s disapproval of her daughter being used for political gain: “I think that it indicates a certain degree of shame with respect to her daughter’s sexual preferences… It makes me really sad that that’s Lynne’s response.”

You’ll probably never hear it in the elite media, but the mantra that Bush has “lost” jobs under his watch is simply untrue. I don’t think the President (any President) is directly responsible for gaining or losing jobs in our economy, but the President does set the agenda and does have an effect. Looking at all the numbers indicate a net gain of jobs under President Bush. (see: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, www.bls.gov) - jweaks

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The End

The Great Flu Vaccine Shortage
Tuesday 19 October 2004 @ 2:07 pm

Washington Monthly
Kevin Drum
October 17, 2004
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_10/004936.php

THE GREAT FLU VACCINE SHORTAGE….As everyone knows by now, the proximate cause of the flu vaccine shortage was contamination at a plant in England owned by Chiron, one of only two companies that manufacture flu vaccine for the U.S. market (the other is Aventis Pasteur). But why are there only two manufacturers of flu vaccine in the first place? After reading a slew of articles, here’s a rundown of all the explanations on offer:

1. For starters, it’s a pretty small market. The total vaccine market (for all vaccines, that is) is about $6 billion out of a market of $340 billion for drugs of all kinds.

2. The flu vaccine business is risky: some years you sell out, but other years you make 50 million doses and only sell 20 million. That makes it fairly unattractive, especially since….

3. It’s a commodity market, so profit margins are thin to begin with.

4. What’s more, the biggest buyer is the government, which buys in bulk at a very low price. So profit margins are even thinner than they might be.

5. FDA regulations have gotten tighter over the years, and vaccine makers have had an increasingly hard time meeting them because it requires expensive plant upgrades.

6. But nobody wants to invest a lot of money to upgrade their flu vaccine plants because there’s new technology coming down the road in a few years that will render the current manufacturing technique (which uses chicken eggs) obsolete.

7. Finally, huge awards in liability lawsuits have scared vaccine makers out of the market. About 50-70% of the cost of most vaccines is taken up by the cost of liability insurance.

I got all this from reading about half a dozen different stories purporting to tell the story of the flu vaccine shortage. But something important was missing from all of them: with two exceptions, all of these explanations apply to every country in the world — but the United States is the only one with a problem. So most of them don’t actually explain anything.

That leaves the two exceptions, and only one of them seems to hold water. Explanation #7, liability costs, is certainly something that could be unique to the United States, but liability costs wouldn’t drive companies out of the flu vaccine market unless liability insurance were unavailable, and this must not be the case since both Chiron and Aventis presumably have liability insurance. It might be expensive, and therefore drive prices up, but it wouldn’t force companies out of the market. (It would — potentially — be a big problem if the price of the vaccine were capped, but while that’s the case for some vaccines, flu vaccine is not price capped.)

That leaves explanation #5, and at first glance it seems the most likely to be the real deal. The FDA has a famously tight regulatory regime, made even tighter in the late 90s, and as a result the United States has only two approved manufacturers of flu vaccine while Britain has half a dozen. (Although, ironically, it’s worth noting that a breakdown of the regulatory regime seems to be a more likely explanation for Chiron’s immediate problem.) The bottom line is that there are other flu vaccine manufacturers besides Chiron and Aventis, but they don’t sell into the U.S. market because the cost of complying with FDA regulations is higher than the narrow profits they could expect to make from selling flu vaccine.

Anyway, that’s my best guess, although it’s practically impossible to be sure since not a single article I read even attempted to make an international comparison even though it’s the most obvious question to ask. If anybody can point me toward a more authoritative report that explains what makes the U.S. market so much different from every other country’s, leave a link in comments.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_10/004936.php

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The End

Party affiliation and political knowledge
Monday 18 October 2004 @ 7:49 pm

Interesting, from one of my favorite sites:

Wednesday, February 11, 2004
Eugene Volokh

Party affiliation and political knowledge: Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University, writes:

Apropos the conservatism and “stupidity” issue, you may find interesting the attached data from my analysis of the 2000 National Election Study (the NES is the most comprehensive US survey of political attitudes and knowledge, which breaks down political knowledge by strength of party affiliation. Note that “Strong Republicans” have much higher political knowledge levels than any other group. The 3.3 gap on a 31 point scale between “Strong Republicans” and “Strong Democrats” may not seem like much, but it is the equivalent of that created by a difference of SEVERAL YEARS of formal education.

Now I note that political knowledge is not the same thing as intelligence (indeed, I have to caution people on this every time I present one of my papers on political ignorance), but I think lack of knowledge is often what people have in mind when they attack conservatives as “stupid.”

I also note that I am not suggesting that people become Republicans BECAUSE they are more knowledgeable. The knowledge gap may simply be an artifact of the fact that highly educated, high income people, are disproportionately likely to be Republicans. Still, it is simply false to say that conservative Republicans are more likely to be politically ignorant than liberal Democrats. The opposite is in fact the case, though independents are on average far more ignorant than either group.

Another irony: the British Conservative Party that Mill was attacking in the 1860s had at least as much in common with modern liberals as with modern Conservatives. For instance, the Conservative leader Benjamin Disraeli invented the “two Nations” mantra that John Edwards has transmogrified into “Two Americas.” 1860s Conservatives were also supporters of workplace regulation and protectionism, though on some other issues (e.g. - imperialism) they did differ from modern liberals.

Here’s the table that Ilya attached:

Table 2.5
Political Knowledge by Strength of Party Identification
2000 National Election Study
Self-Described Party Alignment / Average Political Knowledge Score
(Average number of correct answers on 31 point scale)

“Strong Republican” / 18.7
“Independent-Republican” / 15.7
“Strong Democrat” / 15.4
“Independent-Democrat” / 14.2
“Weak Republican” / 14.1
“Weak Democrat” / 13.3
“Independent-Independent” / 9.5

I can’t independently vouch for this, and of course (as Somin would doubtless agree) there are all sorts of other possible explanations here: For instance, it may be that in 2000 Strong Republicans were more politically energized than Strong Democrats because of their opposition to the incumbent President Clinton. I surely won’t claim much Republican superiority based on this. But I do think that it’s a helpful response to claims of conservative stupidity, claims that are often made but rarely supported.

UPDATE: See: http://www.instapundit.com/archives/014093.php#014093 for more data, from Northwestern lawprof Jim Lindgren via InstaPundit. Again, I stress that I am not claiming Republican superiority, for the reasons that Somin, Lindgren, and I have pointed out. But it does further highlight that “conservatives are stupid” claims usually rest simply on the speaker’s unstated premise that “stupid = disagrees with me on politics.”

http://volokh.com/2004_02_08_volokh_archive.html#107656713823142589

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The End

The Man in the Muddle
Thursday 14 October 2004 @ 2:11 pm

Mark Steyn says that the nuanced John Kerry is a threat to peace. So it’s a good thing he’s going to lose the election.

New Hampshire

These days the most devastating profiles of John Kerry are the puff pieces. Take, for example, last weekend’s New York Times magazine, in which Matt Bai attempted to argue that the Nuancy Boy is a kind of strategic genius who was on to this whole terror thing a decade before anybody else. That line of argument gets a little tiring, so midway through Mr Bai included this relaxing interlude:

A row of Evian water bottles had been thoughtfully placed on a nearby table. Kerry frowned.

‘Can we get any of my water?’ he asked Stephanie Cutter, his communications director, who dutifully scurried from the room. I asked Kerry, out of sheer curiosity, what he didn’t like about Evian.

‘I hate that stuff,’ Kerry explained to me. ‘They pack it full of minerals.’

‘What kind of water do you drink?’ I asked, trying to make conversation.

‘Plain old American water,’ he said.

‘You mean tap water?’

‘No,’ Kerry replied deliberately…

He seemed now to sense some kind of trap. I was left to imagine what was going through his head. If I admit that I drink bottled water, then he might say I’m out of touch with ordinary voters. But doesn’t demanding my own brand of water seem even more aristocratic? Then again, Evian is French — important to stay away from anything even remotely French.

‘There are all kinds of waters,’ he said finally. Pause. ‘Saratoga Spring.’ This seemed to have exhausted his list. ‘Sometimes I drink tap water,’ he added.

You can lead a horse-face to water, but you can’t make him drink. Not in this election. Imagine the strain of being unable to answer a simple question of beverage preference without flipping through the old mental Rolodex to calibrate the least politically damaging answer. Water, water everywhere, but gotta stop to think, to quote The Rime Of The Ancient Swift Boat Mariner. If George W. Bush happened to enjoy Evian, I don’t think he’d be averse to telling us. I certainly wouldn’t. I dislike France for geopolitical reasons, but I like the wine and the food. I like the women. I especially like the cute little girl bellhops in the Ruritanian uniforms at the Plaza Athenée. But John Kerry has invested so much in his imaginary friend in the Elysée Palace you can’t even ask him, ‘Hey, bud, what’ll you drink?’ without him wondering whether you’re impugning his patriotism. So ask a simple question and get a lot of, as it were, tap dancing.

In the debates, it’s easier. He and John Edwards know they have to sound tough, so their writers generally provide them with a line pledging to ‘hunt down and kill the terrorists’. But it’s exhausting having to remember when to spit out the tough talk and not to get caught in some fake-o water-gate controversy, and so your concentration wanders and you get relaxed and then you say things like this:

‘We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance. As a former law-enforcement person, I know we’re never going to end prostitution. We’re never going to end illegal gambling. But we’re going to reduce it, organised crime, to a level where it isn’t on the rise.’

So the Senator has now made what was hitherto just a cheap crack from his opponents into formal policy: the Democrats are the September 10 party.

The ‘I’ll hunt down and kill America’s enemies’ line was written for him and planted on his lips. The ‘It’s just a nuisance like prostitution’ line is his, and how he really thinks of the issue. What an odd analogy. Your average jihadist won’t take kindly to having his martyrdom operation compared with the decadent infidels’ sex industry, but the rest of us shouldn’t be that happy about it either. Kerry is correct in the sense that even if you dispatched every constable in the land to crack down on prostitution, there’d still be some pox-ridden whore somewhere giving someone a ride for ten bucks. But, on the other hand, applying the Kerry prostitute approach to terrorists would seem to leave rather a lot of them in place. In Boston, where he served as a ‘law-enforcement person’, the Yellow Pages are full of lavish display ads for ‘escort services’. The other day, the Boston Phoenix did a lame hit piece on me, in which, if you could stay awake through the wet cement of the guy’s prose, the main beef was that I was not a ‘respectable commentator’ like David Brooks of the New York Times. ‘Respectability’ seems a weird obsession for a fellow who writes for an ‘alternative’ newspaper funded by ads for transsexual hookers whose particular charms are spelled out at length, so to speak. In other words, while you can make an argument for a ‘managerial’ approach to terrorism, the analogy with prostitution sounds more like an undeclared surrender. This is aside from the basic defect of the argument: if some gal in your apartment building is working as a prostitute, that’s a nuisance — condoms in the elevator, dodgy johns in the lobby; if Islamists seize the schoolhouse and kill your kids, even if it only happens once every couple of years, ‘nuisance’ doesn’t quite cover it.

So the choice of analogy is revealing and, as Kerry says, we’ve been here before. Every so often, back in the Nineties, al-Qa’eda blew up some military housing, a ship, a couple of embassies, etc., and the Clinton team shrugged it off as a nuisance. No matter how flamboyantly Osama bin Laden sashayed down the sidewalk in his fishnets and miniskirt he couldn’t catch the Administration’s eye. In 2000, after 17 sailors were killed on the USS Cole, the defense secretary Bill Cohen said the attack ‘was not sufficiently provocative’ to warrant a response.

So Osama tried again, on September 11 2001. And this time, like the ads in the Boston Phoenix, he was very provocative. And that’s the point: even if you take the Kerry doctrine as seriously as the New York Times does, the nuance of nuisance depends largely on the terrorists. When all they could do was kill a few dozen here, a few hundred there, they were a ‘nuisance’ to Clinton, Cohen, Kerry and co; when they came up with a plan that killed thousands, they became something more than a nuisance. But that change in status was determined largely by them. They might go back to being a mere nuisance for 2005, just blowing up a US consulate hither and yon in places no one much cares about. But in 2006 they might loose a dirty bomb in Chicago and upgrade to über-nuisance again. The Kerry doctrine leaves it in their hands. And, in this kind of war, if you’re not on the offensive, you’re losing.

That’s what John Kerry means when he says ‘we have to get back to the place we were’ — back to the Nineties. Mem’ries light the corners of his mind, misty watercolour mem’ries of the way we were, but the reason they’re misty watercolours is that we didn’t see clearly what was going on. It wasn’t just the nuisance of the biennial embassy bombing, it was the terrorist annexation of flop states and the thousands upon thousands of young Muslim men graduating from al-Qa’eda’s training camps and then heading off wherever the jihad calls. The British Muslim discovered among the Beslan gang, for example: if you downgrade the war to a ‘nuisance’, is that the sort of cross-border trend you’re likely to spot?

‘It’s a different kind of war,’ says Kerry. ‘You have to understand it’s not the sands of Iwo Jima.’ That’s true. But Kerry’s mistake is in assuming that because it’s not Iwo Jima, it’s somehow less of a war. Until recently we thought of ‘asymmetrical warfare’ as something the natives did with machetes against the colonialist occupier. But in fact the roles have been reversed. These days, your average Western power — Germany, Canada, Belgium — is utterly incapable of projecting conventional military might to, say, Saudi Arabia or the Pakistani tribal lands. But a dozen young Saudi or Pakistani males with a little cash, some debit cards and the right phone numbers in their address books can project themselves to Frankfurt, Ottawa or Antwerp very easily and to devastating effect. That’s the lesson of 9/11.

So, for all that Bush is accused of being ‘stubborn’, it’s Kerry who refuses to change. He is, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer in their endorsement of the Senator this week, ‘alert to fresh global challenges, yet rooted in the approaches that made the 1990s so productive’. Well, they’re half right. He’s certainly rooted in the approaches of the Nineties, so rooted that he can’t pull himself up and move on, despite the fact that last week’s report of the Iraq Survey Group completely demolishes every prop of the Kerry world-view. When a man keeps telling you it doesn’t count unless the French and the UN are on board, he’s either a fool or a liar — because no serious person can spend 15 minutes on this issue without understanding that the French state at every level, and quasi-state pillars such as TotalFinaElf, were to all intents and purposes Saddam’s concubines, and that the UN Oil-for-Fraud programme had been transformed into the regime’s most reliable Weapon of Mass Destruction.

The attempt to talk the Senator up into a foreign-policy genius is sounding ever more loopy. ‘He was getting it,’ says Richard Clarke, the embittered Clinton-Bush terrorism ‘czar’ who now supports Kerry. ‘And the “it” here was that there was a new non-state-actor threat, and that non-state-actor threat was a blended threat that didn’t fit neatly into the box of organised criminal, or neatly into the box of terrorism.’

Yes, but what does that mean? Even if he does get the ‘it’ that nobody else is getting, what difference does it make if he doesn’t do anything about it? The ‘blended threat’ may not fit neatly into the box, but Kerry fits in there perfectly neatly — the box of complacent assumptions about the Security Council, the EU, the G8 — and he’s so snug he has no intention of climbing out.

It seems to me that John Edwards has the right idea. In the gym of Newton High School in Iowa this week, he skipped the dreary Kerry-as-foreign-policy-genius pitch and cut straight to the Second Coming. ‘We will stop juvenile diabetes, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and other debilitating diseases,’ he assured the crowd and, warming to his theme, turned to the death last weekend of Christopher (Superman) Reeve. ‘When John Kerry is president, people like Chris Reeve are going to get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.’ Read his lips: No new crutches. Now that’s a campaign promise. President Kerry may be paralysed by nuance, but no one else will be. The healing balm of the Massachusetts Messiah will bring the crippled and stricken to their feet, which is more than Kerry’s speeches ever do. Just because he can’t choose his water doesn’t mean he can’t walk on it.

In its own way, this is easier to swallow than the Richard Clarke line. The notion that he can perform miracles on the wheelchair-bound requires no more of a suspension of disbelief than that he can turn back the clock to September 10.

This has been a very dispiriting election, mainly because one party simply refuses to make any intelligent contribution to the debate. John Howard’s splendid victory down under came about at least in part because of the laziness of the Left — Mark Latham’s Labor party offered a new face with not a single new idea. In the US, the Democrats have gone one further — peddling an old face with old ideas on the theory that Americans are worn out by the wild ride of the Bush years and really do long to ‘get back to where they were’, back to September 10, to the summer of shark attacks and missing Congressional interns. But all that going back to September 10 means is that you’ll have to learn the lessons of the morning after all over again: I do believe that if clueless, complacent Kerry won, more Americans — and Britons and Canadians and Australians and Europeans — will die in terrorist ‘nuisances’.

But he won’t win. Because enough Americans understand that going back to where we were means a return to polite fictions and dangerous illusions. You can’t put that world back together.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php?table=old&section=current&issue=2004-10-09&id=5114

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Teen Is Found Alive After Eight Days
Monday 11 October 2004 @ 2:16 pm

From Yahoo! news…
Mon Oct 11, 9:17 AM ET

REDMOND, Wash. - A teenager missing for eight days has been found alive in her wrecked car by a woman who said prayer and dreams led her to the site.

Laura Hatch, 17, last seen at a party Oct. 2, was found Sunday in her 1996 Toyota Camry about 150 feet below a road in this suburb east of Seattle, King County sheriff’s deputies said.

Hatch was listed in serious condition at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, where she was being treated for severe dehydration, a possible blood clot near her brain, broken ribs, a broken leg and facial injuries, said her sister, Amy Hatch.

“We were afraid that we weren’t going to find her, we weren’t going to get her back,” the sister told KING Television in Seattle. “This is the best thing that could happen because there were a million awful scenarios.”

More than 100 friends and acquaintances from Creekside Covenant Church cheered and sang at a celebratory prayer service that initially had been scheduled as a vigil Sunday night.

“We had already given her up and let her be dead in our hearts,” her mother, Jean Hatch, told KOMO-TV.

Hatch evidently went eight days without food or water, sheriff’s Sgt. John Urquhart said, adding that there had been no indication of foul play.

“There was no police search,” he added. “We felt she was most likely a runaway. Obviously, there was another reason.”

Parents Jean and Todd Hatch hired a private investigator and on Saturday organized an unsuccessful search with 200 volunteers in areas near the place where the car was found.

Sha Nohr, a church member and mother of a friend of Hatch, said she had several vivid dreams of a wooded area with the message, “Keep going, keep going,” after she went to bed Saturday night.

She said she awakened Sunday morning with an urgent need to look for Hatch, had her daughter join her and drove to the area where the crash occurred, stopping at one point, then leaving because “it just didn’t feel right” and going to another spot.

Along the way, Nohr said, she prayed: “I just thought, ‘Let her speak out to us,’”

At the second stop something drew her to clamber over a concrete barrier and more than 100 feet down a steep, densely vegetated embankment where she barely managed to discern the wrecked car in some trees.

She called to her daughter, who flagged down a passing motorist and the man helped Nohr get closer to the car as aid was summoned.

“I told her that people were looking for her and they loved her,” Nohr recalled, “and she said, ‘I think I might be late for curfew.’ ”


http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=519&u=/ap/20041011/ap_on_re_us/found_alive_1

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an effete ninny
Monday 11 October 2004 @ 2:14 pm

Excerpt:

‘It was a face-off without their faces on’
(Filed: 10/10/2004)

If George W Bush clobbered Saddam, why can’t he clobber an effete ninny like John Kerry? asks Mark Steyn

Dick Cheney had a nice line in the vice-presidential debate on Tuesday. Noting that John Kerry and John Edwards had twisted themselves into pretzels over their views on Iraq back in the primaries because of the surging anti-war Democrat frontrunner Howard Dean, Cheney scoffed that, if they can’t stand up to Dean, how can we trust them to stand up to al-Qaeda?

Good point. Except that last week frustrated Republicans found themselves with the opposite dilemma: if George W. Bush can clobber Saddam and clobber the Taliban, why can’t he clobber an effete ninny like John Kerry?

Kerry was under more pressure in St Louis

On Friday in St Louis, the President came out swinging. A week earlier, he had looked like a man woken up two hours after he’d gone to bed. This time round, someone shovelled an extra half-dozen spoonfuls in his percolator. Everything moved except his face, the expressions on which had been deemed too peevish, too pursed last time round. I switched on CNN and some correspondent was gabbing away over the headline “BOTOX TRIAL VERDICT”. It wasn’t a report on the debate, but it might as well have been. The allegedly Botoxicated Kerry has an immobile forehead. One would assume it were some kind of laminate, were it not for the sweat. Bush’s forehead, meanwhile, was doing a good impression of Kerry’s: stiff, unmoving, and the effort required to keep it scowl-free apparently sharpened up all his other movements. It was a face-off without his face on.

The television pundits weren’t impressed. Bush’s shouting, he’s too aggressive, he makes you uncomfortable in your living room, he’s too “hot” for a “cool” medium.

I think not. I wrote here last week that Bush owed the American people a “performance”. Television types define performance very narrowly - the kind of accomplished blandness of a smooth news anchor or financial reporter or weather girl - and they tend to measure political performance in media terms, too. But what the over-caffeinated Bush communicated on Friday was his passion, his energy, his resolve, his sense of humour and his authenticity. If he yells and waves his arms around too much to make a convincing weather girl, big deal.

…read the rest:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/10/10/wbush210.xml

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Saddam Possessed WMD, Had Extensive Terror Ties
Tuesday 5 October 2004 @ 12:44 am

Saddam Possessed WMD, Had Extensive Terror Ties
By Scott Wheeler
CNSNews.com Staff Writer
October 04, 2004

(CNSNews.com) - Iraqi intelligence documents, confiscated by U.S. forces and obtained by CNSNews.com, show numerous efforts by Saddam Hussein’s regime to work with some of the world’s most notorious terror organizations, including al Qaeda, to target Americans. They demonstrate that Saddam’s government possessed mustard gas and anthrax, both considered weapons of mass destruction, in the summer of 2000, during the period in which United Nations weapons inspectors were not present in Iraq. And the papers show that Iraq trained dozens of terrorists inside its borders.

One of the Iraqi memos contains an order from Saddam for his intelligence service to support terrorist attacks against Americans in Somalia. The memo was written nine months before U.S. Army Rangers were ambushed in Mogadishu by forces loyal to a warlord with alleged ties to al Qaeda.

Other memos provide a list of terrorist groups with whom Iraq had relationships and considered available for terror operations against the United States.

Among the organizations mentioned are those affiliated with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Ayman al-Zawahiri, two of the world’s most wanted terrorists. Zarqawi is believed responsible for the kidnapping and beheading of several American civilians in Iraq and claimed responsibility for a series of deadly bombings in Iraq Sept. 30. Al-Zawahiri is the top lieutenant of al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, allegedly helped plan the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist strikes on the U.S., and is believed to be the voice on an audio tape broadcast by Al-Jazeera television Oct. 1, calling for attacks on U.S. and British interests everywhere.

The source of the documents

A senior government official who is not a political appointee provided CNSNews.com with copies of the 42 pages of Iraqi Intelligence Service documents. The originals, some of which were hand-written and others typed, are in Arabic. CNSNews.com had the papers translated into English by two individuals separately and independent of each other.

There are no hand-writing samples to which the documents can be compared for forensic analysis and authentication. However, three other experts - a former weapons inspector with the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), a retired CIA counter-terrorism official with vast experience dealing with Iraq, and a former advisor to then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton on Iraq - were asked to analyze the documents. All said they comport with the format, style and content of other Iraqi documents from that era known to be genuine.

Laurie Mylroie, who authored the book, “Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein’s Unfinished War against America,” and advised Clinton on Iraq during the 1992 presidential campaign, told CNSNews.com that the papers represent “the most complete set of documents relating Iraq to terrorism, including Islamic terrorism” against the U.S.

Mylroie has long maintained that Iraq was a state sponsor of terrorism against the United States. The documents obtained by CNSNews.com , she said, include “correspondence back and forth between Saddam’s office and Iraqi Mukhabarat (intelligence agency). They make sense. This is what one would think Saddam was doing at the time.”

Bruce Tefft, a retired CIA official who specialized in counter-terrorism and had extensive experience dealing with Iraq, said that “based on available, unclassified and open source information, the details in these documents are accurate …”

The former UNSCOM inspector zeroed in on the signatures on the documents and “the names of some of the people who sign off on these things.

“This is fairly typical of that time era. [The Iraqis] were meticulous record keepers,” added the former U.N. official, who spoke with CNSNews.com on the condition of anonymity.

The senior government official, who furnished the documents to CNSNews.com, said the papers answer “whether or not Iraq was a state sponsor of Islamic terrorism against the United States. It also answers whether or not Iraq had an ongoing biological warfare project continuing through the period when the UNSCOM inspections ended.”

Presidential campaign focused on Iraq

The presidential campaign is currently dominated by debate over whether Saddam procured weapons of mass destruction and/or whether his government sponsored terrorism aimed at Americans before the U.S. invaded Iraq last year. Democratic nominee Sen. John Kerry has repeatedly rejected that possibility and criticized President Bush for needlessly invading Iraq.

“[Bush's] two main rationales - weapons of mass destruction and the al Qaeda/September 11 (2001) connection - have been proved false … by the president’s own weapons inspectors … and by the 9/11 Commission,” Kerry told an audience at New York University on Sept. 20.

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s probe of the 9/11 intelligence failures also could not produce any definitive links between Saddam’s government and 9/11. And United Nations as well as U.S. weapons inspectors in Iraq have been unable to find the biological and chemical weapons Saddam was suspected of possessing.

But the documents obtained by CNSNews.com shed new light on the controversy.

They detail the Iraqi regime’s purchase of five kilograms of mustard gas on Aug. 21, 2000 and three vials of malignant pustule, another term for anthrax, on Sept. 6, 2000. The purchase order for the mustard gas includes gas masks, filters and rubber gloves. The order for the anthrax includes sterilization and decontamination equipment. (See Saddam’s Possession of Mustard Gas)

The documents show that Iraqi intelligence received the mustard gas and anthrax from “Saddam’s company,” which Tefft said was probably a reference to Saddam General Establishment, “a complex of factories involved with, amongst other things, precision optics, missile, and artillery fabrication.”

“Sa’ad’s general company” is listed on the Iraqi documents as the supplier of the sterilization and decontamination equipment that accompanied the anthrax vials. Tefft believes this is a reference to the Salah Al-Din State Establishment, also involved in missile construction. (See Saddam’s Possession of Anthrax)

The Jaber Ibn Hayan General Company is listed as the supplier of the safety equipment that accompanied the mustard gas order. Tefft described the company as “a ‘turn-key’ project built by Romania, designed to produce protective CW (conventional warfare) and BW (biological warfare) equipment (gas masks and protective clothing).”

“Iraq had an ongoing biological warfare project continuing through the period when the UNSCOM inspections ended,” the senior government official and source of the documents said. “This should cause us to redouble our efforts to find the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction programs.”

‘Hunt the Americans’

The first of the 42 pages of Iraqi documents is dated Jan. 18, 1993, approximately two years after American troops defeated Saddam’s army in the first Persian Gulf War. The memo includes Saddam’s directive that “the party should move to hunt the Americans who are on Arabian land, especially in Somalia, by using Arabian elements …”

On Oct. 3, 1993, less than nine months after that Iraqi memo was written, American soldiers were ambushed in Mogadishu, Somalia by forces loyal to Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid, an alleged associate of Osama bin Laden. Eighteen Americans were killed and 84 wounded during a 17-hour firefight that followed the ambush in which Aidid’s followers used civilians as decoys. (See Saddam’s Connections to al Qaeda)

An 11-page Iraqi memo, dated Jan. 25, 1993, lists Palestinian, Sudanese and Asian terrorist organizations and the relationships Iraq had with each of them. Of particular importance, Tefft said, are the relationships Iraq had already developed or was in the process of developing with groups and individuals affiliated with al Qaeda, such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Ayman al-Zawahiri. The U.S. currently is offering rewards of up to $25 million for each man’s capture.

The documents describe Al-Jehad wa’l Tajdeed as “a secret Palestinian organization” founded after the first Persian Gulf War that “believes in armed struggle against U.S. and western interests.” The leaders of the group, according to the Iraqi memo, were stationed in Jordan in 1993, and when one of those leaders visited Iraq in November 1992, he “showed the readiness of his organization to execute operations against U.S. interests at any time.” (See More Saddam Connections to al Qaeda)

Tefft believes the Tajdeed group likely included al-Zarqawi, whom Teft described as “our current terrorist nemesis” in Iraq, “a Palestinian on a Jordanian passport who was with al Qaeda and bin Laden in Afghanistan prior to this period (1993).”

Tajdeed, which means Islamic Renewal, currently “has a website that posts Zarqawi’s speeches, messages, claims of assassinations and beheading videos,” Tefft told CNSNews.com. “The apparent linkages are too close to be accidental” and might “be one of the first operational contacts between an al Qaeda group and Iraq,” he added.

Tefft said the documents, all of which the Iraqi Intelligence Service labeled “Top secret, personal and urgent” show several links between Saddam’s government and terror groups dedicated not only to targeting America but also U.S. allies like Egypt and Israel.

The same 11-page memo refers to the “re-opening of the relationship” with Al-Jehad al-Islamy, which is described as “the most violent in Egypt,” responsible for the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. The documents go on to describe a Dec. 14, 1990 meeting between Iraqi intelligence officials and a representative of Al-Jehad al-Islamy, that ended in an agreement “to move against [the] Egyptian regime by doing martyr operations on conditions that we should secure the finance, training and equipments.” (See More Saddam Connections to al Qaeda)

Al-Zawahiri was one of the leaders of Jehad al-Islamy, which is also known as the Egyptian Islamic Group, and participated in the assassination of Sadat, Tefft said. “Iraq’s contact with the Egyptian Islamic Group is another operational contact between Iraq and al Qaeda,” he added.

One of the Asian groups listed on the Iraqi intelligence memo is J.U.I., also known as the Islamic Clerks Society. The group is currently led by Mawlana Fadhel al-Rahman, whom Tefft said is “an al Qaeda member and co-signed Osama bin Laden’s 1998 fatwa (religious ruling) to kill Americans.” The Iraqi memo from 1993 states that J.U.I.’s secretary general “has a good relationship with our system since 1981 and he is ready for any mission.” Tefft said the memo shows “another direct Iraq link to an al Qaeda group.”

Iraq had also maintained a relationship with the Afghani Islamist party since 1989, according to the memo. The “relationship was improved and became directly between the leader, Hekmatyar and Iraq,” it states, referring to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Afghani warlord who fought against the Soviet Union and current al Qaeda ally, according to Tefft.

Last year, American authorities in Afghanistan ranked Hekmatyar third on their most wanted list, behind only bin Laden and former Taliban leader Mullah Omar. Hekmatyar represents “another Iraqi link to an al Qaeda group,” Tefft said. (See More Saddam Connections to al Qaeda)

The Iraqi intelligence documents also refer to terrorist groups previously believed to have had links with Saddam Hussein. They include the Palestine Liberation Front, a group dedicated to attacking Israel, and according to the Iraqi memo, one with “an office in Baghdad.”

The Abu Nidal group, suspected by the CIA of having acted as surrogates for Iraqi terrorist attacks, is also mentioned.

“The movement believes in political violence and assassinations,” the 1993 Iraqi memo states in reference to the Abu Nidal organization. “We have relationships with them since 1973. Currently, they have a representative in the country. Monthly helps are given to them — 20 thousand dinars - in addition to other supports,” the memo explains. (See Saddam’s Connections to Palestinian Terror Groups)

Iraq not only built and maintained relationships with terrorist groups, the documents show it appears to have trained terrorists as well. Ninety-two individuals from various Middle Eastern countries are listed on the papers.

Many are described as having “finished the course at M14,” a reference to an Iraqi intelligence agency, and to having “participated in Umm El-Ma’arek,” the Iraqi response to the U.S. invasion in 1991. The author of the list notes that approximately half of the individuals “all got trained inside the ‘martyr act camp’ that belonged to our directorate.”

The former UNSCOM weapons inspector who was asked to analyze the documents believes it’s clear that the Iraqis “were training people there in assassination and suicide bombing techniques … including non-Iraqis.”

Bush administration likely unaware of documents’ existence

The senior government official and source of the Iraqi intelligence memos, explained that the reason the documents have not been made public before now is that the government has “thousands and thousands of documents waiting to be translated.

“It is unlikely they even know this exists,” the source added.

The government official also explained that the motivation for leaking the documents, “is strictly national security and helping with the war on terrorism by focusing this country’s attention on facts and away from political posturing.

“This is too important to let it get caught up in the political process,” the source told CNSNews.com.

To protect against the Iraqi intelligence documents being altered or misrepresented elsewhere on the Internet, CNSNews.com has decided to publish only the first of the 42 pages in Arabic, along with the English translation. Portions of some of the other memos in translated form are also being published to accompany this report. Credentialed journalists and counter-terrorism experts seeking to view the 42 pages of Arabic documents or to challenge their authenticity may make arrangements to do so at CNSNews.com headquarters in Alexandria, Va.

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