Libertarian Leanings

Treason under investigation

The Department of Justice has initiated an investigation into the illegal disclosure that the National Security Agency was intercepting al Qaeda conversations.  The communications monitoring remained secret as the New York Times sat on the story for a year before deciding to publish it in an effort to avoid being scooped by one of their reporters. 

Mr. Duffy [White House deputy press secretary Trent Duffy] said the probe was not ordered by the White House, although President Bush speculated earlier that the Justice Department would initiate an investigation on its own. The president has made no secret of his displeasure over the leak.

"My personal opinion is it was a shameful act for someone to disclose this very important program in a time of war," Mr. Bush told reporters earlier this month. "The fact that we're discussing this program is helping the enemy.

"You've got to understand," the president added. "There is still an enemy that would like to strike the United States of America, and they're very dangerous. And the discussion about how we try to find them will enable them to adjust."

They have their priorities at the Times, yes they do.

Ben Stein offers thanks

As 2005 draws to its close, Ben Stein offers thanks to those who have made his joy possible.

BUT WHAT JUST OCCURRED to me today, December 29, 2005, is that none of this, absolutely none, not one bit of it, would have been possible without the men and women of the Armed Forces. While I was busy being born (and not dying), men and women were getting blown to pieces by German 88's and Japanese mortars to win the big one. While I was growing up, our freedom was saved by the Strategic Air Command ("Peace is our Profession") and by men and women patrolling in the Arctic Circle. While I was in elementary school, my cousin Joe and my uncle Bob were fighting and fine men and women were dying at Cho-Sin Reservoir.

And at the moment I was looking at the stars in perfect peace, far better men than I were getting killed in ambushes in Vietnam.

So, yes, I had a moment of peace and weeks or months of romantic glory, but all behind the shield of the men and women who wear the uniform.

The men and women who defend us deserve our thanks and much more.  They are our heroes.

A Christmas vacation

Sixteen year old Farris Hassan went on a secret Christmas vacation excursion -- to Iraq. 

It begins with a high school class on "immersion journalism" and one overly eager - or naively idealistic - student who's lucky to be alive after going way beyond what any teacher would ask.

As a junior this year at a Pine Crest School, a prep academy of about 700 students in Fort Lauderdale, Hassan studied writers like John McPhee in the book "The New Journalism," an introduction to immersion journalism - a writer who lives the life of his subject in order to better understand it.

So off he went.  His journey took him from Miami to Amsterdam, Kuwait City, Beirut, and finally Baghdad where he is at this moment, developing his journalistic skills.

He said he wrote half the essay while in the United States, half in Kuwait, and e-mailed it to his teachers Dec. 15 while in the Kuwait City airport.

"There is a struggle in Iraq between good and evil, between those striving for freedom and liberty and those striving for death and destruction," he wrote.

"Those terrorists are not human but pure evil. For their goals to be thwarted, decent individuals must answer justice's call for help. Unfortunately altruism is always in short supply. Not enough are willing to set aside the material ambitions of this transient world, put morality first, and risk their lives for the cause of humanity. So I will."

"I want to experience during my Christmas the same hardships ordinary Iraqis experience everyday, so that I may better empathize with their distress," he wrote.

I hope he stays with this journalism thing.  He'll be a refreshing change from those reporters who feel duty bound to bash things American in general and Republican in particular.

Another victory for environmentalists

Opinion Journal has the story.

EUREKA, Mont.--My friend Jim Hurst auctioned his sawmill in August.

Jim's decision to pack it in after 25 years of beating his head on the wall made big news here in northwest Montana but, alas, not a peep from this newspaper or the New York Times. That's too bad, because the loss of our family-owned mills also signals the loss of technologies and skills vital to our efforts to protect the West's great national forests from the ravages of increasingly fearsome wildfires.

I was in Jim's office a few days before the auction. He told me he was at peace with his decision, but Jim has a good game face, so I suspect the decision to terminate his remaining 70 employees tore his guts out. They were like family to him.

Environmentalists have had great success in halting lumber operations on federal land, and it's not always for the purpose of saving our forests.  Some environmentalists actually say that forest fires are better for the forest than selective cutting of trees.  Hard to imagine it benefits the forest when there isn't one anymore.  But perhaps the tide is turning against that kind of thinking.

You would think environmentalists who campaigned against harvesting in the West's national forests for 30-some years would be dancing in the streets. And, in fact, some of them are. But many aren't. Railing against giant faceless corporations is easy, but facing the news cameras after small family-owned mills fold has turned out to be very difficult. Everyone loves the underdog, and across much of the West there is a gnawing sense that environmentalists have hurt a lot of underdogs in their lust for power.

Environmentalists also face a problem they never anticipated. Recent polling reveals some 80% percent of Americans approve of the kind of methodical thinning that would have produced small diameter logs in perpetuity for Jim's sawmill. We Americans seem to like thinning in overly dense forests because the end result is visually pleasing, and because it helps reduce the risk of horrific wildfire--a bonus for wildlife and millions of year-round recreation enthusiasts who worship clean air and water.

A few more "victories" like this one and maybe public opinion will force the radical environmentalists to back off.  Or maybe I'm being foolishly optimistic.

Backing away

Newsmax reports that a pair of our leading luminaries from the mainstream press are blazing a trail, and hoping some Democrats will follow it, away from a suicidal anti-war position. 

Broadcast veterans Tom Brokaw and Ted Koppel agree that Bill Clinton would have gone into Iraq just like George Bush if he were still president in 2003.

By agreeing on this point on their special Christmas Day joint appearance they put the MSM Stamp of Approval on a novel position now being explored by moderate Democrats -- maybe national security is important.  Here is a section of the MTP transcript.

MR. KOPPEL: "...Now, should we be skeptical? Do we have a right to ask critical-- not just a right; do we have an obligation to ask critical questions? And did we fall short of that prior to the Iraq War? That's a perfectly legitimate point, and I think we all have to plead guilty, to one degree or another, to having been, you know, a little bit soft on the administration beforehand.

But in large measure, when the president and his top people tell you, as they did, "Here's our perception of what exists. Here's our perception of the danger to the United States. Here's our perception of a relationship between this guy who has weapons of mass destruction and the group that just blew up the Pentagon and the World Trade Center," I don't know that reporters as a whole can sit there and say, "Oh, hokum. You know, it's just not true." We can raise questions, and I...

MR. BROKAW: Given the absence of hard evidence.

MR. KOPPEL: Hard evidence. Right.

MR. BROKAW: There was not--you know, the French intelligence were sharing the same conclusions with the administration. I thought--I agree with you that I don't think that we pushed hard enough for vigorous debate. I think that on Capitol Hill that the debate was anemic, at best. You had--Ted Kennedy and Senator Byrd, really, were the only ones speaking out with any kind of passion in the Senate, the people who...

MR. RUSSERT: And they were not questioning whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

MR. BROKAW: No. No. No.

MR. RUSSERT: That seemed to be a uniformly held belief.

MR. BROKAW: Right. Yeah.

MR. KOPPEL: Nor did the Clinton administration beforehand.

MR. BROKAW: No.

MR. KOPPEL: I mean, the only difference between the Clinton administration and the Bush administration was 9/11.

MR. BROKAW: Right.

MR. KOPPEL: If 9/11 had happened on Bill Clinton's watch, he would have gone into Iraq.

MR. BROKAW: Yeah. Yeah.

It's their gift to those moderate Democrats who fear their party is headed over the cliff.  It's not only the far left Democratic leadership for whom opinion polls rule.  Moderates check them as well, and maybe Brokaw and Koppel got a peek, too.

Recent polls say 56 percent of Americans approve of the job Mr. Bush is doing to protect the country from another terrorist attack.

"In shaping alternative policies -- particularly on national security, terrorism and Iraq -- Democrats have to be extremely careful to avoid reinforcing the negative stereotype that has cost us so much in the last two national elections," the recent DLC memorandum said.

Republicans led the Democrats by 40 percent to 36 percent on questions about which party can keep the country safe, 45 percent to 40 percent on which party can be trusted on national security and 48 percent to 38 percent on "which party can be trusted more to fight terrorism," the DLC said...

"The Republicans still hold the advantage on every national-security issue we tested," said Mark Penn, a Democratic pollster and former adviser to President Clinton, who co-authored a Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) memo on the party's national-security weaknesses.

Nervousness among Democrats intensified earlier this month after Democrats led a filibuster against the Patriot Act that threatened to block the measure, followed by a victory cry from Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, who declared at a party rally, "We killed the Patriot Act."

Harry Reid apparently didn't get the message, but others have.  Moderate Democrats sensing our efforts in Iraq will be successful after all, are inching closer to the bandwagon.  By claiming that Clinton would also have invaded, Brokaw and Koppel hope to give them a leg up. 

But will there be enough time between now and November?  Will moderate Democrats be able to erase all memory of their leadership's burning desire to surrender to the terrorists?  Will the Democratice party leadership make a successfull pretense of caring about national defense?  Will Koppel and Brokaw publicly campaign for Hillary?

Immigration

Up to now I haven't been able to muster much interest in the issue of illegal immigration.  Today's Wall Street Journal (subscription required) carries an editorial column by Victor Davis Hanson that changes my viewpoint somewhat.

SELMA, Calif. -- "Shameful," screams Mexico's President Vicente Fox, about the proposed extension of a security fence along the southern border of the U.S. "Stupid! Underhanded! Xenophobic!" bellowed his Foreign Secretary Luis Ernesto Derbez, warning: "Mexico is not going to bear, it is not going to permit, and it will not allow a stupid thing like this wall."

The allusions to the Berlin Wall made by aggrieved Mexican politicians miss the irony: The communists tried to keep their own people in, not illegal aliens out. More embarrassing still, the comparison boomerangs on Mexico, since it, and not the U.S., most resembles East Germany in alienating its own citizens to the point that they flee at any cost. If anything might be termed stupid, underhanded or xenophobic in the illegal immigration debacle, it is the conduct of the Mexican government.

"Stupid" characterizes a government that sits atop vast mineral and petroleum reserves, enjoys a long coastline, temperate climate, rich agricultural plains -- and either cannot or will not make the necessary political and economic reforms to feed and house its own people. The election of Vicente Fox, Nafta and cosmetic changes in banking and jurisprudence have not stopped the corruption or stemmed the exodus of millions of Mexicans.

If stricter enforcement of our immigration laws will help to create pressure for the kind of reform that will get Mexico's political house in order, then I'm for it.  Mexico is a beautiful country with wonderful people.  How pathetic that through corruption and ineptitude the Mexican government drives them north across the border for their opportunities to make a living.

The Case for War Examined

The Chicago Tribune examined nine arguments the Bush Administration put forth to justify the invasion of Iraq. 

Seventeen days before the war, this page reluctantly urged the president to launch it. We said that every earnest tool of diplomacy with Iraq had failed to improve the world's security, stop the butchery--or rationalize years of UN inaction. We contended that Saddam Hussein, not George W. Bush, had demanded this conflict.

Many people of patriotism and integrity disagreed with us and still do. But the totality of what we know now--what this matrix chronicles-- affirms for us our verdict of March 2, 2003. We hope these editorials help Tribune readers assess theirs.

Via Instapundit and Steve Antler.

The TV two-step

An unusual thing happened last night as I flipped the TV channels between Law and Order and the Boston Bruins.  They won. 

I try to dodge the ads.  So far, the most successful technique I've found is to switch between two sports events, or a sports event and a show or a movie.  I know, I know, I should get a Tivo, but I'm too old fashioned.  So I just switch channels to avoid the ads, but trying to do it switching between two non-sports shows is an exercise in futility. 

I think the networks are in collusion.  They schedule their advertisements to run concurrently, so there's no point to changing channels when the ads come on.  And do they ever come on.  It's upwards of five minutes of really dumb ads with only seven to twelve minutes of showtime in between.  One hundred and eighty million TV sets across the nation sync up on advertisements.  But with sports, the networks can't always tell when there's going to be a break in the action, so when you switch to a hockey game you might actually get to watch it. 

I switched to the Bruins, down 1 to nothing at the end of the first.  At the first intermission I switched over to Law and Order, a show about a mob hit.  Came the commercials, I switched back to the Bruins.  At the end of the second period they were down 2 to 1.  Back to Law and Order, the police continued their investigation.  I was on a roll, really getting quality time on my TV.

Back to the Bruins.  There's hope for them, I thought.  It was early in the third period, down by only a goal.  Stranger things have happened, I thought.  They might stage a comeback.  Then the Capitals scored.  3 to 1.  Back to Law and Order.  It was fairly interesting, so I stayed with it for a while.  Then came another the commercial break, so I switched back to hockey.  I stared in stunned surprise.  At the end of the third period the score was tied at 3.

Ordinarily it's the Bruins who get caught out on the ice too long, while the other guys make their line changes and get fresh legs out there.  Last night it was the Capitals who got trapped in their own end while the Bruins skated circles around them.  About 2 minutes into overtime Patrice Bergeron set up Brad Stuart in mid-slot with a nice soft pass, and Stuart hammered it into the net for the game winner.  And it was just when I was thinking there was no way the Bruins would win a shootout.

So the Bruins won the game, the jury on Law and Order said, "Guilty," and all the while I skillfully maintained a very high showtime to ad ratio.  A clean sweep if I do say.

Frustration on the left

Tim Blair has the roundup.

Lefties are angry that US citizens aren’t being spied upon:

OK, if the Boston Globe is right, the story about the student at U-Mass Dartmouth is wrong. Understand that it angers me. Many of us who have opposed the Patriot Act since its genesis were waiting for the day that something like this would happen; this is a major setback.

This is a truly heartwarming story.  Don't you think so.  (My emphasis above.)

Post pulls no punches

The New York Post, that is.  And the punching bag is the New York Times, about which the Post says, "The Gray Lady Toys With Treason."

The self-styled paper of record seems to be trying to reclaim the loyalty of those radical lefties who ludicrously accused it of uncritically reporting on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

Yet the paper has done more than merely try to embarrass the Bush administration these last few months.

It has published classified information — and thereby knowingly blown the covers of secret programs and agencies engaged in combating the terrorist threat.

For decades the Times has exercised inordinate influence, electing our leaders for us by coloring the coverage, but the rise of the internet started the erosion of her power.  We begin to see the lengths to which she will go.  This is not news.  We just couldn't see it so clearly before this.