Libertarian Leanings

On media bias

Judea Pearl, the father of murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, challenges the media to adhere to a "Daniel Pearl standard of responsible journalism."

One of the things that saddens me most is that the press and media have had an active, perhaps even major role in fermenting hate and inhumanity. It was not religious fanaticism alone.

This was first brought to my attention by the Pakistani Consul General who came to offer condolences at our home in California. When we spoke about the anti-Semitic element in Danny's murder she said: "What can you expect of these people who never saw a Jew in their lives and who have been exposed, day and night, to televised images of Israeli soldiers targeting and killing Palestinian children."

At the time, it was not clear whether she was trying to exonerate Pakistan from responsibility for Danny's murder, or to pass on the responsibility to European and Arab media for their persistent de-humanization of Jews, Americans and Israelis. The answer was unveiled in 2004, when a friend told me that photos of Muhammad Al Dura were used as background in the video tape of Danny's murder.

Al Dura, readers may recall, is the 12-year-old Palestinian boy who allegedly died from Israeli bullets in Gaza in September of 2001. As we now know, the whole scene is very likely to have been a fraud, choreographed by stringers and cameramen of France 2, the official news channel of France. France 2 aired the tape repeatedly and distributed it all over the world to anyone who needed an excuse to ratchet up anger or violence, among them Danny's killers.

The Pakistani Consul was right. The media cannot be totally exonerated from responsibility for Daniel's murder, as well as for the "tsunami of hate" that has swept the world and continues to rise.

The modern journalist, he says, can be likened to the Biblical prophets serving as moral compass to society, but he also warns that we must beware the false prophets.

Accordingly, to distinguish true from false journalism, just choose any newspaper or TV channel and ask yourself when was the last time it ran a picture of a child, a grandmother or any empathy-evoking scene from the "other side" of a conflict.

At one time Arthur Chrenkoff did just that.  He kept a score card on media coverage of the "other side," which in the media perspective is the American side, of the war in Iraq.

How bad was it? When I sat down at my computer on January 21, 2005, and counted all the stories indexed by Google News, I came up with a total just short of 11,000 negative stories to 407 positive stories, with 123 neutral ones.

This was the ratio on an average day of the Iraq war: 27 “bad news” stories about Iraq for every one reporting some positive developments from the Mesopotamian front of the war on terror.

Now the surge has become so successful that the media simply can no longer ignore it, Mr. Chrenkoff's ratio has shifted to 1.67 negative stories to 1 positive.  The media have behaved abominably in the course of the last few years.  Their campaign has been relentless and the result of it has been increased bloodshed, as in the case of Daniel Pearl.

McCain wins in Florida

Arizona Senator John McCain beat out former Massachussetts Governor Mitt Romney in Florida's presidential primary, collecting 36% of the votes to Romney's 31%.  Rudy Giuliani, who had bypassed the Iowa, New Hampshire, Michigan, and South Carolina races to focus all of his presidential hopes on Florida, came in a distant third with 14.7% of the vote.

Former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, whose status as "America's Mayor" catapulted him to the head of the GOP field for most of last year, finished third. His speech to supporters had the feel of a goodbye, and top aides said he plans to drop out Wednesday and endorse McCain in California ahead of a debate there.

Speaking in Orlando as tears ran down his staffers' faces, Giuliani said: "I'm proud that we chose to stay positive and run a campaign of ideas. We ran a campaign that was uplifting. You don't always win but you can always try to do it right."

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) won the state's largely symbolic Democratic primary. None of the candidates campaigned here and no delegates will be awarded because the state party scheduled the contest earlier than the national party allowed. Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) was a distant second, with former senator John Edwards (N.C.) in third.

Aiming for the foot?

I wonder if John McCain just shot himself in the foot when he accused Mitt Romney of favoring a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. 

So what evidence does McCain have that Romney supported withdrawal? McCain points to this interview Romney gave to "Good Morning America," on April 3, 2007:

QUESTION: Iraq. John McCain is there in Baghdad right now. You have also been very vocal in supporting the president and the troop surge. Yet, the American public has lost faith in this war. Do you believe that there should be a timetable in withdrawing the troops?

MR. ROMNEY: Well, there's no question but that -- the president and Prime Minister al-Maliki have to have a series of timetables and milestones that they speak about. But those shouldn't be for public pronouncement. You don't want the enemy to understand how long they have to wait in the weeds until you're going to be gone. You want to have a series of things you want to see accomplished in terms of the strength of the Iraqi military and the Iraqi police, and the leadership of the Iraqi government.

QUESTION: So, private. You wouldn't do it publicly? Because the president has said flat out that he will veto anything the Congress passes about a timetable for troop withdrawals. As president, would you do the same?

MR. ROMNEY: Well, of course. Can you imagine a setting where during the Second World War we said to the Germans, gee, if we haven't reached the Rhine by this date, why, we'll go home, or if we haven't gotten this accomplished we'll pull up and leave? You don't publish that to your enemy, or they just simply lie in wait until that time. So, of course, you have to work together to create timetables and milestones, but you don't do that with the opposition.

This morning Rasmussen had Romney over McCain in Florida by 33% to 27%.  However, the poll was taken before Governor Charlie Crist announced his endorsement of John McCain.

How the decision was made

An article in the latest Weekly Standard by Fred Barnes provides a blow by blow account of the decision making process that resulted in "the surge."

The date: December 13, 2006. The location: a windowless conference room in the Pentagon known as the Tank. It was an inauspicious place for President Bush to confront the last major obstacle to the most important decision of his second term, perhaps of his entire presidency. And the president chose not to deal with his hosts, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as a commander in chief would address subordinates. He hadn't come to the military brass's turf simply to order the five chiefs and two combatant commanders to begin a "surge" of additional troops in Iraq and to pursue a radical change in strategy. For that, he might have summoned them to the Oval Office or the Situation Room in the basement of the White House. He had come to the Pentagon to persuade and cajole, not command.

The president was in a weak and lonely position. After Republicans lost the Senate and House in the midterm election on November 7, nearly 200 members of Congress had met with him at the White House, mostly to grouse about Iraq. Democrats urged him to begin withdrawing troops, in effect accepting defeat. Many of the Republicans were panicky and blamed Bush and the Iraq war for the Democratic landslide. They feared the 2008 election would bring worse losses. They wanted out of Iraq too.

I would urge you to read the article in its entirety.  It reads like a business school case study in decision making.  Then take another look at the actual plan that was proposed by Frederick W. Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute.

Gates to slay dragon

Today's Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft's billionaire chairman Bill Gates will give a speech at World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland calling for "creative capitalism."  His idea is to harness market forces to better address needs of the poor.

"We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well," Mr. Gates will tell world leaders at the forum, according to a copy of the speech seen by The Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Gates isn't abandoning his belief in capitalism as the best economic system. But in an interview with the Journal last week at his Microsoft office in Redmond, Wash., Mr. Gates said that he has grown impatient with the shortcomings of capitalism. He said he has seen those failings first-hand on trips for Microsoft to places like the South African slum of Soweto, and discussed them with dozens of experts on disease and poverty. He has voraciously read about those failings in books that propose new approaches to narrowing the gap between rich and poor.

Gates ideas have been met with skepticism from those who tend to believe capitalism is the cause of world poverty rather than the solution to it.  Some argue that poverty became a priority for Gates only after he'd made his billions.  William Easterly, a New York University professor and former World Bank economist, doesn't believe enough profit can be made from the people on the bottom to capture and retain the interest of private business.

"There's a lot of people at the bottom of the pyramid but the size of the transactions is so small it is not worth it for private business most of the time."

Gates disagrees. 

...companies including Microsoft had donated huge amounts of cash and products to developing countries without seeking to create sustainable growth. Free Microsoft software in some countries spawned broad usage of computers, while in "other places you announce a big free software grant, come back a few years later, nothing," Mr. Gates said.

His growing awareness of such limits sparked new ideas on how businesses could approach poor countries. At a dinner near Seattle in 2004, Mr. Gates met one of the leading thinkers on that front, C.K. Prahalad, a University of Michigan professor who had written "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid." In that article and a subsequent book by the same title, Mr. Prahalad proposed that the world's four billion poorest people represented a huge market for companies willing to try.

If Gates is successful formulating and promoting a market oriented approach to fighting poverty, he may finally deliver the death blow to that tired old leftist dragon that perpetually seeks to impose anti-capitalist totalitarian solutions on the pretext of ending the grinding poverty imposed on those trapped in corrupt third world anti-capitalist totalitarian regimes.

American Honor

At one time anti-war liberals were quick to compare the war in Iraq to the war in Vietnam.

Beyond the purely pragmatic argument that the war in Southeast Asia was unwinnable, there was also a sense among opponents of the war that defeat would, in some deep way, be balm for America's soul. "For all the anguish felt over the loss of American lives, can we acknowledge there is something proper in the way that hubristic American power has been thwarted?" asked antiwar writer James Carroll in 2006, explicitly making the connection between the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. On the subject of honor, Mr. Carroll added that "the goal of 'peace with honor' assumes the nation's honor has not already been squandered."

But that was before General Petraeus's success with the troop surge became impossible to ignore.  Now the anti-war liberals seem to avoid comparisons of Iraq to Vietnam.  Instead of reinforcing the inevitability of defeat in Iraq, such comparisons raise the possibility that victory in Vietnam had been within our grasp. 

There are two narratives about Tet, which began on the night of Jan. 30, 1968. In the liberal version, the sheer scale of the North's offensive exposed America's politicians and generals as dupes or liars when they claimed that progress in the war was being made and that victory was within reach. "We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds," said CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite in his broadcast of Feb. 27, 1968, adding that "we are mired in a stalemate" that could only be ended by negotiation, not victory. The comments reportedly prompted Lyndon Johnson to remark that "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America."

Conservatives tell a different story. While the U.S. might have been caught off guard by the offensive, the result was nonetheless a rout for the North, which lost every significant tactical engagement and suffered tens of thousands of casualties. Contrary to Johnson's grim political assessment, public support for the war effort actually rose in the wake of Tet: A Gallup poll showed that the percentage of Americans who considered themselves "hawks" on the war went to 61% from 56% following the offensive, while the number of self-declared "doves" dropped to 23% from 27%.

In fact, what Johnson had lost was the support of the media elite, who (conservatives say) used their privileged positions to skew perceptions of what was actually happening in the war. "In all honesty, we didn't achieve our main objective [in the offensive]," admitted North Vietnamese general Tran Do, who in later life became a pro-democracy dissident. "As for making an impact in the United States, it had not been our intention -- but it turned out to be a fortunate result."

The media elite are still among the lost, still skewing perceptions as best they can, but the success of John McCain's candidacy shows that a large block of American voters spurn the media narrative. 

McCain is the candidate who seems to have benefited the most from U.S. success in Iraq.  Just as he had refused to surrender as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, he refuses to surrender in Iraq.  His resurgence shows that there are Americans who still wonder what might have been had we, like McCain, refused to surrender in Vietnam.  We don't want that sad moment in Vietnam's history to repeat itself in Iraq.

Identity politics

Christopher Hitchens begins his discussion of the perils of identity politics with the observation that Rudy Giuliani has avoided the temptation to engage in it in this presidential campaign.  Unlike some in earlier campaigns, Rudy isn't playing the Italian card.

I recall thinking, when Geraldine Ferraro became the first woman on a major-party ticket in 1984, that she would also, if elected, be the first vowel-ending Veep. Indeed, in San Francisco for the Democratic convention that year, I listened to the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti muse over drinks on the possibility of a future Cuomo-Ferraro "all wop" ticket.

The fact that these were now joking words and not fighting words struck me as happily suggestive. (I also thought that a President Walter Mondale would be a very high price to pay for having the first female vice president, and that President Mario Cuomo would be an even higher price to pay to prove that we no longer held any rooted prejudice against the descendants of Mediterranean immigrants.)

A Mondale presidency would have been a high price indeed, but not so high as another Clinton presidency.

End of the line?

As it had been in New Hampshire, so it was in Michigan, only not enough. John McCain drew strong support from independent voters in the Michigan primary.  However, in Michigan independents made up a much smaller percentage of those who voted in the GOP primary than in New Hampshire.

In New Hampshire, McCain and Romney essentially tied among Republicans, according to the exit polls. Among independents, though, McCain stomped Romney 40 percent to 27 percent. And independents made up 37 percent of the "GOP" vote in New Hampshire.

In Michigan, independents made up only 25 percent of the vote, Republicans 68 percent. (The balance? Self-described Democrats voting in the GOP race.) Here, McCain again won among Independents, 36 percent to 26 percent. But Romney crushed him among Republicans, 40 percent to 26 percent.

McCain's strength among independents was not enough to carry him to victory in Michigan.  The primaries now move south into more conservative territory.  Michigan may have been the beginning of the end of McCain's presidential aspirations.

Hillary losing ground among blacks

Black voters are torn.  Their loyalty to the Democratic Party under the leadership of Bill and Hillary Clinton faces challenge from the hope that this might be the year America elects its first black president.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has been engaged in racially tinged political banter with Sen. Barack Obama since her win in New Hampshire, is losing ground in polls with black voters nationally and in South Carolina, where about half of Democratic primary voters will be black...

...The two candidates were tied at 33 percent in South Carolina last month, but a Rasmussen poll released yesterday found Mr. Obama leading with 38 percent of the likely Democratic voters compared with Mrs. Clinton's 33 percent. Among black voters, Mr. Obama leads Mrs. Clinton 53 percent to 30 percent. She leads 40 percent to 21 percent among whites.

In what might be an effort to stop the bleeding Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen engages in some indirect character assassination by way of a connection between Obama and Louis Farrakhan.

Barack Obama is a member of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ. Its minister, and Obama's spiritual adviser, is the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. In 1982, the church launched Trumpet Newsmagazine; Wright's daughters serve as publisher and executive editor. Every year, the magazine makes awards in various categories. Last year, it gave the Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. Trumpeter Award to a man it said "truly epitomized greatness." That man is Louis Farrakhan...

...He [Farrakhan] has vilified whites and singled out Jews to blame for crimes large and small, either committed by others as well or not at all. (A dominant role in the slave trade, for instance.) He has talked of Jewish conspiracies to set a media line for the whole nation. He has reviled Jews in a manner that brings Hitler to mind.

And yet Wright heaped praise on Farrakhan. According to Trumpet, he applauded his "depth of analysis when it comes to the racial ills of this nation." He praised "his integrity and honesty." He called him "an unforgettable force, a catalyst for change and a religious leader who is sincere about his faith and his purpose." These are the words of a man who prayed with Obama just before the Illinois senator announced his run for the presidency. Will he pray with him just before his inaugural?

Cohen goes on to say he wouldn't dream of suggesting that Obama shares Wright's admiration for Farrakhan.  I wonder how Cohen could suppose an attack if this kind will gain traction with African-American voters.

The odds for McCain look pretty good

That's the observation of the Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes.  Senator John McCain's presidential prospects rise as success of the the surge in Iraq becomes more widely recognized.  It helps him that, even when the news from Iraq was at its worst, he never waivered from his commitment to winning the war, and in fact his campaign for the presidency has bet all the chips on it.  Earlier on the Democrats were delighted to cover that bet, but at this juncture it doesn't look like that's going to pay off for them.

Hillary Clinton's response was equally amazing because she passed up a chance to disown her indefensible suggestion last September that General Petraeus was lying about the surge's success. At a Senate hearing, she told him that believing his testimony required the "willing suspension of disbelief." Asked if she still feels that way, Clinton said, "That's right."

This level of denial about the surge among Democrats is politically dangerous. Democratic voters may be immune to the surge effect, but independents are not. If the surge continues to bring stability to Iraq, independents--who produced the Democratic triumph in the 2006 election--almost certainly will begin to shift their support. They have no partisan commitment to defeat in Iraq. Like most Americans, they prefer victory.

It is not enough for Republican candidates to simply prefer victory.  Across the board, If they expect to gain those independent votes, like John McCain they have to demonstrate their commitment to victory in Iraq.