politics
If Karl Rove Leaked the NSA Story, He'd Be a Media Hero
[T]he establishment media clearly leans toward the view that the NSA leak was in the public interest. Unlike the Plame probe, the Justice Department career employees trying to investigate the NSA case can expect no laudatory editorials urging them to pursue their job relentlessly and, above all, no media bloodhounds conducting their own parallel investigations.
The old adage that politics should stop at the water's edge was abandoned long ago. Now the idea that all of us, regardless of political stripe, have a stake in preventing harm to national security from unauthorized intelligence leaks seems to have similarly entered the dustbin of history.
War has solved <i>plenty</i>
The last major war the United States was involved in was Vietnam. The modern Democratic Party leadership all came of age during that war, as did most of the editorial staff in the manistream media. It wasn’t just a defining moment in the modern American left, it was the defining moment, the prism through which the left would view the world from that moment on. Vietnam was justification for every pacifist tendency that every liberal has ever had. When they said that war didn’t solve anything, they could point to Vietnam. When they wanted to show the consequences of war, they could point to Vietnam. When they wanted to show the failure of military force as a tool for political change, they could point to Vietnam. It was the last major war this country was ever involved in. Sure we’ve had military operations, from Grenada to the Gulf War to the Balkans, but Vietnam our last big one, and it was a war we ended up losing. Vietnam has been their de facto answer for everything for the past 30 years.
Iraq threatens their entire belief system. [Emphasis added. --R]
On knowing when to get the job done
Jeff takes the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's ("Intelligencer"? Granted, I know it's a real word, but come one. Couldn't you have just said "Reporter"?) Thomas Shapley--hereafter referred to as "Tom"--to task for the latter's confusing of the Valerie Plame non-event and the recent leak on NSA surveillance:
How peculiar indeed that the President and his administration should respond differently to these two situations. How very odd that when something right out of the pages of a movie of the week crops up and administration opponents do their level best to capitalize on it in order to harm the President and obstruct his second-term agenda, that the administration should respond one way, but when a loose-lipped grudge-bearer calls up a reporter and blows the lid on an operation that saves American lives, the administration does something else entirely.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say the White House is doing its job, Tom.
On the cookie idiocy
From the level-headed responses I've read regarding the NSA's web cookie whoopsie, Captain Ed has to have the best analysis:
In the great spectrum of Internet privacy dangers, "persistent cookies" sits on the weakest end. Spyware from free downloads cause more security problems than cookies, and even the ones used by the NSA can be blocked by any browser on the market. The AP uses the mistake to make cookies sound vaguely sinister when they're almost as ubiquitous on the Internet as pop-up ads, if not more so. The Guardian gets even more hysterical, in all senses of the word, when it says that the "[e]xposure adds to pressure over White House powers".
The silliest part of the story is that no one can understand why the cookies would present any danger to visitors to the NSA website. Both versions of the story call the risk to surfers "uncertain", but a more accurate description would be "irrelevant". Even if the NSA used it to track where casual visitors to its site surfed afterwards, it would discover nothing that any casual surfer wouldn't already be able to access on their own with Google or a quick check on Free Republic. Now imagine who stops to check on the NSA website and try very hard to come up with any good reason to spend precious resources on scouring the web preferences of bloggers and privacy groups instead of focusing on real signal intelligence, which already comes in such volume that the agency has trouble keeping up with their primary task. [Emphasis in the original.]
Sign your politically-motivated movie is tanking
I find it amusing the producers of Syriana are touting the fact of their whopping two Golden Globe nominations. The movie cost $50 million, and has only made $33.6 million after being in theaters a month, a third of that made on its opening weekend. Then there are all of those marketing costs, such as commercials touting your two Golden Globe nominations. [Figures courtesy of Box Office Mojo.]
When you have nothing to offer...
Mary Katharine Ham notes a Boston Globe piece on how, just under three years away from the next presidential election, the Democratic Party is already seeking dirt on a potential Republican contender. This is yet further proof that the Democrats are out of ideas. Their only platform continues to be "We're everything the Republicans aren't." That may work with the lunatic fringe of the Left, but in mainstream America, voters like to hear about plans and ideas for moving the country forward.
But we're just as bad as the terrorists, right?
By now, most people have heard John Kerry's slanderous comments about our servicemen terrorizing women and children in Iraq. James Taranto turns the table on the man who would be President, noting a CNN story about what a handful of our servicemen are really up to: doing everything possible, with help from folks stateside, to see that a little Iraqi girl doesn't die from spina bifida.
Not wanting it both ways
Jeff does an outstanding job of showing the flip side of the coin the press doesn't want to admit:
Yes, the President is responsible for making the decision to go to war based in part on intelligence that turned out to be incomplete. But the President is also responsible for acting with swift resolve to unseat a brutal dictator, terrorist and friend to terrorists. He’s also responsible for having the sheer guts to go it alone when a great many of the West’s liberal democracies shirked their responsibility both as leaders of the world and as members of the Security Council of the United Nations. He’s also responsible for bringing Saddam Hussein to justice, for capturing or killing his cohorts in crime, for cutting off a huge source of funding to Palestinian murder gangs, for shattering Ansar al-Islam, and for freeing the Shiite people of Iraq from decades of illegitimate rule by a Stalinist political party. And in many ways, President Bush is personally responsible for bringing liberty to Iraq for the first time ever, and for changing the history of the Middle East, and the Arab and Muslim worlds.
Who are the surrender monkeys now?
The Democratic Party's national leadership has plumbed a record depth in its search to score points against the Republicans. In the past week and a half, both House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean have called for the United States to surrender in Iraq. Not since George McGovern in 1972 has one party called for the United States military to surrender to an enemy during wartime.
Some will object to the word, "surrender," but there is no other word to describe the immediate withdrawal of troops from the war zone in Iraq. The simple fact is that two of the nation's three highest-ranking Democrats are advocating an enemy victory over U.S. forces in a foreign land. That not only is appalling in its contempt for the troops who have died to liberate Iraq, it is astonishing in its brazen disregard for the lives and well-being of the Iraqi people. [Via Political Diary.]
I think Congress has better things to do
Let's see: renewing the Patriot Act, the Senate needing to confirm Bush's judicial nominees, as well as a Supreme Court nominee, et cetera, et cetera. So what do they turn their attention to? Why, the Bowl Championship Series, of course. Pay attention, because this is likely one of the few political issues Lawson and I will agree on: Representative Barton, you're wasting your time, your colleagues' time, the time of BCS board members, and taxpayer dollars. Congress has no business sticking its nose in to the BCS mess. I wouldn't go as far as Barton in saying the BCS is "deeply flawed," though it has made some whoppers in the past few years: picking Oklahoma over USC to face LSU in 2003, and picking Oklahoma over Auburn to face USC in 2004 immediately spring to mind. The solution to the problems of the BCS is not a Congressional investigation. Rather, the football bigwigs at the NCAA need to get together with the various bowl organizers and sponsors and develop a playoff system for Division I-A football where the championship game will be rotated among the bigger bowls. As the ESPN article notes, there's a lot of money in the bowl games, particularly the BCS bowls, and a playoff system would theoretically kill off some of those dollars. I don't believe that would happen; look at March Madness with NCAA Division I-A basketball. Nevertheless, the overriding issue is money. If it wasn't, then the cadets and midshipmen wouldn't be crammed into the corners of the stadium for the annual Army-Navy game, but would be seated, out of respect, directly behind their teams' benches. (We wouldn't see that awful swoosh logo on those classically minimalist uniforms, either.) Until the NCAA and the bowls figure out a way to not lose money, we won't see the much-needed playoff system--for the only sport in Division I-A without a playoff system--for college football, and we will continue to have controversy over whom should play for the championship, and which team is truly number one.
Error and trust
Jeff points to Lorie Byrd's recent column, and correctly notes how voters should want their elected officials to err: on the side of caution. What really stood out for me when I was reading Lorie's piece, was this:
[I]t must be pointed out that Democrats are not to be trusted with the nation’s security. They have shown that not only will they endlessly debate until it is possibly too late but that after a military action has been initiated, in the face of difficulties and waning public support, many will back out and abandon the mission and the troops. The approach of the Democrats to the threat posed by Saddam Hussein as outlined in all of the intelligence reports available prior to the war in Iraq stands in stark contrast to that of the Bush administration.
Don't mind us, we're just voting this way to get re-elected
Apparently Brownstein and Vaughn could not find one elected Democrat willing to defend the 2002 vote as right at the time and right in retrospect, which tells us a great deal about the Democrats and national security -- primarily that they ought not to be allowed anywhere close to its control. [Emphasis added. --R]
Determined to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory
Happily for Mr Zarqawi, no matter how desperate the head-hackers get, the Western defeatists can always top them. A Democrat Congressman, Jack Murtha, has called for immediate US withdrawal from Iraq. He's a Vietnam veteran, so naturally the media are insisting that his views warrant special deference, military experience in a war America lost being the only military experience the Democrats and the press value these days. Hence, the demand for the President to come up with an "exit strategy".
In war, there are usually only two exit strategies: victory or defeat. The latter's easier. Just say, whoa, we're the world's pre-eminent power but we can't handle an unprecedently low level of casualties, so if you don't mind we'd just as soon get off at the next stop.
Demonstrating the will to lose as clearly as America did in Vietnam wasn't such a smart move, but since the media can't seem to get beyond this ancient jungle war it may be worth underlining the principal difference: Osama is not Ho Chi Minh, and al-Qa'eda are not the Viet Cong. If you exit, they'll follow. And Americans will die - in foreign embassies, barracks, warships, as they did through the Nineties, and eventually on the streets of US cities, too.
But there is no media bias, part 7
You can always count on the press to put a gloomy tone on bright economic news.
[...]
Are four-year highs really modest? Here's hoping the rest of the Christmas shopping season is marked by such "black clouds," "modest gains," "reluctance," and "challenge."
Yeah, some more about those oil company profits
But profits can't be judged by dollar amounts alone. What counts is the percentage of revenues those profits represent. "Our numbers are huge because the scale of our industry is huge," Exxon CEO Lee Raymond tried, probably in vain, to explain during last week's big Senate hearing on oil company profits. Exxon's profits last quarter amounted to 9.8 cents for every dollar of sales. Is that obscene? Well, it was more profitable than Shell (which netted 7.8 cents of each dollar of revenue) or Chevron (6.6 cents) or BP (4.6 cents). But compared to Coca-Cola (21.2 cents), Bank of America (28.3 cents), or Microsoft (33.2 cents), it was nothing to write home about. Everyone is complaining about the price they're paying at the pump, yet no one seems bothered that a can of Coke that used to cost 35 cents has now doubled in price, or that they don't see any dividends returned on that free checking account from BoA, or why the cost of Office isn't $99 instead of $299. I'm not begrudging Coca-Cola, Bank of America, or Microsoft their profits any more than I begrudge the oil companies theirs. The market is clearly bearing what the market will bear in each of the industries the above companies find themselves. Do you want Microsoft Office to cost under a hundred bucks? Then stop buying Microsoft Office. Use one of the scores of alternative word processors available. Well, if you're using a Macintosh, any way. Microsoft seems to have strangled word processor development for Windows. But you see my point. When there's less demand, companies are forced to reduce prices. Gas prices haven't gone down, because Americans aren't buying less gas in significantly high numbers to warrant bringing the prices down dramatically. It's called free enterprise, last time I checked. Smacking oil bosses around may be good politics, but the unglamorous fact is that Big Oil's earnings, 7.7 percent of income in the second quarter of 2005, is lower than the overall US corporate average of 7.9 percent. The oil industry is more profitable than some (automobiles, media, utilities), but it can only envy the profits earned by semiconductors (14.6 percent), pharmaceuticals (18.6 percent), or banks (19.6 percent). Can you just see the CEOs of Intel, AMD, Motorola, and IBM being dragged before Congress to explain why they're making so much money? Ridiculous. The kicker, though, is this: Government revenue from gasoline taxes alone has exceeded oil industry profits in 22 of the past 25 years. Does the road work, including on roads which appear to need no work, ever stop where you live? Perhaps instead of gouging consumers with high gasoline taxes, state and local governments should examine their budgets more carefully. Rather than begin "improvement" projects on roads which are perfectly fine, under the guise of the "use it or lose it" excuse, perhaps state and local governments could channel those gas tax revenues in to paying off debt. Should there be no debt, then why not cut the tax? I suppose that would be too easy.
The MRC needs to hire Jeff
The tin-foil-hat crowd got one thing right after all: The American people have been systematically lied to since 9/11. Not by the President, but by the press.
Deeply irresponsible is an understatement
As usual, Jeff says it better than I was thinking:
It’s as if we’ve got a country full of people who are walking around under the impression that the moon is made of green cheese, repeating it to each other, going on television talk shows to discuss the green cheese issue, publishing lengthy editorials in prominent newspapers about the implications of new revelations about lunar green cheese. It’s positively baffling.
But there is no media bias, part 6
Federalist Patriot 05-44 Digest:
The Big Three nightly newscasts have become nothing more than anti-war activists with a national platform. The Media Research Center recently released a review of over 1,300 news stories on Iraq from January through September. Among their findings was the following: 61 percent of the stories were negative or pessimistic, while only 15 percent were positive. The gap became even worse in August and September with negative stories nearing 75 percent; positive stories at seven percent. Stories about heroic actions by the troops were outnumbered eight to one by stories of abuse or other misconduct. Two of every five news stories covered bombings, kidnappings and other mayhem. Election stories also trended negative, as if things truly were better under Saddam Hussein. We think most Patriot readers will agree--the words that come to mind are "aiding and abetting."
Inquiring minds want to know
Please explain to me how our children have had no school yesterday and today so that the Teachers Unions can go out and organize for Democratic candidates -- but the schools will be open on Friday when the federal Government and most offices will be closed to commemorate our nation's war heroes? This must be an East Coast (West, too?) thing, or perhaps confined to Shirley's home state (Virginia?). The kids were in school yesterday and are today in DFW.
No such thing
Memo to Brendan Miniter: Marines don't like being called "former Marines." "Once a Marine, always a Marine" is how they view it. Having known a few Marines in my time, perhaps "retired Marine" would be a better term in the future.