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Friday, November 30, 2007

Murtha Undercuts Pelosi and Reid


One of President Bush's most vocal critics of the Iraq War has changed his mind. Can this bring some reason to the activities of the Democratic Congress and end its continuing attempts to undermine the troops there?

Murtha finds military progress in trip to Iraq

Warns that Iraqis must do more for their own security
Thursday, November 29, 2007

By Jerome L. Sherman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

WASHINGTON - U.S. Rep. John Murtha today said he saw signs of military progress during a brief trip to Iraq last week, but he warned that Iraqis need to play a larger role in providing their own security and the Bush administration still must develop an exit strategy.

"I think the 'surge' is working," the Democrat said in a videoconference from his Johnstown office, describing the president's decision to commit more than 20,000 additional combat troops this year. But the Iraqis "have got to take care of themselves."

Violence has dropped significantly in recent months, but Mr. Murtha said he was most encouraged by changes in the once-volatile Anbar province, where locals have started working closely with U.S. forces to isolate insurgents linked to Al Qaeda.

He said Iraqis need to duplicate that success at the national level, but the central government in Baghdad is "dysfunctional."

Mr. Murtha's four day-trip took him to a Thanksgiving dinner with troops in Kuwait last Thursday, and he then made stops in Iraq, Turkey and Belgium.

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Eight Years of Liberal Hatred

One of the most viewed and most commented on columns I have ever run was “The Insanity of Bush Hatred” by Peter Berkowitz. This probably was because Berkowitz is himself a well-known and respected liberal, and the criticisms he leveled were therefore more cutting. His article also inspired the following critique, which all may also find as interesting:

Eight Years of Liberal Hatred
By J.R. Dunn, The American Thinker, November 28, 2007 (Excerpts)

“In politics as in personal life, hatred is a dangerous tool. It's like one of the early medieval cannons, just as capable of blowing up in your face as it is of lobbing a ball at the enemy. Of course, the medieval metal casters realized they had a problem and worked to correct it. Haters never seem to get that far.

For the latest evidence of this, we can thank Peter Berkowitz. Berkowitz is that rarity, a sincere liberal with as critical an eye for his own side as he has for the opposition. In a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal, "The Insanity of Bush Hatred", Berkowitz attempts to take the measure of the haters, a phenomenon generally unmentioned by the legacy media, which prefers to act as an unknowing conduit for these people (watch how quickly this changes if Madame Hillary manages to squeak in)….

Berkowitz gives us a nice guided tour of liberal follies from the inside. But he fails at coming up with an explanation. He's a rational man, looking for reasons in the record, sorting through the facts in an attempt to pinpoint exactly where Bush hatred began to metastasize within the liberal mentality. But all he succeeds in doing is to underline the fact that there is no rational explanation. Bush v. Gore, the War on Terror, the administration's trampling of the Constitution... all clearly reveal themselves as hollow excuses, created ex-post-facto to hide the actual explanation. The Supreme Court decision was triggered by Al Gore himself. Future historians will marvel over the fact that an attack against the U.S. generated hatred not for the enemy but for American leadership. And whatever depredations have been carried against American rights and liberties (and I don't believe anything of the sort), they pale in significance against those of FDR, Woodrow Wilson, and, for that matter, Abe Lincoln.

All the same, the two Bush terms have been on unending carnival of hatred. Just to hit the high points, there's the novel blueprinting his assassination, a film on the same topic, and probably more. We've had several impeachment attempts, all hopeless on their face, the latest proposed by the noted statesman Dennis Kucinich. And all this before we get to one single word of media coverage on Karl Rove, waterboarding, surveillance, Virginia Plame, or Scott McClellan.

It's a waste of time looking for a rational explanation amid all this. None could conceivably cover every last convolution of paranoia, delusion, and obsession. "Bush hatred," as Berkowitz writes, "is different." It's different because it has its roots in ideology.

Ideological Devils

We often overlook the fact that liberalism is an ideology, and has been since the days of the New Deal. It is not a doctrine or a school of thought, and does not operate by the rational rules required in those cases. It's an ideology in the sense of a synthetic, politically-based replacement for religious belief, and it operates by the rules of an ideology -- irrational, compulsive, and totally divorced from anything outside of the ideological system itself.

Hatred, along with fear, hysteria, and conformity, is a basic element of ideological thinking. I know of no exceptions. For the Nazis, the hate-figures were, of course, the Jews. For the Soviet communists, they were a shifting cast of kulaks, socialists, capitalists, Trotskyites and "wreckers" (saboteurs out to destroy communist achievements on the orders of any of the above). For the New Dealers, it was businessmen (as it is today for some Greens).

The need for devil figures remains true no matter what part of the political spectrum the ideology lies on, what other elements are present, and whatever the ideology's goals may be. You could go so far as to say that hate is necessary to the definition of any ideology.

The hate figures are often synthetic. Orwell recognized this in his creation of Emmanuel Goldstein in 1984. Goldstein (who was based on Trotsky), the victim of the book's five-minute hate, was a semi-mythical entity with the exact characteristics required to fit the passions of the moment.

If the hate-figures aren't completely artificial, if they're based on real individuals, then they're caricatures, figures distorted to an extent that all sense of reality has been drained out. We've seen this repeatedly from American liberals.

Richard M. Nixon's notorious social gaffes (which are usually a product of extreme shyness) were presented as evidence of incipient insanity, with all of Nixon's actions analyzed for evidence of a breakdown. Thus the 1970 incursion into Cambodia, the result of months of pleading by U.S. military commanders to be allowed to hit the PAVN's supply dumps and training camps across the border, was explained with a claim that Nixon had seen the film Patton the night before.

While it was forgotten amid all the adulation following his funeral, Reagan was loathed nearly as much as Bush during his presidential terms. (A critical moment in my political education occurred when I stepped out of my office moments after Reagan was shot in 1981 and saw Americans dancing in the street over the news.) Reagan, of course, was the halfwit who needed to be led around by his "handlers" lest he stumble in front of a bus or hit the wrong button on the nuclear football. Almost everything he said or did was reported to fit that image, for example, the widely-covered incident in which he referred to Thailand as "Siam". What the reporters failed to realize was that for the first third of Reagan's long life, the name of the place actually was Siam. (Late in the 80s, a small number of liberals began to wise up. Prominent among them was the cartoonist Jules Feiffer, who published a cartoon showing one of his trademark wimpy liberals saying, "Reagan said the Berlin Wall would come down, and I said Reagan was a fool." Each panel featured yet another statement by Reagan answered with the same refrain, until we reach the last: "Because if Reagan was right all along... ... then what kind of fool am I?")

We could go on for page after page if we liked. Eisenhower, the man who coordinated Allied strategy against Hitler's Germany (a better piece of work than any of his critics ever achieved) was dismissed as the "Great Golfer". Newt Gingrich and Tom Delay. Possibly the most odious case I'm aware of: Garry Wills. After it was revealed that an Iraqi hit team had been stalking George H.W. Bush, Wills produced a column in which he said, "Who cares? It's only George Bush."

Then, after all that, and only after all that, do we get to George W. Bush, baby-killer, torturer, trasher of the Constitution, and slave of Halliburton. In the context we've established, none of this looks particularly unprecedented or unique, or even surprising. Bush is simply the latest of a long line of hate-figures -- it's the way the liberal-left does things.

Liberalism does things that way because it has devolved into an ideology with an ideology's characteristics. (Liberalism may well be the only ideology that has actually gone through a process of development: most of the others were designed, to one extent or another.) Little trace remains of discussion, debate, consensus, or any respect for democratic norms and procedures. There's only the philosophy of "whatever it takes", the strategy of "by any means necessary".

It will grow more rabid in time, as it always does. When Rudolph Giuliani is elected, they will turn on him the same way they did Bush. They already have in New York City. (In all discussions of Giuliani's "failings" I have yet to see anyone point out that Giuliani is the sole Republican candidate who has put the boot to the liberals successfully and repeatedly.) For that matter, Mitt Romney would be in for the same treatment if he were elected. Even Ron Paul, borderline radical that he is.

Any Republican elected to high office will be treated the same for the foreseeable future. So the media may as well knock off all the marveling on how hated Republican office holders are. At this point, it's simply part of the job description. Liberalism has become the party of hate -- the first major party to fit that description since the heyday of the Know-Nothings. You can check the record and see how long they lasted.

Can liberalism change? It's doubtful. There are still decent liberals. Berkowitz is only one example. But they are islands. They alone can turn it around, and I don't think there are enough of them. (By his own admission, Berkowitz doesn't seem to have had much luck with his intellectual friends.

In any case, what's required would be that the liberals "de-ideologize" themselves, and there's no record that any political entity has ever accomplished this. Communism was de-ideologized by collapse, fascism by Allied tanks. Not much of a choice from the liberal point of view.

So we can look forward to more viciousness and more nastiness, more foully and more often expressed. It will only break when liberalism does.

Speed the day.”

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Thursday, November 29, 2007

CNN Covers Itself in Glory (Another Word for Manure)


The ambush of Republican presidential candidates by CNN last night should remove any doubts in the minds of fair-minded citizens about CNN’s and Anderson Cooper’s bias and total commitment to the Democratic Party. Normally I don’t like to cover events that are well-covered in the media and by other blogs, but this occurrence was so blatant and so revealing that every attempt to shine light on it must be made. It not only documents the extent to which CNN will go to sandbag Republicans, but it also highlights the “dirty tricks” the Democratic campaigns are capable of.

'Gay question' general linked to Clinton
By: Kenneth P. Vogel, The Politico, November 29, 2007 (Excerpt)

“The retired general who asked about gays and lesbians serving in the military at the CNN/YouTube Republican debate on Wednesday is a co-chair of Hillary Clinton's National Military Veterans group.

Retired Brig. Gen. Keith H. Kerr was named a co-chair of the group this month, according to a campaign press release.

He was also active in John F. Kerry's 2004 campaign for president.

Kerr asked candidates “why you think that American men and women in uniform are not professional enough to serve with gays and lesbians.””


Newsbusters.com November 29,07

“Morning Joe" host Joe Scarborough scoffed at the notion that no one at CNN was aware of retired Brigadier General Keith Kerr's involvement with the Clinton campaign.

JOE SCARBOROUGH: This is twice now in a couple of weeks that CNN has been ensnarled in a Clinton controversy. Before with James Carville sitting there giving his opinions despite the fact that he's contributed to Hillary Clinton, obviously worked for Bill Clinton, he sent out letters saying we really need to fight hard for Hillary Clinton. They didn't even mention it. And again, the damndest thing.

And last night, not only do they have this guy delivering a YouTube video, they also had him there sitting in the audience, they had a shot with him [more than a shot. Anderson Cooper asked whether he was satisifed with the answers he had received and grilled Romney over his answer. Kerr himself made an extended comment from the floor]. It's Bill Bennett [who was a CNN post-debate panelist], it is up to Bill Bennett to explain to CNN, and don't tell me that CNN didn't know, that some people at CNN did not know, that he was part of the Clinton campaign. Don't lie to me.


Michelle Malkin has already done a complete job of exposing the other planted questioners. Cross-posted from her blog:

Digging out more CNN/YouTube plants: Abortion questioner is declared Edwards supporter (and a slobbering Anderson Cooper fan); Log Cabin Republican questioner is declared Obama supporter; lead toy questioner is a prominent union activist for the Edwards-endorsing United Steelworkers

By Michelle Malkin • November 29, 2007 12:47 AM
Welcome to Horticulture Journalism 101. (Keep scrolling down for new updates to this handy CNN/YouTube illustrated plant guide.)

Concerned Young Undecided Person “Journey” = John Edwards supporter “Journey”
***

Concerned Undecided Log Cabin Republican supporter David Cercone = Obama supporter David Cercone
***

Concerned Undecided Mom LeeAnn Anderson = Activist for the John Edwards-endorsing United Steelworkers union LeeAnn Anderson
***

Concerned Undecided Gay Military Retiree Brig. Gen. Keith H. Kerr = Hillary/Kerry supporter and anti-”Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” activist Keith H. Kerr
***

The best thing about Republicans agreeing to do the CNN/YouTube debate is that it created yet another invaluable opportunity to expose CNN’s abject incompetence.

Retired Brig. Gen./gays in the military lobbyist/Hillary-Kerry supporter Keith H. Kerr wasn’t the only plant at the CNN/YouTube debate. The plant uncovering is in full-swing over at Free Republic.

Example: “Journey,” a.k.a. “Paperserenade,” the girl who asked an abortion question, is a declared John Edwards supporter.

You couldn’t tell from the video that CNN aired, where she’s wearing a plain shirt:

But if you click through on her YouTube profile, you see her latest video in response to the candidates’ answers. And she’s prominently wearing…her John Edwards ‘08 t-shirt:
In case CNN’s eyesight is impaired:

How, you ask, should CNN have known? Well, on her YouTube profile, this woman links to her personal blog, where her user profile makes her political leanings crystal clear:

Turns out “Journey/” “paperserenade” is also a big slobbering Anderson Cooper fan. She posted this video a month ago exulting that “Anderson Cooper said my name!” during a CNN viewer comment segment. She wrote, “Horrible video, but at least I’ve got some type of recording of this event that has made my week!:”

On her blog, she posted an Anderson Cooper segment from VH1 with the following comment: “Anderson officially had the Best Week Ever for the week of 10/26/07, and looked more delicious than a pic-i-nic basket while doing so. And lookie, I found the video and uploaded it to Youtube for y’all. :D”
“Delicious!”
***

Update: And another one…Brian McMurphy at SixMeatBuffet (hat tip See-Dubya) notes that David Cercone, the Pompano Beach, Florida, man who asked the question about Log Cabin Republicans, is a declared Obama supporter.
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Tuesday, November 27, 2007

The False Conservative By Robert D. Novak

The False Conservative
By Robert D. Novak, Washington Post, 10/26/2007

Who would respond to criticism from the Club for Growth by calling the conservative, free-market campaign organization the "Club for Greed"? That sounds like Howard Dean, Dennis Kucinich or John Edwards, all Democrats preaching the class struggle.

In fact, the rejoinder comes from Mike Huckabee, who has broken out of the pack of second-tier Republican presidential candidates to become a serious contender -- definitely in Iowa and perhaps nationally.

Huckabee is campaigning as a conservative, but serious Republicans know that he is a high-tax, protectionist advocate of big government and a strong hand in the Oval Office directing the lives of Americans. Until now, they did not bother to expose the former governor of Arkansas as a false conservative because he seemed an underfunded, unknown nuisance candidate. Now that he has pulled even with Mitt Romney for the Iowa caucuses and might make more progress, the beleaguered Republican Party has a frightening problem.

The rise of evangelical Christians as the force that blasted the GOP out of minority status during the past generation always contained an inherent danger: What if these new Republican acolytes supported not merely a conventional conservative but one of their own? That has happened with Huckabee, a former Baptist minister educated at Ouachita Baptist University and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. The danger is a serious contender for the nomination who passes the litmus test of social conservatives on abortion, gay marriage and gun control but is far removed from the conservative-libertarian model of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.

There is no doubt about Huckabee's record during a decade in Little Rock. He was regarded by fellow Republican governors as a compulsive tax-and-spender. He increased the Arkansas tax burden 47 percent, boosting the levies on gasoline and cigarettes. When he lost 100 pounds and decided to press his new lifestyle on the American people, he was hardly being a Goldwater-Reagan libertarian.

As a presidential candidate, Huckabee has sought to counteract his reputation as a taxer by pressing for replacement of the income tax with a sales tax. More recently he signed the no-tax-increase pledge of Americans for Tax Reform. But Huckabee simply does not fit within normal boundaries of economic conservatism, such as when he criticized President Bush's veto of a Democratic expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program. Calling global warming a "moral issue" mandating "a biblical duty" to prevent climate change, he has endorsed a cap-and-trade system that is anathema to the free market.

Huckabee clearly departs from the mainstream of the conservative movement in his confusion of "growth" with "greed." Such ad hominem attacks are part of his intuitive response to criticism from the Club for Growth and the libertarian Cato Institute about his record as governor. On "Fox News Sunday" on Nov. 18, he called the "tactics" of the Club for Growth "some of the most despicable in politics today.

It's why I love to call them the Club for Greed, because they won't tell you who gave their money." In fact, all contributors to the organization's political action committee (which produces campaign ads) are publicly revealed, as are most donors financing issue ads.

Quin Hillyer, a former Arkansas journalist writing in the conservative American Spectator, called Huckabee "a guy with a thin skin, a nasty vindictive streak." Huckabee's retort was to attack Hillyer's journalistic procedures, fitting a mean-spirited image when he responds to conservative criticism.

Nevertheless, he is getting remarkably warm reviews in the news media as the most humorous, entertaining and interesting GOP presidential hopeful. Contrary to descriptions by old associates, he is now called "jovial" or "good-natured." Any Republican who does not sound much like a Republican is bound to get friendly press, as Sen. John McCain did in 2000 (but not today, with his return to acting more like a conventional Republican).

An uncompromising foe of abortion can never enjoy full media backing. But Mike Huckabee is getting enough favorable buzz that, when combined with his evangelical base, it makes real conservatives shudder.

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Sunday, November 25, 2007

A Nasty Fight Is Looming

Many of us are aware that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear a second amendment case involving the overturning of a Washington, DC gun law that prohibited law-abiding citizens from owning and keeping a handgun for personal protection in their own homes. This case is of critical importance.

A recent New York Times editorial on the subject shows just what fair-minded people are going to be up against in this continuing battle, and that we have to be prepared for a fight that promises to become just as dirty and in the gutter as any recent abortion or anti-war dispute. Notice the language of the editorial and also what it does not say.

It uses the scare language of - “violent consequences of denying government broad room to regulate guns” – as if allowing law-abiding citizens the right to have protection in their homes has violent consequences .

In another place the editorial says, “A decision that upends needed gun controls currently in place around the country would imperil the lives of Americans.”

Nowhere does this article make reference to the significant reductions in violent crimes that have followed state decisions to grant concealed carry licenses to qualified, peaceful citizens. This has been the *experience in every one of the 36 states that have put in place concealed-carry laws since 1986. What does concealed carry have to do with laws that prevent the private ownership of any guns? Clearly, if the Washington, DC law is upheld, and the constitutional right to bear arms is overthrown, it will eventually affect everyone’s rights, and all concealed-carry licenses may become null and void.

The New York Times editorial also does not mention the fact that Washington, DC, with its prohibition of gun ownership, and where only criminals can own guns, is considered the murder capital of the world.

It is up to every citizen to fight against this development and up to every gun owner to speak out and to contribute generously to fight a fight that cannot be fought on the facts and the data alone. Since when have liberals been interested in facts and history? They will employ the same smears and the same character assassinations and distortions that they have used against President Bush, VP Cheney, and Justices Roberts and Alito. They will lie and distort and pretend not to understand when the facts are laid out.

New York Times Editorial, November 21, 2007
The Court and the Second Amendment
Correction Appended

By agreeing yesterday to rule on whether provisions of the District of Columbia’s stringent gun control law violate the Second Amendment to the Constitution, the Supreme Court has inserted itself into a roiling public controversy with large ramifications for public safety. The court’s move sowed hope and fear among supporters of reasonable gun control, and it ratcheted up the suspense surrounding the court’s current term.

The hope, which we share, is that the court will rise above the hard-right ideology of some justices to render a decision respectful of the Constitution’s text and the violent consequences of denying government broad room to regulate guns. The fear is that it will not.

At issue is a 2-to-1 ruling last March by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that found unconstitutional a law barring handguns in homes and requiring that shotguns and rifles be stored with trigger locks or disassembled. The ruling upheld a radical decision by a federal trial judge, who struck down the 31-year-old gun control law on spurious grounds that conform with the agenda of the anti-gun control lobby but cry out for rejection by the Supreme Court.

Much hinges on how the justices interpret the Second Amendment, which says: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

Opponents of gun control sometimes claim a constitutional prohibition on any serious regulation of individual gun ownership. The court last weighed in on the amendment in 1939, concluding, correctly in our view, that the only absolute right conferred on individuals is for the private ownership of guns that has “some reasonable relationship to the preservation of efficiency of a well-regulated militia.” The federal, state and local governments may impose restrictions on other uses — like the trigger guards — or outright bans on types of weapons. Appellate courts followed that interpretation, until last spring’s departure.

A lot has changed since the nation’s founding, when people kept muskets to be ready for militia service. What has not changed is the actual language of the Constitution. To get past the first limiting clauses of the Second Amendment to find an unalienable individual right to bear arms seems to require creative editing.

Beyond grappling with fairly esoteric arguments about the Second Amendment, the justices need to responsibly confront modern-day reality. A decision that upends needed gun controls currently in place around the country would imperil the lives of Americans.

Correction: November 23, 2007
An editorial on Wednesday about a Supreme Court gun control case incorrectly described a lower court’s decision. The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reversed the District Court and ruled Washington’s law on gun ownership unconstitutional. The District Court did not overturn the law.


*A recent study by John Lott and David Mustard of the University of Chicago published in the Journal of Legal Studies found that concealed handgun laws reduced murder by 8.5% and severe assault by 7% from 1977 to '92. Had "right-to-carry" laws been in effect throughout the country, there would have been 1,600 fewer murders and 60,000 fewer assaults every year.

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Friday, November 23, 2007

The Death of a Left-Wing Wedge Issue

It was not “politically correct” to oppose experimentation with embryonic stem cells even though said experimentation did not appear to offer much promise. It has also not been “politically correct” to point out the flaws in man-made global warming presentations or to point out flaws in some of Darwinian theory. In the latter two cases, much scientific evidence has accumulated recently that should make open-minded, reasonable people at least want to take a second look.

Instead, as with embryonic stem cells (where the issue is now moot), those who refused to run with the crowd have been denounced, their motives and their intelligence have been ridiculed, they have been denied tenure and their articles have been blackballed at some refereed journals. This is the politicization of science as bad as the Soviet support of Lysenko’s absurd theories or the Catholic Church’s inquisition of Galileo. This is not the way a free people should be conducting their affairs; this is not the way to continue the progress of the common man.

The Death of a Left Wing Wedge Issue: What are the Ethical Responsibilities of Scientists?
November 23, 2007, Discovery Institute

Richard Hayes, executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society in Oakland, explains in an admirable Los Angeles Times article that many scientists who opposed embryonic stem cell research on various grounds were reluctant to say so until now: they didn't want to be seen helping President Bush politically. Hayes' candor is commendable, but the scientists' motives it perhaps unintentionally betrays are craven. It is, in truth, an indictment of the current politicization of science.

This is a serious matter. We can all be thrilled that new technology seems likely to make the use of human embryos an unnecessary source for stem cell production in research. It is a victory for human life and for common sense in laboratory science.

Politically, it takes off the table an issue that hurt conservatives and that the materialist Left has been using as part of an attack on pro-life forces, whom they represent as "anti-science." It was slated to become a major theme in the 2008 elections.

But politics should not trump everything else. If scientists who were skeptical of embryonic stem cell research remained silent for essentially political reasons or were influenced by the big bucks that were behind efforts in California and Missouri to use taxpayer funds to support embryonic stem cell research, they should be chagrined now. They let their politics take precedence over their calling as scientists.

Politics was definitely at play in Missouri, for example, where the issue of stem cells on a state ballot measure was used to defeat conservatives. It was a real "wedge" issue. You can understand why the Left deployed it; polls showed 2 to 1 public acceptance of embryonic stem cell research. But that doesn't let scientists who knew better off the hook, does it? It is appalling that some scientists privately opposed embryonic stem cell research on what they might regard as liberal grounds--such as the program's exploitation of poor women for their eggs--still were guided chiefly by political correctness and kept their peace. Some others surely would have spoken out if the media had asked them. But most of the media, too, are P.C., of course.

So, on how many other issues are dissenting scientists holding their fire because they don't want to be seen helping President Bush or social conservatives? How about end of life issues? How about Darwin's theory of evolution, the sacred writ of materialism?

In some periods of history courage is demanded of statesmen, or military men, or even economists. In our period, we need scientists to show the courage of their private convictions on the whole range of issues that pertain to human dignity and distinctive worth.

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Thursday, November 22, 2007

Crybaby Kerry

One of the reasons I waste my time on anything to do with John Kerry is that I believe that the Democrat frontrunners are so weak that Kerry or Gore will eventually end up as their nominee.

I want to bring up again the aggravation I feel whenever a liberal politician or columnist mentions, in a completely dishonest way, the subjects of Willie Horton or Swift Boating. Since I lived many years in Massachusetts and followed the Horton issue closely, and since I sent a sizeable contribution to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, it angers me greatly when either of these subjects is put forth as if the producers of the Horton ads or as if the Swifties did anything wrong. I’ll let Emmett Tyrell discuss the Swifties; as far as Horton goes, it is absolutely true that Governor Dukakis and Lt. Gov. Kerry supported the unbelievable policy of allowing persons serving life sentences for murder or rape to leave the prisons for unsupervised furloughs.

Here is what Answers.com says about Willie Horton: “On October 26, 1974, in Lawrence, Massachusetts, Horton and two accomplices robbed Joseph Fournier, a 17-year-old gas station attendant, stabbed him 19 times, and left him in a trash can.

Fournier died from blood loss. Horton was convicted of murder, sentenced to life imprisonment, and incarcerated at the Concord Correctional Facility in Massachusetts.

On June 6, 1986, he was released as part of a weekend furlough program but did not return. On April 3, 1987 in Oxon Hill, Maryland, Horton twice raped a local woman after pistol-whipping, knifing, binding, and gagging her fiancé. He then stole the car belonging to the man he had assaulted, but was later captured by police after a chase. On October 20, Horton was sentenced in Maryland to two consecutive life terms plus 85 years. The sentencing judge refused to return Horton to Massachusetts, saying, "I'm not prepared to take the chance that Mr. Horton might again be furloughed or otherwise released. This man should never draw a breath of free air again."

When a political ad pointed out these facts, Massachusetts’ liberals assailed the Bush Campaign for”Racism”

Crybaby Kerry
By R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. American Spectator, 11/21/2007

WASHINGTON -- Most informed Americans have heard about "anger management counseling." It is a widely prescribed therapy for those who lose their temper uncontrollably in public or in private or while watching the Hon. Henry Waxman pretend to be the late Andrei Vyshinsky, prosecutor at the Moscow Show Trials. Well, during the past few days I have been following the Hon. Jean-Francois Kerry's (D-Mass.) controversy with Boone Pickens, and I believe I am in need of "laughter management counseling." Every time I think of this ponderous stone-headed senator bellowing phony pieties, I suffer a dreadful agitation in the funny bone. I only hope that my health insurance is applicable.

As reported late last week, billionaire investor and environmentalist Boone Pickens, during an address at The American Spectator's 40th Anniversary Gala, promised to pay $1 million to anyone who could find error in the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads, which he helped bankroll in 2004. The ads were produced to expose the braggart Kerry's incautious claims about his service during the Vietnam War -- that would be the war Kerry participated in briefly before coming home and traducing his fellow comrades in arms with vicious lies and distortions before the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee. Remember his more recent claim that he supported our war in Iraq before he opposed it? Inconstancy is in his DNA.

Pickens is perplexed that the majority of Kerry's fellow Swift Boat pilots from Vietnam, who considered Lt. Kerry a ham and a fraud while serving with them and a louse when he maligned them, have been made out to be liars. In our political culture, polluted as it is by liberal bugaboos and shibboleths (we call it the Kultursmog), "Swift Boat" has become a hate term not unlike "McCarthyism." In the Kultursmog it has come to mean destroying a person by misrepresenting the person's record. But the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth did not misrepresent Kerry's hoked up record, not in their ads, one of which presented a tape of Kerry's lurid testimony before the Senate. Pickens knows the ads were accurate, and he wants to demonstrate to the American people that they were. Send him the errors in the ads, and he will send you a cool million.

His challenge was not out in the media for more than a few hours than the Great Massachusetts Braggart responded with a letter to Pickens. Typically it is rude, beginning brusquely with "Mr. Pickens," no Dear Mr. Pickens for Kerry. The letter is also delusional. Kerry writes as though by acknowledging Pickens's challenge he is entitled to the $1 million. "While I am prepared to show they," Kerry writes of the Swift Boat Veterans, "lied on allegation after allegation, you have generously offered to pay one million dollars for just one thing that can be proven false. I am prepared to prove the lie beyond any reasonable doubt." In Kerry's next sentence he tells Pickens where to send the check. I kid thee not.

Kerry's presumptuous letter has gotten plenty of attention in the media, but nowhere have I seen it pointed out that Kerry has offered absolutely no evidence that his Swift Boat critics lied. In fact, he has yet to state what the critics' errors might have been in their ads. Pickens responded immediately, politely asking to see the journal allegedly maintained by Kerry in Vietnam and "Your military record, specifically your service records for the years 1971-1978, and copies of all movies and tapes made during your service."

As I said earlier, Kerry was a shameless ham in Vietnam and he remains one. At this writing Kerry has failed even to reply to Pickens, perhaps with good reason, Pickens ended his letter by asking Kerry to make a "commitment. If you cannot prove anything in the Swift Boat ads to be untrue...make a $1 million gift to the charity I am choosing -- the Medal of Honor Foundation." Both men are very rich. Pickens made his fortune by years of brilliant investments. He is one of the world's leading authorities on oil. Kerry made his fortune by marrying it, twice -- most recently to a woman who made her fortune similarly, through marriage.

Kerry has been whining about the rough treatment he received from his former comrades ever since they exposed him in the 2004 election. All the guff in his letter is typical of him: boastful, presumptuous, sophistical. Henceforth, I think I shall forego teasing him about his Francophile pretensions by calling him Jean-Francois. Rather, I shall call him Crybaby Kerry. Moreover, I shall start a clock on The American Spectator's website (www.spectator.org) and let it tick until Crybaby Kerry supplies Pickens with his Vietnam journal, his military records, and proof that the Swift Boat Veterans lied in their ads. Oh, and let us keep the Crybaby Kerry clock ticking until he comes up with his $1 million for the Medal of Honor Foundation. Upon filing this column my Crybaby Clock will begin ticking at Spectator.org. Now if only I could get my laughter under control.


Editorial Note: What "Swiftboating" really means is 'publishing the truth about someone or something', and whenever liberals try to lie about history I will keep trying to set the record raight.

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Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Iraq, Stem Cells and President Bush

According to Charles Krauthammer, the announcement yesterday of a dramatic discovery of a new technique for stem cell research, which does not require the destruction of human embryos, is the direct result of funding from the Bush Administration. Here is another major vindication for President Bush. On Iraq, his enemies are running for cover rather than admit his success. Will this also be true on the subject of stem cells?

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Tuesday, November 20, 2007

A NATION OF COWARDS by Jeffrey R. Snyder


As the Supreme Court decides to consider the overturning of the ban on handguns in Washington, DC, I thought it appropriate to present a celebrated essay on the subject of gun ownership - written and published by Snyder in 1993:

A NATION OF COWARDS

Jeffrey R. Snyder, The Public Interest, Fall, 1993

OUR SOCIETY has reached a pinnacle of self-expression and respect for individuality rare or unmatched in history. Our entire popular culture -- from fashion magazines to the cinema -- positively screams the matchless worth of the individual, and glories in eccentricity, nonconformity, independent judgment, and self-determination. This enthusiasm is reflected in the prevalent notion that helping someone entails increasing that person's "self-esteem"; that if a person properly values himself, he will naturally be a happy, productive, and, in some inexplicable fashion, responsible member of society.

And yet, while people are encouraged to revel in their individuality and incalculable self-worth, the media and the law enforcement establishment continually advise us that, when confronted with the threat of lethal violence, we should not resist, but simply give the attacker what he wants. If the crime under consideration is rape, there is some notable waffling on this point, and the discussion quickly moves to how the woman can change her behavior to minimize the risk of rape, and the various ridiculous, non-lethal weapons she may acceptably carry, such as whistles, keys, mace or, that weapon which really sends shivers down a rapist's spine, the portable cellular phone.

Now how can this be? How can a person who values himself so highly calmly accept the indignity of a criminal assault? How can one who believes that the essence of his dignity lies in his self-determination passively accept the forcible deprivation of that self-determination? How can he, quietly, with great dignity and poise, simply hand over the goods?

The assumption, of course, is that there is no inconsistency. The advice not to resist a criminal assault and simply hand over the goods is founded on the notion that one's life is of incalculable value, and that no amount of property is worth it. Put aside, for a moment, the outrageousness of the suggestion that a criminal who proffers lethal violence should be treated as if he has instituted a new social contract: "I will not hurt or kill you if you give me what I want." For years, feminists have labored to educate people that rape is not about sex, but about domination, degradation, and control. Evidently, someone needs to inform the law enforcement establishment and the media that kidnapping, robbery, carjacking, and assault are not about property.

Crime is not only a complete disavowal of the social contract, but also a commandeering of the victim's person and liberty. If the individual's dignity lies in the fact that he is a moral agent engaging in actions of his own will, in free exchange with others, then crime always violates the victim's dignity. It is, in fact, an act of enslavement. Your wallet, your purse, or your car may not be worth your life, but your dignity is; and if it is not worth fighting for, it can hardly be said to exist.

The Gift of Life
Although difficult for modern man to fathom, it was once widely believed that life was a gift from God, that to not defend that life when offered violence was to hold God's gift in contempt, to be a coward and to breach one's duty to one's community. A sermon given in Philadelphia in 1747 unequivocally equated the failure to defend oneself with suicide:

He that suffers his life to be taken from him by one that hath no authority for that purpose, when he might preserve it by defense, incurs the Guilt of self murder since God hath enjoined him to seek the continuance of his life, and Nature itself teaches every creature to defend itself.

"Cowardice" and "self-respect" have largely disappeared from public discourse. In their place we are offered "self-esteem" as the bellwether of success and a proxy for dignity. "Self-respect" implies that one recognizes standards, and judges oneself worthy by the degree to which one lives up to them. "Self-esteem" simply means that one feels good about oneself. "Dignity" used to refer to the self-mastery and fortitude with which a person conducted himself in the face of life's vicissitudes and the boorish behavior of others. Now, judging by campus speech codes, dignity requires that we never encounter a discouraging word and that others be coerced into acting respectfully, evidently on the assumption that we are powerless to prevent our degradation if exposed to the demeaning behavior of others.

These are signposts proclaiming the insubstantiality of our character, the hollowness of our souls.

It is impossible to address the problem of rampant crime without talking about the moral responsibility of the intended victim. Crime is rampant because the law-abiding, each of us, condone it, excuse it, permit it, submit to it. We permit and encourage it because we do not fight back, immediately, then and there, where it happens. Crime is not rampant because we do not have enough prisons, because judges and prosecutors are too soft, because the police are hamstrung with absurd technicalities. The defect is there, in our character. We are a nation of cowards and shirkers.

Do You Feel Lucky?
In 1991, when then-Attorney General Richard Thornburgh released the FBI's annual crime statistics, he noted that it is now more likely that a person will be the victim of a violent crime than that he will be in an auto accident. Despite this, most people readily believe that the existence of the police relieves them of the responsibility to take full measures to protect themselves. The police, however, are not personal bodyguards. Rather, they act as a general deterrent to crime, both by their presence and by apprehending criminals after the fact. As numerous courts have held, they have no legal obligation to protect anyone in particular. You cannot sue them for failing to prevent you from being the victim of a crime.

Insofar as the police deter by their presence, they are very, very good. Criminals take great pains not to commit a crime in front of them. Unfortunately, the corollary is that you can pretty much bet your life (and you are) that they won't be there at the moment you actually need them.

Should you ever be the victim of an assault, a robbery, or a rape, you will find it very difficult to call the police while the act is in progress, even if you are carrying a portable cellular phone. Nevertheless, you might be interested to know how long it takes them to show up. Department of Justice statistics for 1991 show that, for all crimes of violence, only 28 percent of calls are responded to within five minutes. The idea that protection is a service people can call to have delivered and expect to receive in a timely fashion is often mocked by gun owners, who love to recite the challenge, "Call for a cop, call for an ambulance, and call for a pizza. See who shows up first."

Many people deal with the problem of crime by convincing themselves that they live, work, and travel only in special "crime-free" zones. Invariably, they react with shock and hurt surprise when they discover that criminals do not play by the rules and do not respect these imaginary boundaries. If, however, you understand that crime can occur anywhere at anytime, and if you understand that you can be maimed or mortally wounded in mere seconds, you may wish to consider whether you are willing to place the responsibility for safeguarding your life in the hands of others.

Power And Responsibility
Is your life worth protecting? If so, whose responsibility is it to protect it? If you believe that it is the police's, not only are you wrong -- since the courts universally rule that they have no legal obligation to do so -- but you face some difficult moral quandaries. How can you rightfully ask another human being to risk his life to protect yours, when you will assume no responsibility yourself? Because that is his job and we pay him to do it? Because your life is of incalculable value, but his is only worth the $30,000 salary we pay him? If you believe it reprehensible to possess the means and will to use lethal force to repel a criminal assault, how can you call upon another to do so for you?

Do you believe that you are forbidden to protect yourself because the police are better qualified to protect you, because they know what they are doing but you're a rank amateur? Put aside that this is equivalent to believing that only concert pianists may play the piano and only professional athletes may play sports. What exactly are these special qualities possessed only by the police and beyond the rest of us mere mortals?

One who values his life and takes seriously his responsibilities to his family and community will possess and cultivate the means of fighting back, and will retaliate when threatened with death or grievous injury to himself or a loved one. He will never be content to rely solely on others for his safety, or to think he has done all that is possible by being aware of his surroundings and taking measures of avoidance. Let's not mince words: He will be armed, will be trained in the use of his weapon, and will defend himself when faced with lethal violence.

Fortunately, there is a weapon for preserving life and liberty that can be wielded effectively by almost anyone -- the handgun. Small and light enough to be carried habitually, lethal, but unlike the knife or sword, not demanding great skill or strength, it truly is the "great equalizer." Requiring only hand-eye coordination and a modicum of ability to remain cool under pressure, it can be used effectively by the old and the weak against the young and the strong, by the one against the many.

The handgun is the only weapon that would give a lone female jogger a chance of prevailing against a gang of thugs intent on rape, a teacher a chance of protecting children at recess from a madman intent on massacring them, a family of tourists waiting at a mid-town subway station the means to protect themselves from a gang of teens armed with razors and knives.

But since we live in a society that by and large outlaws the carrying of arms, we are brought into the fray of the Great American Gun War. Gun control is one of the most prominent battlegrounds in our current culture wars. Yet it is unique in the half-heartedness with which our conservative leaders and pundits -- our "conservative elite" -- do battle, and have conceded the moral high ground to liberal gun control proponents. It is not a topic often written about, or written about with any great fervor, by William F. Buckley or Patrick Buchanan. As drug czar, William Bennett advised President Bush to ban "assault weapons." George Will is on record as recommending the repeal of the Second Amendment, and Jack Kemp is on record as favoring a ban on the possession of semiautomatic "assault weapons." The battle for gun rights is one fought predominantly by the common man. The beliefs of both our liberal and conservative elites are in fact abetting the criminal rampage through our society.

Selling Crime Prevention
By any rational measure, nearly all gun control proposals are hokum. The Brady Bill, for example, would not have prevented John Hinckley from obtaining a gun to shoot President Reagan; Hinckley purchased his weapon five months before the attack, and his medical records could not have served as a basis to deny his purchase of a gun, since medical records are not public documents filed with the police. Similarly, California's waiting period and background check did not stop Patrick Purdy from purchasing the "assault rifle" and handguns he used to massacre children during recess in a Stockton schoolyard; the felony conviction that would have provided the basis for stopping the sales did not exist, because Mr. Purdy's previous weapons violations were plea-bargained down from felonies to misdemeanors.

In the mid-sixties there was a public service advertising campaign targeted at car owners about the prevention of car theft. The purpose of the ad was to urge car owners not to leave their keys in their cars. The message was, "Don't help a good boy go bad." The implication was that, by leaving his keys in his car, the normal, law-abiding car owner was contributing to the delinquency of minors who, if they just weren't tempted beyond their limits, would be "good." Now, in those days people still had a fair sense of just who was responsible for whose behavior. The ad succeeded in enraging a goodly portion of the populace, and was soon dropped.

Nearly all of the gun control measures offered by Handgun Control, Inc. (HCI) and its ilk embody the same philosophy. They are founded on the belief that America's law-abiding gun owners are the source of the problem. With their unholy desire for firearms, they are creating a society awash in a sea of guns, thereby helping good boys go bad, and helping bad boys be badder. This laying of moral blame for violent crime at the feet of the law-abiding, and the implicit absolution of violent criminals for their misdeeds, naturally infuriates honest gun owners.

The files of HCI and other gun control organizations are filled with proposals to limit the availability of semiautomatic and other firearms to law-abiding citizens, and barren of proposals for apprehending and punishing violent criminals. It is ludicrous to expect that the proposals of HCI, or any gun control laws, will significantly curb crime. According to Department of Justice and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) statistics, fully 90 percent of violent crimes are committed without a handgun, and 93 percent of the guns obtained by violent criminals are not obtained through the lawful purchase and sale transactions that are the object of most gun control legislation. Furthermore, the number of violent criminals is minute in comparison to the number of firearms in America -- estimated by the ATF at about 200 million, approximately one-third of which are handguns. With so abundant a supply, there will always be enough guns available for those who wish to use them for nefarious ends, no matter how complete the legal prohibitions against them, or how draconian the punishment for their acquisition or use. No, the gun control proposals of HCI and other organizations are not seriously intended as crime control. Something else is at work here.

The Tyranny of the Elite
Gun control is a moral crusade against a benighted, barbaric citizenry. This is demonstrated not only by the ineffectualness of gun control in preventing crime, and by the fact that it focuses on restricting the behavior of the law-abiding rather than apprehending and punishing the guilty, but also by the execration that gun control proponents heap on gun owners and their evil instrumentality, the NRA. Gun owners are routinely portrayed as uneducated, paranoid rednecks fascinated by and prone to violence, i.e., exactly the type of person who opposes the liberal agenda and whose moral and social "re-education" is the object of liberal social policies.

Typical of such bigotry is New York Gov. Mario Cuomo's famous characterization of gun-owners as "hunters who drink beer, don't vote, and lie to their wives about where they were all weekend." Similar vituperation is rained upon the NRA, characterized by Sen. Edward Kennedy as the "pusher's best friend," lampooned in political cartoons as standing for the right of children to carry firearms to school and, in general, portrayed as standing for an individual's God-given right to blow people away at will.

The stereotype is, of course, false. As criminologist and constitutional lawyer Don B. Kates, Jr. and former HCI contributor Dr. Patricia Harris have pointed out, "[s]tudies consistently show that, on the average, gun owners are better educated and have more prestigious jobs than non-owners.... Later studies show that gun owners are less likely than non-owners to approve of police brutality, violence against dissenters, etc."

Conservatives must understand that the antipathy many liberals have for gun owners arises in good measure from their statist utopianism. This habit of mind has nowhere been better explored than in The Republic. There, Plato argues that the perfectly just society is one in which an unarmed people exhibit virtue by minding their own business in the performance of their assigned functions, while the government of philosopher-kings, above the law and protected by armed guardians unquestioning in their loyalty to the state, engineers, implements, and fine-tunes the creation of that society, aided and abetted by myths that both hide and justify their totalitarian manipulation.

The Unarmed Life
When columnist Carl Rowan preaches gun control and uses a gun to defend his home, when Maryland Gov. William Donald Schaefer seeks legislation year after year to ban semiautomatic "assault weapons" whose only purpose, we are told, is to kill people, while he is at the same time escorted by state police armed with large-capacity 9mm semiautomatic pistols, it is not simple hypocrisy. It is the workings of that habit of mind possessed by all superior beings who have taken upon themselves the terrible burden of civilizing the masses and who understand, like our Congress, that laws are for other people.

The liberal elite know that they are philosopher-kings. They know that the people simply cannot be trusted; that they are incapable of just and fair self-government; that left to their own devices, their society will be racist, sexist, homophobic, and inequitable -- and the liberal elite know how to fix things. They are going to help us live the good and just life, even if they have to lie to us and force us to do it. And they detest those who stand in their way.

The private ownership of firearms is a rebuke to this utopian zeal. To own firearms is to affirm that freedom and liberty are not gifts from the state. It is to reserve final judgment about whether the state is encroaching on freedom and liberty, to stand ready to defend that freedom with more than mere words, and to stand outside the state's totalitarian reach.

The Florida Experience
The elitist distrust of the people underlying the gun control movement is illustrated beautifully in HCI's campaign against a new concealed-carry law in Florida. Prior to 1987, the Florida law permitting the issuance of concealed-carry permits was administered at the county level. The law was vague, and, as a result, was subject to conflicting interpretation and political manipulation. Permits were issued principally to security personnel and the privileged few with political connections. Permits were valid only within the county of issuance.

In 1987, however, Florida enacted a uniform concealed-carry law which mandates that county authorities issue a permit to anyone who satisfies certain objective criteria. The law requires that a permit be issued to any applicant who is a resident, at least twenty-one years of age, has no criminal record, no record of alcohol or drug abuse, no history of mental illness, and provides evidence of having satisfactorily completed a firearms safety course offered by the NRA or other competent instructor. The applicant must provide a set of fingerprints, after which the authorities make a background check. The permit must be issued or denied within ninety days, is valid throughout the state, and must be renewed every three years, which provides authorities a regular means of reevaluating whether the permit holder still qualifies.

Passage of this legislation was vehemently opposed by HCI and the media. The law, they said, would lead to citizens shooting each other over everyday disputes involving fender benders, impolite behavior, and other slights to their dignity.

Terms like "Florida, the Gunshine State" and "Dodge City East" were coined to suggest that the state, and those seeking passage of the law, were encouraging individuals to act as judge, jury, and executioner in a "Death Wish" society.

No HCI campaign more clearly demonstrates the elitist beliefs underlying the campaign to eradicate gun ownership. Given the qualifications required of permit holders, HCI and the media can only believe that common, law-abiding citizens are seething cauldrons of homicidal rage, ready to kill to avenge any slight to their dignity, eager to seek out and summarily execute the lawless. Only lack of immediate access to a gun restrains them and prevents the blood from flowing in the streets.

They are so mentally and morally deficient that they would mistake a permit to carry a weapon in self-defense as a state-sanctioned license to kill at will.

Did the dire predictions come true? Despite the fact that Miami and Dade County have severe problems with the drug trade, the homicide rate fell in Florida following enactment of this law, as it did in Oregon following enactment of similar legislation there. There are, in addition, several documented cases of new permit holders successfully using their weapons to defend themselves. Information from the Florida Department of State shows that, from the beginning of the program in 1987 through June 1993, 160,823 permits have been issued, and only 530, or about 0.33 percent of the applicants, have been denied a permit for failure to satisfy the criteria, indicating that the law is benefitting those whom it was intended to benefit -- the law-abiding. Only 16 permits, less than 1/100th of 1 percent, have been revoked due to the post-issuance commission of a crime involving a firearm.

The Florida legislation has been used as a model for legislation adopted by Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Mississippi. There are, in addition, seven other states (Maine, North and South Dakota, Utah, Washington, West Virginia, and, with the exception of cities with a population in excess of 1 million, Pennsylvania) which provide that concealed-carry permits must be issued to law-abiding citizens who satisfy various objective criteria. Finally, no permit is required at all in Vermont. Altogether, then, there are thirteen states in which law-abiding citizens who wish to carry arms to defend themselves may do so. While no one appears to have compiled the statistics from all of these jurisdictions, there is certainly an ample data base for those seeking the truth about the trustworthiness of law-abiding citizens who carry firearms.

Other evidence also suggests that armed citizens are very responsible in using guns to defend themselves. Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck, using surveys and other data, has determined that armed citizens defend their lives or property with firearms against criminals approximately 1 million times a year. In 98 percent of these instances, the citizen merely brandishes the weapon or fires a warning shot. Only in 2 percent of the cases do citizens actually shoot their assailants. In defending themselves with their firearms, armed citizens kill 2,000 to 3,000 criminals each year, three times the number killed by the police. A nationwide study by Kates, the constitutional lawyer and criminologist, found that only 2 percent of civilian shootings involved an innocent person mistakenly identified as a criminal. The "error rate" for the police, however, was 11 percent, over five times as high.

It is simply not possible to square the numbers above and the experience of Florida with the notions that honest, law-abiding gun owners are borderline psychopaths itching for an excuse to shoot someone, vigilantes eager to seek out and summarily execute the lawless, or incompetent fools incapable of determining when it is proper to use lethal force in defense of their lives. Nor upon reflection should these results seem surprising. Rape, robbery, and attempted murder are not typically actions rife with ambiguity or subtlety, requiring special powers of observation and great book-learning to discern. When a man pulls a knife on a woman and says, "You're coming with me," her judgment that a crime is being committed is not likely to be in error. There is little chance that she is going to shoot the wrong person. It is the police, because they are rarely at the scene of the crime when it occurs, who are more likely to find themselves in circumstances where guilt and innocence are not so clear-cut, and in which the probability for mistakes is higher.

Arms and Liberty
Classical republican philosophy has long recognized the critical relationship between personal liberty and the possession of arms by a people ready and willing to use them. Political theorists as dissimilar as Niccolo Machiavelli, Sir Thomas More, James Harrington, Algernon Sidney, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau all shared the view that the possession of arms is vital for resisting tyranny, and that to be disarmed by one's government is tantamount to being enslaved by it. The possession of arms by the people is the ultimate warrant that government governs only with the consent of the governed. As Kates has shown, the Second Amendment is as much a product of this political philosophy as it is of the American experience in the Revolutionary War. Yet our conservative elite has abandoned this aspect of republican theory. Although our conservative pundits recognize and embrace gun owners as allies in other arenas, their battle for gun rights is desultory. The problem here is not a statist utopianism, although goodness knows that liberals are not alone in the confidence they have in the state's ability to solve society's problems. Rather, the problem seems to lie in certain cultural traits shared by our conservative and liberal elites.

One such trait is an abounding faith in the power of the word. The failure of our conservative elite to defend the Second Amendment stems in great measure from an overestimation of the power of the rights set forth in the First Amendment, and a general undervaluation of action. Implicit in calls for the repeal of the Second Amendment is the assumption that our First Amendment rights are sufficient to preserve our liberty. The belief is that liberty can be preserved as long as men freely speak their minds; that there is no tyranny or abuse that can survive being exposed in the press; and that the truth need only be disclosed for the culprits to be shamed. The people will act, and the truth shall set us, and keep us, free.

History is not kind to this belief, tending rather to support the view of Hobbes, Machiavelli, and other republican theorists that only people willing and able to defend themselves can preserve their liberties. While it may be tempting and comforting to believe that the existence of mass electronic communication has forever altered the balance of power between the state and its subjects, the belief has certainly not been tested by time, and what little history there is in the age of mass communication is not especially encouraging. The camera, radio, and press are mere tools and, like guns, can be used for good or ill. Hitler, after all, was a masterful orator, used radio to very good effect, and is well known to have pioneered and exploited the propaganda opportunities afforded by film. And then, of course, there were the Brownshirts, who knew very well how to quell dissent among intellectuals.

Polite Society
In addition to being enamored of the power of words, our conservative elite shares with liberals the notion that an armed society is just not civilized or progressive, that massive gun ownership is a blot on our civilization. This association of personal disarmament with civilized behavior is one of the great unexamined beliefs of our time.

Should you read English literature from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, you will discover numerous references to the fact that a gentleman, especially when out at night or traveling, armed himself with a sword or a pistol against the chance of encountering a highwayman or other such predator. This does not appear to have shocked the ladies accompanying him. True, for the most part there were no police in those days, but we have already addressed the notion that the presence of the police absolves people of the responsibility to look after their safety, and in any event the existence of the police cannot be said to have reduced crime to negligible levels.

It is by no means obvious why it is "civilized" to permit oneself to fall easy prey to criminal violence, and to permit criminals to continue unobstructed in their evil ways. While it may be that a society in which crime is so rare that no one ever needs to carry a weapon is "civilized," a society that stigmatizes the carrying of weapons by the law-abiding -- because it distrusts its citizens more than it fears rapists, robbers, and murderers -- certainly cannot claim this distinction. Perhaps the notion that defending oneself with lethal force is not "civilized" arises from the view that violence is always wrong, or the view that each human being is of such intrinsic worth that it is wrong to kill anyone under any circumstances. The necessary implication of these propositions, however, is that life is not worth defending. Far from being "civilized," the beliefs that counterviolence and killing are always wrong are an invitation to the spread of barbarism. Such beliefs announce loudly and clearly that those who do not respect the lives and property of others will rule over those who do.

In truth, one who believes it wrong to arm himself against criminal violence shows contempt of God's gift of life (or, in modern parlance, does not properly value himself), does not live up to his responsibilities to his family and community, and proclaims himself mentally and morally deficient, because he does not trust himself to behave responsibly. In truth, a state that deprives its law-abiding citizens of the means to effectively defend themselves is not civilized but barbarous, becoming an accomplice of murderers, rapists, and thugs and revealing its totalitarian nature by its tacit admission that the disorganized, random havoc created by criminals is far less a threat than are men and women who believe themselves free and independent, and act accordingly.

While gun control proponents and other advocates of a kinder, gentler society incessantly decry our "armed society," in truth we do not live in an armed society. We live in a society in which violent criminals and agents of the state habitually carry weapons, and in which many law-abiding citizens own firearms but do not go about armed. Department of Justice statistics indicate that 87 percent of all violent crimes occur outside the home. Essentially, although tens of millions own firearms, we are an unarmed society.

Take Back the Night
Clearly the police and the courts are not providing a significant brake on criminal activity. While liberals call for more poverty, education, and drug treatment programs, conservatives take a more direct tack. George Will advocates a massive increase in the number of police and a shift toward "community-based policing." Meanwhile, the NRA and many conservative leaders call for laws that would require violent criminals serve at least 85 percent of their sentences and would place repeat offenders permanently behind bars.

Our society suffers greatly from the beliefs that only official action is legitimate and that the state is the source of our earthly salvation. Both liberal and conservative prescriptions for violent crime suffer from the "not in my job description" school of thought regarding the responsibilities of the law-abiding citizen, and from an overestimation of the ability of the state to provide society's moral moorings. As long as law-abiding citizens assume no personal responsibility for combatting crime, liberal and conservative programs will fail to contain it.

Judging by the numerous articles about concealed-carry in gun magazines, the growing number of products advertised for such purpose, and the increase in the number of concealed-carry applications in states with mandatory-issuance laws, more and more people, including growing numbers of women, are carrying firearms for self-defense.

Since there are still many states in which the issuance of permits is discretionary and in which law enforcement officials routinely deny applications, many people have been put to the hard choice between protecting their lives or respecting the law.

Some of these people have learned the hard way, by being the victim of a crime, or by seeing a friend or loved one raped, robbed, or murdered, that violent crime can happen to anyone, anywhere at anytime, and that crime is not about sex or property but life, liberty, and dignity.

The laws proscribing concealed-carry of firearms by honest, law-abiding citizens breed nothing but disrespect for the law. As the Founding Fathers knew well, a government that does not trust its honest, law-abiding, taxpaying citizens with the means of self-defense is not itself worthy of trust. Laws disarming honest citizens proclaim that the government is the master, not the servant, of the people. A federal law along the lines of the Florida statute -- overriding all contradictory state and local laws and acknowledging that the carrying of firearms by law-abiding citizens is a privilege and immunity of citizenship -- is needed to correct the outrageous conduct of state and local officials operating under discretionary licensing systems.

What we certainly do not need is more gun control. Those who call for the repeal of the Second Amendment so that we can really begin controlling firearms betray a serious misunderstanding of the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights does not grant rights to the people, such that its repeal would legitimately confer upon government the powers otherwise proscribed. The Bill of Rights is the list of the fundamental, inalienable rights, endowed in man by his Creator, that define what it means to be a free and independent people, the rights which must exist to ensure that government governs only with the consent of the people.

At one time this was even understood by the Supreme Court. In United States v. Cruikshank (1876), the first case in which the Court had an opportunity to interpret the Second Amendment, it stated that the right confirmed by the Second Amendment "is not a right granted by the constitution. Neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence." The repeal of the Second Amendment would no more render the outlawing of firearms legitimate than the repeal of the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment would authorize the government to imprison and kill people at will. A government that abrogates any of the Bill of Rights, with or without majoritarian approval, forever acts illegitimately, becomes tyrannical, and loses the moral right to govern.

This is the uncompromising understanding reflected in the warning that America's gun owners will not go gently into that good, utopian night: "You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands." While liberals take this statement as evidence of the retrograde, violent nature of gun owners, we gun owners hope that liberals hold equally strong sentiments about their printing presses, word processors, and television cameras. The republic depends upon fervent devotion to all our fundamental rights.

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Wednesday, November 14, 2007

The Insanity of Bush Hatred BY PETER BERKOWITZ


The Insanity of Bush Hatred
Our politics suffer when passions overcome reason and vitriol becomes virtue.

BY PETER BERKOWITZ
November 14, 2007 Opinion Journal (Excerpts)

“Bush hatred is different. It's not that this time members of the intellectual class have been swept away by passion and become votaries of anger and loathing. Alas, intellectuals have always been prone to employ their learning and fine words to whip up resentment and demonize the competition. Bush hatred, however, is distinguished by the pride intellectuals have taken in their hatred, openly endorsing it as a virtue and enthusiastically proclaiming that their hatred is not only a rational response to the president and his administration but a mark of good moral hygiene….

But as at that D.C. dinner in late spring of 2004, so again in early autumn 2007 at dinner following the Princeton panel, several of my progressive colleagues seized upon my remarks against giving oneself over to hatred. And they vigorously rejected the notion. Both a professor of political theory and a nationally syndicated columnist insisted that I was wrong to condemn hatred as a passion that impaired political judgment. On the contrary, they argued, Bush hatred was fully warranted considering his theft of the 2000 election in Florida with the aid of the Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore; his politicization of national security by making the invasion of Iraq an issue in the 2002 midterm elections; and his shredding of the Constitution to authorize the torture of enemy combatants.

Of course, these very examples illustrate nothing so much as the damage hatred inflicts on the intellect. Many of my colleagues at Princeton that evening seemed not to have considered that in 2000 it was Al Gore who shifted the election controversy to the courts by filing a lawsuit challenging decisions made by local Florida county election supervisors. Nor did many of my Princeton dinner companions take into account that between the Florida Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court, 10 of 16 higher court judges--five of whom were Democratic appointees--found equal protection flaws with the recount scheme ordered by the intermediate Florida court.

And they did not appear to have pondered Judge Richard Posner's sensible observation, much less themselves sensibly observe, that while indeed it was strange to have the U.S. Supreme Court decide a presidential election, it would have been even stranger for the election to have been decided by the Florida Supreme Court
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As for the 2002 midterm elections, it is true that Mr. Bush took the question of whether to use military force against Iraq to the voters, placing many Democratic candidates that fall in awkward positions. But in a liberal democracy, especially from a progressive point of view, aren't questions of war and peace proper ones to put to the people--as Democrats did successfully in 2006?

And lord knows the Bush administration has blundered in its handling of legal issues that have arisen in the war on terror. But from the common progressive denunciations you would never know that the Bush administration has rejected torture as illegal. And you could easily overlook that in our system of government the executive branch, which has principal responsibility for defending the nation, is in wartime bound to overreach--especially when it confronts on a daily basis intelligence reports that describe terrifying threats--but that when checked by the Supreme Court the Bush administration has, in accordance with the system, promptly complied with the law.

In short, Bush hatred is not a rational response to actual Bush perfidy. Rather, Bush hatred compels its progressive victims--who pride themselves on their sophistication and sensitivity to nuance--to reduce complicated events and multilayered issues to simple matters of good and evil. Like all hatred in politics, Bush hatred blinds to the other sides of the argument, and constrains the hater to see a monster instead of a political opponent.

Prof. Starr shows in "Freedom's Power" that tolerance, generosity, and reasoned skepticism are hallmarks of the truly liberal spirit. His analysis suggests that the problem with progressives who have succumbed to Bush hatred is not their liberalism; it's their betrayal of it.” Peter Berkowitz

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Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Let's Take It Easy on Hillary

"CNN's Wolf Blitzer has been warned not to focus Thursday's Dem debate on Hillary. 'This campaign is about issues, not on who we can bring down and destroy,' top Clinton insider explains. 'Blitzer should not go down to the levels of character attack and pull a Russert’".

The above Drudge Report item has been picked up and discussed at length by Rush Limbaugh today who also pointed out the several examples we have now of planted questions at Clinton events. Any cop will tell you that when you catch a bad guy, he has probably gotten away with a hundred crimes for every time he’s caught.

My only problem with all of this is that I am so fearful of a Hillary Clinton presidency, I am starting to worry about overkill and a sympathy vote. I remember when the Republican-majority Congress impeached her husband for perjury and attempting to suborn the testimony of a witness. This action was probably interpreted generally as overkill and may have led to his acquittal at the Senate trial.

I’ve decided to ease up on the series of articles I’ve been posting pointing out her record, her views and her plans for us.

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The Miserable Failures of the Democrat Congress


As Speaker Pelosi pointedly ignores the success of the surge and tries once again to hobble America’s efforts to counter the Islamic fascists by trying again to cut off funding of the troops, the ratings of the Democratic Congress continue in freefall; and as we watch oil top $100 a barrel and gasoline $3.25 a gallon, the Democrats continue to stall any realistic attempts to fix the problem. They would rather see poor people starve with their senseless Biofuels program, and the country go into a recession they can try to blame on Bush, then face up to the need to drill for oil and build nuclear plants – the only ways to end our dependency on Mideast oil. Karl Rove explains the specifics of the failures of the Democrats:


THE OPPOSITE OF PROGRESS
A Failure to Lead
The Democratic Congress is more interested in acting out than in taking positive action.

BY KARL ROVE, November 9, 2007 Opinion Journal

This week is the one-year anniversary of Democrats winning Congress. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid probably aren't in a celebrating mood. The goodwill they enjoyed after their victory is gone. Their bright campaign promises are unfulfilled. Democratic leadership is in disarray. And Congress's approval rating has fallen to its lowest point in history.

The problems the Democrats are now experiencing begin with the federal budget. Or rather, the lack of one. In 2006, Democrats criticized Congress for dragging its feet on the budget and pledged that they would do better. Instead, they did worse.

The new fiscal year started Oct. 1--five weeks ago--but Democrats have yet to send the president a single annual appropriations bill. It's been at least 20 years since Congress has gone this late in passing any appropriation bills, an indication of the mess the Pelosi-Reid Congress is now in.

Even worse, the Democrats have made clear all their talk about "fiscal discipline" is just that--talk. They're proposing to spend $205 billion more than the president has proposed over the next five years. And the opening wedge of this binge is $22 billion more in spending proposed for the coming year. Only in Washington could someone in public life be so clueless to say, as Sen. Reid and Rep. Pelosi have, that $22 billion is a "relatively small" difference.

Let's also be clear about what it means to roll back the president's 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, as the Democrats want to do. Every income-tax payer will pay more as all tax rates rise. Families will pay $500 more per child as they lose the child tax credit. Taxes on small businesses would go up by an average of about $4,000. Retirees will pay higher taxes on investment retirement income. And now we have the $1 trillion tax increase proposed as "tax reform" by the Democrats' chief tax writer last month.

Failing to pass a budget, proposing a huge spike in federal spending and offering the biggest tax increase in history are not the only hallmarks of this Democratic Congress.

Beholden to MoveOn.org and other left-wing groups, Democratic leaders have ignored the progress made in Iraq by the surge, diminished the efforts of our military, and wasted precious time with failed attempts to force an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. They continue to try to implement this course, which would lead to chaos in the region, the creation of a possible terror state with the third largest oil reserves in the world, and a major propaganda victory for Osama bin Laden as well as for Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah.

After promising on the campaign trail to "support our troops," Democrats tried to cut off funding for our military while our soldiers and Marines are under fire from the enemy. For 19 Senate Democrats, this was simply a bridge too far, so they voted against their own leadership's proposal. Democrats also tried to stuff an emergency war-spending bill with billions of dollars of pork for individual members. Now the party's leaders are stalling an emergency supplemental bill with funding for body armor, bullets and mine-resistant vehicles
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After pledging a "Congress that strongly honors our responsibility to protect our people from terrorism," Democrats have refused to make permanent reforms of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that the Director of National Intelligence said were needed to close "critical gaps in our intelligence capability." Their presidential candidates fell all over each other in a recent debate to pledge an end to the Terrorist Surveillance Program. Then Senate Democratic leaders, thinking there was an opening for political advantage, slow-walked the confirmation of Judge Michael Mukasey to be the next attorney general. It's obvious that this is a man who knows the important role the Justice Department plays in the war on terror. Delaying his confirmation is only making it harder to prosecute the war.

Democrats promised "civility and bipartisanship." Instead, they stiff-armed their Republican colleagues, refused to include them in budget negotiations between the two houses, and have launched more than 400 investigations and made more than 675 requests for documents, interviews or testimony. They refused a bipartisan compromise on an expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program, instead wasting precious time sending the president a bill they knew he would veto. And they did this knowing that they wouldn't be able to override that veto. Why? Because their pollsters told them putting the children's health-care program at risk would score political points. Instead, it left them looking cynical.

The list of Congress's failures grows each month. No energy bill. No action on health care. No action on the mortgage crisis. No immigration reform. No progress on renewing No Child Left Behind. Precious little action on judges and not enough on reducing trade barriers. Congress has not done its work. And these failures will have consequences.

Democrats had a moment after the 2006 election, but now that moment has passed. They've squandered it. They have demonstrated both the inability and unwillingness to govern. Instead, after more than a decade in the congressional minority, they reflexively look for short-term partisan advantage and attempt to appease the party's most strident fringe. Now that Democrats have the reins of congressional power, their true colors are coming out and the public doesn't like what it sees.

The Democratic victory in 2006 was narrow. They won the House by 85,961 votes out of over 80 million cast and the Senate by a mere 3,562 out of over 62 million cast. A party that wins control by that narrow margin can quickly see its fortunes reversed when it fails to act responsibly, fails to fulfill its promises, and fails to lead.

Mr. Rove is a former adviser to President George W. Bush.

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Sunday, November 11, 2007

What Hillarycare Would Mean to Americans

One of the things I really like about wintering on the Gulf coast of Florida is the number of Canadian and British friends I have been able to make. For some reason they seem often to enjoy Florida and both ballroom dancing and bridge, and through those activities I have met several couples from both countries. Although my sample size is not very large, it hits me hard that both a Canadian man I know and a British woman I also know have had nightmarish experiences with their respective Canadian and British socialized health-care systems.

The man had a high PSA reading, which often signifies prostate cancer, and must be followed up immediately by a biopsy. Time is critical in diagnosing and treating this horrendous disease. The man had to wait several months before he could have the biopsy; fortunately it was negative, but what he doesn’t know, and I didn’t want to tell him, was that the Canadian doctors were using a biopsy procedure that is outdated and often misses the tumor. I know this because I am a survivor of prostate cancer and know more about it than I care to. See the highlighted section in the article below that deals with prostate cancer survival rates.

The British woman suffered a stroke while vacationing here in Florida and was treated by local doctors in a local hospital. They saved her life and her future quality of life with a rapid and appropriate response followed by a regimen of physical therapy. This happened in the fall of 2006, after which she returned to Great Britain where she found no services available to monitor her condition or her therapy. She and her husband returned this fall, and she told me that she is absolutely convinced that, if the stroke had occurred in England, she would be dead.

"A Canadian Doctor Describes How Socialized Medicine Doesn't Work"

By DAVID GRATZER, IBD Editorials, July 26, 2007

I was once a believer in socialized medicine. As a Canadian, I had soaked up the belief that government-run health care was truly compassionate. What I knew about American health care was unappealing: high expenses and lots of uninsured people.

My health care prejudices crumbled on the way to a medical school class. On a subzero Winnipeg morning in 1997, I cut across the hospital emergency room to shave a few minutes off my frigid commute.

Swinging open the door, I stepped into a nightmare: the ER overflowed with elderly people on stretchers, waiting for admission. Some, it turned out, had waited five days. The air stank with sweat and urine. Right then, I began to reconsider everything that I thought I knew about Canadian health care.

Dr. Jacques Chaoulli faces the media in Montreal in June 2005, after he got Canada's Supreme Court to strike down a Quebec law banning private insurance for services covered under Medicare — a decision the rocked the country's universal health care system.

I soon discovered that the problems went well beyond overcrowded ERs. Patients had to wait for practically any diagnostic test or procedure, such as the man with persistent pain from a hernia operation whom we referred to a pain clinic — with a three-year wait list; or the woman with breast cancer who needed to wait four months for radiation therapy, when the standard of care was four weeks.

Government researchers now note that more than 1.5 million Ontarians (or 12% of that province's population) can't find family physicians. Health officials in one Nova Scotia community actually resorted to a lottery to determine who'd get a doctor's appointment.

These problems are not unique to Canada — they characterize all government-run health care systems.

Consider the recent British controversy over a cancer patient who tried to get an appointment with a specialist, only to have it canceled — 48 times. More than 1 million Britons must wait for some type of care, with 200,000 in line for longer than six months. In France, the supply of doctors is so limited that during an August 2003 heat wave — when many doctors were on vacation and hospitals were stretched beyond capacity — 15,000 elderly citizens died. Across Europe, state-of-the-art drugs aren't available. And so on.

Single-payer systems — confronting dirty hospitals, long waiting lists and substandard treatment — are starting to crack, however. Canadian newspapers are filled with stories of people frustrated by long delays for care. Many Canadians, determined to get the care they need, have begun looking not to lotteries — but to markets.

Dr. Jacques Chaoulli is at the center of this changing health care scene. In the 1990s, he organized a private Quebec practice — patients called him, he made house calls and then he directly billed his patients. The local health board cried foul and began fining him. The legal status of private practice in Canada remained murky, but billing patients, rather than the government, was certainly illegal, and so was private insurance.

Eventually, Chaoulli took on the government in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court. Representing an elderly Montrealer who had waited almost a year for a hip replacement, Chaoulli maintained that the patient should have the right to pay for private health insurance and get treatment sooner. A majority of the court agreed that Quebec's charter did implicitly recognize such a right.

The monumental ruling, which shocked the government, opened the way to more private medicine in Quebec. Though the prohibition against private insurance holds in the rest of Canada for now, at least two people outside Quebec, armed with Chaoulli's case as precedent, are taking their demand for private insurance to court.

Consider, too, Rick Baker. He isn't a neurosurgeon or even a doctor. He's a medical broker — one member of a private sector that is rushing in to address the inadequacies of Canada's government care. Canadians pay him to set up surgical procedures, diagnostic tests and specialist consultations, privately and quickly.

Baker describes a man who had a seizure and received a diagnosis of epilepsy.

Dissatisfied with the opinion — he had no family history of epilepsy, but he did have constant headaches and nausea, which aren't usually seen in the disorder — he requested an MRI.

The government told him that the wait would be 4 1/2 months. So he went to Baker, who arranged to have the MRI done within 24 hours — and who, after the test revealed a brain tumor, arranged surgery within a few weeks. Some services that Baker brokers almost certainly contravene Canadian law, but governments are loath to stop him.

Other private-sector health options are blossoming across Canada, and the government is increasingly turning a blind eye to them, too, despite their often uncertain legal status. Private clinics are opening at a rate of about one a week.

Canadian doctors, long silent on the health care system's problems, are starting to speak up. Last August, they voted Brian Day president of their national association.

Day has become perhaps the most vocal critic of Canadian public health care, having opened his own private surgery center and challenging the government to shut him down.

And now even Canadian governments are looking to the private sector to shrink the waiting lists. In British Columbia, private clinics perform roughly 80% of government-funded diagnostic testing.

This privatizing trend is reaching Europe, too. Britain's Labour Party — which originally created the National Health Service — now openly favors privatization. Sweden's government, after the completion of the latest round of privatizations, will be contracting out some 80% of Stockholm's primary care and 40% of its total health services.

Since the fall of communism, Slovakia has looked to liberalize its state-run system, introducing co-payments and privatizations. And modest market reforms have begun in Germany.

Yet even as Stockholm and Saskatoon are percolating with the ideas of Adam Smith, a growing number of prominent Americans are arguing that socialized health care still provides better results for less money.

Politicians like Hillary Clinton are on board; Michael Moore's new documentary, "Sicko," celebrates the virtues of Canada's socialized health care; the National Coalition on Health Care, which includes big businesses like AT&T, recently endorsed a scheme to centralize major health decisions to a government committee; and big unions are questioning the tenets of employer-sponsored health insurance.

One often-heard argument, voiced by the New York Times' Paul Krugman and others, is that America lags behind other countries in crude health outcomes. But such outcomes reflect a mosaic of factors, such as diet, lifestyle, drug use and cultural values.

It pains me as a doctor to say this, but health care is just one factor in health.
Americans live 75.3 years on average, fewer than Canadians (77.3) or the French (76.6) or the citizens of any Western European nation save Portugal. Health care influences life expectancy, of course. But a life can end because of a murder, a fall or a car accident. Such factors aren't academic — homicide rates in the U.S. are much higher than in other countries.

In The Business of Health, Robert Ohsfeldt and John Schneider factor out intentional and unintentional injuries from life-expectancy statistics and find that Americans who don't die in car crashes or homicides outlive people in any other Western country.

And if we measure a health care system by how well it serves its sick citizens, American medicine excels. Five-year cancer survival rates bear this out. For leukemia, the American survival rate is almost 50%; the European rate is just 35%.

Esophageal carcinoma: 12% in the U.S., 6% in Europe. The survival rate for prostate cancer is 81.2% here, yet 61.7% in France and down to 44.3% in England — a striking variation.

Like many critics of American health care, though, Krugman argues that the costs are just too high: health care spending in Canada and Britain, he notes, is a small fraction of what Americans pay. Again, the picture isn't quite as clear as he suggests. Because the U.S. is so much wealthier than other countries, it isn't unreasonable for it to spend more on health care. Take America's high spending on research and development. M.D. Anderson in Texas, a prominent cancer center, spends more on research than Canada does.

That said, American health care is expensive. And Americans aren't always getting a good deal. In the coming years, with health expenses spiraling up, it will be easy for some to give in to the temptation of socialized medicine. In Washington, there are plenty of old pieces of legislation that like-minded politicians could take off the shelf, dust off and promote: expanding Medicare to Americans 55 and older, say, or covering all children in Medicaid.

But such initiatives would push the U.S. further down the path to a government-run system and make things much, much worse. True, government bureaucrats would be able to cut costs — but only by shrinking access to health care, as in Canada, and engendering a Canadian-style nightmare of overflowing emergency rooms and yearlong waits for treatment.

America is right to seek a model for delivering good health care at good prices, but we should be looking not to Canada, but close to home — in the other four-fifths or so of our economy. From telecommunications to retail, deregulation and market competition have driven prices down and quality and productivity up. Health care is long overdue for the same prescription.


Editorial Note: You can expect to see many more articles about Hillary Clinton if she gets the Democratic nomination. I will do everything in my power to stop her from imposing this nightmare on America.

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