Text 7622, 185 rader
Skriven 2008-09-15 17:52:00 av TIM RICHARDSON (1:123/140)
     Kommentar till en text av ALL /
Ärende: Hey where is everyone?
==============================
On 09-15-08, MO


FOR THE RECORD


"Charlie Gibson got it wrong. There is no single meaning of the Bush
doctrine. In fact, there have been four distinct meanings, each one
succeeding another over the eight years of this administration and the
one Charlie Gibson cited is not the one in common usage today. It is utterly
different. He asked Palin, ‘Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?’ She
responded, quite sensibly to a question that is ambiguous, ‘In what
respect, Charlie?’ Sensing his ‘gotcha’ moment, Gibson refused to tell
her. After making her fish for the answer, Gibson grudgingly explained
to the moose-hunting rube that the Bush doctrine ‘is that we have the right
of anticipatory self-defense.’ Wrong. I know something about the subject
because... I was the first to use the term. In the cover essay of the
June 4, 2001, issue of the Weekly Standard entitled, ‘The Bush Doctrine: ABM,
Kyoto, and the New American Unilateralism,’ I suggested that the Bush
administration policies of unilaterally withdrawing from the ABM treaty
and rejecting the Kyoto protocol, together with others, amounted to a
radical change in foreign policy that should be called the Bush
doctrine."


"Then came 9/11, and that notion was immediately superseded by the advent
of the war on terror. In his address to the joint session of Congress
nine days after 9/11, President Bush declared: ‘Either you are with us or you
are with the terrorists. From this day forward any nation that continues
to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as
a hostile regime.’ This ‘with us or against us’ policy regarding terror...
became the essence of the Bush doctrine. Until Iraq. A year later, when
the Iraq war was looming, Bush offered his major justification by
enunciating a doctrine of preemptive war. This is the one Charlie Gibson
thinks is the Bush doctrine. It’s not. It’s the third in a series and
was superseded by the fourth and current definition of the Bush doctrine,
the most sweeping formulation of the Bush approach to foreign policy and the
one that most clearly and distinctively defines the Bush years: the idea
that the fundamental mission of American foreign policy is to spread
democracy throughout the world... Yes, Sarah Palin didn’t know what it
is."


"But neither does Charlie Gibson. And at least she didn’t pretend to
know while he looked down his nose and over his glasses with weary
disdain, sighing and ‘sounding like an impatient teacher,’ as the [New
York] Times noted. In doing so, he captured perfectly the establishment
snobbery and intellectual condescension that has characterized the
chattering classes’ reaction to the mother of five who presumes to play
on their stage."  Charles Krauthammer


CAMPAIGN WATCH


"Only once in modern times has a vice presidential candidate swung an
election. Lyndon Johnson brought Texas and Alabama to John F. Kennedy in
1960, states that otherwise would have been suspicious of a Catholic
liberal from New England. I think Sarah Palin will be the second. She
has changed the nature of this race in ways ominous for Mr. Obama. First,
this race is no longer between a candidate who advocates change and the
status quo, as Democrats would like to frame it. It’s between two different
visions of change, and between a ticket that’s actually delivered
reform, and a ticket that just talks about it."  Jack Kelly


OPINION IN BRIEF


"One of the greater ironies of our time is that the post-convention
bounce, and it may be more than a mere bounce, is a gift from the
correspondents, pundits and other howling bloviators who set upon Sarah
Palin’s 17-year-old daughter, snarling, snapping and scrapping like a
pack of ravenous wolves. You can read and hear them now consoling each other
with speculations that the National Enquirer, once the scourge of
‘respectable’ journalism, will turn up something from the garbage cans
of Wasilla and the trash bins of Juneau and Anchorage. Barack Obama accuses
John McCain of not ‘getting it.’ Sarah Palin says it’s Sen. Obama who
doesn’t ‘get it.’ They’re all wrong. It’s the bloggers, the reporters,
the pundits and the rest of the far-flung media that doesn’t ‘get it.’ It’s
not the media’s fault. There is no media conspiracy, vast or otherwise.
The average reporter, correspondent, columnist, pundit or editor
couldn’t conspire with the entire Harvard Law School faculty to change the oil
in his wife’s car. It’s worse than a conspiracy. It’s a consensus. The
newsrooms of the agenda-setting newspapers, the television networks and
the newsmagazines have become strongholds of the elites that Barack
Obama, he of Harvard Law, insists he is not one of. The young men and women in
the newsrooms of flyover country emulate the elites and sometimes dream
of one day being one of them."   Wesley Pruden


LIBERTY


"Seven years after its occurrence, 9/11 has become the uber dividing
line between those who believe terror is a ‘nuisance’ which can be capably
addressed by law enforcement, and those who believe it remains a mortal
threat to our nation requiring military action wherever necessary. It
remains the ultimate delineator of liberalism and conservatism. And it
doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the more ‘real’ it becomes, the
more Americans are forced to confront this catastrophe head on, absent
the editing, the ‘expert’ commentary, the psycho-babble and the historical
revisionism, it becomes an albatross around the necks of those who think
all men are ‘reasonable’ given sufficient amounts of ‘multicultural
understanding.’ History can be a cruel mistress. For one day every year,
always less than two months prior to any national election, Americans
will be reminded that freedom is truly fragile, that its sustenance requires
sober vigilanceand that in the world as it is, as opposed to one we
would like, talk is mostly cheap."  Arnold Ahlert


RE: THE LEFT


"The patriotism feared by liberals isn’t the standard
American-flag-pinned-on-your-lapel-patriotism (hardly anyone other than
Barack Obama is against that). The kind they are afraid of is that which
was stirred in us by the attacks on Pearl Harbor and again on 9/11 the
kind that motivated Americans of all races and political persuasions to
pull together in the duty of our common citizenship and the common cause
of enduring American ideals. Liberals are threatened by such patriotism
because they worry that their position their belief that they, rather
than we as free people, are the better rulers of our lives will be usurped by
a rebirth of Thomas Jefferson’s understanding of self-reliance and
independence. They also worry that an increase in such patriotism will
continually motivate men from all walks of life... to join our military
and fight for the preservation of this great nation. It’s hard to
convince men who are risking their lives in service to this nation that this
nation isn’t as good as it once was or that we need to turn the reins of our
government over to Democrats so they can rescue us from ourselves by
‘the audacity of hope’."   A.W.R. Hawkins


INSIGHT


"I favor the policy of economy, not because I wish to save money, but
because I wish to save people. The men and women of this country who
toil are the ones who bear the cost of the Government. Every dollar that we
carelessly waste means that their life will be so much the more meager.
Every dollar that we prudently save means that their life will be so
much the more abundant. Economy is idealism in its most practical form."

Calvin Coolidge


THE LAST WORD


"On Sept. 8, Fox News broadcast an interview between Obama and Bill
O’Reilly that focused on taxation and the economy. Obama repeated his
pledge to cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans, while raising taxes on
the tiny fraction who earn more than $250,000... His tax proposal, he
explained, was a matter of civility: ‘If I am sitting pretty and you’ve
got a waitress who is making minimum wage plus tips, and I can afford it
and she can’t, what’s the big deal for me to say, I’m going to pay a
little bit more? That’s neighborliness.’ If that is Obama’s rationale
for making the tax code even more steeply progressive than it already is,
it’s no wonder voters are having second thoughts about his economic aptitude.
‘Neighborliness.’ Perhaps that word has a nonstandard meaning to someone
whose home adjoined the property of convicted swindler Tony Rezko, but
extracting money by force from someone who earned it in order to give it
to someone who didn’t is not usually spoken of as neighborly. If Citizen
Obama, ‘sitting pretty,’ reaches into his own pocket and helps out the
waitress with a large tip, he has shown a neighborly spirit. But there
is nothing neighborly about using the tax code to compel someone else to
pay the waitress that tip. Taxation is not generosity, it is confiscation at
gunpoint. Does Obama not understand the difference? Perhaps he doesn’t."


"Eager though he may be to compel ‘neighborliness’ in others, he has not
been nearly so avid about demonstrating it himself. Barack and Michelle
Obama’s tax returns show that from 2000 through 2004, when their adjusted
gross income averaged nearly a quarter of a million dollars a year,
their annual charitable donations amounted to just $2,154; less than nine-
tenths of 1 percent. Not until he entered the US Senate in 2005 and began to
be spoken of as a presidential possibility did the Obamas’ ‘neighborliness’
become more evident. (In 2005-2007, they gave 5.5 percent of their
income to charity.)"    Jeff Jacoby



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