Tag: politics

Not wanting it both ways

Jeff does an outstanding job of showing the flip side of the coin the press doesn’t want to admit:

Yes, the President is responsible for making the decision to go to war based in part on intelligence that turned out to be incomplete. But the President is also responsible for acting with swift resolve to unseat a brutal dictator, terrorist and friend to terrorists. He’s also responsible for having the sheer guts to go it alone when a great many of the West’s liberal democracies shirked their responsibility both as leaders of the world and as members of the Security Council of the United Nations. He’s also responsible for bringing Saddam Hussein to justice, for capturing or killing his cohorts in crime, for cutting off a huge source of funding to Palestinian murder gangs, for shattering Ansar al-Islam, and for freeing the Shiite people of Iraq from decades of illegitimate rule by a Stalinist political party. And in many ways, President Bush is personally responsible for bringing liberty to Iraq for the first time ever, and for changing the history of the Middle East, and the Arab and Muslim worlds.

Who are the surrender monkeys now?

New Hampshire Union-Leader:

The Democratic Party’s national leadership has plumbed a record depth in its search to score points against the Republicans. In the past week and a half, both House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean have called for the United States to surrender in Iraq. Not since George McGovern in 1972 has one party called for the United States military to surrender to an enemy during wartime.

Some will object to the word, “surrender,” but there is no other word to describe the immediate withdrawal of troops from the war zone in Iraq. The simple fact is that two of the nation’s three highest-ranking Democrats are advocating an enemy victory over U.S. forces in a foreign land. That not only is appalling in its contempt for the troops who have died to liberate Iraq, it is astonishing in its brazen disregard for the lives and well-being of the Iraqi people.
[Via Political Diary.]

I think Congress has better things to do

Let’s see: renewing the Patriot Act, the Senate needing to confirm Bush’s judicial nominees, as well as a Supreme Court nominee, et cetera, et cetera.
So what do they turn their attention to? Why, the Bowl Championship Series, of course.
Pay attention, because this is likely one of the few political issues Lawson and I will agree on: Representative Barton, you’re wasting your time, your colleagues’ time, the time of BCS board members, and taxpayer dollars. Congress has no business sticking its nose in to the BCS mess.
I wouldn’t go as far as Barton in saying the BCS is “deeply flawed,” though it has made some whoppers in the past few years: picking Oklahoma over USC to face LSU in 2003, and picking Oklahoma over Auburn to face USC in 2004 immediately spring to mind.
The solution to the problems of the BCS is not a Congressional investigation. Rather, the football bigwigs at the NCAA need to get together with the various bowl organizers and sponsors and develop a playoff system for Division I-A football where the championship game will be rotated among the bigger bowls. As the ESPN article notes, there’s a lot of money in the bowl games, particularly the BCS bowls, and a playoff system would theoretically kill off some of those dollars. I don’t believe that would happen; look at March Madness with NCAA Division I-A basketball.
Nevertheless, the overriding issue is money. If it wasn’t, then the cadets and midshipmen wouldn’t be crammed into the corners of the stadium for the annual Army-Navy game, but would be seated, out of respect, directly behind their teams’ benches. (We wouldn’t see that awful swoosh logo on those classically minimalist uniforms, either.)
Until the NCAA and the bowls figure out a way to not lose money, we won’t see the much-needed playoff system–for the only sport in Division I-A without a playoff system–for college football, and we will continue to have controversy over whom should play for the championship, and which team is truly number one.

Error and trust

Jeff points to Lorie Byrd’s recent column, and correctly notes how voters should want their elected officials to err: on the side of caution. What really stood out for me when I was reading Lorie’s piece, was this:

[I]t must be pointed out that Democrats are not to be trusted with the nation’s security. They have shown that not only will they endlessly debate until it is possibly too late but that after a military action has been initiated, in the face of difficulties and waning public support, many will back out and abandon the mission and the troops. The approach of the Democrats to the threat posed by Saddam Hussein as outlined in all of the intelligence reports available prior to the war in Iraq stands in stark contrast to that of the Bush administration.

Don’t mind us, we’re just voting this way to get re-elected

Hugh Hewitt:

Apparently Brownstein and Vaughn could not find one elected Democrat willing to defend the 2002 vote as right at the time and right in retrospect, which tells us a great deal about the Democrats and national security — primarily that they ought not to be allowed anywhere close to its control.
[Emphasis added. –R]

Determined to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory

Mark Steyn:

Happily for Mr Zarqawi, no matter how desperate the head-hackers get, the Western defeatists can always top them. A Democrat Congressman, Jack Murtha, has called for immediate US withdrawal from Iraq. He’s a Vietnam veteran, so naturally the media are insisting that his views warrant special deference, military experience in a war America lost being the only military experience the Democrats and the press value these days. Hence, the demand for the President to come up with an “exit strategy”.

In war, there are usually only two exit strategies: victory or defeat. The latter’s easier. Just say, whoa, we’re the world’s pre-eminent power but we can’t handle an unprecedently low level of casualties, so if you don’t mind we’d just as soon get off at the next stop.

Demonstrating the will to lose as clearly as America did in Vietnam wasn’t such a smart move, but since the media can’t seem to get beyond this ancient jungle war it may be worth underlining the principal difference: Osama is not Ho Chi Minh, and al-Qa’eda are not the Viet Cong. If you exit, they’ll follow. And Americans will die – in foreign embassies, barracks, warships, as they did through the Nineties, and eventually on the streets of US cities, too.

But there is no media bias, part 7

Mary Katharine Ham:

You can always count on the press to put a gloomy tone on bright economic news.

[…]

Are four-year highs really modest? Here’s hoping the rest of the Christmas shopping season is marked by such “black clouds,” “modest gains,” “reluctance,” and “challenge.”

Yeah, some more about those oil company profits

Jeff Jacoby:

But profits can’t be judged by dollar amounts alone. What counts is the percentage of revenues those profits represent. “Our numbers are huge because the scale of our industry is huge,” Exxon CEO Lee Raymond tried, probably in vain, to explain during last week’s big Senate hearing on oil company profits. Exxon’s profits last quarter amounted to 9.8 cents for every dollar of sales. Is that obscene? Well, it was more profitable than Shell (which netted 7.8 cents of each dollar of revenue) or Chevron (6.6 cents) or BP (4.6 cents). But compared to Coca-Cola (21.2 cents), Bank of America (28.3 cents), or Microsoft (33.2 cents), it was nothing to write home about.
Everyone is complaining about the price they’re paying at the pump, yet no one seems bothered that a can of Coke that used to cost 35 cents has now doubled in price, or that they don’t see any dividends returned on that free checking account from BoA, or why the cost of Office isn’t $99 instead of $299.
I’m not begrudging Coca-Cola, Bank of America, or Microsoft their profits any more than I begrudge the oil companies theirs. The market is clearly bearing what the market will bear in each of the industries the above companies find themselves. Do you want Microsoft Office to cost under a hundred bucks? Then stop buying Microsoft Office. Use one of the scores of alternative word processors available. Well, if you’re using a Macintosh, any way. Microsoft seems to have strangled word processor development for Windows. But you see my point.
When there’s less demand, companies are forced to reduce prices. Gas prices haven’t gone down, because Americans aren’t buying less gas in significantly high numbers to warrant bringing the prices down dramatically. It’s called free enterprise, last time I checked.
Smacking oil bosses around may be good politics, but the unglamorous fact is that Big Oil’s earnings, 7.7 percent of income in the second quarter of 2005, is lower than the overall US corporate average of 7.9 percent. The oil industry is more profitable than some (automobiles, media, utilities), but it can only envy the profits earned by semiconductors (14.6 percent), pharmaceuticals (18.6 percent), or banks (19.6 percent).
Can you just see the CEOs of Intel, AMD, Motorola, and IBM being dragged before Congress to explain why they’re making so much money? Ridiculous.
The kicker, though, is this:
Government revenue from gasoline taxes alone has exceeded oil industry profits in 22 of the past 25 years.
Does the road work, including on roads which appear to need no work, ever stop where you live? Perhaps instead of gouging consumers with high gasoline taxes, state and local governments should examine their budgets more carefully. Rather than begin “improvement” projects on roads which are perfectly fine, under the guise of the “use it or lose it” excuse, perhaps state and local governments could channel those gas tax revenues in to paying off debt. Should there be no debt, then why not cut the tax? I suppose that would be too easy.

The MRC needs to hire Jeff

Jeff Harrell:

The tin-foil-hat crowd got one thing right after all: The American people have been systematically lied to since 9/11. Not by the President, but by the press.

Deeply irresponsible is an understatement

As usual, Jeff says it better than I was thinking:

It’s as if we’ve got a country full of people who are walking around under the impression that the moon is made of green cheese, repeating it to each other, going on television talk shows to discuss the green cheese issue, publishing lengthy editorials in prominent newspapers about the implications of new revelations about lunar green cheese. It’s positively baffling.