Month: November 2003

Great featured essay today by Chris Leithner on non-interventionism. Of the Founders, he writes,

Far from being backward, xenophobic and the like, many possessed a keen interest in foreign languages, history, culture, technical and economic developments. Indeed, several ranked among the best literary, technical and commercial minds of the late-eighteenth century. On cultural, scientific and economic grounds, most (Hamiltonians were perhaps an exception) favoured extensive and unfettered private associations with foreigners.

I needn’t take the obvious (and painfully true) jabs at the current president here, for his affliction is America’s. His ignorance is hardly exceptional. Ironically, as the U.S. imperium has grown, with peals of self-applause from the “internationalists,” Americans’ interest in and knowledge of the world has shrunk. Eighty-five percent of the young adults taking this simple survey could not find Afghanistan, Iraq, or Israel on the map. This contrast has been drawn before, of course, but usually by those who see only a funny coincidence. I find no humor and very little simple coincidence any longer.

Over at NRO, Laurie Mylroie blows the Istanbul bombing case wide shut: It’s proof of an al Qaeda-Saddam connection! Meanwhile, the Turks, probably in an act of obeisance to their al Qaeda masters, say the terrorists were Kurds, with connections to U.S.-supported Bosnian forces, the once-U.S.-supported Osama bin Laden, but not to the once-U.S.-supported Saddam Hussein. Still, they may well have been in Iraq, albeit in the no-fly zone, protected from Saddam by the U.S. government.

The Christian Science Monitor posts one item that is only for the Web: their Daily Update. Each day they pick a subject and do a review of the Web for that subject, like a single blog entry.

Today they report on the FBI spying on the Antiwar Movement. Right in the middle, a single paragraph:

Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com says he believes the only reason the memo was ‘leaked’ was to chill the antiwar movement because “who wants their name to be on a government list of possible ‘extremist elements,’ as the memo puts it, who might be ‘planning violence’?”

The American Spectator dislikes little old me. True, when I stopped subscribing several years ago, I cut their readership by a quarter, but they should thank me now. Without the links I’ve been sending them, their online audience would consist of two guys grousing about the lack of Mena coverage.

UPDATE 11/24: Jeremy Lott really cares about my opinion. Good press, bad press, so long as someone is talking, eh? And as for what I’m slamming and my knowledge thereof, keep posting that one antiwar piece by John Corry. It’s good, Jeremy, but damn, even National Review has run some antiwar stuff. You’re under no obligation to “celebrate diversity” or anything, but on the eclecticism tip, all you can say is that you’re better than the Weekly Standard.

The latest issue of Newsweek warns that al-Qaeda is building toward a “spectacular” attack.

Intelligence sources tell Newsweek that “the neocons in the Pentagon have been undermining that relationship by accusing (without much proof) the Syrians of encouraging jihadists to cross into Iraq and of hiding Saddam’s WMD inside Syria.”

The report goes on to reveal the longtime dream of “many in the Bush administration, especially the neoconservatives in the Pentagon centered on Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, that a democratized Iraq will be both a beacon and a base in the fight against radical Islam.” Newsweek warns that “some senior of-ficials worry, though usually not out loud, that the war could backfire. A leaked memo from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pointedly asked whether Islamic religious schools, fueled by anti-Western rage, are creating terrorists faster than American soldiers can kill or capture them.”

Newsweek concludes that the war in Iraq has “almost certainly diverted resources” from the war on terror. “Meanwhile, in Washington, transcripts of electronic intercepts of possible terrorist conversations pile up, unread and untranslated for weeks. Similarly, many Special Operations soldiers who had been chasing through the mountains of Afghanistan looking for bin Laden and his followers were shifted over to Iraq to spend months fruitlessly searching for weapons of mass destruction.”

Meanwhile, officials tell Newsweek that they have no idea who is behind the most recent deadly bombings in Iraq. They have evidence of many different sources, but it is beginning to look more like “Murder on the Orient Express,” where literally everyone is guilty.

A long time ago, pants were mended, not replaced. Books were borrowed, not bought. And people realized that cash was king and crap was crap. Try talking to your grandparents; get a sense of their Depression-era expectations. …

Our expectations have become so inflated, in fact, that even how we classify “poor” has become totally wacked. According to the Census Bureau, 30 million Americans are living in poverty. Not to sound cruel, but it’s a misleading term. By almost any global standard, Americans who are classified as “poor” don’t have it that bad. In 1995, over 41 percent of all poor households owned their own homes. Seventy percent own a car; 27 percent own two or more cars; 97 percent of poor households have a color television – nearly half own two or more; 75 percent have a VCR, 64 percent own a microwave, and 25 percent have an automatic dishwasher.

– Jonathan Hoenig, Greed is Good: The Capitalist Guide to Investing