Howard Dean...

is speaking right now at the DNC. I'm staying tuned to see if he bites the head off a bat.

"I Think Every American Ought to See It"

Now President Clinton, whose own NSA has just been caught literally with his pants down, 'misplacing' top secret documents sought by the commission investigating 9/11, dares to assert agnosticism about whether Michael Moore's claim of a sinister Bush-bin Laden partnership is "totally fair". This is obscene.

A Little Bit of History Repeating

One of the most remarkable aspects of Winston Churchill's drum-beating campaign against Germany in the 1930's was his use of stolen, top secret documents from British Intelligence offices to publicize the true scope of German rearmament, and thereby force the British people into recognize the growing threat of the German Reich. What he did was illegal and underhanded. It also contributed significantly to the continued survival of western civilization.

I reflect on this while reading, with growing amazement, accounts of Sandy Berger's apparent attempt to swipe top secret documents from the National Archive in order to cover up the dramatic failure of the Clinton administration to eliminate Osama bin Laden when they had the chance (a failure for which Berger bares no small amount of responsibility.) Can you imagine if Churchill had never uncovered those intelligence documents detailing Germany's breakneck pace of rearmament, and instead Chamberlain, following a surprise attack by the Luftwaffe, had sent one of his own ministers to swipe them and conceal his own disgrace? It is with that in mind that we should judge the level of contempt and outrage Berger and his former boss deserve.

UPDATE: To carry on the same theme, Andrew Sullivan is discussing parrells between Bush-Kerry and Churchill's 1945 defeat by Clement Atlee. The comparison, I think, could be a reasonable one as far as explaining the behavior of the voting public, but the two cases differ in one major way: few would argue that in terms of the war on terrorism, the United States now stands where Britain did in 1945. We are still deeply entrenched in this conflict, yet complacency abounds.

UPDATE: Experts agree!

By way of comparison, in 1940, when Neville Chamberlain resigned as Britain's prime minister, his successor Winston Churchill asked him to stay on as leader of the Conservative Party and to remain in the Cabinet. Chamberlain did so, serving loyally under Churchill until cancer forced him from office. He died four weeks later, and Churchill paid him handsome tribute and wept at his bier. I'm not saying Clinton, Berger & Co. are the Chamberlains of this new war. The point is even Chamberlain wasn't Chamberlain when he died: Posterity had yet to chisel him the one-word epitaph "Appeaser."

Liberal Minority

The people have spoken. The bastards.

Gmail

I just set up an account with Gmail, the fancy new web-mail service by Google. So now I have three active email addresses, one of which (the one through this site) is so flooded with spam it's almost unusable. We'll see how it goes.

Hitchens on Moore

If you haven't already, drop by Slate and read Christopher Hitchens brutal treatment of Fahrenheit 9/11:

A short word of advice: In general, it's highly unwise to quote Orwell if you are already way out of your depth on the question of moral equivalence. It's also incautious to remind people of Orwell if you are engaged in a sophomoric celluloid rewriting of recent history.

If Michael Moore had had his way, Slobodan Milosevic would still be the big man in a starved and tyrannical Serbia. Bosnia and Kosovo would have been cleansed and annexed. If Michael Moore had been listened to, Afghanistan would still be under Taliban rule, and Kuwait would have remained part of Iraq. And Iraq itself would still be the personal property of a psychopathic crime family, bargaining covertly with the slave state of North Korea for WMD. You might hope that a retrospective awareness of this kind would induce a little modesty.

The whole thing is quite long, and utterly ruthless.

---

On a related note, there was a group calling themselves "Democrats Abroad" outside the Toronto premier of Fahrenheit at the Cumberland theater last night, trying to get American ex-pats to register. They were kept in good company by a petitioner for the Green Party demanding free TCC service on smog alert days, and someone distributing pamphlets which claim an American conspiracy to perpetrate 9/11. It's nice to see that Michael Moore's new movie speaks to such broad swaths of society.

The question on my mind is: how long is Mike going to wait before announcing his bid for President?

UPDATE: As instapundit notes, Ralph Nader has some unkind words for Mr. Moore.

Happy Pride

The combination of a new 50-hour a week job and the task of moving house and home has kept me away from blogging for months now. It's time that changed. I hope everyone is having a great pride weekend thus far. For me, a weekend of partying will be an essential break from long days of backbreaking labour among coworkers who, shall we say, sometimes speak indelicately about matters of sexual orientation. One might also say that they're a bunch of ignorant, redneck racist pricks without putting too fine a point on it.

June 1st Children

Friday night at Scallywags was excellent. You can read the full report of our evening courtesy of Sanam, the girl with the name so hot it's against the law.

Right now I'm reading Dry, the second installment of Augustine Burrough's magnificently depressing and funny personal memoir, and Keep the Aspidestra Flying, one of George Orwell's most underrated novels.

"Ethical Funds"

Why is "socially responsible investing" always equated with eschewing holdings in GMO's, tobacco and liquor, and defense contractors? It seems to me that refusing to invest in your nation's national defense is hardly socially responsible, but rather its perfect opposite.

The Unhinging of the Left Continues

Nothing in the way of anti-Bush rhetoric is too petty, churlish or incoherent for the New York Times editorial board these days. Observe this baffling introduction by Douglas McGrath to a review of a book on Ulysses S. Grant and Mark Twain:

When people speak of the ''weight of history,'' I am not moved. The McGrath head has never been bowed with worry as President Kennedy's must have been during the Cuban missile crisis or as President George W. Bush's surely was when gas prices briefly dipped below $2 a gallon, weakening key stocks in his trust fund.

It is unfortunate indeed that Mr. McGrath is so unburdened by the weight of history. Otherwise, he might not so casually equate the near apocalyptic game of nuclear brinksmanship played by President Kennedy with stupid and vulgar speculation about President Bush's personal stock interests. The formula of "Bush foreign policy+oil+private sector profit" has obviously been so thoroughly absorbed by the antiwar left as canon truth that it can be passed off as the presumptive motivating factor any time the President is mentioned. This remains the case no matter how counterintuitive the connection is, such as above, where Bush is presumed to be supremely interested in keeping oil prices high (as opposed to low, which we are told was the purpose of invading Iraq with its vast oil reserves).

Men like McGrath are not only incapable of imagining the President outside the rubric of abject greed, but fail also to identify any consistency in the application of that supposed greed, which is both pitiable and illuminating.

The Feeding Frenzy

The reactions of Nancy Pelosi and others in the Democratic leadership to the resignation of George Tenet is unintentionally a wonderful demonstration of exactly why the call for Donald Rumsfeld to step down in the wake of Abu Ghraib was so bogus. That time around, people like Pelosi and Jim Bonham of the DCCC were loudly demanding that Rumsfeld do the right thing and step down as a show of regret to Americans and to the Arab world for what coalition soldiers did to prisoners. Now, they greet the departure of Tenent as an insufficient sacrifice to assuage the intelligence failures of 9/11 and Iraq's WMD. If one wishes to know what they would have heard after the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld, one need only read Terry McAuliffe's statement regarding Tenent with a little imagination:

"This White House has presided over some of the worst intelligence failures in American history and this resignation amplifies the widespread problems with how this President has overseen the intelligence community. George Tenet may now be out of the picture, but the President remains and needs to answer for these intelligence failures."

(Emphasis added) Were we really to believe that Rumsfeld would have better served the administration by throwing himself to the political sharks?

Exiled Politics

Charles Krauthammer dissects criticism of the interim Iraqi government:

Then comes my favorite: the new government has no legitimacy because it is composed of so many exiles. What kind of political leadership does one expect in a country that endured three decades of Stalinist tyranny in which any expression of opposition met with torture and death?

     Strange. I do not remember any of these critics complaining about the universally hailed Oslo peace accords that imposed upon the Palestinians a PLO government flown in from Tunisia composed nearly entirely of political exiles.

Quite right. How else is a country such as Iraq to reconstruct a political society when its entire political class has been liquidated by the former regime? What so many commentators fail to understand is that it was not just the likes of Ayad Allawi and Ahmad Chalabi who were driven from Iraq those thirty years, but politics itself which was exiled. Had these politicians stayed in Iraq, their fate would certainly have been the torture chamber and the mass grave, but the media seems to implicitly berate them for not sticking around and toughing it out under Saddam. Obviously, under such circumstances the transitional leaders of the new Iraq must come from outside, while a new generation of domestic leadership is midwifed into existence.

War Games

David Wong wants a more realistic war video game.

Asymetrical Federalism

Mark Steyn offers a modest proposal for the best way to bring order and democracy to Iraq: piece by piece:

Many commentators are now calling for faster elections in Iraq. I'd prefer to go for ''asymmetrical federalism,'' which is a Canadian term, but don't let that put you off. What it means is that the province of Quebec has certain powers -- its own immigration policy, for example -- that the province of Ontario doesn't.
[...]
Something of the sort is already happening on the ground in Iraq. There are some 8,000 towns and villages in the country. How many do you hear about on the news? For a week, it's all Fallujah all the time. Then it's Najaf, and nada for anywhere else. Currently, 90 percent of Iraqi coverage is about one lousy building: Abu Ghraib. So what's going on in the other 7,997 dots on the map? In the Shia province of Dhi Qar, a couple hundred miles southeast of Baghdad, 16 of the biggest 20 cities plus many smaller towns will have elected councils by June. These were the first free elections in Dhi Qar's history and ''in almost every case, secular independents and representatives of nonreligious parties did better than the Islamists.''

I join those who question what sort of country is going to be handed over to the Iraqis on "Sovereignty Day". Particularly, I don't believe the best way to create lasting order is with an all-at-once passing of the baton to an unnamed interim government, but by building the political infrastructure from the bottom up: give independent rule to the individual villages, towns and cities that are ready for it, hold off on those that aren't, and withdraw the footprint of US rule to the higher levels of government, where it is needed more and noticed less.

Prison Abuse Photos

The Daily Mirror has apologized for running fake pictures of British troops abusing Iraqi prisoners. That's appropriate (and, indeed, impressive by the ethical standards of say, the New York Times or Boston Globe when confronted by their own chicanery). However, it doesn't undo the damage done by those photos. I'm all for taking full responsibility for the horrific abuse that was committed at Abu Ghraib, but doctored pictures like those run in the Mirror not only damage the international reputation of Britain and the rest of the coalition, but they put British and coalition troops in direct harm. They are in fact material support for our enemies. The Mirror's apology may be an acceptable mea culpa to its readers, but it does nothing to calm the bloodlust of Iraqi militants who, lets face it, probably don't read British tabloids on a regular basis.

British citizens ought to be outraged, and demand a full scale manhunt for the producers of these vile pieces of propaganda, and demand greater accountability from media outlets who run damaging and dangerous photos without verifying their authenticity.

A Response to Murder

Oftentimes, the evil that is done in the world is beyond our power to directly effect. While we must continue to support the war on terror which directly engages and eliminates the forces of murderous Islamist fascism, we can also choose to use the event of their crimes - like the brutal and obscene murder of Nick Berg in Iraq - as an opportunity to contribute to good causes elsewhere and unrelated to those events.

The Command Post would like to take this opportunity to see that, while Berg's killers and their allies are tracked down and punished, some basic good be done in the world to offset this horror. To that end, they would like us to donate to a fund set up to assist an amazing family in sending their special-needs children to college.

There are people in the world quietly doing exceptional things every day, and their cause should not suffer because the attention of moral people is directed towards more dramatic and distant events. Do what you can to help, be it by contributing money or further publicizing the cause.

End of Days

I thought it was oddly foreboding that it was hailing on a day in May, but then I got home and noticed this. Suddenly, the apocalyptic weather just fits.

North Korean Disaster

A massive explosion resulting from the collision of two trains in North Korea is being reported as having killed or injured as many as 3,000. Of course, any figures coming out of N. Korea are highly suspect, and an accident of this sort occuring in that country is subject to much speculation. So far, all we know is that something terrible has happened, but as usual we have to wait and see. All early reports are, as a rule, wrong.

Go Blue Team

My iBook gets out of the shop tomorrow. Right now, I’m blogging from my roommates computer. Yonge looked like the streets of Karbala last night after the Leafs took game 7. Thousands of people took to the streets in cars and on foot, burning Senators effigies, flashing nudity from the rooftops, and drawing in the riot police on horseback. If this town wins a Stanley Cup, it will take the US Marine Corps to contain the festivities.

Go Leafs Go.

Janet Reno at 9/11 Commission

My iBook is in the shop today, so I'm blogging from the library. You may wish to go read testimony from yet another security official trying to strike just the right balance between seeming to have known enough about terrorist activity pre-9/11 to be better than the other guys, but not enough to have had good reason to actually do anything. What a sorry sight: retired officials clamoring for an image of staunch meteorcity.

Fierce Iraqi Resistance?

This story paints quite a picture of the ‘insurgent’ resistance in Iraq:

US marines told today how they killed one suicide bomber and discovered a suicide bomb workshop in the Sunni Muslim bastion of Fallujah, apparently run by Iraqis and foreigners.
[....]
Police in the holy city of Karbala charged that some Iraqis were indoctrinated and high on drugs when they were dispatched on suicide missions.

We really are at war with the 14th century.

Condoleezza's Testimony

If Condoleezza Rice were ever to run for President, she’s certainly off to a good start.:

In the wake of Condoleezza Rice's testimony before a national television audience, 50% of American voters have a favorable view of the nation's National Security Advisor. Just 24% have an unfavorable view, while 26% are not sure or do not know who she is.
[....]
Seventy-one percent (71%) of Americans said they followed news stories of the Rice testimony somewhat or very closely.

Among those who were following the story closely, Rice was viewed favorably by 56% and unfavorably by 28%.

Hindsight is 20/20

This bit of alternative history ought to be the last word on the 9/11 commission. Bush couldn’t have prevented the attacks because the American public, and the world, wouldn’t have let him.

Just so you know

Jonathan Rauch will be here in Toronto on Monday, April 19th to promote his new book, "Gay Marriage". Jonathan is always a reasoned and articulate advocate of same-sex marriage, among many other issues. I encourage you to come to the Glad Day Bookshop (598A Yonge St.) at 5 p.m. to get a copy signed. I’ll be there.

Heavy Fighting in Iraq

It's a bloody day in Iraq today, with heavy fighting between coalition forces and supports of Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric. The fighting appears to be the fiercest in and around Fallujah and al Ramadi, though it's going on elsewhere as well. It is probably going to get worse before it gets better, but rest assured: whatever happens in the next days, it cannot be worse than the alternative - ceding control of Iraq to those who oppose stability, democracy and secular society. A period of open warfare against the enemies of a peaceful and prosperous Iraq is certainly not a time to draw back, but to press forward.

Al-Sadr is a fringe extremist who represents a small but militant minority of Shiites who want to install an Islamic Republic in Iraq. He doesn't speak for most Shiites, and certainly not most Iraqis, but will no doubt attempt to use opposition to the US occupation as a rallying point for ethnic, tribal and political factions of all stripes, provided he gets to lead them. I believe time will reveal how thin the support for his ideology actually is, but in the meantime we ought to brace ourselves as the media goes into full Vietnam-Quagmire mode.

Steve Den Beste, in a seemingly prescient article posted yesterday, believes the insurgents have made a colossal blunder by opting for open warfare against the coalition, and have in fact made the job of eliminating them that much easier. That may be true, but its small comfort to those fighting and dying on the front line.