What Berger's behavior reveals

Jonah Goldberg writes that Sandy Berger's document stealing, and Bill Clinton causal response to a question about it, reveals that (what a surprise) the Democrats have little concern for national security.

Europeans against Europe

Gerard Baker writes that European voters are expressing their skepticism of a Eurostate at the voting booth.

European voters--especially in the New Europe, which is alive and well, it should be noted--have good reason to react against the E.U.; there is a widespread view reflected in polls that it is out of touch, corrupt, and bureaucratic. Its economic policies stifle enterprise with complex regulations; its leading economies espouse high taxes and expensive welfare states even as the population ages rapidly. Above all, its Franco-German leadership still dreams of creating what amounts to a single, multination state, with its own foreign policy, that will make the E.U. much more effective at blocking U.S. policies.
To all this, most of Europe's voters said last month, politely, roughly what Dick Cheney said to Democratic senator Pat Leahy on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

The Committee on the Present Danger

Clifford May writes about a bi-partisanship attempt to inform the public about America's enemies. Democrats US Senator Joe Lieberman, former Clinton CIA director James Woolsey and Republican US Senator Jon Kyl have decided that current national security challenges require Americans to unite in order to win the war on terror.

Could the bad guys defeat us? Senator Kyl believes that is conceivable -- if the terrorists succeed in their "strategy to terrorize, demoralize and divide America and its allies." Sen. Lieberman noted that Scoop Jackson recognized the reality of terrorism as far back as 1979, when he described it as a "modern form of warfare against the liberal democracies."

Ambassador Woolsey suggested that it has been difficult for Americans to respond to terrorism in part because "the terrorists say they are motivated by religion and Americans tend not to question other people's religions."
But those fighting what they describe as a jihad – a holy war -- against the U.S., he added, "have as much to do with Islam as Torquemada had to do with the Sermon on the Mount."

The Dirty Harry Coalition

I have often wondered what unifying principles are shared by two different groups of right of center people, those who are religious and those who are not. I believe the answer to that question can be found in one of Clint Eastwood's movies, where Eastwood plays the iconoclastic police officer Dirty Harry. At one point Dirty Harry says: "A man's got to know his limitations."

But, Thomas Sowell wrote a book titled "A Conflict of Visions" that presents the unifying attitudes of rightwingers in a more philosophical perspective. Rightwingers tend to subscribe to a "constrained vision of man." According to this vision, man is inevitably burdened by moral, intellectual and physical limitations. Sowell quotes Adam Smith's thought experiment regarding a horrible earthquake in China and how little such an event would impact an Englishman compared to the Englishman's loss of his own little finger. The constrained vision of man accepts the fact that human beings tend to care about themselves more than others.

An alternative vision of man is what Sowell describes as the "unconstrained vision." According to this vision, man is naturally good, healthy and wise. But, the existence of artificial institutions cause man to be bad, sick and ignorant. Private property, corporations, marriage, patriotism and family represent these artificial institutions, according to the unconstrained vision.

Constrained visionaries (members of the Dirty Harry Coalition) understand, instinctively or intellectually, that these institutions are vital to the creation and maintenance of civil society among self-regarding individuals. The existence of "artificial institutions" is a result of man's natural fallibility and vanity, not a conspiracy sold to us by a handful of men.

Mark Steyn still thinks Bush will win

Mark Steyn writes that Bush is still likely to win, despite the efforts of Evan Thomas of Newsweek and others in the media.

[This is] Kerry’s and Edwards’s problem. Ask them about Iraq and they drone on about getting the UN back in there and bringing France and Germany on board by giving them ‘fair access to the multibillion-dollar reconstruction contracts’ plus ‘a leadership role’ in exchange for some troops. But all the UN’s done for Iraq is rip off its people in a $10 billion Oil-for-Food scam that’s bigger than Enron, Worldcom and every other corporate scandal combined. And bribing France and Germany with US tax dollars and Middle East meddling rights in exchange for vague promises of military resources they don’t have isn’t so smart, either.

The Anti-Chomsky Reader

Clara Magram reviews The Anti-Chomsky Reader in National Review. An excerpt:

Give Noam Chomsky credit for consistency. For nearly half a century, he has unfailingly praised the world's most brutal totalitarian regimes, even as he has slandered democracies. In 1970, Chomsky — a leading opponent of the Vietnam War — visited North Vietnam and wrote admiringly of the "high degree of democratic participation at the village and regional levels." The Hanoi leadership he termed "flexible and intelligent." Later in the 1970s, reports of the Khmer Rouge's bloody atrocities surfaced; the MIT linguistics professor dismissed them as products of "the U.S. propaganda system."

Did Saddam seek uranium from Niger or onions?

Mark Steyn writes the media's sudden lack of interest regarding Joe Wilson's credibility, now that covering such an issue would help, rather than hurt, Bush's reelection chances.

......contrary to what Wilson wrote in the New York Times, Saddam Hussein was trying to acquire uranium from Niger. In support of that proposition are a Senate report in Washington, Lord Butler's report in London, MI6, French intelligence, other European agencies -- and, as we now know, the CIA report, based on Joe Wilson's original briefing to them. Against that proposition is Joe Wilson's revised version of events for the Times.
This isn't difficult. In 1999, a senior Iraqi "trade" delegation went to Niger. Uranium accounts for 75 percent of Niger's exports. The rest is goats, cowpeas and onions. So who sends senior trade missions to Niger? Maybe Saddam dispatched his Baathist big shots all the way to the dusty capital of Niamy because he had a sudden yen for goat and onion stew with a side order of black-eyed peas, and Major Wanke, the then-president, had offered him a great three-for-one deal.

Religion, America and Europe

Mark Steyn writes about American and Europe and the relationship between religious belief and national dynamism.

‘When men cease to believe in God,’ said Chesterton, ‘they do not believe in nothing; they believe in anything!’ The anything most of the Western world’s non-believers believe in is government: instead of a state church, Europe believes in the state as church — the purveyor of cradle-to-grave welfare will provide daycare for your babies and take your aged parents off your hands. The people are happy to have cast off the supposed stultifying oppressiveness of religion for a world in which the state regulates every aspect of life. The French government’s recent headscarf ban — which, in the interests of an ecumenical fig-leaf, is also a ban on yarmulkes and ‘large’ crucifixes — seems the way of the future, an attempt to push all religion to the fringes of life. A couple of years back, a Canadian ‘human rights commission’, in its ruling that a Christian printer had illegally discriminated against a gay group by turning down a printing job for pro-gay literature, said he had the right to his religious beliefs in his own home but he had to check them at the door when he left for work in the morning. Who’s in the closet now?

Why does the world hate Israel?

Herbert London asks the question: Why does a nation half the size of lake Michigan and possessing no oil reserves generate so much hatred from the rest of the world?