Stromata Blog

Another Argument Against Daylight Saving Time

. . . is that it adds an hour to the election campaign.

In solidarity with my fellow resisters in Arizona, Hawaii and parts of Indiana, I don’t observe DST myself. The time has come to end it for everybody.

If there are good reasons to change work and other schedules for half the year, people will figure them out on their own. We don’t need a government nanny to regulate wake-up times. Like most official interference, this one produces more ill effects than good. Twice a year, almost all of the population suffers mild jet lag, with corresponding effects on productivity and good humor, and home air conditioners tend to run an hour longer throughout the Summer months, which ought to be anathema in these energy-conscious times.

Daylight Saving Time is the classic liberal rationalist cause, combining blithe disregard for the rhythms of nature with a zeal to meddle in everyone else’s life. Perhaps the big push for its repeal can wait until after we defeat Islamofascism, but not, I hope, much beyond that.

A Rapid Response to a Leftist Jeer

Cliff May replies at length to this irritating e-mail:

Dear Mr. May, Eight Marines dead in a day, and the Bush camp is happy – happy - to see Osama in a video? “A little gift” is what the Bush campaign folks are saying. What the heck is going on with the GOP, when the taunts of a terrorist butcher – one that Bush has so far failed to kill – are seen as good for Bush's chances? Hope all’s well in GOP-land, because it sure looks odd from the outside. Take care, [Name withheld]

But a short rejoinder is all that is necessary. Mine is that I am glad to have Osama’s reminder that we are in the midst of a war, and I am even more glad that the reminder came in no more deadly a form than a whining, Michael Mooreish videotape. I count on my fellow Americans to figure out which candidate is more likely to pursue the war to victory and who deserves credit for the fact that the steady stream of terrorist atrocities on our soil that many experts foresaw in the wake of 9/11 never came to pass.

Addendum: The Truth Laid Bear offers a another reason to welcome the Osama tape (with apologies to Hugh Hewitt): “If it's not close, we get to sleep on Wednesday!”

Osama on the Campaign Trail

That Osama bin Laden is alive surprises me. For almost three years, he avoided showing himself to the world, even on videotape. The most reasonable inference was that he didn’t appear because he couldn’t, but reality doesn’t have to be reasonable. Instead, it now looks like he waited patiently for the right moment to emerge from hiding. The fact that he did so four days before the Election in order to spout a litany of Fahrenheit 9/11-inspired attacks on George W. Bush tells us all that we need to know about his motivation.

Sophisticates have been insisting that al-Qa’eda is delighted at the prospect of four more years of the Bush Administration, because the supposedly mismanaged War on Terror has boosted its recruitment. If so, no one has told al-Qa’eda’s nominal chief. What was significant about his tirade was that he was trying, however ineptly, to make arguments that might influence American voters, not simply ranting against evil Crusaders. I doubt that he expects a President Kerry to collapse instantly, but it’s clear which candidate is the “lesser evil” from his point of view.

The trajectory of events if Senator Kerry should win is also becoming clear. Whatever the Senator’s subjective desire to kill terrorists, his victory would be a great morale booster for their cause around the world. In Iraq, in particular, the other side will assume that it just needs to hold out for a few more months in order to win. In light of that possibility, Iraqis will be more fearful of aiding the interim government. The coming assault on Fallujah will be bloodier, and an Iraqi-American victory there will be less demoralizing to the foe.

It is hard to see how a President whose core supporters are fervently anti-war will be able to continue a conflict against a reinvigorated enemy for very long. He would doubtless try to exit gracefully, but any American retreat will be hailed throughout the House of Islam as a glorious triumph over the infidel. The famous “Arab street” has been quiescent in the face of American power. Can we count on it to remain so when it perceives American weakness? The image of Caliph Osama riding into Riyadh might not be utter fantasy.

John Kerry does not deserve to be the bearer of the hopes of our nation’s enemies, but he shouldn’t be surprised that the role has been thrust upon him. He could have lined up with the President on the war and made it clear to Osama and Zarqawi and the rest that a Kerry Administration would give them no respite. He refused to do that. As a result, if he wins the Presidency, he will take office under highly adverse conditions of his own making. If he has a plan to cope with them, it had better be a work of genius.

Comparing Competence

Okay, the Kerry-Media Campaign wants voters to make their decisions on the basis of neutral competence. Fine. I’ll go along with that.

On one side, we have the commander-in-chief in two swift, brilliantly executed military campaigns. Overseeing a war is about as strenuous a test of competence as exists. In retrospect, we may think that Afghanistan and Iraq were easy, but that wasn’t the way that they looked beforehand. Plenty of experts predicted long, tough campaigns, and they had good grounds for pessimism. We could have been drawn into an endless, bloody stalemate in Afghanistan, just like the Russians in the 80’s. The drive to Baghdad could have been a bloody slog followed by a bloodier siege, as many military commentators expected. (I more than once heard the Iraqi capital compared to Stalingrad.) The aftermath of Saddam’s fall could have been a montage of burning oil wells, epidemics, desperate refugees, food shortages and the other disasters forecast by relief agencies. With all of the dire, and not implausible, scenarios that might have been, it is astounding that Afghanistan has just completed free elections and that all but a sliver of Iraq is peaceful and beginning to prosper.

Not everything in either country is perfect, but is it really true that all of the good things are due to luck and all the bad to incompetence?

On the other side is a candidate who has trouble with the challenge of running a political campaign. He takes a long time to make up his mind, churns his staff incessantly, is inordinately influenced by the last advisor to get his ear. . . . Those are the complaints from his own camp. We don’t know how he would manage a war, but is his performance in what should be a simpler role all that encouraging?

Further Reading: Charles Krauthammer, “Kerry’s Afghan Amnesia”

Chicago Boyz, “Nonsensical Criticism of Bush, Part . . . Oh, Hell, I Lost Count Years Ago”

If the New York Post has it right, another believer in Bush’s competence is Osama bin Laden:

Officials said that in the 18-minute long tape — of which only six minutes were aired on the al-Jazeera Arab television network in the Middle East on Friday — bin Laden bemoans the recent democratic elections in Afghanistan and the lack of violence involved with it.

On the tape, bin Laden also says his terror organization has been hurt by the U.S. military’s unrelenting manhunt for him and his cohorts on the Afghan-Pakistani border. [Via The Truth Laid Bear"]

Cheers for Curt Schilling

After frequently deriding Democrats’ obsession with celebrity endorsements, the folks at the NRO Corner are upset with Red Sox star Curt Schilling for making a lame (literally) excuse for backing out of a campaign appearance with President Bush. At which I roll my eyes. Maybe the Red Sox management pressured him (the team is, after all, partly owned by the New York Times), or maybe he didn’t feel comfortable leaping into the political arena and perhaps being hounded with detailed questions about current events (did he keep up with the news from al-QaQaa during the World Series?), or maybe his doctor really did warn him that he needs to rest his injured ankle. He was already scheduled for a parade at Disney World; adding another day on his feet doesn’t intuitively seem like a great idea for a guy whose career would be ruined by a permanent leg problem.

Whatever the reasons, this doesn’t even qualify as a kerfuffle, and I mention it only as an excuse to cheer Mr. Schilling for a reason unrelated to politics. Several years ago, toymaker Hasbro acquired the venerable Avalon Hill Gaming Company. Hasbro had no interest in AH’s hard core wargames, such as Advanced Squad Leader and the Great Campaigns of the American Civil War series, and their demise seemed imminent. Curt Schilling, an ASL grognard, saved them by putting up most of the money for Multi-Man Publishing, which licensed the lines from Hasbro and has since expanded them considerably. As a further service to the hobby, MMP later bought The Gamers, enabling its principals to concentrate on designing wargames instead of struggling to run a small business.

To the serious wargamer, whatever he thinks of the Boston Red Sox or George W. Bush, Curt Schilling is a hero. Let him soak his ankle in peace.

Quotes of the Day

David Frum:

This election year very much reminds me of the tiresome piece of 1970s pseudo-oriental wisdom about the Chinese mandarin who dreamt about being a butterfly – and woke up unsure whether he was a man dreaming of being a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming of being a man. Well likewise: I’m not sure whether the NYT and CBS are extensions of the Kerry campaign – or whether John Kerry is simply a projection of the NYT and CBS campaign.

James Taranto:

This weekend marks the end, for this year, of Daylight Saving Time, except in Arizona, Hawaii and most of Indiana, which stay on Standard Time year-round. That makes this weekend an especially exhilarating time for conservatives. Just two days before the election, we actually get to turn the clock back.

Quote of the Day

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. in OpinionJournal Political Diary (subscription only, a mere $3.95 a month for lots of writing like this):

It tells you something that the biggest voting bloc in support of the Iraq war is the families of soldiers fighting it (as every poll of military families shows, never mind the media’s fascination with parents who’ve become ex-Bush supporters because they want to “bring our sons homes”). Those families are the voters for whom everything changed and who are living in a new reality since Sept. 11, a reality that has barely touched the average American.

Forget terrorism. Forget the babble of John Edwards, who’s been peddling voters an image of themselves as Hooverville residents in the depths of another Great Depression. Some Americans naturally eat up the idea of themselves as victims. They’re used to having it easy (by historical standards) and want it easier. We consume so much health care that it has become a menace to our jobs and incomes, but how many Americans are even willing to be inconvenienced to fix this? Or take the nonsense about a middle class withering in the face of stagnant wages. Remove the steady influx of immigrants from the equation and household incomes have risen across the spectrum.

In World War Two, more than 10% of the U.S. population served in uniform. Today, barely one household in 700 has a member serving in Iraq or Afghanistan. Americans have just experienced the two greatest economic booms in the country’s history, the 1980s and the 1990s, interspersed by two of the shallowest, shortest recessions in the country’s history. This is not an America bestirred to face challenges and “pay any price” etc.

A certain Democratic pundit [sc. Mr. Jenkins’ Wall Street Journal colleague Al Hunt] routinely accuses Mr. Bush of failing to ask Americans to “sacrifice anything.” Notice that every Kerry attack line, however, seems to suggest President Bush is asking Americans to risk and sacrifice too much. Yet the pundit may be right. Mr. Bush’s biggest problem is that he’s prodding America to rise to an occasion at a time when the country feels little natural inclination to get off the couch.

“The biggest voting bloc in support of the Iraq war is the families of the soldiers fighting it” ought to be the opening line of a Bush ad.

A Russian Enigma

Though the elite media are unlikely to pay attention to it, I’m sure that the blogosphere is already abuzz over Bill Gertz’s “Russia Tied to Iraq’s Missing Arms”. (Wonder what James Taranto will make of that less than felicitous headline.) I’m going to post my own first reactions before reading what anyone else has to say. That way I can at least claim that my analysis is original, though there’s no chance that it will be unique.

I note at the outset that Mr. Gertz relies entirely on a named source, John A. Shaw, deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security. In an age when spectacular allegations so often rest on anonymous figures whose motives and credibility cannot be evaluated, that is almost a shock. As I’ve noted before, one of the corruptions of contemporary journalism is that unnamed sources are generally treated as more trustworthy than those that speak on the record. That unspoken prejudice guarantees, I’m afraid, that the Gertz article will have less impact than it should. I predict, too, that its first mention in the New York Times will be in a piece quoting “State Department (or CIA) sources” as denying everything.

Mr. Gertz devotes much of his space to considering whether Russian military units took the famous al-QaQaa explosives to Syria before the war, but a broader significance of this Russian collaboration with the Ba’athist regime is that it destroys Senator Kerry’s quaint notion, expressed in the first Presidential debate, that we could take our time about deposing Saddam Hussein because we had him “trapped”. Saddam’s ability to send aid, indeed large-scale aid, to terrorists elsewhere was, it is now clear, unimpeded by sanctions, U.N. inspections and other half-measures. The idea that we could safely leave him in place is Pollyannism on high stilts.

The Russian connection likewise demonstrates how meaningless are the words and resolutions of the United Nations Security Council. Senator Kerry claims to have met with all of the Council members and to have based his vote on authorizing the invasion of Iraq on what they told him. Did the Russian ambassador tell him about his country’s ties with the Ba’athist regime? Did the Senator really expect that ambassadors (“honest men sent to lie abroad for the good of their country”, as the old saw runs) would disclose to him all of the data needed to judge their nations’ dedication to “containing” Saddam?

We already knew that, if elected, Mr. Kerry will be the greatest Presidential naïf since Jimmy Carter. And it isn’t a revelation that Moscow was no friend of regime change in Baghdad. The real news is not the content of the story but the Bush Administration’s willingness to make it public.

It is scarcely conceivable that Mr. Shaw spoke without authorization from his superiors, either Secretary Powell or the President himself. It is also hard to believe that the U.S. government would publicize facts so discreditable to Russia without a go-ahead from President Putin. So the enigma is, why did Mr. Putin give his consent?

The most plausible explanations, I think, are the success of the invasion and the Beslan atrocity. The former would convince a realistic statesman (one unlike, say, Jacques Chirac) that sniping at America and extending covert help to its enemies are doomed strategies. President Putin is a realist, and all realists love winners.

Reinforcing that realpolitik sentiment is the murder of scores of school children by Islamofascists, a deed that appalled Russians just as 9/11 did Americans. Russia may be only a semi-democracy, but its elected leader cannot afford to be seen as siding with the friends of the friends of the Beslan murderers.

The convergence of these two factors has, it appears, led Russia to switch sides in the War on Terror. Admitting past misdeeds is part of the conversion process. I suspect that word will soon start to spread of the firing, demotion, even prosecution of officials who took Iraqi bribes or gave what will be retroactively characterized as “unauthorized” assistance to Saddam.

Whether whole-hearted Russian cooperation will add much strength to the forces of civilization is unfortunately open to doubt. Russian military forces are demoralized and have blundered badly in Chechnya. The country’s intelligence services and police are probably still rife with crypto-communists. The Putin Administration’s movement away from economic and political liberty is “worse than a crime, a blunder”. Nonetheless, having Russia a friend is better than facing it as a foe. We should feel hopeful, albeit with ambivalent hope.

A Ray of Light from Old Europe

European anti-Americanism has been a persistent hindrance to the War on Terror. A lot of people across the water think that the United States is as serious a menace as, if not worse than, al-Qa’eda. And it’s not hard to figure out why, when one looks at what their leftist-dominated media tell them day after day. Davids Medienkritik illustrates the point with a collage of German magazine covers proclaiming that George W. Bush’s morally bankrupt America threatens the world with its “Blood for Oil” fundamentalist crusade.

It is heartening, then, to read this item in the OpinionJournal Political Diary (subscription only, but a bargain at $3.95 a month):

Today, Germany’s best-selling newspaper, Bild, with 12 million readers, advocated the re-election of Mr. Bush. Newspaper endorsements are rare in Germany – in 2002 only a few leading papers endorsed a candidate in the German election. Polls show that 85% of Germans prefer John Kerry, but Bild defied public opinion and offered a list of reasons ranging from free trade to terrorism for why Mr. Bush deserves a second term. Not only is Mr. Bush confronting Muslim extremists more vigorously than Mr. Kerry likely would, the paper noted. But if President Bush remains in office, Germany would be under less pressure to send troops to Iraq (presumably because Germans have gotten word that John Kerry’s “secret” plan is to threaten to walk away unless Europe gets involved).

“Every new American government makes its mistakes,” reads the endorsement. “Bush has already made his. Kerry, by contrast, has never held an executive office. He would be poorly prepared for the job, worse than most presidents before him. . . . With Bush we know what we’re getting. With Kerry, no one knows what he stands for and where he’s going to lead America.”

I suspect that quite a few other Europeans feel the same way but have been deterred from admitting it, perhaps even to themselves, by the stifling anti-Americanism all around them. We can hope that Bild’s defiance of euro-conformity will be emulated elsewhere.

Update (10/28/04): Davids Medienkritik has the text of the Bild endorsement.

Listening to the Roorback

The New York Times’ missing explosives roorback has three unsavory aspects.

First, a newspaper that pretends to be more than a party house organ has a responsibility to conduct a careful examination of charges that pop up in the last days of a political campaign. A U.N. official said that 380 tons of HMX and RDX high explosives disappeared from al-QaQaa, a major Iraqi military compound, because American forces didn’t mount a proper guard. Did the Times make any serious attempt to determine whether the explosives were present when our troops arrived? Did it consider the plausibility vel non of the picture of looters carting off such a huge quantity of material? Did it put the story into perspective by noting that the Ba’athist regime possessed hundreds of thousands of tons of explosives or that Coalition troops have seized c. 400,000 tons since the fall of Baghdad? Did it inquire whether HMX or RDX-based bombs had actually been used by terrorists or would be notably more powerful than any other kind? No. No. No. No. The tale was stripped to a core of prejudicial factoids, then shouted to the world.

Second, the charges emanate from a foreign official with both ideological and personal motives (none animadverted to by the Times) for attacking the President Bush. The source is Mohammed El Baradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, whose lackadaisical approach to Iran’s nuclear program has put him repeatedly at odds with the U.S. What’s more, M. El Baradei’s term of office is coming to an end, and the Bush Administration announced last month that it opposes his reelection. How highly coincidental that, immediately thereafter, he started writing letters about a disappearance that occurred at least 18 months ago. How interesting that his unsubstantiated speculations about when and how it happened were accepted by the Times as too good to check.

Third, the whole story is much like the Southern politician’s accusation, “My opponent matriculated at college, and his sister is a thespian!” American troops first entered al-QaQaa on April 4th, before fighting ended in Baghdad. The facility had been identified as a potential WMD site, and securing it was given high priority. A search conducted immediately after the fall of Baghdad found no HMX or RDX. If our troops searched inadequately – and there is no evidence to back that accusation – the fault doesn’t lie with the high command, which gave the correct orders, much less with President Bush.

The overwhelmingly most likely hypothesis is that the materiel was moved out of al-QaQaa before the invasion began. As the Times itself observed a few days ago, it is now evident that Saddam laid the groundwork for post-war terrorism before the invasion. His preparations included the dispersal of munitions throughout the country. While the transportation of 380 tons of explosive raw materials would be a huge task for furtive looters, it was a trivial effort for the pre-war Iraqi military.

All in all, we see a “perfect storm” of media bias, foreign meddling and incomprehension of military reality. What was, at the unlikely worst, a blunder of trivial significance is elevated into a major reason to oust the Commander-in-Chief. That the Kerry campaign has taken up this ridiculous theme in stump speeches and a new commercial illustrates both its frivolity and how little of substance it has to convey.

Update (10/27/04): The New York Sun reports today that the United States urged M. El Baradei’s agency to destroy the Iraqi stocks of HMX and RDX in 1995. He refused. Now he professes alarm at fact that they may have fallen into the wrong hands.

CNN’s coverage of the story presents both sides. It is pretty clear that only one makes any sense.

Update (10/28/04): According to IAEA documents leaked to ABC News, the RDX disappeared from al-QaQaa before January 2003. The HMX may have still been there, but maybe not. The IAEA admits that it was possible to remove the material without breaking the seals that inspectors had placed on the cache.

This proof of Bush’s “incompetence” looks more and more like a sign of Kerry’s (and the elite media’s) desperation.

Further Reading: Andrew C. McCarthy, “Incredible Incompetence”

From a Reader: A reminder that M. El Baradei may have institutional as well as personal motives:

It’s interesting that I haven’t heard much about the oil-for-food scandal since the Al Qaqaa story broke the other day. I expected developments in that scandal to continue to be reported right up to the election. And, it’s equally interesting that a UN agency sent a memo on this just days before our election, when the administration has known about it for over a year. What’re the chances that the UN is playing hardball with the administration that is sponsoring the oil-for-food investigation against the UN?

Update (10/28/04) ABC News has shown a videotape, taken on April 18, 2003, that it interprets as showing evidence that HMX was present at al-QaQaa on that date. I have no way to evaluate that interpretation, but, at most, we now have contradictory evidence about when the explosives were removed from the base – and nothing at all to suggest incompetence at higher command levels.

If HMX was present, it is obvious that the soldiers on the spot didn’t recognize it for what it was. Let’s remember that the U.S. was specifically interested in the substance because of its potential role in Iraq’s nuclear weapons program. Finding signs of WMD programs was a high priority in the days after the fall of Baghdad. Troops would not have simply looked at a huge HMX stockpile and gone on their way.

Now, it may be that someone blundered by failing to identify the contents of the al-QaQaa cache. If so, it was the kind of mistake that frequently occurs in wartime, not a stupid command decision.

We must also bear in mind the counter-evidence:

• The site had been examined with some care by the Third Infantry Division on April 4th. It found no HMX.

• Moving many tons of materiel out of al-QaQaa after Coalition forces took control of the surrounding area would have been a remarkable feat. The IAEA reported the presence of 194 metric tons of HMX at the site. That’s a lot more than casual looters can take away in their knapsacks.

• As noted above, also by ABC, the IAEA’s assertion that HMX was at al-QaQaa as late as March 2003 is unreliable. The seals on the bunkers holding it would not have prevented its removal, and the inspectors did not verify that it was still there.

• There is no sign that HMX has been used by the terrorists, a fact that suggests that it is now in the custody of Syria or another foreign power, not sitting in Zarqawi’s headquarters.

Whatever the full facts here, the Kerry campaign’s notion that the President made a culpable misjudgement is an astonishing focus on the trivial (a foreshadowing of a Kerry Administration’s sense of priorities, perhaps?). Would President Kerry have personally inspected every bunker in Iraq? Or is his point that we should have delayed ousting the Ba’athists until we could send a vastly larger army? In that case, the missing HMX would certainly be under Saddam Hussein’s control at this moment. Would that make us safer?

Libertarian Frolics and Detours

Walter Olson, whose commentary on litigation follies is invaluable, declares today that he is going to vote for the Libertarian Party Presidential candidate, who he concedes “appears to be a barking moonbat” (Seems, Wally? Nay, he is), rather than George W. Bush. He links to other small-l libertarians who share his sentiment, some of whom plan to go further and cast an ultimate protest vote for John Kerry.

Their complaint is one that I’ve heard often: that the Bush Administration “combin[es] aggressive social conservatism with uncontrolled spending and big new government programs”. Few of the complainers argue that Senator Kerry is any better, and Wally doesn’t try to make that case. Instead, the notion seems to be that a Bush defeat will lead to a Republican Party that takes small government principles more seriously and panders less to spending lobbies, after which all of the damage wrought by a Kerry Administration can be undone.

I’m not the one to tell libertarians what action is in their own best interests, but reasoning of this sort fits the stereotype of libertarianism as the philosophy of “We happy few – and the fewer, the happier.”

President Bush doesn’t have an admirable record of restraining federal spending, but he isn’t at all a hopeless case from a small government point of view. He has been remarkably successful in cutting taxes, has reduced trade barriers (despite the temporary folly of the now-lapsed steel tariffs), has proposed a sensible immigration reform (unfortunately stalled by closed borders sentiment in Congress) and is responsible for only one big new government program, the Medicare prescription drug benefit. The last is a wretched idea, sure to expand expensively. On the other hand, he insisted, at considerable political cost, on yoking it to health savings accounts, the first concrete step that the government has ever taken toward steering health care to a free market track.

Libertarian protest voters may wish to contemplate the policies that their protest will help produce: Senator Kerry advocates tax hikes (some of which he could, as President, obtain simply by vetoing extensions of the 2001 cuts), has promised to “renegotiate” trade liberalization agreements (his running mate is an outright protectionist), will pursue either higher immigration barriers or a utopian multiculturalist policy (depending on whether he is more swayed by his labor union or his Hispanic Left constituency) and has plenty of ideas for dramatically expanding the size and scope of government. Maybe a Republican-controlled Congress will keep him in check, but maybe he will hive off enough left-leaning GOP votes to enact much of his program. The “golden age” of Clinton inertia was largely the product of that President’s personal lack of interest in all issues except reelection. Anti-Bush libertarians are betting a lot on the hope that John Kerry is cast from the same mold.

But I don’t want to descend to the argument that W is the lesser of two evils. If one looks at issues central to liberty, he is a good, albeit not a perfect good.

First, whatever libertarians may think about the President’s conservative stands on abortion, homosexual rights and stem cell research, those controversies are less important than freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of association, all of which are threatened by left-wing policies. Bush spokesmen haven’t been calling for restoration of the “fairness doctrine”, threatening retaliation against news media that present unfavorable views of their candidate, floating plans for “national service” for all high school graduates (temporarily played down so as not to conflict with the “Bush has a secret plan to restore the draft” smear) or assuring trial lawyers that they need not worry about significant tort reform. Nor has the Bush Administration given aid and comfort to campus speech codes, affirmative action racism or restrictions on the right of private organizations to determine their own membership. Aggressive social liberalism is a more serious danger to our rights at the present time than the President’s rather mild social conservatism.

Second, George Bush is the first President to take steps toward reversing the tide of Big Government in two of the areas that it most dominates: retirement policy and health care. Not even Ronald Reagan seriously suggested transforming Social Security’s public liabilities into private assets or increasing, rather than diminishing, the role of the patient in making choices about medical care. One reason why the Statist Left is so stridently anti-Bush is its fear that, within a couple of generations, Social Security reform and health savings accounts will create a new capitalist class of senior citizens, independent of the State and with an economic interest in limiting its impact on the economy.

A second Bush term will be a promising environment for pro-liberty initiatives. A Kerry victory will take them off the table for years. It could also lead to the demise of the small government wing of the Republican Party. If the President loses, the media will be quick to attribute the outcome to his “heartless right-wing policies”, and Republican opportunists will get lots of favorable coverage as potential “rescuers” of the party. In those circumstances, the likelihood that the next Republican nominee will be as libertarian as George Bush is close to nil. Libertarian purists who think that they have a lot to moan about now “ain’t seen nothing yet”.

Correction: Walter Olsen assures me that his statement was not meant to be read as a declaration that he intends to vote for the Libertarian Party candidate. I evidently read too much into it. At least, I didn’t misread as badly as some of his correspondents, who think that he endorsed John Kerry.

Further Reading: Hogberg’s Libertarian Guide to Bush Vs. Kerry considers a lot of issues in greater depth. I do disagree on some points, especially –

• The advantage that Mr. Hogberg gives to Kerry on “Government Spending” is wishful thinking. It assumes that Republicans will continue to control Congress throughout a Kerry Administration and will hold the line against government extravagance with virtual unanimity. To that I respond with three words: Ha, ha, ha.

• Abortion and same-sex marriage are far from unambiguous issues from the perspective of individual liberty. There is no libertarian principle that grants the right to kill very small human beings, so libertarian pro-abortionists rest their position on their understanding of biology or theology, not on the proper role of the state. The arguments in favor of state recognition of same-sex marriage are all grounded in equality, not liberty. So long as the government doesn’t persecute homosexuals, their liberty is unimpaired by a lack of state-conferred benefits.

• I’m surprised at how often libertarians omit freedom of speech, press and assembly from their lists of key political issues. Those freedoms are all under attack from the Left right now. I don’t think that there is much question about which Presidential candidate is more likely to defend them from the PC Police.

Religion Left and Right

A guy using the nom de spam “Reality Check” (sent from the e-mail address [email protected]) has favored me – and doubtless many other pro-Bush sites – with a long, not-too-coherent comment headed “GEORGE W BUSH IN [sic] NOT A BORN-AGAIN CHRISTIAN!”. His screed has no connection with the content of the post, about domestic economic policy, to which it is attached, but I’ll leave it up as an example of Kerryite guerilla warfare, part of the effort to discourage Christians from voting by appealing to their supposed prejudices. It is of a piece with the Kerry-Edwards remarks about Mary Cheney.

This incident prompts a few thoughts about the differences between the much reviled Religious Right and the benignly neglected Religious Left. John Kerry highlighted the distinction yesterday when he delivered a sermon on faith and politics. The core of his message was that true Christians are impelled by their beliefs to support tax-financed social welfare programs. On the other hand, they must never support laws reflecting their belief that abortion kills innocent human life. In other words, mixing church and state is fine, so long as the church pleads for expanding the state and otherwise keeps its mouth shut.

By this line of argument, a prudential disagreement – about what policies will have the actual effect of helping the poor – is recast as a moral one: Liberals think that the poor ought to be better off, while conservatives delight in grinding them into the dust.

There are, it can’t be denied, spokesmen for the Religious Right who espouse peculiar views; Pat Robertson springs to mind. There are very few, though, who confuse prudence and morality so consistently as the Left. Religious Rightists arguing against welfare programs usually make the same points as secular-minded libertarians: Welfare leads to generations of dependency and makes its recipients worse off. They don’t pretend to be raising a religious objection to welfare programs, nor do they imply, as Senator Kerry does, that those who disagree with them are deficient as Christians.

A few issues, notably abortion, fall into a different category. There the Right and Left within the Christian community disagree on moral fundamentals. One side believes that abortion is murder, the other that it isn’t worth getting excited about: a venial sin at worst. The Christian Left isn’t “pro-choice” out of a general bias in favor of liberty, but only because abortion doesn’t offend it. By the same token, Stalinist Russia didn’t outlaw playing cards, dancing and alcohol, but that doesn’t make it an exemplar of freedom.

If one believes the elite media, George W. Bush is the religious zealot in the Presidential race and John Kerry the modern sophisticate. Yet the President rarely, if ever, asserts that a policy is meritorious because it accords with Christian teaching. Even on abortion, stem cell research and same-sex marriage, where moral issues loom large, he limits himself to principles that are widely held by believers and unbelievers alike. By his own account, his faith in God is a source of strength and solace in troubled times, not of policy prescriptions. It is his opponent who claims to find a political platform in the Gospel, which won’t disturb the “wall of separation” crowd at all, so long as it is their platform.

Update (11/25/05): “Reality Check” has now added a briefer version of his spam comment to this post. Sorry, pal, the election really is over (unless you hope to influence the Electoral College, whose members probaby don’t read this blog).

Taxation With Ulterior Motives

Friday morning, somewhat unexpectedly, the President signed the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004. Until a few days ago, the word had been that the bill would sit on his desk until Election Day or later, presumably because there was no time for a signing ceremony in the last days of the campaign.

I doubt that there is any great political significance to the decision to take care of the matter now rather than later. The elite media will doubtless try to find a sinister side to what they keep characterizing as a “corporate tax cut” (the measure is in fact revenue-neutral according to the Joint Tax Committee) and will overlook the important fact that, the sooner it was signed into law, the sooner could begin the process of removing the tariffs imposed by the European Union in retaliation, blessed by the WTO, for the “export subsidies” that AJCA removes. Resolving this trade dispute, to which Democrats in Congress were mostly oblivious (including a certain French-looking Senator from Massachusetts who by the way served in Vietnam) is a good thing. (Senator Kerry came against the bill, and a spokesman said immediately after its signing that, elected, he would seek speedy repeal. See the addendum for a few more words on that topic.)

From my personal point of view, what is important about AJCA is not the parts that add or subtract revenue but the provisions altering the tax treatment of nonqualified deferred compensation. Their purpose isn’t to raise money for the fisc (their revenue impact is a negligible billion dollars total over ten years) but to appease pseudo-populist resentment through pseudo-punitive restrictions. The upshot is that, whether or not AJCA creates American jobs generally, it certainly creates work for Americans like me.

I suppose that I’m ungrateful to gripe about a fountain of billable hours, but this development illustrates in miniature the defects of a tax system that makes an important point of reforming human behavior as well as collecting revenue. The impetus for deferred compensation “reform” came from tales of gigantic pay packages given to executives as they departed their employers. Feelings of envy were aggravated by (mostly inaccurate) articles in publications like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal alleging that the executives who were promised these packages bore no real risk of non-payment in the event of employer insolvency. Why aren’t they being taxed now? the media demanded to know.

The quick answer was that the Treasury has little reason to care when deferred compensation is taxed, because taxation of the employee is accompanied by a deduction for the employer (in some cases delayed by a year, so that the fisc actually profits from deferral). Since taxable entities and their employees tend to be in pretty nearly the same tax brackets, the net effect is a wash. (The rules are different, and much less favorable, for tax-exempt employers, to which deductions are meaningless. The government maximizes revenue by taxing their executives’ deferred compensation as soon as it vests.)

In the absence of any significant revenue considerations, sensible tax policy dictated rules that were understandable and free of traps for the unwary. The old deferred compensation regime perhaps did not wholly attain to that ideal, but it had the virtue of leaving plan design to the parties involved and imposing tax in a way that made intuitive sense. Its replacement is essentially a government-designed straitjacket. As straitjackets go, it isn’t particularly constricting, but why should Capitol Hill staffers, few of whom have ever so much as participated in a private sector deferred compensation arrangement, be deciding what features are best for all situations? If some Congressional socialist were to propose putting compensation deals between companies and their executives under the supervision of a federal oversight committee, he wouldn’t attract 20 votes, yet it proved easy to slip an equivalent intrusion into a tax bill.

So it is with much other political aggrandizement and social engineering. The income tax has theoretical advantages over other forms of taxation, but those are balanced, if not outweighed, by a practical flaw: No other form of taxation is so readily manipulated for non-revenue ends. The cumulative impact of decades of petty tinkering for petty ends has probably done as much damage to the economy as a couple of middle-sized wars.

Addendum: Among Senator Kerry’s leading campaign themes are the decline in American manufacturing jobs and the evils of outsourcing. One would imagine, then, that he would find AJCA’s centerpiece, a tax rate reduction for income derived from U.S. production facilities, compatible with his aims. Instead, he promises to seek its repeal as a first order of business, should he become President. Since the rate reduction was designed to offset the elimination of export tax subsidies, the net effect of its repeal would be an unequivocal tax increase on a segment of the economy – domestic manufacturing – that is supposedly the object of the Senator’s solicitude. Or perhaps he would also like to restore the erstwhile subsidies and resume the nascent trade war with the rest of the world. That is a fine policy for a soi disant multilateralist!

These Are a Few of My Favorite Blogs

Right Wing News periodically ranks its proprietor’s favorite blogs. Accompanying the latest list is a request for similar ones from other bloggers. Always happy to oblige, I offer my own, highly eccentric and subjective honor roll of favorites (rank order approximate and variable from day to day):

1. Best of the Web Today – James Taranto’s daily roundup of important, interesting and downright odd stories from around the Internet
2. Kerry Spot – Bright, brightly written guide to what’s happening in the election
3. Watch: Covering the War on Terror – Links to news and opinion about the war
4. Instapundit – If he didn’t exist, the Left would try to keep him from being invented.
5. The Corner on NRO – National Review’s group blog
6. Overlawyered – Chronicling the high cost of American litigation; a fine source of information about the latest absurd lawsuits
7. Tim Blair – Australia’s blogospheric heavyweight
8. Little Green Footballs – Number one target of the Angry Left, so how can you not like him?
9. David Frum’s Diary – Best of the younger generation of neoconservative commentators
10. Hoystory – This guy ought to have his own syndicated column.
11. Iraq the Model – The antidote to the American media’s doom and gloom
12. Nixatron Blog-Times – Omnium gatherum of political news and opinion
13. Armavirumque – Group blog of The New Criterion, a great cultural magazine
14. Cronaca – Art, archeology, history, a dash of politics
15. Bjørn Stærk Blog – Imagine what it must be like to be a young, right-of-center pundit in Norway!
16. Arthur Chrenkoff – An Australian who is best known for publicizing the abundant good news from Iraq and Afghanistan.
17. Right Wing News – What the name implies, with a good sense of humor
18. Universe Today – News about astronomy, cosmology and the space program
19. Venezuela News and Views – You really should be paying attention to what’s going on in the world’s next communist dictatorship.
20. The Volokh Conspiracy – Group blog featuring libertarian and conservative law professors
21. Blogs4God – A meta-blog of religiously oriented blogs
22. Power Line – The blogosphere’s newest superstar
23. JustOneMinute – Practically an investigative reporter
24. The Conservative Brotherhood – Meta-blog of right-of-center African-American blogs
25. Transterrestrial Musings – Commentary on the space program, politics and related topics
26. Geek Press – News from the odd corners of science
27. Sound Politics – Covering Washington State; the model of what a regional political blog ought to be
28. The Edge of England’s Sword – Dubious statistics exposed, global warming debunked, the demise of Toryism lamented
29. Rasmusen’s Weblog – Economics, religion and politics; the first is heavily mathematical and can be intimidating, but you don’t have to understand all of it.
30. ConSim World – News about wargaming

Looking over the list, I already disagree with some of the rankings and regret numerous omissions. Don’t The Charlock’s Shade and Midwest Conservative Journal (the source for information about the breakup of the Anglican Communion) and Belmont Club and Jihad Watch and Davids Medienkritik and The Shape of Days and The Forest for the Trees and Europundits and a bunch of others deserve to be in the top tier? Yep. But I can either apportion places with absolute justice or finish this post. I choose the latter.

Quotes of the Day

From an NRO Corner reader, currently teaching in Red China:

One of the things I find particularly distressing is how the careless and hateful rhetoric of Democrats and the media have been swallowed hook, line, and sinker by the Chinese, who receive it via (God help us!) the BBC. Bush evil. Bush stupid. That's what my students believe; the dismissive tone of their voices, when they mention President Bush’s name, speaks more than any words can. Democrats and the media are so insular, that they do not begin to conceive of the impact of their propaganda and how that shapes the way the rest of the world views us. What has poisoned the perception of the U.S. abroad is not the actions of GWB, but that of the Democrats and the media who noised abroad their disdain and lack of support for Dubya, all for political gain. Had the Democrats and media done what was right, the U.S. would be in different odor around the globe.

From Yale Bulldogs (via Man Without Qualities):

For the first time since the U.S. Presidential election process came down to Republicans vs. Democrats, candidates from the same undergraduate institution oppose each other. Since a Yale man (graduate school included) will occupy the White House for the fifth straight term – and both of the current candidates were athletes – we surveyed the largest Bulldog team to see who was getting the most support. The 2004 Yale Football team leans to the right with 62 players voting for George Bush ’68 (baseball). John Kerry ’66 (lacrosse, hockey, soccer), who shared the Yale campus with his opposition for two years as an undergraduate, got 27 votes while 11 players said they were undecided. The current Bulldogs were also asked who on their team is most likely to become president of the U.S. The clear-cut choice is senior OL Dickey Shanor (Cheyenne, Wyo.), who hails from the same state as current V.P. Dick Cheney.

Another potential political luminary on the team is senior wide receiver Teddy Pataki (son of NY Governor George), who will be entering the Marine Corps after graduation.

Kerry on American Futility

James Taranto calls attention to (yet another) strange Kerry viewpoint, recounted in today’s Washington Post:

Kerry’s belief in working with allies runs so deep that he has maintained that the loss of American life can be better justified if it occurs in the course of a mission with international support. In 1994, discussing the possibility of U.S. troops being killed in Bosnia, he said, “If you mean dying in the course of the United Nations effort, yes, it is worth that. If you mean dying American troops unilaterally going in with some false presumption that we can affect the outcome, the answer is unequivocally no.”

Mr. Taranto is, not unnaturally, appalled by the implication that “the U.N. – that club of dictators and anti-Semites – is worth dying for, but America isn’t”, but there is worse to be said. Notice Senator Kerry’s dichotomy: a “United Nations effort” vs. “American troops unilaterally going in with some false presumption that we can affect the outcome”. What about, American troops going in with the true “presumption that we can affect the outcome”?

In the Balkans, in fact, American power did affect the outcome decisively. Without the U.S., Old Europe could not have overcome so negligible a opponent as Milosevich’s Serbia. It was recognition of that reality that led the Europeans to seek our intervention. If they could have done the job themselves, an American presence would have been neither needed nor wanted.

Yet Senator Kerry, at least according to the Post (in an article clearly intended to be supportive), cannot so much as contemplate the prospect of successful American action on our own. No wonder he sees Iraq solely in shades of dark gray and fantasizes that the French or Germans will ride to our rescue. Such a mindset clarifies the debate about whether he would, as President, give foreign powers a de facto veto over our military options. If he believes that acting unilaterally is inevitably futile, of course he won’t waste money and lives in that fashion. By his lights, why should he?

The article has another ponderable:

A more recent theme for the senator from Massachusetts has been the importance of listening carefully to military advice. It is a subject he touched on in the past but seems to have emphasized more in the current campaign . . . Kerry says his Pentagon would be more respectful of the views of his generals than Bush’s has been. In August he told Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper, that he would “have it a prerequisite that the secretary of defense work effectively with the professional military, listens to their advice, and . . . is respectful in the way we do disagree with it.”

That may be a sensible policy, but doesn’t it sound odd from a candidate who has repeatedly denounced the President for letting the military conduct the Tora Bora operation without civilian micromanagement? What President Kerry would “listen to”, it seems, is generals’ amateur advice, preferably hypercautious, on foreign politics, even as he second guessed their professional judgement on how to conduct combat operations.

The keynote of the Kerry campaign, above all else, is the futility of action, whether the challenge is terrorists abroad or the unfunded Social Security liability at home. In the words of the cool, conservative men of the musical 1776:

Why begin till we know that we can win?
And if we cannot win, why bother to begin?
We say this game’s not of our choosing.
Why should we risk losing?
We cool, cool men.

Sometimes it’s not hip to be cool.

The Perils of Quoting in French

I’ve noticed that spammers once in a while pick up a word or two from my Web site to insert into their subject lines:“Kerry Islamofascism, buy viagra on-line”, etc. My latest experience hints at further spambot evolution, though it conceivably may be a coincidence.

A few days ago, I animadverted to a silly left-wing claim that the U.S. government made up the moniker “al-Qa’eda” in 2001. As evidence to the contrary, I quoted a book written in 1999, which stated that Osama bin Laden had founded the an organization of that name in 1988. To add weight to that refutation, I quoted my source in its original language, French. (Luckily, the couple of sentences were simple enough that I could translate them.) That was the first French to appear on Stromata Blog beyond the occasional brief phrase.

Today, I received an e-mail of a familiar type, but the subject line was not “BUSINESS PARTNER NEEDED” or “IN STRICTEST CONFIDENCE”, but “A Votre Attention”, and it began –

Cher Ami,

Recevez mes salutations. Mon nom est Abdulati al-Abaidi. Je suis depuis fort longtemps le le secrétaire personnel et confidentiel de l'ingénieur Saif Al Islam Muammar al Gaddafi le fils ainé du colonel Muammar Gaddafi de la Libye. Les informations que je m'en vais vous divulguer sont des secrets d'Etats, et devrais par conséquent être gardés dans le plus grand secret et la plus haute confidentialité. Etant donné mes compétences, j'étais important dans l'industrie secrète de pétrole. Secrète parcequ'avant que la décision et l'annonce de l'arret de nos programmes nucléaires ne soit prise en décembre dernier 2003 par notre leader absolu, la vente et l'achat du pétrole Libyen était sous embargo.

Continuing with the expected promise of 25 percent of $30,000,000. (Haven’t these guys ever heard of euros, or Swiss francs?)

I must watch my tongue more carefully.

Saddam, WMD’s and Terror: What the ISG Found

Strangely undercited in the blogosphere is an essay the appeared last Thursday in the Wall Street Journal, “Have War Critics Even Read the Duelfer Report?” by Richard Spertzel. Mr. Spertzel, as a member of the team that produced the report, is perhaps in a good position to highlight the findings that have real signficance. Here is what he says:

While no facilities were found producing chemical or biological agents on a large scale, many clandestine laboratories operating under the Iraqi Intelligence Services were found to be engaged in small-scale production of chemical nerve agents, sulfur mustard, nitrogen mustard, ricin, aflatoxin, and other unspecified biological agents. These laboratories were also evaluating whether various poisons would change the texture, smell or appearance of foodstuffs. These aspects of the ISG report have been ignored by the pundits and press. Did these constitute an imminent threat? Perhaps it depends how you define “threat.”

The chemical section reports that the M16 Directorate “had a plan to produce and weaponize nitrogen mustard in rifle grenades and a plan to bottle sarin and sulfur mustard in perfume sprayers and medicine bottles which they would ship to the United States and Europe.” Are we to believe this plan existed because they liked us? Or did they wish to do us harm? The major threat posed by Iraq, in my opinion, was the support it gave to terrorists in general, and its own terrorist activity.

The ISG was also told that “ricin was being developed into stable liquid to deliver as an aerosol” in various munitions. Such development was not just for assassination. If Iraq was successful in developing an aerosolizable ricin, it made a significant step forward. The development had to be for terrorist delivery. Even on a small scale this must be considered as a WMD. . . .

Documentation indicates that Iraq was training non-Iraqis at Salman Pak in terrorist techniques, including assassination and suicide bombing. In addition to Iraqis, trainees included Palestinians, Yemenis, Saudis, Lebanese, Egyptians and Sudanese.

Quite simply, the Ba’athist regime in Iraq concentrated on perfecting chemical and biological weapons specifically for terrorism. To ignore that fact and assert that Saddam Hussein was “no threat” because he didn’t maintain a WMD arsenal for a conventional war is a supreme instance of “distraction from the War on Terror”. President Bush didn’t fear that the Iraqi army would deploy chemical and biological arms to reconquer Kuwait or invade Saudi Arabia. His central concern was that, if left to fester, Iraq would become a supplier of money and weapons to a variety of terrorist groups. The Duelfer Report demonstrates that Saddam was working toward exactly that end.

Any evaluation of the decision to depose the Ba’athists is frivolous unless it takes into account the costs of not acting. One of those costs is that Saddam Hussein would have been free to continue on the same trajectory, a trajectory that, unless we were extraordinarily lucky, would have led to terror strikes more deadly than 9/11. The people whose lives were saved don’t know who they are, which impresses me as a good reason for all of us, as equally potential casualties, to cast grateful votes for George W. Bush.

The Free Press in Brussels

The American press has been quite upset lately by subpoenas demanding information about reporters’ sources for the possibly (though not probably) illegal revelation that the glamorous Valerie Plame-Wilson works for the Central Intelligence Agency. (JustOneMinute has been doggedly following this kerfuffle, saving the rest of us the trouble.) It’s no shock that journalists don’t like the idea of other journalists being forced to disclose the identities of informants. The courts have, however, consistently ruled that keeping them secret is not a First Amendment right.

How much more does Freedom of the Press flourish in Old Europe! Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights guarantees it, and European Union courts have held that governments have no justification for compelling reporters to say whence they obtained leaked information.

It turns out, however, that Article 10 is less than completely binding on the EU’s own executive branch. The Daily Telegraph reports on what happened to a newsman who tried to shield the sources of stories critical of the European Commission:

The European Court has quietly brushed aside 50 years of international case law in a landmark judgment on press freedom, ruling that Brussels does not have to comply with European human rights codes.

In a judgment with profound implications for civil liberties, Euro-judges backed efforts by the European Commission to obtain the computers, address books, telephone records and 1,000 pages of notes seized by Belgian police – on EU instructions – from Hans-Martin Tillack, the former Brussels correspondent of Germany’s Stern magazine. . . .

Mr Tillack had written a series of hard-hitting exposes of EU fraud and skulduggery, relying on inside sources. . . .

He was arrested by the Belgian police in March and held incommunicado for 10 hours for allegedly bribing an official to obtain internal EU documents.

The action was requested “urgently” by the EU’s anti-fraud office, which claimed Mr Tillack was about leave for America. In fact, he was moving back to Hamburg.

Leaked anti-fraud office documents have since shown that the allegation was concocted over dinner between two commission spokesmen.

Raymond Kendall, the former Interpol chief and now head of anti-fraud office oversight board, testified to the [British House of] Lords in May that officials had acted improperly “purely on the basis of hearsay” and were “obviously” in collusion with Belgian police to identify Mr Tillack’s sources.

Claiming that the anti-fraud office head had more power to launch raids and seize documents than any other police chief in the world, he said the body was a danger to civil liberties. “They can do whatever they want to do. There is absolutely no control whatsoever,” he said.

Mr. Tillack’s lawsuit to prevent the European Commission from making use of the seized records was rejected by the EU’s highest court. While the basis for the decision appears to have been at least partly procedural, it certainly doesn’t augur well for the rights that the American media regard as “sacred”. I await indignant editorials, particularly from U.S. newspapers and television networks that have correspondents in Europe.

The Next Moonbat Theme

The Loony Left house organ The Guardian, in the course of a long paean to a forthcoming BBC special “disproving” the very existence of terrorism, informs its gullible readers that –

. . . al-Qaida did not even have a name until early 2001, when the American government decided to prosecute Bin Laden in his absence and had to use anti-Mafia laws that required the existence of a named criminal organisation.

So Jacques Baud, a Swiss counterterrorism expert, must have had precognition of this American deception when he wrote, in the 1999 edition of Encyclopédie des Terrorismes,

Bin Laden se sépare d’Azzam [Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian terrorist with whom he had co-founded Makhtab al-Khidamat c. 1980] et commence à exporter la lutte pour l’islam (Djihad) à travers le monde, et crée en 1988 une nouvelle organisation – l’al-Qaeda (“La Base”) [emphasis added]. Après la mort d’Azzam par l’explosion d’une voiture-bombe, le MAK se divise, et sa faction la plus extrémiste rejoint Bin Laden. [Bin Laden broke with Azzam and began exporting the struggle for Islam (“jihad”) throughout the world. In 1988 he created a new organization, al-Qa’eda (“the Foundation”). After the death of Azzam in a car bomb explosion, the MAK split, and the most extreme faction rejoined bin Laden.]

(Hat tip to Dhimmi Watch). The BBC mockumentary is not the only sign that “terrorism is just an illusion” will be the next big Leftist theme. I suspect that we’ll hear it a lot as soon as the Presidential election is over, no matter which candidate wins.

Gandalf LIED! People Died!

Are you fed up with simplistic good vs. evil story lines? Want your heroic fantasy with a dash of nuance? Let me recommend Fellowship 9/11, a new documentary that exposes the truth behind that neoconservative volume of Bushitler LIES, The Lord of the Rings.

One of the most controversial and provocative films of the year, Fellowship 9/11 is Academy Award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore’s searing examination of the Aragorn administration’s actions in the wake of the tragic events at Helms Deep.

With his characteristic humor and dogged commitment to uncovering – or if necessary fabricating – the facts, Moore considers the reign of the son of Arathorn and where it has led us.

He looks at how – and why – Aragorn and his inner circle avoided pursuing the Saruman connection to Helms Deep, despite the fact that 9 out of every 10 Orcs that attacked the castle were actually Uruk-hai who were spawned in and financed by Isengard.

Fellowship 9/11 shows us a Middle Earth kept in constant fear by “Orc Alerts” and lulled into accepting a piece of legislation, the Patriot Scroll, that infringes on basic civil rights. It is in this atmosphere of confusion, suspicion and dread that Aragorn, backed by the secretive “Fellowship Group,” makes his headlong rush towards war in Mordor – and Fellowship 9/11 takes us inside that war to tell the stories we haven’t heard, illustrating the awful cost to soldiers and to orcs and to their families.

It’s time for regime change in Minas Tirith!

Plum Springs Eternal

To The Charlock’s Shade thanks for reminding me that today is the 123rd birthday of P. G. Wodehouse. “Plum” is not as well known now as when his stories highlighted the Saturday Evening Post and his musical comedies ran on Broadway (five simultaneously in 1917, a record never equaled), but an amazing proportion of his hundred-plus books remain in print, and The Wodehouse Society flourishes.

Wodehouse continues to delight, which is remarkable when one contrasts the fate of other comic writers of the first half of the 20th Century. Jerome K. Jerome, James Thurber, Robert Benchley, Will Cuppy and the others who once would have been listed as Wodehouse’s peers are not entirely forgotten, but they are fading. As time goes on, one more and more reads them the way we do Aristophanes or Plautus or, let us confess, the comedies of Shakespeare, aware that jokes are in the air but not quite moved to laugh at them. Wodehouse is not like that. He retains his sparkle notwithstanding the extinction of his milieu. Bertie Wooster, the incomparable Jeeves, Aunts Dahlia and Agatha, Lord Emsworth, Uncle Fred, Mr. Mulliner, the Oldest Member, Psmith, Ukridge and all the rest could never have lived in the “real world”, but they are alive in the better-than-real world that “Plum” created.

It is not, one must emphasize, a world of wish fulfillment, as in the poorer run of romance novels. Bertie Wooster is a rich young man with the cleverest of manservants, but he also scarcely gets through a book without being compelled, by the implacable and quixotic “Code of the Woosters”, to undertake an impossible task that carries a high risk of grievous bodily harm from blackguards or gangsters or irate swans. His chance of success always looks as dim as his wits, and failure will inevitably be attended by dire consequences. It is a rare Wodehouse story that does not skate on the edge of tragedy.

What makes the stories timeless is that the potential tragedy never arises from necessity or passion. Destitution is absent, and the Seven Deadly Sins show up only in attenuated caricatures of gluttony and sloth. All conflict flows, rather, from mild virtues and quotidian vices, from obsession with pigs or paperweights, from shame at making a living from cheap literature, from fear that a prize cook will be lured to another household or a pretty daughter into marriage with an unsuitable young man, from petty loans and ridiculous wagers. We see in Wodehouse humanity purified but not perfected. His humor grows out of the incongruities of the human heart. Until our hearts change beyond recognition, he will amuse us.

Japanese Against Danegeld

While Senator Kerry has never told us in which Washington restaurants he me all of those “foreign leaders” who yearn for him to become President, some such persons certainly exist: Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schröder, Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega, to name a few. So perhaps it’s worth noting that the Prime Minister of the world’s second biggest economic power, Junichiro Koizumi of Japan, has openly endorsed President Bush. One of his advisors explains why:

Liberal Democratic Party Secretary General Tsutomu Takebe said Friday there will be trouble if Democratic challenger John Kerry beats incumbent George W. Bush in the U.S. presidential election.

Takebe, who is seen as a right-hand man of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, told a Nippon Broadcasting System radio program, referring to the Nov. 2 presidential election, “It would mean trouble if it is not President Bush. Mr. Kerry is trying to address the North Korean problem bilaterally. That is totally out of the question.”

In the first Presidential debate, Senator Kerry said that he would give in to North Korea’s demand for talks between Washington and Pyongyang without the participation of other nations. The flaw in that idea is that the U.S. has no effective way to apply pressure to the North without the assistance of neighboring countries, unless we are willing to threaten a thermonuclear attack (which we aren’t). All that we could do in bilateral negotiations is subsidize the dysfunctional North Korean economy in return for promises to abandon nuclear weapons building. We tried that approach under the Clinton Administration, and it failed. Senator Kerry’s plan is to resurrect failure and try it again. In fact, he seems to like the idea of offering bribes to tyrannical regimes, as that is the essence of his proposed approach to Iran’s development of nuclear capabilities.

Rudyard Kipling had the final word on international protection rackets:

It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray;
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say:

“We never pay anyone Danegeld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that pays it is lost!”

The Canadian Paradise

One hardly ever meets a liberal who doesn’t believe that the United States would be an infinitely better place were it only more like Canada. Here we labor in the tightening grip of fascism. North of the border, meanwhile, all is peace, serenity, New Age fuzzy warmness . . .

Bloggers in Canada are deleting posts after Warren Kinsella, an aide to former Prime Minister Jean Chretien, threatened them with legal action. [Cicada]

Upon threat of legal action from the wise, courageous, and apparently unchallengeable Warren Kinsella, I have pulled my previous post.

I'm not a lawyer, like Warren Kinsella, LL.B. I don't know if what I wrote meets the legal definition of defamation, and I can't afford to find out, so I've deleted the post. [Babbling Brooks]

BlogsCanada asks, “Who is Warren Kinsella and why is he threatening bloggers?” The quick answer is that he is a bigshot Toronto lawyer and former aide to the former Prime Minister. He likes to wear “George Bush is an Internationalist Terrorist” t-shirts. He doesn’t like to be criticized himself, and so he has launched legal threats against bloggers with unkind words to say about the Chrétien administration and particularly about the Adscam scandal.

Here in the proto-fascist U.S., nobody would pay attention. In Canada, everybody does, and the offending posts vanish from the Internet. Ah, freedom!

Catullus, it seems, could write more harshly about a Roman dictator than a modern Canadian dare about a democratically elected leader’s minion.

Nil nimium studeo, Caesar, tibi velle placere,
nec scire utrum sis albus an ater homo.

Tu quoque, Kinsella.

The Vice President’s Daughter

Were there nothing else to be said about John Kerry’s gratuitous reference to Mary Cheney during last night’s debate, a fundamental moral truth, as an Instapundit reader observes, is that using a daughter to score a political point against her father is despicable. The Senator’s own campaign manager refuted any innocent interpretation of his remarks when she stated that Miss Cheney’s sexual preference is “fair game”. “Game” is what hunters shoot at. The target is obvious when one looks at Mary Beth Cahill’s remarks in full (as quoted by Fox News):

I think it’s an acknowledged fact, she seems to be very proud and open about her sexuality, her parents seem to be very proud of her. And she has been a subject of the campaign off and on. It comes up. There are a lot of questions here about gay marriage and she is someone who is a major figure in the campaign. I think it’s fair game and I think she has been treated very respectfully.

Unless Miss Cahill’s secret goal is to make Republicans look broad-minded and tolerant, the only possible meaning of “fair game” is that she believes voters will find pride in and openness about homosexuality discreditable. That is an unexpected sentiment from the mouth of a high official of the party that claims to champion homosexual rights. Perhaps it simply stems from the Democrats’ obvious contempt for large segments of the American people: The Bible-thumping rubes will turn against President Bush if they learn that his running mate’s daughter is a fag.

But there’s another possible explanation, one that is consistent with an oddity that I noted a while ago: A number of homosexuals served in fairly high-ranking posts in the Clinton Administration. Bill Clinton’s biography, which is otherwise a blizzard of names, omits them all – almost as if he did not wish to appear on the same printed page as sexual deviants.

The tactical alliance between liberals and homosexual activists doesn’t mean that liberals have to approve of, much less celebrate, homosexuality in their hearts. The insinuation that Dick Cheney ought to feel disgraced by his daughter’s conduct suggests that the Kerrys and Cahills share the prejudices that they condemn in conservatives. One wonders what policies they would pursue if liberalism were ever to become so dominant that it could dispense with homosexual support. The contemporary Left shows a strong penchant for banning or compulsorily reforming habits that it dislikes. If smokers are to be harassed, will “queers” necessarily be left alone?

Further reading: William Kristol, “Fair Game”:

How stupid does John Kerry think the American people are? Does he really think they will believe that he singled out Mary Cheney because he “was trying to say something positive about the way strong families deal with this issue?” Does he think they will accept his claim that he was saying something about the Cheneys’ “love of their daughter”? Of course, he wasn’t. In his answer, he never mentioned or came close to mentioning the Cheney family, or the Cheneys’ love. He merely brought up Mary Cheney as a lesbian, out of left field, in order to get her name and sexual orientation into an answer where no such citation was expected, called for, or remotely appropriate. His campaign manager let slip the truth when after the debate she told Fox News’s Chris Wallace that Mary Cheney was “fair game.”

Noted in Passing

* If we know anything at all, it is that the puzzle of when and under what circumstances John Kerry was discharged from the Navy will never incite the curiosity of any newspaper more elite than the little known New York Sun. BeldarBlog seems to have all of the necessary data, but I have yet to see an explanation that makes sense. Lieutenant Kerry’s Navy Reserve commitment ended in 1972. In the normal course of events, he would have received his discharge then. Instead, it came in 1978 under a procedure used for involuntary separations, and the panel that disposed of the matter was convened by an (apparently highly unusual) Presidential order.

I can account for most of the facts. Suppose that Kerry asked for a discharge in 1972 and was informed that, on account of conduct unbecoming an officer (such as meetings with enemy officials in Paris and false war crimes accusations), he would be mustered out under other than honorable conditions. He could then have withdrawn his request and remained in the Inactive Reserve until and unless the Navy took action to force him out. That would account for his remaining nominally on the rolls for six additional years. Why, though, when President Carter, presumptively friendly to war resisters (his first official action was amnesty for draft dodgers) took office, didn’t Lieutenant Kerry just resubmit his discharge request and exit in the normal way? There is probably a mundane, bureaucratic reason. Learning it isn’t vastly important, but (you’ve heard this before) can’t reporters who pore over every scrap of paper, genuine or forged, relating to George W. Bush in the National Guard bring themselves once in a while to ask questions about the anomalies in the Democratic candidate’s career?

* Happy Birthday to Margaret Thatcher, 79 years old today.

* On a sad note, military historian David Chandler died last Sunday at age 70. His magisterial The Campaigns of Napoleon is the one book that everybody with a serious interest in the Napoleonic Wars has read.

* The Daily Telegraph reports that the murdered children of Beslan have a fitting memorial:

One of Russia’s leading icon artists has painted a 3ft-high rendering of the children who died in the Beslan school siege last month.

Mikhail Osipenko, who lives and works in St Petersburg, painted the icon as part of a commemoration to coincide with the end of the traditional Orthodox 40-day mourning period. . . .

The icon is based on the Babes of Bethlehem which commemorates the slaughter of the innocents, King Herod’s murder of the children after Christ was born. It depicts white-robed children, black devils and a crying Virgin Mary. The Caucasus mountains can be seen in the background.

The icon will be kept in a local monastery until the completion of a church which is to be built in time for the first anniversary of the gun battle that left more than 300 dead, half of them children.

May the Lord God remember them in His Kingdom.

* The debate? Oh, that. I suppose that “victory” is in the eye of the beholder in these affairs. The media will do all that they can to cover all eyes with a pink gauze, just as they did after each of the other encounters. They’ve always succeeded in shaping a perception that the President did worse, and his opponent better, than was evident to my vision. I won’t waste my pixels grumbling and will second the Kerry Spot’s verdict:

John Kerry came across as an old, tired, worn out, stretched-out Leftist Tree Spirit belched forth by the fiery pits of Massachusetts liberalism. Despite citing Ronald Reagan so frequently that one might think he had a nervous tic, his answers made clear that a President Kerry would chart the country on a course further to the left than Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, and LBJ. We know what we’ve got in George W. Bush. Conservative most of the time, moderate when he doesn’t have the votes; a guy who may make mistakes, but you’ll always know where he stands.

The Ressentiment Tax

The tax bill that Congress passed on Monday (called, with customary inattention to truth in labeling, the “American Jobs Creation Act of 2004”) could have been a straightforward resolution of an unnecessary quarrel. Several years ago, the World Trade Organization ruled that U.S. tax reductions on earnings generated by exports violated its rules. After much backing and forthing, the European Union last year imposed retaliatory tariffs, carefully calibrated to have their greatest impact on goods manufactured in “red” states. The purpose of the new law is to remove the offending “tax subsidies” in order to bring an end to the EU levies.

The legal merits of the WTO decision can be debated, but, if the reasoning may have been wrong, the result was right. Government favoritism of goods produced for export over those for the home market are minor league “industrial policy”, leading only to distorted resource allocations and reduced wealth. Getting rid of them is in our best interests, not Europe’s. Instead of retaliating, the EU would have been cleverer to encourage the continuance of this subvention from the American taxpayers.

The simple option for Congress would have been an across-the-board cut in business tax rates to replace the export incentives. Our lawmakers do not, however, like simplicity, which limits their ability to get credit for handing out favors. Hence, AJCA is a heap of narrow rate decreases, credits and deductions, balanced by a slew of tax hikes and enforcement initiatives to achieve a zero net revenue loss for the feds. Among the money raisers is a set of new rules governing the tax treatment of unfunded deferred compensation, an area within my direct sphere of professional interest.

What is most interesting about the new rules isn’t their technical details, but the impulse behind them. As a source of revenue, they are trivial, scored by that Joint Tax Committee staff at $1 billion over ten years, a figure that is probably an overstatement. Under pre-AJCA law, a for-profit company’s naked promise of future compensation, backed by nothing by its own word, is not a taxable event. Until the promise is fulfilled, the company gets no deduction and the employee recognizes no income. Hence, these transactions are of virtually no financial interest to the U.S. Treasury. No matter when the compensation is paid, the employee’s income is usually offset by the employer’s deduction. The only advantage to the government from earlier recognition of income comes when the payor is in a lower tax bracket than the recipient. If, for instance, a corporation in the 34 percent tax bracket pays $100,000 to an executive in the 35 percent bracket, the former owes $34,000 less income tax and the latter $35,000 more. It’s in the government’s interest to collect the difference sooner rather than later, but the revenue effect isn’t dramatic. (N.B. The tax consequences are different if the payor is tax-exempt. There being no balancing deduction, the government takes its tax bite from the executive as soon as his rights are not contingent upon continued rendition of substantial services.)

At the moment, the top individual and corporate tax rates are an identical 35 percent. Next year, selected manufacturing corporations will pay only 32 percent. That differential means that discouraging the deferral of compensation will accelerate the government’s cash flow, if only to a paltry extent. I’m fairly confident, based on the tentative reactions of my own clients, that the effect will be even smaller than the Joint Committee projects. The new law penalizes a few gimmicks that have become popular in recent years (notably options with exercise prices below fair market value at the date of grant and “haircut” provisions that allow employees to elect early distribution of deferrals in exchange for forfeiture of part of the amount deferred) and eliminates a couple of shady practices (such as setting up “rabbi trusts”, supposedly subject to the claims of the employer’s creditors, in out-of-the-way jurisdictions where creditors may be unable to enforce their rights), but none of those features is essential to any company’s compensation planning. There’s no reason to anticipate that their demise will have much real impact on executives’ propensity to accept postponement of the receipt of pay.

If that is so, why did Congress go to the trouble of enacting “reforms”? An examination of the changes shows that they lack rational coherence, either as revenue raisers or policy tools. Some of their consequences are anomalous by any standard.

If a company promises an executive in 2005 that it will him $100,000 in 2010, with the proviso that he can elect an earlier distribution by giving up ten percent of his entitlement, AJCA will tax him in 2005 at a top rate of 55 percent, compared to 35 percent for current compensation. Why should income in prospect be taxed more heavily (especially that much more heavily) than income in hand?

Another oddity is the disparate treatment of stock options and stock appreciation rights. A stock appreciation right is economically indistinguishable from a stock option issued at the money, yet AJCA (or its legislative history, to be more precise) characterizes SAR’s as deferred compensation, bound by the new rules, while exempting options on employer stock. (Options on property other than employer stock are not exempt, again for no discernible reason.)

The more one looks at AJCA’s deferred compensation rules, the more forcefully it appears that they are not thought-out tax policy but a simple concession to envy. For years, deferred compensation packages, such as Richard Grasso’s at the New York Stock Exchange, have been targets of faux-populist outrage, not because of the minutiae of the arrangements but because they involve lots of money and therefore are assumed to be evil. That is, unfortunately, the mentality of many Congressional and IRS staffers. People who are rich enough that they don’t mind putting off payday need to be slapped in the face, and a 20 percent surtax is a satisfying slap. That the punishment bears no relationship to any offense and won’t actually be incurred by anyone (save the occasional unwary executive who tries to act without an expensive tax advisor) doesn’t make much difference.

Ineffectual posturing is more irritating than injurious. I’m grateful that Envy has such inept champions in the federal government. On the other hand, I’m annoyed that it has any influence at all. Don’t we elect conservatives to office in order to cleanse the government of the spirit of ressentiment?

Addendum: For those who would like to know the nitty-gritty, here is my concise summary of the new deferred compensation tax rules:

The Ultimate Who’s Who

The Oxford University Press rounded off the last millennium by producing, at a cost of £22½ million (four-fifths from private sources), a new, expanded edition of that quintessential reference work, The Dictionary of National Biography. The old DNB, which began publication in 1885 and continued to be supplemented through 1996, aimed to summarize concisely the life of every dead Englishman worth remembering. In the words of the first editor, Sir Leslie Stephen,

It is not upon the lives of the great men that the value of the book really depends. It is the second-rate people – the people whose lives have to be reconstructed from obituary notices or references in memoirs or collections of letters. . . .

The 63 original DNB volumes (published 1885-1900) contained 29,120 biographies. Nearly ten thousand more appeared in supplements. The Oxford edition is vaster yet: lives of 49,295 men and 5,627 women, born in or significantly connected with the British Isles (not all of them real – there are entries for Piltdown Man, King Arthur and Martin Marprelate), recounted in 62½ million words by some 10,000 authors. The price is correspondingly impressive: £7,500, though there is a £1,000 discount through the end of November. In the U.S. Amazon charges only $11,000, which at current exchange rates makes the volumes cheaper for Americans than for Brits (and buyers get free shipping, too!).

Perhaps Bill Gates and Teresa Heinz Kerry will purchase sets to grace their studies, but the rest of us can hope to see the new DNB only in libraries, and not in many of those. That is, that is all that we would be able to hope for, were it not for the wonders of the Internet. Quite astonishingly, the complete text (with the original DNB thrown in) has been put on-line and is accessible individual subscribers for $295 a year (£195 plus VAT in the U.K., so Americans are favored here, too). That is an absurdly cheap rental compared to the cost of acquisition. What’s more, the computer version is easier to use than the printed one. It is possible, for example, to cull all the biographies of figures who were active during the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603), a total of 4,425 individuals, who can be arranged alphabetically or in order of birth or death. That is, incidentally, a formidable assemblage of about five million words on Elizabethan history. To give an idea of the breadth of coverage, here is one page of results picked from the middle of the period:

Elphinstone, James, first Lord Balmerino (1557-1612), administrator and judge
Airay, Henry (1558x60-1616), college head
Armin, Robert (1563-1615), actor and comic writer
Bland, Tobias (c.1563-1605), Church of England clergyman
Caesar [formerly Adelmare], Sir Julius (bap. 1558, d. 1636), civil lawyer
Warner, William (1558/9-1609), poet and lawyer
Walpole, Henry [St Henry Walpole] (bap. 1558, d. 1595), Jesuit and martyr
Spenser, John (1558/9-1614), college head
Singer, John (fl. 1583-1603), actor
Shaw, John (1558/9-1625), Church of England clergyman and religious writer
Radcliffe, Egremont (d. 1578), rebel and alleged assassin
Mosse, Miles (1558-1615), Church of England clergyman
Meredith, Richard (1558/9-1621), dean of Wells
Lodge, Thomas (1558-1625), author and physician
Lindsay, Alexander, first Lord Spynie (c.1563-1607), landowner and courtier
Kyd, Thomas (bap. 1558, d. 1594), playwright and translator
Kemp, William (fl. 1585-1602), actor
Hunnis, William (d. 1597), musician and conspirator
Hume, David, of Godscroft (1558-1629x31), political theorist and poet
Hay, Francis, ninth earl of Erroll (bap. 1564, d. 1631), rebel

Other selections are possible, e. g.,, everyone connected with “Armed forces or intelligence services” (5,076 people) or all Orthodox Christians (49) or Welsh-language poets (59).

In those tens of thousands of names, Veals are not, I fear, prominent, though two of my known ancestors, Colonel Thomas Veal (“(c.1591-1663/4), royalist army officer and conspirator”) and Dame Katherine Berkeley (“(d. 1385), benefactor”), are listed.

All in all, if there were nothing else to say in favor of computers, this project would vindicate their existence.

Where Indiana Jones Should Have Gone

Having lived for centuries in near solitude, connected to the rest of Christendom by only the frail thread of the Patriarch of Alexandria’s once-a-generation appointment of its Abuna (Archbishop), the Ethiopian Church has nurtured unique customs inspired by the Old Testament, including circumcision, animal sacrifice and, in some circles, observance of the Saturday Sabbath. Now, via Cronaca, I learn that Ethiopia should have been the setting for Raiders of the Lost Ark. Indeed, in a sense, it witnessed an actual plundering of the Ark of the Covenant 136 years ago.

On April 10, 1868, a British punitive expedition defeated the Ethiopian Emperor Theodore II at the Battle of Magdala (or Magdela or Maqdala). The victors seized a vast quantity of loot, which was auctioned off for the benefit of troops. One of the most active buyers was a representative of the British Museum, who had been foresightedly sent to accompany the force. His purchases included ten “tabots”, replicas of the Ark of the Covenant that are essential to the consecration of Ethiopian houses of worship. A church’s tabot is carried in procession on the feast day of its patron saint and the Feast of Epiphany. At other times, it is kept shrouded and may be viewed only by priests. The original Ark allegedly resides in the Church of Our Lady of Zion in the former Ethiopian capital Axum. For fear of divine wrath, no outsiders are allowed to look upon it (quite consistent with Stephen Spielberg’s story line).

The descendants of the raiders of 1868 have grown more accommodating toward foreign beliefs. The Art Newspaper has this account of the modern fate of the plundered tabots:

British Museum (BM) director Neil MacGregor has decided that there is one small group of objects within his care that no one, not even he, should be allowed to see. These are tabots, which are regarded by Ethiopian Christians as representing the original Ark of the Covenant, the wooden chest which once housed the Ten Commandments. . . .

The Art Newspaper can reveal that the BM’s tabots were moved earlier this year from its ethnography store in Hackney to their own special room in the basement of the museum’s main building. They were carried by a senior member of the Ethiopian church in Britain and were covered during the transportation. Once inside the special room, and alone, the priest placed the tabots, wrapped in cloth, on a shelf covered with conservation-quality purple velvet. No museum staff, not even curators or conservators, are permitted to enter the locked room.

It is, of course, somewhat pointless for a museum to hold objects that can never be seen by scholars, let alone by the general public. Delicate discussions are therefore underway for a long-term solution.

The BM has begun discussions which could lead to the loan of the tabots to the Ethiopian Orthodox church in London, possibly on a renewable five-year basis.

The tabots would then be housed securely in the London church, where they would remain out of view.

While I won’t condemn this instance of multiculturalism, it is only fair to observe that the British were able to steal the tabots only because they had previously been taken from church buildings by Emperor Theodore in the course of his campaign to subordinate the Abuna to his political authority. Had the little arks remained in their appointed places, they would never have left their native land.

And Maybe Bush Ignited Mt. St. Helens, Too

Either the Kerry campaign’s internal polling is looking desperate or the candidate has completely lost control of his mouth. His latest charge is that the shortage of flu vaccine is President Bush’s fault.

If you can’t plan to have enough of that vaccine, what are they doing with respect to the other things that could potentially hurt America in terms of bioterrorism, chemical terrorism, other kinds of things? . . .

You’re telling me your flu shots are canceled because this administration was unwilling to play straight with the American people. That’s wrong. As a value system, that’s just wrong — not to mention the incompetence of not planning so that you know you have enough vaccine.

Anybody who follows health care issues at all knows that the immediate reason for this season’s vaccine shortage is the discovery of tainted doses at a British plant, which was promptly shut down by the U.K. authorities. It was slated to produce half of America’s vaccine requirement. There is no way to compensate for the shortfall, because very few companies manufacture vaccines. The reason for the shortage of manufacturers is the heavy risk of tort liability. And the reason for that is that the Democratic Party’s loyalty to its principal source of political contributions: plaintiffs’ trial lawyers.

If we’re going to talk about who “has a plan” and “plays straight with the American people”, is it the candidate who has identified the broken tort system as a major problem and proposed steps to reform it, or the one who has consistently opposed reform and whose “plan”, so far as one can tell, is to pull flu vaccine out of the same magic hat the contains tens of thousands of allied troops to take over in Iraq?

Not Unhappy, John: The Portent from Downunder

The conjunction of Ditto 17 and the new tax bill (which includes drastic reform of the rules governing deferred compensation and therefore falls within my area of professional interest) has cut my time for politics and blogging to near zero. As usually happens when political developments are only glimpsed in my peripheral vision (i. e., when I have to rely on glances at what the elite media are peddling), I was feeling pessimistic yesterday. The headlines made Paul Bremer’s revisiting of May 2003, the Duelfer Report and the latest economic numbers all sound like bad news for the President. Of course, even limited reading and reflection showed that the substance of each story was the opposite of the media line, but how can ordinary voters, who will never see Ambassador Bremer’s own interpretation of his views or sane commentary on what the Iraq Study Group actually found or the Heritage Foundation summation of the state of the economy, become aware that the headlines are blatant propaganda?

This morning brings, admittedly from the other side of the world, an encouraging sign that the Big Left Journalists may not be able to fool enough of the people enough of the time. In Australia, where the press is an order of magnitude more biased, parochial and leftist than in this country, and where public support for the Iraqi campaign has always been tepid at best, the “BUSH LIED! HOWARD LIED!!” theme blared throughout the final few days before the federal elections, seemingly giving the Labour Party unstoppable momentum. (And don’t forget that John Kerry’s sister, who heads his campaign’s expatriate effort, endorsed the anti-war Labourites during a recent trip downunder.) Yet this morning brings the news that the government has not just won reelection but probably increased its Parliamentary majority. As I write, the Australian Electoral Commission reports that, with three-quarters of the vote counted, the Liberal/National coalition has taken 76 of the 126 decided seats. Twenty-four remain too close to call. The coalition needs to win only five of them to equal its current total in Parliament.

Quite a spectacular result: Better than the polls forecast and directly contrary to what appeared to be the trend. In Australia, one should note, polling is easier and generally more accurate than the U.S. Voting is compulsory, so pollsters don’t have to sift likely voters from the total adult population. Nonetheless, no one, save a handful of optimistic bloggers, foresaw the swing to the Right. If this is a straw in the wind for America, John Kerry will look like George McGovern on November 3rd.

On its own terms, the Australian result is a defeat for the terrorists, who tried to influence it by bombing the Australian embassy in Jakarta. Diana Kerry added her opinion that the country endangered itself by allying with the U.S. But Aussies are made of sterner stuff than Spaniards and weren’t intimidated.

Addendum: For those who would like to try their own hands at keeping Australia on the side of freedom and civilization, Prime Minister Forever is an inexpensive, first rate computer game recreating the election, down to the individual candidates in each district. It costs only $14.99 in Australian dollars and includes the recent (less fortunate) Canadian election as a bonus.

Update (10/10/04, 10:50 p.m. CDT): With four divisions still too close to call, the government has 84 seats. Three of the undecideds are currently held by Labour. It also appears that the Liberal-National coalition has accomplished the very difficult feat of winning control of the Senate, which is selected by proportional representation and has therefore tends to be splintered by minor parties. (The last time that the Lib-Nats had a majority was in 1976.) While the Senate has less power than the lower house of Parliament, it can block some government measures. Winning it will make it possible to John Howard to be much more of a reformer in this fourth term than during his first three. Inter alia there is a possibility of abolishing the anti-democratic practice of compulsory voting.

Further Reading: Arthur Chrenkoff assesses the extent to which the Australian election was “about” the War in Terror and the significance of the Senate outcome.

Update (10/29/04): Finishing the vote count takes a long time in Oz. It was not until this morning that the Electoral Commission called three of the last four doubtful seats in the House of Represenatives. The Liberal-National Coalition now has 86, an gain of five over the last Parliament. The Senate tally, completed yesterday, gives it 39 of 76 seats.

EternityCon: Bill Krucek, R.I.P.

Bill Krucek, who for a quarter century attended to the nuts and bolts of Chicagoland SF conventions, died yesterday evening following a long illness. When I first met him, in 1981 I think, he was working operations at Windycon, and he kept on doing so, con after con, until failing health, the effect of diabetes, forced him into semi-retirement. He was the perennial voice of experience and authority at Operations HQ, the man who knew how to move all the paraphernalia of a convention into and out of a hotel with the least possible waste of time and energy, how to cope with the steady stream of big and little crises during the con, and, most important, how to find the right person to accomplish any task.

He twice filled the larger and more strenuous role of running convention services for the World Science Fiction Convention, at Chicon V and Chicon 2000. As chairman of the latter, I can say that hardly anyone else worked as diligently and with so little self-aggrandizement as Bill. Perhaps his most valuable quality as a Worldcon division head was his ability to find top-flight people to take on positions that involve tedious work and no glory, the jobs that tend to be forgotten in the hubbub of the event. His staff liked working for him, and he always made sure that they, rather than he, got full credit for their labors.

Physically he was a large man, but he came across more like an elf than a giant. Never having much money, he rarely appeared at conventions outside the Midwest and wasn’t well known in fandom at large. That is fandom’s loss. Those of us who knew him will remember him fondly and grieve that he won’t be sitting on his chair in Windycon Ops this year.

Senator Edwards’ Tax Shelter

Since it came up in the VP debate, I’ll put on my professional hat and explain John Edwards’ “tax shelter”. Mr. Edwards was making lots of money as a personal injury lawyer, so he set up an “S corporation” to house his practice. In an S corporation, profits are taxed directly to the shareholders. The corporation earned roughly $6 million a year, substantially all from Mr. Edwards’ personal services. It paid him a roughly half million dollar annual salary, leaving a profit of $5½ million. He paid income taxes on both the salary and the profit.

So far, the tax bite is the same as if there had been no corporation. The role of the “shelter” was to lower his Medicare tax, which is levied only on salary, not on undistributed profits. By characterizing 90 percent of his earnings as corporate profit rather than salary, the future Senator cut his Medicare tax bill by 90 percent.

To the extent that the corporation’s earnings derived from Mr. Edwards’ services rather than the investment of capital, he was legally obligated to take them in the form of salary. Not having access to the corporate records, I can’t judge whether any legitimate arguments existed for the salary/profit split, though I would never recommend it to a similarly situated client. What I can judge is the pettiness of the scheme. The Medicare tax rate is 2.9 percent, and half of the amount paid is deductible against income taxes. Hence, this very wealthy lawyer turned these less-than-square corners for the sake of saving about $125,000 in taxes. Then he drones on about how President Bush has a secret plan to eliminate taxes on millionaires.

A Better Guide Than Polls (Part II)

A while ago, I suggested that, for those who wish to follow the election horse race day-by-day, there is a better guide than polls, namely, how the candidates conduct themselves. When I wrote that, the publicly available polling data were, as they are now, full of mixed messages: President Bush was up by 11 points according to Gallup but had far narrower leads, or none at all, in other surveys. The clue to the true situation was the Kerry campaign’s actions, which hinted that it believed itself to be far behind and in need of a couple of long touchdown passes to get back into the ball game.

An optimistic Kerryite is welcome to score last week’s debate as a touchdown (I’d call it a field goal myself), and he can draw comfort from some poll results. On the other hand, the Democrats are still lining up in shotgun formation and throwing deep. The latest signs are –

• a press release touting “Halliburton” as the “one word answer” in tonight’s Vice Presidential debate

• a new, high visibility TV ad pushing the Michael Moore thesis that the President is a puppet of Saudi-controlled Arabia

• another ad that tries to defuse the “global test” gaffe by quoting the lead-in to that phrase out of context and claiming that President Bush “is lying about it” (i. e., by quoting the whole paragraph instead of just one sentence)

These are not the moves of a campaign that it confident of its position in the race. If Senator Kerry believed that his foreign policy message was working, he would be reiterating and expanding on it, not backtracking and shouting “Halliburton! Halliburton! Halliburton!” the way that he used to shout “Vietnam!”

Meanwhile, the President announces a major foreign policy speech in Pennsylvania, currently the hardest fought swing state. The elite media’s spin is that the Republicans must be panicking. Panic would be a “John Kerry lied about our men in Vietnam” speech delivered in Ohio. Keeping the emphasis on Iraq and the War on Terror is a sign that the Bush campaign sees those issues as vote winners. It is not foolishly hyper-optimistic (that would be a speech on Darfur delivered in California), but my inference is that internal polls are showing good news.

Is Climate Change the Norm?

Via Geek Press comes a link to an article on Nature’s Web site, “Past Climate Change Questioned”. The title, hinting at doubts about whether the climate has changed at all, isn’t well chosen. What the story reports is a study indicating that past changes may have been more dramatic than researchers currently believe. Hence, data showing a global warming trend over the past few decades may simply reflect an ordinary fluctuation rather than the effects of human activity.

The Earth’s temperature may have fluctuated more wildly during the past 1000 years than previously thought, according to a new study that challenges how researchers use tree rings and corals to give us a picture of the Earth’s past. . . .

To work out the planet’s temperature during the past few hundred years, researchers often look at the width and density of annual rings in trees or the growth of corals. Such temperature indicators, known as proxies, are then used to construct average global temperatures.

But this method could be tainted by a systematic error, according to Hans von Storch, a climate modeller at the GKSS Institute for Coastal Research in Geesthacht, Germany, and his colleagues. Consequently researchers might have underestimated the size of temperature fluctuations from medieval times until the nineteenth century, by a factor of two or more.

Storch and his colleagues started with a computer model of climate history, and extracted the temperature for specific points in the Northern Hemisphere at particular times. They used these temperatures to figure out what the corresponding proxies should look like at these times and places. This picture was fed back into a model to recalculate the past global climate and the team’s results are published in Science [footnote omitted].

Surprisingly, temperature fluctuations in the reconstruction were smaller than in the original climate model. The researchers suspect that any attempts to reconstruct the global climate from real proxies, such as tree rings, corals, ice cores and historical weather records might similarly underestimate temperature changes. This calls into question the results of many such climate models.

This work is purely theoretical, based on models rather than real-world data, but it strongly suggests that our picture of past climatic patterns overlooks sharp, sudden swings. The popular impression that the weather used to be broadly predictable from year-to-year and has only recently become chaotic may be just another aspect of mankind’s enduring nostalgia for lost ages of felicity.

Weighing the Debate

Last Thursday’s is the first Presidential debate ever that may be remembered for policy disagreements rather than such extraneous factors as Nixon’s makeup, Reagan’s one-liners or Gerry Ford’s premature liberation of Poland. Senator Kerry, while continuing his rhetorical twisting on specific issues (invading Iraq was a “mistake”, but the troops there now aren’t “dying for a mistake”, etc.), circuitously laid out a consistent, straightforward overall stance on foreign policy. His principles can be summarized succinctly:

• The United States should take military action only with the approval of many other nations. That is the implication of both the “global test” and the complaint that too few allies are helping out in Iraq. We can also infer that the Democratic candidate regards some combination of backing from France, Germany, Russia and Turkey as crucial, since those are the only major countries that can be called “allies” in some reasonable sense and that did not support the invasion of Iraq.

• International coalitions are in and of themselves sufficient to solve problems. His promised first step toward pacifying Iraq will be to call a summit. From that gathering supposedly will flow commitments of troops and money for rebuilding Iraq. Leaving aside the limited prospects that any of the nations that aren’t currently aiding Iraq will be persuaded to do so, how much actual force could any of the holdouts bring to the theater of conflict? Senator Kerry calculates that America has 90 percent of the troops on the ground. (He ignores the Iraqi army and police, whom he seems to regard as beneath notice.) To reduce that figure just to 75 percent, he would need to attract over 20,000 additional foreign soldiers, which is well beyond the deployment capability of France and Germany combined. Russia might be able to furnish the men, but its record of ineptitude and brutality in Chechnya casts strong doubt on the value of its assistance. It is unlikely that the Senator is oblivious to our allies’ military weaknesses, so one can only conclude that, in his eyes, their symbolic gestures will be effective in the real world. A show of planetary solidarity will by some means or another cow the terrorists into acquiescence.

• The best way to deal with enemies is to offer carrots rather than brandish sticks. His suggested strategy for thwarting the Iranian mullarchy’s nuclear weapons program is to offer them nuclear fuel, to be followed by sanctions if the gift isn’t used solely for peaceful purposes. As President Bush pointed out, sanctions against Iran are already in place, so Senator Kerry would, it appears, lift them as his first negotiating step. Toward North Korea he is equally accommodating. Pyongyang has been insisting upon bilateral talks with the U.S., leaving out Red China, Japan and South Korea. The Asian countries are, however, the only ones with realistic leverage against the North. We don’t trade with North Korea and currently have no useful military option that we can carry out on our own. (Building low-yield “bunker buster” nukes would give us a credible military threat, but Senator Kerry opposes doing that.) Hence, there is nothing to discuss in two-party negotiations unless the U.S. offers concessions in return for promises of good behavior. President Clinton tried that route with disastrous consequences. Senator Kerry seems eager to travel it again.

• The United States stands on a moral par with all other nations, regardless of their forms of government or their conduct. That is the only conclusion that one can draw from the Senator’s astonishing argument that continued American development of atomic “bunker busters” will make it untenable for us to restrain nuclear proliferation. Kim Il Jong doesn’t care, of course, about finespun moralisms; North Korea’s nuclear weapons building isn’t a response to America’s and would proceed just as quickly even if we were to unilaterally disarm. Indeed, unilateral disarmament is the natural conclusion of any argument that begins with the premise that free, democratic states have no greater moral right to armaments than do vicious despotisms.

• The War on Terror is a limited conflict between the United States and Osama bin Laden. I have already offered my opinion of that point of view.

In brief, whatever ambivalence existed before has now been removed. A Kerry Administration pledges to pursue the kind of policies for which the Left, including Senator Kerry himself, agitated during the Cold War.

Naturally I think that an experiment in McGovernism would be a disastrous response to Islamofascism, but, if my countrymen want to “give peace a chance”, that’s their decision. With luck, a peaceful, free and prosperous United States of America will outlast my lifetime, however badly the War on Terror is managed.

But I don’t really expect the experiment to be tried. What is remarkable about the current election is that there was a non-fanciful possibility that the Kerry candidacy would utterly collapse on Thursday. It didn’t, because the candidate refrained from conducting himself like a street corner ranter. He still has to sell his strategic vision to the electorate, and it doesn’t impress me as attractive merchandise. The stock market appears to agree. Assuming that my analysis of its movements is correct, i. e., that stocks rise or fall inversely to the probability of a Kerry victory, Friday’s big gains suggest that investors believe that the debate ensured the President’s reelection. That could be irrational exuberance, but it’s reassuring nonetheless.

Quote of the Day

James Bowman:

I was having dinner in the company of one of the Bush-bashers, a man who actually refers to himself as an “intellectual” and who spent the whole meal bashing away until I finally said to him: “But why is George Bush lying and deceiving us, as you say he is, in order to wage war in Iraq when there is no obvious electoral advantage in it?”

He looked at me in a sort of pitying way, as if he thought me just too stupid to “get” it and said: “Because he’s in the pocket of the Israelis!”

Of course he could have said any number of other things: that he did it for the oil or to increase the profits at Halliburton or to avenge his father or any of a host of more exotic reasons, but it didn’t really matter as long as the reason were hidden from the sight of the base vulgar and only accessible to advanced powers of ratiocination like his own. I suddenly realized that, like the conspiratorial omnivore Michael Moore, he would probably have been prepared to accept any or all of these explanations too, so long as he wasn’t asked to believe the one thing that has always seemed to me most obvious, namely that Bush is an ordinarily decent guy doing all he can to do what he thinks best for his country. An intellectual like my dinner companion can’t believe that, you see, because that’s what the stupid people believe. It would amount to a loss of identity for him, a devastating decline in status from the Aspirational Cognitive Élite to the lumpen mass of the cognitively challenged.

A Primer on Social Security Reform

For those not fixated on Osama bin Laden, international global tests or other such nonce issues, I recommend an excellent new article from the Heritage Foundation, “The Top Ten Myths About Social Security Reform”. The author, David C. John, lucidly summarizes the reasons why the present system is unsustainable in the long run and explains why a gradual shift to full or partial privatization will reduce the risk of a future collapse.

Within 15 years, Social Security retirement benefits will exceed the taxes collected to pay them. At that point, the system will begin drawing down its hypothetical trust fund, which holds nothing but I.O.U.’s on the U.S. Treasury. To meet those obligations, the government will have to raise taxes, cut spending or borrow money, just as it would if the trust fund did not exist. By about 2042 the I.O.U.’s will be gone, an event of no economic but some legal significance. Current law, with limited exceptions, forbids using general revenues to pay Social Security benefits, except to the extent that the trust fund cashes in its “assets”. Unless the law is changed, either Social Security taxes will rise sharply in the 2040’s, as people born in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s are reaching retirement age, or benefits will be cut back. Today’s twenty-somethings can look forward to one of history’s great inter-generational donnybrooks, pitting their elderly selves against younger workers who don’t want to bear a steadily escalating tax burden. (Amending the law to permit the use of general revenues will not, of course, ameliorate the burden; income taxes would simply go up instead of Social Security levies.)

If the present system remains unchanged, without benefit reductions, the government will have to collect additional revenues of $27 trillion (adjusted for inflation but not present-valued) over the next 75 years. The amount needed each year will rise steadily, e. g., from $280 billion in 2050 to $640 billion in 2075 (2004 dollars in each case). Those gaps won’t be as daunting then as they would be now, because the economy will presumably grow in the meantime, but they will never be small change.

The concept behind privatization is to substitute capital accumulation for a large portion of Social Security’s unfunded liability, thus making retirement benefits individual property that will not be at the mercy of younger taxpayers. That strategy does have to get over a short-term rough patch: Since reducing benefits already accrued is, quite rightly, politically impossible, there will be a phase-in period during which workers will have to continue paying the taxes needed to support grandfathered benefits and put funds into their own individual accounts. In effect, part of the system’s unfunded liability will be accelerated, but whatever hardship that entails will be more than offset by the long-run decrease in unfunded commitments and the creation of private wealth to replace public promises.

Mr. John’s analysis covers these and other issues in greater detail. At some point during the third Presidential debate (the one on domestic policy), Senator Kerry is bound to drag out privatization as a bogeyman. By reading a few pages now, you can be ready to skewer his arguments when he does.

The Global Test

I hope that I’m not engaging in an illegal leak, but it so happens that my firm’s communications specialists have been engaged by the United Nations Security Council to prepare the 2004 update of the “Global Test for Preemptive Action Against Terrorism”. A member of the engagement team gave me a copy. It may not be the final draft, but I pass it along in case it is of interest to my readers.

UNO Doc. No. 2004-578-124-666
GLOBAL TEST FOR PREEMPTIVE ACTION AGAINST TERRORISM
For Use by the United States of America

Important: This is the English Counterpart to the Official French Text. See “Scoring” infra.

1. What is the political affiliation of the President of the United States of America?

A. Democrat
B. Independent
C. Republican

2. What is the form of government of the nation (the “Target Nation”) against which the proposed preemptive action will be carried out?

A. Pluralistic democracy
B. Limited, imperfect democracy
C. Ruthless dictatorship

3. What is the Target Nation’s general attitude toward the United States?

A. Cordial and supportive
B. Neutral
C. Relentlessly Hostile

4. What is the predominant religion of the Target Nation?

A. Judaism
B. Christianity
C. Islam

5. How often since the end of World War II has the Target Nation launched an unprovoked attack against another country.

A. None, and it has been attacked repeatedly by others.
B. No more than twice.
C. Whenever it thought it could get away with it

6. In what circumstances has the Target Nation used chemical weapons in combat?

A. Never
B. Only against foreign enemies
C. Against foreign enemies, rebellious subjects and underperforming soccer teams

7. What was the reaction of the Target Nation’s head of government to the incidents that took place in New York City and Washington, D.C. on September 11, 2001?

A. Sorrow and sympathy for the American people
B. Formal condolences coupled with a reminder that Amerika had it coming
C. Wild applause

8. What is the normal fate of political dissidents in the Target Nation?

A. They make vast sums of money from films and books criticizing the government.
B. They are ignored.
C. They are fed into paper shredders.

9. How cooperative is the Target Nation with international efforts to monitor its chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs?

A. Completely
B. Partially
C. Hans Blix attests to its compliance

10. Which other nations endorse the proposed preemptive action?

A. France, Germany and Russia
B. Great Britain and Australia
C. Poland

Scoring: Each “A” is worth 2 points. Each “B” is worth 1 point. Each “C” is worth zero points. (Exception: In Question 10, “B” is worth zero points and “C” subtracts one.) Add five points if the test is taken in French. Subtract five points if the President of the United States cannot read the French version.

Results:

24 or higher: The action is approved, and France will dispatch the Foreign Legion and a professional semioticist to help.

20-23: The action is permitted.

16-20: Objections to the action will be withdrawn in return for a small gratuity to President Chirac.

15 or less: The action is disapproved. Convene a summit, s’il vous plait, and seek restoration to the International Community.

Addendum: Rand Simberg has uncovered a different, computer-assisted Global Test. It may be under development as a more nuanced and sophisticated replacement for the preceding written test but appears to still be in beta.

For faster results, here is a Global Pop Quiz.

Kerry Math: Iraqis = Zero

Last night Senator Kerry repeated one of his favorite campaign lines: “This president has left [our alliances] in shatters across the globe, and we're now 90 percent of the casualties in Iraq and 90 percent of the costs.” Though part of an argument about how much better he would be than the incumbent at “lead[ing] those alliances”, this rhetoric’s real appeal is to residual American isolationism: Why should we be doing all the work for a bunch of furriners? Let ’em take care of themselves.

Whatever the (limited) merits of that sentiment, it doesn’t fit the facts here, because it leaves out the contribution of our most important allies: the Iraqis themselves. As the Wall Street Journal pointed out yesterday, Iraq currently has 100,000 soldiers and policemen on duty, with more in the process of being trained. Its forces on the ground will soon surpass the Coalition’s. At least 750 uniformed Iraqis have been killed in combat. The U.S. military has suffered 800 combat deaths (which includes deaths during the invasion itself, as well as the post-war period). Turning those figures into a “90 percent” American war requires newer math than the Senator ever learned at Yale.

Just as Senator Kerry snubbed Iraq’s Prime Minister, his arithmetic treats the people of Iraq as nothings. That same contempt for local allies was an integral part of the anti-war mentality during the Vietnam conflict: The elected leaders of South Vietnam were “puppets” (just what Kerry aide Joe Lockhart called Iyad Allawi); its army was cowardly and incompetent; the anti-communist majority of its populace wasn’t worthy of notice. A President who approaches Iraq with such attitudes guarantees that the outcome there will replicate Vietnam, this time with international terrorism as the beneficiary.