Man, Michael Ramirez should get a Pulitzer for his work, oh yeah, he has!
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Michael Ramirez
A Gaffe, an Absurdity, and a Policy
By Charles Krauthammer
Townhall.com
WASHINGTON -- When the House of Representatives takes up arms against $4 gas by voting 324-84 to sue OPEC, you know that election-year discourse has gone surreal. Another unmistakable sign is when a presidential candidate makes a gaffe, then, realizing it is too egregious to take back without suffering humiliation, decides to make it a centerpiece of his foreign policy.
Before the Democratic debate of July 23, Barack Obama had never expounded upon the wisdom of meeting, without precondition, with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bashar al-Assad, Hugo Chavez, Kim Jong Il or the Castro brothers. But in that debate, he was asked about doing exactly that. Unprepared, he said sure -- then got fancy, declaring the Bush administration's refusal to do so not just "ridiculous" but "a disgrace."
After that, there was no going back. So he doubled down. What started as a gaffe became policy. By now, it has become doctrine. Yet it remains today what it was on the day he blurted it out: an absurdity.
Should the president ever meet with enemies? Sometimes, but only after minimal American objectives -- i.e. preconditions -- have been met. The Shanghai communique was largely written long before Richard Nixon ever touched down in China. Yet Obama thinks Nixon to China confirms the wisdom of his willingness to undertake a worldwide freshman-year tyrants tour.
Most of the time you don't negotiate with enemy leaders because there is nothing to negotiate. Does Obama imagine that North Korea, Iran, Syria, Cuba and Venezuela are insufficiently informed about American requirements for improved relations?
There are always contacts through back channels or intermediaries. Iran, for example, has engaged in five years of talks with our closest European allies and the International Atomic Energy Agency, to say nothing of the hundreds of official U.S. statements outlining exactly what we would give them in return for suspending uranium enrichment.
Obama pretends that while he is for such "engagement," the cowboy Republicans oppose it. Another absurdity. No one is debating the need for contacts. The debate is over the stupidity of elevating rogue states and their tyrants, easing their isolation and increasing their leverage by granting them unconditional meetings with the president of the world's superpower.
Obama cited Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman as presidents who met with enemies. Does he know no history? Neither Roosevelt nor Truman ever met with any of the leaders of the Axis powers. Obama must be referring to the pictures he's seen of Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta, and Truman and Stalin at Potsdam. Does he not know that at that time Stalin was a wartime ally?
During the subsequent Cold War, Truman never met with Stalin. Nor Mao. Nor Kim Il Sung. Truman was no fool.
Obama cites John Kennedy meeting Nikita Khrushchev as another example of what he wants to emulate. Really? That Vienna summit of a young, inexperienced, untested American president was disastrous, emboldening Khrushchev to push Kennedy on Berlin -- and then near fatally in Cuba, leading almost directly to the Cuban missile crisis. Is that the precedent Obama aspires to follow?
A meeting with Ahmadinejad would not just strengthen and vindicate him at home, it would instantly and powerfully ease the mullahs' isolation, inviting other world leaders to follow. And with that would come a flood of commercial contracts, oil deals, diplomatic agreements -- undermining precisely the very sanctions and isolation that Obama says he would employ against Iran.
As every seasoned diplomat knows, the danger of a summit is that it creates enormous pressure for results. And results require mutual concessions. That is why conditions and concessions are worked out in advance, not on the scene.
What concessions does Obama imagine Ahmadinejad will make to him on Iran's nuclear program? And what new concessions will Obama offer? To abandon Lebanon? To recognize Hamas? Or perhaps to squeeze Israel?
Having lashed himself to the ridiculous, unprecedented promise of unconditional presidential negotiations -- and then having compounded the problem by elevating it to a principle -- Obama keeps trying to explain. On Sunday, he declared in Pendleton, Ore., that by Soviet standards Iran and others "don't pose a serious threat to us." (On the contrary. Islamic Iran is dangerously apocalyptic. Soviet Russia was not.) The next day in Billings, Mont.: "I've made it clear for years that the threat from Iran is grave."
That's the very next day, mind you. Such rhetorical flailing has done more than create an intellectual mess. It has given rise to a new political phenomenon: the metastatic gaffe. The one begets another, begets another, begets ...
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
May 20, 2008
Appeasement and Its Discontents
Obama & Dubya.
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online
Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.
So spoke President’s Bush to the Israeli Knesset on the 60th anniversary of the birth of the Jewish state last week. Ostensibly the president’s historical references made perfect sense for a variety of reasons. First, the state of Israel is inextricably a result of the Holocaust — a genocide that was in itself the logical consequence of an ascendant Nazi state, whose industry of death might could been circumvented by concerted action earlier in the late 1930s by the then stronger liberal democracies.
Bush was assuring the Israelis that the United States would not, in contrast to liberal democracies of the past, appease states and organizations intent on killing Jews by the millions.
Second, Bush’s warning came in a climate of fear and weariness in the West, in which calls to meet without preconditions with both Iran and Hamas — the former state whose president has forecast the impending destruction of Israel, the latter terrorist organization whose charter hinges on the end of the Jewish state — have been voiced by several public figures, most prominently in recent days by former President Carter.
Third, the warning about appeasement comes not just after, and in implied defense of, military action in both Afghanistan and Iraq, but in the case of the United States, also after the September 11 catastrophe, which itself followed a decade of bipartisan inability to confront and respond to a number of al Qaeda serial provocations.
The speech caused outrage among Democrats who insisted that it was “appalling” and a “smear” on Barack Obama, who has advocated talks, without preconditions, with Iran, and who had been informally endorsed by a Hamas official, and who had recently fired a Middle Eastern adviser, Robert Malley, for meeting with Hamas leaders. Obama fired off the following reply:
It is sad that President Bush would use a speech to the Knesset on the 60th anniversary of Israel’s independence to launch a false political attack...It is time to turn the page on eight years of policies that have strengthened Iran and failed to secure America or our ally Israel…George Bush knows that I have never supported engagement with terrorists, and the president’s extraordinary politicization of foreign policy and the politics of fear do nothing to secure the American people or our stalwart ally Israel.
Three questions are raised by this controversy. First: What constitutes appeasement in the 21st-century age of globalization? Second: If President Bush had wished to imply a connection with the unnamed Barack Obama, how fair would such a charge have been? Third: Has President Bush himself followed his own advice and shunned the appeasement of “with terrorists and radicals”?
Most define appeasement not by the mere willingness on occasion to negotiate with enemies (i.e., the heads of nation states rather than criminal terrorist cliques). Rather, appeasement is an overriding desire to avoid war or confrontation to such a degree so as to engage in a serial pattern of behavior that results in an accommodation of an enemy’s demands — and ultimately the inadvertent enhancement of its agendas. Key here is the caveat that there must muscular alternatives to appeasement, as was true with a rather weak 1936 Nazi Germany or a non-nuclear theocratic Iran.
Talking with an Iranian theocrat like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad per se might not necessarily constitute appeasement. But continuing such talks without preconditions that made no progress in curbing Iranian nuclear agendas, or support for Hezbollah terrorists and Shiite militias in Iraq would not only be futile, but encourage further Iranian adventurism — by the assurance that negotiations were infinite and there would be few lines in the sand and little chance of military opposition to follow. In our era, the locus classicus of appeasement is the near decade of negotiations, empty threats, and drawnout diplomacy with Slobodan Milosevic, in which with virtual impunity he butchered thousands of Croats, Kosovars, and Bosnians — until a belated bombing war forced him to capitulate.
Bush in his Knesset address may have acknowledged that expansive notion of appeasement when he elaborated on his “negotiate with terrorists and radicals” line, with the proviso of futility — namely that such talking assumed an “ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.” In addition, Bush’s example — that when “Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided” — suggests that his reference to appeasement meant not just one-time talking, but delusional and persistent engagement that is oblivious to facts on the ground.
If the president also meant to include Obama among those who would engage in such appeasement, would there be any evidence for such a view? Obama himself has never been in a position of exercising executive judgments, so we have only his campaign statements from which to surmise. In this regard, we certainly know that Obama is willing to meet any and all our enemies without preconditions. During a televised debate he was asked directly whether he would agree “to meet separately, without precondition . . . with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea,” Obama replied: “I would.”
His website amplifies that answer with the boast that “Obama is the only major candidate who supports tough, direct presidential diplomacy with Iran without preconditions.” The problem here would not be in theory talking with an Iran or Syria — Sec. of Defense Gates on numerous occasions has advocated negotiations with Teheran — but in a priori signaling to tyrants such an eagerness to elevate their grievances to head-of-state diplomacy. Under what conditions, how long, and to what degree Obama would be willing to exercise non-diplomatic options when talks proved futile would adjudicate whether his preference for unconditional talks devolved from diplomacy to appeasement.
If a President Obama were to enter into multiple negotiations with Iran, and if Iran were to continue to subvert the Lebanese government and threaten Israel through its surrogate Hezbollah, and continue to develop a nuclear arsenal while promising the destruction of Israel, at what point would he be willing not merely to cease talking, but to accept that his negotiations had done more harm than good and thus required a radical change of course — and would it be in time?
Given President Bush’s admonitions about appeasement, does the president practice what he preaches?
That depends on a variety of factors such as whether enemies are nuclear or not, whom exactly we define as adversaries — Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, the Sudan, Libya? — and to what degree our existing negotiations are proving not only futile, but emboldening our enemies by the assurance that we will neither cease diplomacy nor threaten the use of force.
Both the president and Obama, in arguing abstractly over appeasement, do not factor in such realist concerns of leverage that govern decisions to negotiate, such as exporting ten million barrels a day of scarce oil (Saudi Arabia), the possession of nuclear weapons in the hands of an unstable government (Pakistan and North Korea), or the unwillingness of American public opinion to support an armed intervention (Darfur).
In that regard, Barack Obama shows his own inexperience when he evokes past summits that a John Kennedy or Ronald Reagan conducted with the nuclear Soviets — contemporary rivalries in which escalation to nuclear annihilation was a real worry, and at the time Soviet combatants (as is true in Iraq) were not killing our own soldiers.
In short, nothing in the president’s speech was inaccurate, inflammatory, or hypocritical. Whether Barack Obama believes he was a target of the president’s rhetoric, or whether he would engage in appeasement, hinges on whether his overeagerness to talk without preconditions to the world’s thugs and rogues would persist in the face of unpleasant facts — and so make the likelihood of eventual military action more, rather than less, likely.
©2008 Victor Davis Hanson
Appeasement and Its Discontents
Obama & Dubya.
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online
Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.
So spoke President’s Bush to the Israeli Knesset on the 60th anniversary of the birth of the Jewish state last week. Ostensibly the president’s historical references made perfect sense for a variety of reasons. First, the state of Israel is inextricably a result of the Holocaust — a genocide that was in itself the logical consequence of an ascendant Nazi state, whose industry of death might could been circumvented by concerted action earlier in the late 1930s by the then stronger liberal democracies.
Bush was assuring the Israelis that the United States would not, in contrast to liberal democracies of the past, appease states and organizations intent on killing Jews by the millions.
Second, Bush’s warning came in a climate of fear and weariness in the West, in which calls to meet without preconditions with both Iran and Hamas — the former state whose president has forecast the impending destruction of Israel, the latter terrorist organization whose charter hinges on the end of the Jewish state — have been voiced by several public figures, most prominently in recent days by former President Carter.
Third, the warning about appeasement comes not just after, and in implied defense of, military action in both Afghanistan and Iraq, but in the case of the United States, also after the September 11 catastrophe, which itself followed a decade of bipartisan inability to confront and respond to a number of al Qaeda serial provocations.
The speech caused outrage among Democrats who insisted that it was “appalling” and a “smear” on Barack Obama, who has advocated talks, without preconditions, with Iran, and who had been informally endorsed by a Hamas official, and who had recently fired a Middle Eastern adviser, Robert Malley, for meeting with Hamas leaders. Obama fired off the following reply:
It is sad that President Bush would use a speech to the Knesset on the 60th anniversary of Israel’s independence to launch a false political attack...It is time to turn the page on eight years of policies that have strengthened Iran and failed to secure America or our ally Israel…George Bush knows that I have never supported engagement with terrorists, and the president’s extraordinary politicization of foreign policy and the politics of fear do nothing to secure the American people or our stalwart ally Israel.
Three questions are raised by this controversy. First: What constitutes appeasement in the 21st-century age of globalization? Second: If President Bush had wished to imply a connection with the unnamed Barack Obama, how fair would such a charge have been? Third: Has President Bush himself followed his own advice and shunned the appeasement of “with terrorists and radicals”?
Most define appeasement not by the mere willingness on occasion to negotiate with enemies (i.e., the heads of nation states rather than criminal terrorist cliques). Rather, appeasement is an overriding desire to avoid war or confrontation to such a degree so as to engage in a serial pattern of behavior that results in an accommodation of an enemy’s demands — and ultimately the inadvertent enhancement of its agendas. Key here is the caveat that there must muscular alternatives to appeasement, as was true with a rather weak 1936 Nazi Germany or a non-nuclear theocratic Iran.
Talking with an Iranian theocrat like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad per se might not necessarily constitute appeasement. But continuing such talks without preconditions that made no progress in curbing Iranian nuclear agendas, or support for Hezbollah terrorists and Shiite militias in Iraq would not only be futile, but encourage further Iranian adventurism — by the assurance that negotiations were infinite and there would be few lines in the sand and little chance of military opposition to follow. In our era, the locus classicus of appeasement is the near decade of negotiations, empty threats, and drawnout diplomacy with Slobodan Milosevic, in which with virtual impunity he butchered thousands of Croats, Kosovars, and Bosnians — until a belated bombing war forced him to capitulate.
Bush in his Knesset address may have acknowledged that expansive notion of appeasement when he elaborated on his “negotiate with terrorists and radicals” line, with the proviso of futility — namely that such talking assumed an “ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.” In addition, Bush’s example — that when “Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided” — suggests that his reference to appeasement meant not just one-time talking, but delusional and persistent engagement that is oblivious to facts on the ground.
If the president also meant to include Obama among those who would engage in such appeasement, would there be any evidence for such a view? Obama himself has never been in a position of exercising executive judgments, so we have only his campaign statements from which to surmise. In this regard, we certainly know that Obama is willing to meet any and all our enemies without preconditions. During a televised debate he was asked directly whether he would agree “to meet separately, without precondition . . . with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea,” Obama replied: “I would.”
His website amplifies that answer with the boast that “Obama is the only major candidate who supports tough, direct presidential diplomacy with Iran without preconditions.” The problem here would not be in theory talking with an Iran or Syria — Sec. of Defense Gates on numerous occasions has advocated negotiations with Teheran — but in a priori signaling to tyrants such an eagerness to elevate their grievances to head-of-state diplomacy. Under what conditions, how long, and to what degree Obama would be willing to exercise non-diplomatic options when talks proved futile would adjudicate whether his preference for unconditional talks devolved from diplomacy to appeasement.
If a President Obama were to enter into multiple negotiations with Iran, and if Iran were to continue to subvert the Lebanese government and threaten Israel through its surrogate Hezbollah, and continue to develop a nuclear arsenal while promising the destruction of Israel, at what point would he be willing not merely to cease talking, but to accept that his negotiations had done more harm than good and thus required a radical change of course — and would it be in time?
Given President Bush’s admonitions about appeasement, does the president practice what he preaches?
That depends on a variety of factors such as whether enemies are nuclear or not, whom exactly we define as adversaries — Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, the Sudan, Libya? — and to what degree our existing negotiations are proving not only futile, but emboldening our enemies by the assurance that we will neither cease diplomacy nor threaten the use of force.
Both the president and Obama, in arguing abstractly over appeasement, do not factor in such realist concerns of leverage that govern decisions to negotiate, such as exporting ten million barrels a day of scarce oil (Saudi Arabia), the possession of nuclear weapons in the hands of an unstable government (Pakistan and North Korea), or the unwillingness of American public opinion to support an armed intervention (Darfur).
In that regard, Barack Obama shows his own inexperience when he evokes past summits that a John Kennedy or Ronald Reagan conducted with the nuclear Soviets — contemporary rivalries in which escalation to nuclear annihilation was a real worry, and at the time Soviet combatants (as is true in Iraq) were not killing our own soldiers.
In short, nothing in the president’s speech was inaccurate, inflammatory, or hypocritical. Whether Barack Obama believes he was a target of the president’s rhetoric, or whether he would engage in appeasement, hinges on whether his overeagerness to talk without preconditions to the world’s thugs and rogues would persist in the face of unpleasant facts — and so make the likelihood of eventual military action more, rather than less, likely.
©2008 Victor Davis Hanson
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Terror Terminology
by Oliver north
Townhall.com
LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- The term "politically correct" is defined by The American Heritage Dictionary thus: "Of, relating to, or supporting broad social, political, and educational change, especially to redress historical injustices in matters such as race, class, gender, and sexual orientation." Add to that litany of "historical injustices" the title of my New York Times best-seller: "American Heroes in the Fight Against Radical Islam."
In recent weeks, the vocabulary police opened a new front in the war on terror by issuing a list of do's and don'ts for terrorism terminology. In an effort to fight a kinder, gentler war on Islamic radicals, the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at the Department of Homeland Security, in consultation with unnamed Islamic interest groups, has issued a paper titled "Terminology to Define the Terrorists: Recommendations From American Muslims."
This policy document warns U.S. government officials against "using theological terms, particularly those in Arabic, even if such usage is benign or overtly positive. Islamic law and terms come with a particular context, which may not always be apparent." The paper goes on to counsel: "It is one thing for a Muslim leader to use a particular term; an American official may simply not have the religious authority to be taken seriously, even when using terms appropriately." In other words, we infidels have no street cred in the Islamic world.
We are told that we should no longer use words and phrases such as "jihadist," "Islamic terrorist" or "Islamist." Using the word "Islamic," the experts have advised us, may "concede the terrorists' claim that they are legitimate adherents of Islam."
At best, this advice is seriously flawed. At worst, it is an ominous recipe that invites defeat, for it begs us to ignore the identity of those who have declared war against the West in general -- and the U.S. in particular. The authors urge us to disregard the first axiom of war: If you don't know your enemy, you will lose.
In an interview for Fox News' "War Stories," Bernard Lewis (the dean of Mideast scholars) contrasted the way we fought fascism during World War II with the current conflict: "Then we knew who the enemy was. We knew who we were. Nowadays we have great difficulty in defining the enemy. We have to be careful not to offend anybody. We don't even seem to be able to define our own cause, let alone the enemy's. This kind of uncertainty makes it very difficult to carry on any sort of struggle."
Unfortunately, the Department of Homeland Security policy paper -- drafted with the help of anonymous "influential Muslim Americans" -- not only makes the current struggle more difficult but also is riddled with outright falsehoods. The document states, "The civilized world is facing a 'global' challenge, which transcends geography, culture, and religion." That statement defies reality. We didn't label al-Qaida, Hamas, Hezbollah, Jemaah Islamiyah and Mahdi Army murderers (to name just a few of the groups I have seen in action) Muslim holy warriors; they did. We didn't call their savage suicidal bombing campaign an Islamic jihad; they did.
The Department of Homeland Security document insists that "Islam and secular democracy are fully compatible -- in fact, they can make each other stronger. Senior officials should emphasize this positive fact." That "positive fact" simply isn't. Save for Iraq and Afghanistan, where U.S. troops have become the protectors of Muslim women and nascent representative political institutions, there is no Islamic majority country where "secular democracy" flourishes. We didn't create these realities; Muslim leaders did.
Reality has little to do with this new wave of political correctness, and it goes well beyond this new DHS policy document. Muneer Fareed of the Islamic Society of North America told The Washington Times that he has contacted Sen. John McCain's office to urge him to "rethink word usage that is more acceptable to the Muslim community." Fareed is upset that McCain consistently refers to "radical Islamic extremism."
In London, the British government's Home Office has advised government officials that they should use words such as "violent extremism" instead of "terrorism." When fanatics carry out horrific attacks on innocent civilians in the name of Islam, the perpetrators should be referred to as "criminals" instead of "terrorists."
Not to be outdone in the political correctness department, the European Union has come up with guidelines on how to talk about terrorists who literally are dying to kill us. It warns, "Unintended stigmatization resulting from an ill-considered choice of words may have serious negative psychological effects and thus contribute to the process of radicalization." In other words, it's all our fault.
If we succumb to this kind of mindless mumbo jumbo and doublespeak to describe the Islamic radicals who are trying to kill us, we're courting uncertainty and defeat. Or as one very politically incorrect soldier put it plainly during a book signing this afternoon, we're screwed.
Thursday, May 08, 2008
Investor's Business Daily political cartoonist and Senior Editor Michael Ramirez was yesterday awarded a Pulitzer Prize, his second and the newspaper's first. In awarding Ramirez, the Pulitzer panel lauded his "provocative cartoons that rely on originality, humor and detailed artistry." Michael Ramirez was a 2004 Lincoln Fellow of the Claremont Institute.
An example.....worth a thousand words?
Lincoln Fellow Michael Ramirez Wins Second Pulitzer
An example.....worth a thousand words?
Lincoln Fellow Michael Ramirez Wins Second Pulitzer
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
Interesting opening shots...Go John!
Senators Obama and Clinton have very different ideas from my own. They are both lawyers themselves, and don't seem to mind at all when fundamental questions of social policy are preemptively decided by judges instead of by the people and their elected representatives. Nor have they raised objections to the unfair treatment of judicial nominees. For both Senator Obama and Senator Clinton, it turned out that not even John Roberts was quite good enough for them. Senator Obama in particular likes to talk up his background as a lecturer on law, and also as someone who can work across the aisle to get things done. But when Judge Roberts was nominated, it seemed to bring out more the lecturer in Senator Obama than it did the guy who can get things done. He went right along with the partisan crowd, and was among the 22 senators to vote against this highly qualified nominee. And just where did John Roberts fall short, by the Senator's measure? Well, a justice of the court, as Senator Obama explained it -- and I quote -- should share "one's deepest values, one's core concerns, one's broader perspectives on how the world works, and the depth and breadth of one's empathy."
These vague words attempt to justify judicial activism -- come to think of it, they sound like an activist judge wrote them. And whatever they mean exactly, somehow Senator Obama's standards proved too lofty a standard for a nominee who was brilliant, fair-minded, and learned in the law, a nominee of clear rectitude who had proved more than the equal of any lawyer on the Judiciary Committee, and who today is respected by all as the Chief Justice of the United States. Somehow, by Senator Obama's standard, even Judge Roberts didn't measure up. And neither did Justice Samuel Alito. Apparently, nobody quite fits the bill except for an elite group of activist judges, lawyers, and law professors who think they know wisdom when they see it -- and they see it only in each other.
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