Samizdata

 

British blogger posts on the folks leaving his country.  

 

Mark Steyn on the Clinton dénouement. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.

There's been a lot of reaction to the NY Times McCain hit piece. We'll start out with reaction from the left. Seattle Post-Intelligencer editor first.

 

LA Times blog posts on the pass taken by the Boston Globe.

 

Editors of SF Chronicle. 

Enough with the libs, now some of our favorites post on the Times. American Thinker first.

Two posts from Power Line.

 

Abe Greenwald from Contentions.

And, of course, the Captain.

 

American Spectator looks at smoking bans in "Serfdom by a Thousand Cuts."

 
Neal Boortz on all the climate bureaucrats in San Francisco.

The EU has determined that passenger flights by DC-3's flown by Air Atlantique Classic Flight or any one else must cease when the regulations come into effect on July 16th of this year. These rules are imposed upon and override UK regulations, so even though the UK CAA is on the side of Air Atlantique, it will make little difference. Brussells, not London, is the capital of the United Kingdom.

The new rules require any aircraft with more than 19 passengers must have an armoured door to the crew cabin among numerous other modifications. They even demand an inflatable slide be added to the passenger door. There are no exceptions for classic aircraft and thus after July 16th the soulless gray men will make the European world that much more like themselves.

The EU Federal State is a special case of the general truth whose promulgation is a primary raison d'etre of Samizdata: The State is Not Your Friend.

Note: If you want to fly on a DC-3 before your betters prevent you for your own good, you had better hurry. You can reach AACF at 08703-304747 for reservations.

Sinclair's Musings

Leaving the country

When economists want to know what people think they try to avoid relying upon asking them. Surveys, opinion polls, personal anecdote and other ways in which people express their opinion can often be misleading or distorted. When and how a question is asked and how it is phrased can seriously affect the outcome of a poll. More importantly, people may express a certain preference in a poll but make quite different choices when asked to make real decisions with real consequences.

It is often better to look at revealed preferences; how people actually behave when faced with actual decisions in real life rather than hypotheticals in a survey.

Some dramatic new evidence of this kind emerged yesterday. High staff turnover often suggests that an organisation is not a pleasant place to work. High numbers of asylum seekers from Venezuela suggest that Hugo Chavez's rule is not very pleasant. The Army's recruitment and retention difficulties suggest that the poor management of the Armed Forces is making them an increasingly unpleasant place to work. In that light, the evidence yesterday that Britain is facing the biggest brain drain in 50 years, that those most able to leave are doing so, is an alarming suggestion that things are going very wrong in Britain today:

Why are people leaving? One suggestion:

Ever higher levels of tax; little to show by way of public service results for that huge drain on private incomes; an overly meddlesome state that leaves people bereft of control over their own lives. Yesterday's emigration numbers should be a wake-up call for a nation whose government is attempting to do too much and doing a very poor job of it. If things don't change Britain will continue to lose far too many of its best and brightest.

 

Orange County Register

Obama makes Hillary look like Bill Richardson

by Mark Steyn

On the day that Margaret Thatcher was toppled by her own party, I ran into an old friend, a hard-core leftist playwright, Marxist to the core, who wasn't as happy as he should have been. He jabbed me in the chest. "You bastards on the right!" he fumed. "You wouldn't even let us be the ones to drive the stake through her heart."

I'm sure in America's Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy there are similar mixed feelings. The Clintons have met their Waterloo but it's not some doughty conservative warrior who gets to play Duke of Wellington, only some freshman pap peddler of liberal boilerplate whom no one had heard of the day before yesterday.

Such are the vicissitudes of politics. I see from the gay newspaper the Washington Blade that, as the headline writer put it, "Clinton Leads Among Gay Super Delegates." Only in the Democratic Party. I don't know how many supergays it takes to outvote the nonsuper primary and caucus voters from Maine to Nevada to Hawaii. They may yet pull Sen. Clinton's chestnuts out of the fire, but they're looking pretty charred and indigestible right now. Unlike the Fall of Thatcher, it's nothing so glamorous as an act of matricide, but just the nightly hell of a tired vaudeville act that can no longer find the spark.

Bill Clinton understood a crude rule of show business – that, if you behave like a star, there are plenty of people who'll treat you like one. The apotheosis of this theory was his interminable ambulatory entrance down mile after mile of corridor at the 2000 Democratic convention in Los Angeles, when Slick Willie finally out-Elvised Elvis – or, more accurately, out-Smarted the opening sequence of "Get Smart."

Apparently, no one had thought to tell him to try to get within four miles of the stage before the introductory video ended. He was, by my calculations, outside the men's room on Corridor G27, Sub-Basement Level 6 of the Staples Center. As he began the long, long, lo-oo-oo-oong televised walk to the podium the crowd watching the monitors cheered – and, 20 minutes later, after he'd strolled down the first three or four windowless tunnels of attractive luminous drywall, hung a left by the water cooler, taken the emergency stairs, cut across the stationery closet, moved smoothly through the boiler room and had still only reached the Coke machine on Sous-Mezzanine Level 4, and there was at least a mile and a half between him and the stage, and the Democratic activists out in the hall were beginning to figure they could get dinner and a movie and still be back in time for the last third of his walk-on, they were nevertheless still cheering.

In effect, President Clinton dared them not to cheer. Tom Jones wouldn't have risked it. Engelbert Humperdinck would have balked. But, after eight years of talking the talk, Bill walked the walk. In the hall, the delegates' hands were raw, bleeding stumps, but the Slickster knew that, even if he started his entrance in Idaho, those Dems would cheer him every step of the way.

The Clintons turned the Democratic Party into a star vehicle and designated everyone else as extras. But their star quality was strictly comparative. They had industrial-strength audacity and a lot of luck: Bill jumped into the 1992 race when A-listers like Mario Cuomo were too cowed by expert advice that Bush the Elder was unbeatable. Clinton gambled, won the nomination and beat a weak opponent in a three-way race, with Ross Perot siphoning votes from the right. He got even luckier four years later. So did Hillary when she embarked on something patently absurd – a first lady running for a Senate seat in a state she's never lived in – only to find Rudy Giuliani going into instant public meltdown.

The SAS, Britain's special forces, have a motto: Who dares wins. The Clintons dared, and they won – even as almost everyone else in their party lost: senators, congressmen, governors, state legislators. Even when they ran into a spot of intern trouble, sheer nerve saw them through. Almost anyone else would have slunk off in shame, but the Clintons understood that the checks and balances don't add up to much if you're determined not to go: As at that 2000 convention speech, they dared the Democrats not to cheer.

With hindsight, the oral sex was a master stroke. Bill Clinton likes to tell anyone who'll listen that he governed as an "Eisenhower Republican," which is kind of true – NAFTA, welfare reform, etc. If you have to have a Democrat in the Oval Office, he was as good as it gets for Republicans – if you don't mind the fact that he's a draft-dodging noninhaling sex-fiend. Republicans did mind, of course, which is why Dems rallied round out of boomer culture-war solidarity. But, if he hadn't been dropping his pants and appealing to so many of their social pathologies, his party wouldn't have been half so enthusiastic for another chorus of "I Like Ike."

Hillary is what the Clintons look like with their pants up. Their much-vaunted political savvy turns out to be a big nothing: The supposed masters of "the politics of personal destruction" can't turn up anything better on Obama than some ancient essay from his Jakarta grade school, plus a few limp charges of plagiarism. And instead of getting the surrogates to crowbar the enemy every time Hillary opens up on him she looks mean and petty, and he gets to do his high-minded Obamessiah routine.

Their star quality was also, as noted above, mostly a giant bluff. In his heyday, Bill could channel his narcissism into a famously sure "common touch" – he liked to bask in proof of his awesome empathetic powers. But, in the years since he left the Oval Office, he's played too many gazillion-dollar-a-plate jet-set dinners in France and Switzerland, and the "common touch" has curdled. That was plain even by the 2002 midterms, when you could more or less correlate Democratic losses by his travel schedule. He's a bust on the stump.

And, worst of all for Bill and Hill, the Dems found a new star – their first in 16 years. Look at it from Hillary's point of view: She'd expected to run against the likes of Joe Biden, Bill Richardson, Chris Dodd – the usual mediocrities and misfits. Then Barack Obama came along, and did what the Clintons did in 1992 – saw his opportunity and seized it. All of a sudden, she's the Bill Richardson – worthy but dull, earthbound and joyless, lead weights round her ankles.

She has a melancholy dignity in decline. She knows she would make the better president, but every time she tries to explain why it sounds prosaic and unromantic. Bill gave the party an appetite for slick lounge acts, and this time round Barack's the guy delivering it in buckets of gaseous uplift. Can Barbra Streisand and the Supergays get Hillary airborne again? I doubt it. Go back to that Staples Center entrance in 2000, and try to imagine Hill walking that walk. How far would she get before the applause died away and she'd be padding that endless corridor to no audible accompaniment but the clack of her heels?

By Charles Krauthammer

This from a man who was a severe critic of the postwar occupation of Iraq and who, as author Peter Wehner points out, is no wide-eyed optimist. In fact, in May 2006 Cordesman had written that "no one can argue that the prospects for stability in Iraq are good." Now, however, there is simply no denying the remarkable improvements in Iraq since the surge began a year ago.

Unless you're a Democrat. As Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) put it, "Democrats have remained emotionally invested in a narrative of defeat and retreat in Iraq." Their Senate leader, Harry Reid, declares the war already lost. Their presidential candidates (eight of them at the time) unanimously oppose the surge. Then the evidence begins trickling in.

We get news of the Anbar Awakening, which has now spread to other Sunni areas and Baghdad. The sectarian civil strife that the Democrats insisted was the reason for us to leave dwindles to the point of near disappearance. Much of Baghdad is returning to normal. There are 90,000 neighborhood volunteers -- ordinary citizens who act as auxiliary police and vital informants on terrorist activity -- starkly symbolizing the insurgency's loss of popular support. Captured letters of al-Qaeda leaders reveal despair as they are driven -- mostly by Iraqi Sunnis, their own Arab co-religionists -- to flight and into hiding.

After agonizing years of searching for the right strategy and the right general, we are winning. How do Democrats react? From Nancy Pelosi to Barack Obama, the talking point is the same: Sure, there is military progress. We could have predicted that. (They in fact had predicted the opposite, but no matter.) But it's all pointless unless you get national reconciliation.

"National" is a way to ignore what is taking place at the local and provincial level, such as Shiite cleric Ammar al-Hakim, scion of the family that dominates the largest Shiite party in Iraq, traveling last October to Anbar in an unprecedented gesture of reconciliation with the Sunni sheiks.

Doesn't count, you see. Democrats demand nothing less than federal-level reconciliation, and it has to be expressed in actual legislation.

The objection was not only highly legalistic but also politically convenient: Very few (including me) thought this would be possible under the Maliki government. Then last week, indeed on the day Cordesman published his report, it happened. Mirabile dictu, the Iraqi parliament approved three very significant pieces of legislation.

First, a provincial powers law that turns Iraq into arguably the most federal state in the entire Arab world. The provinces get not only power but also elections by Oct. 1. U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker has long been calling this the most crucial step to political stability. It will allow, for example, the pro-American Anbar sheiks to become the legitimate rulers of their province, exercise regional autonomy and forge official relations with the Shiite-dominated central government.

Second, parliament passed a partial amnesty for prisoners, 80 percent of whom are Sunni. Finally, it approved a $48 billion national budget that allocates government revenue -- about 85 percent of which is from oil -- to the provinces. Kurdistan, for example, gets one-sixth.

What will the Democrats say now? They will complain that there is still no oil distribution law. True. But oil revenue is being distributed to the provinces in the national budget. The fact that parliament could not agree on a permanent formula for the future simply means that it will be allocating oil revenue year by year as part of the budget process. Is that a reason to abandon Iraq to al-Qaeda and Iran?

Despite all the progress, military and political, the Democrats remain unwavering in their commitment to withdrawal on an artificial timetable that inherently jeopardizes our "very real chance that Iraq will emerge as a secure and stable state."

Why? Imagine the transformative effects in the region, and indeed in the entire Muslim world, of achieving a secure and stable Iraq, friendly to the United States and victorious over al-Qaeda. Are the Democrats so intent on denying George Bush retroactive vindication for a war they insist is his that they would deny their own country a now-achievable victory?