TOPICS

~ George 'Dubya' Bush
~ Michael Moore
~ Foreign Policy
~ Domestic Politics
~ Presidential Election 2004
~ Presidential Election 2000
~ Clinton Scandals

"The US is large, contains multitudes and often contradicts itself. The America of the National Rifle association and John Ashcroft is also the America of the Sierra Club and the Civil Liberties Union."
        - Anatol Lieven in Prospect

"All my life, watching America. All my life, there's panic in America, there's trouble in America."
        - from "America" by British band Razorlight

DUBYA: THE AMERICANS' AMERICAN

George W Bush, president of the United States, may or may not be one of the following: a) a laid-back, good-time guy who stumbled implausibly into the White House, only to reveal, at a moment of daunting national crisis, a square jaw and an iron backbone; b) a rich nitwit surrounded by evil henchmen who run the country.
        - Tony Allen-Mills reviews 'Stupid White Men' & 'Ambling Into History', "The Times"

"Get as close to Bush as you have been to me, don't underestimate him. He's a shrewd, tough politician and absolutely ruthless."
        - Reported advice from Bill Clinton to Tony Blair

I have been watching George W Bush for five or six years now and it pretty much goes the same every time. He decides on his goal (tax cuts, missile defence, re-taking the Senate), the received opinion says it's never gonna happen, and somehow by the end of the day the chips have all fallen his way.
        - Mark Steyn, "The Daily Telegraph"

"The story of America is the story of expanding liberty."
        - George W. Bush, speech at Republican National Convention 2004

"The greatest service Bush has ever done to the United States is to be the sacrificial goat that carries the sins of the people with him... The main purpose of a war crimes trial is not to declare a handful of people guilty, but everyone else innocent. The next president of the United States, whoever it is, will have a tremendous opportunity to simply travel around the world and not be Bush: 50 per cent of the job done already."
        - Walter Russell Mead, interviewed in "The Spectator" (Dec'07)

Sometimes a political figure becomes so hated that he can't do anything right in the eyes of his enemies. President Bush has achieved this rare and exalted status. His critics are so blinded by animus that the internal consistency of their attacks on him no longer matters. For them, Bush is the double-bind president.If he warns of a terror attack, he is playing alarmist politics. If he doesn't warn of a terror attack, he is dangerously asleep at the switch. If he adopts a doctrine of preemption, he is unacceptably remaking American national-security policy. If the United States suffers a terror attack on his watch, he should have preempted it.
        - Rich Lowry, "Bush Can't Win - Even If He Does", "National Review"

The reason the left hate George W Bush with such a passion is surely that he has effectively stolen their own radical clothes and revealed them instead as reactionaries who would prop up the old world order... this (neoconservative) optimistic, liberal philosophy of hope has much more controversially surfaced in the project to spread democracy to rogue states. But many old-style conservatives, who see the world very differently and do not believe societies can be transformed, are as horrified by this approach as are those on the left whose own agenda is to tear up the west’s moral codes and replace them by multiculturalism, moral equivalence and pacifism.
        - Melanie Phillips, "The Daily Mail"

If President Clinton, not the hated evangelical from Texas, had taken out the Taliban and the regime of Saddam Hussein — two of the worst, most murderous, most illiberal regimes imaginable — would liberals in general have been hostile? I’ll say what I’ve said before, repeatedly and tiresomely, I’m sure: A good many people would rather Afghan homosexuals be stoned to death than that they be liberated by George W. Bush.
        - Jay Nordlinger, "National Review"

The Bush administration retains its capacity to startle, mainly because it has redefined the lazy term "conservative" to mean someone who is impatient with the status quo.
        - Christopher Hitchens, "MSN Slate"

It’s a remarkable achievement to get damned day in, day out as the new Hitler when 90 percent of the time you’re Tony Blair with a ranch.
        - Mark Steyn, on misunderstanding of Bush's policies

"Democrats in America are evenly divided on the question of whether George W. Bush knew about the 9/11 terrorist attacks in advance. Thirty-five percent of Democrats believe he did know, 39 percent say he did not know and 26 percent are not sure." So, one in three Democrats believe that Bush was in on it somehow, and a majority of Democrats either believe that Bush knew about the attacks in advance or can’t quite make up their minds... If Bush — whom Democrats insist is a moron — is clever enough to green-light one 9/11, why is Iraq such a blunder? Surely a James Bond villain like Bush would just plant some WMDs?
        - Jonah Goldberg, on the results of a Rasmussen poll, "National Review"

Bush is hated because he is the embodiment of everything that the United States is, and Europe is not: not just enormously powerful, militarily and economically, but brashly confident and fervently patriotic. Where Europe is steeped in historical guilt and self-loathing — so immersed in its own unforgivable past that it is trying to fashion a constitution that actually prohibits national pride — America is profoundly proud of the success of its own miraculous achievement."
        - Janet Daly, "The Daily Telegraph"

One can’t escape the conclusion that the politics of conviction helps the President not because his own convictions are so good but because those of his opponents are so bad. The Democrats’ failure to win the public trust on ‘values’, Iraq and the Supreme Court have left them stewing in embitterment. Then Mr Bush rolled right over the foes of a National Security Agency plan to tap international calls: ‘If there are people inside our country who are talking with al-Qa’eda, we want to know about it — because we will not sit back and wait to be hit again.’ If there are people inside the Democratic party who are considering pursuing the matter further, their career in elective politics will be short.
        - Christopher Caldwell, "The Spectator"

George W Bush is a stupid southerner, a thick Texan who has never travelled outside America, a Bible-reading bigot who stole the election from good Al Gore. Now for a few facts. Bush and Gore have similarly mixed academic records. At graduate school, Gore recorded extremely poor marks in divinity and law. Bush can fly an F102 jet: this demands a high degree of numeracy and motor skills, or else you go down.
        - Eoghan Harris

One sign of the Democrats' desperation is that some of them continue to try to tar the Bush administration with innuendoes of racism, even though its Cabinet members have included people of Hispanic, Japanese American, Jewish, and Chinese American ancestry, as well as two consecutive black Secretaries of State.
        - Thomas Sowell

"How do you keep a black man in prison?"
"Re-elect Bush?"
"We can't wait until November."
        - Method and Red, "Method & Red"

I hear savage attacks on George Bush's failure to sign the Kyoto Treaty by people who have 3 cars sitting in their drive. I hear America called "the great ecological Satan" by folks who regularly fly to their holiday home in the south of France.
        - Mary Kenny, "The Irish Independent"

Bush is a liberal democrat — he has stood for election several times, you know. What has he ever done that’s fundamentalist?
        - Jay Nordlinger, whenever someone says "Bush is a Fundamentalist", "National Review"

It is sad to see someone being beaten up by the English language.
        - Martin Amis(?) on George W Bush

"I know that human being and fish can coexist peacefull."
        - George W Bush, speech as President

The nation's teachers should applaud Jesse Jackson for his calling President Bush "unliterate". If they ever need to explain irony to their students, they'll never find another example so succinct.
        - Quote spotted on IMAO

To be opposed by a fool is one thing; to be bested by him, repeatedly, is far more galling.
        - Ramesh Ponnuru, "Why They Hate Bush", "National Review"

If Bush is too dumb to be President, how dumb do you have to be to be consistently outwitted by him?
        - Mark Steyn, after Republicans win the mid-term elections

Today we are hearing echoes of the old sneers and jeers at Ronald Reagan's mind when the smartness of people like Al Gore and Hillary Clinton are contrasted with the supposed lack of smartness of President George W. Bush. As in the past, the standard for smartness is not achievement but glib rhetoric, smug airs and presumptuous proposals. But rating people by what they have accomplished is rare today. Take Al Gore - please. Just what has he actually done, aside from talking a great game? Bush was a jet pilot. How many dumb jet pilots do you know?
There was a time when we followed the ancient admonition, "By their fruits ye shall know them." Today, it is by their rhetoric and by their adherence to fashionable theories that we judge. By that standard, Ronald Reagan was not smart. But, fortunately for this country, he was wise.
        - Thomas Sowell, "Wise versus Smart"

As anybody in the international affairs area of The Irish Times can tell you, Washington was once a beautiful city, where art and culture and progressive values flourished under the Clintons. But now it has fallen to George W Bush's Bible Belt barbarians; slow-talking men in stetsons and sunglasses, and fast-mouthed women with big hair. The Irish left knows that the domestic policy of Bush Republicans is to do down the poor and send as many of them as possible to death row. Foreign policy is flying around in black helicopters, ripping up rainforests, spreading global capitalism like peanut butter, and being beastly to anybody from Baghdad.
        - Eoghan Harris

There is a long tradition of intellectual snobbery directed against American Presidents. The East Coast said that Abraham Lincoln was just a hick lawyer from the sticks; Franklin Roosevelt was considered a playboy, as was John Kennedy; as Alistair Cooke observed yesterday, Harold Macmillan thought Dwight Eisenhower "woefully uneducated"; Harry Truman was called a "bankrupt haberdasher", as indeed he had been; the Ivy League treated Ronald Reagan with a sublime mixture of condescension and distaste. The three 20th-century Presidents to have been treated with the greatest intellectual respect were Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. If the test is success in office, then one should go for the hicks and the simpletons every time.  If any President could have surpassed Ronald Reagan in this contest for intellectual contempt, it would be George W. Bush.
        - William Rees-Mogg, "Is George just dumb enough to be great?",  The Times.

"When I made a suggestion he didn't like, he gave me this look, as if to say: 'Are you the very stupidest person I am going to hear from today, or only in the top five?'"
        - David Frum, on his time as a speechwriter in the Bush administration

"Karl Rove had ideas that nobody else had — and that was his value to the president. Karen Hughes had the same ideas that everybody else had — and that was hers."
        - David Frum, on Bush's backroom team, "The Right Man"

"Hey, Mr. President, you should wear your hair like mine."
"Second term, Ozzy, second term."
        - Reported exchange between Ozzy Osbourne and President Bush at a dinner function

"George, if you want to end tyranny in the world, you're going to have to stay up later."
        - First Lady Laura Bush pokes fun at President Bush's sleeping habits at a press function

"There are all these conspiracy theories that Dick Cheney is running the country, that Karl Rove runs the country. Why aren't there any conspiracy theories that I run the country? It ticks me off."
        - George W. Bush (Mar'2006)

"Happy Columbus Day everybody. The holiday is named for the man who discovered America, although President Bush said that Columbus didn't occupy the country, so much as liberate the Indians."
        - Jay Leno

"We're all capable of mistakes, but I do not care to enlighten you on the mistakes we may or may not have made."
        - Quote by Bush when Governor of Texas

"Do you think you owe the Iraqi people an apology for not doing a better job?"
"That we didn’t do a better job or they didn’t do a better job?"
        - Scott Pelley, interviewing President Bush on "60 Minutes"

"At Harvard, he was a very avid and skillful poker player. One of the secrets of a successful poker player is to encourage your opponent to bet a lot of chips on a losing hand. This is a pattern of behavior one sees repeatedly in George W Bush's political career."
        - Thomas Lifson, comtemporary of President Bush in university

In polite and supposedly sophisticated circles in America today it is acceptable to say George Bush is akin to a Nazi and that America is becoming Nazi-like. The Nazis murdered millions of men, women and children. Their victims weren't "collateral damage" in a war, and they were not executed after a long and fair trial. The Nazis sent their victims to gas chambers and ovens in boxcars. Nazi scientists injected dyes into the living eyes of small children to see if they could be made "Aryan." They made soap out of people. What on earth has George Bush done that deserves such comparisons? What could he possibly do?
If you can't show me any of these things - and you can't - then stop calling the man a Nazi. Because when you say he's no different from Hitler, you are also saying that Hitler is no different from George Bush. And that means that Hitler's crimes were no worse than George Bush's "crimes." And whatever you think of what George Bush has done or might do, if you think any of it is the moral equivalent of the Holocaust, you are in effect saying the Holocaust really wasn't that bad.
        -  Jonah Goldberg, "The Politics of Dangerous Stupidity", "National Review"

If people could hate totalitarian dictatorship as much as they do George W. Bush — the world would be a happier place.
        - Jay Nordlinger, "National Review"

In politics as in retailing, you never argue with the customer. If the polls are accurate, the American people perceive George W. Bush as a upright and honorable man. On the other hand, they don't much like his economic policies, and they worry that he may be too much of a risk-taker in foreign affairs.
A smart political operation would work on those pre-existing weaknesses. It wouldn’t waste time trying to convince an incredulous public that the genial likeable man they see on television is in reality the reincarnation of Adolph Hitler. But the Democratic political operation of 2004 has not been smart. It has in fact been astonishingly, gaspingly, Guiness Book of Records stupid. It has been simultaneously hysterical and harmless, irate and irrelevant, paranoid and purblind.
        - David Frum, "National Review"

George W Bush reminds me of a sort of modern-day Epaminondas, who got it into his head that the way to stop attacks on Thebes was not just to fight back near Thebes (although he did that very well), but go to the heart of darkness and free the helots. George W. Bush got it into his head that the way to defeat these people who've been killing us for 20 years — recently on the USS Cole, on September 11, at the first World Trade Center attack, and on and on — was not to simply swat them, but to go right into their countries and destroy the conditions that created these fanatics. But, then again, after Epaminondas freed 250,000 slaves, the Thebans put him on trial for his life.
        - Victor Davis Hanson, interviewed for TAE

As the Washington Post points out - the richest 400 tax payers pay as much to the feds as the poorest 40 million in taxes. It kind of puts into perspective the constant refrain that Bush's tax cut mainly benefits the rich. In today's lopsided economy, any reduction in all tax rates will inevitably benefit the rich. I guess Al Gore wasn't smart enough to figure that out. The real worry is the danger in a system where increasing numbers of people are consumers of government goodies, and a smaller and smaller number of people pay for more and more of it. This is a recipe for majoritarian tyranny. If we have one-person-one-vote and you can always vote for higher taxes and spending, knowing you won't ever have to pay for it, why not do so?
There's a reason public spending increased by 8 percent last year under a Republican Congress. And there's a reason some Republicans are quietly insouciant about possible future deficits under their tax plan. They figure there's no legitimate way to stop the dependent class voting for more and more, except throwing the government into periodic fits of bankruptcy. There really ought to be a better way.
        -  Andrew Sullivan

MICHAEL MOORE: THE ANTI-AMERICANS' AMERICAN

A one-man weapon of mass distortion.
        - Padraic MacKiernan, in Ireland's "Sunday Independent"

"They think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious, ignorant and so on. And they've taken as their own, as their representative American, someone who actually embodies all of those qualities."
        - Christoper Hitchens, on Moore's popularity in Europe

To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of "dissenting" bravery.
        - Christopher Hitchens dissects Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" for MSN Slate

The more you think Michael Moore is an insightful and honest person the less reason there is for the rest of us to pay attention when your lips are moving.
        - Jonah Goldberg, writing in "National Review"

The popularity of Moore is a good indicator of just how debased and simplistic our view of American and world politics has become. The irony is that the sort of people who love Moore regularly accuse Bush of having a simplistic view of the world. Michael Moore is a demagogue, an inveterate publicity seeker who has grown fat, both literally and metaphorically, from feeding off anti-Bush hatred. He's a sort of secular tele-evangelist.
        - David Quinn, "The Irish Independent"

Mr Moore is a dangerous man to flirt with ... The Republicans are citing him as proof of their charge that the Democrats are "a coalition of the wild-eyed". If they have any sense , they may even steal a Moore cinematic technique: show the Democratic elite traipsing along the red carpet to see Fahrenheit 9/11 and then cut to a grainy shot of Mr Moore telling Britons that "Americans are possibly the dumbest people on the planet."
        - from the Lexington column in "The Economist"

Moore follows his GUT, by which I mean his Grand Universal Theory: Bush is to blame for everything. Because of Bush, the Saudis secretly run U.S. policy. Because of Bush, the Taliban were in bed with Texas energy executives. Because of Bush, the Taliban got toppled -- Whoa, hold up a minute, I thought he was all pals with the Taliban. The Saudis certainly were, which is why they opposed the liberation of Afghanistan. Bush has always been the issue for Moore. On Sept. 11 itself, his only gripe was that the terrorists had targeted New York and D.C. instead of Texas... The fellows at the controls of those planes were training for 9/11 when Clinton was president and Gore was ahead in the polls, and they'd have still been in the cockpit had Ralph Nader been elected.
        - Mark Steyn, "Connect the dots when you watch 'Fahrenheit'", "Chicago Sun Times"

The war on terror’s a bit of a joke on the Left these days. In "Fahrenheit 9/11", Michael Moore says Bush is deliberately keeping the population in a state of fear, and he gets some of his biggest laughs with clips of solemn announcers announcing upgraded terrorism alerts. I suppose it is pretty funny. Until it happens. And then Moore and the Democrats will switch to arguing that Bush knew it was going to happen all along and didn’t do anything about it.
        - Mark Steyn, "The Spectator"

"The Lord Haw-Haw of the war on terror."
        - Richard Littlejohn, on BBC's "Question Time"

The most annoying sound at this year's Cannes Film Festival was the incessant drone of Michael Moore telling everyone in town that he had been silenced. If only.
        - Mark Kermode, "The Observer"

"It is that stupid moron's right to be that utterly completely wrong."
        - Dennis Miller gives his opinion of Michael Moore

The mobile cheeseburger.
        - Paul Johnson, "The Spectator"

I never know whether he is as ignorant as he looks, or even if that would be humanly possible.
        - Christopher Hitchens, from his collection "Love, Poverty and War

Moore mostly avoids straightforward factual assertions - which makes the movie harder to confront and argue with - in favor of ellipsis and misdirection. Moore accuses - if 'accuse' is a synonym for 'insinuate' - Bush of approving the flight of the bin Laden family from the U.S. after Sept. 11. Will anyone care that the movie, viewed as either art or journalism, is a mess? 'Fahrenheit 9/11' has a Palme d'Or from the Cannes film festival - and now the implicit endorsement of the Democratic Party establishment. This embrace of Moore's crackpottery is great news for Moore, very bad news for Democrats.
        - Andrew Ferguson, "Will 'Fahrenheit 9/11' Burn the Democrats?", "Bloomberg News"

It isn't enough to say that Moore manipulates the facts, or that he is a charlatan, or that his arguments are glib. The reality is that his methods are working, and working for a reason. He is the grizzled face of a culture in denial, the contrarian voice of the millions who would rather hate Dubya than confront the awesome threat that stalks our age. His success is an urgent warning to those who support the war, who grasp its importance, to raise their game, and fast.
        - Matthew d'Ancona, in Britain's "Sunday Telegraph"

The slippery logic, tendentious grandstanding and outright demagoguery on display in "Bowling for Columbine" should be enough to give pause to its most ardent partisans, while its disquieting insights into the culture of violence in America should occasion sober reflection from those who would prefer to stop their ears.
        - A.O. Scott, reviewing "Bowling For Columbine" for "The New York Times"

Fahrenheit 9/11 is crude propaganda, not serious cinema and as a piece of propaganda, I suspect that it will have a strong impact on the alienated and the uninformed. As a piece of cinema, Fahrenheit 9/11 is an inept work. Moore has no idea how to edit a film... History is cleansed of complexity, politics is free of paradox and the truth is always simple. That a work of crude propaganda such as this should have won this year’s Palme d’Or is a scandal.
        - Cosmo Landesman, film critic for "The Times"

"It's a terrific piece of entertainment. There are even some interesting facts in it. But it is to the documentary what Oliver Stone's 'JFK' film was to history."
        - Ted Koppel, on "Fahrenheit 9/11"

"The message of this film is very weak and propagandistic. We were used to such messages in the communist days. Everybody has open eyes and can understand that this is propaganda. It was a weak film that tells us nothing new."
        - Václav Klaus, premier of the Czech Republic, on "Fahrenheit 9/11"

"America sure is a great country, where someone like Michael Moore trashes the president and gets away with it- and makes so much money!"
        - a young Iranian, seeing the real lesson of "Fahrenheit 9/11" (via Andrew Sullivan)

Michael Moore arrived late in his trademark jeans, shirt, working man’s jacket, and baseball cap. One of the BBC producers made a joke about the contrast between his outfit and my own Washington-standard-issue blue suit and red tie. I replied that I’d noticed that Moore was wearing a watch that cost at least fifteen times as much as every article of clothing on my body. I learned later that he’d arrived by private jet.
    - David Frum, recalling his experience opposite Moore on BBC's "Question Time", "National Review"

Michael Moore insists, "I don't own a single share of stock." He denounces clever Enron style schemes to conceal wealth and rails against Haliburton as the Mother of All Evils. As Peter Schweizer reports in "Do As I Say (Not As I Do)", Moore told the IRS his home is the headquarters of his tax-free foundation, to which he contributes some of his millions for the write-off. The foundation, in turn, not only bought stock — its holdings are a Who's Who of "greedy" corporations, including Halliburton.
        - Jonah Goldberg, "National Review"

"Right now Michael Moore is saying, 'I should have just made "Super Size Me." I've done the research.'"
        - Chris Rock, hosting the Oscars (2005)

You would have to say that the quality of thought and argument in all this is astonishingly low, the propaganda amazingly crude, except that since the films of Michael Moore came into vogue, stupidity, crudeness and shrill one-sidedness seem to have become common in political documentaries. The people who buy tickets to them don't expect to learn anything they didn't already know, only to have their most treasured political resentments flattered and encouraged.
        - James Bowman, reviewing "Sir! No Sir!" for "The American Spectator"

Philadelphia, the American Colonies, July 4, 1776 — Leaders of the self-described “American patriots” movement gathered in this Pennsylvania city today to sign an official declaration of their political intentions, despite widespread criticism of a failing war policy and complaints that their military action was launched under false pretenses.  “Here it is, July of 1776, and George W. and his lackeys are just now getting around to declaring what this war is supposedly all about?” complained Loyalist playwright Michael LeMoore. “Washington and his neo-congressionalists rushed us into war at Lexington and Concord, before anyone had ‘declared’ a single word about independence. Face it: George lied, and people died.” Moore was referring to what patriots call “The shot heard 'round the world,” when colonial forces fired on British soldiers in violation of accepted international rules of military engagement... Though most colonists agree that King George III is a tyrant, polls consistently show that a minority of colonists support open military action against the British. Many pundits also question whether removing the monarchy will make any fundamental difference in the lives of Americans.
        - Michael Graham, imagining an 18th century Michael Moore in "National Review"

US FOREIGN POLICY

"For everyone but America the free world is mostly a free ride."
        - Mark Steyn, "The Spectator"

Of all the Western democracies, only two have no choice but to depend on their own military forces for their survival — the United States and Israel. The rest have for more than half a century had the luxury of depending on American military forces in general and the American nuclear deterrent in particular. People who have long been sheltered from mortal dangers can indulge themselves in the belief that there are no mortal dangers.
        - Thomas Sowell

What’s your favourite fact? Come on, everyone has a favourite fact. Here’s mine: more young people supported the Vietnam War than did any other section of the American population. As the war progressed, the whole country turned against it, but those under 30 remained least likely to regard it as an error.
        - Daniel Finkelstein, "The Times"

It is America that is doing most of the heavy-lifting in the aftermath of the tsunami. It was the US military which intervened in Bosnia and later in Kosovo to help oppressed and persecuted peoples in both of those regions when the rest of the international community, including the EU and UN, could do nothing. Without the strength and power of the United States, the international community would be helpless in the face of most international crises. This strength and power has been paid for out of the taxes of the American people. Europe could acquire this same power, but won't - because it won't spend the money. And yet it feels free to constantly criticise the US for having this power in the first place, for
using it as it deems appropriate, and for not giving the UN a veto over its actions. The Asia disaster shows once again how much the world relies on the United States, and it demonstrates once again our irrational resentment of that country.
        - David Quinn, "The Irish Independent"

Despite our present anti-Americanism and our faux pacifism, we know that if Ireland and Europe were ever in trouble again we'd send forth the message: "Send in the Marines". And the Marines would be sent forth. There wouldn't be much mockery then.
        - David Quinn, "The Irish Independent"

Today sees the birthday of the greatest democracy the world has ever seen — not that you would know it in Ireland, where you'd be forgiven for assuming that America is a country which combines the worst elements of Nazi Germany with Nero's Rome.
        - Ian O'Doherty, "The Irish Independent"

"What would the world look like with a different superpower? If we look at the real world alternatives the 20th century threw up - the British and French empires, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union [and now, he might have added, the growing power of China] - then the US begins to look quite benign."
        - Jonathan Cape, reviewing Andrew Anthony's "The Fall-out", "The Observer"

America’s critics point out that the U.S. does many things that empires once did — police the seas, deploy militaries abroad, provide a lingua franca and a global currency — and then rest their case. But noting that X does many of the same things as Y does not mean that X and Y are the same thing. The police provide protection, and so does the Mafia. Orphanages raise children, but they aren’t parents. If your wife cleans your home, tell her she’s the maid because maids also clean homes. See how well that logic works... Unlike the Romans, or even the British, our garrisons can be ejected without firing a shot. We left the Philippines when asked. We may split from South Korea in the next few years under similar circumstances. Poland wants our military bases; Germany is grumpy about losing them... Naomi Wolfe, Frank Rich, and other leftists believe that the "imperialistic" war on terror has turned America into a police state. But if they were right, they wouldn’t be allowed to say that.
        - Jonah Goldberg, on America's "Empire", "National Review"

The Berkeley city council has made national news by telling Marine Corps recruiters that they are unwelcome in that bastion of the academic Left. It is a shame that Berkeley is not on some island in the South Pacific, because then they could be given their independence and left to defend themselves.
        - Thomas Sowell

Americans are often criticised for lacking nuance. The world could do with a tad more nuance when it looks at America.
        - Gerard Baker, "The Times"

The United States of America is a flawed nation. So is every country in the world. Every one has fought ill-advised wars and exported dubious ideas, pursued questionable foreign policy doctrines and suffered internal dissension and poverty. Every one. Yet unlike almost every other nation, the United States has also been a beacon of liberty. We know this here in Europe because it was to our shores that American boys came to protect one part of the Continent from the totalitarian instincts of the other part. It was here they gave their lives and here they stayed to defend us from ourselves and here from which they departed when their job was done, without retaining a single piece of real estate, save the cemeteries in which they buried their sons.
        - Daniel Finkelstein, "The Times"

If the United States was the kind of country that people say it is, run by Nazis and all this nonsense, we could disarm North Korea in an afternoon.
       - Christopher Hitchens

Does any nation have a constitution comparable to ours? Does merit — or religion, tribe, or class — mostly gauge success or failure in America? What nation is as free, stable, and transparent as the U.S.? Try becoming a fully accepted citizen of China or Japan if you were not born Chinese or Japanese. Try running for national office in India from the lower caste. Try writing a critical oped in Russia or hiring a brilliant female to run a mosque, university, or hospital in most of the Middle East. Ask where MRI scans, Wal-Mart, iPods, the Internet, or F-18s came from.
        - Victor Davis Hanson, on the strengths of America, "National Review"

When he spoke to Congress in 2003, Tony Blair said, “As Britain knows, all predominant power seems for a time invincible but, in fact, it is transient. The question is: What do you leave behind?” It’s not hard to see what Britannia left behind – they include not only the current global hegemon but also the key regional powers almost everywhere on the map, from South Africa to India to Australia; three-sevenths of the G7 leading economies; and the only five nation states to have been on the right side of all three of the 20th century’s global conflicts. By contrast, since the end of the Second World War, the US has gone to almost perverse lengths not to promote American ideas of liberty and self-government. Americans don’t have an imperialist bone in their bodies, so instead they created transnational institutions – the UN and its variously malign progeny – explicitly structured to enable groupings of America’s weak rivals to combine into a kind of pseudo-superpower. What benefit has this been?
        - Mark Steyn, "National Review"

"You'll think I'm off my trolley when I say this, but the Bush administration is the most radical - in a positive sense - in its approach to Africa since Kennedy."
        - Bob Geldof

"The largest source of imported energy for the United States is the Province of Alberta. Indeed, whenever I'm asked how America can lessen its dependence on foreign oil, I say it’s simple: annex Alberta. The Albertans would be up for it."
        - Mark Steyn, "The Spectator"

"Do you think 9/11 will be viewed as the first event in the US empire's decline and fall?"
"No. This is not an empire, first of all. If the United States was an empire, your country would be our 51st state."
        - Canadian metal magazine "Brave Words and Brass Knuckles" interviews Jon Schaffer

"There is a brutal debate on the American right between old-fashioned isolationists who say 'we have no business with the world' and the neo-conservatives who say 'we have no choice'."
        - Simon Schama, British historian

If the president is not to deviate further from his free-trade philosophy, he will have to hold off the few, who will be angry, in the interests of the many, who will neither know nor appreciate his efforts on their behalf. That is a lot to ask of a politician.
       - Irwin Stelzer, "The Sunday Times", 10.08.03

Like Britain in the early 1900s, America does not have enough power to solve all the world’s political and economic problems. But it does have enough military muscle to deter any country from seeking to impose its will on others. There is a basic paradox about American leadership that is likely to make it essentially benign, at least until much later in the century. This is that the values it espouses and seeks to establish overseas would, if adopted by other countries, make those countries stronger.
The United States is the first pre-eminent power in history whose ideas, if they triumph, would bring about the loss of its own dominance.
        - Bill Emmott, "20:21 Vision: 20th Century Lessons for the 21st Century"

America should not gratuitously welcome such dislike; but we should not apologize for it either. Sometimes the caliber of a nation is found not in why it is liked, but rather in why it is not. By January 1, 1941, I suppose a majority on the planet — the Soviet Union, all of Eastern Europe, France, Italy, Spain, and even many elsewhere in occupied Europe, most of Latin America, Japan and its Asian empire, the entire Arab world, many in India — would have professed a marked preference for Hitler's Germany over Churchill's England. Think about it.
        - Victor Davis Hanson, "On Being Disliked", "National Review"

"If America does not do things, nobody else will."
        - Sir Michael Howard, British historian

"Now let's see if I understand this correctly. President Clinton has ordered our forces to engage an entrenched, politically motivated enemy, backed by the Russians, on their home ground, in a foreign civil war, in difficult terrain, with limited military objectives, with bombing restrictions, boundary and operational restrictions, queasy allies, far across an ocean, with uncertain goals, without prior consultation with Congress, having the potential for escalation, while limiting the forces at his disposal, and while the majority of Americans are opposed to, or are at best uncertain about, the value of the action being worth American lives. So, what was it that Clinton was opposed to during Vietnam?"

- Lt. Gen. Tom Griffin USA (retired) on the Kosovo crisis

The Taiwan issue is simple. It is whether a government that oppresses its own people should be allowed forcefully to extend that oppression to an island that has opted for democracy and has no wish for reunification while this yawning political gap endures. Support for the Taiwanese is a litmus test of commitment to self-determination.
        - The Times of London

Dear China, We're sorry that you don't train your fighter pilots better. As a token of our apology, here's a copy of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2000. We're sorry that you're front-line fighter planes can't outmaneuver a 35 year old prop-driven airliner. Perhaps you'd like to consider purchasing some surplus 1950's era Lockheed Starfighters from Taiwan.
        - Anononymous version of the US 'apology' to China

He sticks it to North Korea, which is still, after all, a barbaric Stalinist regime. He refuses to apologise to the Chinese for the downing of the EP-3 spy plane; and why should he? It was their fat fault that one of their fighters bumped into the American plane, in international air space, and consequently crashed into the sea. He's decided to scrap the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which also seems sensible, since that document is now about as meaningful as the Treaty of Versailles.
But of all the tough-guy acts that Bush has performed in his first few months, of all the pieces of exuberant Reaganism, nothing has so intoxicated the world with hate as his decision to scrumple up the Kyoto protocol and use it for putting practice in the Oval Office.
        - Boris Johnson, "Go Bush Baby", The Daily Telegraph

It is well known that meeting the Kyoto treaty on carbon-dioxide reduction will delay global warming by six years at most by 2100. Yet the annual cost of that treaty, in each year of the century, will be the same as the cost - once - of installing clean drinking water and sanitation for every human being on the planet. Priorities, anyone?
        - Matt Ridley, "The End Is Not Nigh", The Spectator.

There is a lesson here for the Bush Administration, too. As Henry Kissinger has quipped, whereas the problem with the Clinton Administration was that the explanation was better than the policy, with the Bush camp the problem is that the policy is better than the explanation.
        - WSJ Opinion

One British critic of America’s propensity to military action recalls the old saw: "When you have a hammer, all problems start to look like nails." This is true. But nations without great military power face the opposite danger: when you don’t have a hammer, you don’t want anything to look like a nail.
        - Robert Kagan, "The Times"

The psychology of weakness is easy enough to understand. A man armed only with a knife may decide that a bear prowling the forest is a tolerable danger, inasmuch as the alternative - hunting the bear armed only with a knife - is actually riskier than lying low and hoping the bear never attacks. The same man armed with a rifle, however, will likely make a different calculation of what constitutes a tolerable risk. Why should he risk being mauled to death if he doesn't need to?
        - Robert Kagan, "Paradise and Weakness", "Policy Review Online"

For the first time, the Left doesn't even bother to fake concern for the victims of fascism. Brutal dictators now fear nothing so much as the reelection of a Republican president.
        - National Review

"The West disputes not America's positions so much as its right to have positions. To do so is 'unilateralist' - which is, when you think about it, just another word for 'independent'."
        - Mark Steyn

"Clinton wanted the world to love America. He failed. Bush wants America to be respected and if necessary feared."
        - Anonymous US official

"One of the reasons that ballistic missiles are attractive to so many is that there are currently no defences against them. Given their destructive power they are terror weapons by their mere existence….. History teaches that weakness is  provocative and, in a real sense, the absence of missile defence provokes others into seeking such weapons."
        - Henry Kissinger

"At the heart of the opposition to a missile shield is that it would stimulate an arms race. I do not agree. Current vulnerability to missile attack is an invitation to build offensive weapons.
During the Cold War, perhaps the argument that the West should not build a shield and should instead remain vulnerable to missile attack could be understood, even if one disagreed with it. We were in a two power world that maintained an uneasy peace based on mutually assured destruction. But the position is very different now. To choose to remain vulnerable in a world  of multiple threats would be absurd as well as and dangerous."
       - William Hauge, speech as Conservative Party Leader

"It's like being 'Xena, Warrior Princess.'"
        - Madeleine Albright, stock response to questions about being a female secretary of state

Our people glow with pride over our nuclear efforts, sometimes literally. I repeat that the enrichment is for peaceful purposes only, and we seek only peace, and peace is our goal, and there is nothing more we love than peace. Except death. Sorry; forgot. Death is definitely number one.
        - James Lilek's version of the letter from the Iranian President to President Bush

"Amnesty International suffers from an acute case of the Moynihan Syndrome. According to Moynihan’s law, the amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there.  The greater the number of complaints being aired, the better protected are human rights in that country.  The reason is obvious.  Those countries in which human rights are the most severely violated are also those where no freedom of speech nor press is permitted."
        - Steven E. Plaut, "Front Page Magazine"

"Over and over again, our enemies have forced us to do things we wouldn't have done if we had been left to our own devices. We were torpedoed into the First World War by German U-boats. We were bombed into World War II, just in time, by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. We were dragged unwillingly into the Cold War by Stalin's impatient power grabs. We were forced into the Gulf War by Saddam's hasty invasion of Kuwait (if he had waited a year or two, we would have dismantled a considerable portion of our military). And we were terrorized into the current unpleasantness by the attacks of September 11th."
        - Michael Ledeen, "Guardian Angels"

America's critics say that America only intervened in Europe when it had to. They say that the Marshall Aid plan was needed because shattered Europe was no good as a trading partner. They say that America confronted the Soviet Union in order to keep the world safe for capitalism. They say that America is never altruistic, that it only ever acts in its own self-interest. And up to a point, it's true. America, like every other country in history acts in its own self-interest. But what a definition of self-interest! This is the kind of self-interest the world needs. It is self-interest that sees there is more to be gained by rebuilding your enemies than by crushing them underfoot. It is self-interest that knows freedom and democracy do not build true rivals in the old historical sense, but allies and trading partners. Has there ever been a great power like this? No one claims that America does not make bad decisions, and can never be petty-minded or vain, or vulgar, or materialistic. But give me America any day over any of the available alternatives... I am thankful that in America, and in Britain, we have at least two countries that appraise the world realistically and are not content to remain in a fantasyland in which we believe that all disagreements can be resolved simply by good intentions. And, of course, we know that if the world ever does turn into the sort of peaceful place we all long for, it will be because of America and its realism, and not because of its critics and their delusions.
        - David Quinn, "National Review"

(a) You stupid, ignorant nigger. (b) What else could you expect from a Jew? (c) Did you know that more than half of all Muslims don't have a passport? No wonder they're so backward.
The above three statements are, of course, unacceptable in a polite society. But swap the terms 'nigger', 'Jew' and 'Muslim' for 'American' and they're the kind of sentiment likely to receive nods of approval around the table at all self-respecting dinner parties. We live in a culture which is obsessed with not offending anyone. You can see it in the strange and self-defeating willingness to be lectured on our failings from Islamic supremacists who themselves come from morally-bankrupt societies. There are countless other examples but the general consensus now is that we must respect all cultures, regardless of how undeserving of respect they are. Except the Americans. It is considered absolutely fine to dismiss America as a country populated almost entirely by ignorant, gun-toting, Bible-reading rednecks who are obsessed with abortion and evolution and who have no idea of the wider world around them.
        - Ian O'Doherty, "The Irish Independent"

The Patriot Act to a European is proof of American illiberality in a way that China’s swallowing Tibet or jailing and executing dissidents is not. America’s support for Saudi Arabia is proof of our hypocrisy in not severing ties with an undemocratic government, while few care that a country with leaders who traverse the globe in Mao suits cuts any deal possible with fascists and autocrats for oil, iron ore, and food. Yes, we are witnessing one of the great transfers of power and influence that have traditionally changed civilization itself, as money, influence, and military power are gradually inching away from Europe. And this time the shake-up is not regional but global. While scholars and economists concentrate on its economic and political dimensions, few have noticed how a new China and an increasingly vulnerable Europe will markedly change the image of the United States.
As nations come to know the Chinese, and as a ripe Europe increasingly cannot or will not defend itself, the old maligned United States will begin to look pretty good again. More important, America will not be the world’s easily caricatured sole power, but more likely the sole democratic superpower that factors in morality in addition to national interest in its treatment of others. China is strong without morality; Europe is impotent in its ethical smugness. The buffer United States, in contrast, believes morality is not mere good intentions but the willingness and ability to translate easy idealism into hard and messy practice. Most critics will find such sentiments laughable or naïve; but just watch China in the years to come. Those who now malign the imperfections of the United States may well in shock whimper back, asking for our friendship
        - Victor Davis Hanson, "The Global Shift", "National Review"

In a famous PBS-televised seminar at Columbia University, the moderator imagined a hypothetical in which the late Peter Jennings was imbedded with enemy troops in a Vietnam-like war. He then asked whether, if given the opportunity, he’d warn American troops they were about to be ambushed or whether he’d hang back and simply “roll tape” on the slaughter. Jennings agonized. “I think,” he said after a long pause, “that I personally would do what I could to warn the Americans.” Mike Wallace was appalled. “I am astonished” that you would interfere, he said to Jennings. “You’re a reporter!” When asked if American reporters have a higher duty to their country or fellow Americans, Wallace replied, “No, you don’t have a higher duty. No. No. You’re a reporter.” This browbeating was enough to get Jennings to change his mind. This is just one of countless examples of how patriotic waters run tepid in the elite media. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, ABC’s David Westin told journalism students that he couldn’t take a position on whether or not the Pentagon was a legitimate target. Other journalists agonized about whether or not there was an inherent conflict between wearing a tiny American flag on their lapels and doing their jobs. In World War II, American journalists — including Walter Cronkite and the legendary Ernie Pyle — wore American military uniforms and saw no conflict.
    - Jonah Goldberg, "National Review"

Two decades ago in the Washington Monthly, I quipped that U.S. bombers were becoming so few that eventually they would be named after states, like battleships. So, guess what: The Air Force now names its B-2 stealth bombers after states. There's a B-2 christened the Spirit of Georgia, another the Spirit of Alaska, and so on—with no danger of running out of names, because B-2 production stopped at 21. Today, the United States has just 183 bombers in its entire arsenal, versus more than 75,000 at the peak of World War II. Currently, the Pentagon plans to spend a gasp-inducing $320 billion on thousands of new fighter jets, but has nothing budgeted for new bombers for at least another decade; the Air Force actually says the Kennedy-era B-52 bomber will remain in service until 2037 — when any still capable of getting airborne will be 80 years old.
        - Gregg Easterbrook, "Slate Magazine" (April'07)

US DOMESTIC POLITICS

We’re in the middle of a series of historic economic transformations. A social revolution has radically increased the number of women in the work force and pushed down the wages of men.
A medical revolution has led to enhanced diagnosis and treatment but also rapid health care inflation that burdens American employers and eats into workers’ weekly paychecks. An information revolution has increased the economic rewards of education and punished those who lack it. A pedagogical revolution has led to ferocious competition to get into the top universities but a decline in quality at the primary and secondary levels. For the first time in the nation’s history, workers retiring from the labor force are better educated than the ones coming in. All of these huge social forces have had profound effects on how Americans work and live. All of them have combined to create a mass upper class, but also a struggling working class. They have all contributed to rising living standards — and also to the feelings of anxiety that show up in poll after poll.
        - David Brooks, "The New York Times" (Apr'08)

The New York Post recently compiled a list of the things that the New York City Council tried to ban — not all successfully — just in 2006 alone: pit bulls; trans-fats; aluminum baseball bats; the purchase of tobacco by 18- to 20-year-olds; foie gras; pedicabs in parks; new fast-food restaurants (but only in poor neighborhoods); lobbyists from the floor of council chambers; lobbying city agencies after working at the same agency; vehicles in Central and Prospect parks; cell phones in upscale restaurants; the sale of pork products made in a processing plant in Tar Heel, N.C., because of a unionization dispute; mail-order pharmaceutical plans; candy-flavored cigarettes; gas-station operators adjusting prices more than once daily; Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus; Wal-Mart.
        - Jonah Goldberh, "National Review"

It requires media hysteria to miss the point of what is offensive about House Republicans, and it’s not just their stupid e-mails. It’s their ability to take a “Contract with America,” morph it into an “entitlement for all Americans,” and produce a truly offensive amount of pork, cynicism, and cronyism, all in 12 short years. No wonder conservatives are furious at Republicans.
        - Denis Boyles, after another Republican scandal in 2006, "National Review"

Philosophers and partisans will debate for years the question of whether Democrats deserved to win the 2006 elections, but let us agree that the Republicans deserved to lose. Through its own crapulence, jobbery, and malfeasance, the Grand Old Party lost the House of Representatives, the jewel of the Republican revolution. Let's take the Democrats at their word. They wanted this election to be a referendum on President Bush and the GOP. Despite valiant efforts by the Republicans to make the election a choice between two parties, the Dems succeeded in making it thumbs-up or thumbs-down on just one: the GOP. And so the Republicans were doomed. The GOP once had the reputation of being able to run government like a business and wars like a finely tuned machine.
        - Jonah Goldberg, on why Congress lost Congress, "National Review"

When not trying to force a pullout from Iraq, their main effort has been chasing Bush-administration scandals that loom large only in their fevered imaginations... The Democrats’ latest tactic is to give an implicit choice to Bush officials: They can either come to Capitol Hill to testify so Democrats can try to build a perjury case against them, or they can refuse, in which case Democrats will cite them for criminal contempt of Congress... The Democratic majority brings to mind a paraphrase of the old saw about teaching: Those who can, legislate. Those who can’t, investigate.
        - Rich Lowry, on the Democratic Congress of 2007, "National Review"

In her opening remarks, Speaker Pelosi said, “This is an historic moment — for the Congress, and for the women of this country. It is a moment for which we have waited more than 200 years.” Pardon me, but is there a single human being who has been waiting for a woman to be Speaker of the House? One? I don’t think of Nancy Pelosi as a woman. I think of her as a left-wing Democrat from San Francisco. And she ought to view that as a compliment.
        - Jay Nordlinger, "National Review"

Mr. Bush's 2000 campaign strategy was explicitly to be "a uniter, not a divider." The contested election outcome made the Bush Presidency polarizing from the start, however, and some Democrats have never considered him legitimate. The debate over Iraq and Mr. Bush's response to the war on terror has compounded the rancor. Mr. Rove is hardly any more "divisive" than any other political strategist; has everyone forgotten James Carville or Harold Ickes? The difference is that Mr. Rove's remarkable run of success — first in Texas, then nationwide from 2000-2004 — has caused many on the political left to assume he must be cheating. Otherwise, how could anyone vote for these Texas yahoos?
        - The Wall Street Journal, as Karl Rove departs (Aug'07)

'Crush your enemies, see them driven before you and hear the lamentations of their women' ...Wait a minute, that's Conan. I stepped out of character here for a second.
        - Governor Arnie, explaining his governing philosophy to "The New York Times"

Mr. Gore, if I wanted to buy an anti-trust lawsuit against one of my competitors, would I send the check directly to the White House, or should I transfer it through the Chinese government?
        - Slate reader Steve Jones on Bill Clinton's antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft.

Al Gore's ability to say ridiculous things with a straight face, and without a shred of evidence,  is one of his most effective political talents.
        - Thomas Sowell

For those wondering why Condoleezza Rice is a Republican, it is worth remembering that the Alabama of her youth was run by a bunch of vicious southern Democrats, who set dogs on civil-rights marchers, and that decades later it was a Democrat senator from West Virginia — Robert Byrd, a former Ku Klux Klansman — who led the fight to prevent her from becoming the most powerful black woman in the history of America.
        - Sarah Baxter, reviewing "Condi" by Antonia Felix in "The Times"

Under Charles Murray's plan, all transfer payments would vanish, from Social Security and Medicare to corporate welfare and agricultural subsidies. In exchange, every low-income American over the age of 21 and not in jail would get $10,000 a year from the government. And everybody else would still get at least $5,000 a year from Uncle Sam. The only hitch is that people would be required to take out a minimal health insurance policy, and the tax code would stop favoring companies that offer health insurance. In a flash, the working poor would be richer. Work even for a half a year at minimum wage, and the extra $10k would put you above the poverty line. The whole bloated, nannying welfare state would be a memory. Market forces would finally be introduced to the health-insurance industry, driving down the absurdly high price of health care. Women who choose not to work so they can raise their kids would get the full $10,000 no matter how much their husbands earned, supporting families more than the current system and with less paperwork.
        - Jonah Goldberg, reviewing "In Our Hands" by Charles Murray, "National Review"

Instead of demanding new billion-dollar programs for health care and education, we should take more responsibility for our own welfare. Americans need to readjust their budget priorities. One might be able to believe that a $200-dollar-a-month private catastrophic-health plan is out of the reach of most Americans — if we were also to hear that sales of video games, cell phones and plasma televisions have crashed.
        - Victor Davis Hanson, "National Review"

The paradox of a right to health care is that it discourages the very activities that help deliver on that right... As in other nations, policymakers would discourage medical innovation because every new discovery puts them in the uncomfortable position of either increasing taxes or saying “no” to patients... Patients would demand far more medical care because additional consumption would cost them little. Higher tax rates would discourage work and productivity, yielding less economic growth and wealth... A fourth difficulty is how to deliver all this medical care. Declaring health care to be a right does nothing to solve the problem of getting the right resources to the right place at the right time. Where are doctors most needed? Where will we place hospitals? Who will produce surgical tools? How much should they be paid? These decisions must be made through the political process. Yet the political process does a poor job of keeping up with shifting needs. Worse, experience in other countries shows that those with political power would enjoy a greater right to health care by virtue of their ability to affect the allocation of medical resources.
The fundamental problem with the idea of a right to health care is that it turns the idea of individual rights on its head. Individual rights don’t infringe on the rights of others. Smith’s right to free speech takes nothing away from Jones. The only obligation Jones owes to Smith is not to interfere with Smith’s exercise of her rights. A right to health care, however, says that Smith has a right to Jones’ labor. That turns the concept of individual rights from a shield into a sword.
        - Michael F. Cannon, "National Review"

The biggest of the big lies in the "health care" hype is that a lack of insurance means a lack of medical care. The second biggest lie is that health care and medical care are the same thing... It is amazing how many people seem uninterested in such things as why so many doctors in Britain are from Third World countries with lower medical standards — or why people from Canada come to the United States for medical treatment that they could get cheaper at home. Government price controls on pharmaceutical drugs are more of the same illusion of something for nothing. People who are urging us to follow other countries that control the prices of medications seem uninterested in the fact that those countries depend on the United States to create new drugs, after they destroyed incentives to do so in their own countries.
        - Thomas Sowell

Consider the controversy over the State Children's Health Insurance Program, which is up for renewal. Most Republicans favor extending it. Almost all Democrats, and some Republicans, favor expanding it in a way that transforms it. SCHIP is described as serving "poor children" or children of "the working poor." Everyone agrees that it is for "low-income" people. Under the bill that Democrats hope to pass over the president's veto tomorrow, states could extend eligibility to households earning $61,950. But America's median household income is $48,201. How can people above the median income be eligible for a program serving lower-income people? ...the people currently preening about their compassion should have some for the English language.
        - George F Will, "The Washington Post"

I was against the recall on the grounds that the people of California elected Gray Davis and therefore they deserved to be punished. Seriously. Democracy isn’t merely about "the people" getting what they want, it’s also about the people getting what they deserve. Mobs get what they want every time. Citizens make informed choices and then live with — and learn from — the consequences. Those lessons inform how we view not merely candidates but parties and philosophies. "We gave those guys their shot and they blew it, I won’t be voting for that crowd again," is an indispensable reaction in democratic politics.
        - Jonah Goldberg, "National Review"

By general consensus, the California crisis was triggered by the unexpected convergence of at least four significant factors: A) a 30 percent increase in the demand for electricity in one of the nation's fastest-growing states, B) a shortage of power sources resulting from environmental attitudes that had prevented the state from bringing on line a single new power plant in 15 years, C) an increased dependence on power from other states in which demand was also rising and D) a misguided legislative decision to half-deregulate the industry, allowing utility companies to purchase power at market rates on the supply side of the equation, but maintaining regulatory controls on consumer prices on the demand side. By 2001, the cost of power to California's utilities was more than 10 times what they were allowed to charge consumers, who — because their price was fixed — lacked incentive to restrict demand. This put the utility companies on the verge of bankruptcy, unable to purchase additional power.
        - David Horowitz

If you don't understand the economics of price controls, just look at the history of it. Price controls created a gasoline shortage in the United States in the 1970s, food shortages in France in the 1790s, and housing shortages under rent control in cities around the world at various times in between. Why should anyone be surprised that price controls caused a shortage of electricity in California today when price controls have been causing shortages as far back as the days of the Roman Empire?
        - Thomas Sowell, "Easy Economics and Complicated Politics"

From the Cincinnati riots to the real worries about racial profiling, we're all used to the idea that white cops are somewhat trigger-happy with black suspects. Worth noting then that, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 1998, "the black-officer-kills-black-felon rate was 32 per 100,000 black officers - much higher than the white-officer-kills-black-felon rate of 14 per 100,000 white officers." This may well be partly explained by the preponderance of black cops in black districts. But it certainly complicates the simplistic view that white cops are gunning for black suspects with wild abandon. In fact, the rate at which white cops have been killing black criminals has been dropping for two decades. Tell that to Al Sharpton.
        - Andrew Sullivan, on the Cinncinatti Riots

I think it's a good thing to humanize people on death row for all sorts of reasons... It is relevant that Hitler was good to his dogs, because if we make him into some sort of cosmic force, a tool of God or Satan, akin to a disease or a hurricane, we in a sense absolve Hitler of personal responsibility and we dupe ourselves into believing that another person like him cannot come along. The overused admonition, "Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it," is apt. If we lose sight that all villains are humans we will not be equipped to see evil when it is right in front of us. As with Hitler, being human provides no immunity from the applicability of Justice; it confers it.
        -  Jonah Goldberg, "National Review Online", on the McVeigh execution

Shabby logic often tries to equate the murderer's act of taking a life with the law's later taking of his life. But physical parallels are not moral parallels. Otherwise, after a bank robber seizes money at gunpoint, the police would be just as wrong to take the money back from him at gunpoint. A woman who used force to fight off a would-be rapist would be just as guilty as he was for using force against her.
Letting murderers live has cost, and will continue to cost, the lives of innocent people. The only real question is whether more innocent lives will be lost this way than by executing the murderers, even with the rare mistake - which we should make as rare as possible - of executing an innocent person. As so often in life, there is no real "solution" with a happy ending. There is only a trade-off. Those who cannot bring themselves to face trade-offs in general are of course unable to face this most painful of all trade-offs. But they have no right to consider their hand-wringing as higher morality. People are being murdered while they are wringing their hands.
        - Thomas Sowell, "Jewish World Review"

Among the reasons apparently taken into consideration, according to the New York Times, for not imposing the death penalty on Zacarias Moussaoui was "his troubled upbringing in a dysfunctional immigrant Moroccan family in France." Are only people with blissful childhoods to be held fully accountable for their crimes? Do jurors have any way of knowing how many other people with unhappy childhoods never murdered anybody? Even if we take a completely deterministic view of crimes — that they are all due to circumstances beyond the individual's control — why should that lead to lesser punishments? One of the factors we can control is punishment. But nothing a jury can do will stop people from having unhappy childhoods. For centuries, we have quarantined innocent people who had some deadly dangerous and communicable disease through no fault of their own. The point here is that the safety of society usually overrides questions about some cosmic sense of justice for the individual. Jurors cannot act as if they were God on Judgment Day taking all individual circumstances into account. They are not equipped to do that and there is no point pretending that they are. What people are equipped to do is show common sense. That is what our legal system is increasingly failing to do.
        - Thomas Sowell

As if the whole Dick Cheney shooting his friend in the face wasn't funny enough — honestly, can you even think about it without breaking into laughter — it seems that even cranky animal rights group PETA have got involved. According to a statement released by them: "Mr Cheney, there is so much violence in the world that is beyond our control but you can avoid hurting innocent animals, and well-connected lawyers, by putting down your guns and taking up a non-violent sport." I have an idea: members of PETA volunteer to be stalked by hunters armed with paint ball guns — nobody gets killed, and we get a chance to make a hippy squeal. I'd sign up for it.
        - Ian O'Doherty, "The Irish Independent"

"If your mother is on the Titanic and the Titanic is sinking, the last thing on earth you want to be preoccupied with is getting more passengers on the Titanic."
        - Senator Phil Gramm (Rep-Tex) comments on President Clinton's plan to expand Medicare

"We no longer have a welfare state so much as a geriatric state, at the service of the selfish whim of the elderly."
        - Rich Lowry, "Operation Please Granny" in National Review

Despite the rhetoric of Washington lobbying groups, those over 65 are now the most affluent and secure in our society, and are on the verge of appearing grasping rather than indigent. They bought homes before the great leap in prices; they went to college when it was cheap; and they often have generous pensions in addition to fat social security checks. So ossified rhetoric about the "aged" in the social security debate — increasingly now not so much the Greatest Generation of WWII and the Depression as the first cohort of the self-absorbed baby boomers — is self-defeating. George Bush is appealing to a new group that really is threatened — the under-35's who cannot afford a house, have student loans, high car and health insurance, and are concerned that their poor therapeutic education will leave them impoverished as China and the rest of Asia race ahead.
        - Victor Davis Hanson, "National Review"

"The Canadian government actually spends less on health care per person on Canada's universal health-care system than the US government does on Medicare, Medicaid, veterans' benefits and other public-sector health programs."
        - David Frum, "National Review"

"Access to a waiting list is not access to health care."
      - Beverley McLachlin, Chief Justice of Canadian Supreme Court

"The flu crisis isn’t a failure of the market, it’s a failure of the government’s attempts to rig the market."
        - Mark Steyn, on shortages of flu vaccines

Americans, who produce a wholly disproportionate share of the world's new life-saving drugs, are being asked to imitate price control policies in countries where such policies have dried up the costly research behind such discoveries. These countries have left the development of new drugs to the United States. But if we follow their example by killing the goose that lays the golden egg, who can we turn to for developing new medicines? This could be the most costly free lunch of all.
        - Thomas Sowell

California's politicians are following a strategy which has worked well politically in New York City: milking the productive people in order to support the unproductive, whose votes count just as much and are easier to get.
        - Thomas Sowell, "Jewish World Review"

"The purpose of the deficits, and the tax cuts, is to cut away the revenues and so reduce the size of the state. You cannot cut spending directly because there are too many interests against you. But voters will support tax cuts and eventually that will force discipline on spending."
        - Steve Forbes, explaining Reaganomics

What will the states do with their overflowing coffers? During the revenue boom of the 1990s, states allowed their budgets to bloat as they expanded programs such as Medicaid to unsustainable levels. When the recession hit in 2001 and revenues stagnated, state officials moaned that they were innocent victims of a fiscal crisis. They responded by hiking taxes and clamoring for more aid from Washington. Only a few years into the current boom, some states are already making the same mistake of overspending. In California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed a budget increase for fiscal 2007 of 8.4 percent, which follows a 9.7 percent increase in 2006. This is the same governor who, in 2003, said, "if you spend, spend, spend, then you have tax, tax, tax, but all of a sudden you say, 'Where are the jobs?' Gone, gone, gone." In seeking reelection this year, Schwarzenegger has found a new interest in "spend, spend, spend."
        - Chris Edwards, tax director at the Cato Institute in "National Review"

Various pressures ensure that the American hypocrisy about gambling will only get worse in the near future. The hunger of cash-starved state governments for new revenue streams combined with the miraculous renaissance of hundreds of Indian tribes previously unknown or assumed to be extinct means that the trend toward legalized gambling in more places is likely to continue apace. On the other hand, the vested power of established interests means that every new "gaming" venture faces resistance. More dollars are spent attempting to protect existing monopolies from competition than to create new ones—though Jack Abramoff's example lets an ambitious young lobbyist dream of one day being paid to push in both directions at the same time. Even if you took money and politics out of the equation, the eternal struggle between American Puritanism and the American love of excess—the cold war between Salt Lake City and Las Vegas—would prevent us from ever developing consistent or coherent laws and policies.
        - Jacob Weisberg, "Slate Magazine"

What offends some liberals is that the federal government isn't involved — and the federal government should do whatever they think is good. Leaving this to the states and the private sector is just too unsatisfying. Meanwhile, some pro-life conservatives who would like to see a far more comprehensive ban on the practice are largely powerless to affect the course of the research at all now that it's out of Washington's hands. And that's as it should be. Federalism — sending tough issues to the lowest, most local levels possible — is the best compromise one can ask for when dealing with such issues. The alternative is to ask the federal government almost literally to split the baby. Sure, more federal funding might advance the science a bit faster. But the current system has one great advantage. It doesn't force people who think human life is precious to pay for its destruction.
        - Jonah Goldberg, on embryonic stemcell research, "National Review"

Milton Friedman compares the performance of Catholic schools and public schools in New York City. The Catholic schools (only one-half of whose students are Catholic) cost half as much per student as the public schools and send almost twice as many graduates on to college... On nothing are the Friedmans more emphatic than that school choice would help poorer students. Competition inevitably encourages quality, and students who are free to opt for alternative schooling would flock to do so, as they have done in experiments in Chicago and Milwaukee and, are e xpected to do in Arizona and Utah. Non-Catholic blacks fight to get their children accepted in Catholic schools in Chicago, where a premium is placed on work and on reading and writing. The principal opponents of change are the same unions that Governor Schwarzenegger is fighting with in California, seeking to maintain their hold on the teachers' victims — the students.
        - William F Buckley, "National Review"

Today the nation still ignores what had been learned years before 1983... In 1966, the Coleman report, the result of the largest social science project in history, reached a conclusion so "seismic" -- Daniel Patrick Moynihan's description -- that the government almost refused to publish it. Released quietly on the Fourth of July weekend, the report concluded that the qualities of the families from which children come to school matter much more than money as predictors of schools' effectiveness. The crucial common denominator of problems of race and class -- fractured families -- would have to be faced. But it wasn't. Instead, shopworn panaceas -- larger teacher salaries, smaller class sizes -- were pursued as colleges were reduced to offering remediation to freshmen.
After 1962, when New York City signed the nation's first collective bargaining contract with teachers, teachers began changing from members of a respected profession into just another muscular faction fighting for more government money. Between 1975 and 1980 there were a thousand strikes involving a million teachers whose salaries rose as students' scores on standardized tests declined.
        - George Will, "Educations Lessons We Left Behind", "Washington Post"

In this clumsy piece of agitprop, Chris Hedges seems astounded at Christianity's starring role in American life, as if it's suddenly appeared on the scene, and not the country's founding tenet... Hedges also doesn't let little things like the American Constitution get in the way of his views... There is a book to be written on how the world's most powerful, most modern country is also one of the most religious. This is not that book.
        - Harry Mount, reviewing "American Fascists: The Christian Right", "The Telegraph"

Where did theoconservatism come from? In my view, it arose as a response to the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade (1974), the case that decriminalized abortion. (The Canadian Supreme's Court's 1988 decision in R. v. Morgentaler had a similar, though weaker, impact.) The Supreme Court decisions were an outrage to devout Christians. Previously, the law had protected what they saw as a fundamental value: the sanctity of human life. Now that protection was gone and there was no recourse. The decision of the nine justices overrode both the voice of the people and the word of God. People who said that this wasn't a black-and-white issue simply didn't understand it. It was necessary to get real conservatives into positions of power -- Congress, the Supreme Court, the presidency -- people who would be steadfast in their determination to resist and then reverse the country's drift away from a Christian society.
        - William Christian, reviewing "The Conservative Soul" in "The Globe and Mail"

People disagree passionately about science and morality because they care about them, and when their disagreements involve public policy, the forum for resolving them will be politics. Neither religion nor science can expect a free pass in the court of public opinion or in the voting booth.
        - Richard Brookhiser, "Time Magazine"

Harvard has many of early-21st century America's strengths — but many of the country's weaknesses as well. Its diversity is skin-deep: like the country as a whole, Harvard is actually getting more class-stratified, not less so, both within the school and in how well the student body reflects the broader society. Its scientific successes have been balanced by drift and even rot in the humanities, which mirror the larger rot in American popular culture; its formidable clout is undercut by a deep insecurity about its purpose and it founding ideals; and perhaps most importantly, its unprecedented wealth has too often fostered a spirit of materialism, greed, and success-at-all-costs. Harvard doesn't "hate America," as one conservative writer once put it — it is modern America, with all the good and bad that being modern America entails.
        - Ross Douthat, author of "Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class"

"I hope, in the end, that I love Harvard as we should love the world: not because it is good (it is not) but because there is good in it, and things worth fighting for. Perhaps the rest will pass away, until in my memory and the memory of my classmates only the best remains, the beauty of the place and the promise of greatness, a promise that went unfulfilled in my four years but endures nonetheless — as if around another corner, through another ivied gate, there waits the university of our imagination, the Harvard of our unrequited dreams."
        - Ross Douthat, "Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class"

I am old enough to remember when America’s colleges and universities seemed to be the most open-minded and intellectually rigorous institutions in our society. Today, something very much like the opposite is true: America’s colleges and universities have become, and have been for some decades, the most closed-minded and intellectually dishonest institutions in our society. Colleges and universities today almost universally have speech codes, which prohibit speech deemed hurtful by others, particularly those who are deemed to be minorities (including women, who are a majority on most campuses these days)... The students who were exempted from serving their country during the Vietnam War condemned not themselves but their country, and many sought tenured positions in academe to undermine what they considered a militaristic, imperialist, racist, exploitative, sexist, homophobic — the list of complaints grew as the years went on — country... This regnant campus culture helps to explain why Columbia University, which bars ROTC from campus on the ground that the military bars open homosexuals from service, welcomed Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose government publicly executes homosexuals
        - Michael Barone, "National Review"

The University of Colorado convened a panel of professors to review Ward Churchill’s academic work. They found him to be a plagiarist, to have falsified evidence, to have invented historical events, to have written putatively academic studies on subjects in which he has no academic background and to lack the basic outlook of a scholar. (Churchill actually told them that he starts his research with an ideological conclusion and then looks to find the evidence to confirm it.) Finally, they recommended that he be fired. Yet, he is still on the faculty of the University of Colorado. It is that hard to fire an academic incompetent and fraud.
        - David Horowitz, interviewed on "National Review"

"When we began 20 years ago, a national survey showed that only 25 percent of the public thought the media were biased. Today that number stands at 89 percent. The establishment press has a massive credibility problem, and they’re all hemorrhaging viewers and readers. It’s no coincidence that the exception is FOX News."
"Is FOX News right wing or not?"
"Actually, I’m asked this a lot, to which my answer is that there are more self-described on-air liberal Democrats on FOX than there are conservatives on every other network combined. And liberals complain about the right wing bias of FOX. Amazing."
        - Brent Bozell, of the Media Research Center, interviewed on "National Review"

Nine out of ten journalists in the United States donate, when they make campaign donations, to the Democratic Party... The New York Times forbids its reporters from making donations, because it says with the ease of internet access, it would enable people to get a misleading impression that the paper isn’t even-handed. No, it would enable people to get the correct impression that your news is being written and researched and reported by Democratic Party contributors and voters and supporters.
        - Mark Steyn

Senator Dianne Feinstein asked Judge John Roberts whether his being Catholic would interfere with carrying out his duties on the Supreme Court but she would undoubtedly have felt insulted if anyone had asked her whether being Jewish would interfere with her carrying out her duties as a Senator.
        - Thomas Sowell

What happened here was not just a sly judicial coup, but an explicit one in the wake of the expressed will of the California electorate, and their elected representatives... We have kind of compensated by over-venerating a handful of guys in black robes, just because they happen to be called judges, and sit on a fancy court. And there’s no reason for this. It’s entirely at odds with the founders’ conception of a functioning republic, that in effect, you should turn a handful of judges into super monarchs who can overrule.
        - Mark Steyn, after California's Supreme Court legalizes gay marriage (May'08)

The dementia is getting out of hand — in other news, the Secret Service stopped George Will as he tried to barge into the White House, reportedly to explain the Constitutional Convention to the president with hand puppets.
        - Jonah Goldberg, on the furore over nomination of Harriet Miers to US Supreme Court

All but the most liberal Democratic senators understand that the smart thing to do is to confirm US Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito as quickly as possible. Every day spent debating the Alito nomination is a day spent debating abortion, same-sex marriage, and racial preferences – issues on which Democrats lose. Every day spent debating the Alito nomination is a day spent not debating gasoline prices and the war in Iraq – issues on which Democrats can win. The logical political conclusion is that Democrats should put the nomination behind them as rapidly as possible. The trouble is that the Democrats’ increasingly radical donor base will not allow the party to do what is logical.
Unlike the Republicans – who raise their money in millions of small donations — the Democrats rely on big contributors. Who is giving the Democrats all this big money? The short answer: Hollywood. Between 1989 and 2003, the Democratic party raised an estimated $100 million from the entertainment industry. (To be precise: not just movies, but also music and television.) To put that money in context, that is about as much money as the Republicans are estimated to have raised from the oil industry.
        - David Frum, "Il Foglio"

Despite NASA’s fluff about the “wild success” of Discovery’s flight, at this point about the only people enthusiastic about the shuttle program are aerospace contractors and the pork-barreling congressmen from those states where NASA makes its home. For them, every half-a-billion-dollar space-shuttle launch represents the wonderful majesty of cold, hard cash. Defenders of the embattled shuttle program say, among other things, that it is needed to support the international space station. Alas, it’s true. The shuttle basically exists to go to the space station, and the space station exists so the shuttle can have someplace to go. They are mutually reinforcing boondoggles. Together they represent the stunted dreams and the wasteful spending of the space program 36 years after Neil Armstrong took “one small step.” Time to give the shuttle an honored place in the Smithsonian.
       - Rich Lowry, "National Review"

The penny is no longer made from copper (too expensive), but merely has a cooper coating over zinc, which is also now too expensive. It isn’t easy finding a substance worthless enough to make into pennies. It now costs 1.23 cents to make 1 cent. That means it will take 10.7 billion pennies to make 8.7 billion pennies this fiscal year.
        - Rich Lowry, arguing for the penny's abolition, "National Review"

"Gays want to get married, have children, and go to church. Next they'll be advocating school vouchers, boycotting HBO, and voting Republican."
        - PJ O'Rourke, "I Agree With Me", in "The Atlantic"

The trial is about class in America at its most extreme - the topic Americans most want to avoid. Michael Jackson represents an extreme case of the increasingly powerful and isolated over-class, the super-wealthy who, in a society where money is the ultimate source of power, have become used to creating gated, sequestered universes of their own. They are free from limits or middle-class morality. And they are never satisfied. But Jackson's accusers are also a symbol of the inverse phenomenon: a white underclass whose preferred method of self-enrichment is the victim culture of lawsuits and celebrity manipulation. Ask yourself what virtues or values Jackson shares with his accusers and you uncover an obsession with material wealth, a never-slaking thirst for fame, an ethics-free approach to the shakedown of others. The Jerry Springer culture embraces the very high and the very low. It's what they have in common.
        - Andrew Sullivan, "American Nightmare" in "The Times"

But why did the jury hand down the verdict that they did? In truth, Jackson was supposed to be judged by a jury of his peers and that was simply not possible. There is nobody, fortunately, quite like him. But the person that the jury did recognize, relate to, and intensely dislike was the accuser’s scamming finger-wagging mom.
        - Myrna Blyth, "National Review"

Future historians (assuming that an interest in the past survives) will be struck, I suspect, by the confusion in our society concerning sexual boundaries. On one hand, almost no sexual display is forbidden, and the most casual of liaisons is perfectly normal; on the other, university professors dare not be alone in a closed room with a female student for fear of accusations of sexual misdemeanor, and in some offices the most mildly flirtatious of remarks is taken as little short of rape. Extreme licentiousness thus coexists with a Puritanism that out-Calvins Calvin. One minute we are told that anything goes, and the next that we must carefully censor ourselves for fear of permanently traumatizing anyone who might overhear supposedly salacious remarks. At last, Herbert Marcuse’s concept of repressive tolerance seems to make some sense: We can do what we like so long as we live in fear.
       - Theodore Dalrymple, "National Review"

The most basic function of government, maintaining law and order, breaks down when floods or blackouts paralyze the system. During good times or bad, the police cannot police everybody. They can at best control a small segment of society. The vast majority of people have to control themselves. That is where the great moral traditions of a society come in — those moral traditions that it is so hip to sneer at, so cute to violate, and that our very schools undermine among the young, telling them that they have to evolve their own standards, rather than following what old fuddy duddies like their parents tell them. Now we see what those do-it-yourself standards amount to in the ugliness and anarchy of New Orleans. New Orleans can be rebuilt and the levees around it shored up. But can the moral levees be shored up, not only in New Orleans but across America?
        - Thomas Sowell

We have been hearing for a long time what a terrible thing it is to reveal the name of a covert C.I.A. agent — and it is a terrible thing because that can be a life-and-death situation for the agent exposed and a devastating setback for this country's ability to get people in other countries to supply intelligence. But it was quite an anticlimax when the man who is accused of doing that — Lewis Libby on Vice President Cheney's staff — is not even charged with the crime for which a special prosecutor was appointed, with extraordinary powers and an extraordinary budget. Unfortunately, this situation is not unique. It is not uncommon for a prosecutor to charge someone with a crime that did not even exist when the prosecutor's investigation began. In other words, the crime was created during the course of the investigation.
        - Thomas Sowell

It is simply naive to believe that a businessman will have no interest in politics when politicians have taken a great interest in him. And it is grotesquely unfair to assume that businesspeople are corrupt simply because they want to support politicians less inclined to hurt them. Microsoft CEO Bill Gates used to brag that he barely spent a dime on lobbying — “I live in the other Washington,” he liked to say. But the very moment that government — federal and state — tried to tear apart his company, Gates abandoned his view that the New Economy could ignore the Old Politics. Now D.C. is awash in Microsoft lobbyists. Wal-Mart is only now learning the same lesson. If you don’t get in the game, you might be regulated out of it. Of course, not all businesses that support politicians of either party are doing it out of self-protection. Some are merely rent-seeking opportunists. Some are both. Sugar growers, for example, have ripped off taxpayers and consumers to the tune of billions. If government stopped protecting the industry from competition, it would mostly disappear and stop gouging us at the same time. Liberals think Republicans are living up to their principles when they get cozy with fat cats. The reality is that Republicans betray their principles when they give fat cats a reason to come to Washington to begin with.
        - Jonah Goldberg, "National Review"

While America has been run by one of the most doltishly ineffectual governments in history, it has forged ever further ahead of Europe in terms of wealth, science, technology, artistic creativity and cultural dominance. Why does America’s prosperity and self-confidence seem to bear so little relationship to the competence of its government? The obvious answer is that America, founded on a libertarian theory of minimal government, has always had low expectations of politicians. In America, it is not just business that thrives independently of government, perhaps even in spite of government. The same is also true of other areas of excellence which in Britain are considered quintessentially in the public domain — higher education, leading-edge science, culture and academic research. Because Americans expect so little of their government, they are rarely disappointed. They do not slump into German-style angst when their governments fail to find solutions to the nation’s problems.
In Europe, by contrast, the public expect government to solve all problems, and the media try to hold politicians accountable for everything. The result is a culture of dependency that extends far beyond the welfare state, to business and to the worlds of education, medicine,