Christopher Hitchens: Firehouse Rot; John Kerry's cheapest shot

Slate ^ | 7/30

[ambrose]

Firehouse Rot John Kerry's cheapest shot.

By Christopher Hitchens

Posted Friday, July 30, 2004, at 10:15 AM PT

Allowance made for choreography, stagecraft, and all the rest of it, there need be no doubt that the Democrats in Boston sincerely wish to "project" the idea of compassion for the underdog, inclusiveness in general, and perhaps above all a degree of care and measure in foreign policy. The AIDS victim in South Africa, or the Bangladeshi woman hoping for a new well: These are sufferers and strugglers who would get genuine applause whether it was Barack Obama mentioning them or not. Of course we understand that our future is bound up with theirs.

But in the last few weeks I have been registering one of the sourest and nastiest and cheapest notes to have been struck for some time. In a recent article about anti-Bush volunteers going door-to-door in Pennsylvania, often made up of campaigners from the Service Employees International Union, or SEIU—one of the country's largest labor unions—the New York Times cited a leaflet they were distributing, which said that the president was spending money in Iraq that could be better used at home. The mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom, recently made the same point, proclaiming repeatedly that the Bay Area was being starved of funds that were being showered on Iraqis. (He obviously doesn't remember the line of his city's most famous columnist, the late Herb Caen, who referred to San Francisco as "Baghdad by the Bay.") These are only two public instances of what's become quite a general whispering campaign. And then on Thursday night, Sen. Kerry quite needlessly proposed a contradiction between "opening firehouses in Baghdad and shutting them in the United States of America." Talk about a false alternative. To borrow the current sappy language of "making us safer": Who would feel more secure if they knew that we weren't spending any tax dollars on Iraqi firehouses?

There is something absolutely charmless and self-regarding about this pitch, and I wish I could hear a senior Democrat disowning it. It is no better, in point of its domestic tone and appeal, than the rumor of the welfare mother stopping her Cadillac to get vodka on food stamps. In point of its international implications, it also suggests the most vulgar form of isolationism, not to say insularity.

[liberallarry]

Just saw this.

Possibly I'll come to the same conclusions you did, possibly not. Judgement calls are an irreducible part of political opinion and we all make them differently.

I saw this clearly in the reviews of Gibson's "The Passion". Steyn, Krauthammer, Buckley, and Christopher Hitchens are all first-rate minds. They all came to different conclusions which they articulated beautifully. I ended up thinking that Colby King's was the best.

[Democratshavenobrains]

Democrats apparently no longer care about poor people in other countries, except to blame all their problems on the United States.

[McGavin999]

Excellent article, thank you. I'm rather tired of these fine people constantly being slandered. A couple of them had blog sites while they were there. It was facinating to read their daily deeds.

[liberallarry]

$1.9 Billion of Iraq's Money Goes to U.S. Contractors

Thought you might like to see this.

[McGavin999]

Oh my goodness, you mean we actually used Iraqi oil money to improve the Iraqi oil infrastructure so Iraqis could make money? You mean we actually spent Iraqi money to purchase gas in Kuwait so we could furnish it to Iraqis at 5 cents a gallon?

Come on.