Kerry Meeting With Nicaraguan Communist Dictator Daniel Ortega
Posted on 10/24/2004 2:50:52 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Maybe I'm getting old. I've been covering politics for 53 years, and that's just since John Kerry's convention speech. I'm sick of this election, even before the Democratic Party's chad-diviners have managed to extend it to mid-December. These are serious times and the senator is not a serious man. And so we have a campaign that has a sharper position on Mary Cheney's lesbianism and the deficiencies of Laura Bush's curriculum vitae than on the central question of the age.
There are legitimate differences of opinion about the war, but they don't include Kerry's silly debater's points. On the one hand, the Tora borer drones that Bush "outsourced" the search for Osama bin Laden to the Afghans, though at the time he supported it ("It is the best way to protect our troops," he said in December 2001. "I think we have been doing this pretty effectively."). But, on the other, he claims he's going to outsource Iraq to the French and the Germans, though neither of them wants anything to do with it.
As for this Bush-failed-to-get-bin-Laden business, 2-1/2 years ago I declared that Osama was dead and he's never written to complain. There's no more evidence for his present existence than there is for the Loch Ness monster, which at least does us the courtesy of showing up as a indistinct gray blur on a photograph every now and again. Osama is lying low because he's in no condition to get up.
But, even if he weren't, that's a frivolous reductive way of looking at this war. He's not a general or head of state; he can't sign an instrument of surrender, and make all the unpleasantness go away. The enemy is an ideology that appeals to various loose groupings from the Balkans to Indonesia, as well as to entrepreneurial free-lancers like the shooter who killed two people at LAX on July 4, 2002. If Kerry's oft-repeated "outsourcing Osama" crack is genuinely felt, it shows he doesn't get this war. And, if it's just cheapo point scoring, it's pathetic.
Almost everything falls into that category. Iraq's messy. So? What isn't? America has no Colonial Office, no political administrators with decades of experience in far-flung climes; its occupation of Iraq was learnt on the fly, because there was no other way. But the ludicrous defeatism over what's at worst a partial success is unbecoming to a great nation. If the present Democratic-media complex had been around earlier, America would never have mustered the will to win World War II or, come to that, the Revolutionary War. There would be no America. You'd be part of a Greater Canada, with Queen Elizabeth on your coins and government health care.
Speaking of which, if there's four words I never want to hear again, it's "prescription drugs from Canada." I'm Canadian, so I know a thing or two about prescription drugs from Canada. Specifically speaking, I know they're American; the only thing Canadian about them is the label in French and English. How can politicians from both parties think that Americans can get cheaper drugs simply by outsourcing (as John Kerry would say) their distribution through a Canadian mailing address? U.S. pharmaceutical companies put up with Ottawa's price controls because it's a peripheral market. But, if you attempt to extend the price controls from the peripheral market of 30 million people to the primary market of 300 million people, all that's going to happen is that after approximately a week and a half there aren't going to be any drugs in Canada, cheap or otherwise -- just as the Clinton administration's intervention into the flu-shot market resulted in American companies getting out of the vaccine business entirely.
The war against the Islamists and the flu-shot business are really opposite sides of the same coin. I want Bush to win on Election Day because he's committed to this war and, as the novelist and Internet maestro Roger L. Simon says, "the more committed we are to it, the shorter it will be.'' The longer it gets, the harder it will be, because it's a race against time, against lengthening demographic, economic and geopolitical odds. By "demographic," I mean the Muslim world's high birth rate, which by mid-century will give tiny Yemen a higher population than vast empty Russia. By "economic," I mean the perfect storm the Europeans will face within this decade, because their lavish welfare states are unsustainable on their shriveled post-Christian birth rates. By "geopolitical," I mean that, if you think the United Nations and other international organizations are antipathetic to America now, wait a few years and see what kind of support you get from a semi-Islamified Europe.
So this is no time to vote for Europhile delusions. The Continental health and welfare systems John Kerry so admires are, in fact, part of the reason those societies are dying. As for Canada, yes, under socialized health care, prescription drugs are cheaper, medical treatment's cheaper, life is cheaper. After much stonewalling, the Province of Quebec's Health Department announced this week that in the last year some 600 Quebecers had died from C. difficile, a bacterium acquired in hospital. In other words, if, say, Bill Clinton had gone for his heart bypass to the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, he would have had the surgery, woken up the next day swimming in diarrhea and then died. It's a bacterium caused by inattention to hygiene -- by unionized, unsackable cleaners who don't clean properly; by harassed overstretched hospital staff who don't bother washing their hands as often as they should. So 600 people have been killed by the filthy squalor of disease-ridden government hospitals. That's the official number. Unofficially, if you're over 65, the hospitals will save face and attribute your death at their hands to "old age" or some such and then "lose" the relevant medical records. Quebec's health system is a lot less healthy than, for example, Iraq's.
One thousand Americans are killed in 18 months in Iraq, and it's a quagmire. One thousand Quebecers are killed by insufficient hand-washing in their filthy, decrepit health care system, and kindly progressive Americans can't wait to bring it south of the border. If one has to die for a cause, bringing liberty to the Middle East is a nobler venture and a better bet than government health care.
So what does that mean? Can the Queen of England have Celine Dion summarily executed? If so, why hasn't she done this already?
So AUSTRALIA isn't a country either? What the heck? Is the USA the only country in the world that got a job and moved out of its parent's basement?
Actually, although Canada has largely abolished the death penalty (as had most other Commonwealth countries, sans the African and Asian ones), there is still a law on the book that could merit the death penalty. Were C. Dion to strike the Queen or in any way "injure her Royal peace" she could be brought up on capital charges. No, the Queen cannot summarily excecute anyone, the Magna Carta, the foundation for our American Law, precludes this.
It is a country--but a Dominion Country.
A Dominion is a nation that has as its head of State the Queen of England and whose government is appointed by Her Majesty's Representative, the Gov-General. This appointment to "form a government" is almost always given to the leader of the party that can secure the majority of seats in the lower house of Parliament. Technically the "Supreme Court" of these Dominions is the Privy Council in London, but since Australia, New Zealand, and Canada "repatriated" their constitutions decades ago, this is just a formality.
Kerry Meeting With Nicaraguan Communist Dictator Daniel Ortega
So Canada keeps the queen around just to be polite? They don't have the heart to tell her she's not all that relevant to their lives?
Sounds like the same arrangement we have with Whoopi Goldberg.
Bing, bang, boom!
I kept waiting for *someone* during the debates to ask Kerry/Edwards, "So, do you believe that if Osama Bin Laden is captured, international Islamic terrorism will just ... stop?"
No, it's not just being polite....they generally prefer a parliamentary system where the Head of State is not the Head of Government and rather than have an figure-head president (a la Germany) they would rather continue and nourish their bonds and connection with the Queen. She is the Queen of Canada after all. It's not called the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for nothing!
Perhaps the best thing that could happen to all the geezers voting for Kerry because they want cheap prescriptions and their SS checks to keep coming is for him to get elected and the drug companies to go bankrupt. After we found that my father was taking dozens of medications, many incompatible with each other, I came to the conclusion that the less medicine we have available the better. Perhaps Terrayza can convince this gullible crowd that her nine white raisins soaked in gin will keep them alive forever and it will be much cheaper than the ridiculously expensive pills they swallow by the handful every day.
What a cheering sight on a dark, rainy morning!
>> No, the Queen cannot summarily excecute anyone, the Magna Carta, the foundation for our American Law, precludes this.
Raise up the glass to "Good King" John.
At least Ms. Dion is employing people in Vegas in her show, contributing to the American Economy with her lavish spending, considered America good enough for her son to be born here, and refuses to discuss politics, unlike some musicians.
BTTT
Ping!
Another stunningly dead-on point! Wow!
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