Posted on 10/24/2004 6:54:31 AM PDT by finnigan2
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.
I'm not sure tht's true of big cities nowadays.
This is exactly the argument I've been trying to make to my idiot liberal friends. Ever hear of asymmetric warfare? Look up 'asymmetric' in the dictionary and tell me if you can plot a course on something asymmetric!
Yep.
How come these people can manage to get paid? It is called a market economy.
Capitalism. It Just Works! TM
Hahahahaha!!!
I think this is the best Steyn piece of all I've read.
And I too have believed binLaden to be dead for a few years at least. It's the Left who still needs him to be alive to function as a prop for one of their current campaign "arguments". There is simply no reason for him to be alive when he suddenly and mysteriously "stops" creating videos and making Jihad statements. He's dead. But, no irony here, it's the Left who still contends he's alive and so they've had to create him over as a Legendary Outlaw Underground Folk Hero, because, apparently he's THEIR kind of hero. That's just the way the equation works out.
Think so? Think all these people who put together public programs were just dummies huh?
Well then all you have to do is vote out all forms of public assistance; - deny emergency room care to those who can't pay, cut off Medicare and all state assistance, cease funding public education and medical education, no free vaccines against communicable diseases, etc., etc., and....
Paradise, here I come!!!
P.S. don't forget to cut off all the pork from which you benefit.
OUCH! More and more democRATic talking points are revealed as nothing else but cheap demagoguery and shameless attempts to confuse the uninformed.
ping for later
Why is our populace so blind?
We Americans are thankful that Poland is one of our strongest allies in the war on terror.
Yup. I teach in a Christian high school and what you say has penetrated even to our hallowed halls to some extent.
We sure could use more of it...and less burdensome and meaningless government regulation, and less frivolous, more reasonable limits to law suits.
Coming to the conclusion that our health care system is burdened by overpopulation is just wrong
Did I lead you to believe that was my conclusion? Sorry I didn't mean to. My conclusion is that our health care system is overburdened by increasingly large numbers of people who can't pay for mandated services.
I'd like to see a real analysis of the drug industry.
Are the drug companies doing the research...or is the NIH? Are the drug companies tremendously profitable or do they plow most of their profits into research? What role, if any, do insurance companies play in this and how profitable are they? What role does the government play? Are there monopoly issues, serious regulatory exclusions, etc.?
As usual politics plays a big role. Drug companies lobby heavily to get laws they want. What laws are those and why do they want them?
And I'm all for government funded research, because it's one of the few things the government does that actually pays off, but I doubt the drug companies would like it very much if a new discovery clobbered the market for one their drugs.
The drug companies. Sigh... I know too little about them to comment.
Most of the drug companies are public. If someone thinks they are getting away with highway robbery, they can buy stock in them. The problem is the system is broken, and the companies work within that system to make their living.
If you don't have any money, that is your problem and can only be remedied by you. To believe in anything else is to believe that all of us must be enslaved to the worst of us.
People are fundamentally and inherently different. Not everyone can be wealthy or successful...or rational and clever. When times are really hard, like during the depression, great numbers of people are really poor.
Last time I checked, the Great Depression was a historical oddity. Besides, I knew a lot of people who lived through it, and they didn't find it nearly as bad as its hype. Back then, people didn't have Tom, Peter, and Dan to tell them how miserable they were.
But slightly higher unemployment rates do not mean that everyone is suddenly poor. And among those that do lose their jobs, prioritizing and rational decisions make a huge difference in how long they are out of work and how miserable they are when they are out of work.
The really telling thing is the fact that the people you champion are miserable no matter how good the economy is. The problem is with them, not the rest of us.
Recognition of our limited powers and our responsibility to others has been with us for a long time. It is at the heart of most major religions.
To believe in anything else is to believe that all of us must be enslaved to the worst of us
That's a really pejorative way of characterizing a basic truth. The poor, the weak, the stupid, the ugly, the criminal, the failed are always with us...unless we decide to kill them en masse.
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