Posted on 07/11/2008 3:22:54 PM PDT by Congressman Billybob
The great danger in offering unqualified praise to another person is they could turn around, do / say something really stupid, and make you doubt your original judgment. That’s why the greatest praise for public officials comes when they are safely dead. From that position, they are unlikely to offer any new, public embarrassment.
Still, it’s important to climb out on a limb from time to time.
There are three people whose bylines I always follow. I have never ceased to be impressed by any column I’ve read from any of these three gentlemen (in alphabetical order): Charles Krauthammer, Thomas Sowell, and Mark Steyn. The one I praise today is Krauthammer. By the way, I’ll save the public figure I am attacking, for last. Dessert first, liver and onions after.
Krauthammer’s latest column is “The Alter of Soft Power.” He begins with the incredible rescue of Ingrid Betancourt and 14 other long-held hostages from the hands of the FARC terrorists in Columbia. It was executed by the Columbian military without a shot being fired. American special forces played a critical role in the intelligence gathering that made the rescue work.
This was, he wrote, a classic example of “hard power.” That means using your military assets to get a result in a confrontation. “Soft power,” on the other hand, means negotiations, resolutions, mild sanctions, but nothing which would be called military or an act of war.
Krauthammer pointed out that in the six years that Betancourt was held in the jungle, all the governments of Europe repeatedly passed resolutions deploring the kidnappings, and urging Columbia to negotiate with the FARC captors. Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez had offered to be a go-between. Only another use of “hard power,” a raid into Ecuador by the Columbia Army, revealed the truth.
In the Ecuador raid, Columbia killed a top official of FARC, but it also captured computers and their files which revealed that President Chavez was financially supporting FARC and working hand and glove with them. That use of “hard power” was attacked by European (and some American) supporters of talking with, rather than acting, against terrorists.
Krauthammer points out that “soft power” is the preferred action by many sources, including the UN and the G-8, against other groups of murderers including Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, the Sudanese so-called leaders in Darfur, and the dictators in what used to be Burma, who allowed untold thousands of their citizens to die in the aftermath of floods, rather than let in foreigners bringing help (but also lifting the veil of secrecy in that benighted nation).
As usual, Krauthammer made a logical, penetrating analysis of a major public issue. He offered clear, supportable truth, which needs to be pounded into the mushy skulls of many leaders around the world. It is a pathetic commentary that the UN refused, this very day, to support any sanctions to get rid of the murderous Mugabe.
And now we turn to the opposite end of the scale, stupidity in public.
A Dallas County Commissioner in a public discussion of failures of the County’s Central Collections, referred to it as a “black hole.” Documents and money were going into the Bureau, and never being seen again. One black Commissioner demanded an apology, and another one, Commissioner John Wiley Price said that “that type of language is unacceptable.”
Warming to his task, Commissioner went on to condemn in the hearing other terms he considered racist, including the difference between “angel food cake and devil’s food cake.” He also objected to the use of the phrase, “black sheep.” And he used the phrase, “Jew you down,” as an example of a “racist” remark he deliberately would not use, because he is so sensitive to such matters.
To put no fine point on it, Commissioner Price is as dumb as a hoe handle. “Black hole” is an astronomical expression which means a collapsed star with such high gravity that not even light can escape. It was an excellent metaphor for a failed public agency. It is also a reasonable description of the quality of Commissioner Price’s brain, not because he is black, but because he shows world-class ignorance.
The more people we have in the public sphere like Krauthammer, the better off we will be. The more we have who are like Price, the worse off we will be. And, anyone thinking of attacking me as racially prejudiced, before doing so, find out the racial backgrounds of the three people I praised so highly at the beginning.
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About the Author: John Armor practiced law in the US Supreme Court for 33 years. He now lives in Highlands, NC, and is working on a book on Thomas Paine. John_Armor@aya.yale.edu
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I got a million more, but I chose to be niggardly when it comes to sharing.
Thanks John.
Well, Price has hardly been niggardly in demonstrating his contempt for language.
Drat! Beat by a niggardly 6 minutes.
I don't think that Price is demonstrating contempt for language—to do that you have to be aware of the definitions of words and their etymology, which he plainly just doesn't know—and what you do not know about you cannot be contemptible about. He only demonstrates ignorance. Those who ACCEPTED his demands for apology should have told him of his error. By not doing so, THEY demonstrated contempt for the language.
Well, you’ve certainly made the matter crystal clear.
Speaking of black holes, I recall having seen articles about them recently, and some physicists are thinking they would probably be better described topograpically as donuts, rather than spheres. We're probably out of luck calling them black dounts though, as African-American police officers might take offense.
Refer to them as Donuts of a Different Color
I would have agreed with you about Charles Krauthammer without reservation. On the night of the Heller decision, speaking on Fox news, he agreed with Stevens dissent.
LOL!!!
Hey, what you got against rocks?
They're at least useful for something.
So if it's 'angel food cake,' it's white. If it's 'devil's food cake,' it's black.
I had to retrieve Price's cerebral discussion of cake. I wonder if he objects to black power?
I was wondering how Krauthammer reacted to Heller. That's what I expected, agreeing with the minority. He, George Will and Robert Bork are three usually good conservatives except on the Second Amendment.
"The hand of God moves in mysterious ways." If Robert Bork wasn't borked, Heller would have been 5 - 4 the wrong way. I thought Bork's replacement Anthony Kennedy would vote with the majority, but I was hoping Souter and Ginsburg would uphold an individual right view, like they did in the minority opinion in Muscarello where they joined Scalia and Rehnquist.
We dodged a bullet - BIG TIME!
I did some research on Krauthammer. If you haven't noticed, he uses a wheelchair. He's a psychiatrist by training, maybe via Harvard's hospital affiliates, IIRC. I was wondering whether he was a gunshot victim which might explain being wheelchair bound and dislike for the Second Amendment, but he wasn't. There was an accident, but I can't recall the cause, IIRC.
P.S. I was also wondering what was FReeper robertpaulsen's reaction to Heller. robertpaulsen hasn't posted anything since early April.
Thank you. I was pretty sure it an accident.
That being said, some “Blacks” are so dark that they are almost purple.
http://es.geocities.com/sangarci_2003/BillDuke.jpg
Check out the great actor Bill Duke. That dude is DARK. Still a dark brown I suppose but as someone pointed out, we are almost all a shade of brown because we have the same melanin molecule that is the same color, some just have more of it than others.
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I'm with George. I have his grill, too. :)
Sure, some folks are darker than others. However, some who are of mixed heritage are paler than "whites".
And some of us appear to have none, and burn to a shade of purple in the sun. Ack! :)
Not exaxctly.
He thought Stevens had the better of the Originalist argument; I will grant your point if we agree that it's pretty tough to see how you could take that position if you didn't believe a priori that there was no Individual Right. Personally, I thought Scalia demolished Stevens. The line about a mixed idiom of "filled the bucket and died," in Scalia's refutation is laugh-out-loud funny, and his description of the the reasoning behind Steven's split idiom as "Grotesque" was poetry.
Sometimes Homer nods. As solid as Will, Krauthammer and Bork are on so many things, they're simply wrong on this and on a few others. And sometimes even a blind pig finds a truffle: Lawrence Tribe was on the right side of this issue, hell, he's very publicly and very thoroughly reversed himself in coming over to the Individual Right side of the debate. Nobody's perfect.
Except -- of course -- me.
Good post.
However, a mention of the Pelosi connection to this should have been included.
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