Free Republic

No lie: Kerry's just a wannabe April 4, 2004BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST For a year or so now, I've woken up to a ton of e-mails each morning with the subject marked BUSH LIED! -- or, to be more precise, BUSH LIED!!!!!!! I'm not one who thinks it helpful to characterize a policy difference as a ''lie.'' So, when John Kerry says he supports the Kyoto Treaty even though he voted for a bill that declared the United States would never ever ratify it, that doesn't mean he's a ''liar,'' it just means that, well, to be honest, I...

"Vote for the crook, not the Fascist." In 2002, that was the cheery slogan of French electors offered a choice between Jacques Chirac and Jean-Marie Le Pen. Two years on, as part of the remorseless Francisation of Canada's political culture, it's now the strategy of Ottawa's Paulitburo. Yes, this Adscam business is a bit hard to explain, and it would be helpful if the statistically inevitable immolation of Yvon Duhaime's next federally subsidized Shawinigan enterprise could be postponed for a year or two, and maybe we need a two-billion dollar federal registry of single mums so that when Crown Corporation...

In the old days, the headline "Germans Go On Offensive" would have caused palpitations among Czechs, Poles, Belgians, etc. But, in the case of this weekend's AP headline, Germans going on the offensive refers not to sending German troops to foreign countries, but keeping foreign troops in Germany. And it's the Germans having the palpitations, after press reports that the Pentagon plans to pull out half its troops. Right now, Germany plays host to 175,000 Americans — military personnel plus their families — and reducing that number to 80-90,000 would leave a big hole in an economy that's already looking...

In January 2002, the Enron story broke and the media turned their attention to the critical question: how can we pin this on Bush? As I wrote in this space that weekend: "Short answer: You can't." So Enron retreated to the business pages, and, after a while, the media and the Democrats came up with an even better wheeze: how can we pin September 11 on Bush? Same answer: you can't. But that doesn't stop them every month or so from taking a wild ride on defective vehicles for their crazy scheme. The latest is a mid-level bureaucrat called Richard...

One year after the war began, Mark Steyn believes that anyone who looks honestly at liberated Iraq must see it as a success story New Hampshire Before we get on to the breezy assertions and specious arguments, here are ten facts about Iraq today: 1) Saddam Hussein is in jail, his sons are in ‘paradise’, and of the 52 faces on the Pentagon’s deck of cards all but nine are now in one or the other of those locations. 2) The coalition casualties in February were the lowest since the war began. 3) Attacks on the Iraqi oil pipelines have...

A neighbour of mine refuses to let her boy play with "militaristic" toys. So when a friend gave the l'il tyke a plastic sword and shield, mom mulled it over and then took away the former and allowed him to keep the latter. And for a while, on my drive down to town, I'd pass Junior in the yard playing with his shield, mastering the art of cowering more effectively against unseen blows. That's how the "peace" crowd thinks the West should fight terrorism: eschew the sword, but keep the shield if you absolutely have to. Yesterday, The Telegraph reported...

I wonder if John Kerry has perhaps launched his descent into caricature a couple of months too early. Usually, the successful losing candidate waits till late spring/early summer before shifting gears and beginning each day with the campaign trying to explain some rhetorical triviality from the previous week that's stuck to his shoe and he can't seem to shake off. Ever since last summer, I've been mocking Sen. Kerry's tortured explanations as to why his vote in favor of such-and-such in fact demonstrates his staunch opposition to it. As I wrote a couple of months back: ''His vote against the...

"When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, naturally they will like the strong horse." So said Osama bin Laden in his final video appearance two-and-a-half years ago. But even the late Osama might have been surprised to see the Spanish people, invited to choose between a strong horse and a weak horse, opt to make their general election an exercise in mass self-gelding. To be sure, there are all kinds of John Kerry-esque footnoted nuances to Sunday's stark numbers. One sympathises with those electors reported to be angry at the government's pathetic insistence, in the face of...

Anyone who wants to understand why the media are held in such low regard by the public -- in polls of the most respected professions we usually come somewhere between Nigerian e-mail scammers and serial pedophiles -- should consider the following headline from an Associated Press story in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer last week: ''Accused Spy Is Cousin Of Bush Staffer'' The accused spy is Susan Lindauer, who is accused of working for Saddam Hussein's intelligence agency. She describes herself merely as an "anti-war activist,'' though, as the daily rummage through the Baathists' scrupulous paperwork indicates more clearly every day, being...

"THE bombs dropped on Baghdad exploded in Madrid!" declared one "peace" protester in Spain. Or as Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty put it, somewhat less vividly: "If this turns out to be Islamic extremists . . . it is more likely to be linked to the position that Spain and other allies took on issues such as Iraq." By "other allies", he means you – yes, you, reading this on the bus to work in Australia. You may not have supported the war, or ever voted for John Howard, but you're now a target. In other words, this is...

The US is powerful and religious; the EU is weak and secular. Mark Steyn wonders whether it is any coincidence The other day, the guy on my local radio station mentioned that The Passion of The Christ was the Number One movie in America. ‘So congrats to Mel Gibson,’ he said. ‘And it’ll probably hold on to the Number One slot until the new Starsky & Hutch opens.’ It’s always useful to keep things in proportion. But, in fact, Starsky & Hutch opened and The Passion cleaned its clock. Last weekend, it took in $51.4 million, as against S&H’s $29.05...

I'm a small-government guy, so my default position on any issue is that, generally speaking, I'm on whichever side the government's not. Last week, for example, the government of Nova Scotia announced that it wished to clamp down on newspaper and broadcast usage of words such as "fruitcake", "nutcase", "madman", "kooky", etc, as these terms are hurtful to the mentally ill. To that end, it was offering cash rewards to citizens who reported sightings of these terms in the media. Whatever "hurt" these words do the mentally ill is less than that done to society by a state that polices...

Benyamin Cohen, editor of the online publication Jewsweek, went to see Mel Gibson's The Passion Of The Christ and came out homicidal: "My first comprehensible thought was this: I really want to kill a Jew." Maureen Dowd of The New York Times agreed: "In Braveheart and The Patriot, his other emotionally manipulative historical epics, you came out wanting to swing an ax into the skull of the nearest Englishman. Here, you want to kick in some Jewish and Roman teeth. And since the Romans have melted into history...." Really? You want to kick in some Jew teeth? I mean, really...

The news that Boris Johnson and half his Tory colleagues have been flirting with John Kerry like a Congressional overseas exchange intern programme came as no surprise to me. Though the Senator likes to think of himself as exuding Kennedy-esque glamour, to Conservatives he has the reassuring mien of an unexciting Cabinet heavyweight back when the party still had heavyweights and a Cabinet to put them in. You can see why the Tory benches have been mesmerised by the immobile features of the Botoxicated Brahmin: superficially, he has the air of a cadaverous Douglas Hurd. As the Tories used to...

THE CELEBRIFICATION OF MARRIAGE The other day in France a woman married a corpse. For some reason, this reminded me of Democratic Party primary voters and John Kerry. But others drew different conclusions. Because marrying a dead person is apparently entirely legal in la republique francaise, a gay activist wrote to me from San Francisco to point out that a French corpse has more rights than a California gay. True, but the French corpse has a duller club scene. The grass is always greener on the other side, particularly when you’re six feet under it. But these days proponents of...

The other day the Sun bestowed the title of "Britain's Laziest Woman" on Susan Moore of Burythorpe, North Yorkshire. Miss Moore had come to the paper's attention courtesy of its Shop-A-Sponger Hotline: as Alastair Taylor explained: "Super-sponger Susan, 34, has not done a day's work since dropping out of college in 1988." Despite receiving "Jobseeker's Allowance" for 16 years, she does not seek jobs, and never has. She was offered one by a supermarket, but it was five miles away so she wasn't interested. Ryedale Jobcentre put her on a "New Deal" course and, to make sure she attended, sent...

How goes the war? No, not Vietnam. The other one. You remember. It was in all the papers until a month ago when Vietnam returned for a Democratic Party dinner-theater tour starring Massachusetts' answer to Robert Goulet. Can't get into it myself. I dozed off the other day watching a White House press conference in which President Bush was asked nary a question about anything that had happened since 1972, and I dreamt there was a muffled explosion from al-Qaida down the street blowing up the Capitol. And, when it had died away, the press corps brushed the plaster dust...

Last weekend, George W Bush went to Florida for Nascar's Daytona 500 race. His likely Democratic rival, John F Kerry, did not approve. "We don't need," he declared, in the portentous drone he has been perfecting for three decades, "a President who says, 'Gentlemen, start your engines.' We need a President who says, 'America, let's start our economy.' " Hmm. If this is the best material Senator Kerry's high-price consultants can provide, it is going to be a long, long while from here to November. It's unlikely that any but the most partisan Democrats can stomach nine months of a...

<p>Conan O'Brien finds Anglophone Canadians can't take a joke about Francophone ones.</p> <p>W.C. Fields said never work with children or animals. That goes double if the animal's a hand puppet. So when Conan O'Brien's sidekick, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, visits Quebec and characterizes the natives as obnoxious, dull and mostly homosexual, and rent-a-quote Canadian Members of Parliament are asked for their reaction, the best response is: "Sorry, I'm a little tied up today. Why not try Miss Piggy or Lamb Chop?"</p>

The Default Democrat from another world How do you feel about "outsourcing"? John Kerry, the Default Democrat that his party's poor voters are trying hard to pretend to be excited about, is very opposed to it. His stump speech includes fierce denunciations of American corporations that export jobs overseas. He has pledged his support for a "Call Center Consumer's Right To Know", which would require that the guy at the call center identify his location at the beginning of every call. Right now, you just get vague hints – for example, if I'm in New Hampshire and dial directory inquiries...