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DOWNTOWN HOUSTONPACHYDERM CLUB |
What do you do when you don't have as much of something as you need? One of the things you can do is stretch it out to make it last as long as it can. That is what the political left is doing with the poor. A lot of noise is made about how we are "running out" of this or that natural resource -- almost always falsely -- but the real problem of the left is that they are running out of the poor, who serve as a justification of the left's drive to extend their power over all the rest of us. The idea that we are not safer because al Qaeda is not yet stopped is absurd. Of course we have terror alerts. We will continue to have them until al Qaeda is extinguished, and you do not eliminate in two years a menace that was granted eight years of unmolested growth and metastasis when Dean's party was in power. In all major wars there reaches a critical tipping point when the ultimate outcome of the conflict begins to become clear. Then the pulse of war really quickens, as allies, neutrals, and observers all scramble to adjust their allegiances to match the inevitable verdict to come on the battlefield. For all the scary ante bellum rhetoric about thousand-year Reichs and the defiant slogans of "We will bury you," no one wishes to lose, or even be associated with defeat. Is there nothing five justices on the Supreme Court could proclaim that would finally lead a president to say: I refuse to pretend this is a legitimate ruling. Either the answer is no, and we are already living under a judicial dictatorship, or the answer is yes, and – as Churchill said – we're just bickering over the price. RED STATES
CARE: In news sure to depress those for whom Republican stinginess and
antipathy for the less fortunate is an article of faith, the Massachusetts
Catalogue for Philanthropy has just released its Generosity Index 2003,
which ranks states not just by how much their residents give per capita
but also by how much they give relative to what they earn. As OpinionJournal.com
reader Gabriel Openshaw pointed out to us, the resulting index shows
that the top 20 states all went for George W. Bush in the 2000 election--while
15 of the 20 least generous went for Al Gore. Maybe, he suggests, the
difference is that those in red states are more generous with their
own money while those in blue states are more likely to be generous
with other people's money. Hypocrisy
is the only sin that really inflames them. Inasmuch as liberals have
no morals, they can sit back and criticize other people for failing
to meet the standards that liberals simply renounce. After
the massacre at Columbine High School, students and families were invited
to paint tiles above student lockers. The school district had taken
all reasonable precautions, immediately deploying an army of secular
"grief counselors" with teddy bears to descend on the school after the
attack. Nonetheless, some students painted their tiles with "objectionable"
messages, such as: "4/20/99: Jesus Wept" and "God Is Love." This would
not stand: The school removed 90 tiles with offending religious messages. What
if Saddam fails to comply and we fail to act, or we take some ambiguous
third route which gives him yet more opportunities to develop this program
of weapons of mass destruction? . . . Well, he will conclude that the
international community has lost its will. He will then conclude that
he can go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating
destruction. And someday, some way, I guarantee you he'll use the arsenal. Given
the sober moment and the danger at hand, what are the chances this is
the last time you and I will see each other? Messrs.
Clinton and Carter might ponder that they themselves in their own times
of crisis benefited greatly from the discretion of the presidents who
preceded them, Mr. Carter at key moments during the Iran hostage crisis
and Mr. Clinton at many points including--well, for a solid year during
the Monica scandal, George Bush 41 was urged every day to speak out
about what Bill Clinton had done to the presidency. And Mr. Bush wouldn't
say boo. Would've been bad for the country, didn't want to make it worse.
To me,
Clinton's the sort of guy who'll always volunteer to help you move,
then when you've got four of ya picking up the sofa, he's the one who'll
fake lifting. Dear Mr.
Clinton, Where have the last five years gone? To my thighs? Sincerely,
Monica Lewinsky (1.17.2003) If she
had lived, Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old. Through his tireless
work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her
in her old age. For Castro,
freedom starts with education. And if literacy alone were the yardstick,
Cuba would rank as one of the freest nations on Earth. The literacy
rate is 96 percent. It looks
as though we’ll all be footing the bill for the Clintons’ place in Chappaqua,
purchased by the First Couple for $1.7 million when Hillary had to demonstrate
her New York roots. The Secret Service needs a place on the property
to house its agents, and the Clintons have been so good as to make available
a structure for their bodyguards. By an amazing coincidence the rent
matches the monthly mortgage payment for the entire property. He may
be on the way out, but Bill Clinton can still count on his friends in
the media to cover for him. Today’s Los Angeles Times is a good example.
The paper cut a line from George Will’s Jan. 11 column, eliminating
a reference to well-founded allegations that President Clinton committed
rape. (Editor’s Note: Houston Chronicle’s 1.14.2001 syndicated
column of George Will also omitted the reference.) George
W. Bush would have gained six votes more than Al Gore if all the dimples
and hanging chads on 10,600 previously uncounted ballots in Miami-Dade
County had been included in the totals, according to a review by The
Palm Beach Post. That result would have been a hard blow to Al Gore’s
hopes of claiming the presidency in a recount. Before the vice president
conceded last month, the Gore camp had expected to pick up as many as
600 votes from a Miami-Dade recount -- barely enough to overtake Bush’s
razor-thin Florida lead. Instead, The Post’s review indicates Gore would
have lost ground. If everything were counted -- from the faintest dimple
to chads barely hanging on ballots -- 251 additional votes would have
gone to Bush and 245 more would have gone to Gore, The Post review showed. After
eight years of color-by-number Clinton appointments, deemed evidence
of the Democratic Party's "racial sensitivity," liberals are now complaining
as George W. Bush breaks color barriers and makes history. Retired General
Colin Powell, as Secretary of State, will be the third highest-ranking
official in the Executive Branch, third only because he turned down
the second spot and wasn't interested in running for the first. Condoleezza
Rice is to become the first black woman national security adviser. She
won't be the first black in the post; that was Mr. Powell, who served
under yet another Republican meanie, Ronald Reagan. ... and
once when I was interviewing [Al Gore] about a year ago he said you
know there's an expression in my faith, WWJD, do you know what that
is? ... What Would Jesus Do, and he said I never make a political decision
that I don't ask myself what would Jesus do. We were
talking about -- speaking for all women, if I may, Toni Morrison wrote
in The New Yorker that Clinton was our first ‘black President,' and
I think, in a way, Clinton may be our first ‘woman President.' And I
think that may be one of the reasons why women identify, because he
does have a lot of feminine qualities about him: The softness, the sensitivity,
the vulnerability, that kind of thing. In the
year 664 in Dark Ages Britain, an abbot stepped down from a coveted
spot as bishop after his predecessor, missing and feared dead, turned
up alive and well. The abbot became the patron saint of good losers.
His name is actually St. Chad. If shysters
are going to rewrite laws which men and women have died to preserve,
then blood ain't much currency in this millennium. But if
you look closely at that map you see a more complex picture. You see
the state where James Byrd was lynch-dragged behind a pickup truck until
his body came apart — it’s red. You see the state where Matthew Shepard
was crucified on a split-rail fence for the crime of being gay — it’s
red. You see the state where right-wing extremists blew up a federal
office building and murdered scores of federal employees — it’s red.
The state where an Army private who was thought to be gay was bludgeoned
to death with a baseball bat, and the state where neo-Nazi skinheads
murdered two African-Americans because of their skin color, and the
state where Bob Jones University spews its anti-Catholic bigotry: they’re
all red too.
The
Gulf War vote was the most troubling thing I ever saw in my life.
Al Gore came to our chambers and said, ‘How much time will you give
me in this debate?' We said, ‘We'll give you seven minutes.' He said,
‘They give me seven on the other side.' We said, ‘We'll give you fifteen.'
And he said, ‘I'll be back.' And then he called the Secretary of the
Senate, and he said, ‘Damn it, if I don't get that kind of time, I'm
going to vote the other way.' I was there. You can go ask Nunn and
Mitchell and those of us who were involved who watched Al Gore on
the toughest vote he ever cast shopping around to see which side would
give him the most time in the debate. It galled me then. It galls
me now. Gloria
Borger: Bill Bennett, let me go to you. Joe Lieberman also said
that, quote, "morality cannot be maintained without religion."
He later struggled to explain that statement. But did that cross
the line a little bit? Of course,
the problem with the Clintons is not that all conspiracy theories about
them are true, just that all conspiracy theories about them are possible.
In
his 15-minute address, Bush quoted Jackie Robinson and W.E.B. DuBois
and invoked his religious convictions to make is case before the NAACP
supporters. And without explicitly acknowledging his party's failure
to support much of the 1960s-era civil rights agenda (Click
here for voting percentages for the 1964 Civil Rights Act),
he chastised the GOP, saying that ‘there's no escaping the reality
that the party of Lincoln has not always carried the mantle of Lincoln.'
... we
had a miserable economic performance in the 1980s and you don't have
to take my word for that, just ask anybody on the street who went through
it. We had the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
We had a quadrupling of our national debt. We had $300 billion budget
deficits stretching out as far as the eye could see ( Click
here for a graphic disproving Al Gore). Crime rates soared,
social problems got worse. There was no plan to do anything about it.
When Clinton
entered the White House, his party dominated the U.S. Senate, 57-43;
the U.S. House, 258-176; the country's governorships, 30-18; and a large
majority of state legislatures. Today, Republicans control the Senate,
55-45; the House, 222-211; governorships, 30-18; and almost half of
state legislatures. A contrarian
take on the cost of the Starr investigation so often decried by media
figures: Taxpayers benefitted and the media made a lot of money off
the Lewinsky scandal. In the Washington Whispers section of the April
17 U.S. News & World Report, Paul Bedard unmasked: Sure it
was expensive, but the $52 million spent on independent prosecutor Kenneth
Starr’s probe of Whitewater, Travelgate, and Monica Lewinsky probably
paid for itself and maybe scored a profit for taxpayers via tax revenues
generated from book and video sales and TV specials. Unofficial tabulations
of money made in the marketing of Whitewater and Monicagate alone are
in the tens of millions of dollars, and the tax take should easily
top Starr’s budget, say tax pros. “It’s difficult to imagine that the
government received less than $52 million off private-sector spin,”
says Pete Sepp, vice president of the National Taxpayers Union.
Consider: ABC reportedly made $30 million–up to 35 percent taxable–on
its Lewinsky interview; gobs of Clinton scandal books have sold well;
Lewinsky profited through sales of handbags and flacking for Jenny Craig;
lawyers made millions; cable TV fed off the scandal; even C-SPAN sold
tapes. “It’s probably one of the most bizarre public-private ventures
ever,” says Sepp. QUESTION:
Can you name the country that has: 709,000 active duty service personnel,
293,000 reserve troops, eight standing Army divisions, 20 Air Force
and Navy air wings with 2000 combat aircraft, 232 strategic bombers,
13 strategic ballistic missile submarines with 3114 nuclear warheads
on 232 missiles, 500 ICBM’s with 1,950 warheads, four aircraft carriers,
121 combat ships and submarines with associated support bases, shipyards
and logistical assets? |
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Downtown
Houston Pachyderm Club / 1217 Prairie, Suite 206 / Houston TX 77002
