Jerry Brown Campaign Gets Off The Ground
March 3, 2010
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This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.
The One That Got Away
March 3, 2010
Nanny Nation
March 3, 2010
This image has been posted with express written permission.
This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.
“How does your life help to remove the causes of war?”
March 3, 2010
“How does your life help to remove the causes of war?” is a popular bumper sticker. Is this just moralistic bromide–or does it really mean something?
War is so inimical to modern Western sensibilities that we find it hard to imagine anything worse. That is why we have songs and slogans and bumper stickers as mantras to ward off the thought of war. And yet, as the history of the last century has amply (and bloodily) demonstrated, there are even worse things than war. Totalitarian regimes do not always need to make war in order to annihilate entire peoples, while terrorists practice their murderous trade without any of the rules or conventions of war. Sometimes, too, in order to preserve peace it is necessary to confront those who are bent on war with force. Democracies almost always prefer to deter rather than to destroy, but this is not always possible. So removing the causes of war may well involve engaging in various kinds of conflict.
“Blessed are the peacemakers; for they shall be called the children of God.” When we consider how we may be true to the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount, we must not pretend that making peace is the same thing as pacifism. During the Cold War, in which my generation reached adulthood, there was always a choice. You could support the so-called “peace movement”, which in practice only ever protested against the military preparations of the West, and which was in many cases manipulated by the KGB to serve its own purposes. You could preserve the status quo, thereby preventing the immediate threat of nuclear war, but acquiescing in tyranny. Or you could reject the status quo and use words and ideas to bring about a bloodless victory. When Reagan used the words “evil empire” to describe the Soviet Union, he inspired dissidents everywhere, and when he called on Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, he helped to bring it about. In both cases the president was opposed by the entire American and European foreign policy establishment; in both cases he was vindicated by events.
In my own case, like many others, challenging the Evil Empire took the form of visiting opposition activists in what we then called Eastern Europe. Later, when I became the Daily Telegraph’s correspondent there, I was fortunate to have a small part in the fall of the Berlin Wall. At the famous press conference on November 9, 1989, when the easing of travel restrictions on East Germans was announced, it fell to me to ask the final question: “What will happen to the Berlin Wall now?” This was the first time the Wall itself had been mentioned in the press conference, and it seems to helped to encourage the watching East Berliners to go out and demand to be allowed to pass through the checkpoints.
Today the situation is very different, but there are still threats to the West from various quarters. In 2008, I launched the monthly magazine Standpoint to defend the values of our civilisation, because I still believe that the free market in ideas is the best method to persuade those who can be persuaded to embrace the liberty under the law that is uniquely on offer here. For those whose implacable hatred of the West leads them to wage war against it, persuasion is no doubt insufficient. But in the arsenal of democracy, the only weapons that I know how to fire use words as ammunition.
It was John Stuart Mill who first expressed the idea, often wrongly attributed to Edmund Burke, that “bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.” However ineffectual my efforts for peace, I hope that I cannot be accused of doing nothing to thwart the foes of freedom.
Otherwise, the most important thing that I can do for peace is to live up to the principles that I hope to pass on to my children’s generation. If respect is the tribute that age exacts from youth, the debt is often repaid with hypocrisy. A peacemaker is one who knows the value of what is sacrificed in war.
The most precious and most vulnerable blessing of peace is that it makes possible the life of the mind. The warrior may be a noble calling, but there is nothing ennobling about war. Peace is the elixir of the intellectual life. It is not enough to call yourself an intellectual: anyone can do that. No, you must lead the intellectual life. I believe passionately that those who have enjoyed the benefits of the intellectual life must set an example to the less fortunate. We who have inherited our civilisation also have a duty to bequeath it intact to posterity.
American politics, particularly in the big-government, ever-more-insolvent blue states, are increasingly driven by scandal. We are witnessing a meltdown of the political class in states where the growth of government has, even in weakened economies, offered bountiful opportunities for living well off the public purse. Illinois, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut have all had to force corrupt governors from office in recent years. But now New York is sprinting ahead in the scandal sweepstakes. If extraordinary front-page editorials in today’s New York Daily News and New York Post calling for the resignation of David Paterson are any measure, the Empire State is headed for its third governor in three years.
That isn’t to say that Illinois, New Jersey, and Connecticut haven’t put up a good fight. A recent string of scandals helped defeat New Jersey governor John Corzine at the polls and forced Connecticut senator Chris Dodd to drop his reelection bid. In Illinois, Barack Obama’s path to the presidency was paved by two scandals against would-be opponents that opened the door to the Senate for him. The governor whom Obama twice supported for office, Rod Blagojevich, has been impeached, in part for trying to sell Obama’s Senate seat, while the man who bought the seat, Roland Burris, has been forced to step aside come November. Alexi Giannoulias—Obama’s buddy, heir to the Broadway Bank, and the Democratic nominee for the Obama-Burris seat—is involved in his own troubles. His family’s once-thriving bank made loans to the mob-associated Michael “Jaws” Giorango, who was convicted of running gambling and prostitution operations, and to Tony Rezko, a fixer with close ties to both Obama and Blagojevich. It seems unfair not to give Scott Lee Cohen, briefly this year’s nominee for Illinois lieutenant governor, a passing mention. Cohen, a pawnbroker who self-financed his runaway victory despite being unable to pay child support to his ex-wife, dropped out of the race after accusations came to light that he had held a knife to the throat of one of his girlfriends, a prostitute.
And then there’s Obama’s hometown of Chicago, where he racked up an enormous majority in the Democratic Party presidential primary that was crucial to his early lead over Hillary Clinton in the popular vote count. A new study from the Better Government Association notes that in the past 36 years, “31 sitting or former Chicago aldermen have been convicted of corruption or other crimes.”
Illinois and New Jersey are probably the only two states where corruption has burrowed so deeply as to involve the public medical schools. In Illinois, until recently, you could buy admission to the state’s medical school. In New Jersey, thanks to the patronage of Senator Robert Menendez of Hudson County—a man elected to the U.S. Senate despite being caught on tape engaging in a shakedown—until last year you could buy the presidency of the University of Medicine and Dentistry. Shocking? Not when you remember why former New Jersey senator Robert “the Torch” Torricelli was forced to drop out of his 2002 campaign for reelection: he had accepted gifts from David Chang, a lobbyist of sorts for nuclear North Korea. New Jersey law clearly states that in the final 51 days of a campaign, a candidate, no matter how badly tarnished, can’t be replaced by a substitute. Never mind: Torricelli’s fellow Democrats on the New Jersey Supreme Court shredded the law and allowed him to be replaced by fellow Democrat Frank Lautenberg, a former U.S. senator who went on to win the election. Lautenberg, whose accomplishments as senator are less than noteworthy, was one of the 60 votes that allowed President Obama to push his health-care proposals.
But for all this, New York doesn’t need to take a backseat to Illinois and New Jersey. In the past few years, Joe Bruno, the Republican temporary president of the New York State Senate, and Democrat Alan Hevesi, the New York State comptroller, have been forced to step down and then convicted of taking bribes. Meanwhile, the inventory of state legislators and New York City Council members caught up in shenanigans is too long to list, though Hiram Monserrate is worthy of special mention. Monserrate, who has enjoyed close ties with the Scientologists, helped paralyze the State Senate for two months this past summer while he switched back and forth between the parties, looking to buy himself the best possible deal. Earlier, he had assaulted a lady friend with a piece of broken glass. When that case finally came before the bar of justice, Monserrate, an embarrassment even in Albany, was rebuked by the courts and expelled from the Senate.
Now, Charlie Rangel—New York State’s ranking member in the U.S. Congress and the chair of the House’s powerful, tax-writing Committee on Ways and Means—has been given a slap on the wrist by his fellow Democrats on the House Ethics Committee for taking lobbyist money for a junket to the Caribbean. Rangel, who is far better at raising other people’s taxes than at paying his own, also recently discovered that his taxable net worth was roughly $1.5 million more than he had previously stated…
Crank It Up
March 3, 2010
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This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.
Anatomy Of An Earthquake
March 3, 2010
This image has been posted with express written permission.
This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.
