| Core: noun, the most important part of a thing, the essence; from the Latin cor, meaning heart. |
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| Needless Commentary from Small-Town America |
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The Weblog at The View from the Core - Friday, February 04, 2005
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The Hug! I just didn't want to be the only blogger on Earth who didn't post The Picture this week. :-)
Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 02/04/05 10:10:57 PM |
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"Self-destructive Idiocy" A reader writes: I remember reading in CS Lewis' novel That Hideous Strength about how the evil eldila would destroy their willing puppets, like Frost and Wither, as "They always break their tools." And indeed that is precisely what happened in that book. Perhaps that is one explanation for the otherwise baffling display of self-destructive idiocy by powerful MSM potentates currently on display in both the unbelievable bad judgment seen in the Rathergate scandal and the very public paranoid ravings of Mr. Jordan. I really don't want to explore the boundary between demonology and MS "journalism," but as the power of the established media starts to wane, so it seems does the does the sanity of some of its powerful. Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 02/04/05 09:55:02 PM |
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"The Global Throng" If you only read one thing this week, let it be this. Thanks to Margaret for calling to our attention the latest from VDH @ NRO. Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 02/04/05 09:23:03 PM |
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News from Let's Try Freedom Bob Hayes is good enough to include The Blog from the Core on his blogroll, and me in his e-mail distribution, so I'm happy to link to his very first breaking news — though it's probably superfluous since the InstaPundit has already taken notice. FWIW, I am wondering exactly why academic freedom means a professor can say any damn thing he wants and nobody can do anything about it. (Isn't that what it amounts to — the more extreme forms, at the least?) What about the academic freedom of students, to not be subjected to effluvium from a cesspool? Or the academic freedom of parents who pay for their children's education, likewise to not have their relatives subjected to effluvium from a cesspool? Or the academic freedom of taxpayers who pay to construct the classroom buildings, likewise to not have their tax money wasted on distributing effluvium from a cesspool? Academic freedom without academic accountability leads to academic irresponsibility. Is this not abundantly clear? P.S. See also How wide a berth? Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 02/04/05 08:15:55 PM |
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Counting on Catastrophe III A couple of surveys by the folks from MRC. First, a press release, Jan. 31 (emphasis and quoted ellipses in original): + + + + + .... Rather was right to be cheered by Sunday’s events, but if the Iraqis had listened to the chorus of negativity coming from reporters in the days and weeks before the vote, he might not have had any good news to report. Pessimistic journalists suggested the election would be worthless and dangerous: Too few would vote to make the results “legitimate” while at the same time an army of terrorists would create a “bloodbath.” ■ Election Might “Demolish” Iraq: On his syndicated Chris Matthews Show this weekend, the openly anti-war MSNBC anchor comically suggested that the election might destroy Iraq. In a show taped before voting began, Matthews set up the topic: “Birth of a nation — will elections unite Iraq or ignite civil war? Will this weekend's vote create a country or demolish it?...For Iraqis, a moment teeming with risk and potential: liberation or devastation.” ■ A “Bloodbath” on Sunday: FNC war reporter Steve Harrigan, who spent most of the last two years in Iraq, was deeply pessimistic in a Friday morning appearance on Fox & Friends. “I think there’s going to be a bloodbath on Sunday,” he predicted. “All over the place, especially in Baghdad and a few other cities, Mosul....About half the country’s in big trouble.” NBC’s Matt Lauer hit the same theme as he began that morning’s Today: “Bloody countdown. Amid growing violence, will Iraq be able to hold its first free elections in more than 50 years?” ■ “No Way” Election Can Happen: Two months ago, some reporters suggested that the plan for holding elections on January 30 was an optimistic fantasy. On the November 26 Today, NBC’s Katie Couric said elections “seem to be really questionable at this point in time.” A few days later, on the December 5 Evening News, weekend anchor Mika Brzezinski declared that the situation in Iraq “seems only to worsen as election day gets closer and closer....Some are now saying there is no way the election deadline can be met.” ■ ... And No Legitimacy: Reporters argued the vote would mean nothing if the minority Sunnis stayed home. “If nearly a quarter of the population does not participate,” ABC’s David Wright wondered on World News Tonight January 5, “will the vote be legitimate?” And anyone predicting a high participation rate was labeled an “optimist,” i.e., unrealistic. “Election officials optimistically predict a 50 percent voter turnout,” reporter Kimberly Dozier announced on CBS’s Early Show January 25. In fact, the turnout was much higher, with early estimates that 60 percent of Iraqis voted. ■ Jennings Still Unsatisfied: On Sunday’s World News Tonight, ABC’s Peter Jennings seemed less than impressed. “It seemed a strange way to experience the democratic process, from the back of a heavily-armored vehicle,” he grumped. In “parts of the Sunni Muslim heartland, it looks as if the election process has been rejected,” Jennings sourly suggested. “Without Sunni participation, somehow, the future here is still pretty bleak.” ....
+ + + + + Second, Brent Bozell's column, Feb. 2: .... Let’s take a moment to reconsider the avalanche of media pessimism that aimed to kick the can and postpone all this happiness into a nebulous future somewhere down the road. In November, CBS reporter Kimberly Dozier warned that "Some believe just talking about elections can get them killed." In December, CBS Sunday anchor Mika Brzezinski was positively despondent: "To the battle for Iraq now, which seems to only worsen as Election Day gets closer and closer," she said. "Some are now saying there is no way the election deadline can be met." Who were these "some," the anonymous stand-ins for every pessimistic media brain cramp? The numerical predictions could turn out to be quite embarrassing. On "The Chris Matthews Show" in December, the perfectly named Katty Kay of the BBC predicted "five percent" turnout in Mosul. (Mosul’s turnout, while it may end up being comparatively low, was one of the really joyous surprises.) In mid-January, CBS reporter David Hawkins lobbied for electoral delay: "Despite warnings that in some places voter turnout may be less than 10 percent...Is there any discussion about delaying the vote?" NBC reporter Jim Maceda warned "only half" of Iraq’s voters would turn out because "as the violence spreads, so does the panic. Election workers are under siege. Candidates are dropping out. An election some call historic, but the fear factor is taking its toll." Even on January 25, CBS’s Dozier was back to insult Iraq as "an unlikely place for a free and fair election...Now many Iraqis say they’re under siege by an unwelcome, sometimes brutal occupier and trapped in a war between those foreign forces and terrorists." Could we have a more ridiculous example of moral equivalence? She then warned "Election officials optimistically predict a 50 percent voter turnout." .... Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 02/04/05 07:35:52 PM |
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Terry Schindler Schiavo Update I've been remiss in blogging these. Fr. Rob Johansen blogs at Thrown Back, Jan. 25: As many of you already no doubt know, yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court declared that it would not hear Florida governor Jeb Bush's appeal on behalf of Terri's Law, the law which enabled him to intervene to save Terri's life. This is without doubt a setback for the Schindlers, and this pretty well spells the end for Terri's Law. I can't say I'm very surprised, as I always thought it was unlikely that the U.S. Supreme Court would involve itself in a question regarding Florida state law. While the decision is a setback and disappointment, this is not the end of the road. It's not time to start panicking yet. As the Schindlers point out at Terri's Fight, there are still other matters pending in the courts which could be the means of saving Terri's life. There are three cases pending: .... Cal Thomas writes at WaTi, Jan. 28: Monday, the same day thousands marched in Washington in opposition to the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision, which opened the floodgates to abortion on demand, that same court refused to reinstate a Florida law designed to keep alive a severely brain-damaged woman. How ghoulishly ironic.... And Susan Silver writes at the Framingham Tab, Jan. 28: The Terri Schiavo case has spawned a complicated tangle of legal and moral questions. But I believe the resolution to Terri's plight may rest in a simple, albeit unlikely, solution: By starting over. They might begin by tossing Judge Greer to the wolves and presenting the case to a fresh pair of judicial eyes. Fair eyes that will not ignore pertinent background medical information, like the bone scans that were done on that fateful night in 1990 when an unconscious 26-year-old Terri first arrived at the hospital. The scans showed many broken bones and traumas consistent with strangulation. It might be important to find out why Greer wouldn't allow an investigation into this.... Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 02/04/05 05:53:16 PM |
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"The Left Is Worth Nothing" If only. Thanks to Margaret for notice of this Dennis Prager column at TownHall, Feb. 1: "Someone who does not know the difference between good and evil is worth nothing." — Miecyslaw Kasprzyk, Polish rescuer of Jews during the Holocaust, New York Times, Jan. 30, 2005 It took a Polish rescuer of Jews in the Holocaust, cited this week 60 years after the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration and death camp, to best describe those people who cannot or refuse to know the difference between good and evil. They are "worth nothing." .... Since the 1960s, with few exceptions, on the greatest questions of good and evil, the Left has either been neutral toward or actively supported evil. The Left could not identify communism as evil; has been neutral toward or actually supported the anti-democratic pro-terrorist Palestinians against the liberal democracy called Israel; and has found it impossible to support the war for democracy and against an Arab/Muslim enemy in Iraq as evil as any fascist the Left ever claimed to hate.... Look, I know what they mean. But, worth nothing? If only. "Someone who does not know the difference between good and evil" is actually worth a great deal to those who are evil. Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 02/04/05 08:11:49 AM |
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Core's Observation Or, the Grand Unified Theory of Democratic Presidential Politics. William Voegeli writes at OpinionJournal, yesterday: .... The narrative of Democrats trying to find a narrative might be more promising, or at least more interesting, if it were fresher. The problem is the Democrats have lost five of the last seven presidential elections, not to mention control of Congress in 1994, and have talked about the urgent need to redefine and re-explain themselves after every one of those defeats. It has been 24 years since that dim, unelectable extremist Ronald Reagan won a landslide against Jimmy Carter. A generation later, can there really be any promising ideas that haven't already been taken down from the shelf? Here is what the Democrats have to show for 2 1/2 decades of introspection, besides a worsening win-loss record: After Walter Mondale lost 49 states in 1984, the Democratic Leadership Council was brought forth, conceived in panic and dedicated to the proposition that a politically viable party must become less liberal. In reaction, various groups and candidates have asserted that the prescription for Democratic victories is to become more liberal, to present the voters a choice, not an echo. It's hard to say who will win this tug-of-war, and twice as hard to see how either approach will reverse the Democrats' losing streak.... The "no message" interpretation of the 2004 election claims that this gap has now closed, finally and completely: Liberalism cannot become politically strong again until it stops being so theoretically weak. But Democrats need to recognize how far back, and how far down, liberalism's confusion goes. The notion that liberalism is fundamentally indecipherable was voiced frequently during the 1930s, when liberals absolutely dominated American politics. Raymond Moley, an erstwhile advisor to FDR, wrote of the New Deal in his memoirs, "To look upon these programs as the result of a unified plan, was to believe that the accumulation of stuffed snakes, baseball pictures, school flags, old tennis shoes, carpenter's tools, geometry books, and chemistry sets in a boy's bedroom could have been put there by an interior decorator." In 1940 another New Dealer, the economist Alvin Hansen, admitted, "I really do not know what the basic principle of the New Deal is. I know from my experience in the government that there are as many conflicting opinions among the people in Washington as we have in the country at large." But the complaint that it's impossible to figure liberalism out has, until recently, typically been voiced by exasperated conservatives. For decades they have watched liberals rushing around with wheelbarrows and ladders, busy, busy, busy at building the welfare state. New programs are created, old ones expanded, urgent needs discovered and rediscovered. Conservatives marvel at this vast construction site and ask prosaic questions: What is this thing going to look like when it's done? How big is it going to be? How will we know when it's finished? And just in case there's any doubt that they are conservatives, how much is all this going to cost?... Let's cut to the chase, Faithful Reader, and simplify it all. Here are the Democratic Party's nominees for president since 1972:
Who's the big winner in that crowd? Apart from the 1976 fluke, in which Jimmy Carter was elected because Gerald Ford had pardoned Richard Nixon, the only winner is Bill Clinton. Apart from being a presidential winner, what sets him apart from the others? To look at it from the other direction, what do all of them have in common, except for Bill Clinton? Here's what they all have in common. McGovern, Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry: none of them have the slightest hint of a trace of a sense of humor. Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 02/04/05 07:52:56 AM |
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Does America's Military Torture and Murder Journalists? Is this the horror story of the century? Or the most heinous slander? CNN's Eason Jordan, it seems, accused the American military of "targeting" journalists. He has done so before, too, along with accusing our military of kidnapping and torturing journalists. Ed Morrissey is all over this.
Either (1) Eason Jordan is a sociopathic liar or (2) mainstream media has been spiking a murder-and-torture story that would bring down the entire Bush administration over night. How likely do you think (2) is, Faithful Reader? Sure, we need Social Security reform. Sure, we need immigration policy and enforcement reform. Sure, we need all kinds of other reforms. Ours is a fallen race. We also need a new Sedition Act. P.S. See also The Media's War On Our Troops. Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 02/04/05 07:19:23 AM |
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