Happy Warrior Wanted

The phrase "Happy Warrior" is invoked in politics, most recently in connection with Ronald Reagan. Reagan had more than a bit of success when it came to winning elections and this was due in no small part to his demeanor. The guy laughed off the most brutal attacks, stayed on message and cleaned his opponents' clocks. But Hillary Clinton? Another story entirely.

Senator Clinton is in the news today for reacting to some quotes from Karl Rove (no relation) that appear in a forthcoming book, quotes to the effect that Rove believes Clinton will be the 2008 Democratic nominee and that she has a brittleness about her that may be a liability. In a similar situation, Ronald Reagan would have laughed off the quote and said something to the effect that "my opponents are trying draw attention away from their record." Hillary Clinton muddles the message.

She makes the second point but also insists that Rove "spends a lot of time obsessing about me." So the story now has to do with Rove's obsession. The shot she tried to land on the GOP for allegedly screwing things up ends up halfway down the page. And now she's let the world know that the evil Rove attack machine is gearing up to oppose her so maybe she wouldn't be the best 2008 candidate after all.

It's very early in the race for the White House but Hillary Clinton is unopposed and, amazingly, flailing. The past few weeks have seen her saying that the House of Representatives is run like a "plantation." She was roundly criticized and even mocked for her shrill opportunism on Saturday Night Live. Then she leveled an attack on school vouchers, raising the possibility that this would lead to "the school of the Church of the White Supremacist" or "the school of the Jihad."
Even an adoring audience was described as "puzzled". I'm no great expert on the school voucher issue but isn't it obvious that there would be no taxpayer-funded school of the jihad for the same reason that individual teachers don't teach jihad in schools now: there's control over the curriculum that is being taught and any voucher program would naturally insist upon that.

To clarify, I'm not crazy about Hillary Clinton or her politics, for the most part but I don't think she's insane or evil or a communist or any of the harsh invective that gets hurled around the world of politics these days. By all accounts, she's quite charming in person. But her possible candidacy for the presidency is going to raise some interesting issues.

Senator Clinton is given to flights of rhetorical fancy, to put it kindly. To my knowledge, no reporter has asked her to defend or further comment on or even to explain those comments. And there's been a real paucity of questions about the lady's views over the past six years. I doubt one person in ten here in her home state could even tell you what she stands for. The first issue: will Hillary Clinton be a candidate whose views and words are somehow off limits for the media? After all, they have been so far.

And the second issue: given Hillary Clinton's abysmal performance so far in positioning herself, is it possible that, and here comes the blasphemy, she's not really all that bright? Not that she's dumb by any stretch of the imagination, but the sparkling intelligence she's allegedly imbued with? Is there any evidence of that? Oa plans to explore these matters again soon.

Other Shoe Alert

Over at Slate, Mickey Kaus weighs in on the Dubai ports deal:

"Is it comforting matter that "security" at American ports will still be "controlled by U.S. federal agencies led by the Coast Guard and the U.S. Customs and Border Control Agency ... ." Not if what you're worried about is a small cell of people looking for a way to get around the Coast Guard's security. Just having a port operator that is more easily approached by people who speak Arabic vastly increases the risk, at least the risk from Arab jihadists, no?"

Sure, this is a good point but it's more than that: it's essentially the other shoe that I was waiting to have drop during the debate on whether to go to war with Iraq. To explain: the Bush administration felt that Saddam's WMD, whether he actually had them or had the ability and opportunity to make them in the future, could easily be given to Al Qaeda. Those opposed to the war often insisted that Saddam, a fairly secularist Mideast leader, was anathema to the Jihadists and those two could never cooperate. A third possibility never seemed to be mentioned by anyone: even if Saddam wouldn't give his WMDs to terrorists, wasn't it possible that some person or persons in Saddam's army or laboratories or power structure, someone with Jihadist leanings, might do so? That would be the equivalent of the "small cell" that Kaus cites here.

It's this third possibility, the people somewhere in the middle of the hierarchy who can exploit matters towards their own ends, that might be the deal breaker with the Dubai ports matter. It's just interesting to me that no one ever raised this point in connection with Iraq.

Source of Denial

With all due respect to Andrew Sullivan, he’s really off
base when he talks about "historian" and obvious Holocaust denier David Irving’s "first-rate mind." Having read the book by the historian Richard Evans,
Lying About Hitler, it’s clear that Irving was way out of his intellectual depth during the trial. (Irving had sued Professor Deborah Lipstadt for libel after she identified Irving as a Holocaust denier). In fact, the degree to which Irving is bitch-slapped around the courtroom due to his inability to construct an intellectually coherent defense regarding his books, research, etc. is almost painful to read. Well, maybe not all that painful. Lying About Hitler, although very dry in spots, turns into the feel-good book of the year in its last third. David Irving does such an execrable job of defending himself that the entire "field" of Holocaust denial implodes along with his reputation. And this in front of a worldwide audience. And that makes for the most potent argument against laws that prohibit Holocaust denial or other types of hateful speech: they rob the proponents of these views of the public forums they need to put bullets into their feet. Irving exited the Lipstadt trial as a crumbling wreck; his prison sentence may make him a martyr. Listen to Lipstadt
herself.

U.N.couth

The latest issue of Imprimis arrived in the post today and the inimitable Mark Steyn is featured with the transcript of his recent address, "America and the United Nations." It's a must
read.

Port Retort

President Bush is taking a lot of flak for threatening to
veto
the UAE ports deal. Normally, I would be on the side of the critics but the degree of Bush’s resolve here is pinging my radar. I may be wrong and wildly off base but I’m being reminded of Reagan’s resolve in selling AWACS (Airborne Warning System and Control) planes to Saudi Arabia. For those who don’t remember, this was a key precusor to asking for a quid pro quo in which the Saudis increased oil production. The result was having the price of oil drop, which meant far less hard currency for the Soviet Union. For more, look in any volume of recent history under the heading, "Winning the Cold War." As long as there are security safeguards in place, Arab allies are a good thing, yes?

Kristol Blue Persuasion

From the same Meet the Press transcript as below comes this
gem.

MR. RUSSERT: Bill Crystal, the editor of the Weekly Standard, said this: "The White House press corps is crazy and pompous

Gee, I loved him in City Slickers, especially the scene where he speaks at length about National Greatness.

Capillary Action

Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, in the UK’s Guardian, finds the major media has an instinct for the
capillary in regard to Dick Cheney’s Buckshotgate.

As if right on cue, Arianna goes ballistic, or maybe anti-ballistic given the nature of the story, with this zany
screed regarding Mary Matalin’s appearance on Meet the Press. There may be a clue here to Huffington’s long-ago switch from Republican to Democrat: Republicans, like Mary Matalin, occasionally wear brooches that are a bit gauche in La Arianna’s opinion. To hell with your whole damn party, you right-wing, brooch-wearing, accident-defenders! And don’t take her word for it about Matalin’s performance: at the bottom of the piece, we find that the liberal blogosphere agrees as one that Matalin was no darned good. Thank goodness a coterie of impartial judges could be found.

Suffice it to say that there’s a middle ground in the way we can view the whole incident. There was an unfortunate accident, everyone involved was pretty shaken up and Cheney and his people could have handled it better. Yeah, they screwed up in not getting the information out. But the MSM reaction shows one of the main problems with the media, that of context and how it’s handled and presented. Some accidents just sort of happen and have no larger significance, no real connection to anything else, but that’s in the real world. In the media world, every political story that concerns someone of conservative or Republican background has to be part of some larger and damning narrative. And if it doesn’t fit, then dammit, we’ll make it fit.

Just look at Maureen Dowd, another of the Meet the Press guests, she of the annoying parallelisms and clumsy constructions, a writer so uniformly terrible that she’s sure to retire from her NY Times post with a veritable raft of Pulitzer Prizes. Dowd attempts to link the shooting of Harry Whittington to the larger Dick Cheney narrative by invoking the phrase, "blowing off." The
transcript has Dowd saying, regarding Cheney, "We don’t what democratic institution he’s blowing off at any given minute." And other references to "blowing off" the FISA Court, the UN, etc. are made by Dowd. Leave aside whether Cheney is actually anti-democratic to the point where he’s sticking a dagger in democracy’s heart 24/7. The point is, can this accidental shooting be termed as being a "blowing off?" Did Cheney "blow off" his friend, Harry? The normal linguistic construction as regards a shooting would be to "blow away." It’s a typically maladroit Dowd construction. I shudder to think of the material Dowd rejected: "Cheney’s got to stop shooting the FISA court in the face!"; "The vice president can't keep mistaking the UN for quail, you know." It is, of course, as Dowd would insist, part of the pattern. That wonderful, blessed overall pattern that makes everything hang together.

Best of all was this exchange Matalin had with TV newspup David Gregory about his tantrum in the White House press room earlier in the week.


MATALIN: Because you went on a jihad, David. For four days you went on a Jihad.
GREGORY: And that's an unfortunate use of that word, by the way. This is not what that was.


Of course, it was on Meet the Press that Maureen Dowd herself, just a few years ago, referred to President Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign as a kind of jihad. Jeers to MoDo for being uncharacteristically silent in this instance. She should have taken the opportunity to call Gregory on the carpet, vociferously defending the God-given right to continually invoke the notion that your ideological adversaries are engaged in some kind of irrational holy war. Does free speech have no defenders left?

Shot a Man in Reno, Just to...

I suppose we all remember where we were when we heard that Dick Cheney had been part of a hunting accident and (ominous pause) that there was a 24-hour time lag in the reporting of the thing. With a story of such earthshaking importance, it's no wonder the White House was being grilled relentlessly today. Those reporters smell Pulitzer, dammit! Nothing matters but getting the story!
Monday, obviously, was a slow news day. But still, as every TV news report will observe, questions remain... (Is there any human event or endeavor where questions, in some form, don't remain?)

It's been a long day but here's a shot, so to speak, at some basic jokes on this. Use them, rewrite them, tell your friends:

Vice President Dick Cheney accidently shot a man while hunting. Then after the shooting, he announced that his new rap CD would be a tribute to Biggie and Tupac....

The White House is a bit embarrassed by the Cheney shooting. Even worse is the aftermath, when Cheney staffers rushed to the field to put up a "Mission Accomplished" banner...

Vice President Dick Cheney accidently shot a man while hunting. Reportedly, the shotgun had a lot of kickback. Which is why, right after the shooting, Jack Abramoff showed up and demanded his percentage.

That's it. And if you listen to commercial radio, please prepare to hear everyone across the nation play a parody version that takes off on Aerosmith's Janie's Got a Gun.

Test Post

Yes, what could be better than a test post? Smells like bloggy victory, of a sort.