XDA

This Week, with Bill Clinton operative George Stephanopolous, started with UN Ambassador John Bolton, but he was speaking in international bureaucratese and I now have no memory of anything he said. Oh, one thing--he seemed to think that China saying it wasn't doing what it had just voted to do (see Diomedes' excellent posting below) was unthinkable. Maybe unthinkable, but very real none the less.

Now he's providing Harold Ford a free political infomercial; I have to believe that he'll give Bob Corker separate but equal time. We'll see. Ford came off has a pretty good guy. I liked it that he wouldn't describe the abortion horror he witnessed that changed his mind about abortion as a political issue. He feels that it is a constitutional right that should be rarer. I, and Ann Coulter, find that an impenetrable self-contradiction. Imagine calling for the right to keep and bear arms to be ever rarer. (OK bad example-I'll try again) Imagine calling for the constitutional right against self incrimination to be ever rarer. Constitutional rights exist and they exist for a reason and they must be followed and made real all the time or the whole point is lost, and thus no real constitutional right should be ever rarer. Corker did pretty good too. I have to say the embarrassment factor about saying you're not voting for a candidate who happens to have dark skin could make the extremely thin lead Ford has in the polls go away in early November. Democrats call that embarrassment racism. Maybe. Tough to call.

Panel time, Fareed Z points out the historical fact, that all rollbacks of nuclear weapons programs (I'm only aware of South Africa's) were the result of two party talks with a lot of carrots from the US, to support the Democrat talking point that we need to go it alone (for once) with North Korea. Wrong. China, which is our mortal enemy, is the key and will do nothing to help us out (until Japan has nukes too). George Will points out properly that Cuba and North Korea have had sanctions against them for decades and still exist (barely) and so further sanctions will probably have no effect. I say no, duh. With a country where people are eating tree bark to survive and they only have two thousand light bulbs that work, not allowing them to import consumer goods probably will be somewhat unuseful.

Now they're talking '08 presidential election politics. Isn't there a closer election than that? I guess the story is closed on the '06 elections.

Well known political expert Marg Helgenberger (who looks great--loved her in China Beach) is up next. What? Was Jessica Alba unavailable? She wants women to vote. Who doesn't?

32 American dead in Iran and Iraq in a week! Ouch. They're all really young and they're all from flyover country.

On to the Fox Sunday show with registered Democrat host Chris Wallace, they have Secretary of State Rice, only speaking slightly less obtusely than Bolton. She'll be followed by John Kerry. Can't wait. She also blows off China's clear statement that they're not doing anything to help, like inspections of goods going in and out of North Korea. She seems to think that the UN is actually capable of anything. Sorry, Condi--it's not. In my opinion it has actually passed the League of Nations in utter uselessness.

With the lead from Secretary Rice shorting out, they go early to commercials. One is for Clint Eastwood's movie about the battle on Iwo Jima. I might go see that. Wallace throws the failure of the Bush Administration to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of the North Korean (and the invasion of target of opportunity Iraq). She handles the question well. I add, what did they want us to do with North Korea--nuke it? Two thirds of the Axis of Evil is actually more dangerous than when President Bush said it was our policy to prevent Iran and North Korea from getting nuclear weapons. True. Wallace points out that our diplomatic efforts vis a vis Iran, through the UN, have been tepid at best and completely ineffectual. True, again.

Non-president Kerry starts out saying North Korea is bad but then actually blames everything on President Bush. Quelle surprise. Kerry says that talking directly to North Korea is the answer. Yeah, sure. It worked so well with Clinton. Kerry seems to think that Bush scotched the deal even though he admits the North Koreans were cheating on the deal from the start (although he clings to the meaningless distinction between plutonium (produced under the first Bush and Clinton administrations, but made into a bomb while Bush 43 was president) and uranium, the cheating bomb component (first produced while Clinton was president) not yet (we assume) a bomb). With Kerry, it's not that there are evil guys in the world which we do our best to combat or contain, all evil flows from the failures of the Bush Administration--the Kerry corollary to the Blame America First platform of the Democrat party. Kerry is generally wrong. Thank God, according to an HBO documentary next week, Republicans cheated in Ohio and kept Bush in the White House.

Panel time: Kristol says what I'm thinking. We are going to let Iran and North Korea get and keep nukes with nary a bad thing presently happening to them, unless our 'allies' step up and actually help. Fat, freakin' chance. We Republicans have gotten on board the multilateral fantasy of the UN and have therefore frittered away the political advantage the Republicans had of being prepared actually to do something, 'unilaterally' if necessary, to prevent evil men from getting powerful weapons, that is, to do something other than talk. Right thinking people are not fooled by Bolton or Rice. The trouble is that Democrats are even less willing to do anything other than talk, ineffectually, so Republicans are still the lesser of two weevils.

Now they're too talking about '08. Is the election just over three weeks away suddenly chopped liver? Even on Fox? In final words about the next elections, the mood is bleak. If things don't change it will be Speaker Pelosi. Like I said, bleak. Juan Williams says something in closing about Republicans could have some real hope. Really.

Chris Matthews short show. Has Bob Woodward suffered a mini-stroke, or has he always talked that way? The first 15 minutes are an infomercial for Woodward's book. I'm still not buying it, literally and figuratively. Matthews unconsciously reveals what is his central problem--he likes to deal in psychobabble (is President Bush worried about being in the shadow of his father?) rather than talk about facts. He moves by default to speculation about grist for gossip rather than rigorous logic of analysis. I saw it all in a second. That's why I prefer Prager and Hewitt to most of the TV talking heads, Kristol and Hume excepted.

For better or worse, a pledge many of us recognize (even if we failed to uphold it) is not just for marriage--it exists in political alliances. If we say we will support the government of (South Korea, South Viet Nam) Iraq against our mutual enemies, you have to stick with that even if it gets hard and battle deaths are in the stratospheric area of 4 per day. Doing less than that--Oh, it's too hard we have to cut and run--damages America's ability to protect itself much much more than 4 battle deaths and multi millions spent every day. I wish the Iraqis would be more like Floridians and less like the Lebanese of the 70s, but the Iraqis will do what they want to do. They will seize the opportunity we have sacrificed to give them to be relatively free from political violence or they will, Balkanslike, dive into a consuming violence over differences not worth a dime. It was not wrong to give them the opportunity or to depose the Hitler like dictator (with sociopath sons waiting in the wings). Part of the legacy of deposing of Hitler was East Germany, and the rest of Eastern Europe under Soviet face stomping boots for 50 years. Not exactly nirvana that.

Matthews ends with his unerring ability to misunderstand movies. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was reasonably good (even when it went achronistic during the filibuster) and the new Robin Williams flick is crap. These movies did not represent the spirit of the times, few movies do--the rare, great ones--they represent the ideas of the filmmakers. Nothing more. Matthews merely uses movies he watches to reinforce his pop psychology analysis as he did all through his book, American: Beyond our Grandest Notions. Compare that little read book to one from a good writer/thinker, Walker Percy, using movies to illustrate actual human truths in The Moviegoer.