Between Two Worlds

(2004-11-23) -- Veteran CBS News anchor Dan Rather this afternoon said he was "scrambling like a gila monster on hot sand" to verify allegations that he will step down from his role on the CBS Evening News in March 2005.

"If this is true, I want to break this story," said Mr. Rather as he rushed from his office to track down a hot tip on the story. "I received a fax from a Kinko's in Texas indicating that I'm relinquishing the anchor desk, but we need to run this past several handwriting experts and get it fully vetted before we break into programming with the announcement."

When asked a moment later about the incident by a reporter on the ski run, Kerry said sharply, "I don't fall down," the "son of a b*itch knocked me over."

Contrast that with what what happened on Saturday night, as reported by the Washington Times:

President Bush broke up a fight last night between his lead Secret Service agent and a Chilean security detail, pulling the agent through a wall of men trying to bar his bodyguard's access to a state dinner.
Mr. Bush and first lady Laura Bush arrived at 8 p.m. local time yesterday at the Estacion Mapocho Cultural Center for the official dinner of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.
After the first couple posed for photos with Chilean President Ricardo Lagos and his wife, the four entered the doorway with a line of Chilean security guards and uniformed police closing quickly behind him.
The president's lead agent approached the line of men as quickly as it closed and demanded to be allowed through. Within a few seconds, the confrontation began to escalate with voices being raised and shoving in all directions.
"You're not stopping me! You're not stopping me!" yelled the agent, as captured by several television cameras. "I'm with the president."
During the fracas, another Secret Service agent was roughly pulled from the tumult and pushed against a concrete wall by Chilean security. A few seconds later, after posing for yet more pictures about 15 feet inside the doorway, Mr. Bush and the rest of the party turned to enter the dining room. But the president quickly turned his head to the growing din just outside.
Mr. Bush calmly turned right as the other three continued on and inserted himself into the fight. The president reached over two rows of Chilean security guards, grabbed his lead agent by the shoulder of his suit jacket and began to pull.
The tape of the incident, viewed by reporters last night, could not pick up any words the president might have been saying as he worked to get the agent through the line.
A few Chilean guards turned their heads and noticed that the arm draped over their shoulders was that of the president, and the line softened. Mr. Bush pulled his agent through, who was heard to say, "Get your hands off me" as he passed roughly through the doorway.
Mr. Bush then adjusted his shirt cuff and said something to the first dignitary he passed as a grin crossed his face.
According to Secret Service sources, the man Mr. Bush pulled through is a high-level agent and one of the president's personal favorites.

Check out the sobering and insightful email about this to Powerline.

• a billion seconds ago it was 1972
• a billion minutes ago it was A.D. 102
  
• a billion hours ago it was the "Stone Age"

• If all of Saddam's $21 billion were in dollar bills and you wanted to count them (at a rate of $1 per second), it would take you 665 years, 332 days of continuous counting.
• Let's say that you made a book, and on every page you printed 1000 dollar signs on every page. If the book contained 21 billion dollar signs, it would be 21 million pages long, 42 million inches thick, and would be the length of 11.5 football fields placed end-to-end.
  

Powerline later posted to this Newsday report, which, if accurate, seems to be welcome new indeed:

The White House has ordered the new CIA director, Porter Goss, to purge the agency of officers believed to have been disloyal to President George W. Bush or of leaking damaging information to the media about the conduct of the Iraq war and the hunt for Osama bin Laden, according to knowledgeable sources.

In a better world, the PLO chief would have met his end on a gallows, hanged for mass murder much as the Nazi chiefs were hanged at Nuremberg. In a better world, the French president would not have paid a visit to the bedside of such a monster. In a better world, George Bush would not have said, on hearing the first reports that Arafat had died, "God bless his soul."

God bless his soul? What a grotesque idea! Bless the soul of the man who brought modern terrorism to the world? Who sent his agents to slaughter athletes at the Olympics, blow airliners out of the sky, bomb schools and pizzerias, machine-gun passengers in airline terminals? Who lied, cheated, and stole without compunction? Who inculcated the vilest culture of Jew-hatred since the Third Reich? Human beings might stoop to bless a creature so evil -- as indeed Arafat was blessed, with money, deference, even a Nobel Prize -- but God, I am quite sure, will damn him for eternity.

Arafat always inspired flights of nonsense from Western journalists, and his last two weeks were no exception.

Derek Brown wrote in The Guardian that Arafat's "undisputed courage as a guerrilla leader" was exceeded only "by his extraordinary courage" as a peace negotiator. But it is an odd kind of courage that expresses itself in shooting unarmed victims -- or in signing peace accords and then flagrantly violating their terms.

Another commentator, columnist Gwynne Dyer, asked, "So what did Arafat do right?" The answer: He drew worldwide attention to the Palestinian cause, "for the most part by successful acts of terror." In other words, butchering innocent human beings was "right," since it served an ulterior political motive. No doubt that thought brings daily comfort to all those who were forced to bury a child, parent, or spouse because of Arafat's "successful" terrorism.

Some journalists couldn't wait for Arafat's actual death to begin weeping for him. Take the BBC's Barbara Plett, who burst into tears on the day he was airlifted out of the West Bank. "When the helicopter carrying the frail old man rose above his ruined compound," Plett reported from Ramallah, "I started to cry." Normal people don't weep for brutal murderers, but Plett made it clear that her empathy for Arafat -- whom she praised as "a symbol of Palestinian unity, steadfastness, and resistance" -- was heartfelt:

"I remember well when the Israelis re-conquered the West Bank more than two years ago, how they drove their tanks and bulldozers into Mr. Arafat's headquarters, trapping him in a few rooms, and throwing a military curtain around Ramallah. I remember how Palestinians admired his refusal to flee under fire. They told me: `Our leader is sharing our pain, we are all under the same siege.' And so was I." Such is the state of journalism at the BBC, whose reporters do not seem to have any trouble reporting, dry-eyed, on the plight of Arafat's victims. (That is, when they mention them -- which Plett's teary bon voyage to Arafat did not.)

And what about those victims? Why were they scarcely remembered in this Arafat death watch?

How is it possible to reflect on Arafat's most enduring legacy -- the rise of modern terrorism -- without recalling the legions of men, women, and children whose lives he and his followers destroyed? If Osama bin Laden were on his deathbed, would we neglect to mention all those he murdered on 9/11?

It would take an encyclopedia to catalog all of the evil Arafat committed. But that is no excuse for not trying to recall at least some of it.

Perhaps his signal contribution to the practice of political terror was the introduction of warfare against children. On one black date in May 1974, three PLO terrorists slipped from Lebanon into the northern Israeli town of Ma'alot. They murdered two parents and a child whom they found at home, then seized a local school, taking more than 100 boys and girls hostage and threatening to kill them unless a number of imprisoned terrorists were released. When Israeli troops attempted a rescue, the terrorists exploded hand grenades and opened fire on the students. By the time the horror ended, 25 people were dead; 21 of them were children.

Thirty years later, no one speaks of Ma'alot anymore. The dead children have been forgotten. Everyone knows Arafat's name, but who ever recalls the names of his victims?

So let us recall them: Ilana Turgeman. Rachel Aputa. Yocheved Mazoz. Sarah Ben-Shim'on. Yona Sabag. Yafa Cohen. Shoshana Cohen. Michal Sitrok. Malka Amrosy. Aviva Saada. Yocheved Diyi. Yaakov Levi. Yaakov Kabla. Rina Cohen. Ilana Ne'eman. Sarah Madar. Tamar Dahan. Sarah Soper. Lili Morad. David Madar. Yehudit Madar. The 21 dead children of Ma'alot -- 21 of the thousands of who died at Arafat's command.

Most presidential elections are character- or theme-driven. This one was event driven. That's what happens in wartime. You can spin all the theories you want about how Abraham Lincoln won re-election in 1864, but if Sherman had not taken Atlanta, Lincoln would have lost. In the election of 2004, events were once again in the saddle. Given how Bush's term started, the election should never have been close. After 9/11 and America's swift crushing of the Taliban, President Bush had the political world at his feet. Over the next few years, he could easily have coasted to victory, crowning his achievement with the equally astonishing establishment of a democratic and pro-American government in Afghanistan just weeks before his own re-election. He would have won in a landslide.

Instead, and against all personal political calculation, Bush wagered it all on Iraq and nearly lost his presidency. The 2004 election hinged on Iraq, in three political incarnations: Iraq, the war; Iraq, the first presidential debate; Iraq, the media magnet for countless bad news stories. Together they very nearly overthrew Bush.

It certainly was not John Kerry doing the overthrowing. The only reason it was tight is that the Democrats picked a candidate singularly weak on Iraq. Kerry reflected precisely their own ambivalence. He could never articulate a consistent and coherent alternative policy. The entire Democratic Convention was an exercise in avoiding the issue. Kerry spent four days talking not about Iraq but about Vietnam. This glaring non sequitur gave Kerry the distinction of having a convention with no bounce. Even worse, by gratuitously bringing up Vietnam, a still bleeding psychic wound, Kerry opened himself to weeks of politically damaging attack from embittered fellow swift-boat veterans.

By mid-September the challenger should have been far ahead. For months the war news had been devastating for the President: the mounting casualties, the absence of wmd, Abu Ghraib, the kidnappings and beheadings. The President's popularity, once 90%, began to dip below the fatal 50% mark. Yet Kerry could do nothing. If the election had been held Sept. 29, it would have been a Bush landslide. Enter Iraq in its second incarnation, the foreign policy debate of Sept. 30, and Kerry was reprieved. This debate, devoted overwhelmingly to Iraq, was a calamity for the President. Kerry held to two declarations—I really had only one position on Iraq, and I have a plan on how to win it—that went unchallenged by a confused and agitated President. Those 90 minutes undid months of advertising (abetted by Kerry's numberless about-faces) that had portrayed Kerry as inconsistent, cynical, weak and uncertain.

It was the President who looked weak and uncertain. Kerry, looking presidential, instantly passed the "Commander in Chief" threshold, just as John Kennedy had in his 1960 debates. The President's enormous lead collapsed.

In the subsequent weeks, what was left of Bush's lead was ground away by, as always, Iraq—a steady drip drip drip of discouraging news punctuated by the occasional sensation amplified by an eager and often partisan press. The finale was the 380 tons of explosives that had disappeared, only possibly on Bush's watch, out of a total of more than 650,000 tons left behind by Saddam Hussein. Banner-headlined, it dominated the news—and Kerry's attacks—in the final week of the campaign.

With the election hanging in the balance, the campaign awaited some improbable development to tip the scale. Re-enter Osama bin Laden. The irony could not be richer, the circle more complete. By reminding us of 9/11 and the war on terrorism, bin Laden invoked the only thing that could trump Iraq—and save the President. His chilling reappearance reminded us of our peril, put Iraq in perspective and played precisely to the President's success and strength—success and strength that he so squandered in Baghdad. Bin Laden was never one to remotely understand the American mind—he spectacularly misjudged 9/11—and he pulled his nemesis over the finish line.

But even worse was Maher's mindless righteousness about his own atheism. For years Maher has been auditioning for his Profile in Courage award by saying "brave" things about the unreality of Jesus and the silliness of religion. Every mention of religion causes a dirty smile and joyful sneer to spawn across his face. The other night he was pounding the table with great satisfaction for having the courage to be a "rational" person and hence an unbeliever — and of course the audience was applauding like so many toy monkeys.

There's no time here to dismantle fully the edifice of condescension and ignorance constructed by Maher and Smiley (I put Dowd in a different category). But what offends them so much about religion is that it is a source of authority outside — and prior to — politics. What has offended the Left since Marx, and American liberalism since Dewey, is the notion that moral authority should be derived from anyplace other than the state or "the people" (conveniently defined as citizens who vote liberal). Voting on values not sanctified by secular priests is how they define "ignorance." This was the real goal of Hillary Clinton's "politics of meaning" — to replace traditional religion with a secular one that derived its authority not from ancient texts and "superstitions" but from the good intentions of an activist state and its anointed priests. Shortly before the election, Howell Raines fretted that the worst outcome of a Bush victory would be the resurgence of "theologically based cultural norms" — without even acknowledging the fact that "theologically based cultural norms" gave us everything from the printing press and the newspaper to the First Amendment he claims to be such a defender of.

What Maher, Raines, and Smiley fail to grasp is that all morality is based upon transcendence — or it is merely based on utilitarianism of one kind or another, and therefore it is not morality so much as, at best, an enlightened expediency or will-to-power. It is no more rational to vote based on a desire to do "good" than it is to vote based on a desire to do God's will. Indeed, for millions of people this is a distinction without a difference — as it was for so many of the abolitionists progressives and civil-rights leaders today's liberals love to invoke but never actually learn about.

Love, in fact, is just as silly and superstitious a concept as God (and for those who believe God is Love, this too is a distinction without a difference). Chesterton's observation that the purely rational man will not marry is just as correct today, because science has done far more damage to the ideal of love than it has done to the notion of an awesome God beyond our ken. Genes, hormones, instincts, evolution: These are the cause for the effect of love in the purely rational man's textbook. But Maher would get few applause lines from his audience of sophisticated yokels if he mocked love as a silly superstition. This is, in part, because the crowd he plays to likes the idea of love while it dislikes the idea of God; and in part because these people feel love, so they think it exists. But such is the extent of their solipsism and narcissism that they not only reject the existence of God but go so far as to mock those who do not, simply because they don't feel Him themselves. And, alas, in elite America, feelings are the only recognized foundation of metaphysics.