Sunday, October 16, 2005

Steyn Versus Cohen: Even in a Bad Week, Bush Is Doing Well

Be alert, gentle readers. We're going to cover a lot of territory.

We note with amazement that Washington Post bloviator Richard Cohen is calling for an end to Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation of the Valerie Plame un-scandal. Cohen is right: this is no crime, and special prosecutors are always overzealous. However, it simply couldn't be the case that Cohen would speak so kindly of the fate of a Republican. He goes on to imply that the real scandal is that the President took us to war on a false premise.

Next we note that Iraq has something rare in the Middle East: a constitution approved by referendum.

Further we note that for Cohen, this matters less than the fact that we did not find in Iraq the WMD that every major intelligence agency expected to find there. We did find mothballed WMD development programs awaiting restart at the lifting of UN sanctions, plus a genocidal apparatus for enforcing the will of the dictator, plus consistent harboring of international terrorists, plus misappropriation of UN oil-for-food funds to line the pockets of the dictator's cronies while starving the populace. But no poison gas. Well, really, we did find some, but not very much.

And so we note Mark Steyn. Sorry, gentle readers, but we have no link for this one, as we refer to a remark on the radio with Hugh Hewitt. Steyn, in his weekly appearance on the conservative Californian's stimulating show, noted: "Free Afghanistan: done! Free Iraq: done! The liberals put 'Free Tibet' stickers on their Volvos back in 1962, and it's no freer now than it was then!"

In the battle of significant opinions, Steyn clobbers Cohen in this round. Surely there's something for all humans to celebrate in the Iraqi election today. Surely there's something noteworthy in the fact that it came off without any major violence (who said that the Iraqi forces were incompetent or that the Bush administration lacks an "exit strategy"?). Surely this matters more than whether every detail of prewar intelligence was correct.

SWNID recalls that the American Manhattan project to build an atomic bomb during World War II was largely spurred by a letter from Albert Einstein to President Roosevelt warning that the Nazis were at work on a bomb. However, after the war it was learned that resistance effort had stymied German bomb research. So did FDR and Truman fight the war by mistake?

This has been a pretty miserable political week for the Bushies. How is it that all the while they're managing to do what many thought could not be done?

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