When Hillary did her weepy emoting bit on Monday, tears welling in her eyes as she grieved that Americans might miss out on all the plans she has in store for us, it stirred vague memories of something — but I couldn’t quite remember what.

Tuesday evening, watching her victory bash on TV, with more tears (this time in Bill’s eyes), it hit me. I realized exactly what Hillary’s tears reminded me of. From Through the Looking Glass, “The Walrus and the Carpenter”:

“I weep for you,” the Walrus said:
“I deeply sympathize.”
With sobs and tears he sorted out
Those of the largest size,
Holding his pocket-handkerchief
Before his streaming eyes.

Great poem. Here’s a link; best guide I can think of to the Clinton campaign.

Comments

Here’s a question, as Iran gets ever bolder in the face of U.S. appeasement, denial and Irrational Intelligence Estimates — Is Ahmadinejad’s tailor already at work preemptively stitching up leisure suits for American sailors?

Shades of the British hostage-taking outrage last March, Iranian gunboats have just threatened three U.S. Navy ships in the vital Gulf chokepoint of the Straits of Hormuz. According to a Pentagon spokesman, the Iranian boats made “aggressive maneuvers” indicating “some hostile intent.” The threat was bad enough so that the U.S. ships, according to the Pentagon, had to “issue warnings and conduct some evasive maneuvers.”

According to some news accounts now rolling in, the details were rather more alarming than that. The Times of London, for instance, is reporting that “Iran speedboats ‘threatened suicide attack on US’ in Strait of Hormuz.”

With President Bush about to head out Tuesday on a swing through the Middle East, what is the administration doing about this? Words, words, words. The Pentagon tells us “The Defense Department will work with the White House and State Department officials to come up with the appropriate way to address the incident with the Iranian government.”

This would be the same State Department currently making excuses for North Korea’s regime missing yet another deadline on its erstwhile “disarmament” deal? This would be the same White House that is now running out the clock on Bush’s final year on office, while Iran’s centrifuges whirl their way toward an era of Iranian nuclear extortion and dominance in the Middle East?

Iran by any normal intelligence estimate is, yes indeed, pursuing the bomb. Iran has threatened the existence of Israel; backed, trained and helped arm the Hezbollah terrorists now consuming Lebanon; backed and armed terrorists who have murdered civilians and U.S. soldiers in Iraq. Iran’s government has been been spreading totalitarian, ideological poison around the world for almost three decades, in some cases by example, in others by direct dispatch of armed terrorists. And when Iran used its gunboats last year to test the international waters by taking hostage 15 British soldiers, returning them after a humiliating ordeal, in which those bizarre leisure suits were just the finishing touch in Tehran’s swaggering display of manipulation, violation, and pushing-the-envelope, Iran paid no price.

For almost three decades, Iran’s Islamic regime has played hostage politics to its own enormous advantage. If the Bush administration in response to this latest threat does nothing but issue a “warning,” Tehran doesn’t even need to take hostages. America loses another round, and together with our allies we move one step further along the road from accepting Iranian leisure suits, to accepting Iranian blackmail backed by mushroom clouds.

2 Comments

Friends keep forwarding stories about UN plans to team up with Marvel Comics, for a project to promote the UN via comic books in which super-heroes such as Spiderman will battle alongside such UN types as blue helmets and sustainable-development capacity-building facilitators, all fighting together for that great UN cause of … well, that’s the big question. What does the UN really fight for?

Certainly not truth, justice and the American way. The UN version of truth is “we can’t comment during an ongoing investigation”; the UN version of justice is anything that diplomatic immunity and other people’s money can let you get away with; and the UN take on the American way was neatly summed up by the General Assembly resolution last month in which the UN approved for itself the biggest core budget ever, by a vote of 142 to 1 — the lone dissenter being the United States (which gets assessed for 22% of this now more than $2 billion annual core budget, and overall contributes more than $5 billion per year to the special funds, agencies, programs, projects and doo-dads of the sprawling UN system’s more than $20 billion budget).

So what might this UN-Marvel Comics love-in really accomplish? There is, perhaps, a clue in the pilot plan, which calls for these UN-flattering comics to be distributed free to some one million American schoolchildren.

That raises the question: Why start with kids in America? Yes, America is home base to Marvel Comics. But this plan was conceived with the help of a French film-maker, Romualdo Sciora, and it is being executed in cahoots with the oh-so international UN (here’s a link to the Japanese Under-Secretary General for Public Information, Kiyo Akasaka, touting the deal). Surely the UN has bigger image problems to remedy in places where it has stood by during genocide, such as Rwanda, Bosnia or Darfur. Surely the UN has more visible damage to counter in places such as Haiti, Sri Lanka, or a slew of countries in Africa, all homes to sex scandals revolving around abuse of impoverished kids by those UN peacekeepers Spidey’s about to hook up with.

Not that kids abroad deserve to be smothered in UN propaganda; someone could do them a bigger favor by producing cartoon distillations of some of the Oil-for-Food trial transcripts. Complete with such thrills as backroom graft, secret bank accounts and bags of cash carted around to bribe UN officials, these have the virtue of imparting at least some degree of documented truth.

But what stands out about the UN comic-book targeting of American kids in particular is that America is the UN’s motherlode of taxpayer money. Could this UN super-hero project have anything to do with the UN’s deep interest in ensuring that American Mommies and Daddies keep forking over billions of U.S. tax dollars every year to the UN? Could it have anything to do with the UN’s need to indoctrinate yet another generation of Americans into the fiction that bankrolling UN per diems promotes a better world? For that job, is it really fair to recruit Spiderman? If the UN wants to enlist a super-hero in its cause, let’s invent one who really knows how to get the job done. Call him Bag Man!

2 Comments

Just spent two days on assignment with Pajamas Media in New Hampshire, where Roger Simon and I rented a 4-wheel drive and sped past the snowbanks (turned out the roads were fine; it’s New Hampshire, they know snowplows) to catch up with Rudy Giuliani and John McCain for the next two installments of the Pajamas in-depth “War on Terror Conversations” with the candidates. Videos coming Monday.

Surrounding the interviews were a number of unusual vehicular encounters, including a chance to ride a Segway (addictive!) at the factory where we met with Rudy, and an interlude waiting for McCain at offices that featured in one corner what I guess is the once-again trendy bicycle-built-for-two. We wrapped up the evening by dropping by Hillary’s campaign headquarters in Manchester, arriving just in time to join the volunteers watching the Clinton pileup in Iowa — and if you haven’t already read Roger’s exquisite take on the experience, you can find it on his blog under the headline, “Tales of Hillary: Seeing A Ghost in New Hampshire.”

Who will win? Who knows? This race is just beginning to pick up speed, and the finish line lies many Segway rides, bicycle rides, handshakes and shakeups down the road. But this much I think is a sure bet: The winner can expect a nasty test early in the next administration from the inquiring minds of jihadis and affiliates, who will want to know just how much they can get away with. And watching Washington right now, one thing I am increasingly convinced of is that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein will stand in the end as a major success of the Bush administration, while the worst failures are right now stacking up in the form of diplomatic denial and appeasement in dealing with places such as Iran and North Korea. More in my column in the Philadelphia Inquirer, on the axis of wishful thinking.

1 Comment

OK, Jan. 1 is a good day for contemplation, but I can’t stay away from the news either. Between the slam!-bam!-thud! of presidential wannabes slugging it out in Iowa and New Hampshire, there’s plenty bubbling up from the world the lucky winner will inherit: murderous post-election riots in Kenya; Hamas and Fatah taking time out from attacking Israel in order to kill each other (or do they dual-task on these things?); the murder of an American diplomat and his Sudanese driver in Khartoum (a city which by this account is one of the safest cities in Africa, which doesn’t exactly sound like a compliment to the rest) …

So two notes for the day. As expected, North Korea has failed to meet the end-of-2007 deadline for delivering a full accounting of its nuclear program (an event marked by the International Herald Tribune with the headline: “North Korea calls on U.S. to abandon hostility“), thus demonstrating yet again that in negotiating with Kim Jong Il’s government, the only things we can depend on are that Pyongyang will lie and cheat — and as part of that, the only thing North Korea will do on time is miss deadlines.

And on the Pakistan front, the canonization of Benazir Bhutto continues (or, as my fellow Pajamas blogger Roger Kimball has noted, the Diana-ization). That might be harmless, except that nuclear-armed terrorist-infested Pakistan is a place where it is a good idea, if possible, to keep a grip on reality in calibrating policy decisions. As Bhutto’s husband and son take up her mantle, here’s a link to the best article I’ve seen yet on the real Benazir Bhutto, by William Dalrymple, writing in the U.K.’s Observer, on “Pakistan’s Flawed and Feudal Princess.” Providing some instructive detail on the Bhutto lifestyle, and calling Benazir Bhutto “as much a central part of Pakistan’s problems as she was the solution to them,” Dalrymple says — and I think he has this right — that “much of the success of the Islamists in countries such as Pakistan comes from the Islamists’ ability to portray themselves as champions of social justice, fighting people such as Benazir Bhutto from the Islamic elite that rules most of the Muslim world from Karachi to Beirut, Ramallah and Cairo.”

1 Comment

Scarcely has 2008 begun, and if you’ve picked up a newspaper, flipped on the TV, or gone online, it’s right back to those ancestral voices prophesying war, conflict, doom, gloom, mud-slinging, blood-letting and those endless cycles of creative destruction, destructive creations, you-name-it. The bad news is, there’s much to it.

But before returning to the hub-bub, let’s take a moment for some of the really good news. America, and much of the rest of the world, has never had it better. We live in an age of astounding inventions, which thanks to our free society have been devised, improved and made available at such speed that it gets easy to forget just how good it all is. If you’re in the mood to take a short wander away from the mad rush of daily news, here’s a lovely, eclectic item to print out and peruse for perspective — one of my favorite essays by a modern economist. Richly worth reading, it goes by the unenticing title of “Do Real-Output and Real-Wage Measures Capture Reality? The History of Lighting Suggests Not.” The author is Yale economist William Nordhaus, and while I might differ with some of his views on more mundane matters of policy, with this article he gets at something deeply important, and he does it beautifully.

Nordhaus’s subject here is the price of light, and what that tells us about the astounding improvements in quality of life that some of our modern inventions have brought us. He notes that in the 1.4 million years since our Australopithecus ancestors began using fire, or the tens of thousands of years since the introduction of the fat-burning lamp, the truly mighty innovations have taken place within the past 150 years – and our measurements of the benefits fall far short of the realities. Skip the equations if those are not your cup of tea. Nordhaus writes with a clarity that belies his training as an economist, and he lays out step by stop how it happens that the average Joe today, with a few minutes of work, can afford many times the quantity of light once available only to emperors and kings.

And as the winter night falls on Jan. 1, 2008, and we switch on our lamps, very best wishes to all Pajamas readers for a happy new year, in this miraculous age of light.

1 Comment