Further proof that the UN has marginalized itself:
Annan wants the Baath Party to share power in Iraq.
Want to understand why liberals are mocked more than conservatives? Just read this
raspberry/piss & moan argument and compare/contrast it with an
argument made by an adult. The differences are just amazing.
UPDATE: Here's what
Jonah Goldberg has to say about liberal penny-pinching:
Even more intensely, Democrats denounced the Bush Administration for not understanding how long and difficult the task would be to rebuild Iraq. While grilling Pentagon officials shortly before the war, Sen. Joseph Biden rightly insisted "that maintaining a secure environment after a possible war with Iraq" would be essential "for any positive change we wish to bring to Iraq." Biden wanted to "make sure we don't do what we've done in Afghanistan" in Iraq.
Well, now it turns out the Democrats want to do exactly that. Virtually all of the Democratic presidential aspirants - including their new golden boy Wes Clark - don't want to spend any more money on Iraq.
Each one of them has some cutsey-wutsey joke or jibe about how outrageous it is that we can spend money on a new power grid or on healthcare in Iraq but we can't spend money on such things here at home. "If we can open firehouses in Baghdad, we can keep them open in the United States," declared John Edwards, a candidate who was particularly adamant that we do more in Afghanistan this time last year.
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It's too bad the Democratic Party seems more committed to defeating Bush than winning its own arguments - or winning the war on terrorism for that matter. Compared to the alternative, I'll take Bush's "hypocrisy" any day.
And
Peter Beinart:
You'd think Democrats would have applauded the president's conversion, perhaps even claimed credit for it. Instead, leading Democrats responded to Bush's U-turn with one of their own. With the polls showing that a majority of Americans, and a huge majority of Democrats, don't want to spend more money on Iraq, prominent Democrats decided Bush was too committed to nation-building. Almost overnight, it was Democrats who wanted to reconstruct Iraq on the cheap.
Democrats support the $51 billion Bush has requested for Iraqi military operations. But they want him to separate that from the roughly $20 billion he has requested for rebuilding Iraq's hospitals, electrical grid, and police. Ask Democrats whether they support that latter request, and they give three responses, each more dishonest and opportunistic than the last.
The first response is that the Bush administration should be spending the money at home. As John Kerry said at the September 9 Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) debate, "If we can open firehouses in Baghdad, we can keep them open in the United States of America." Yes, if we repealed the tax cuts, perhaps we could. But that's not going to happen, so, in the real world, Democrats have to decide whether to support large sums for Iraqi nation-building, even though their constituents won't get the domestic spending they vastly prefer. At the end of the day, Kerry will probably vote yes. But his debate answer pandered to an audience that wanted to hear him say no.
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The third dodge is to equate reconstructing Iraq with lining Dick Cheney's pockets. "I will not support a dime to protect the profits of Halliburton in Iraq," proclaimed Bob Graham at the CBC debate. But, for better or worse, rebuilding Iraq and securing Halliburton's profits are now intimately connected, and it is not exactly a sign of foreign policy seriousness to propose abandoning the former in order to prevent the latter.
These three nonresponses to Bush's budget request expose the shallowness of what passes for Democratic national security doctrine. If Democrats had a distinct post-September 11, 2001, vision, it was partly that the war on terrorism required a Marshall Plan as well as a Truman Doctrine; we needed to build schools in the Muslim world, not just crack skulls. Yet, now, with the Bush administration finally recognizing that defeating terrorism requires making sure Iraqis have electricity and clean water, the Democratic presidential candidates are looking for any excuse to avoid saying yes. Pandering to public isolationism may make short-term political sense, but, in the long-term, it will simply confirm what many Americans already believe: that you can dress up the Democratic Party in whatever uniform you want, it still doesn't have a strategy for the defining challenge of our time.
Scrooge McDuck has more heart than these 10 democratic candidates and their constituents combined. How can anyone in good conscience adopt a position which boils down to "how dare the President spend our money to lift those people out of poverty?"
Just like Hei Lun, i'm no huge fan of Bush. The democrats are mostly right when they say he's been persona non grata
with his domestic policies. Yet, in light of all of the arguments that can be made against this administration, I can't accept the one that says Bush should be removed because he's doing
too much for the impoverished survivors of Saddam Hussein's regime.
