Category Archives: The World

Our lack of a national health plan is preventing me from fully enjoying the Olympics

So last night, I read all about this cool thing the TV folks are using at the Olympics. The WSJ had a half-page story explaining how a clever, but simple, device called the DiveCam enables viewers in their homes to see the following:

On TV, a diver walks out onto a platform. The camera fixes on him. He
waits. He leaps. And then — somehow — the camera stays with him as he
plunges. In the instant it takes him to break the water’s surface, the
picture suddenly cuts to an underwater shot — and we watch in
disbelief as the dive culminates in a burst of bubbles.

This sounded very cool, so I went into the TV room and lo and behold, diving was on at that very moment. So I watched, and — basically saw the same kind of camera angle I saw when I watched Olympics back in the 60s, except that we had a black-and-white set then. So I asked my wife, who had watched a LOT more Olympics than I had, whether she had seen the DiveCam shots, and I explained what that meant. No, she hadn’t.

So I looked at the WSJ story again, and then noticed something in the lead paragraph:

BEIJING — High-tech televisual bells and whistles have carried
couch-based Olympic watching way beyond the mere reality of being here.
Thousands of cameras are catching the action in China — every one of
them high-definition. Yet for a feat of engineering magic that dazzles
as it baffles, nothing beats the DiveCam.

Did you see it? "every one of them high-definition…"

So I ran back in and told my wife that the problem was that we don’t have an HD television! You know what she said? She told me she heard from her friend Mary this week, and Mary wanted her to be sure to tell me that she’s really enjoying watching the Olympics!

I told you about Mary in a recent column — remember? She’s my wife’s friend from high school whom we stayed with in Memphis when we went to that wedding. She had a very nice 42-inch, 1080-resolution flat-panel HDTV set that she had recently bought for $800 from Sam’s Club. I enjoyed watching it while I was there. This was before our $1,200 "economic stimulus" check came from the gummint. This seemed highly fortuitous, until the check actually came, and Mamanem said we had to spend it on a health care bill — a health care bill that we wouldn’t have had to deal with if we had a proper national health plan like other civilized countries (the "why" is complicated, having to do with a brief period during which my youngest wasn’t covered by my insurance that I pay a heap of money for; she’s back on it now). This led me to assert that the gummint could keep its blasted check, and use the money toward a national health plan … the lack of which is now preventing me from properly appreciating the Olympics.

A latter-day Berlin Airlift?

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I had thought that the U.S. was sort of out of options as far as confronting the resurgent Russian Bear as it mauled Joe Stalin’s old stomping grounds. But I had not thought of this: Sending U.S. troops in with humanitarian aid, a sort of latter-day Berlin Airlift, if you will.

This accomplishes a couple of things: It applies soft power in a way that also puts the U.S. military smack in the middle of the confrontation, thereby drawing a line in the sand. It’s an approach that combines subtlety with bravado. With statements such as this from Bush:

We expect Russia to ensure that all lines of communication and transport, including seaports, airports, roads and airspace, remain open for the delivery of humanitarian assistance and for civilian transit…

The U.S. both establishes itself as the nice guy, but also, in the words of Huck Finn, "dares them to come on."

I don’t know, but this may be the right approach. What do you make of it?

Don’t test the cranky old guy

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Did you read Kathleen Parker’s column today, which I recommended yesterday? Well, go read it now before the rest of this, because it’s good, and I’m about to give away the punch line.

Basically, she imagined three missives to Putin, the first one from Bush — an excerpt:

Hey, which reminds me. What’s up with Georgia? This is not good,
Vlad. You and I have had our moments. And, OK, fine, your dog’s bigger
than mine. A lot bigger. Stronger and faster, too. We got it. But you
can’t just go invading democratically elected countries that are U.S.
allies. You can’t have everything, Vlad. If you don’t stop, I’m going
to have to do something, and you know I don’t want that. What I want is
for you to not make me look like a fool.

Look, Vlad. Seven years
ago, it was you and me in Crawford. We had a blast. You loved my truck!
We bonded. I went out on a very big limb and told the whole dadgum
world that we were soul mates….

Then, she imagined one from Obama. An excerpt from THAT:

I’m sorry to be writing this e-mail instead of meeting you in person, preferably in the Oval Office, where I belong. Soon, soon.

Nevertheless,
and notwithstanding the foregoing, I felt it imperative that I express
my deep concern about Russia’s invasion of the tiny, democratically
elected sovereign nation of Georgia. It would appear that you are not
familiar with my platform for change and hope. War does not fit into
this template, and I am quite frankly at a loss for words to express my
deep, deep distress.

As the chosen leader of a new generation of
Americans who speak a global language of peace, hope, harmony and
change, this is simply unacceptable. Quite frankly, your actions pose
potentially severe, long-term consequences. I’m not sure what those
might be, but they won’t be nice or fun.

Then, finally, the message from McCain, which you should be able to enjoy whether you like him or not. The following is NOT an excerpt, but the entire message:

Hey, Putin.

Don’t make me come over there.

McCain

Actually, I’m not certain she made that last one up. Maybe she’s tapped into his e-mail.

Is the Georgia invasion ‘McCain’s moment?’

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You may note that the pundits most eager to write about Georgia and what it means are of the conservative persuasion. And there’s no question that they, at least, believe that moments like this one make McCain look like a more attractive choice for commander in chief. George Will wrote this:

Vladimir Putin, into whose soul President George W. Bush once peered
and liked what he saw, has conspicuously conferred with Russia’s
military, thereby making his poodle, “President” Dmitry Medvedev, yet
more risible. But big events reveal smallness, such as that of New
Mexico’s Gov. Bill Richardson.

On ABC’s “This Week,” Richardson,
auditioning to be Barack Obama’s running mate, disqualified himself.
Clinging to the Obama campaign’s talking points like a drunk to a
lamppost, Richardson said this crisis proves the wisdom of Obama’s zest
for diplomacy, and that America should get the U.N. Security Council
“to pass a strong resolution getting the Russians to show some
restraint.” Apparently Richardson was ambassador to the U.N. for 19
months without noticing that Russia has a Security Council veto.

This
crisis illustrates, redundantly, the paralysis of the U.N. regarding
major powers, hence regarding major events, and the fictitiousness of
the European Union regarding foreign policy. Does this disturb Obama’s
serenity about the efficacy of diplomacy? Obama’s second statement
about the crisis, in which he tardily acknowledged Russia’s invasion,
underscored the folly of his first, which echoed the Bush
administration’s initial evenhandedness. “Now,” said Obama, “is the
time for Georgia and Russia to show restraint.”

John McCain, the
“life is real, life is earnest” candidate, says he has looked into
Putin’s eyes and seen “a K, a G and a B.” But McCain owes the thug
thanks, as does America’s electorate. Putin has abruptly pulled the
presidential campaign up from preoccupation with plumbing the shallows
of John Edwards and wondering what “catharsis” is “owed” to
disappointed Clintonites.

In tomorrow’s paper, Kathleen Parker even more starkly — and more amusingly — contrasts McCain to both Bush and Obama.

Whomever you like for president, you gotta admit the KGB line is a good one. It’s a favorite of McCain’s, and we’re likely to hear him saying it more. His campaign is already putting out the line that events in Georgia have shown him to be "‘Prescient’ On Russia And Putin."

So how about it, folks? Does this affect your choice for November, and how? Does it make you more likely to vote for McCain — or for Obama? Or does it not affect your thinking one way or the other?

Yes, it’s grotesque to speak of such awful events in terms of its effect upon an election, but face it, folks: About all that you and I and the guy down the street can do in reaction to what’s happened is choose the guy who’s going to lead us in a world in which Russia knows it can get away with stuff like this.

What is it about the Russians and the Olympics?

The Rooskies catch us with our pants down

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The central narrative of global affairs in the first 37 years of my life (I choose that number out of convenience, since German reunification occurred on my 37th birthday, and that is sort of midpoint between the fall of the Wall and the failed Soviet coup of 1991) was dreading, preparing for and at the same time trying to avoid the moment that Slim Pickens, in "Dr. Strangelove," described as "New-q-lure combat, toe-to-toe with the Rooskies."

Well, we put all that behind us some time ago — people voting for the first time in this year’s elections have no memory of the time when our itchy trigger fingers hovered over that calamity, fueling such pop culture reflections as not only Strangelove, but its dead-serious counterpart "Failsafe," or lesser touchstones such as "The Day After," or "Twilight’s Last Gleaming," or "WarGames," or … well, we could go on and on. Suffice it to say, we thought about that stuff a lot.

Now, we argue over Iraq, worry over Afghanistan, and basically are unmotivated to think about any greater military challenges — such as that posed by our host in the current Olympics. Our toes are now too busy on the starting lines at poolside, waiting for the starting pistol, to be set against the toes of the Rooskies.

And into that vacuum strides, suddenly and decisively, a newly resurgent, confident, muscular, resentful, petulant, oil-rich Russia, once again under KGB management. And takes out Georgia before we’ve managed to say so much as, "Hey, wait a minute…"

That’s the thing that strikes me about the events of recent days. While Americans have concerned themselves with Beijing’s festivities and the sins of John Edwards, the Russians have dropped the hammer on one of our most promising allies in their once and future sphere of influence. Decisively.

I had to wait yesterday past the usual time for a George Will column — the one we ran today — which was the first commentary from one of our main syndicated columnists on what was happening in Georgia. And by that time, the Russians had essentially achieved their goals.

And the lesson here is that they can do this, and will do it again when they choose — and no one here, or in Europe, is ready for either this time or the next one.

Why isn’t it the Peking Olympics?

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Being pretty sure that I’ve had this explained to me before, and I just forgot the explanation, I’ll ask again: How come we say "Beijing" instead of "Peking" now?

Here’s the thing that puzzles me about this: It was supposed to be a phonic representation of the way the Chinese name sounds. So how could the West have been so wildly wrong about the way the name of that place was said for so long? "Peking" doesn’t really sound anything like "Beijing," or at least not enough so that if someone said "Beijing," we would make the mistake of writing it phonetically with a "P" and a "K."

And if his name was Mao Zedong, why did we hear Mao Tse-tung for all those years?

My theory is that one version of Chinese somehow won out politically over another. Like Mandarin over Cantonese or some thousand other variations, because I know there’s a bewildering array of them. Another theory is that the Chinese are just messing with the heads of us foreign devils, and maybe at the height of the Olympics, while they have the attention they’ve been craving, they’ll suddenly announce that the city’s name is pronounced "Vei-ling" or something, just to see if we’ll start calling it that. Then they’ll laugh their heads off.

But I suppose that’s just the paranoia of the Westerner who never truly understands the East, try as he might.

The Iraq paradox

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We’ve arrived at a very weird place in terms of our presidential candidates’ positions with regard to Iraq. Thanks to the amazing success of the surge — the policy that Bush at long last initiated after four years of John McCain saying that’s what we should do — both McCain and Obama find themselves in an awkward situation.

The Surge has succeeded so well that Maliki is emboldened to say that we can start talking about the Americans leaving, since the Iraqi government sources have gotten so much better at kicking the Sadrists around and other such demonstrations of prowess.
Obama is so wedded to the mythology of MoveOn.org et al, for whom it is a religious precept that every soldier or Marine ever sent into Iraq was the worst, most horrible mistake in the history of the universe (actually, I’m probably understating their position just a little here).These are the bruised innocents who reaction to the surge was, "What? We’re going to send MORE soldiers in to be maimed and killed; have we lost our freaking minds?"
McCain feels like, "Finally, everybody (except the MoveOn types) recognizes that MY idea of boosting our force levels has worked beyond our wildest dreams, bringing us closer and closer to being able to declare victory." Of course, with things going so well he’s not about to say that the success of the surge we can, irony of ironies, speak about Americans drawing down forces — just what Obama’s always wanted to do, regardless of realities on the ground. That would look like Obama was getting his way, and among the simple-minded it would look like "Hey, Obama was right all along" — even though he was the exact opposite of right, even though we only got to this good spot by doing what Obama adamantly opposed.
And Obama certainly can’t recognize currently reality and say "Oh, well, the surge worked. Wow, great jobs guys; you proved me wrong. But now can we leave?" If he ever uttered the phrase, "the surge works," his most intense and devoted supporters’ heads would explode spectacularly.

So here we are: Things are going well in Iraq, and neither campaign can use that fact advantageously.
How weirdly ironic is that?

Mccain_2008_wart

It’s about Obama, and rightly so

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Republicans and fellow travelers have been griping for about a week now about the coverage of Barack Obama’s trip abroad. They see it as unfair; they see it as favoritism. This point of view can be seen reflected in Robert’s cartoon of Wednesday.

But they’re missing an important point: Obama going abroad and meeting foreign leaders is news because it’s something new. John McCain going abroad to hang with foreign leaders is old hat, dog-bites-man stuff.

My point is sort of underlined by the results of the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, which finds Obama having a lead in a straight-up match, but McCain having a distinct advantage when it comes to whether voters are comfortable with the candidate’s background and values. As the WSJ reports today:

…With the nominations of both parties effectively settled for more than a month, the key question in the contest isn’t over any single issue being debated between the Democrats’ Sen. Obama or the Republicans’ Sen. John McCain. The focus has turned to the Democratic candidate himself: Can Americans get comfortable with the background and experience level of Sen. Obama?
This dynamic is underscored in a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll. The survey’s most striking finding: Fully half of all voters say they are focused on what kind of president Sen. Obama would be as they decide how they will vote, while only a quarter say they are focused on what kind of president Sen. McCain would be.
The challenge that presents for Sen. Obama is illustrated by a second question. When voters were asked whether they could identify with the background and values of the two candidates, 58% said they could identify with Sen. McCain on that account, while 47% said the same of Sen. Obama. More than four in 10 said the Democratic contender doesn’t have values and a background they can identify with….

The bottom line is, folks are still making up their minds about Obama, so every move he makes is of high, relevant interest to voters. Both his detractors and admirers should welcome this.

I don’t know about you, but I decided what I thought about John McCain a long time ago. I thought he should have been nominated and elected in the year 2000, and I think we’d all be better off if that had happened. Yeah, I know some people have changed their minds about him since then, but I have not, nor have a lot of others.

But all of us — including those of us who like what we’ve seen so far — are still making up our minds about Obama. And I don’t know about you, but I’m going to be paying close attention to what all this intense scrutiny reveals, for good or ill, as I make up my mind for November.

What did you think of Al Gore’s speech?

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On tomorrow’s page we’ll be running a Tom Friedman piece that holds up Al Gore’s speech as the kind that the actual current president of the United States ought to be making — and the kind that an Energy Party president would certainly make. Here’s how Friedman described it:

… If you want to know what an alternative strategy might look like, read the speech that Al Gore delivered on Thursday to the bipartisan Alliance for Climate Protection. Gore, the alliance’s chairman, called for a 10-year plan — the same amount of time John F. Kennedy set for getting us to the moon — to shift the entire country to “renewable energy and truly clean, carbon-free sources” to power our homes, factories and even transportation.
Mr. Gore proposed dramatically improving our national electricity grid and energy efficiency, while investing massively in clean solar, wind, geothermal and carbon-sequestered coal technologies that we know can work but just need to scale. To make the shift, he called for taxing carbon and offsetting that by reducing payroll taxes: Let’s “tax what we burn, not what we earn,” he said.
Whether you agree or not with Gore’s plan, at least he has a plan for dealing with the real problem we face — a multifaceted, multigenerational energy/environment/geopolitical problem…

Me, I’m really busy trying to get pages out without Mike, which is not easy, let me tell you. But maybe y’all can go read Al’s speech and tell me what you think. All I know is that what I’ve heard about it — from Friedman and others who have filtered and condensed its points — sounds good. But maybe the devil’s in the details.

What do y’all think?

Oh, yeah — Obama’s a senator, isn’t he?

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Yesterday, when I got the release from Jim DeMint about his request to Barack Obama for hearings on Afghanistan, my first thought had nothing to do with the substance of what DeMint was saying.

My first thought was, "Why’s he asking Obama that?"

And then it hit me: Obama is a United States senator. Not only that, he’s the chairman of a subcommittee on European affairs. I had momentarily forgotten the first fact, and I don’t think I ever even knew the second one.

Set aside for a moment the fact that it’s still a bit of a political stretch for DeMint to try to hold Obama, as European affairs chair, somehow accountable for some of our NATO allies not pulling their weight in Afghanistan — which, politically speaking, is what this challenge is about.

I’m still left marveling that it took me by surprise that someone was asking Obama to do some actual Senate work. We all have a bit of a tendency, don’t we, to think of Obama as this presidential candidate who’s more or less always (as far as we’re concerned) been a presidential candidate, rather than, say, a lawmaker.

Baby Rulers: 10 world leaders who would be younger than Obama

WHAT ‘gay beaches?’

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Readers of this blog learned yesterday that "South Carolina is so gay," or so a just-aborted British ad 854gayembeddedprod_affiliate74sourc
campaign would have it. I can’t take credit for that "scoop," of course — Adam Fogle broke it.

But it wasn’t until I saw a reproduction of the poster itself in the paper today (and aren’t those posters, on display at a station in the London Underground, going to be a hot item on E-Bay?) that I learned that among South Carolina’s "gay" charms are "gay beaches."

That’s a new one on me. Where would these "gay beaches" be? Certainly not on the Grand Strand — must be somewhere further down the coast.

Not that I’m interested for myself, you understand.

And not that there’s anything wrong with that…

Wouldn’t World Population Day be a lot more fun without all these darned PEOPLE?

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Just moments ago I received this release from an outfit called "Population Media Center," regarding something called "World Population Day." An excerpt:

Today as we commemorate World Population Day, Population Media Center and Population Institute pledge their commitment to help bring population numbers into balance with natural resources, so humanity can live in harmony with the earth….

Whenever I hear from folks who are terribly worried about World Population, folks who don’t like "growing population" any more than Mark Sanford likes "growing government," I get more than a little creeped out.

That’s because I can’t escape this suspicion — I’ve had it all my life — that, like Soylent Green, "population" is… people! And the only way to reduce it is to get rid of the, well, people. What do we do when the Whitetail deer population gets out of control? We go shoot ’em — lots of em.

And when we’re talking people, I have a little trouble getting on board with that. Unless, of course, Big Brother is for it, in which case I think it’s just peachy.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that…

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Adam Fogle has filed a TPS report to the effect that… well, here’s how it starts:

SCPRT FUNDING PROGRAM TO MARKET SC AS ‘GAY STATE’
This may come as a surprise to many South Carolinians, but your tax dollars are being used to target gay travelers from across the pond.
The Palmetto Scoop has learned that the Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism — a state agency overseen by the Gov. Mark Sanford’s office — is spending an undisclosed amount of its nearly $14 million advertising budget to take part in the “So Gay” campaign, an effort launched in London, England, by the gay marketing agency “Out Now” to lure homosexual tourists to South Carolina and five U.S. cities.

Columbia has been struggling hard to come up with a marketing slogan to attract tourists. Could "So Gay" be it?

And yes, my headline came from a "Seinfeld" episode. If Adam can make allusions to "Office Space," I can do the same with "Seinfeld."

The Three Amigos in Colombia

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Having read that John McCain was in-country at the time of the Colombian rescue, or just before it, I shouldn’t have been surprised to learn, from the Greenville paper, that Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman were there, too. An excerpt:

The setting seemed appropriate for conspiratorial murmurings, a sort of New World "Casablanca," in a Spanish colonial era seaside fortress inside a 475-year-old city that long ago outgrew its old walls.
"Right before we went into dinner, President Uribe grabbed me and said he had something to tell me and Sen. McCain and Sen. Lieberman, so I went and got John and Joe," Graham told The Greenville News.
Graham said that Uribe and Colombia’s defense minister, Juan Manuel Santos, eased them away from the dining area into a quiet corner. It was around 8 p.m. when Santos briefed the trio, saying, "We’re going to initiate a hostage rescue tonight," and went on to describe how government agents had infiltrated the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, Graham recalled…

Yet another adventure of the Three Amigos, last seen hanging with Gordon at No. 10.

T. Boone Pickens’ plan for energy independence

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Assuming the link works for you, I invite you to go read T. Boone Pickens’ piece in the WSJ today, headlined, "My Plan to Escape the Grip of Foreign Oil."

Now I know what you’re thinking: Mr. Pickens being an oil man from way back, his plan for independence is likely to be as simple and monolithic as Joe Wilson‘s — specifically, drill.

But while he says, way down in the piece, "Drilling in the outer continental shelf should be considered as well," it plays less of a role in his vision than it does in the Energy Party‘s, if that. It comes after he urges us to "explore all avenues and every energy alternative, from more R&D into batteries and fuel cells to development of solar, ethanol and biomass to more conservation."

Turbines All of that follows his exploration of his main idea, which is to convert a large portion of our energy
generation to wind power, which he lauds by saying "Wind is 100% domestic, it is 100% renewable and it is 100% clean." He would use natural gas thereby freed up from power generation to run our vehicles.

All that is great, but I think the best passage in the piece is when he explains why we must take extraordinary measures to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. I leave you with that excerpt:

Let me share a few facts: Each year we import more and more oil. In 1973, the year of the infamous oil embargo, the United States imported about 24% of our oil. In 1990, at the start of the first Gulf War, this had climbed to 42%. Today, we import almost 70% of our oil.
This is a staggering number, particularly for a country that consumes oil the way we do. The U.S. uses nearly a quarter of the world’s oil, with just 4% of the population and 3% of the world’s reserves. This year, we will spend almost $700 billion on imported oil, which is more than four times the annual cost of our current war in Iraq.
In fact, if we don’t do anything about this problem, over the next 10 years we will spend around $10 trillion importing foreign oil. That is $10 trillion leaving the U.S. and going to foreign nations, making it what I certainly believe will be the single largest transfer of wealth in human history…

Why we went to war in Iraq

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We all read all sorts of back-and-forth about Iraq. There are the coulda-woulda-shouldas of whether we should have gone in or not, how we could have managed things better after we got there (which we sure as anything coulda and shoulda, long before we finally implemented the Surge), and whether we should stay or not now (which, of course, we should).

But few couch the situation preceding the Iraq decision the way I remember it as clearly as Doug Feith's piece in The Wall Street Journal today.

What I remember is that we had an unsolved problem that needed solving. For 12 years Saddam had violated the terms under which we had stopped shooting in 1991. This was not a mere abstract problem, not a question of tidying up loose ends. As Feith writes, Iraq was shooting at U.S. and British pilots enforcing the No-Fly zone almost daily. Regime change had been, for good reason, the policy of this country since 1998 — but we hadn't figured out how to get it done.

Totally apart from the need to "drain swamps" in the Mideast, apart from whether Saddam still had the WMD we had already seen him use on his own people, this was the situation (and had been the situation ever since the first Bush administration):

In the months before the 9/11 attack, Secretary of
State Colin Powell advocated diluting the multinational economic
sanctions, in the hope that a weaker set of sanctions could win
stronger and more sustained international support. Central Intelligence
Agency officials floated the possibility of a coup, though the 1990s
showed that Saddam was far better at undoing coup plots than the CIA
was at engineering them. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz
asked if the U.S. might create an autonomous area in southern Iraq
similar to the autonomous Kurdish region in the north, with the goal of
making Saddam little more than the "mayor of Baghdad." U.S. officials
also discussed whether a popular uprising in Iraq should be encouraged,
and how we could best work with free Iraqi groups that opposed the
Saddam regime.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld worried
particularly about the U.S. and British pilots enforcing the no-fly
zones over northern and southern Iraq. Iraqi forces were shooting at
the U.S. and British aircraft virtually every day; if a plane went
down, the pilot would likely be killed or captured. What then? Mr.
Rumsfeld asked. Were the missions worth the risk? How might U.S. and
British responses be intensified to deter Saddam from shooting at our
planes? Would the intensification trigger a war? What would be the
consequences of cutting back on the missions, or ending them?

However wrong he'd later prove to be about how to conduct our operation in Iraq — and he was WAY wrong — Rumsfeld was at that time raising the right questions.

After 9/11, things changed — among them our willingness to let a problem such as this one fester. As Mr. Feith notes:

To contain the threat from Saddam, all reasonable means short of war had been tried unsuccessfully for a dozen years.
The U.S. did not rush to war. Working mainly through the U.N., we tried
a series of measures to contain the Iraqi threat: formal diplomatic
censure, weapons inspections, economic sanctions, no-fly zones,
no-drive zones and limited military strikes. A defiant Saddam, however,
dismantled the containment strategy and the U.N. Security Council had
no stomach to sustain its own resolutions, let alone compel Saddam's
compliance.

You may remember it differently. But that's pretty much the way I remember it.

Colombians now have their own Entebbe

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"We have an amazing military. I think only the Israelis can possibly pull off something like this."

— Ingrid Betancourt

Just a week or two back, I read a front-page story in the WSJ about Ingrid Betancourt. The thrust of the story ("A Hostage to Fame") was that she was such a cause celebre around the world that she had too much value to the FARC, and therefore would probably never be traded. This caused me to think, "And this story isn’t helping with that, is it?"

But what wonderful news yesterday! Just goes to show good things can happen, even when they seem impossible.

And good for the Colombian military — they now have their own Entebbe, and that’s saying something. Nobody but the Israelis can say that, and the Israelis have gone through a good, long dry spell without one. Sure, there was the Syrian/North Korean nuke plant, but that’s nothing like putting boots on the ground way into the interior of Africa, complete with major-league deception and an impossible rescue.

One of my colleagues said this was better than Entebbe — it was, after all, cleaner. No hostages or rescuers killed, the deception complete from start to finish. Absolutely. Of course, the rescuers in this case had a lot more time to plan, months in which to infiltrate and gain the guerrillas’ trust. In the end, different kinds of operations. Entebbe was a brilliantly executed military coup de main. This latest caper was more of a perfect intelligence operation, involving no actual combat between armed antagonists. No, that’s not a perfect distinction — the military operation involved great intel, and the intelligence operation required military skills and discipline — but it serves.

Anyway, it was a great job, and the Colombians deserve a big Way to Go! from civilized folk everywhere.

France_betancourt_wart

Democrats officially write off the xenophobe vote

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Now this one ought to set off the nativists:

In Convention First, 2008 Democratic National Convention To Be Simulcast In Spanish

Comcast Named Official Cable Television and Video On Demand Provider, Will Produce and Distribute Bi-Lingual Convention Coverage to Millions Worldwide

DENVER – In keeping with its commitment to make the 2008 Democratic National Convention the most accessible and technologically-savvy event of its kind, the Democratic National Convention Committee (DNCC) announced today that Comcast Corporation will produce simultaneous, online streaming coverage of the Convention in Spanish at DemConvention.com and make available a broad range of Convention content through its signature On Demand service. The DNCC also announced that Comcast has been named the Convention’s Official Cable Television and Video-On-Demand (VOD) provider.
“We set out to ‘bring down the walls’ of the Pepsi Center and make this year’s historic Convention as inclusive and accessible to as many people as possible,” said Leah D. Daughtry, CEO of the DNCC. “Comcast is helping us bring the Convention to a growing number of computer screens and televisions throughout the country and around the world.”
From the Comcast Media Center, based in the Denver metro area, Comcast will provide live, gavel-to-gavel Spanish-language interpretation of all Convention activities…
“With Spanish as the primary language of approximately 35 million Americans – not to mention the more than 300 million Spanish-speakers outside the United States – offering bilingual coverage of the Convention makes more people feel welcome under the Democratic Party’s ‘big tent’,” said Texas State Senator and Convention Co-Chair Leticia Van de Putte. “As a Texan and a Latina, I’m proud to belong to a party that embraces the Hispanic community.”

"Ay, caramba!" the English-only crowd is thinking right about now. "No somos listos por eso!" (Or would that be, "no estamos listos"? Randy?) I’m not even going to get into the fact that the last part of Leticia Van de Putte’s name sounds like an insult in Spanish, because that would be digressing way too much…

Does this mean some of y’all will be voting for McCain now?

bradwarthen.com

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