31 Tuesday Aug 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
I had a conversation a couple months ago with a colleague, a political scientist, in which we were comparing notes on the presidential election. These were not George W. Bush’s best days. Nevertheless, he noted, every model that political scientists use to predict the outcome of presidential elections pointed to a Bush victory, based on the strength of the economy. There was one potential anomaly, and that was the wartime character of the Bush re-election bid.
24 Tuesday Aug 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
There are two possibilities: Either the Kerry campaign actually believes that the Bush campaign is behind Swift Boat Veterans for Truth; or the Kerry campaign just thinks it’s good politics to blame President Bush personally for the Vietnam veterans who served in proximity to Mr. Kerry and have decided he is “unfit” to be commander in chief. The question, then, is which of these two views is the dumber?
17 Tuesday Aug 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
Last week, the Commission on Presidential Debates announced the moderators for the 2004 election face-offs, and once again, I have been passed over in favor of the likes of Jim Lehrer and Bob Schieffer. In the brilliant Paddy Chayefsky-Sidney Lumet satire “Network,” Peter Finch plays Howard Beale, a network anchorman who has gone around the bend and become the “mad prophet of the airwaves,” mad as hell and not going to take it any more, vowing to speak the truth that no one else dares to.
02 Monday Aug 2004
Posted in Weekly Standard
What gay marriage won’t change.
The Weekly Standard
IT IS POSSIBLE that at the end of the day, gay marriage will be an enduring reality, at least in some places. This troubles many people, even as others hold it up as an important element in the recognition of equal human dignity. But how much, really, will be changed by gay marriage? With all due respect, I think both proponents and opponents overstate the likely effects. Gay marriage will neither be especially dangerous to marriage as such, as opponents fear, nor will it usher in equal recognition for gay and lesbian couples, as proponents hope.
Some opponents of gay marriage take their position on the basis that homosexuality as such is morally wrong. This position provides an intellectually consistent grounding for opposition to gay marriage, but it is nowadays rarely the basis of arguments made in the public square. Instead, opponents of gay marriage generally argue that the expansion of the use of the term “marriage” to gay couples as well as the extension to them of the legal and customary rights of married couples will diminish the sanctity of marriage and weaken an institution that is of vital importance to the rearing of succeeding generations. In short, gay marriage will have a bad effect on marriages of the traditional man-woman variety.
27 Tuesday Jul 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
The left is back. I don’t say this in relation to the Democratic convention in Boston, where, of course, in their heart of hearts, many of the delegates do indeed wish that their party could be more explicitly progressive in its appeal to American voters. The point of the Democratic convention will be to inject as much progressivism into the debate as the party’s wise men and women think is prudent in relation to appealing to an electorate that is not especially left-wing in outlook.
20 Tuesday Jul 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
Where is the John Edwards surge in the polls for John Kerry? Democrats want to know. What happened? With a choice for veep as brilliant as Mr. Edwards, shouldn’t Mr. Kerry have gotten a bigger bump than the small-to-nil effect the announcement actually produced?
13 Tuesday Jul 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
John Edwards may be the best politician of his generation. Never mind what he brings to John Kerry’s campaign for president in 2004. In an astonishingly small number of extraordinarily acute political moves, Mr. Edwards has established himself as the single most likely American to occupy the Oval Office one day [and here I include Mr. Kerry].
06 Tuesday Jul 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
Does politics still have a slow season? If so, the Fourth of July weekend marks its official beginning. According to conventional wisdom, even in an election year, summer is no time to try to drive a political message. People aren’t interested. But does that old conventional wisdom adequately take into account the intensity of feeling this year? That’s the proposition we are likely to test this summer.
29 Tuesday Jun 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
Because of Iraq, 2004 has been a very edgy year. The absence of bad news is excellent news, minimal bad news on any given day is good news, and as for good news, there isn’t enough to take the edge off for long. At least the nature of the challenge has clarified itself over the past couple months: on one side, Abu Musad Zarqawi’s world of barbarity, mayhem and beheadings; on the other, the United States, its allies, the new Iraqi government and what would seem to be the vast majority of Iraqis themselves.
22 Tuesday Jun 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
The main reason for going to war in Iraq, in my view then and now, was the danger posed by Saddam Hussein going forward. This is a view I came to only after starting to think about the nexus of rogue states [such as Saddam’s Iraq], terrorist organizations [such as al Qaeda] and weapons of mass destruction [WMD] that might be produced using the resources of states but transferred to terrorist organizations for release.
Tod Lindberg 