Tom Maguire posts at JustOneMinute: “If This Is Advocacy… “
Hands up if you seriously think that, following her health care debacle of 1993/94 and the Congressional flip to the Republicans, Hillary has any intention at all of delivering a health care plan that will be unpopular… I don’t see any hands. (emphasis added)
That will be the correct gesture when this coercive program comes for your money.
Steve Chapman, writing in Reason Magazine online, demonstrates some dazzling 9/10 “logic.”
There are several paragraphs in his piece, “Who’s Still Afraid of Osama?” that demonstrate his inability to apply real logic to the discussion. This paragraph was the most blatant to me:
But remember: After Sept. 11, 2001, we all thought more attacks were a certainty. Yet Al Qaeda and its ideological kin have proved unable to mount a second strike.
Ergo, they can’t do anything anymore to hurt us!
What amazing thinking.
Two paragraphs later he adds to the argument:
The events required to make that happen include a multitude of herculean tasks. First, a terrorist group has to get a bomb or fissile material, perhaps from Russia’s inventory of decommissioned warheads. If that were easy, one would have already gone missing.
Ooops! That last sentence puts the lie to this argument. Google for the answer to whether anything radioactive (note, not just a warhead with arming and triggering mechanism) has gone missing over the past few years.
The last quote I’ll add shows how Mr. Chapman fails to understand the nature, scope, risk and uncertainty of the problem:
Mueller recalls that after the Irish Republican Army failed in an attempt to blow up British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, it said, “We only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.” Al Qaeda, he says, faces a very different challenge: For it to carry out a nuclear attack, everything has to go right. For us to escape, only one thing has to go wrong. That has heartening implications. If Osama bin Laden embarks on the project, he has only a minuscule chance of seeing it bear fruit. Given the formidable odds, he probably won’t bother. None of this means we should stop trying to minimize the risk by securing nuclear stockpiles, monitoring terrorist communications and improving port screening. But it offers good reason to think that in this war, it appears, the worst eventuality is one that will never happen. (emphasis added)
It may be unlikely to happen. It may not happen, but recall two three things that are crucial pieces of the argument:
1. The enemy has stated that they want to cause mass casualties, and using a dirty or radiological bomb is one of their goals;
2. They have friends. Many of these friends would be willing to help them with various parts of this effort.
Oh, and 3. They are patient, persistent, and don’t use our risk and casualty “calculus” to decide on which missions to pursue.
If Osama wants to increase the tension in the West by attempting a nuclear or radiological attack on any of the West’s countries, the risks, potential costs, and likely death of the trigger pullers won’t cause him to flinch one bit.
Stealing Glenn Reynolds’ word.
Larry Elder posts ten proposed questions for the next Democrat debate at IBDeditorials.com. I particularly like number 10 about global warming:
10. Sen. Obama, this question is about global warming, something about which you urge extreme action to fight. You criticize President Bush for going to war in Iraq, even though all 16 intelligence agencies felt with “high confidence” that Saddam Hussein possessed stockpiles of WMD. Critics of Bush say he cherry-picked the intelligence. Hundreds, if not thousands, of scientists consider concerns about global warming overblown. Isn’t there far more dissent among credible scientists about global warning than there was among American intelligence analysts about Iraq? If so, as to the studies on global warming, why can’t you be accused of cherry-picking?
He says they’re free to be used by any news organization …
From an Investors’ Business Daily editorial:
… Oil production is declining as his state oil company becomes increasingly politicized. Its earnings are being diverted from investment and maintenance to pork-barrel social programs that have nothing to do with energy.
It’s about Hugo Chavez. Not too far from some of her socialist ideas.
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