www.dailycorinthian.com
Opinion
Reece Terry, publisher
Mark Boehler, editor
4 • Saturday, April 19, 2014
Corinth, Miss.
The stupid hounding of Condi Rice If Condoleezza Rice were as self-pitying and politically crass as Attorney General Eric Holder, she would be wondering aloud what it is about her race and gender that accounts for the hostility to her. Rice’s speaking gigs on college campuses and her ascension to the board of the Internet company Dropbox have sparked protests calling for her to be disinvited, cashiered and generally isolated and shamed. Condi Rice is not a natural lightning rod. She’s such a Rich disreputable figure that she’s Lowry on the board of the Kennedy National Center and the Boys and Girls Review Clubs of America. She’s such a lightweight that she’s a Stanford University professor. She’s such a yahoo that she once accompanied Yo-Yo Ma on the piano. The mob nonetheless believes that her due punishment for serving the wrong administration in the wrong cause should be banishment. When the University of Minnesota invited her to give a lecture as part of a series marking the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, the school’s faculty roused itself. Roughly 200 of them demanded that the invitation be revoked, partly because she is unfit to be part of a civil-rights lecture series. What would give anyone the idea that a woman who was the nation’s first female African-American secretary of state, who experienced Jim Crow firsthand during her childhood in Alabama, who was friends with one of the girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing would have anything relevant to say about civil rights? The Minnesota professors say that it is in a “spirit of free expression” that they ask for the reversal of Rice’s invitation. Because nothing says free expression like shutting down someone’s lecture. They claim they would love to have Rice come to the school on some other occasion. Presumably to sit in the dock at a mock warcrimes trial. The Rutgers faculty reacted in a similar vein to the selection of Rice as the school’s commencement speaker. It called for undoing the decision, explaining that “a Commencement speaker, who is entrusted with speaking to graduating students about the direction of their future lives, should embody moral authority and exemplary leadership.” Does the Rutgers faculty really think Rice will urge graduating students to go out and start “wars of choice” and do “extraordinary renditions”? If the past is any guide, Rice will tell the Rutgers students about the importance of getting an education, of finding their passion, of being optimistic -- you know, all the truly dark stuff that animates quasi-war criminals. The protesters of Dropbox’s decision to put Rice on its board said it called into question the company’s “commitment to freedom, openness, and ethics.” In their brief against her, they didn’t raise any remotely plausible concern about how she would influence the policies of the company. The hounding of Rice, naturally, all goes back to Bush national-security policy. If support for the Iraq War is a mark of odiousness, though, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and John Kerry should never be allowed to set foot on a campus or sit on a corporate board, since they all voted to authorize it. As for interrogation, the most frequently cited act of “torture” is waterboarding. A total of three terrorists were subjected to it. The legality and wisdom of this Bush policy -- and others -- is certainly open to debate. But Rice’s critics aren’t interested in argument. They are offended by Rice’s very presence. As usual, her harassment is about narrowing the range of respectability so as to limit the parameters of political debate. This time, it is failing. The leaders of the University of Minnesota, Rutgers and Dropbox have refused to dump Rice. Of course, if the typical rules applied, the fierce opposition to her would be attributed to racism, sexism and any other handy “-ism.” Just imagine what Eric Holder would say if his opponents embarked on a concerted campaign to silence and shun him. Rich Lowry can be reached via e-mail: comments.lowry@nationalreview.com.
Prayer for today Lord God, help me to select with care the site, the plans, and the foundation of my life. May I use the best material; and may it be worthy of a permanent home. Amen.
A verse to share “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast.” — Ephesians 2:8-9
NED’s chickens come home to roost When Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Empire an “evil empire,” the phrase reflected his conviction that while the East-West struggle was indeed a global geostrategic conflict, it had a deep moral dimension. If Americans did not see the Cold War as he did, a battle between good and evil, Reagan knew that they would indefinitely sacrifice neither the wealth of the nation nor the blood of its sons to sustain it. That is in the character of Americans. Jimmy Carter had sought to remove that moral dimension by declaring, “We have gotten over our inordinate fear of communism.” But with his “evil empire” speech, Reagan re-moralized the Cold War in what Natan Sharansky called “a moment of moral clarity.” Here we come to the heart of the matter as to why Americans want to stay out of any Ukrainian conflict. Americans not only see no vital U.S. interest, but also no moral dimension to this quarrel. If, after all, it was a triumph of self-determination for Ukraine to secede from the Russian Federation, do not Russians in Crimea and Donetsk have the same right — to secede from Kiev and go home to Russia? If Georgians had a right to break free of the Russian Federation, do not Abkha-
zians and South Ossetians have a right to break free of Georgia? Turnabout Patrick is fair play is Buchanan an old American saying. Columnist O p - e d writers bewail Vladimir Putin’s threat to the “rules-based” world we have created. But under what rule did we bomb Serbia for 78 days to tear away Kosovo, the cradle province of the Serb people? Perhaps some history is in order. Compare how Putin brought about the secession and annexation of Crimea, without bloodshed but with popular approval, with how Sam Houston and friends brought about the secession of Texas from Mexico, and its annexation by the United States in 1845. When the Mexicans tried to retrieve a disputed piece of their lost Texas territory, James K. Polk accused them of shedding American blood on American soil, had Congress declare war, sent Gen. Winfield Scott and a U.S. army to Mexico City, and annexed the entire northern half of Mexico, which is now the American Southwest and California. Compared to the Jacksonian, James Polk, Vladimir Putin is Pierre Trudeau.
Even in Eastern Ukraine, it is hard to see a moral issue. For the Kiev regime is loudly denouncing as “terrorists” the Russians who are taking over city centers by using the exact same tactics the Maidan Square demonstrators used to seize Kiev. If it was heroic for the Svoboda Party and Pravy Sektor to fight police and torch buildings to oust Viktor Yanukovych, the elected president of Ukraine, upon what ground do the usurpers who inherited his power bewail the same thing being done to them? Is there not glaring hypocrisy here? And where do we Americans come off piously damning what the Russians are doing in Ukraine? In the last decade, Putin has learned how to play the Americans’ game. And before winding up in a conflict we managed to avoid over four decades of Cold War, perhaps we should call off this game of thrones, and consign NED to the boneyard. Today, two courses of action are being hotly pressed upon the Obama White House by the War Party. Both appear likely to lead to disaster. The first is to arm the Ukrainians. This would likely provoke a war with Russia that Kiev could not win, and lead Ukrainians to
believe the Americans will be there beside them, which is not in the cards. The second option is the sanctions road. But Europe, dependent on Russian oil and gas, is not going to vote itself a recession. And should the West sanction Russia, Moscow would sanction Ukraine and sink what the Washington Post calls that “black hole of corruption and waste that is the Ukrainian economy.” As for more U.S. warships in the Black and Baltic seas and more F-16s and U.S. troops in Eastern Europe, what is their purpose, when we are not going to go to war with Russia? In the title of the old song, Johnny Cash got it right, “Don’t take your guns to town,” unless you’re prepared to use them. Undeniably, President Obama and John Kerry have egg all over their faces today, as they did in the Syrian “red line” episode. Yet they continue to meddle where we do not belong, issue warnings and threats they have no power to enforce, and bluster and bluff about what they are going to do, when the American people are telling them, “This is not our quarrel.” Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?”
Watch out for Chicken Little science The cult centered on “global warming” alarmism is getting hot under the collar. People seem to have stopped paying attention and polls show “climate change” barely registers on a list of voters’ concerns. This can only mean, as losing politicians like to say, that their message isn’t getting through. What to do? Why shout louder, of course. A recent story in The New York Times sought to help alarmists raise the decibel level: “The countries of the world have dragged their feet so long on global warming that the situation is now critical, experts appointed by the United Nations reported Sunday, and only an intensive worldwide push over the next 15 years can stave off potentially disastrous climatic changes later in the century.” I guess we had better get ready for climate Armageddon then because China, one of the world’s worst polluters, is not likely to comply. The Obama administration and liberal politicians in general seem to promote climate change fiction in order to gain even more dominance over our lives. Apparently controlling one-sixth of the economy through Obamacare isn’t enough for
Reece Terry
Mark Boehler
publisher rterry@dailycorinthian.com
editor editor@dailycorinthian.com
Willie Walker
Roger Delgado
circulation manager circdirector@dailycorinthian.com
press foreman
them. Most of the “reporting” on the subject is decidedly one-sided, including PresiCal dent Obama’s Thomas claim in his last State of Columnist the Union address that “The debate is settled. Climate change is a fact.” Science is never settled, or it wouldn’t be science. The Times story was about a meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in Berlin. To read it one might think there is unanimity of opinion on the subject by panel members. Maybe that’s true of current members of the panel, but it is instructive to read the comments by former IPCC member Richard Tol, who, among other things, is professor of the Economics of Climate Change, Institute for Environmental Studies and Department of Spatial Economics, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. Professor Tol, writes Globalwarming.org, recently “accused the IPCC of being too alarmist about global warming and asked to have his name withdrawn from
its recently released Working Group II report (WG2) on climate change impacts.” In a recent article for the Financial Times titled “Bogus prophecies of doom will not fix the climate,” Tol explains why, “Humans are a tough and adaptable species. People live on the equator and in the Arctic, in the desert and in the rainforest. We survived the ice ages with primitive technologies. The idea that climate change poses an existential threat to humankind is laughable.” German meteorologist Klaus-Eckart Puls goes further. He has written that contrary to the alarmists’ claims of melting polar ice caps and rising sea levels, the rise in sea levels has declined 34 percent over the last decade. His report, which analyzed satellite data from TOPEX and JASON-1 and JASON-2 missions studying global ocean topography, concluded that the sea level rise has “slowed down significantly,” and that “...it should not be speculated on whether the deceleration in the rise is a trend or if it is only noise. What is certain is that there is neither a ‘dramatic’ rise, nor an ‘acceleration’. Conclusion: Climate models that project an acceleration over the last
World Wide Web: www.dailycorinthian.com To Sound Off: E-mail: email: news@dailycorinthian.com Circulation 287-6111 Classified Adv. 287-6147
20 years are wrong.” There are plenty of ways to check Puls’ conclusions, including www.climatedepot.com, which provides links to the papers and work of climatologists and other scientists who take a decidedly different position from that of the climate change crowd. Climate change is a fact? Don’t think so. The Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer, writes, “If climate science is settled, why do its predictions keep changing? And how is it that the great physicist Freeman Dyson, who did some climate research in the late 1970s, thinks today’s climate-change Cassandras are hopelessly mistaken? ... Climate-change proponents have made their cause a matter of fealty and faith. For folks who pretend to be brave carriers of the scientific ethic, there’s more than a tinge of religion in their jeremiads.” Yet another reason not to trust climate change alarmists. Cal Thomas’ latest book is “What Works: Common Sense Solutions for a Stronger America” is available in bookstores now. Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribune.com.
How to reach us -- extensions:
Newsroom.....................317 Circulation....................301 news@dailycorinthian.com advertising@dailycorinthian. Advertising...................339 Classifieds....................302 com Classad@dailycorinthian.com Bookkeeping.................333
Editorials represent the voice of the Daily Corinthian. Editorial columns, letters to the editor and other articles that appear on this page represent the opinions of the writers and the Daily Corinthian may or may not agree.