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David Horowitz concisely states:
President Owes No Apology for War
Amid all the flak over the resignation and testimony of weapons sleuth David Kay and the savage attacks on President Bush’s war decision by the Democratic contenders, the most obvious unasked question is: Why should the president be on the defensive over a war as good as this one?
Casualties were minimal, 25 million people were freed, and a brutal regime was dismantled a prison for children was liberated and mass graves stopped being filled. Why should Bush have to apologize for a war that brought Libya’s Moammar Kadafi to heel, made the Syrians and Iranians more pliant and has killed or taken into custody thousands of terrorist soldiers and allies?
In short, the war in Iraq is among one of the most justified military actions in history.
What Janet did isn’t illegal. But it was wrong. Wrong for her, wrong for MTV, wrong for CBS, wrong for the NFL, and wrong for the viewers.
The history of the last 10+ years of music has been built around a continual argument that, “Hey, what we’re doing is wrong—idolizing murderers, drug dealers, gang-bangers, cop-killers, and whatever else we can come up with—but it’s not illegal, so you can’t stop us, and if you try we’ll yell it’s a violation of freedom of speech.”
And that got the music industry a free pass to get free publicity by doing all the worst things they could think of.
This example at the Superbowl exposes the weakness of the “violation of free speech” argument.
All kinds of legal actions are wrong. Freedom means freedom. Good behavior cannot be achieved by legislation.
But this Superbowl moment shows how much harm can be done to oneself and to others by legal means.
The whole music industry is in the tank now. Its sales have been dropping precipitously for years to the extent that many in it wonder if it can continue.
It’s not because of downloading. It’s because the music is as bad as they can get it to be. And people are sick of listening to it.
We have to all stop buying into the music industry’s scam that if we point out how badly they’re behaving, we’re violating their freedom of expression. Something doesn’t have to be illegal to be wrong. They have the legal right to behave badly. But we have to tell them to stop doing it anyway, because it’s bad for them and bad for us.
Revised 2-4-04.
Per Richard Bennett (via Jeff Jarvis):
So what is happening? Briefly put, Dean’s problem is the Deaniacs. The Internet-driven campaign has enabled him to amass a large following, but they’re primarily unbalanced people, fanatical followers, extremists, and wackos. In my experience with Internet-enabled activism, these are the kind of people most attracted to online chat and email wars, so an organization that’s going to use these tools to recruit has to prune the weirdos before they run off the mainstream people you need to reach out to the undecided mainstream people whose support you really need in the voting booth. Others have written that the orange-hatted, tattooed, and body-pierced volunteers who flew into Iowa alienated the actual voters, and that’s real.
If many of those surrounding Dean were batty—is it possible that Dean believed they were everyday Americans? Could that help explain why he thought his angry, extremist rhetoric would play to the American people?
Roger L. Simon disagrees, as I do, with Kerry’s stand on treating terrorism as a matter for police action only.
Also popping into my head were the recent words of Democratic presidential frontrunner John Kerry who told us the other day that the threat of terrorism had been exaggerated and that what was really necessary was “police action.” Well, he’s right in one regard—some police or intelligence agency (or maybe more than one) picked up some information about these flights. Whether that information was correct or not we don’t know and maybe never will. But we do know it was persuasive enough to convince officials at British Airways and Air France to cancel the flights.
I would like to ask Senator Kerry this: Does he think we should live like this the rest of our lives? Police action is all well and good, but, to the best of my knowledge, it has yet to put an ultimate end to murder, rape, etc. I don’t know about other people but I’d like to believe that some day this is going to stop. If it takes more than calling 9-11 to prevent another 9-11, so be it. I’m afraid if we listen to Senator Kerry’s prescription, it won’t be Ida Cox we’ll be singing. It’ll be the yet more familiar lyrics of the great BB King:
”...you’ve done me wrong, baby, and you’ll be sorry someday.”
I’d like to add that the terrorists would love us to treat this as a police action, because that makes it a tit-for-tat arrangement. They attack us, we arrest a few of them, then they attack us again, and it goes on forever, like it has done for years in Israel. The Bush doctrine is not at all what the terrorists have in mind. The Bush doctrine is, you attack us, we take over the country we believe most supports you—liberate it from its dictators—and return it to its people. This doesn’t work at all for the terrorists. This is not tit-for-tat. This is tit-for-we terraform your planet so things can grow there again. Much better.
...on a gas-guzzling S.U.V.!
Tell me I’m not the only one who sees irony in that. The notion that the Iraq war is about “blood for oil” is preposterous. But if you really believe it—shouldn’t you be driving something that doesn’t burn up the maximum possible amount of oil?
