Convention Commentary
PETER ROBINSON CRITIQUES ARNOLD: "And who could deny the power of his story? A poor boy in Austria, who saw the evil empire with his own eyes, then came to America and found freedom and abundance and now holds high office. Yet he struck me as uni-dimensional, a problem he’ll need to address if he intends to remain a national figure. Arnold’s world is a lot like Ayn Rand’s: Either make a success of yourself or you’re somehow defective. Arnold spoke not a word about the sick, the old, or the unfortunate. Arnold’s hero (and mine) Milton Friedman might want to take Arnold aside. “We’re in favor of free markets,” Milton would explain, “not just because they create opportunities for the strong, but because the abundance they foster enables us to engage in larger and more magnanimous acts of charity.”
SPEAKING OF THE WAR [Ramesh Ponnuru]
I think McCain did more than any of the other speakers--including Cheney--to actually make the case for it.
THE FIRST GULF WAR [Jonah Goldberg]
I think all of the Republicans who've dinged Kerry's vote against the first Gulf War have missed an opportunity by not actually repeating some of the arguments that Kerry made in defense of that no-vote and then comparing those arguments to his more recent rationales. He believed in 1990-91, for example, that we would abandon the principle of "deterrence" if we tried to remove Saddam from Kuwait -- which he'd invaded undeterred. His rationale for being "against" the more recent Gulf War is that Bush didn't build a big enough coalition even though the first war couldn't have had a bigger coalition and Kerry still opposed it. He criticized W for not getting final approval from the United Nations -- but Poppa got exactly that and Kerry still opposed it. Etc.
LILEKS, sounding like Zell: "Look, over in Roosia y’all got a hunnert Islamic terrorists holdin’ schoolkids hostage with bomb belts, and they’d do it here in a heartbeat, and they might probably will. So can we talk about spendin’ federal money on carvin’ up embryos later?"
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