New Media Alliance - Daniel Clark

by Daniel Clark

If conservatives are having trouble motivating themselves to vote this November, they might keep in mind that a Democrat victory could mean the return of Philip Coyle to the Pentagon. An inveterate missile defense skeptic, Coyle is usually presented by the media as if he were a dispassionate scientist offering objective, if harsh, expert opinions.

A typical reference in an April 17th Reuters story about Coyle’s recent congressional testimony identified him as having “served from 1994 to 2001 as an assistant secretary of defense and the head of Pentagon arms testing.” With credentials like those, his testimony that a missile shield is both unworkable and unnecessary sounds like a pretty compelling indictment of Bush administration policy.

That is, until you recognize that Coyle’s tenure in the Defense Department consisted of almost the entirety of the Clinton presidency. Almost immediately after taking office, Clinton began to decimate our missile defense program, and squelch its funding, so that his liberal domestic agenda could reap the benefits of the so-called “peace dividend.” The mere fact that Coyle would serve that administration so prominently for so long, without exhibiting any of his trademark rebelliousness, suggests a tolerance for, if not an agreement with, the Clintons’ antipathy for national defense.

In reaction to an alarming National Intelligence Estimate on the nuclear capabilities of Iran and North Korea, Congress passed a law in 1999 requiring the deployment of a defensive missile shield as soon as it was “technologically possible.” President Clinton initially threatened to veto the bill, but relented after an overwhelming 97-3 passage in the Senate.

Enter Philip Coyle, who, in his 2000 annual report, concluded that a missile shield would not be technologically possible in the foreseeable future, and that the development of our missile defenses should not be “schedule-driven.” This assessment eviscerated the carelessly worded law, and allowed Clinton to keep the program in mothballs for the duration of his term.

Since President Bush resurrected the project, Coyle, now senior advisor to a think tank called the Center for Defense Information (CDI), has been a constant bearer of gloom and defeatism. This January, he traveled to Prague, at the same time that Lt. Gen. Henry Obering, director of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency, was trying to persuade the Czech government to host a radar station as part of the system. Coyle did all he could to foil those efforts, by telling our allies that they were in danger of triggering a new Cold War, as if the Czechs’ past suffering under Soviet aggression had been caused by strong American defenses.

This appearance, for the explicit purpose of undermining American foreign policy, was made by Coyle at the invitation of Greenpeace. The environmentalist group, best known for attacking whaling vessels in Ty-D-Bol boats, was originally formed to protest American nuclear testing. Today, it opposes our missile defense plan, on the basis that it is “likely to fuel a new arms race” and “upset the global strategic balance.” That Coyle would speak at Greenpeace’s behest suggests that he, too, seeks to maintain a global strategic balance, rather than tip the scales in favor of the United States.

It’s no coincidence that Coyle should associate with Greenpeace, given the obvious leftward slant of the CDI. Among the center’s board of advisors are liberal Hollywood icons Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, radical feminist author and “women’s studies” professor Barbara Winslow, and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream co-founder Ben Cohen. One might as well solicit national security advice from Country Joe and the Fish.

These affiliations belie Coyle’s stated concerns about the project’s viability. To the contrary, opponents of our missile defense plan base their criticisms on the premise that it will prove effective. They would have no concerns about escalation or strategic imbalance if our defenses were as inept as Coyle portrays them to be.

Coyle has an additional reason to oppose the deployment of a missile shield, in that he had already obstructed it for seven years. If the project is ultimately successful, the naysayers will be remembered as dangerous fools. Furthermore, if that success arrives too late to save one of our allies, both Coyle and President Clinton will bear some of the responsibility.

That’s a pretty compelling incentive to torpedo the whole program, which is what Coyle might soon have the authority to do. That’s one consequence of a Democrat presidency that most Americans should find too grim to contemplate. Or to put it a way that a CDI advisor might understand, “Whoah, bummer.”

by Daniel Clark

The summary of a recent Pentagon report says there was “no ’smoking gun’” connecting Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda. One can just imagine how furiously somebody must have lobbied to have that language included, because those are the same three magical words that have been successfully used to convince the public that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction.

Because the “smoking gun” standard is entirely subjective, the existence of such a thing can never be proven, at least not to the satisfaction of a determined contrarian. Thus have the most intransigent critics of the war effort succeeded in granting themselves veto power over the facts. Regardless of the evidence of Saddam’s WMD, there cannot be a “smoking gun” until Hans Blix, Cindy Sheehan and the New York Times agree to say that there is.

That’s the degree of denial that’s necessary to characterize the Pentagon report as anything other than an absolute vindication of the war in Iraq. That study, comprised of information culled from the evidence left behind by Saddam’s government, makes it clear to all but the willfully obtuse that removing the Iraqi dictator was essential to any serious effort to combat terrorism.

A Senate Intelligence Committee report issued in 2006 had taken an imprisoned Saddam Hussein’s word for it that he had not cooperated with al-Qaeda, although the terror group had met repeatedly with his Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS). This new study, which has received far less media attention, tells another story. “Captured documents reveal that the regime was willing to co-opt or support organizations it knew to be part of al-Qaeda,” it concludes, “as long as that organization’s near-term goals supported Saddam’s long-term vision.”

The identities of two of Saddam’s beneficiaries ought to be enough to cause the Senate to rescind, and apologize for, its attempted exoneration of the deposed Iraqi government. One of those groups is Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Ayman al-Zawahiri’s organization that became the nucleus of al-Qaeda. The other is the Afghani Islamic Party, which Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard tells us controlled that part of Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden established his training camps in the early 90s.

In addition, Saddam has funded Ansar al-Islam, which has become the core of al-Qaeda in Iraq, as well as Filipino al-Qaeda affiliate Abu Sayyaf, and a Bahrainian group called the Army of Muhammad, which an IIS document describes as an “offshoot of bin Laden” whose use of a different title “can be a way of camouflaging the organization.”

This tells us not only that Iraq was collaborating with al-Qaeda, but that it was doing so surreptitiously. That’s why we’re learning that Saddam assisted many affiliates of, and precursors to, bin Laden’s organization, but we’re not likely to find a picture of the Butcher of Baghdad directly handing Osama an enormous check, as if he’d just won the Dinah Shore Classic.

Not that it would make any difference, as long as we are operating under the “smoking gun” standard. Even if we had a video of the two men’s lips meeting as they nibbled their way from opposite ends of a long strand of spaghetti, the Democrats and therefore the news media would forcefully deny any relation between them. They’d probably even argue that if the two villains were really in cahoots, they’d never be careless enough to be seen together.

Perhaps because of our gullibility regarding dual-use materials related to Saddam’s WMD programs, he seems to have understood that all he needed was a modicum of deniability in order to placate the West. If an al-Qaeda terror cell wanted to be eligible for Iraqi funding, all it needed to do was change its name to al-Cougar Mellencamp, and it could count on the rest of the world to play dumb.

By swiftly dismissing the evidence as it arises, the three magic words have spared the “Bush lied” chorus responsibility for everything about which it has been proven wrong. Critics of inaccurate prewar intelligence have themselves been far less accurate in their anti-war intelligence, such as their certainty that Islamic terrorists would never cooperate with an infidel like Saddam. As long as they maintain that there’s “no smoking gun” to the contrary, however, they need never admit fault.

By refusing to accept unwanted realities, they’ve relegated themselves to the land of the anti-war lotus-eaters, where they remain comfortably numb to the impact of the emerging facts. The tragedy is that most American news consumers have become unwittingly trapped in that haze-filled netherworld with them.

by Daniel Clark

If it’s true that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, then that explains the tendency of liberal Democrats to seek shelter behind the Stars and Stripes.

When Barack Obama tried to distance himself from the anti-American ramblings of his spiritual advisor, Jeremiah Wright, he enlisted the help of not one, but eight American flags. He must have figured that, with all those banners standing behind him, he’d sound patriotic no matter what he actually said. That was apparently an accurate assessment, in fact, as few accounts of his widely lauded speech have bothered to note that he indirectly blamed Wright’s hatred of America on America itself.

This is the same Sen. Obama, remember, who had once worn an American flag pin on his lapel, but removed it in protest of the war in Iraq. The war continues, and so does Obama’s protesting it; nevertheless, he has changed his mind and embraced the American flag, now that he needs it as a security blanket.

Bill Clinton affected a similar reconciliation back in 1994. When he’d been a student at Oxford during the Vietnam War, he had protested against his own country on foreign soil. He had by that point been drafted, but had received an unprecedented deferment in exchange for an insincere promise to join the ROTC. In a letter justifying his duplicity to his ROTC director, Col. Eugene Holmes, Clinton told the former POW and Bataan Death March survivor about his “loathing the military.” Solipsistically unaware of the insult he was delivering, he wrote in closing, “Merry Christmas.”

While Clinton was running for president in 1992, Col. Holmes warned of “the imminent danger to our country of a draft-dodger becoming Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States.” In an affidavit detailing the ways in which Clinton had misled him, the colonel explained, “These actions cause me to question both his patriotism and his integrity.”

This personal history made President Clinton’s presence at Normandy for the 50th anniversary of the D-Day invasion more than a little awkward. As usual, he figured it was nothing that a little superficial contrivance couldn’t fix. Using an American soldier’s grave as the setting for a photo-op, he picked up a small flag that had obviously been left there on the ground as a prop. He then unfurled and planted it, in a thoroughly unconvincing moment of faux-spontaneity.

When it comes to cynical use of the American flag for political cover, nobody can top Sen. John Kerry. When he was with Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Kerry co-authored a book whose cover featured a gang of hippies hoisting an upside-down flag, in a mock Iwo Jima pose. Included in its pages was the false testimony he infamously related to the Senate in 1971, in which he slandered his fellow soldiers with accusations of murder, rape and mutilation. Kerry had also thrown away his military ribbons in protest, and secretly met with the Vietcong in Paris, as a representative of the VVAW.

By the time Kerry ran for president a few decades later, he tried his best to present himself instead as Audie Murphy, Sergeant York and Popeye, all rolled into one. At the 2004 Democratic National Convention, he comically surrounded himself with American flags, including an enormous one hanging directly above the podium. “We call her Old Glory,” he lectured. “For us, that flag is the most powerful symbol of who we are and what we believe in.” Whatever desecrating the flag had said about who he is and what he believes in, he didn’t explain.

Like Obama and Clinton, Sen. Kerry was using the American flag as a fig leaf, to conceal his naked hostility toward the United States. For these three, Old Glory plays the same role as the betrayed wives of sleazy politicians like Jim McGreevey, Larry Craig, Eliot Spitzer, and … well, Bill Clinton. Like those women, American flags have been repeatedly placed next to their unfaithful mates, as if to signify acceptance of them, despite their faults. The image being presented is that it is the flags that are endorsing these liberal Democrats, instead of the reverse. Unlike the politician’s wives, however, the flags cannot consent to this degradation.

That’s why these men are able to manipulate our national symbol in a manner apparently inconsistent with their true beliefs, without considering themselves to be hypocrites. For them to use the Stars and Stripes to mop up their political messes is simply another of their usual desecrations.

– By Daniel Clark

Like Bill Clinton before him, Barack Obama is waging a campaign of “change” – a buzzword whose meaning he’s never been forced to explain. That’s because the word itself resonates with his liberal supporters, who see virtue in the image of themselves as “agents of change.” They portray conservatives, by contrast, as “defenders of the status quo.”

To be sure, there are particular changes that conservatives do fear. Creeping socialism, moral relativism, and the dissolution of the nuclear family are just a few examples. That only stands to reason, because it would take someone completely devoid of values to welcome all changes indiscriminately. If there’s anyone who fears and hates the very concept of change, however, it is those on the political left.

The most obvious manifestation of this lies in the area of environmentalism, where the main concern in recent years has been “climate change.” Despite the fact that the climate has changed constantly throughout history, liberals are convinced that the earth is at its optimal temperature right now, a determination they feel free to make, as self-appointed managers of the ecosystem. Thus they are determined to thwart any further changes, regardless of what hardships their efforts impose everyone else.

Other natural processes they want to ban include extinction, erosion, and the introduction of invasive species. Not that liberals are arrogant, mind you; it’s just that they’ve taken it upon themselves to assign geographic boundaries to all of creation. Perhaps we should be grateful that they allow the earth to continue orbiting the sun.

Their view of economics is not much different. To this day, the Industrial Revolution remains an object of liberal scorn. They still condemn the assembly line as dehumanizing, but now also bemoan the replacement of assembly line workers with machines.

Whenever unemployment rises, you can count on liberals to demand a stop to corporate downsizing. Of course, if corporations couldn’t downsize, they’d never take a chance on expanding in the first place. That’s okay, though, because liberals regard growing, successful corporations as menaces to society, just as they do shrinking, failing ones. Changes in either direction are equally worthy of their contempt.

If liberals had gotten their way, they’d have held back progress in order to save the jobs of the ice man and the blacksmith. Don’t believe it? Just look at the way they decry the loss of neighborhood “mom and pop” stores. Their enemies in this case are the large retail and supermarket chains, which shoppers find more convenient than going to separate, specialized stores scattered around town. To consumers – many of them moms and pops themselves – this change has undoubtedly been one for the better, but liberals lament it all the same.

The whole Marxist foundation of liberal economic policy contends that society is divided into distinct and static economic classes, which the Democrats try to enforce through government activism. The progressive income tax, among other measures, aims to entrench these divisions by punishing upwardly mobility. Far be it for mere citizens to violate those class separations by climbing the economic ladder. Liberals’ message to the so-called “middle class” and “working class” is clear: This is your lot in life. Get used to it.

When it comes to foreign policy, liberals resist change, even if the current situation is intolerable. During the Cold War, they fought to preserve the doctrine of “mutually assured destruction,” by which the only thing preventing the Soviets from vaporizing us was their fear that we’d do the same to them. The Democrats opposed Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative – which had the potential to render long-range ballistic missiles obsolete – preferring instead to remain in a precarious standoff with an immoral and powerful aggressor.

In recent years, they’ve warned us against destabilizing the Middle East, despite the fact that the only thing stable about it is its constant state of insanity. We’re no more capable of destabilizing that part of the world than we are of burning ashes, but liberals don’t want us to pursue our terrorist enemies there, for fear that we might disturb the usual pattern of bloodshed.

Seeing themselves as the agents of change, liberals cannot abide those changes which are not of their own doing. They have an especially difficult time accepting changes that suggest the existence of a higher power than themselves. Once they have assumed responsibility for everything from wealth distribution to the temperature of the earth, the last thing they need is to have some meddlesome Supreme Being hanging around.

Groucho Marx used to say that he refused to join any club that would have him as a member. Following that rule, he could have registered with either of our major political parties without fear of contradiction.

No organization that isn’t directly involved in government would choose its leaders the way the Republicans and Democrats do. The NRA, for example, would never invite members of Sarah Brady’s organization to cast ballots in its elections. Only the political parties – the same people who are responsible for the federal tax code, Social Security and the National Endowment for the Arts – could be so bereft of logic and integrity as to allow their most important decisions to be made in part by their enemies.

As usual, the Republican presidential nomination was all but decided after only about a dozen states had voted. Many of those early states held open primaries, which means that some Democrats and independents had more of a say in picking the Republican nominee than most Republicans did.

With their own party’s nomination already in the bag, large numbers of Republicans are now participating in the Democrat primaries in those states where they’re allowed. That means a Republican voter in Texas may cast a meaningful ballot in the Democrats’ nominating process, but not in that of his own party.

Perhaps even more vexing to registered voters from both parties is the fact that some states allow registered independents into their primaries as well. Common sense dictates that you can’t have a nominee if you don’t even have a party. But then, if everyone had common sense, it would be called unanimous sense. Since it’s not, that means there are people who haven’t got it. As a result, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of independents have been allowed to participate in the primaries, while continuing to smugly consider themselves to be above partisan politics.

Moreover, the Republican and Democrat primaries have been crashed by members of minor parties, representing libertarians, vegetarians, octogenarians, and probably even the Mad Hungarian for all we know. People who otherwise disdain the two-party system suddenly decide to become donkeys and elephants for a day, and they’re allowed to get away with it, without being required to do so much as knock on the door and say “swordfish.” Even Triple-A has more stringent membership rules than that.

Incredibly, both parties passively allow their voting bases to be diluted in this manner, while at the same time effectively locking huge percentages of their own voters out of the process. Consequently, millions of Americans are discovering that, in the spirit of Groucho, they belong to parties that refuse to have them as members.

The development of this predicament has been aided by the parties’ natural proclivity to pass the buck. Since open primary laws are the result of state legislation, the national parties don’t regard the matter as any of their business. If they really wanted to take control of the process, however, they could do so easily, and the Democrats have recently shown us how.

By refusing to seat the delegates from Michigan and Florida, the Democratic Party is dictating primary election laws to the states. Those two states had moved their primaries ahead on the calendar, against the wishes of the parties, which are determined to protect the special status of traditional early primary states. The Republican Party reacted by cutting the numbers of delegates from the offending states in half, whereas the Democrats eliminated them altogether.
There’s no good reason the same shouldn’t be done to restore the integrity of the nominating process. If a state allows members of one party to vote in another party’s primary, lets registered independents cast primary ballots, conducts voter registrations at the polling stations on election day, or declines to even require voters to identify their party affiliations, then that state should be stripped of its delegates.

If the Democrats think that’s a fitting punishment for committing a faux pas against the town of Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, then neither party ought to have any compunction about imposing it on states that corrupt the process by inviting the wrong people into it. Sure, that would leave a small number of states to select the presidential nominees, but that’s what’s happening already. The difference is in whether the two major parties want to stand up for their own interests, or to preserve the same arcane procedures and provincial jealousies that have made the current system the farce that it is.