Hunter College Republicans

Senator Hillary Clinton won New Hampshire today, after a crushing defeat in Iowa last week. Hillary long presented herself as the most qualified and most experienced candidate. Americans don’t vote by resume, however. The process is far more human than that.

Senator John F. Kennedy trumped Vice President Nixon. Governor Bill Clinton took the Presidency from George H.W. Bush, a President who oversaw the most one-sided victory in the history of warfare. (His son would preside over a miserable miscalculation in Iraq, but still secured reelection by a more human appeal to strengthen national security versus the boorish Kerry.)

Americans like to see a positive, human message: youth, vibrancy, optimism, strength, resilience, passion. What Hillary needed to do most was drop her claim to throne.

This is precisely what Hillary has done. Her message during all of 2007 was, “I am inevitable.” Obama’s smashing victory changed that, so to continue hawking that would have been blatantly dishonest to voters.

So she did what any woman worth her salt would have done: she cried. She shed a few tears—genuine, I believe—and voters saw what Hillary was: a candidate under siege. As her voice cracked, she spoke about what she wanted for the country, and how she only wanted the best for us and our children. Conservatives and pundits across the board (myself included) scoffed at the display of weakness, believing it would hurt her.

Unfortunately, we didn’t anticipate that all that attention also meant that the clip would be played on television screens all day. Overnight, decisively behind in the polls, she went from being a walking resume, to a real person. The acting wasn’t superb, but it was a sincere display of a moderate amount of emotion. According to polls, up to a fifth of all Democratic primary voters decided who to vote for the very day of the election. Certainly, the rare display of emotion was on the voters’ minds.

This is a big, big boost for Hillary Clinton. Obama supporters would have loved to predict New Hampshire as another nail on the coffin for the Hillary campaign. Unfortunately, Hillary has upped her game, and gotten in touch with her human message again. In her victory speech, she thanked New Hampshire for allowing her to “find her voice” again. She has broken Obama’s monopoly on a human message.

Now, it wasn’t a decisive victory, certainly by less than five points. (Compare that with Obama’s nine-point margin in Iowa last week.) Further, she had a massive infrastructure in place in New Hampshire, with a strong ability to turn out Hillary supporters. The Obama campaign took the news in stride, accepting second place with pride and dignity.

But with Hillary’s newfound game, Obama’s job just got harder.
Some may say Hillary’s show of emotion wasn’t calculated, but as Bill Kristol says in the piece below, nothing the Clintons do is not calculated.

Best Clip of Clinton Crying:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=T1sZ0DrEEMw

Best Commentary of Clinton Crying (Fair and Balanced ;)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=0j4hJvqtMdI

It has been tirelessly repeated that the Bush Administration's foreign policy post-9/11 was not the same as what Bush ran on as a presidential candidate in the 2000 election. Governor Bush of Texas was against nation-building, against secret detentions of Muslim-Americans (which got him 75% of the Muslim vote), and against the world's superpower being the world's police force.

This was the sober foreign policy of the old-guard of the Republican Party, namely James Baker and George H.W. Bush.

After 9/11, of course, much of that changed. Our troops are nation-building in the Middle East, enemy combatants are detained and their detentions challenged in court, and the United States has now reclaimed its status as Defender of the Free World. This, of course, is the rise of the Vulcans, or Vice President Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Norman Podhoretz.

However, the Vulcans were not prepared for the difficulties of their ambitious goals. Though Gen. Petraeus' surge is a military success, the War in Iraq is a public relations failure.

Meanwhile, Assad of Syria and the Ayatollahs of Iran are biding their time until Bush leaves office, an unfortunate by-product of free elections is that time is on the side of dictators and despots. Simply wait for the tough guy to leave, maybe they'll elect a woman who could be easier to intimidate.

As for defender of the Free World, the United States is allowing a genocide in Darfur and a Saudi regime which sentences a woman to forty lashes for having been gang-raped.

The world may not have been ready for the neconservative revolution of freedom and liberty. America cannot do it alone, our supremacy is not that unrivalled. We have Russia, China, and Iran working against it. Israel gives us its important support, the EU drags its feet. America cannot do it alone, and we tried.

Now, however, a new foreign policy expert has arrived. Rumsfeld resigned, Rove the same, Wolfowitz the disgraced resigned head of the World Bank, Podhoretz is working for Giuliani.

The only advisors left from the President's original circle are Vice President Cheney and Secretary of State Condi Rice. And Condi has bested Cheney.

READ THIS ARTICLE FOR MORE ON HOW CONDI WON THE GAME:
http://www.slate.com/id/2180103/pagenum/all/#page_start


Condi is now running Bush's foreign policy. She is behind the drive for a Palestinian state. She is behind the cooperation with Syria at Annapolis, the collaboration with Iran to reduce violence in Iraq. She may even be behind convincing the President to release the parts of the NIE report about Iran's defunct nuclear ambitions (something which could not have happened without the President's approval).

Condi has always been the most brilliant person in the President's circle. She was a Soviet-era expert, which still leaves her to blame in the question: How the hell did relations with Russia sour when we have a Secretary of State who is a Russian expert and speaks fluent Russian? She should be having tea with Putin every week, alternatingly talking about pleasant things and ICBMs alike.

Nonetheless, Rice and Cheney are academics. They both have their PhD's in political science. Wolfowitz was too (University of Chicago), but he was an ideologue, who managed to convince Cheney and Rumsfeld. Unfortunately, Rice was the only pragmatic one in the President's circle, and she gets to mould Bush's legacy.

With record low approval ratings, the Bush Administration will be recorded in history as having been a mixed bag. It will be one that had approval ratings upwards of 90% during 9/11, and the lowest in the last year of his office. A solid Republican majority in the beginning, a formidable Democratic Congress by the end. Powerful victories (invasion of Iraq) with crushing defeats (Social Security reform).

And final, a schitzo foreign policy. Non-interventionist Republican to neoconservative to realist. With Rice finally having control of the President's ear, even more so than Cheney, we can finally expect a pragmatic academic to be running US foreign policy. I've never been more optimistic for the Bush administration.

The Kingdom, starring Jamie Foxx, is one of the best pictures ever made on Middle Eastern politics. After a triple attack on an residential complex for American living in Saudi Arabia, an FBI team is denied by the Saudi government from investigating the attack. Jamie Foxx, head FBI investigator, coerces Washington politics to go into the desert kingdom anyway, and what he finds is a massive cover-up going to the highest levels of the Saudi regime.

  The beginning of the film was great. But first, two men in Saudi police uniforms hijack a police jeep, and begin spraying machine gun fire into a softball game in a residential complex populated by Americans. Then, a suicide bomber blows himself up, killing survivors of the machine gun fire. After things have settled, the FBI attache in the residential complex phones home. But then, another bomb goes off, killing even more people. The rest of the film is filled with similarly climatic action sequences. This film does not disappoint.

First, this movie deserves bonus points for complexity. Saudi Arabia is not displayed as an exotic desert kingdom, but a very real country with very real problems. The fact that the oil industry needs hundreds of skilled American workers, and thousands of unskilled workers from other countries, conflicts with the significant segment of the population which believes non-Muslims have no place "occupying" Islam's holy land.

Second, there are very real conflicts between the Saudi government needed the Americans to support them, but also the ability to project a strong monarchy to the Saudi people. This is portrayed throughout the film, as the Saudi government and US State Department work together to suppress the fact that an American team is investigating the worst terrorist attack on Saudi soil.

Finally, as for the end, I will say that the last twenty minutes of this film is better than all two hours of Syriana. Minimal romance and no sex scenes are a plus. This is a true Middle East political blockbuster. If you're a foreign policy wonk, Arabist, or anyone of the similar lines of profession, this is the best thing (geo-politically, at least) since "Three Kings".

Conservative economic policy is the closest approximation to a modern understanding of economics. Liberals are over 500 years behind in their understanding of money, and their policies are based upon notions that any economist would call absurd, like:

- "Raising taxes is a good thing for the economy."
- "The rich don't pay any taxes."
- "National healthcare would actually save money for businesses."
- "We need a raise in the minimum wage."

And most absurd of all:

- "The state should take care of its citizens."

These laughable concepts form the basis of all erroneous conclusions liberals reach. (Well, at least the economic ones.)

Conservatives tend to follow the prestigious Austrian school of economics, which teaches a radically free-market ideology in relatively dense language, but devoid of the complexity and mathematical diarrhea of modern economics. Libertarians also pay homage to brilliant economists in the mould of von Mises.

Worry not, though. The demagoguery of liberals is bound to backfire. If liberals do implement their economic utopia, the system will inevitably collapse. Then conservatives can step in, and easily abolish upwards of 90% of federal, state, and local governments.

The highest result of education is tolerance.

The freedom of the press is the most important right, but the public's right to critique the press is also fundamental. The Fourth Branch of government consistently behaves like the traditional three branches, that is to say, they pretend they that are immune to criticism and above the law.

Frankly, the press are not immune to criticism. No more so than the President, your Congressman, a police officer, or a US soldier.

Just once, I'd like to see someone abandon their constituency for the good of the country. A black man vehemently oppose affirmative action, or a white man sell his house to black people. Yes, we live in a free society, where we can demand entitlements and government protections, but where is the instinct to solve all this as reasonable men and women?

We should be eager to reach solutions and solve problems. Instead of give and take, we prefer to more firmly entrench ourselves. For once, I'd like to see two opposing political groups achieve a compromise that no one is entirely content with, but at least they have solved a problem for the American people. This stubborn-headed procrastination is threatning to collapse the American economy in many ways.

Trade with China, for example. When Nixon made peace with China, he avoided nuclear war. Now, however, the Chinese are in a position to destabilize our economy. With global nuclear warfare no longer a threat, we should begin rebuilding America's industrial base. Whether through market forces or government subsidies, something needs to be done for Americans who are graduating school or have not complete school.

Manual labor has been an essential part of our economy. The hardest thing about working in America is not hard work. Thanks to OSHA and other regulations, dangerous jobs are well-paying jobs, and most Americans work in very safe settings. The hardest thing is getting a job to break through and build a career on. The hardest thing is leving that dead-end job and getting one to rise in.

The responsibility lies not only on the individual. The American corporation is chartered by our government. If corporations move jobs overseas to sell us cheaper products, we will become an economic society with a wider economic gap.

Nor should the unions remain stubborn at all times. There are times where workers should take a cut. But only if the corporations will also fulfill their civic responsibilities and take care of their employees when times are good. There was a time when the American economy did function like this. Now, every problem with the American economy can be traced to an imbalance in the power of government, a corporation, or a union.

But with strong middle-class industrial jobs disappearing, our economy is being reduced to two types of jobs: low-paying service jobs and high-paying specialist jobs.

If specialists are the only high-income earners, we are in danger of becoming a society of little general knowledge and common link. Specialists tend to revolve their lives around their field, so demanding is their career choice.

Unskilled workers will be forced to take low-paying service jobs, and essentially, all non-specialists will be significantly poorer. This is the shrinking of the middle class, and it is becoming a danger to our American way of life. The American economy is centered around the middle class, and we need to do everything possible to stop it from shrinking.

The future for the American economy is bleak. In essence, all of America will be a service economy with money circulating between those who serve others. It threatens us with the prospect of us all being waiters--whose taxes pay the salaries of bus drivers. Niether political party is willing to rise to the occassion and stand up against China, corporations, and unions who threaten to derail the American economy. These institutions should be keeping each other in check. Big Government is just as big a threat as Big Corporation and so is Big Union. Anyone disagree?

The left has no real arguments, only catch-phrases for their sheep-like constituents to understand. A real political ideology doesn't need the oh-so-clever rhyme "Bush Lies, Who Dies?".

For Democrats, history begins yesterday. Bush lied to the country about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction? Iraq was complying with the UN inspectors, and Bush invaded anyway? Well, look at their beloved Bill Clinton.

In 1998, Saddam Hussein threw out the UN weapons inspectors, and Bill Clinton launched Operation Desert Fox. Below are the first three paragraphs of Clinton's speech to the American people when announcing the campaign:

"Earlier today, I ordered America's armed forces to strike military and security targets in Iraq. They are joined by British forces. Their mission is to attack Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs and its military capacity to threaten its neighbors.

Their purpose is to protect the national interest of the United States, and indeed the interests of people throughout the Middle East and around the world.

Saddam Hussein must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the world with nuclear arms, poison gas or biological weapons."

(link: http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1998/12/16/tran
scripts/clinton.html )

Bill Clinton bombed Iraq in 1998 for possessing WMDs. Everyone thought he had them. The UN, the US, the French, the Russians. All these intelligence agencies thought he had the weapons.

President Bush didn't lie. To "lie" means to intentionally deceive. If Bush didn't know that Saddam abandoned his program (and Saddam never told anyone), then he didn't intentionally mislead. It seems that the supporters of Bill Clinton (the greatest liar we've ever had, he INTENTIONALLY misled the American people all the time on the Lincoln Bedroom, Chinese nuclear secrets, etc.) have forgotten the definition of lie.

Frankly, President Bush is the most amazing President in modern history. Saddam was bribing the UN and Europeans with the Oil for Food program. They were in his pocket. No wonder they opposed the war. With friends like these, who needs enemies? But, Saddam would have gotten the UN to lift sanctions within a few years, and he could have restarted his WMD program (which even Bill Clinton knew he was going to pursue) and invaded the Middle East.

President Bush stopped that war well ahead of time. President Bush pulled off the Middle East equivalent of stopping Hitler in 1933. Liberals want another 6 million Jews to die before anyone lifts a finger. God Bless George W. Bush, the greatest President in modern history.

Before you respond, I'd like everyone to read this article on Operation Desert Fox. For liberals in the media and elsewhere, history begins yesterday. Understanding Bill Clinton's attack on Iraq in 1998 is crucial to understanding the invasion in 2003.

Whether you're for gay marriage or not... say it.

If a politician can't be honest this issue, how can we believe them on national security, abortion, and other important issues?

Yesterday, all but two Democratic presidential candidates appeared at a debate hosted by Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights group, and Logo, a gay and lesbian-oriented television channel.

Senator Barack Obama did not say he would have signed a gay marriage bill if it came up while he was serving in the Illinois legislature.

Senator Hillary Clinton defended her husband's signing of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in 1996, and said she also did not support gay marriage.

And the darling of the far-left, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, said he believed homosexuality was a "choice".

If all the Democrats are running to the right of Republicans on this issue, gay marriage must be unpopular, and Democrats are abandoning their gay constituents, who vote overwhelmingly Democrat. This continues the history of the Democratic party of abandoning so-called oppressed minorities. What have Democrats done for blacks lately? Jews? About inner city and rural poverty?

Frankly, the only cause liberals have not sold out (and never will) is abortion. So driven is the Democratic Party on the wholesale destruction of human life, that everything else on their agenda can wait. Well, that and raising your taxes.

(See the Bill Richardson clip here at the New York Times' coverage.

http://www.nytimes.com/cq/2007/08/10/cq_3261.htmla>)

We live in a culture where political correctness reigns so supreme, that one believes receiving dirty looks constitutes persecution. A July 30th Newsweek article on Muslims living in the United States covered a group of successful Muslims in Cleveland being addressed by President Bush.

Fareed Siddiq, a prominent financial adviser in the region, asked the President what he was doing to improve America's image in the Muslim world. He also asked the President what he should tell his relatives in Pakistan why he lives in America.

The President replied, "Great question. I'm confident your answer is, 'I love living in America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, the country where you can come and ask the president a question and a country where--', Are you a Muslim?", the President asked, interrupting himself.

"Yes," replies our Mr. Siddiq.

"Where you can worship your religion freely. It's a great country where you can do that."

Newsweek asked Mr. Siddiq how he felt about that answer.

"It was a good answer, said Siddiq, but not good enough for him-- not when he [...] is afraid to use the bathroom on flights because he doesn't want to frighten his fellow passengers as he walks down the aisle."

Living in America "was not good enough for him", because he must cautiously use the bathroom. A Muslim who has made his success here pitifully believes that a dirty look, or mere suspicion after 9/11, is unreasonable and "not good enough". Perhaps he should leave all his wealth here, and go to Pakistan, where at least he won't get dirty looks.

While people are innocent until proven guilty, we as Americans must be ever-vigilant against terrorism. It was the passengers who brought down Flight 93, and passengers must not be hampered in their readiness to react and serve their country again by strong-arming potential hijackers. Muslim-Americans, including myself, will just have to nervously go to the bathroom. This is the price that we pay for being safe. If you ask me, that's a bargain.

Many have had to pay much more in order to ensure security. Japanese-Americans were rounded up, as were Italian and German-Americans, during World War II. President Lincoln declared martial law in the state of Maryland. After communal riots that killed thousands in India, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency. American Muslims... complain that everyone watches them as they walk down the aisle.

The Newsweek article had a quote by Charlie Allen, intelligence chief at the Department of Homeland Security, "Most Muslims in America think of themselves as Americans." The 9/11 hijackers were not Americans, but foreigners; as opposed to the London bombers, who were homegrown Muslims. American Muslims are upwardly mobile, successful, and peace-loving.

If nothing else, this shows that American Muslims are fully-assimilated. But they are too assimilated when they act like the rest of the spoiled princes and princesses that now represent our nation, and feel a single pea through 70 mattresses. Whatever inconveniences 9/11 had for American Muslims, it is hardly a pressing matter.

This post has been edited by an administrator

The Iranian nuclear program is not simply a brainchild of the radical Shi'a ayatollahs who seized power in 1979.  In much of the Third World, and Iran is no exception, a nuclear program is a symbol of national pride, of self-sufficient defense capability, as well as technological prowess. "Our living standard may not be as high as the First World's, but we can achieve nuclear technology, and just about anything else you can do too."

Frankly, the Iranian regime is largely being democratic in pursuing nuclear weapons. This is not to say we should let them acquire these weapons, as they are still a terror-sponsoring nation and have developed advanced missiles capable of hitting Israel and (yes) Eastern Europe. But the idea is that the weapons program is so popular, even if there was a democratic revolution in Iran, they would probably still pursue a nuclear device.

 Further, nuclear technology is 60-year old technology. It's about as old as the microwave. Can the United States seriously expect to forever derail the ambitions of every nation that seeks a nuclear device? Probably not.

How about an aerial strike? This is problematic for two reasons. First, Iranian facilities are often in underground bunkers or actually underneath mountains. Since there is talk of preemptively using nuclear weapons to derail the Iranian program, and since it is theorized that some Iranian facilities may be underground beneath cities, it would be difficult to nuke a city just because there's a nuclear bunker in there. Conventional bombing would also be quite catastrophic, as the Allied bombing of Berlin to shake up Hitler's bunkers was.

 But more importantly, such a strike would only be a temporary delay. Strike-Iran advocates often cite the example of Israel's strike on Iraq's nuclear plant in Osirak. However, after the liberation of Kuwait in 1991, UN inspectors found that Saddam had simply accelerated his nuclear plans after the attack, and succeeded in keeping further developments clandestine. Recently, Libya voluntarily abandoned its WMD program (which was secretly built with Pakistani and North Korean help). It is very easy for rogue nations to continue their nuclear programs in private, especially ones with as much surface area as Iran and Libya.

The sad reality is, an invasion of Iran will fail, and a strike will only be a temporary delay. Unless diplomacy succeeds (and it does not appear likely at this moment), Iran will attain nuclear weapons. My post next week will deal on how to deal with a nuclear Iran,  drawing lessons from our relations with a nuclear Soviet Union.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. That's how a reform-minded governor is now wrapped up in New York politics-as-usual. Especially since it was revealed last week that Governor Spitzer's aides were using state funds to smear a political opponent.

The situation for the Governor is so bad that even the New York Times, normally a Democratic mouthpiece, could not spin it in his favor in this article. A full 50% of New Yorkers believe Spitzer knew about his aides' activities, and a whopping 80% believe he should testify under oath under an investigation. A minuscule 33% believe Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's report clearing the governor of any wrongdoing.

But the governor's troubles began much earlier. First, New York healthcare professionals lambasted the governor's hospital cuts. Then, environmentalist and community-conscious New Yorkers were upset at Spitzer's selling out to big corporations in establishing a giant casino upstate, though the project would return New Yorkers' gambling money in Atlantic City and Mohegan Sun back to the state.

Then, denizens of New York City were outraged at Spitzer's silence when State Senate Republicans derail Mayor Mike Bloomberg's plan to reduce congestion in the city. Interestingly, after all these setbacks, Spitzer is finally concerned with being a populist governor again. He has now signed a bill that will make Bloomberg's plan to beautify the city (at exorbitant cost to city commuters) a reality.

It is well known in New York circles that Eliot Spitzer is the most image-conscious politicians in the state. But with his progressive, reform-minded platform, and 69% landslide, Spitzer wrongly believed that his mandate to govern came with a blank check. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and Spitzer's campaign believed they could bend the rules for the greater good, to institute greater and more progressive reforms. It's OK to use Machiavellian tactics, to derail those evil Republicans. It's for the greater good.

This is the great folly of liberalism. Conservatives new reforms must be implemented through the people's branch, that is, the legislature. We are the true democrats and populists. Liberals prefer avenues of Supreme Court rulings (by unelected Supreme Court judges) forcing state legislatures to do their dirty work, which could never win on a national or state-wide platform.