I responded today to a letter I read in the Wall Street Journal where the writer claimed the following:

“Whether you agree or disagree with his [George W. Bush] policies, he has been unable to sustain the goodwill and support of the world community that accrued to the U.S. after 9/11, largely as a result of his lack of experience and knowledge of the world at large and our place in the global community.”

I’ve heard this misnomer repeated ad nauseam for years, but I have found that true goodwill doesn’t come with strings attached.

Indeed, the very concept of “squandered goodwill,” as it’s often packaged, is nonsense. Goodwill is something someone proffers out of sheer benevolence. If one must bend to the whims and beliefs of the giver in order to earn goodwill then it was never goodwill to begin with.

Many of the liberal’s so-called “world community,” well before the war in Iraq began, offered support only on a conditional basis while simultaneously telling us we had it coming.

One month after 9-11, NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani justifiably refused to accept a $10 million donation to the Twin Towers Fund from Saudi Prince Al-Walid because the prince suggested the U.S. should lessen its support of Israel. The irony of a self-imposed royal autocrat from a family of autocrats telling the United States it should support an Islamic-fundamentalist hijacked non-country instead of the region’s only liberally constitutional representative democracy goes without saying.

Here’s another example of the Goodwill Misnomer: John Rosenthal noted in the WSJ the “myth of squandered sympathy,” citing the now famous op-ed in France’s Le Monde by Jean-Marie Colombani, titled “We Are All Americans.” Just one year later — again, six months before the war in Iraq — Mr. Colombani reflected that “we have all become anti-American,” specifically citing American opposition to both the Kyoto Protocol and an International Criminal Court. Curiously, Rosenthal noted, the Le Monde writer failed to mention that both were extensions of Clinton administration policies — policies quite in place when Europeans were supposedly “all Americans.”

Meanwhile and conversely, the US is often the recipient of obstruction by a 192-member United Nations whose overall budget is financed by almost 25 percent by the American taxpayer – and yet we continue to fund when debatably none of the other 191 members would put up with it.

And when the US military delivered aid to Indonesia in 2004 for the Asian Tsunami or to Myanmar this year we did not demand their governments oppose treaties harmful to US interests, or give money to the victims of Palestinian suicide bombers, etc.

Instead, we just helped them.

I found this interesting: John Pomfret of the Washington Post takes some wind from the sails of the argument that within 10-20 years China’s economy will outpace that of the United States. This was argued in The Economist, for example, recently. It’s curious that so many people that consider themselves “liberal” would celebrate the potential for an illiberal and often brutal regime to become the world’s largest economic superpower, isn’t it?

But Pomfret’s article focuses on the facts of the argument, and he finds them quite lacking. Here’s the highlights:

Too many constraints are built into the country’s [China's] social, economic and political systems. For four big reasons – dire demographics, an overrated economy, an environment under siege and an ideology that doesn’t travel well – China is more likely to remain the muscle-bound adolescent of the international system than to become the master of the world.

In the West, China is known as “the factory to the world,” the land of unlimited labor where millions are eager to leave the hardscrabble countryside for a chance to tighten screws in microwaves. If the country is going to rise to superpowerdom, says conventional wisdom, it will do so on the back of its massive workforce.

But China’s demographics stink. No country is aging faster than the People’s Republic, which is on track to become the first nation in the world to get old before it gets rich. Because of the Communist Party’s notorious one-child-per-family policy, the average number of children born to a Chinese woman has dropped from 5.8 in the 1970s to 1.8 today – below the rate of 2.1 that would keep the population stable. Meanwhile, life expectancy has shot up, from just 35 in 1949 to more than 73 today.

Economists worry that as the working-age population shrinks, labor costs will rise, significantly eroding one of China’s key competitive advantages.

The big number wheeled out to prove that China is eating our economic lunch is the U.S. trade deficit with China, which last year hit $256 billion. But nearly 60 percent of China’s total exports are churned out by companies not owned by Chinese. China is part of the global system, but it’s still the low-cost assembly and manufacturing part – and foreign, not Chinese, firms are reaping the lion’s share of the profits.

China’s environmental woes are no joke. This year, China will surpass the United States as the world’s No. 1 emitter of greenhouse gases. Sixteen of the world’s 20 most polluted cities are in China; 70 percent of its lakes and rivers are polluted and half its population lacks clean drinking water. By 2030, the nation will face a water shortage equal to the amount it consumes today; factories in the northwest have already been forced out of business because there just isn’t any water.

Yet we seem to revel in overestimating China. Recently I was at a party where a senior aide to a Democratic senator was discussing the business deal earlier this year in which a Chinese state-owned investment company had bought a big chunk of the Blackstone Group, a U.S. investment firm. The Chinese company has lost more than $1 billion, but the aide wouldn’t believe that it was just a bum investment. “It’s got to be part of a broader plan,” she insisted. “It’s China.”
I tried to convince her otherwise. I don’t think I succeeded.

Jonah Goldberg on ESPN’s decision to honor Tommie Smith and John Carlos.

Earlier this month, ESPN awarded Tommie Smith and John Carlos the Arthur Ashe Courage Award at the ESPYs — the sports network’s equivalent of the Oscars — for their once infamous, and now famous, black-power salutes from the medal platform at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics.

The stench of self-congratulation surrounding ESPN’s decision is thicker than the air in a locker room after double overtime. “As the passage of time has given us the opportunity to put their actions into the proper context,” gloats USC professor Todd Boyd in an ESPN.com column, “their supporters can now feel vindicated while their detractors must eat their words.”

The argument that Smith’s and Carlos’s critics must dine on their denunciations rests on an inch-deep nostalgia and the triumph of celebrity culture.

Comments by ESPN sportscaster Stuart Scott typify the inanity of ESPN’s award. Scott, who was 3 years old in 1968, nonetheless told the Desert Sun newspaper that he remembers how “tense” the times were and how he remembers thinking, “Oh, that was cool for a black man to do that.” He added: “As an adult, I get it even more now.” Even more than when he was barely out of diapers? That’s setting the bar high.

“I’ve got daughters,” Scott said, “so I have to explain to them why that was so important, and how much — even after they did it — grief and hatred they had to face when they came back to the States, to their own country. And why that means they’re courageous.”

By this standard — for want of a better word — any self-indulgent protest at the Olympics is proof of courage. This is hardly surprising: Radical chic is a corporate marketing plan these days. Che Guevara is a hero suburban teens stick on their T-shirts, and once “revolutionary” music provides the soundtrack for the latest Nike ad.

In today’s culture, is it even worth trying to remind people that the black-power salute was, for those who brandished it most seriously, a symbol of violence — rhetorical, political, and literal — against the United States? It was the high sign for a racist militia, the Black Panthers, which orchestrated the murder of innocents and allied itself with America’s enemies. In today’s lingo, you might even say black power was “divisive.”

But even a more benign view of the salute shouldn’t obscure the intense contradictions of ESPN’s decision to honor Carlos and Smith. Both men were members of the Olympic Project for Human Rights, which wanted a complete black boycott of the ’68 Olympics. The group considered an entire generation of heroic black athletes, including Jesse Owens and Jackie Robinson, to be Uncle Toms.

(Does ESPN endorse this piece of history, too? Yes? No? Hello?)

Another important distinction is that this was 1968, not 1938. By the end of the 1960s, America had seen two decades of steady — if too slow — racial progress. The black-power vision of an irredeemably “racist Amerikkka” was all but blind to the desegregation of the military, the accomplishments of Owens and Robinson, and the civil-rights acts of 1957, 1960, 1964 and even 1968. One hopes ESPN disagrees with those views as well.

There’s also the fact that the black-power salute amounted to an obscene gesture aimed directly at the Olympic ideal. “The Olympic Games as an ideal of brotherhood and world community is passe,” declared radical black sociologist Harry Edwards in 1968. Edwards organized the OPHR and pushed for the Olympic boycott. “The Olympics is so obviously hypocritical that even the Neanderthals watching TV know what they’re seeing can’t be true.”

In a sense, Edwards was right then — and now. The Olympic ideal of putting politics aside and celebrating pure athleticism has always been exactly that, an ideal. And all ideals are ultimately unachievable. China is using the Olympics to paper over the brutality of its repressive regime, just as Hitler did in 1936. In 1972, Palestinian terrorists — grateful for 1968′s lesson in the propaganda value of Olympics media attention — slaughtered Israeli athletes. Nations are political entities, so you can’t take the politics out of national rivalries.

The question is not, and never has been, whether the Olympic ideal can be achieved, but whether it should be pursued. By embracing those who spat on that idea, it seems ESPN thinks the answer is no. That is assuming ESPN gave much thought to the question in the first place.

Just in time for the next election cycle, Republican Sen. Ted Stevens has been indicted. Media outlets are naturally going out of their way to make sure everyone knows his political party… if only they applied the same rules to Democrats:

[Newsbusters] Hmmm. When Congressman William Jefferson of Louisiana was caught with bushels of money stuffed in a freezer, I do not recall Jordan or anyone else writing about the negative prospects for Jefferson’s fellow congressmen- some of whom were also under investigation. And I certainly do not recall that the Associated Press was particularly interested in following lobbyist Tony Rezko’s money trail when it appeared to be getting close to Obama. I have no sympathy for Stevens. if he did what he is accused of, he deserves to pay the price. It is things like this that dampen American enthusiasm for politicians. However, I don’t recall a similar hue and cry from the AP about serial defaulter Laura Richardson and her sweetheart deal, nor any interest in following the sweetheart deals for California Senator Dianne Feinstein’s husband. If only the Associated Press was as industrious in following up cases like this as they are when the target has an ‘R’ after his or her name. but that of course would require both objectivity and professionalism- something the AP has proven time and again that they sadly lack.

Even worse, William Jefferson is still serving.

On that note, here’s another measurement of the mainstream media’s clear slant and affection for Obama. Newsbuster’s research found that the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts gave Barack Obama ten times the air coverage during his 8-day trip overseas compared to John McCain’s 7-day trip in March. 92 minutes to just 8.5 minutes of coverage.

The MRC’s Peter Sasso calculated that the CBS Evening News was the most obviously tilted, with more than 34 minutes of Obama coverage during the eight days from July 20 through July 27. Back in March, McCain’s seven-day trip garnered a piddling ten seconds from CBS, a ridiculously lopsided 200-to-1 disparity. For its part, ABC’s World News gave Obama nearly as much coverage as CBS (about 33 minutes), or roughly 15 times more attention than they provided McCain’s trip (slightly more than two minutes). NBC Nightly News spent nearly 25 minutes covering Obama, or about four times more than they gave McCain back in March (a little over six minutes).

The decision by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to ban Iraqi athletes from the Beijing Olympics is truly disgusting, summarized succintly by Michael Soussan:

If Uday Hussein was acceptable to the IOC, why is the committee up in arms about the Iraqi government’s decision to reshuffle its Olympic management team? The answer is that Iraq’s new Olympic managers have not yet been accredited by the IOC. What will it take to get them accredited? Will they have to start torturing their athletes the way Uday used to do, when they failed to perform to his liking?

The IOC, if you didn’t know, claims that Iraq awarded its national Olympic committee based on politics. This is a joke considering it had no problemo with Saddam Hussein, who not only awarded posts based on political allies, but, you know, murdered anyone who wasn’t a political ally.

Amazing. Then again, this is the same committee that bestowed further legitimacy to a country, China, that doesn’t even acknowledge the right of its own citizens to speak, assemble or practice religion freely.

Related:

Uday Hussein’s death frees Iraqi athletes

The horrors of Saddam’s ‘sadist’ son

Iraqi’s Olympic chief turns on top aide

Were he Republican, wouldn’t he by now have been given the same “stupid” label the media gave Ronald Reagan, Dan Quayle and G.W. Bush?

Investor’s Business Daily has the tally, including:

• “Obama, who isn’t a member of the Senate banking committee, said, ‘”just this past week, we passed out of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, which is my committee, a bill to call for divestment from Iran.’”
• Obama: “I’ve now been in 57 states? I think one left to go. Alaska and Hawaii, I was not allowed to go to even though I really wanted to visit…”
• Obama: “You know, it’s always a bad practice to say ‘always’ or ‘never’ “
• Obama mentioned that as president he’d “expect to be dealing with [European leaders] over the next eight to 10 years” — 10 years?
• Obama: “Israel is a strong friend of Israel’s.”
• “He [Obama] confused Sioux Falls, S.D., with Sioux City, Iowa, claimed that Arkansas is closer to Kentucky than to Illinois, and called Iran — with population bigger than France’s and a land mass four times that of Germany — ‘a tiny country.’”
• “He [Obama] reckoned that tornadoes had killed 10,000 people in Kansas even though the real number was 12.”

Repetition in the era of mass communication is everything: presidents make no more or less gaffes than they did in the time of Lincoln — whose opponents likewise labeled him stupid, often calling him an “ape” or “monkey.” Sound familiar? — but the difference is it’s repetition in 24-hour news cycles, and whom the media targets and whom they give a break.

A compilation by the Weekly Standard’s John McCormack really gets down to brass tacks — how much money the mainstream media directs towards Democrats. It’s predictable but staggering nonetheless:

Follow the money, writes William Tate:

An analysis of federal records shows that the amount of money journalists contributed so far this election cycle favors Democrats by a 15:1 ratio over Republicans, with $225,563 going to Democrats, only $16,298 to Republicans.

Two-hundred thirty-five journalists donated to Democrats, just 20 gave to Republicans — a margin greater than 10-to-1. An even greater disparity, 20-to-1, exists between the number of journalists who donated to Barack Obama and John McCain.

And the International Herald Tribune reports

The Tyndall Report, a news coverage monitoring service that has the broadcast networks as clients, reports that three newscasts by the traditional networks — which have a combined audience of more than 20 million people — spent 114 minutes covering Obama since June; they spent 48 minutes covering McCain.

While the disparity in coverage of Obama and McCain is revealing, the quality of news coverage is much more important. And the media are all too often willing to give Obama a pass on his distortions.

For example, last night Barack Obama said on NBC: “What I said even at the time of the debate of the surge was that when you put 30,000 American troops on the ground, of course it’s going to have an impact. There’s no doubt about that.”

That’s not true. In January 2007, Obama said that the surge would not reduce the level of violence (see the YouTube video at the link). But Brian Williams never called Obama out on this lie.

Great op-ed by Cindy McCain, wife of John, on her recent trip to Rwanda:

…With some education, training, basic rights and empowerment, women will transform a society — and the world.

Women today make up a disproportionate percentage of the Rwandan population. In the aftermath of the genocide, they had to head households bereft of fathers. They had to take over farms, and take jobs previously done by men. But there were opportunities, too: Today, 41% of Rwandan businesses are owned by women… A new constitution ratified in 2003 required that women occupy at least 30% of the seats in parliament. (In our House and Senate only about 17% of the seats are filled by women.) Some wondered at the time whether it was feasible to meet this target. Now, nearly half of parliament and a third of the president’s cabinet posts are held by women. Rwanda today has the world’s highest percentage of female legislators.

This is by embedded journalist and author Michael Yon. He’s highly optimistic, but as he mentions, he’s also earned his analytic ability when it comes to Iraq. General Petraeus, is far more cautious, but of course, Petraeus has to watch his wording far more carefully. Petraeus, by the way, told the Obama camp on their visit that a 16-month pullout is not yet feasible, saying “let’s keep our powder dry.”

‘The war in Iraq is over. We won. Which means the Iraqi people won.”

When I wrote this on my Web site a few days ago, I set off a mini-firestorm. Perhaps because I have spent more time embedded with combat troops in Iraq than any journalist I know – and have interviewed countless Iraqis and members of the coalition military.

But I stand by my words, just as I stood by my assertion of February 2005 that Iraq was in a state of civil war, and later understood that Al Qaeda was its proximate cause. Those statements went against the vested interests of both Bush supporters who didn’t want to admit how bad the situation was in Iraq, and war critics, who didn’t want to admit that much of it was Al Qaeda’s fault.

Back then, both sides brought out their dictionaries and muddied the water by arguing semantics: What exactly do you mean by a civil war? What exactly do you mean by Al Qaeda?

So I will be very clear what I mean when I say we have won the war. A counterinsurgency is won when the government’s legitimacy is no longer threatened by the insurgents, the government is able to protect its own people and the people are participating in the government. In Iraq, all three conditions apply.

As early as July 2007, I was saying the surge was succeeding. Yes, the Sunni tribes were repulsed by Al Qaeda’s cruelty and turned to fight against the terrorists. And Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr agreed to a ceasefire. Yet these developments came about as a direct result of the surge and the awakening in Al-Anbar Province.

The surge also made it possible for the government of Iraq and the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) to become effective. This year, offensives in Basra and Baghdad’s Sadr City showed that the Shiite-majority government could take on Shiite militias. And while there were some defections and other problems in both campaigns, the ISF performed very capably. Sure, they had American support. But the fact that Iraqi troops liberated Iraqi neighborhoods went a long way to demonstrating the growing proficiency of the ISF and the legitimacy of the Iraqi government.

The sectarian violence is now mostly over. Al Qaeda has been pushed out of most of its urban enclaves and is now being chased into the hills. Even more important, Al Qaeda has been thoroughly discredited in Iraq. Similarly, now that the civil war no longer justifies their existence, the Shiite militias are largely seen as criminal groups rather than protectors or liberators.

The Iraqi government has reached 15 of the 18 benchmarks set by the U.S. Congress to measure security, political and economic progress. Ten of 18 provinces have been turned over to provincial Iraqi control, with the other eight provinces expected to be turned over by the end of the year. Violence is down to levels not seen since 2004.

There is still fighting in Iraq. But while there remain some terrorists at large, now we are truly fighting “the dead-enders.”

The center of gravity in this war has always been the Iraqi people. And when you talk to them, as I have over the past three and a half years, you realize that victory is at hand. They no longer live in fear. Despite sectarian conflicts that are now political rather than military in nature, the feeling of Iraqi nationalism is palpable. Yes, they are Shiites and Sunnis and Kurds, but they are also Iraqis. Just like we are Floridians and New Yorkers, but also Americans.

Relations between Iraqis and Americans are very good and continue to improve. This does not mean that we will always agree on every issue. The Status of Forces Agreement, for instance, is particularly nettlesome, and the fact that the Iraqis are hanging tough in negotiations shows how confident the Maliki government is about its own sovereignty. Good for them.

We should keep some troop presence in Iraq to continue supporting the ISF in its peacekeeping mission. There will still be sporadic violence and even spectacular attacks. But I believe that by the end of the year, barring some unexpected setback, even the most ardent war critics will have to admit the obvious: The war is over. We won.

[McClathy Newspapers] In Britain’s House of Commons, only 15 of 646 members are non-white, although minorities make up about 8 percent of the country’s population.

In France , there’s only one minority deputy among the 555 members of the National Assembly who represent mainland France , although perhaps one in five citizens is of minority descent. Two members of the 305-seat Senate hail from North Africa , although no senators are black, and President Nicolas Sarkozy has appointed three minority women to his Cabinet.

Neither Britain nor France has significant affirmative action programs, nor is there a sizeable black middle class, as in the United States . The French, for whom national identity is paramount, don’t count race in their census.

European political systems also function differently than the American-style primaries. In Europe , tight circles of party insiders, who often attend the same elite schools, choose the national candidates. Critics say that makes it harder for outsiders, and minorities, to break in.

…”I think because of Obama a lot of people feel it’s more possible now here because they didn’t expect it in America,” said Zachary Miller , a black man who hails from Ohio , lives in Paris and is vice chairman of Democrats Abroad in France and an Obama supporter. At the same time, Miller said, “the conclusion is certain things would have to change. No one’s really very optimistic that will happen anytime soon.”

Didn’t expect it in America..? In America? Sounds like Europe should worry about Europe and stop casting stones at America.

I love the Dennis Miller radio show, and he had a great comment this week in response to Nanci Pelosi, et. al.’s, repetitive charge that “We can’t drill our way out of this [our energy woes].”

Miller’s reply: “Yeah, well we can’t ceiling fan our way out of it either.”

Brilliant! I hope that catches on. You want to build stockpiles of other energies? Great. But this pie in the sky notion that we’ll just have no need for petroleum is absurd. Republicans should be using Miller’s retort every day.