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No Truck With Huck--III
In explaining our aversion to Mike Huckabee's presidential campaign, so far we've covered his views on health and taxes. Whatever a candidate's shortcomings on domestic subjects, though, sound ideas and instincts on foreign policy can go a long way to compensate. (Conversely, however fun-crazy Ron Paul's domestic views may be, his scary-crazy foreign-policy notions disqualify him even as a protest vote.)
So how does Huckabee do on foreign policy? An essay appears under his byline in the January issue of Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, and it is not reassuring. Here's how it opens:
The United States, as the world's only superpower, is less vulnerable to military defeat. But it is more vulnerable to the animosity of other countries. Much like a top high school student, if it is modest about its abilities and achievements, if it is generous in helping others, it is loved. But if it attempts to dominate others, it is despised.
American foreign policy needs to change its tone and attitude, open up, and reach out. The Bush administration's arrogant bunker mentality has been counterproductive at home and abroad. My administration will recognize that the United States' main fight today does not pit us against the world but pits the world against the terrorists. At the same time, my administration will never surrender any of our sovereignty, which is why I was the first presidential candidate to oppose ratification of the Law of the Sea Treaty, which would endanger both our national security and our economic interests.
Is the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination really likening world politics to a high school and America to a "top student"? Someone, please, tell us this is a nightmare and we're about to wake up! The New York Times raised a lot of eyebrows with this revelation about Huckabee:
At lunch, when I asked him who influences his thinking on foreign affairs, he mentioned Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, and Frank Gaffney, a neoconservative and the founder of a research group called the Center for Security Policy. This is like taking travel advice from Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, but the governor seemed unaware of the incongruity.
And sure enough, the first two paragraphs of the Foreign Affairs piece are both Friedmanesque (blasting the Bush administration's "arrogant bunker mentality," though Friedman would have come up with a much more labored metaphor) and Gaffneyian (opposing the Law of the Sea Treaty, which the Bush administration favors). There isn't necessarily a logical contradiction between these positions, but they seem highly discordant nonetheless--as do Huckabee's calls, in the same essay, to establish full diplomatic relations with Iran, an enemy state that is pursuing nuclear weapons, while invading Pakistan, a troubled ally that has nuclear weapons.
That latter pair of positions echo Barack Obama's, and suggest that Huckabee has the same defect Obama does: a complete lack of foreign-policy experience. Further evidence from this is in the Times profile:
When I pressed him, he mentioned he had once "visited" with Richard Haass, the middle-of-the-road president of the Council on Foreign Relations. . . . "What you do," he explained, "is surround yourself with the best possible advice." The only name he mentioned was Representative Duncan Hunter of California. "Duncan is extraordinarily well qualified to be secretary of Defense," he said.
Huckabee served more than a decade as governor of Arkansas, and he would not be the first president to have risen from the statehouse in Little Rock. His would-be forerunner, Bill Clinton, took a long time to get up to speed on foreign policy, and his response to the threat of militant Islamist terrorism proved inadequate. Maybe governing Arkansas is not sufficient experience to be president, especially at a time of international peril.
Then again, Clinton's successor was also a governor of a South Central state without a lot of foreign-policy experience, and George W. Bush's campaign pronouncements about a "humble" foreign policy were almost as trite as Huckabee's high school musings. Yet faced with a crisis, Bush had the right instincts, and in our view he has, on the whole, been quite a good foreign-policy president.
We realize, of course, that that last statement puts us decidedly in the minority. But if you are in the majority that doesn't think Bush has done a good job, that's all the more reason you should be wary of Huckabee.
Thanks for Clearing That Up
"He's not equating homosexuality with necrophilia. He's saying there's a range of aberrant behavior. He considers homosexuality aberrant, but that's at one end of the spectrum. Necrophilia is at the other end. . . . No way is he saying that homosexuality is like having sex with dead people. That's not it at all."--Huckabee aide Joe Carter, quoted by TalkingPointsMemo.com, Dec. 18
The al Qaeda Cheering Section
The Politico reports on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's latest pronouncement:
Republicans have gotten their way in the battle over spending, have forced Democrats to jettison rollbacks of tax breaks for oil companies, and have beaten back attempts to pay for expanded children's health care programs with a tobacco tax increase. Even though they're in the minority, the GOP, backed by President Bush, has used the filibuster to block Democratic priorities over and over this fall.
"Who's winning?" Reid asked a group of reporters. "Big Oil, Big Tobacco. . . . Al Qaeda has regrouped and is able to fight a civil war in Iraq. . . . The American people are losing."
Even the media have come around to acknowledge that the "surge" in Iraq has been successful in curtailing al Qaeda, but Harry Reid is such a dead-ender, he still insists the enemy is winning. What's more, how cal al Qaeda be fighting a "civil war" in Iraq? Didn't Reid get the memo that al Qaeda has nothing to do with Iraq?
Hillary Who?
Here are the first two paragraphs of a story in today's Washington Post:
WATERLOO, Iowa--Moments before Bill Clinton and Magic Johnson, the former president and the former point guard, are supposed to take the stage here in the small, no-frills gymnasium of the local Boys & Girls Club, you see it from behind a purple curtain. It's a pouf of white hair bouncing up and down, up and down. Whether it's a hop or a jump is beside the point. What it is, is this: Bill Clinton getting revved up to stump for his wife. It's Bill Clinton . . . getting pumped.
"Oh yeah, he was getting ready," Johnson, who led the Los Angeles Lakers to five NBA championships, explains later. "He was just getting fired up. We both got fired up. He was just jumping, getting ready."
So what's this all about? What the heck are Bill Clinton and Magic Johnson doing in Iowa? The third paragraph finally tells us:
In the frantic rush to the Jan. 3 caucuses in Iowa, the Surrogate-in-Chief has not been making headlines for being psyched up. No, the buzz is that he's meddling, annoyed and angry as the sheen of inevitability has worn off Hillary Clinton's campaign . . .
Oh, that's right. Mrs. Clinton is running for president! We hadn't really forgotten, but it's kind of amusing that her negatives are so high that friendly reporters seem to feel constrained to bury her name even in stories about her campaign.
Never Mind
Yesterday we noted that CNN was quoting Bill Clinton as saying that his wife, if elected president, would send him and George H.W. Bush overseas to soothe foreigners resentful over George W. Bush's presidency. "Did anyone check with Bush père to make sure he's on board with the plan to send him abroad to badmouth his son?" we asked. Apparently no one had. CNN later reported:
[The elder] Bush has shot down his successor Bill Clinton's idea. . . .
In a statement sent to CNN Tuesday afternoon, former President Bush's chief of staff Jean Becker said that he "wholeheartedly supports the President of the United States, including his foreign policy. He has never discussed an 'around-the-world-mission' with either former President Bill Clinton or Sen. Clinton, nor does he think such a mission is warranted since he is proud of the role America continues to play around the world as the beacon of hope for freedom and democracy. . . ."
It's funny, isn't it? Clinton says outrageous things like this, and one just chuckles and thinks: There goes the old rascal again. Al Gore and John Kerry could never get away with it. Unfortunately for Mr. Clinton, neither, we suspect, can his better half.
Deadbeat Dad--III
The New York Post, our sister tabloid, brings us some good news:
A Brooklyn judge yesterday turned aside a deadbeat dad who tried to cash in on his estranged son's $2.9 million 9/11 death benefit, ruling the father had given up any claim to the dough when he walked out on his family. . . .
The decision leaves the father, Leon Caldwell Sr., unable to collect a penny of the award from the Victim Compensation Fund.
Leon Sr., who left his wife, Elsie, and sons Leon Jr. and Kenneth in 1973, "never sent the children any birthday or Christmas presents or attended any graduations or religious ceremonies," the judge wrote.
For more background, see our columns of April 6, 2004, and June 19, 2007.
Dark Circles Under Gray Lady's Eyes
From a New York Times report on exotic Egyptian customs:
For men, it is more and more popular to have a zebibah.
The zebibah, Arabic for raisin, is a dark circle of callused skin, or in some cases a protruding bump, between the hairline and the eyebrows. It emerges on the spot where worshipers press their foreheads into the ground during their daily prayers.
It may sometimes look like a painful wound, but in Egypt it is worn proudly, the way American professionals in the 1980s felt good about the dark circles under their eyes as a sign of long work hours and little sleep.
Granted, we were pretty young in the 1980s, but we don't remember ever hearing any Americans say they "felt good about the dark circles under their eyes." Did we miss a cultural phenomenon, or is the Times just making this stuff up?
Problem, Solution
- "Man With New 40-Disc CD Changer Needs 18 More CDs"--headline, Onion, Aug. 4, 1999
- "Area Man Releases CDs"--headline, Plainsman (Huron, S.D.), Dec. 17, 2007
He Must've Been Really Motivated
"Teen Who Was Pepper-Sprayed to Participate in Program"--headline, Associated Press, Dec. 19
And if They Study Diligent, They'll Perform Good
"Time to Think Global in Testing U.S. Students"--headline,
News You Can Use
- "Year's End Is Chance to Re-Examine Goals"--headline, Associated Press, Dec. 19
- "Study: Timing of Pills Might Matter"--headline, Associated Press, Dec. 17
- "There Is More in Las Vegas Than Just Football"--headline, Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Dec. 19
Bottom Stories of the Day
- "Documentarian Ken Burns Backs Barack Obama"--headline, FoxNews.com, Dec. 18
- "Motion to Transfer Kraner Land Not Seconded"--headline, Newark (Ohio) Advocate, Dec. 18
Some Things Aren't Worth Doing Well
Here's a very odd report from the Detroit News:
A second competency test was ordered Monday for an 11-year-old boy accused of forcing a 7-year-old boy to perform sex acts on a Howell School bus in May.
This sort of misses the point, doesn't it? Forcing someone to perform sex acts is wrong, no matter how competently it is done.
(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Michael Segal, Ed Lasky, Jim Orheim, David Gerstman, Joel Goldberg, Nat Semple, Casey McEnelly, Danny Brown, Tom Linehan, Mark Kellner, Ronald Marshall, Jack Archer, Michele Schiesser, Doug Black, Justin Lodge and Thomas Nowinski. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)
Conservative wins SKorea presidency by landslide
©AFP - Jeon Young-Han
SEOUL (- Lee Myung-Bak won South Korea's presidential election by a landslide Wednesday, as voters backed the former Hyundai chief executive to revive the economy and disregarded fraud allegations against him.
Lee's two closest rivals conceded defeat to the opposition conservative candidate, whose victory ends a decade of left-leaning rule.
With 99.7 percent of the votes counted as of early Thursday, Lee had won a 48.6 percent share compared with his closest challenger's 26.2 percent, according to the Yonhap news agency, the biggest victory margin in the nation's democratic history.
"Dear people, today you gave me overwhelming support," the Grand National Party (GNP) candidate said in brief comments to the electorate after a rapturous welcome at party HQ.
©AFP - Choi Won-Suk
"I will serve you politely and humbly... I will do my best to revive the country's economy which is facing a crisis."
Lee's nearest rival, Chung Dong-Young of the liberal pro-government United New Democratic Party, and rightwing independent Lee Hoi-Chang conceded defeat.
"I humbly accept the people's choice," said Chung, who seemed close to tears.
Koreans grappling with high youth unemployment, an ever-widening income gap and soaring property prices gave the candidate whose slogan was "Economy First!" the unprecedented mandate despite a looming fraud investigation.
GNP headquarters erupted with joy when exit polls flashed on a screen. Officials and supporters hugged each other, wept and yelled "Hurrah!"
Thousands of others celebrated in the streets in near-zero temperatures, chanting "Lee Myung-Bak!" setting off firecrackers and cheering and dancing.
©AFP - Jung Yeon-Je
Lee, who turned 66 on polling day, will be the nation's first leader from a business background and the first president-elect to face a criminal inquiry.
He will be inaugurated on February 25 to replace incumbent Roh Moo-Hyun, who congratulated his successor on his victory.
State prosecutors cleared Lee early this month of involvement in a 2001 share-rigging fraud involving his former business partner, an issue which had dogged his campaign.
But apparent new video evidence surfaced Sunday of Lee's past connection to a firm linked to the scandal, prompting rivals in parliament to vote for an inquiry by an independent prosecutor.
©AFP - Choi Won-Suk
Media reports said the prosecutor may report just before the inauguration but most voters were clearly willing to accept the awkward situation.
"I saw the video clip but I don't care about anything else but my livelihood," said a small restaurant owner who gave his name as Han. "My business is so bad these days."
Despite the share scandal, in which Lee strongly denies involvement, many see him as having the best background to boost the economy.
The man once nicknamed the "bulldozer" rose from childhood poverty to become a Hyundai construction executive and mayor of Seoul, where he pushed through an ambitious and hugely popular waterway beautification scheme.
Lee's "747" campaign pledge aims to achieve seven percent growth, increase per capita income to 40,000 dollars and make South Korea the world's seventh largest economy by encouraging market forces.
©AFP/Pool - Kim Jae-Hwan
"I know many people are now in a difficult situation," he told cheering supporters in a televised message.
"I will solve their problems... I will show you that we can do anything if we all work together."
Apart from the economy, Lee promises a firmer line on North Korea, accusing the Roh government of pampering the communist state with unconditional aid. He says he would offer it massive help but strictly tied to denuclearisation.
"The election outcome was amazing," Sungkyunkwan University political science professor Kim Il-Young told AFP.
Kim said Lee might have benefited from the lowest ever turnout in a Korean presidential election of 62.9 percent.
"The disclosure of the video claim prompted conservative voters to band together while many liberal voters gave up and did not vote," Kim said.
"The outcome reflected widespread public despair at President Roh's administration."
The United States welcomed Lee's win, expecting to continue cooperation with Seoul on North Korean nuclear disablement and other issues.
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