Month: April 2004

Dodgers Land Bradley, Hope He’s Not Sheffield

The Los Angeles Dodgers, who have underachieved for several years and haven’t won a playoff game since Orel Hershiser beat the A’s in 1988, finally pulled the trigger on a major trade for a big-time hitter … but somehow this sounds familiar:

If all goes well, Milton Bradley will be that long-awaited impact hitter, stirring a dormant Dodger offense to life and displaying his supreme talent for the hometown fans. If not, he’ll be the guy who displaced an entire outfield on the eve of the season opener, a volatile personality injected into the clubhouse of a manager whose contract expires at the end of the season.
New owner Frank McCourt promised a big bat before the season started, and new General Manager Paul DePodesta delivered with 24 hours to spare, but only after the Cleveland Indians basically fired Bradley for misbehavior. The Dodgers gambled on him Sunday, trading their best outfield prospect for one of the most explosive players in the game, in every sense of the word.

New GM DePodesta had just been derided over the weekend by the LA Times’ T.J. Simers as The Lightweight GM for failing to make a trade or a free-agent signing for the big bat the Dodgers needed this season (well, OK, that they need every season), but that was more than a little unfair; after all, McCourt hired him after the free-agent frenzy and most of the trading had been completed. The previous GM had the chance to trade for Richie Sexson, who would have been a better fit — more on that in a minute — but refused to give up Franklin Gutierrez, who got a lot more expendable in the new regime.
So how does a guy like Milton Bradley become available on the eve of Opening Day, considering that he hit .321 last year with a .421 OBP? Well …

The Indians had made Bradley their cleanup hitter, but after he failed to run out a popup last Wednesday and subsequently argued with Manager Eric Wedge, they announced they would trade him. … In February he was sentenced to three days in jail after failing to pull over as ordered by Ohio police last year. In 2001 he was taken to a hospital after refusing to leave a restaurant when drunk.

Great. It sounds like they traded for another immature prima donna with clubhouse issues. Didn’t we go down this road with Gary Sheffield, who hit well but spent most of his LA career whining about his pay and accusing management of racism for not renogotiating his contract after his first couple of seasons with the club? Instead of Sexson, who played first base and had no “citizenship” issues, now we get Bradley, whose presence requires a major reshuffling of the lineup. Dave Roberts, the speedster who leads off for LA, moves from center to left, Juan Encarnacion moves from left to right, and Shawn Green moves from right to first base.
On the night before the opener.
If this works, of course, DePodesta is a genius, but even if it doesn’t, this was the best deal he could get. And that’s a pretty poor reflection on the previous ownership of a club that had the second-highest payroll in the league last year.

Pincus Spins

Walter Pincus puts on a ballet of spin in today’s Washington Post, as he tries to wrap readers around the inherent contradictions in his analysis that a degraded al-Qaeda, an ineffectual Osama bin Laden, and the replacement of terrorist leadership with less-capable candidates is somehow bad news:

The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq has accelerated the spread of Osama bin Laden’s anti-Americanism among once local Islamic militant movements, increasing danger to the United States as the al Qaeda network is becoming less able to mount attacks, according to senior intelligence officials at the CIA and State Department.
At the same time, the Sunni Triangle has become a training ground for foreign Islamic jihadists who are slipping into Iraq to join former Saddam Hussein loyalists to test themselves against U.S. and coalition forces, these officials say.

Translation: the attacks on al-Qaeda and their state sponsorship has made them increasingly unable to mount attacks on their own. In the meantime, would-be terrorists are flooding into a narrow geographical area in order to square off against the American military — instead of dispersing themselves throughout the world, and specifically the US, to murder American civilians.
So far, sounds great to me.
After that, Pincus relates the usual blather about how American military action created anti-American feelings amongst Islamofascists, and how that hatred has pushed the groups to link up where they previously were more concerned with local leadership issues. I see. I was unaware that groups like Hezb’ Allah and Islamic Jihad loved Americans before the fall of 2001. That must have been why they kept kidnapping them in Lebanon in the 1980s; they just couldn’t spend enough quality time with Yanks before that. And even though ignoring bin Laden’s previous provocations, like attacking Khobar Towers, the two American embassies in Africa, and the USS Cole obviously encouraged that string of increasingly aggressive attacks, Pincus somehow gets the impression that they really stopped liking us in October 2001, when we invaded Afghanistan.

Since attacks in East Africa, on the USS Cole, and on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, al Qaeda has lost its sanctuary in Afghanistan. Its once top-down control of terrorist operations now is in the hands of less experienced people.
That makes it less clear what roles al Qaeda played in recent bombings in Bali, Istanbul, Riyadh, Tunisia, Casablanca and Madrid. Authorities said that local extremists carried out these attacks, although Black said a possible al Qaeda leadership connection to Madrid is still under investigation.

More bad news — al-Qaeda doesn’t have its address any more in Afghanistan. How short-sighted we were to dislodge them! I guess Pincus argues that we were better off knowing where they were, so we could find them later on. You know, in case they did something really nasty, like discriminate against women and gays. [Oh, wait … never mind.] As far as their role being less clear in the laundry list of car-bombings Pincus lists, it’s only less clear if you don’t accept their taking responsibility for almost every single one of them. Madrid, clearly, was not the work of “local extremists,” as Basques generally don’t chant in Arabic before blowing themselves up to avoid arrest.
That may be the single silliest paragraph published in the Washington Post this year.

Black and the senior intelligence analyst said it would be a mistake to believe the United States faces a monolithic terrorist threat. “Before Iraq, al Qaeda had some success with like-minded organizations conducting operations,” the analyst said.

The only people who believe that are people who think all history began on 9/11/01. Besides, the real threat isn’t the asymmetrical groups themselves, it’s their financial and strategic support from terrorism-sponsoring states. That’s why we’ve acted against states since then — to impress upon them that supporting terrorists no longer carries zero risk.

As the United States and its allies have systematically captured and killed almost 70 percent of the al Qaeda leadership, bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman Zawahiri, are on the run and unable to provide operational leadership. Bin Laden’s effectiveness as a plotter of terrorist acts has been “greatly reduced,” Black said.
Black told the House panel that bin Laden maintains some contact with the remaining leadership but command and control is handled by younger and less experienced leaders. Bin Laden, Black said, “spends most of his time trying to figure out, you know, how they’re going to come for me and is this going to be the day.”

Anyone want to guess why this was left to the bottom of the article? Anyone? Oh, come now … let’s not always see the same same hands. It’s because Pincus wants to promote the view that taking an active approach to terrorism is ultimately futile, since other people will also hate us for taking al-Qaeda and its state sponsors out. Pincus keeps spinning, but he remains essentially in the same defeatist place, blaming the US for Islamofascist hatred. It’s the Spanish impulse, and the events of the last week should have made clear how irrelevant those concerns are when people hate you not for what you do or say, but for the fact of your existence.

Guardian: Bush, Blair Agreed on Iraq War 9/20/01

Tomorrow’s UK Guardian/Observer reports that George Bush and Tony Blair reached a personal accord nine days after 9/11 to go to war in Iraq, in a story that’s bound to have electoral impact on both sides of the Atlantic:

According to Sir Christopher Meyer, the former British Ambassador to Washington, who was at the dinner when Blair became the first foreign leader to visit America after 11 September, Blair told Bush he should not get distracted from the war on terror’s initial goal – dealing with the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
Bush, claims Meyer, replied by saying: ‘I agree with you, Tony. We must deal with this first. But when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq.’ Regime change was already US policy.
It was clear, Meyer says, ‘that when we did come back to Iraq it wouldn’t be to discuss smarter sanctions’. Elsewhere in his interview, Meyer says Blair always believed it was unlikely that Saddam would be removed from power or give up his weapons of mass destruction without a war.
Faced with this prospect of a further war, he adds, Blair ‘said nothing to demur’.

Vanity Fair will publish the entire interview in a 25,000-word feature article on the Iraq war in the May issue, and this testimony will make some headlines in the US. However, as many of us have been saying since that same time frame, the Iraq war was a necessary and logical choice for the second front in the war on terror, for myriad reasons. Chiefly, the decade-long quagmire in Iraq had damaged the West’s credibility in dealing with obvious security threats such as Saddam, and that standoff kept a large amount of our armed forces pinned down in the failing campaign for containment. Not only that, but since most of those forces were based in Saudi Arabia, they provided a continuing provocation for terrorists and threatened the stability of the Saudi government. That’s not even considering the intelligence that informed Western governments of Saddam’s WMD arsenal and capacity and the connections between Saddam and terrorists in Palestine and other areas, or the strategic reasons behing eliminating the largest military threat in the region at the advent of the war on terror.
Bush will be able to deflect criticism by reminding people that the official US policy towards Iraq was regime change, a policy mandated by Congress in 1998, and that the terror attacks on 9/11 forced him to make that policy goal a high priority. In the aftermath of the Clarke debate, where even Democrat Bob Kerrey wondered aloud why we didn’t just invade Afghanistan before 2001 if we knew al-Qaeda based itself there, it’s hard to question why Bush considered action against Iraq to be such a high priority. Blair, on the other hand, may have a lot more trouble explaining his agreement to Bush’s plan, mostly because he allowed people to believe that he was a late convert to the plan. It wasn’t the only mistake Blair made, either.
It was no secret that the impetus for the Bush administration’s return to the UN to seek that elusive 17th resolution explicitly authorizing the use of force was a combination of Tony Blair and a reluctant Congress. However, Vanity Fair’s article will reveal that France tried to stop the Anglo-American initiative — in order to avoid the breach that developed:

Vanity Fair also discloses that on 13 January, at a lunch around the mahogany table in Rice’s White House office, President Chirac’s top adviser, Maurice Gourdault-Montagne, and his Washington ambassador, Jean-David Levitte, made the US an offer it should have accepted. In the hope of avoiding an open breach between the two countries, they said that, if America was determined to go to war, it should not seek a second resolution, that the previous autumn’s Resolution 1441 arguably provided sufficient legal cover, and that France would keep quiet if the administration went ahead.
But Bush had already promised Blair he would seek a second resolution and Blair feared he might lose Parliament’s support without it. Meanwhile, the Foreign Office legal department was telling him that without a second resolution war would be illegal, a view that Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney-General, seemed to share at that stage. When the White House sought Blair’s opinion on the French overture, he balked.

And so it turns out, if this report is correct, that the French offered the Americans and the Brits a way to allow France to avoid any responsibility for the war — and if accepted, France would not have blocked the Coalition’s plans. Whether the French were sincere may be another question, as the French would renege on another verbal understanding with Powell and Bush in the days just after this incident. However, Blair’s refusal to play along — remaining more concerned with the “legal” justifications — make him look a lot more Clintonesque than previously thought. At the same time, the Democrats in Congress pressured Bush to go back the UN one more time before taking action, and the combined fecklessness of Blair and Congress doomed the alliance.
If this report turns out to be true, you can expect it to be nothing more than a blip on the American electoral scene. As the Clarke testimony proved, Americans have already processed the Iraq war and are more interested in policy moving forward than in rehashing the decision-making process, and besides, Bush never hid his desire to comply with Congress’ policy of regime change. Blair’s been a bit too smart for his own good, and this revelation may wind up proving him to truly be the heir to David Lloyd-George, who won the war and wound up being chased out of office.

BBC: Spanish Suspect Islamists in Rail Bomb

While I initially held off on commenting on the Spanish rail bombs discovered this week, it’s becoming more apparent — at least to the Spanish — that radical Islamofascists have targeted Spain despite their appeasement:

The explosives found on a high-speed rail track on Friday were of the same type and brand used in the Madrid train blasts, Spain has confirmed.
But Spanish Interior Minister Angel Acebes said it was still too soon to draw any conclusions about who planted the unexploded device. …
Several newspapers reported on Saturday that the Spanish embassy in Egypt had recently received a letter signed by the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades threatening to attack Spanish embassies and Spanish interests in north Africa and the southern and eastern Mediterranean region.
The letter warned that the attacks would go ahead unless Spain withdrew its troops from Iraq and Afghanistan within four weeks, El Mundo reported. … Spaniards have reacted in stunned disbelief at the news of another attempted attack.

Appeasement never works. You think Europeans would have learned that lesson after World War II, but apparently not. They don’t hate Spaniards because Spain has troops in Iraq (but it’s interesting that Spaniards have focused on that while still denying that Iraq had any connection to the terrorists); they hate Spaniards because they have occupied al-Andalus for over 500 years. They hate Spaniards because they’re not Muslims, just like they hate Americans, and Brits, and even the French, who have had their own Islamofascist threats against rail systems to resolve.
So if the Spaniards believe that they will avoid attacks by simply appeasing the terrorists, they should prepare themselves for a long string of surprises like these. There is no negotiating with Islamofascists; they don’t want your cooperation, they want you dead. Get used to it.

Northern Alliance Radio On the Air Today!

It’s Saturday, so it’s time for another installment of the Northern Alliance Radio Network. Unfortunately, I won’t be there today — I have a prior commitment at an Irish-language workshop. (I’ve got to post on that later on …) The rest of the gang will be there, reviewing the week’s news stories, interviewing important guests, and dissecting the local media. Be sure to tune in if you’re in the area.

Kerry Didn’t Always Master the Rope Line

Today’s New York Times runs a puff piece — typical weekend fare — on John Kerry, this time on his supposed skills as a flesh-presser on the campaign trail:

Mr. Kerry, the all-but-nominated Democratic presidential candidate, has been criticized throughout his career for an aloof, inaccessible style on the stump, and his stemwinders are a constant worry for supporters of his White House bid. Yet he is proving adept at the more intimate political ritual of the rope line: the inevitable postspeech meet-and-greet over a rope placed as a security measure to keep the crowd from the candidate. It is a daily dance that has become a central, even dominant element of his schedule. In fact, he sometimes spends more time in that kind of chitchat than in delivering substantive speeches.

Jodi Wilgoren doesn’t mention Kerry’s most well-known rope-line moment from this campaign season, however (link to my post here):

Sen. John Kerry, all but officially the Democratic presidential nominee, called Republicans he is battling “crooked” Wednesday. … “Keep smiling,” one man said to him.
Kerry responded, “Oh yeah, don’t worry man. We’re going to keep pounding, let me tell you — we’re just beginning to fight here. These guys are the most crooked, you know, lying group of people I’ve ever seen.”

Why would the New York Times talk about John Kerry’s skills on the rope line and fail to mention this disastrous event that appears to have kicked off his month-long decline in the polls? This happened less than four weeks ago! Either Wilgoren is completely ignorant of it — which calls into question her competence as a political correspondent — or the Times has decided to ignore it in favor of synthesizing Kerry into a gregarious, likable candidate.
(cross-posted at Oh, That Liberal Media)
UPDATE: Eric at Classical Values has more information on Jodi Wilgoren.

Is Germany Awakening From Its Socialist Coma?

The London Telegraph profiles a new German book that is flying off the shelves in Berlin and around the country, arguing that Germany may be in a fatal economic decline. The book, Germany: Decline of a Superstar, points out the crippling effect the nanny state has had not only on German productivity but also on its inventiveness and its self-sufficiency:

The book argues with a brutal frankness that Germany needs to be completely restructured and that it has been poorly run since 1945.
The result, according to Mr Steingart, is a country where industry is on its knees, where the welfare state is deep in debt, whose inventive minds have been forced into exile, and whose citizens largely hate work. … “It is simply not profitable or viable to have German workers, who cost considerably more than they produce,” Mr Steingart says.
“Our productive core is melting away and Germany is going downhill,” he says, drawing on a cigar and leaning back in a leather armchair in his glass-panelled office in central Berlin. “The GDP of both the British and French is higher than the Germans’ and this is a shocking discovery for us. In the 1970s, Britain’s GDP was only half of ours.”

By way of example, the book discusses the Adlon Hotel, a five-star establishment in the heart of Berlin, which was rebuilt almost from scratch after World War II. The Adlon receives foreign dignitaries and the wealthy and powerful from all over the world, and one would suppose that spending a night would cost more than most of us take home in a week. For all of that, the Adlon is still forced to outsource its laundry service by trucking the linens 80 miles to Poland every night. Why? Because the overnight service, transportation costs, and the sheer inconvenience are all outweighed by German labor costs, where the employer has to pay 42% of all social entitlement taxes on each worker.
Germany has been paralyzed on the issue of economic reform, which has undermined Gerhard Schroeder’s government in much the same way that the Socialists have challenged the cutbacks proposed by Chirac’s so-called conservative government in France. Once the masses have sipped the nanny-state Kool-Aid, you find that their addiction to government stipends resists most efforts at detoxification. In that way, creeping socialism isn’t so much of a cycle as it is a steady march towards bankruptcy. The popularity of this book indicates that all hope isn’t lost, but it will take a lot more than 50,000 copies to reverse the decline.
One of my first posts on this blog related a story that perfectly captures the problems that Germany will face in trying to recast itself as an economic power. The first step will be to convince Germans like this that they aren’t entitled to a comfortable lifestyle without working for it. While that’s hardly a revealed wisdom in the US, in much of Europe it would be anathema to suggest that people who don’t produce don’t have the right to share in the spoils.

Nader: The Magical Mystery Tour Is Dying to Get Off The Ground

The Washington Post profiles Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate-cum-presidential wannabe, who’s busy trying to get himself on the ballot around the country. As Brian Faler notes, Nader isn’t helping himself with his go-it-alone strategy:

Nader’s task would be easier if he accepted the presidential nomination of one of the minor parties that already have spaces reserved on some states’ ballots. Some members of the Green Party, which has yet to choose its presidential candidate, want to support Nader. The Green Party nomination would give access to ballots in 23 states, thanks to the party’s performance in previous elections. The Reform Party, founded by Texas billionaire Ross Perot, has offered Nader its top spot, along with its seven ballot spots. The Natural Law Party is also considering giving him its nomination and 12 ballot lines, according to John Hegelin, the group’s former presidential candidate.
But Zeese said Nader will not accept any of those nominations because he does not want to be too closely associated with any one party, even if it would give him an edge in the chase for signatures. “Ralph sees himself as an independent,” Zeese said. “I think what happens is that when you pick one party, you’re defined by that party. . . . Rather than being defined by that party, we define ourselves.”
Zeese added that Nader hopes to appeal to a broad spectrum of third-party voters and would accept their organizations’ support, volunteers and ballot lines. “It’s more powerful to have a coalition of third parties come together and say: We are joined together to challenge the duopoly,” Zeese said.

So Nader says that he won’t run under the banner of any one party — except in a few states, where he will create a party to ease signature requirements — but parties are more than welcome to list him as their candidate. What a great guy! He won’t represent their parties and he won’t lift a finger to promote their parties, but he’ll be glad to sit atop their ticket. What’s even funnier is that some of the fringe parties are actually considering Nader’s suggestion.
Nader could have easily gotten on the ballot by running on the Green ticket, as he did in 2000, but something about his ego just won’t allow him to work in an organization that he doesn’t own lock, stock, and barrel. One other reason that Nader eschewed the Greens this year comes up at the end of the article, where Nader’s campaign talks about their outreach to a very different constituency:

Nader has said he will appeal this year to disgruntled conservatives and independents. Yesterday, he posted an “Open Letter to Conservatives Upset With the Policies of the Bush Administration,” inviting them to join his independent campaign.

You can bet that any conservatives who might give Nader the time of day — all four of them — would lose interest if Nader fronted for radical enviros like the Greens. Nader’s move makes sense only if you believe that conservatives would ever support a candidate that routinely rails against the evils of the open market and proposes government intervention on a scale that far outstrips those of the Democrats — well, mainstream Democrats, at any rate.
If that’s why Nader dumped the Greens, he’s wasting his time and energy chasing rainbows, or chasing signatures anyway. He now must build his own organization from the ground up in order to meet the signature requirements in each state. Nader himself estimates that he will need 1.5 million signatures in order to qualify in all 50 states, and he refuses to pay for signature gatherers. That means Nader will wind up spending most of his time trying to find volunteers for the grunt work of politics rather than getting his message out — not a great way to launch an independent bid.
My guess is that Nader will wind up on most of the ballots, as quite a few states have low thresholds. I’d guess that he’ll be on at least thirty ballots, and since Nader will likely concentrate on states where neither Kerry nor Bush have a commanding lead, he’ll wind up tilting the election to some limited extent. Nader’s existence will, at the very least, allow the Democrats to continue their fantasy that only Nader stood between them and their rightful place in power.

Job Growth Soars in March

Job growth may finally be catching up to the roaring economy, as 308,000 jobs were added in March:

U.S. payrolls grew at the fastest pace in nearly four years in March, the government said Friday, in a report that soared past Wall Street’s expectations and could play a pivotal role in Fed policy and the presidential election. … Payrolls outside the farm sector grew by 308,000 jobs in March, the Labor Department reported, compared with a revised gain of 46,000 in February.

When these numbers were released, stock prices jumped and the bond market dropped, indicating that Wall Street was surprised at the strength of the new job creation. It’s hard to understand why. Capital investment jumped upward the past few months, indicating that businesses were gearing up for higher production that would require higher employment.
Now that the economic recovery is an undisputable fact and job growth seems to be catching up to it, the Democrats are in real trouble in November. They managed to inadvertently shore up the case for pre-emptive action by trumpeting the testimony of Richard Clarke while pointing out the Clinton’s reluctance to engage in it. Now they have an unlikable and inconsistent candidate at the top of the ticket running against a war president and an expanding economy.
Good luck.
UPDATE: The Commissar notes that Atrios, according to his own calculations before the report was released, now acknowledges that the Bush tax cuts are working. I wonder if Atrios will actually agree with himself, or twist into a Kerry-like pretzel to dispute his own criterion.
UPDATE II: Okay, I’ve just been over to Eschaton to check out the comments … and I feel like I need to take a shower. Here’s one of Atrios’ readers, suggesting (with nary a rebuke) that Blackwater Security has some openings, yuk, yuk. yuk. On his blogads, there’s this: “George Bush and Karl Rove expect to lose Florida this year. Insidiously, they’re targeting Minnesota, replacing lost electoral votes.”
Can someone explain to me what’s so insidious about a presidential candidate campaigning in Minnesota and trying to win? Certainly, that has to be less insidious than glorying in the brutal murders of four of your own countrymen.

Yesterday Was What?

As you may have noticed, I played an April Fools joke on you all yesterday …er, by not playing one. Ha ha! Bet I had you all fooled, right?
Okay.
However, if I had played one, maybe it would have been like this post at Fraters Libertas. The Elder thought through what a number of bloggers should have done to celebrate yesterday — and none of us did. Thank goodness for The Elder.
But Glenn, if you’re reading this … it’s all lies. I swear.