Archive Listing
June 10, 2005 - June 3, 2005

Saturday, August 07, 2004

Friday, August 06, 2004

Thursday, August 05, 2004

COUNTRY STUFF. It's inevitable that pampered millionaires are going to make fools of themselves from time to time when they seek to rub shoulders with us commoners. It happened yesterday in Iowa, where both Kerry and Bush were trying so hard to demonstrate their solidarity with the ordinary citizens whose votes they need if they are to secure the most powerful office in the world. The agent of humiliation in both cases was corn. Monsieur Kerry seemed to be overwhelmed by the very existence of this ubiquitous vegetable, brandishing 'ears' as if they were rustic sceptres awarded him by adoring peasants. To prevent any reoccurrence of this faux pas, we are forwarding the following little exegesis on the history of corn to the Democratic National Committee. We hope they take advantage of this opportunity to educate Mr. Kerry about a subject he might find useful in campaign visits to come. (NOTE TO INSTAPUNK READERS: You don't need to read the text word for word; it has been chosen especially to be as dry and academic as the towering intellectuals of the people's party prefer their reading to be.)

Over a period of thousands of years, Native Americans purposefully transformed maize through special cultivation techniques. Maize was developed from a wild grass (Teosinte) originally growing in Central America (southern Mexico) 7,000 years ago. The ancestral kernels of Teosinte looked very different from today's corn. These kernels were small and were not fused together like the kernels on the husked ear of early maize and modern corn.

By systematically collecting and cultivating those plants best suited for human consumption, Native Americans encouraged the formation of ears or cobs on early maize. The first ears of maize were only a few inches long and had only eight rows of kernels. Cob length and size of early maize grew over the next several thousand years which gradually increased the yields of each crop.

Native Americans discovered that, unlike wild plants and animals, a surplus of maize could be grown and harvested without harming their environment. Tribes in southern New England harvested great amounts of maize and dried them in heaps upon mats. The drying piles of maize, usually two or three for each Narragansett family, often contained from 12 to 20 bushels of the grain. Surplus maize would be stored in underground storage pits, ingeniously constructed and lined with grasses to prevent mildew or spoiling, for winter consumption of the grain.

George, on the other hand, appears to have some slight idea about what corn is; he just doesn't know anything about eating it. For example, even in Iowa, they don't generally consume it raw. So we're sending this recipe -- courtesy of the Fanny Farmer website -- to the Republican National Committee in hopes they'll find someone to prepare and serve some corn on the cob to the Texan-in-Chief, who has probably never seen a bright green field full of plants that a human being would want to eat.

There is nothing like fresh corn on the cob, quickly boiled, spread with lots of sweet butter, and sprinkled with salt. Two ears per person may seem like a proper serving, but appetites run high when corn is in season and freshly picked. Click here for information about choosing and handling corn.

Just before cooking, husk the corn, pull off the silky threads, and cut out any blemishes with a pointed knife. Drop the corn into a large pot filled with boiling salted water. Cover the pot and let the water return to a boil again, then turn off the heat and keep the pot covered. After about 5 minutes, remove enough ears for a first serving. You can keep the remaining corn warm in the water for another 10 minutes without its becoming tough. Serve with lots of butter and salt.

Everyone in both parties says they wants to win Iowa. Well, if the Dems and the GOP are serious about that, they'd better learn that this particular state is a gridwork of roads at right angles to one another, subdividing a giant field of corn. Learn what it is, learn how to cook it and eat it, and you'll have a shot at wooing the voters. You might also be the beneficiary of a marvelous bit of wisdom: eating freshly cooked corn on the cob with an ocean of butter and a half ton of salt is a bit of heaven. But don't tell the Iowans you found all this out from a native of the place where the very best sweet corn in the world is grown -- southern New Jersey. Unfortunately, all that midwestern corn tastes like dirt and is only good for feeding the pigs. That's something the jayhawks would probably rather not know.

Wednesday, August 04, 2004

Tuesday, August 03, 2004

Monday, August 02, 2004

RESETTING THE CLOCK. It may seem like we've been goofing off since the convention, but in reality we've been reading the dozens of opinion pieces about what the Democrats and Senator Kerry were trying to accomplish in Boston and what, if anything, they have accomplished. All our reading has surfaced two articles which we find representative of the two poles of thought prevailing in the media. The lefthand pole thinks Kerry has succeeded in making himself a credible candidate on national security issues. Any of a dozen articles would serve to illustrate this viewpoint, but we've chosen Trudy Rubin's essay in Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer because it skips the stylistic persiflage and lays out a nuts-and-bolts case for Kerry as commander-in-chief. We also like the title: Worldview -- Kerry has grasp that Bush doesn't. That's pretty unambiguous. So is her basic premise:

The main question is not whether John Kerry is a nice guy. It's whether his policies are more suited for the country's security needs over the next four years. That's what people were trying to divine from the Democrats' convention in Boston.

After watching the speech, talking to Kerry foreign policy advisers - and visiting Iraq three times since the war - I'd say the answer is yes. Here's why:

The Bush antiterror policy has lost its way. Yes, the President does what he says, but what he says and does has led us into a defensive position in the struggle against terrorism.

Our military is bogged down in a guerrilla war against Iraq that hasn't weakened al-Qaeda. Just the opposite. The terrorist organization has found a new base in an unstable Iraq.

Anti-Americanism in the Mideast has never been greater. Iraq's instability and Bush's abandonment of efforts to promote Israel-Palestinian peace are a recruitment ad for al-Qaeda.

And, no, Ms Rubin's matter-of-fact assessment of the situation does not mean she's chalking it up to bad luck or the predictable chaos of international politics. All of the ills she describes are George Bush's fault:

The Bush administration's hype on Iraq - expanding Saddam Hussein's real threat to the Mideast into a nuclear threat against the U.S. mainland - has made much of the world cynical about the antiterrorist struggle. Most Europeans and Arabs don't believe in the reality of this battle against Islamist jihadists. That makes the effort much harder.

If the United States is to rally other countries to this long-term goal - and convince their citizens - a more credible U.S. leader is required. The world's growing anti-Americanism, which hampers any global alliance against terrorism, is focused on the persona and policies of George W. Bush.

Kerry has stressed over and over that he will rebuild our alliances and repair the breeches within NATO. On Thursday he said, "We need a president who has the credibility to bring our allies to our side and share the burden." He is overly optimistic about what the allies would contribute, especially in Baghdad. But he would have a far better chance than Bush of persuading our NATO allies to do more in Afghanistan, and take on new missions outside Europe. Kerry advisers say he would push for needed reforms in NATO and the United Nations.

Wiithout wasting time disputing her highly debatable characterizations, we'll simply highlight the collapsing confidence in the final paragraph of the quote. Up to this point, she's been marching briskly toward a seemingly rational conclusion that we need someone better than George Bush. But just when we expect to learn why Kerry is so much better, she acknowledges that Kerry's best credential is that he has "stressed over and over" that he will make our so-called friends like us more. Then she admits that he is "overly optimistic" and stumbles to the end of her thought with the lame asterisk that "Kerry's advisers say" he might try to secure "reforms" in the U.N. and NATO. Hmmm. Before, it sounded like she was saying all the obstructionism in the U.N. and NATO was Bush's fault. So why do they need reforms? Isn't the big idea here that Kerry himself is the necessary reform?

Despite Ms. Rubin's breezy exposition of Bush's failures, her essay winds up at a different destination than her tone promises. It's really an exercise in wishful thinking. We don't like the way things are. We don't like it that people around the world are trashing America at every whipstitch. We don't like it that America is still a terror target and nobody else seems to care. We don't like it that winning the war on terror hasn't been a neat little miniseries which could be wrapped up before the audience got bored. And here's a guy who says he can make it all better by applying his impeccable continental manners at the diplomatic table. Yeah, maybe we don't completely believe that, but it sure would be NICE, wouldn't it? Wouldn't it?

We said that Ms. Rubin's piece was representative. It is. All the enthusiasm for Kerry is wishful thinking. That's why there are never any specifics. No specifics in his nomination speech. He didn't utter the term 'Islamic fascism' once. He didn't mention exactly which allies have to be on our side before an American action is not unilateral. (His rhetorical history would indicate that 'multilateral' means with the support of France and Germany, while 'unilateral' means without the support of France and Germany. That's a helluva big picture view, isn't it?) Yes, he said he would double special ops forces and add another division to the army, but what for? We aren't ever going to fight another war unless we have to. What does that mean? After the suitcase nuke levels Los Angeles? He didn't say. And there have been no real specifics in the various pro-Kerry articles following the convention. There are only vague aspirations for a foreign relations rapprochement designed to substitute European troops for American so that our boys can come home where they belong. No one's used the term "peace with honor," but with all the Vietnam nostalgia floating around the country like a cloud of methane, perhaps we can be excused for being reminded of that old figleaf for surrender. It's as if the war on terror itself can't be justified unless the rest of the world agrees to it. If they don't, we should forget about it and cope with whatever happens whenever it happens.

All of the assessments from the right have focused in various ways on this head-in-the-sand attitude by Kerry's supporters. Everything about the Democratic Convention seemed to be designed to turn reality into something different. The party pretended to be pro-military and hawkish about terror even though 95 percent of the delegates were completely opposed to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and many, if not most, favor an immediate pullout from Irag that would be disastrous. Republicans have spilled a lot of ink pointing out this and other Democrat hypocrisies written into the party's toothless platform. But there is a more fundamental denial of reality at work, one that is ably articulated by Mark Steyn in his Sunday Telegraph op-ed titled He was complacent, arrogant and humourless. How they loved him. Here's his most acute observation:

...after being for-and-against the war for the last year according to political necessity, Kerry seems to have settled on a position of doing pretty much what Bush is doing while simultaneously spending more time on the blower to Kofi, Jacques and Gerhard. If I were a principled anti-war Democrat, I'd be furious.

But they're not. Because the real distinction is not between pro- and anti-war, but between September 11 Americans and September 10 Americans. The latter group is a coalition embracing not just the hardcore Bush haters - for whom, as the opening of Fahrenheit 9/11 makes plain, it all goes back to chads in Florida - but the larger group of voters who've been a little stressed out by the epic nature of politics these last three years and would like a quieter life. That's what John Kerry's offering them: a return to September 10.

That's the current campaign scene in a nutshell. Trudy Rubin and her brothers and sisters on the left want to repeal not only George W. Bush, but everything that's happened since election day 2000. And they think that maybe if we just start acting normal on the world stage, meaning the way we acted before September 11, maybe the world stage will start acting normal too. The problem is, it's not going to happen. The world stage wasn't in such hot shape before 9/11. The U.N. was already engaged in the greatest and most costly institutional corruption in history, the French and Russians were already making dirty deals with the Iraqis, Jimmy Carter had already doomed the U.S. to the current nuclear stalemate with North Korea, and al Qaeda and its affiliates had already killed hundreds of Americans with impunity. The nations whose anti-Americanism we didn't notice until G. W. Bush was in office didn't much care about all that then, and they're not going to start to care about it if Kerry resumes the Clinton foreign policy of 1992-2000. Nor is Islamic fascism going to go away just because another American president starts insisting on 'serious' new talks with Yassir Arafat.

Worse, in their haste to crown a candidate behind whom all the faithful could unite against the hated Bush, the Democrats carelessly selected the most blatant of their army of panderers. Again, Steyn cuts right to the chase:

In another perilous time - 1918 - Lord Haig wrote of Lord Derby: "D is a very weak-minded fellow I am afraid and, like the feather pillow, bears the marks of the last person who has sat on him." It's subtler than that with Kerry: you don't have to sit on him; just the slightest political breeze, and his pillow billows in the appropriate direction. His default position is the conventional wisdom of the Massachusetts Left: on foreign policy, foreigners know best; on trade, the labour unions know best; on government, bureaucrats know best; on defence, graying ponytailed nuclear-freeze reflex anti-militarists know best; on the wine list, he knows best.

There probably isn't anyone in the United States who doesn't feel at least an occasional yearning for the comparatively carefree days before 9/11. But would we really go back to that time, even if we could? We'll close with our own little reminder of September 10, 2001. Take a look. Is that where you want to be right now?

Sunday, August 01, 2004

HEINZ 57 VANITY. Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.

For there is a man whose labour is in wisdom, and in knowledge, and in equity;


. . . yet to a man that hath not laboured therein
shall he leave it for his portion.

This also is vanity and a great evil.

Saturday, July 31, 2004

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