For a while I thought that Canadians had nothing in common except the fact nobody there, with the exception of a boatload of hippies, was American. I whimiscally decided that, in order to be taken seriously, a country needs someone outside the country to hate it (besides the Quebecois)–and everybody was ignoring them. So I’ve been politely loathing Canada and things Canadian as my bit to help out Canadian sovereignty. Since every Canadian I met seemed to despise my country for being so violent, blah blah blah, I thought it a cry for attention and was willing to throw you lot a bone.

However, Grant McCracken undermines my efforts when he writes:

Plainly and simply, our neighbour needed us to close ranks, show solidarity, and present a single face to the dithering world community.

Er, no. If you’re really feeling indebted for those years of protection (which would assume we were doing this purely out of the kindness of our heart instead of needing a conveniently safe place to put the DEW Line), nothing says “thank you” like cash–maybe all that money you save on prescription drugs and not having any police since everyone up there is pure as the wind-driven snow, which I gather you have much experience with.

Seriously, just because we were determined to start a war on the thinnest of evidence doesn’t mean you’re less a friend (or a bratty younger brother) if you don’t follow us in. That’s like saying if Americans all started drinking heavily and going for a dip in the ocean, it would be Canada’s job to do the same to show solidarity to the world.

If you think it was right to go to war anyway because Saddam was a bad guy and for some reason was more important than all the other bad guys out there, fine. Criticize your government on that basis. But quite frankly it’s stupid to do it just because your ally has a yen. If that were so, how much shame would you put on the US (or, for that matter, yourselves) over the Suez crisis? I don’t hear anybody rushing to say Canada needed to put in troops in a land grab because you got a system of common laws from the UK and share a monarch.

If Canada were to say “Hey, we won’t go into Afghanistan because, well, thanks for the low, low prices on all the F-18s, but hey, we don’t want to become a target for the next 9/11, eh,” that would be ingratitude. That was the place to stand up and show solidarity. But to make a judgment that evidence of a threat from Saddam is insufficient, particularly when history has proven that judgment right and the American (and, honestly, mine at the time) judgment wrong, is not something to criticize.

Now, if you make the argument that the decision was taken on this visceral anti-Americanism you describe, the reasoning might be worthy of criticism. But so far, this is one of the few things I think Canada can feel just a bit smug aboot.

And remember, I hate Canada. Politely.

I know, gentle readers, that you have been anxiously awaiting my take on the entire Swift Boat Thingy.

I have been wondering how to put my thoughts into words, but now, thankfully, Jesse Walker has done it for me. Please read it for the Real Ultimate Take on the Truth Behind the Lies.

Looks like terrorism may be reaching Russia, as the same day that 250 rebels are staging an attack on Grozny in advance of Putin’s weekend visit there, two planes from the same airport have disappeared from radar within minutes of each other in two different places in Russia. One has been confirmed to have crashed.

Two planes, simultaneously crashing? Smells like Al Quaeda. They love simultaneous bombs.

Well, I guess GWB will get some more support from Putin, if this pans out like I suspect.

The Adam Smith Institute has a good summary of China’s role in your pain at the pump. In even more brief, China’s increasing energy usage is outstripping supply, and will continue to drive up fossil fuel prices.

Unfortunately, China is not using that oil as efficiently as large Western countries. However, the Kyoto protocol, which Western countries (infamously save the US) signed, doesn’t let Western countries get credit for emissions reduction in developing countries like China. This is profoundly stupid.

The largest growth in raw material consumption will be in the less-developed countries, as they have further to go to achieve the state of the art in development. So if they are going to be burning more oil for the same kilowatt hour of electricity, doesn’t it make sense to make them more efficient as they grow, rather than trying to limit consumption in the West which is much closer to the theoretical maximum of efficiency?

If you redirect pollution reduction efforts to areas where they can be done most cost-effectively, everybody wins—assuming you’re dead-set on making the reductions. China gets more efficient plants and reduces energy expenditures, and the West doesn’t have to pay as much per ton of carbon eliminated from the atmosphere.

However, I suspect that vision would enrage many environmental activists who are more interested in economic hairshirt practices and ideological purity than actual reductions in pollution.

Plus setting targets for pollution reduction in developing countries scares the bejebus out of them, as they instinctively know what the EU claims not to know: any distortion of the market results in lower overall wealth creation. Their legitimacy is now tied to how well they sustain their rates of growth, and they fear any measure that might mitigate that. At the same time, there is an overall lack of trust in true market mechanisms to distribute pollution reduction more efficiently than bureaucrats.

To tie this all together, if Kyoto had allowed reductions in developing countries, the US would have likely signed. If the US had signed and started making reductions in China, Chinese demand might be slightly reduced, and projections of its future demand would definitely be reduced. In all likelihood, you’d pay less at the pump.

In the meantime, enjoy the last few years you can use your SUV without taking out a third mortgage.

I’m loath to disagree with Virginia Postrel–she’s extremely bright and a great writer, as well as putting out the best issues Reason has ever seen–plus she is a total babe…but I digress. In this post questioning the motives of Kerry-leaning libertarians, she falls down hard, and unfortunately I have to take issue:

I have a sneaking suspicion that Kerry-leaning libertarian hawks (now that’s a small demographic!) are simply kidding themselves in order to stay on the fashionable side of politics.

The thrust of her argument is that Kerry is indeed a classic Massachusetts liberal who wants to socialize this, raise taxes on that, and basically had his economic understanding frozen at the height of Eugene V. Debs’s influence on the Left. So electing him is dangerous compared to Bush. As evidence she quotes his focus on nationalizing health care through providing federal insurance.

Errr…Kerry is no Clinton, but then Clinton had a certain, more far-reaching health-care proposal that went nowhere against the Republican congress. The fact of the matter is that we would talk less about Clinton’s centrism were he saddled with the 98th Congress instead of the 104th or later. So the gridlock argument is not one to be brushed aside lightly.

The upshot of it is that both Bushes put Clinton to shame in the social spending and federal regulation realm…liberals ought to be in love with the Bush family. If only it weren’t for that pesky war and religious superstition dictating social policy!

With regard to the Iraq war, I’m not in the libertarian hawk set that Postrel mentions–though I was not against the war before it happened, neither did I think it a good idea at that time. And now I think it was a lousy idea and events have proven war opponents right and hawks wrong, even assuming coverage of the war and its aftermath has been skewed.

But I certainly do have problems–big problems–with Bush’s domestic policy. He embodies everything I hate about conservatives and liberals (ironically my take on Al Gore as well). So I’l be voting for Kerry to get Bush out of office. I don’t pretend it will be a positive good, but at this point less bad is a much better option.

And as far as the specious argument that being anti-Bush is cool: come on, if libertarians wanted to be cool, they would stop being libertarians. Being an anti-Bush libertarian wins you few if any friends–more like toleration from the Left, and condemnation as a traitor from the Right. It would be much cooler to be some sort of granola Peace Corps hippy–and I’d find more social acceptance as an unthinking Christian evangelical.

In short, nobody becomes libertarian because it’s cool, so once they’ve made the leap to libertarianism, you have a large burden of proof to show before you can claim that any other policy position they take is due to fashion rather than an honest assessment that it’s right. Move from Dallas to here in the DC area and see just how cool you feel as any sort of libertarian, pro- or anti-Bush.

CNN has a story about an FBI contract translator’s wrongful dismissal case being dismissed because the evidence needed to prove the case one way or the other is secret.

Now, having at one time held a piddling Secret clearance, I can tell you that a lot of stuff that is classified is bogus…at most it needs to be classified for about 72 hours and then it is worthless. Details of Hillary Clinton’s itinerary in various trips she made abroad, as far as I know, are still Secret…even though they’re published in the press and over for several years. (No, this is not the Secret material I had access to, just an example.)

However, there are cases in which the testimony would not be best left out in the open (“Well, since the Aurora pictures taken at Mach 9 with our image enhancement technology show the defendant’s license plate on the car moments before it blew up, we’re relatively sure it was him.”). But why can’t these cases be handled by specially cleared judges who are cleared Secret, Top Secret, and a special few who are code-word cleared?

I would prefer open trials in most cases–but the idea that a case is dismissed because the government says, “Uh, no, that’s a…secret…yeah, that’s the ticket,” is even more repulsive to me.

Until then, let’s change regimes at home so the trend has a chance to reverse–and vote those bums out if they don’t reverse it.

(See, Mike? It’s not hard, and I didn’t quote anybody out of context. Loads of reasons to vote against Bush–it’s like taking candy from a baby.

Hmmm…I’m hungry.)

I was going to write something about how, even though I think in retrospect I was stupid to assume the Bush administration knew anything about Iraq that your average PoliSci undergrad didn’t, I’m not going to bother to see Fahrenheit 9/11.

However, my favorite movie critic has done it for me, and said it better than I would have.

The key line is this:

Two Fingers for Fahrenheit 9/11. I hate Bush, but I have better reasons than this.

Ditto.

This entry in the Washington Times about flight attendants still being trained to submit to hijackers has made me more angry than anything I’ve seen in a long time.

Exactly how big of an idiot do you have to be to realize that the risk/reward ratio for resisting hijackers has changed forever to the side of reward? The reward is: possibly living. The risk is: possibly dying. The risk of doing nothing is almost certainly dying, and the benefit is, you may get to live until your plane is used as a murder weapon for people on the ground.

This, if for no other reason, is why I’m a libertarian. It takes a village to raise a child, and it takes a government to tell that child to allow people to murder him and others.

This is morally, rationally, ethically, and even aesthetically indefensible. The only moral framework from which this can be argued is pacifism (which I view as immoral, as it basically aids and abets murder by not opposing it in any meaningful way), and I highly doubt the same government who will try to throw you in jail for “embarrassing” them or invades the nation of Iraq because they didn’t like the cut of their leader’s jib is operating on the principle of pacifism.

Remember, if you’re for nationalized health care, you want the same decision-making quality that went into the TSA in charge of your cancer treatment: “It’s best not to treat cancer because there are nasty side-effects.”

Thank you.

No, really. I mean it. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Things were starting to look bad there for a while, what with Spain leaving what little of a coalition we had and John Kerry gaining in the polls. I thought I might have to move to Russia to institute the kind of foreign policy I dream of.

But you’ve saved me.

Every time you lop off a head, you make people that much more unsure they want to object to unilateral action against you people. Even if we’re not getting anything done, we can be seen to be Doing Something, and every beheading makes Abu Ghraib a little less bad by comparison.

So please, I beg of you, keep it up. I don’t want to have to move to Russia, because it’s so full of damn dirty Slavs and other untermenschen.

Your pal in conflict and big budgets,
Paul

In his blog post about Poles liking Ronald Reagan more than we do, Tyler Cowen writes:

The irony is that Lech Walesa, author of these words, remains far more popular in the United States than in his native Poland. Taxi drivers told us that the Poles “hated” Walesa, even though we regard him as a hero for world freedom.

His taxi driver was partially right–Poles felt a much magnified version of what most educated people feel about George W. Bush, in terms of speech, education, and intelligence. Unlike Bush, Walesa came by it honestly. It’s ironic that only in the fall of communism did the working class actually take power anywhere in Central or Eastern Europe.

Walesa’s speech combined the accent of Bill Clinton with the grammatical, um, innovations of Bush, though maybe not as unintelligible as your usual MTV rapper. He tried to quote a famous Polish saying that translates to “I do not want to, but I must,” in regard to his Presidential ambitions in 95. Unfortunately, he used the wrong verb form, so it came out sounding like “I ain’t wanna, but I gots to.” In fact, when living in Poland at the time, I bought a t-shirt that would read in English: “I ain’t wanna, but I gots to GO TO SCHOOL.”

The Poles can be weirdly snobbish, especially about language. My theory is that since national identity in that part of the world is closely tied to language, there is an expectation that linguistic ability is part of legitimacy in the ruling class. They’re thrilled when you learn a little bit of Polish; but once you get partially fluent they seem to think you a bit dim, since you’re not well-spoken.

The degree of dislike of Walesa is a function of geography. Political attitudes in Poland map fairly well to which country ruled that part in the Partition of Poland. The Austro-Hungarian south leans right, the Russian east goes left, and the Prussian northwest is the swing state, so to speak. However, the area around Krakow is considered a bit toffee-nosed, so they, while liking his party (or the tens of “sofa parties”–parties in which the members could all fit on a sofa–that took its place after it collapsed), were a bit embarrassed by Walesa.

I like the guy, though I’ve never met him–I suspect however that it’s a fairly American rags-to-riches story, for which we have a greater cultural appreciation.