Wednesday, October 20, 2004

 
A Mess of Porridge in Mesabi
["'Iraq is a mess,' he[Edwards] said, because of Bush's and Cheney's incompetence in diplomacy and military planning."-StarTribune]



Thanx to Rich Lowry for printing Edwards' support for snowmobiles in "national parks and forrests." The Red StarTribune to which I subscribe may have decided that howler might have cost him a few votes of those who would have seen it as a transparent lie and suppressed a few votes of the Red/Green types who might have viewed it as a sellout.
It's difficult to judge the costs and benefits of snowmobiles without knowing the political affiliations of those nominees for the "Darwin Awards" who demonstrate the relative lack of those machines' buoyancy on thin ice or open patches of water.
Speaking of Iraq, Edwards said, "its a haven for terrorists that didn't exist before." "Terrorists"?!? I thought that they were the "Minutemen" of Iraq. If Michael Moore and Johnboy were to meet up alone in a national park or forrest, it's unlikely that they would voice any differences of opinion more substantive than who had the prettier mouth or who could best squeal like a pig.
One can differ as to whether or not we have chosen the best turf in deciding to fight Islamofascism in Iraq, and one can argue that we have been too squishy in dealing the unrighteous inhabitants of Sodom Hussein's Fallujah/Gomorrah, but the assertion that Iraq was not, but now is, a "haven for terrorists" is debatable(if only Bush were capable of debate!) Edwards was probably not engaged in a sober comparison of the relative creature comforts and risks to life in uniform in Saddam's barracks versus those of safe houses out of uniform in Fallujah and elsewhere. It's Bush's fault, of course, that many Muslims hate us. If Bush had only pulled out all of our forces from the entire sacred Arabian peninsula which propped up what Edwards called the "Saudi oil family," we would have been lauded by the Islamic world and the peace of the world would not have been threatened by the uniforms which guarded the peaceable land of Iraq!
Edwards also said, "Their friends are making all the money. They're never going to anything about oil prices." Yep, Kedwards could appoint Jimmy "Dhimmi" Carter, the great doer of good deeds during the "oil crisis," Energy Czar.
A case can be made for allowing reimportation of prescription drugs. The New England Journal of Medicine recently ran a reasonably fair piece of largely armchair reasoning on this subject. The author made the common sense observation that lower prices for drugs would probably lead to less money being spent on research and development. And made a reasonable guess that reimportation could lead to modest decrease in prices paid for patented drugs in the U.S. and sharply higher prices in the rest of the world as prices equalized. Snake oil salesmen/demagogues such as Kedwards prefer not to admit that there might be some trade-offs(some of which might be defensible)in their schemes. There is nothing in their slavering rhetoric to suggest any justification for allowing any patents on any drug whatsoever. And there is no rational reason in their debased world for not raising the minimum wage to say, $50 per hour. Kedwards might decide to admit that there are some costs to their proposals if Bush's team decided to confront Kedwards' superstitions. Then again, there was enough hatred, stupidity, and evil in this country to elect Clinton twice and give Gore a plurality.