Jeff Jarvis writes;

Character is not a measure of competence. And what I really want in a President is competence. Jimmy Carter had character; he was a terrible President. Jerry Ford was his Republican counterpart: good guy, nothing President. Bill Clinton ended up with a cracked character but I say he was a good President. Richard Nixon had the character of a cockroach, yet he was, in many ways, quite competent.

I wasn’t aware the two qualities were mutually exclusive. Without character, competence promises you little more than a highly successful psychopath. See Joseph Mengele.
I also wasn’t aware that it was possible for someone as smart as Jeff to have such a fundamental lack of understanding about what character is. Or that all human beings of the age and political experience of those seeking presidential office will have had plenty of tests of their character, both small and significant, to be measured by. Character does not lie dormant until tested by crisis. It is measured in the day to day decisions we make as we grow from childhood to adulthood.
But, most of all, character is not about being without flaws. Character is the ability to recognize ones flaws and rise above them.
C. Dodd Harris emails;

Jarvis has been very impressive since 9/11, proving that one can be a liberal in one’s sensibilities and yet still retain some sense. But he will only really come fully into the light when he can finally admit to himself that Clinton really wasn’t an especially good President. Not bad, per se, but far too flawed – by the very character deficiencies Jarvis would excuse – to ever have been anything other than an placeholder President. By doing little, he managed to ride the waves created by better men and retain the office (which was all he really cared about), but no-one will remember him in 100 years. Bolder men like Bush, Reagan and Roosevelt meanwhile, will be marked down as linchpins of history.
Mr. Jarvis is only a step away, truth be told, as he is surely aware just how much the very size of the problem that loosed the shingles from his own eyes – Islamofascist terrorism – can be laid at the feckless feet of Bill Clinton’s lack of willingness to do anything about it. But he’s not quite ready to take the plunge just yet. Hence, the tortured arguments about how character isn’t important in Presidential aspirants.
Great thinkers all the way back to Aristotle have considered the inculcation of virtue the single most important task of any society. Because, as the Founders understood, without character not much else matters. That’s why they considered character the principal factor in measuring fitness for public office.

Via Jeff Jarvis

7 World Trade Center rising from the ashes.

There’s nothing like running Hell bent for leather at the enemy with your grenade and it’s fuse flying madly in the wind, and upon spotting an enemy combatant, to grab one end of the grenade in your teeth, pull, and let the rest fly. One of the kids would say “Man we don’t keep bombs like that in our bathroom. All we got is these stick-on headbands.”

Cyril Doll on Canada Day celebrations in Calgary. Which is today, of course. (Only in Canada do we work on our national holiday, if it means trading it for a long weekend.)

Last Sunday, I was counted among the 30 odd thousand fans who attended the Stampeder-Alouettes football match. In a fit of unbridled patriotism the staff working the doors to McMahon stadium enthusiastically handed out little Canadian flags to the good people in attendance. “Maybe Shelia Copps will be singing the national anthem,” I wondered to myself. Alas, time told that was not the case.
As the game wore on and the Alouettes successfully began to lay the smack down on the Stamps, my attention diverted away from the field to the stands itself. I noticed hundreds of these little flags gracing the cement floor of the bleachers, along with all the spilt beer, chewing gum and excess nacho cheese. Unfortunate, but again I say you would never see such disrespect for a flag in America nor I suspect Mexico nor as say Croatia nor Germany. Maybe because those countries actually fought for their independence, whereas we Canadians were thrown a bone from Great Britain once they figured they had all the fur they needed? Was it not our first Prime Minister who ran with this British style of governance and then gave it to us making so bold as to claim the West will be Canada�s crown colony? Now, as a Westerner it seems to me that these reports of patriotism- gone-bad maybe stem from this laid-back Canadian attitude. Oh well, since nobody else is here this morning maybe I’ll just go and do my Canadian duty and hit the pub, because I… am… Canadian.

Yup.

Cosby, again.
But this time, with applause, and support from Jesse Jackson.

“Let me tell you something, your dirty laundry gets out of school at 2:30 every day, it’s cursing and calling each other n—— as they’re walking up and down the street,” Cosby said during an appearance at the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition & Citizenship Education Fund’s annual conference.
“They think they’re hip,” the entertainer said. “They can’t read; they can’t write. They’re laughing and giggling, and they’re going nowhere.”

If only we could hear First Nations leaders speak with this much unapologetic honesty.

Michelle Malkin is sympathetic, but unhappy about Vice President Dick Cheney’s suggestion to Patrick Leahy in the Senate.

I am still have nightmares about the dangling heads of Nick Berg and Paul Johnson and Kim Sun-Il, and all the mainstream media will be prattling on about today is Dick Cheney’s use of the F word.

She’s asking for more creative suggestions. “Feel free to leave the profanity-free putdown you would have used on Leahy.”
Unfortunately, the damage is done. The only befitting action now for Cheney is a full, unequivocal retraction:

“I was out of line, Mr. Leahy. I take it back. “
“Unfuck yourself.”

Prior to [9/11], Conservatives, however distasteful, were inchoate; they had tacitly acknowledged the intellectual leadership of the Liberal project. No more. Now Liberals were confronted with people who didn’t want to read the New York Times, were unimpressed by celebrity and didn’t want to go to Harvard. Many liberals didn’t recognize “their” familiar country any more. James Lileks described the intensity of the revulsion at the barbarians at the gates; not Osama Bin Laden, but rather someone else.

I ask my Democrat friends what they’d rather see happen — Bush reelected and bin Laden caught, or Bush defeated and bin Laden still in the wind. They’re all honest: they’d rather see Bush defeated.

[…]
Through the long summer of 1990s, the wounds festered as the infection deepened. It was masked by the ineffectual cologne of NGO projects, corrupt aid delivery, United Nations peacekeeping public relations projects, by selective media coverage and by the jangling of fund raising concerts at which a Secretary General appeared, like some secular pope, to give his blessing, until the boil burst over Manhattan on that bright autumn day. As the debris showered on New York it obscured the fact that a new post-post-colonial ideology was ready to push the Liberal edifice aside and take up the challenge of Islamic terrorism; underneath the War for Terror there was now a War for the West.
James Lilek’s friends must know that electing John Kerry to the White House will not restore the antebellum world. Things have gone too far for that. The Third World in general and the Islamic World in particular have burst their bounds; they can no longer be herded into the decrepit and threadbare tent of the United Nations; the Kyoto climate agreement; the International Criminal Court or any of Potemkin treaties woven by the European Union. Islamic fundamentalists are openly attacking Russia; besetting India; seizing British naval vessels; threatening to interdict the Straits of Malacca; menacing the House of Saud; renewing hostilities in Kosovo; bombing trains in Spain; raging through the Sudan and building nuclear enrichment plants. No Clintonian ceremony in the Rose Garden can replace the planets in their old orbits. All John Kerry can do if he must pay the price of restoring the Liberal dream is to withdraw, like Prince Prospero, into the artificial gaieties of last Bal Masque while the Red Death stalks without.

Go read it all.

Professor Bainbridge has a piece on the difference between positive rights and negative rights. For Canadians, a worthwhile reminder that governments that purport to protect one’s “right” to employment, to health care, for example, provide them at a great cost to negative rights and personal liberty.

If the majority thinks all employees should be paid a living wage, the freedom of individual employees to take a lower wage and of individual employers to offer a lower wage is circumscribed. Again, we often see the same sort of disregard for private property and freedom of contract in nominal democracies as in totalitarian regimes.

Saskatchewan provides a recent example of the danger of postive rights governments – withdrawel of government “guaranteed” rights to health care in rural Saskatchewan.
In forcing a “right to health care”, the state has prohibited private providers from operating in the system. So, when the state decides that it cannot or will not provide service to a segment of the population, those citizens suddenly find that instead of having a “right” – their access to health care has been effectively prohibited by the same government that claims to guarantee it.

Something tells me Sean is going to win this battle, if attitude counts for anything.

Not that this is a startling revelation. But, in contrast to the timeless wisdom we are reminded of in the wake of Reagan’s passing, Jaeger has some quotes to remind us just how clueless our former prime minister was.

“We have a great deal to learn from the Soviet Union . . . a country from which we have a great deal to benefit.”

Michael Totten, at Tech Central Station;

It’s bad enough that the torchbearers of Political Correctness compromised their honorable anti-racist principles with expediency and hypocrisy. But what’s left of Political Correctness is worse even than that. There’s also something implicitly racist about it. White Christians are held to the highest possible standard. They’re expected not to have a racist thought in their heads and are called out for the slightest infraction. Culprits who really are racist (and who aren’t merely guilty of checking the “wrong” box on their voter registration) deserve all the shellacking they get. Meanwhile, however, ethnic and religious minorities are allowed to behave like skinheads. It looks as though the activist set expects hatemongering anti-social behavior from Muslim immigrants just as they expect a dog to pee on the rug. It’s the “soft bigotry of low expectations” with a racial twist.

Read the “Berkeley Intifada”.

Pejman Yousefzadeh on the millionth Bloomingdale’s customer.

Watching the ceremonies today on Juno Beach, I wonder how many of us were uncomfortable with the juxtaposition of commemorations being led by Liberal politicians whose policies have been responsible for the evisceration of the Canadian military over the past 30 years.
Nicholas Packwood says it best.“Bring back this Canada.”

Bagpipes played their eerie sound as the Royal Highland Regiment left the harbour in England. They played the pipes on the transports as they rocked up the shore. They bagpipes howled as the Black Watch hit Juno Beach. The bagpipes gave a simple message to the Germans defending Juno beach: we are crazy, we are coming, and you are going to die.

Mr. Martin – I hope you and your Liberal government members and your social engineering, leftist career beaurocrats looked long and hard into the faces of those elderly veterans today.
For every one of them is twice the man of the lot of you combined.

“In the 1950s, Khrushchev predicted: “We will bury you.” But in the West today, we see a free world that has achieved a level of prosperity and well-being unprecedented in all human history. In the Communist world, we see failure, technological backwardness, declining standards of health, even want of the most basic kind–too little food. Even today, the Soviet Union still cannot feed itself. After these four decades, then, there stands before the entire world one great and inescapable conclusion: Freedom leads to prosperity. Freedom replaces the ancient hatreds among the nations with comity and peace. Freedom is the victor.
And now the Soviets themselves may, in a limited way, be coming to understand the importance of freedom. We hear much from Moscow about a new policy of reform and openness. Some political prisoners have been released. Certain foreign news broadcasts are no longer being jammed. Some economic enterprises have been permitted to operate with greater freedom from state control.
Are these the beginnings of profound changes in the Soviet state? Or are they token gestures, intended to raise false hopes in the West, or to strengthen the Soviet system without changing it? We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace.
General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

Rest In Peace, Mr. Reagan. And thankyou.
Outside The Beltway has a roundup of photos and links.
Dean Esmay;
“I hated him when he was President.
Now I’m a 38 year-old man who can’t stop crying.
And that’s the truth.”
Kathy Shaidle remembers when she stopped hating him, too. “It’s too late to say I’m sorry, but not to say that he was right about a lot of things and I was wrong.”
Wretchard, at the Belmont Club;
“The man who won Cold War died today. He couldn’t take it with him, but left his legacy to billions of human beings. He was characterized as an idiot, an automaton and charlatan by many of his critics. Yet none of his detractors, however polished and poised, have changed the world so profoundly as this one man.”

Bill Whittle .

I, and others who see a terrible threat in the growth of Radical Islam, did not invent this term. It is considerably older than my humble self; besides, I do not speak Arabic. It is their term. And unlike people determined to hide until this problem goes away, I am determined to take Islam at its word.
Finally, consider this: Muslims are angrily at war with Buddhists in East Asia. Muslims are at enraged with Animists in Africa. Of course, none of this approaches the sheer hatred that Muslims bear towards Hindus in the South Asia peninsula. And this foaming hatred blanches compared to the white-hot fury Muslims feel to the Christian American Crusaders. And this fury is but a candle to the incandescent, boiling, supernova of murder they feel toward the Jews.
Does anyone beside me detect a pattern here? You know, my Dad told me once, “Bill, if more than three people in your life are utter, total assholes, then maybe it’s you.”
I am not a religious person. I do not have a horse in this race. But everywhere I turn in the world today, I see Radical Islam – – and not the United States — at war with everybody. And I have no choice but to conclude that this is not a blip or a hiccup. It is a growing threat. And it needs to be met head-on. Right now.

And for our apologist friends;

The truly remarkable, astonishing and galling issue here is that while the multi-culturalists are the ones shrieking the loudest about understanding different people and different values, they are the ones absolutely least willing to take themselves at their own words and so they consistently apply western thought models to people who think nothing like we do.

It’s long, and worth your time.

Thomas Lifson has his suspicions about what may be going on behind the scenes of UNSCAM.
If true, I suspect it isn’t the first time – there was a rather sudden reversal of position from France, Germany and Russia over their initial refusal to forgive Iraq’s debts a few months ago – despite the warnings of the pundits and political critics who said the exclusion of those countries from bidding on lucrative rebuilding contracts was a self-inflicted foot wound.
Via Instapundit, who as usual, has a great roundup of links

Sean at Pol:Spy compares gasoline prices to HP printer ink costs. I’m sort of on the same page as he is.

I get around 12 mpg in my 86 Dodge pickup. As inefficient as that is, I cannot justify replacing it with a newer, fuel efficient car. And I’ve looked into it.

Why not? It’s paid for, and costs 41$ a month to insure. Occassional repairs are part of the deal, but they are inexpensive as repairs go, and used parts are available if need be. The original cost in buying it used ($5K) 5 years ago, and then replacing the engine ($3K) – far less than buying a new or newer car or truck would have been. I don’t think twice about its reliability before taking it to Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Chicago.
The actual cost of a newer vehicle in payments, depreciation and insurance more than eat up any fuel savings, and when you live on a budget in which you have no idea from month to month what your income is going to be – that’s an issue.
And then there’s this: if you think that paying $90 to drive a full size pickup the 6 hours from Saskatoon to Calgary is expensive – try mailing it instead.

Iraq the Model describes the new life of an Iraq soldier.

Jay Currie spotted this contrasting AIDS story in Asia.

AIDS victims in 1987: Philippines 135 / Thailand 112
In 1991 the WHO predicted the Philippines would have 80,000 to 90,000 cases and Thailand 60,000 to 80,000 AIDS victims.
Thailand promoted the use of condoms in massive campaigns where Catholic Philippines promoted “Abstinence” and “Be faithful”.
The prognosis of the WHO was wrong for both countries:
1999: Philippines 1,005 / Thailand 755,000 AIDS victims.

Jaeger, on the already-wearing-thin Iraqi Prison Scandal Outrage[tm];

Bush could haul Rumsfeld out in public and do a Daniel Pearl on him, offering up his head on a silver platter to be used in the next soccer game in Fallujah and the opponents would say it’s not enough. He could it follow that up and commit hari-kari on Al-Jazeera and they’d say he took the easy way out, and anyway Wolfowitz is still pulling the strings so nothings changes. So forget about the public relations and just do what’s necessary to restore discipline, punish the guilty and get on with it.