Excelente entrevista, onde David Galernter - um estudioso de ciência da computação -revela sua tristeza face à degradação moral dos EUA( o quase total rompimento com valores básicos que, até então, pareciam indissociáveis da vida civil norte-americana) estimulada desde dentro das universidades por obra e graça dos intelectuais, tudo isso no bojo da "contra-cultura", que, segundo ele, virou o país de cabeça para baixo e disseminou mundo afora o tão em moda anti-americanismo, ítem indispensável aos nossos professores-doutrinadores e mantra na boca de esquerdistas. Uma percepção muito afinada com a de gente como Jacques Barzun, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Jean-François Revel e Allan Bloom.
28 de setembro de 2008
How the Democrats Created the Financial Crisis: Kevin Hassett
Kevin Hassett
The financial crisis of the past year has provided a number of surprising twists and turns, and from Bear Stearns Cos. to American International Group Inc., ambiguity has been a big part of the story.
Why did Bear Stearns fail, and how does that relate to AIG? It all seems so complex.
But really, it isn't. Enough cards on this table have been turned over that the story is now clear. The economic history books will describe this episode in simple and understandable terms: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac exploded, and many bystanders were injured in the blast, some fatally.
ALAN KEYES ON IRAQ WAR
I will not for the moment go into the question of whether it was right or wrong to choose Iraq as some kind of strategic priority in the war against terror. I frankly have said in the past and would say now — and not with the wisdom of hindsight either — it was not what would have been my choice.Having, however, determined that we were going to go to war, and what we said was the best interest of defending the American people against weapons of mass destruction and other terrible elements of terrorism, somebody explain to me why it is that we see fit to then take the question to the United Nations?When we respond to an attack on the United States and are moving forward with a strategy necessary to defend ourselves, we don't have to ask a "by-your-leave" from the UN — especially not when the regime established by the UN to keep Iraq under control had collapsed, without any effective action from other member nations.Now, after we won the military victory in Iraq — which, thank God, everybody assumed we would — what should have happened? Well — and this is not the wisdom of hindsight either, because I said so at the time — what we should have done at that point was to keep the security aspects to ourselves and turn all the political junk over to the UN. That's part of why it's there.This whole business of nation-building and shepherding people through representative government — it's not our purpose. How many people believe that we're going to introduce representative self-government in the Middle-East in the Arabic and Islamic countries, where they have never known not even one moment of liberty and self-government, as individuals or as a people where even some of their own clerics stand up and declare that their religion is contrary to the very principles of self-government?How many people think we're going to do it, in one year, in five years, in one generation? I don't think we will! Why on earth did we set it as our objective? It makes no sense! You set yourself up for failure, and we did.Instead, we should have turned to the international community and said, "Look. We established a UN because it was supposed to, among other things, help nations along the road to self-government." Some of the things that are put in that charter were our things, and they're not bad things. Why do we never use them against these bad guys?Put the UN on the spot. We should say, "You should be working, all of you, to help these people to achieve representative institutions of self-government. Get in here with your money, and with your workers, and so on" — and guess what? Right this minute, would it be our prestige that was on the line? No.I think that sometimes we wear blinders, we have prejudices. There should be no blinders and no prejudices when it comes to figuring out what we do to defend the interests of this country.
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