Just last week my Bush-hating roommate
suggested that if I really supported the war in Iraq that I’d
go over there and fight myself. But if he really cared about
affirmative action, wouldn’t he be willing to give up his
seat in the Law School in the interest of
“diversity?”
- D.C. Lee
The Law School, coincidentally, recently sent an e-mail to its
students explaining that the only reason military personnel can
recruit on campus is because the school would lose federal funding
if it didn’t. In other words, the Law School would ban the
military — specifically, its don’t ask, don’t
tell policy — if it could. And to think, all this time I
thought tolerance and acceptance meant tolerance and acceptance of
all ideas, not just liberal ideas.
And speaking of “diversity,” the Center for
Individual Rights is seeking fees from the University for
successfully challenging the University’s undergraduate
affirmative action policies. The CIR is seeking approximately two
million dollars, which the University claims is too much. The
University, it should be noted, spent over eight million dollars
defending its affirmative action policies.
In other news, Democrats continue to criticize the Bush
administration for fighting the wrong war at the wrong place at the
wrong time. Saddam Hussein, they say, had no weapons of mass
destruction and did not pose an immediate threat to U.S. security.
But would anyone disagree that there’s an improved chance for
peace and stability in Iraq? When an appellate court reviews a
trial court’s decision, it doesn’t reverse the trial
court if it reached the right result for the wrong reasons.
As an alternative to pre-emptive military action, Kerry has
proposed an ambiguous “global test” to determine
whether the U.S. should defend its interests. Presumably, the site
for this “global test” will be at one of the many
“summits” Kerry plans to organize with our allies. But
does anyone outside of the U.N. still think group meetings are
productive?
Summits, Kerry suggests, are a worldwide panacea. After all, as
a popular T-shirt notes, war has not solved anything …
except ending slavery, Nazism and Communism.
Talk to a liberal environmentalist and you’ll soon learn
that global warming, a hot-button issue whose costs may not be
experienced for generations, is a pressing concern requiring
immediate attention. Talk to a liberal foreign policy-maker and
you’ll soon learn that stability in Iraq, a hot-button issue
whose benefits may not be realized for generations, can wait on the
back burner while Kerry organizes political summits and subjects
relief efforts to a global test.
Kerry, in a July interview with the Telegraph Herald (Dubuque,
Iowa), said he personally opposes abortion and believes “life
begins at conception.” Kerry said he will not, however, take
his Catholic belief and “legislate it on a Protestant or a
Jew or an atheist.” Presumably, Kerry will also not endorse
any laws criminalizing murder, domestic abuse or child pornography,
as such laws would be the equivalent of legislating his Catholic
belief on Protestants, Jews and atheists.
Nineteen years ago, John Edwards successfully sued an
obstetrician whose negligence in reading a fetal heartbeat monitor
resulted in brain damage to a child. According to The New York
Times, Edwards stood before a jury and channeled the words of an
unborn baby girl. “She speaks to you through me,”
Edwards told the jury. “And I have to tell you right now
— I didn’t plan to talk about this — right now I
feel her. I feel her presence. She’s inside me, and
she’s talking to you.” As Douglas Johnson, in an
exceptional column for National Review Online, notes, sometime
between 1985 and 2004 Edwards lost the ability to hear the voices
of the unborn. “It seems,” Johnson explains,
“that nowadays there are voices that ring much louder in
Senator Edwards’ mind than those of unborn victims. After
all, unborn children cannot vote, or register others to vote, or
distribute brochures, or make contributions, or do any of the other
things that will determine whether John Kerry and John Edwards are
elevated to the highest office in the land.”
Hillary Clinton, in an interview with CNBC after last
Friday’s presidential debate, did some stump-work for John
Kerry. Oh, how it must grate the junior senator from New York to
stump for Kerry knowing that every sound bite hurts her own chances
of running in ’08. For once, though, I think the Clintons and
I can agree on something: Bush ’04.
Lee can be reached at
“mailto:leedc@umich.edu”>leedc@umich.edu.