THAT CONSERVATIVE "RACISM" AGAIN

"President Bush and diversity: Against expectation, and without divisive debates over affirmative action and quotas, he has built an extraordinary record of minority appointments to his inner circle. He did it by sneaking them in the front door while everybody was watching. Condoleezza Rice's nomination yesterday to be secretary of state is the latest and most dramatic example. That she would be the first black woman to hold the post - and that she would succeed Colin Powell, the first black man - is a groundbreaking moment in American racial history. Our original sinners would be shocked. But we're not, and that, too, takes the breath away. America clearly is ready for a black official to be our representative to the world. And both Powell and Rice are so obviously qualified that it's as though race is not a factor for or against them....

Limousine-liberal Democrats and their media poodles, many of whom send their children to near-segregated private schools, have basically ignored the racial triumphs Powell and Rice embody. Just as they have barely noted that Rod Paige, the departing secretary of education, is the first black to hold that job. Or that Ann Veneman, the departing secretary of agriculture, is the first woman to hold that job. Or that Alberto Gonzales, if confirmed, will be the first Hispanic attorney general. Or that Bush has an Arab-American and two Asian-Americans in his cabinet. Had a Democratic President made those appointments, the celebratory coverage would invoke Harry Truman's integrating the armed forces or Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson's battle for civil rights. Talk about your double standards.

No matter. Bush isn't looking for applause. And my guess is that his trailblazing days are not finished. Given William Rehnquist's failing health, Bush likely will get to nominate an associate justice and a chief justice of the Supreme Court. There has been talk that Clarence Thomas might get the top job. I don't see it. A more likely scenario is that whoever Bush adds to the panel, he would elevate Sandra Day O'Connor to chief justice. She is the one true swing vote on the court and thus the perfect leader to guide its deliberations and jawbone for consensus. Did I mention she would be the first woman to hold the job?"

More here.

And British conservatives have twice chosen a Jew to lead them: Benjamin Disraeli in the 19th century and Michael Howard in the 21st century

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ELSEWHERE

Great news! Republican Dino Rossi won the governorship of Washington State by 261 votes over Democrat Christine Degregorie after 2 weeks of counting. Bush was defeated in this state but Rossi won in a state that is one of the most irreligious in the U.S.

Jeff Jacoby has a good tribute to John Ashcroft and a reply to the hysterical Leftist slurs about him.

"Reed Irvine, the indefatigable founder of Accuracy in Media and one of the very first people to question the received wisdom of the news media, passed away last night. He was 82. As a media critic, Reed Irvine was a trailblazer. While much of America was still blinded to the still fairly new notion that journalists could rise above their human nature and deliver the news without even a scintilla of bias, Irvine knew better".

From "The Australian": "With our US and Thai trade deals effectively overcoming their final hurdles, yesterday was a red-letter day for Australian trade. It was also a big day in sustaining the prosperity that two decades of economic reform have already brought us.... This is good news for our exporters, which means good news for employment, growth and living standards overall. But the other side of the coin, an increased range of cheaper imports, is just as important. Reduced protection on imports means local producers become smarter, more innovative and more efficient - just as we have seen with the local car industry, which rather than taking its begging-bowl to Canberra each year is now taking its products into niche export markets in Asia and the US. Cheaper shirts for our backs and refrigerators for our kitchens leave us with more money for the big things - our homes, our health, our kids' education. As former Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating pointed out last week, the anti-trade Left has yet to demonstrate how forcing people to pay more for the necessities of life contributes to a fairer society".

News from another planet: "Berkeley tolerates its homeless people, and takes good care of their stuff when they abandon it in shopping carts. Not only does the city pack carts and other belongings into a huge container in case folks want it back -- it also deep-freezes them for as long as 90 days."

This must be a classic case of doing the right thing for the wrong reason: Brazil's Leftist President Lula is decriminalizing drugs. Why? It looks like it is in part a payoff to the drug barons that backed Lula financially during his rise to power.

Very encouraging: According to Pew Research, 41% of voters said that they used the web to obtain campaign news with 21 percent saying that they used the internet as a primary news source. And 40% said that media coverage of George Bush's campaign was unfair.

Tyrrell: "At the heart of the liberal crack-up, which I first diagnosed in 1984, is the impulse to politicize everything from food to sex to happenstance -- and to moralize. The liberal of the liberal crack-up is a free-floating moralizer. Such liberals are also dramatists of the most adolescent variety. No human experience is beyond their melodrama. There is no misfortune that they will not exploit for votes. Their politics is built on a world of extremes. The conservatism of President George W. Bush, a conservatism that has been governing America for most of the past 24 years, remains to these liberals shocking, dangerous or "extremist," as they say. The liberalism of the liberal crack-up is what is "extremist." Even a sensible idea or a fine principle is exaggerated to the point that it becomes preposterous and untenable. Thus in the last election, the perfectly sensible and tolerant solution for stable homosexual couples' legal difficulties, namely, civil unions, was not sufficient"

Dodging Federal speech restrictions: "The FCC has no jurisdiction over radio broadcasts that come from satellites in the sky. Regulators can scare executives worried about their million-dollar bonuses and small station managers struggling to get by. But satellite radio takes programming decisions out of the hands of individual stations with their individual prejudices."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

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