Richard Bennett

The analysis of the PoMo Left in: Will Wilkinson / The Fly Bottle is worth printing and framing. In essence, he says that the Old Left used a reasoned, scientific analysis of poltical economy to arrive at the position that socialism is more just than capitalism. As this analysis was disproved by mounting historical evidence to the contrary, it became necessary to either discard reason or to discard socialism. And we know which tack the PoMos have taken.

It seems that I have to scoop the un-scoopable Andrew Sullivan on his appearance on Washington Journal with Christopher Hitchens. The boys were clearly the worse for wear owing to the unseemly hour at which the show is shot, but they managed to keep a stiff upper lip and soldier on. The most significant event was Hitch’s admission that he’s no longer a socialist, a question that host Brian Lamb has been taunting him with for some ten years now. He equivocated a bit, declaring that it’s not really possible for anyone to be a socialist these days since there’s no world-wide socialist movement, no prospect of one in the future, and no coherent socialist critique of capitalism, so it’s not really a personal choice.

The only areas of disagreement between the two were religion and health care; Sully’s a Roman Catholic and Hitch is an “anti-theist.” They traded the standard strawmen on this question in a particularly amusing way. Sully’s big on the free-market system of health care we have in the United States, and credits it for the anti-HIV drugs that are keeping him alive, while Hitch is nostalgic for the National Health, which was working fine twenty years ago when he left England.

Finally, the call-in audience was true to form for Complaint-Span: loony as all get-out. It was a fun show.

Fed Status for Fetus Spurs Debate

Abortion rights supporters said the change could help lay legal groundwork establishing the rights of a fetus and lead to a reversal of the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade (news – web sites) decision that legalized abortion.

“It undermines the whole premise of Roe v. Wade by giving legal status to a fetus from the moment of conception,” said Marcia Greenberger of the National Women’s Law Center.

The left’s position on abortion is inconsistent with its position on capital punishment and its alleged concern “for the children,” as their outrage over pre-natal care and punishment of fetal murder clearly shows. Tommy Thompson and the administration have brought these inconsistencies to the surface, and helped the poor at the same time.

What Mr. Bush did with that speech Tuesday night was akin to Chuck Yeager strapping the entire Democratic Party into an X-1 and taking the whole lot of them up to 80,000 feet at Mach 2. They were in ideological air they’d never breathed before.

“Let’s roll,” the president announces. First he talks about hunting down thousands of human time bombs. Then he heads to North Korea, Iran and Iraq and rolls them through a 360 around the “axis of evil.” About now, Tom Daschle’s smooth smile is touching the back of his neck. But he won’t stop; now the president is saying “I will not wait on events while dangers gather.” Sweat is running down Joe Biden’s legs. Teddy shifts, thinking his seat in the House is starting to come apart; surely this guy is going to ease off.

Instead, the one-year president invokes History itself, which “has called America and our allies to action,” and says that “it is both our responsibility and our privilege to fight freedom’s fight.” Barbara Boxer thinks her head is being pulled through the Capitol dome. A voice inside Hillary’s helmet is saying, “We’re going to survive this; see if you can move your hands and applaud.”

Finally, the speech ends, the party is back on terra firma, and Mr. Gephardt makes a few remarks on what he’s just experienced. He says: “Our values call for protecting Social Security, and not gambling it away on the stock market. Our values call for helping patients and older Americans, not just big HMOs and pharmaceutical companies. Our values . . .”

Listening to this, I had one thought: The Democratic Party is shrinking. Maybe not in numbers; it got half the popular vote in 2000. But ideologically, culturally, in the ways a political organization should keep its politics alive and wired to the turbines of national life, the Democratic party is winding down.

Read it all in: Opinion Journal – it speaks for itself.

Here’s another link on Daniel Scotto, the analyst fired by Paribas for accurately predicting Enron’s collapse Conflict for Dain analyst? (1/30/2002)

And Daniel Scotto, a bond analyst for BNP Paribas, told the Wall Street Journal that he was forced out because he told clients in August that Enron securities “should be sold at all costs and be sold now.” The company said Scotto’s departure was unrelated to his research.

Now contrast Scotto with Mark Easterbrook of Dain:

He not only termed Enron a buying opportunity on Oct. 23 — a day after the SEC request became public knowledge — he also was among the last analysts to downgrade Enron’s stock, issuing an “underperform” on Nov. 29 with the stock trading at 61 cents.

The possibility that Easterbrook may have been less than objective in his assessment of Enron’s stock is easy to understand.

Dain, of course, was one of Enron’s underwriters. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the scandal at Enron isn’t so much about politics or accounting as it is about conflicts of interest on the part of brokerage houses.