Reckless Disregard

We had intended to write a piece on NBC's gross irresponsibility in airing the video of the Marine in Fallujah shooting the terrorist, but Bill Roggio at The Fourth Rail says it all and says it better than we could. We highly recommend his essay to our readers.

The only thing we would add to what he has written is the question of motive. What good reason could NBC possibly have had for showing the video? Were they trying to instruct viewers that ugly things happen in war? That would seem a bit superfluous. Were they trying to discredit our troops and possibly the war? If so, their conduct is close to treasonous. Were they trying to win themselves acclaim among their peers in the news business? If so, they were seeking to aggrandize themselves at the expense of making our sons' and daughters' job in Iraq a great deal tougher, and they were exploiting a young Marine's conduct under extreme duress just so they could receive the plaudits of their colleagues. That is reprehensible.

In short, they had no good reason for showing the video and in doing so have acted with incredible recklessness. NBC has given our enemies a propaganda coup that they've been exploiting non-stop ever since the shooting was first aired, and the network has consequently disqualified itself, in our opinion, as a trustworthy repository of the public's confidence.

Update: Whatever you do don't pass up this e-mail from a Marine on the events surrounding the shooting in the mosque.

Liberal Wit

If a Conservative cartoonist had penned something as grotesque as this, as utterly void of wit as this, as despicably racist as this they'd be justifiably crucified by the liberal media. Unfortunately, the MSM is as hypocritical about race as it is about almost everything else, so they'll just yawn and roll over since these cartoons (See here and here ) were authored by kindred Left-wing spirits.

Neither of these "cartoonists" could carry Condaleeza Rice's briefcase, let alone match her accomplishments and character, which makes their cheap shots all the more disgusting. Where's the NAACP when they have a legitimate reason to be outraged?

Greed and the Cost of Health Care

Health care costs keep rising. Liberals blame greedy drug companies and Conservatives blame avaricious trial lawyers. Both may be right, but there's a third cause. As the amount of our health care that is picked up by insurance providers rises so does the cost of that care. Health care providers simply charge what the market will bear. As long as insurance companies pay the bulk of the expenses, providers will charge all they can get.

There's a chart here that shows the inverse relationship since 1960 between health care cost and out-of-pocket spending on that care.

Thanks for the tip to No Left Turns.

Hentoff on the Swift Vets

The old Leftist warhorse Nat Hentoff has always struck us as uncommonly fair to people who are his ideological rivals. In a recent column he praises John O'Neill and the Swift Vets for their grace under fire and for their ability to defend their attacks on both Senator Kerry's war record and his subsequent involvement with Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

The oft-heard claim that the Swifties had been thoroughly debunked and discredited is arrant nonsense. It's merely a way of dismissing them without having to actually confront their allegations. The claim that they were lying about the young John Kerry was itself never substantiated. Neither Senator Kerry nor his campaign ever really answered the Swiftees' arguments, and Kerry's refusal to release his naval records lent enormous credibility to the charges that he was not what he claimed to be.

Perhaps more than any other single factor, John O'Neill and the Swift Vet campaign undermined Kerry's pretensions to be qualified to serve as president and kept him out of office. That makes them heroes twice over.

Culture Shock

Fox News has this interesting item:

Thirty states are poised to make abortion illegal within a year if the Supreme Court reversed its 1973 ruling establishing a woman's legal right to an abortion, an advocacy group said Tuesday.

How can this be? We thought the majority of Americans endorsed a woman's right to choose. If even pro-choice groups think that throwing the issue back into the state legislatures would threaten current abortion practice then they are implying that abortion rights don't have the support in this country that their advocates have been claiming for them. State legislators aren't going to ban a practice, after all, that most of the voters favor.

If, overnight, abortion-on-demand became illegal in 3/5 of the nation, shock waves would ramify throughout the culture, the Left would go ballistic, and the culture war in this country would escalate and intensify. None of which, of course, is a reason for not overturning Roe v. Wade.

The history of abortion jurisprudence is a good illustration of how the Left seeks to impose it's agenda upon the nation. They have been singularly unsuccessful in convincing legislatures to promulgate their nostrums, so they by-pass the democratic process, take the decision as to what laws we shall live under out of the hands of the people, and have autocratic and sympathetic judges do the work of legislating for them.

This is one reason the Left has been apoplectic about George Bush's electoral victory on November 2nd. If he appoints judges that hew to a strict constructionist view of the law, who see their task as one of interpreting the law, not creating it, the Left will be bereft of the only tool it has, beyond civil disobedience, for imposing its will upon the rest of us. Let us hope.