Great column in the New York Sun about a fellow traveler on the road to enlightment. Shh! Don’t tell the Dems. They still not know there are millions of us.

Via Roger L. Simon

Just when I was starting to feel all warm and fuzzy (see previous post) I encounter this crap from Teddy Kennedy:

“Top officials in the Administration have endorsed interrogation methods that we’ve condemned in other countries, including binding prisoners in painful ‘stress’ positions, threatening them with dogs, extended sleep deprivation, and simulated drownings.”

And this killer response (pun intended) from Arthur Chrenkoff:

Ironically, Senator Kennedy himself drowned more people than American interrogators. As James Taranto would write, “Mary Jo Kopechne could not be reached for comment”.

Ok, someone tell me again why mainstream Democrats like this are worthy of any respect. Thank God the American people had the good sense to keep Kennedy Klone Kerry out of office. Oh wait, KKK is already taken by Democratic Senator Byrd from West Virginia.

And the Dems wonder why they can’t win elections?

Florida Cracker has a nice story about the budding friendship of Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush:

It’s kind of late in the game, but Mr. Clinton finally has the father he always wanted:

Family and friends who say the improbable love fest between George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton is totally genuine still can’t refrain from occasionally rolling their eyes.

Barbara Bush, the 41st president’s tart-tongued wife, calls them the Odd Couple. Florida Gov. Jeb Bush now refers to the Democrat who ended his father’s political career as “Bro.”

A close friend of the Bush family spoke for many partisans on both sides of the political divide last week by musing, “It’s a good development for the country – but it sure is a strange development. I’m a little speechless.”

And President George W. Bush, who created this tag-team mismatch by naming his immediate predecessors joint envoys for U.S. tsunami relief efforts, brought down the house at Washington’s A-list Gridiron Club dinner last month by mentioning Clinton’s recent surgery.

“When he woke up he was surrounded by his loved ones: Hillary, Chelsea and my Dad,” Bush deadpanned.

It’s a sweet story- don’t pick at it; just enjoy it.

—

The emerging warm friendship between the Oscar and Felix of American politics, who now call themselves Bill and George and have even begun telephoning one another for advice, is that rarest of commodities: a good-news story amid the partisan rancor of an increasingly polarized capital city.

“I’m enjoying the relationship, and to be honest with you I didn’t think I would,” Bush recently told the New York Daily News.

Once bitter political foes with minimal regard for each other, the 80-year-old Bush and 58-year-old Clinton have forged surprisingly close ties, a who-would-have-thought development helped along by a parallel thaw between Clinton and the current President Bush.

“This is definitely for real,” a top aide to one of the exes said. “We thought the relationship would come to an end with the tsunami. It certainly didn’t.”

That’s an understatement. Clinton has rearranged a busy West Coast schedule to appear with the elder Bush in Houston next month, and more joint events are in the works. The two talk regularly, and their staffs are in almost daily contact. They’ve golfed together, sat side by side at the Super Bowl, and cut TV spots appealing for tsunami contributions.

The News also has learned that Clinton will speak at the Bush library at Texas A&M University this fall. A reciprocal visit to the Clinton library will surely follow, and last week Clinton told The News he’s looking forward to golfing with Bush in Maine this summer.

“They really have been having a great time together,” Sen. Hillary Clinton told The News.

Aides and friends to both admit being confounded by the relationship. Except for graduating from Yale and sharing a secret fondness for ribald humor, there is little in their DNA to suggest such chumminess.

A former Clinton assistant thinks their membership in the country’s most exclusive all-male club is at the core of the thaw. “This is a fraternity even more exclusive than Skull and Bones,” the aide noted, referring to the mysterious Yale society that counts both Presidents Bush among its members.

It’s a sign of their mutual affection that the elder Bush has resorted to what he usually derides as “psychobabble” to try to explain the relationship.

“Maybe I’m the father he never had,” Bush recently speculated, referring to the fact that Clinton’s father died in an automobile accident before the future president was born.

Advisers to both men scoff at cynics who allege the relationship is politically motivated, yet concede that the former leaders – as well as President Bush and Hillary Clinton – benefit from their detente.

“They’re trying to move Hillary to the center for 2008, and this helps de-demonize her and her husband,” a longtime Bush confidant said.

Similarly, a veteran of the Clinton White House argued that reaching out to Clinton helps the current President Bush by softening the perception his policies have divided the country.

“It gives Clinton back some legitimacy,” the source said, “but Bush knows Clinton is still popular and has a lot of international goodwill that can be helpful to Bush. It’s good all-around PR.”

Several sources say this mutual-inoculation society began building below the political radar last June, when the younger Bush – who ended every 2000 campaign speech by vowing to restore dignity to a scandal-tarnished Oval Office – made extremely gracious remarks when Clinton’s portrait was unveiled at the White House.

More recently, the elder Bush has told friends he appreciates that Clinton refrained from blasting his son’s Social Security reform plan and strongly supported U.S.-backed elections in Iraq.

By all accounts, the friendship blossomed on their whirlwind March visit to Asian nations hammered by the tsunami. Clinton insisted the octogenarian Bush take the stateroom, with its full-sized bed, on their 757 government jet.

Touched by Clinton’s deference, Bush stretched out while Clinton slept on the floor – on a comfy Tempur-Pedic mattress Bush brought along for his younger predecessor.

“President Bush’s energy and stamina really impressed me during our travels together,” Clinton reminisced to The News. “Thanks to my own health problems, I was the tired one after a long day of work! Now that I’ve had my surgery, maybe I stand a better chance of being able to keep up with him.”

Since the Asian trip, the two former leaders of the free world have often seemed joined at the hip. Only the most rabid Bush and Clinton haters could object.

“Here we are in one of the ugliest times in American politics, and something good like this happens,” a former senior government official said. “It sends an awfully positive signal.”

Well, I’m not going to mock or make fun. I think it would be nice to see more of this kind of thing. Although I voted for Bill Clinton 4 times*, he turned out to be a pretty big disappointment. I don’t so much care about the Monica fiasco, but letting Bin Laden get away was inexcusable. Well, nothing to be done about that now, so if we can stop the dehumanization of political opponents that’s progress towards finally achieving a level of debate where the issues, not the personalities are what matter.

Which is not to say that extremists who hate America (Michael Moore comes to mind) are worthy of respect. But as a person who has remained married to a sometimes scary liberal I like to think that somewhere in the vital middle we can find some common ground.

Maybe.

* Twice for President, twice as Governor of Arkansas.

Powerline has some great info and insights on the two judges who will be brought for confirmation before the Senate.

So it will be interesting to see if the Democrats play the filibuster game again. There is no reason these judges should not be confirmed. The lies the Dems and media are spreading don’t hold up, and the debunking by Powerline of the CSM article is but the latest example.

No one has shown me one shred of evidence that these judges are not qualified to serve on the courts as desired by President.

I love it when the only response Europeans can make to the weakness of their own society is to say “oh yeah, well America sucks worse”. No one denies that we have our own issues to deal with here, but I don’t see the same kind of emigration statistics like the brain drain occuring in the old world. What is really hilarious is the mantra that the European economy is stronger than ours. I guess if you keep telling yourself that long enough you might actually start to believe it.

Of course, that does not make it true. No less authority than that liberal bastion called the New York Times has an article dispelling the myth of a higher standard of living  in Europe.

All this was illuminated last year in a study by a Swedish research organization, Timbro, which compared the gross domestic products of the 15 European Union members (before the 2004 expansion) with those of the 50 American states and the District of Columbia. (Norway, not being a member of the union, was not included.)

After adjusting the figures for the different purchasing powers of the dollar and euro, the only European country whose economic output per person was greater than the United States average was the tiny tax haven of Luxembourg, which ranked third, just behind Delaware and slightly ahead of Connecticut.

The next European country on the list was Ireland, down at 41st place out of 66; Sweden was 14th from the bottom (after Alabama), followed by Oklahoma, and then Britain, France, Finland, Germany and Italy. The bottom three spots on the list went to Spain, Portugal and Greece.

Alternatively, the study found, if the E.U. was treated as a single American state, it would rank fifth from the bottom, topping only Arkansas, Montana, West Virginia and Mississippi. In short, while Scandinavians are constantly told how much better they have it than Americans, Timbro’s statistics suggest otherwise. So did a paper by a Swedish economics writer, Johan Norberg.

Contrasting “the American dream” with “the European daydream,” Mr. Norberg described the difference: “Economic growth in the last 25 years has been 3 percent per annum in the U.S., compared to 2.2 percent in the E.U. That means that the American economy has almost doubled, whereas the E.U. economy has grown by slightly more than half. The purchasing power in the U.S. is $36,100 per capita, and in the E.U. $26,000 – and the gap is constantly widening.”

Can you imagine how bad it would be if the Euros actually paid for their own defense? Whatever. I stand by the assertion that Europe as we have known it is unlikely to survive the 21st century. If they weren’t so damn arrogant I might even feel some pity as their pathetic society goes the way of the dinosaur. Godless socialism, declining birthrates, staggering Muslim immigration, and an economy in the toilet. All hail the brilliance of our betters for creating a perfect storm of destruction.

Meanwhile, as we watch the former powers of Europe fade into oblivion, the Chinese are making noises. China will be America’s challenge in the coming years. I expect we will prevail but we won’t have the time or resources to bail out our feckless former allies for a third time.

Oh well.