Sunday roundup

Our first stop is Mark Steyn. How best to describe Steyn's column today? How about "what happens when you pass out two irons to a bunch of Miami pensioners and then tell them that you are cancelling bingo?" How about "what happens when you tell Boston PD that there might--might--be a Bush supporter in a large crowd in Kenmore Square who just happens to be a Yankees fan?" How about....well, why don't you just read the durn thing yourself. Here's just a taste:

But the ludicrous defeatism over what's at worst a partial success is unbecoming to a great nation. If the present Democratic-media complex had been around earlier, America would never have mustered the will to win World War II or, come to that, the Revolutionary War. There would be no America. You'd be part of a Greater Canada, with Queen Elizabeth on your coins and government health care.

Speaking of which, if there's four words I never want to hear again, it's "prescription drugs from Canada." I'm Canadian, so I know a thing or two about prescription drugs from Canada. Specifically speaking, I know they're American; the only thing Canadian about them is the label in French and English. How can politicians from both parties think that Americans can get cheaper drugs simply by outsourcing (as John Kerry would say) their distribution through a Canadian mailing address? U.S. pharmaceutical companies put up with Ottawa's price controls because it's a peripheral market. But, if you attempt to extend the price controls from the peripheral market of 30 million people to the primary market of 300 million people, all that's going to happen is that after approximately a week and a half there aren't going to be any drugs in Canada, cheap or otherwise -- just as the Clinton administration's intervention into the flu-shot market resulted in American companies getting out of the vaccine business entirely.

The war against the Islamists and the flu-shot business are really opposite sides of the same coin. I want Bush to win on Election Day because he's committed to this war and, as the novelist and Internet maestro Roger L. Simon says, "the more committed we are to it, the shorter it will be.'' The longer it gets, the harder it will be, because it's a race against time, against lengthening demographic, economic and geopolitical odds. By "demographic," I mean the Muslim world's high birth rate, which by mid-century will give tiny Yemen a higher population than vast empty Russia. By "economic," I mean the perfect storm the Europeans will face within this decade, because their lavish welfare states are unsustainable on their shriveled post-Christian birth rates. By "geopolitical," I mean that, if you think the United Nations and other international organizations are antipathetic to America now, wait a few years and see what kind of support you get from a semi-Islamified Europe.

So this is no time to vote for Europhile delusions. The Continental health and welfare systems John Kerry so admires are, in fact, part of the reason those societies are dying. As for Canada, yes, under socialized health care, prescription drugs are cheaper, medical treatment's cheaper, life is cheaper. After much stonewalling, the Province of Quebec's Health Department announced this week that in the last year some 600 Quebecers had died from C. difficile, a bacterium acquired in hospital. In other words, if, say, Bill Clinton had gone for his heart bypass to the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, he would have had the surgery, woken up the next day swimming in diarrhea and then died. It's a bacterium caused by inattention to hygiene -- by unionized, unsackable cleaners who don't clean properly; by harassed overstretched hospital staff who don't bother washing their hands as often as they should. So 600 people have been killed by the filthy squalor of disease-ridden government hospitals. That's the official number. Unofficially, if you're over 65, the hospitals will save face and attribute your death at their hands to "old age" or some such and then "lose" the relevant medical records. Quebec's health system is a lot less healthy than, for example, Iraq's.

One thousand Americans are killed in 18 months in Iraq, and it's a quagmire. One thousand Quebecers are killed by insufficient hand-washing in their filthy, decrepit health care system, and kindly progressive Americans can't wait to bring it south of the border. If one has to die for a cause, bringing liberty to the Middle East is a nobler venture and a better bet than government health care.

He also bitchslaps Kerry on the outsourcing Osama nonesense, and does the deed using a Kerry quote from the time, the nuance of which must have been lost on me.

Why, you say? But of course---because I'm ignorant. That's the theme of Jeff Jacoby's piece today in the Boston Globe, which takes a long, slow, drag on the Democrats' favorite drug, the Adlai Stevenson syndrome. According to Jacoby, the average voter is dumber than a sack of rocks---the implication of which goes unstated that if/when Kerry loses, it's because Amerika the dumb is not worthy of him.

This article is useful for two reasons: 1. to add to the pile of evidence that the Democrat elites are starting to panic going into the last week, and B. one of my favorite themes of how lefty elites disparage small-r republican institutions (like the electoral college) in favor of radical democratic openess, but when the demos goes and acts the way the demos do, by electing republicans, recalling Gray Davis etc., they cry foul at some travesty or miscarriage of justice---if only the people knew what was truly in their interest! Why oh why won't they listen to us---it must be because they are stupid and corrupt! The answer is never "Gee, maybe because they don't like where we are leading them?" Remember: the Vanguard of the Proletariat is never wrong! That's why it can be trusted with absolute power, you bourgeois jackal!

Antidote, you ask? Nurse, 20o cee-cees of Ralph Peters, stat! What, he's not responding? Damn the risks---here's both barrels of VDH.

And if THAT doesn't revive you, I know of only one thing that could: how about proof of how Dubya has a higher IQ than Kerry? D'Oh! That's just going to ruin Oliver Willis' day!