Some Quick Blogs

We haven't blogged much lately, so here's some brief items to get us going again:

• There's been a lot of blogging about Maureen Dowd's article on Clarence Thomas, but the main problem with it is a very basic one: whether or not Thomas benefited from affirmative action has nothing to do with whether or not affirmative action is constitutional. Thomas is under no obligation to deem something constitutional merely because it was of benefit to him.

• Marcus Cole, a Stanford Law professor, bluntly refers to Dowd as a racist. Good for him. The same should be said of Al Sharpton, according to whom Clarence Thomas is not the right kind of black. Why should Dowd and Sharpton be called racists? Because they believe that members of a particular race should endorse certain political views and only those views. There isn't anything different about this than a white supremacist accusing another white of being a race traitor.

• Richard Gephardt is an extremist, pure and simple:

  When I'm president, we'll do executive orders to overcome any wrong thing the Supreme Court does tomorrow or any other day.

  He doesn't belong in any political office. He either doesn't understand or doesn't care about the tripartite nature of our government. That alone makes him unfit for any office. I can't even begin to imagine the outrage had Bush let loose such a remark of unmitigated imperiousness.

• Then there's Howard Dean:

  "The president has divided us," former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean said. "He's divided us by race by using the word 'quotas.' There's no such thing as a quota at the University of Michigan, never has been."

  Of course there has never been a quota at UM. There's only been points awarded to minorities in order to reach a "critical mass" of certain minorities. Why, that's not a quota.

That's enough for now. My stomach's turning.

Marsh Arabs return to the ravaged Garden of Eden (via Instapundit)

The Chicago Tribune's Paul Salopek reports [registration required] that the Marsh Arabs are cutting the levees and dams that drained the Tigris-Euphates marshes. The problem with this is that uncontrolled flooding of these dry areas could result in salt poisoning of the affected areas. Saddam, so beloved of the Euro-left and its apologists here, drained over 7,000 square miles of wetlands {more than our Everglades, btw} and destroyed the habitat of over 1 billion birds, to say nothing of the tens of thousands of Marsh Arabs who lived for 5,000 years in a "sustainable" relationship with the marshes. They urgently need water experts and ecologists on the ground to release the water so that it does not do permanent damage.

Never fear, our ever-lovely enviro-fanatics are on the case! Well, actually, they aren't. It's that old devil George "It's all about the oiiiiiillllll" W. Bush who is actually pushing for scientific marsh reclaimation, in the face of widespread indifference on the part of the media and the usual whining suspects. Once again, we see that misanthropy and political invective are what really concerns the so-called "environmental movement." In the face of one of the greatest eco-crimes in human history, all they can do is writhe in their own self-hatred and destructiveness.