Ukraine is pressing to have the United Nations recognise the Holodomor as genocide, and has called on Israel’s support for the resolution.  Though I am no fan of Yushchenko himself, I wish them luck.  The Ukrainian famine, the result of deliberate state starvation of millions of people, is one of the great genocides of the 20th century and should be called what it is.    

I await the outpouring of commentary that declares that the Ukrainian genocide is a matter that should be left to historians and kept out of politics, as all of Ankara’s apologists have argued for so long.  Somehow I don’t think we’ll be hearing from many of them this time, since they are presumably not working for the Kremlin as well.  Perhaps some will maintain a kind of grim consistency and talk about how the kulaks provoked the authorities into starving them, but I doubt it.  Making apologies for Talat and Enver is one thing, since most people have no idea who they are or what they did, but not too many people want to stand up for Stalin these days.  It would, of course, be no more outrageous and dishonest than what some have said about the Armenian genocide.  Obviously, when the perpetrator was the Soviet regime and the modern-day successor is a government that Washington disapproves of, it suddenly becomes much easier to speak of past genocides and point out the internal repression by the regime.  It suddenly becomes much less “controversial” to state the obvious.   

The tactics of denial are the same in Moscow as they are in Ankara: claims of genocide are deemed “propaganda” and the province of a particular ethnic group.  Yet both official denials of genocide are equally wrong and equally pernicious.  I applaud Ms. Shymko for her article.   

Ms. Shymko writes:

It’s time for Russia to make peace with its past, by showing a willingness to make peace with its neighbors. Acknowledging Stalin’s genocidal complicity in the 1932-33 state-sponsored Famine in Ukraine would be an important first step.

Note that this article is calling for the Russians to acknowledge the famine as genocide, which is a far more “provocative” step than calling on our own President to do so.  Moscow should acknowledge the Ukrainian genocide, but I think we all know that it will not.

Now that Spitzer has rejected the idea, Clinton has managed to discover what her position on driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants actually is (today, she’s against them).  In the end, this is the smart move–expose yourself to some scorn from pundits and reporters now in exchange for taking the safe (and, as it happens in this case, correct) position and avoiding bigger trouble later.  Obama, notably, had already come out in favour of the idea, so on one of the more prominent differences between them Obama is on the wrong side of the issue not just nationally but also among Democratic voting blocs that he already has trouble winning over. 

P.S.  Her opponents will try to make this into a question of her credibility, as well they might, but this will not end up making much of a dent.  A lack of credibility and being on the wrong side of this issue could have hurt her substantially.  Now she is protected, and she can probably spin it with some prattle about having “thought long and hard” about a “difficult issue,” which, in our bizarre political culture, somehow makes her seem more responsible and intelligent than the people who actually say what they think the first time around.

For some perspective on just how ridiculous Giuliani’s “0-for-3” victory strategy really is, consider that Steve Forbes received 30% in Iowa in 2000 and then went nowhere (getting 13% in New Hampshire) and Alan Keyes managed to get 14% and then 6% in N.H.  As of right now, Giuliani is apparently expecting to get only slightly better results than Alan Keyes and go on to win the nomination after also losing New Hampshire with Forbes-like numbers and losing Michigan (whose primary is in some kind of weird limbo at the moment).  He’s also in danger of losing South Carolina….to Mitt Romney?  Strange possibilities.  In the past we have seen how quickly leads in South Carolina both before and after New Hampshire can vanish, so he cannot count on his position remaining stable until late January.  Plus, California isn’t New Jersey–Giuliani doesn’t have some absurdly large, prohibitive lead out there.  There were, at last count, 23 states holding primaries or caucuses on February 5, and I believe Republicans are voting in all but one or two of those states (the New Mexico GOP hasn’t moved up their primary). 

Yes, I know this cycle is allegedly very different because of February 5 (will this day also get its own ditty, “remember, remember, the Fifth of February, the day of that stupid super-primary”?), but if Giuliani’s “strategy” is going to succeed he needs to be building up an insurmountable lead in the most delegate-rich states, and right now he isn’t achieving that.  I talk more about the perverse and unintended consequences of the front-loading of the primary system in an article for Chronicles in an upcoming issue.

P.S.  All of my statements are qualified by the reality that Dick Morris seems to share the same view, which is a good sign that I have gone wrong somewhere.

Dave Weigel is right when he says that “dismissal’s the correct response to an article that claims a Murray Rothbard devotee refuses to speak to Jews.”  I refrained from diving into the absurd argument over the particulars of the charge (I did link to Alex Massie’s response), because dismissing and ignoring it was the best approach.  However, it has reached such a point that I thought I would say a few things. 

Remarkably, I even agree with Jonah Goldberg:

And I agree with you [addressed to Derbyshire], the biggest takeaway from the American Thinker piece is that Paul’s shop needs to get professional. I do think that Paul — if he is the real deal — has a special obligation to draw bright lines between himself and a lot of the fringe-folks who are flocking to him.  

Paul does draw these lines whenever he speaks, simply by stating what it is that he does believe.  Even so, if it would put to rest this nonsense it might be worth doing.  Of course, it is insulting that Paul should have to re-state what must seem to him (and the overwhelming majority of his supporters) to be the blindingly obvious: for him, as for us, racial hatred is abhorrent, all violent, coercive statist ideologies are abhorrent, neo-Nazis are equal parts ridiculous, pathetic and hideous, and so on.  The overwhelming majority of his supporters–conservative, libertarian, moderate and liberal–have nothing to do with these ideas.  

It was insulting and absurd when some people said that Romney was trying to send a message in “code” to anti-Semites everywhere by announcing his campaign from the Ford Museum.  That stupid controversy fortunately died a pretty quick death.  I hope that this one ends this week, today, because it is absurd and based on the insane standard that the allegedly no-hope protest candidate must scrutinise the ideological beliefs of all his individual donors and actively denounce genuinely lunatic websites who happen to be saying positive things about him, as if their lunatic comments had anything to do with the man or his campaign when they clearly do not.  This is a standard, of course, that is not actually applied to any other campaign.  Who knows what you might find if you went rummaging through the donations to other candidates?  If Obama received donations from a Nation of Islam member, would that be treated as a scandal or an irrelevance?  Anyone who treated it as a scandal would be a fool.  Maybe there are some objectionable characters who have donated to Giuliani–in the end, so what?  Unless we’re talking about the buying of access or favours, which is clearly not at stake here, the relevant subject should be the candidate and his own positions.  There are plenty of bloggers, particularly those on the left, who like to complain about “the Freak Show” and the media’s obsession with trivia, as well they should, but everyone should recognise that this is just another part of that obsession.     

Let’s be very clear: Paul is being attacked in this case not because of anything he has actually done or said, but because of what other people say while misusing his name as a symbol for their own purposes and because of who those people are.  There are other candidates out there today who are open to “pre-emptively” nuking other countries, seem indifferent to the state’s use of torture and cheer on aggressive war, but when they themselves actually espouse these horrible ideas it is deemed a “policy” difference and therefore permissible on national television.  Ron Paul gets a check from some fanatic, and suddenly you’d think the world is coming to an end.  There is an incredible imbalance here.

One of the reasons we, the vast, reasonable majority of Paul supporters, support Paul is that he vehemently, publicly, repeatedly rejects the assumptions on which all of these ideologies are founded.  Obviously.  It shouldn’t have to be said, but now it’s been said.  You can now resume thinking about things that matter.  Goodness knows I’ve already wasted too many words and too much time on this trash.

On another campaign with a heavy dose of idealism and amateurism, here is Dan McCarthy on Barry Goldwater and his legacy:

To answer that question, one has to look to the sharpest division that split the Goldwater movement of the ’60s. It wasn’t the division between libertarians and traditionalists, it was the division that separated idealistic libertarians and traditionalists alike, the campaign amateurs, from the campaign professionals. The conservative movement still pays lip service to economic liberty, social order, and military strength—but on all three points, Republicans have become hollow men who have preserved the rites of Goldwaterism but who long ago lost its spirit. That was an amateur spirit—in both the best and worst senses of the word—and it drew together in common cause traditionalists and libertarians as different as Brent Bozell and Goldwater speechwriter Karl Hess.   

It is indeed this same kind of idealistic amateurism–and I mean that phrase as a compliment–that you see in the Paul campaign, but the price of that amateurism is that the campaign does not, perhaps cannot, engage in the kind of rapid-fire response press handling and spinning that we have come to expect from the other consultant-bloated campaigns.  Certainly, this is a technical liability, but it is a perfect example of what has been until very, very recently a shoe-string operation that has inspired its supporters partly through its very modesty.

Fatima Bhutto reminds us that the cover girl for democracy in Pakistan was awful in her own right when she was in power and remains an utterly cynical politician who will try to manipulate everyone for her own advantage.  Both of these claims are true.  I think she is also right that if Bhutto were to come to power the democracy that she would be promoting there would be as farcical as it has been in the various “colour” revolution states.

Only people bewitched by the myth of “People Power” could think that given Georgia’s disillusionment any good come from another coloured-coded revolution endorsed by the same journalists and “human rights” activists who have praised Georgia as a model for change. Many of the Western groups who funded and trained the so-called “rose revolutionaries” in Georgia in 2003 have been behind the scenes of the “saffron revolution” in Burma. If Burma’s military rulers should go the way of Eduard Shevardnadze will Burma fall through the floor into the same politics of corruption, drugs smuggling and backstabbing which have pock-marked Georgia’s tragic post-Soviet history.

Proponents of “People Power” from the Caucasus to South-East Asia ignore the poverty, oppression, disease and death which have followed events like the “Rose Revolution.” Western media like The Economist and so-called human rights watchdogs like the Council of Europe have a lamentable record of fellow travelling with successive corrupt and cruel regimes in Tbilisi since 1991. It is not too much to say that there isn’t any bad situation which the nexus of Western intelligence agencies, media and human rights agencies cannot make worse, while singing their own praises as the proponents of a new dawn of human happiness.

The infighting and mutual accusations of crime, corruption and killings among the Rose Revolutionaries is the starkest case yet of the reality of a post-People Power country contrasting with the myth peddled abroad in the Western media. No journalists who painted a rosy picture of the new rulers of Georgia has yet come forward to correct, let alone apologise for their myth-making under the guise of reporting. ~Mark Almond

Mr. Almond has an extremely long, but very important post detailing how things have come to the current pass in Georgia.  He also had this to say:

However disillusioned Georgians and other long-suffering people around the world may be with the West’s cult of revolution, so long as bogus revolutions to suit geo-strategic purposes can be passed off as the work of the people, then Georgians will have to suffer another false dawn of freedom and prosperity.

My thoughts exactly.

How badly is Fred Thompson doing?  So badly in Iowa that he is considered less honest about his beliefs than Mitt Romney.  When asked whether a candidate says what he believes, 56% say yes for Romney, while only 53% say the same for Thompson.  How poorly must your campaign be going when you are viewed as more of a panderer than the monumental fraud himself?  Wasn’t Fred’s appeal supposed to be that he was the straight-talking, no-nonsense Tennessean?  He can’t persuade anybody that he’s really motivated, and he can’t even persuade all that many people that he’s sincere.  Does he have anything left to offer?

Try to wrap your mind around this: 75% of likely Iowa GOP caucus-goers say they would vote for a candidate who is less conservative but can win, and 49% say that they would vote for someone with different social views, but 58% say they want a Republican who is more conservative than Bush, with only a third wanting to continue with Bush or have “less conservative” policies.  In short, many of these voters are saying that they would trade their overall preference for more conservatism for a less conservative winner–no wonder they never get what they want!

The latest CBS News poll puts Paul at 8% in New Hampshire (still just 4% in Iowa), which confirms the result from at least three other polls that I can recall from the last week or two that show him at 7%.  This puts him within eight points of both McCain and Giuliani.  If this is right (and I should note that this poll’s sampling error for N.H. Republicans was 6 points!), second place is an entirely realistic goal at this point, provided that he continues to climb in the polls as he has finally started to do.  If Paul outperforms either of them (especially McCain with guaranteeing a win), the story is unfortunately not going to be, “Why is Ron Paul doing so well?” but instead will be, “Why is X so pathetically weak?”   

Also, Huckabee seems to be moving up in Iowa, now at 21%.  If Huckabee managed somehow to win Iowa (and two-thirds of Romney’s supporters are not yet fully committed to backing Romney), that could badly damage Romney and shake things up, but it would probably to the ultimate advantage of Giuliani.  At the start of the month, Ross explained the perverse (that’s my term, not his) relationship between Huckabee’s surge and Giuliani’s success.  I still don’t think a Giuliani-Huckabee ticket would work at all, nor is it likely to happen, but they do seem to have ended up as very strange natural political allies.

Full results of poll are here.

It’s official: the rationale for the NRLC’s endorsement of Fred Thompson makes no sense.  The NRLC claims that “he is best positioned to top pro-abortion candidate Rudy Giuliani for the Republican nomination,” which I would like to believe (since I stupidly predicted that Thompson would win) but which I also know at this moment to be utter nonsense.  Clearly, from a purely “he can beat Giuliani” perspective you would have to go with Romney, which is horrific but nonetheless it is the reality at the present time. 

It would be one thing to endorse Thompson on the grounds that he has a solid voting record (and they did cite this at the announcement), or that he is more reliable and trustworthy than the other leading candidates.  But this appeal to his potential as the Bane of Giuliani seems as wrong as it gets.  Then you see that they can get it even more wrong:

…and also, looking at polls against the likely Democrats, he is well-positioned, and we believe best positioned, to win the presidency of the United States for unborn children.

What polls have they been looking at?  For months, Thompson has performed worse in head-to-head match-ups with named Democrats than McCain or Giuliani.  Either you dismiss these polls as essentially meaningless and based on the opinions of poorly informed voters, or you have to acknowledge that Thompson’s national electability is worse than it is for these other candidates.  You don’t get to make up entirely new results that suit your endorsement.  I suppose these are the sorts of things that organisations have to say when they make endorsements, but this desperate “pre-buttal” of the obvious criticisms just shows how bizarre the endorsement really is. 

Then this line summed up everything that’s wrong with Thompson’s campaign:

Thompson did not attend the group’s event announcing the endorsement at the National Press Club.

Couldn’t be bothered, I suppose.  You can almost hear him saying, “I’m not saying that I don’t want your endorsement, ‘cuz I kinda do.” (apologies to SNL)