Jack Kemp, Canada, and more.
Jack Kemp's 'Lonely Voice' The Scrapbook is here to report a Jack Kemp sighting. Readers with long memories, and a taste for masochism, will remember Mr. Kemp from the 1996 vice-presidential...
...Instead of grabbing Vice President Gore by the lapels, shaking him hard, and explaining to him (a) the long history of Republican opposition to racial discrimination, (b) the long history of Democratic support for racial discrimination, and (c) the difference between racial equality and racial quotas, Jack Kemp, instead, thanked Al Gore for the compliment...
...Kemp from the 1996 vice-presidential debate, when Al Gore twice praised him for being "a lonely voice in the Republican party" against racial discrimination...
...Having too much confidence in one's own good intentions, friendly disposition and enlightened outlook makes one an easy mark—a hard lesson many young people eventually learn as a result of various misadventures...
...they express disbelief at the idea that it needs defending (or warrants it...
...Fast forward 11 years to last week's hearing before a Senate panel on a bill to grant District of Columbia residents a voting member of the House of Representatives...
...Smith, a distinguished University of Virginia law professor, emerged victorious...
...Readers will recall that this race sparked national attention when baseball aficionado and columnist George F. Will endorsed Alderson, while William F. Buckley went to bat, so to speak, for Smith...
...It's not quite a revolution in the Ivy League halls, but it's certainly a good start...
...Kemp by the lapels...
...good country that wants to be loved, with uneasy relations with a neighbour that aspires to remain great and therefore needs to be fearful...
...In the debut issue, Travis D. Smith eloquently explains (as his headline puts it) "Why Canada Needs Conservatives, Though it Tends to Imagine Otherwise": "Young Canadians unhesitatingly affirm that there is greater freedom of thought in Canada than in the United States...
...The votes of alumni were counted last week in the Dartmouth College trustees race, in which the conservative petition candidate Stephen Smith ('88) faced off against three establishment candidates backed by the Alumni Council, including San Diego Padres CEO Sandy Alderson ('69...
...could join the state of Maryland—call it South Bethesda—just as the part of the District south of the Potomac River, then known as Alexandria County, was retroceded to the state of Virginia in 1846...
...of Tennessee...
...Le Big Bang AMay 15 headline in Le Figaro on the new French president's preparing his government: Nicolas Sarkozy prepare un big bang ministeriel...
...Or, if it's simply a question of representation, then the residential neighborhoods of D.C...
...In a press release, Smith stated: "I came to Dartmouth in 1984 as an inner-city kid raised on welfare in Washington, D.C...
...Canada is a (very...
...Rod-gers ('70), George Mason law professor Todd Zywicki ('88), and Hoover Institution fellow Peter Robinson ('79...
...At the same time, they express confusion and frustration that Americans still engage in lively political disputation over questions which they regard as settled...
...It is as if Canadians think that we should already live in a world where only technical questions remain, relegating nagging quarrels to judicial resolution (where their outcome is not much in question...
...But the fact is that the United States Constitution is pretty doggone explicit about the status of Washington, D.C., as a "federal enclave"—not a state— and that members of the House must represent states, not federal enclaves...
...Great Moments in Captioning We've harped before on the absurd degree to which wire services will bend over backwards to be "objective" and nonjudgmental...
...An inconvenient truth, as it were...
...Al Gore Sr...
...At which point The Scrapbook had to be restrained from grabbing Mr...
...Canadians are right to cherish the freedom, prosperity and justice of their society, but supposing too strongly that history is on our side only leaves us vulnerable...
...In higher education news, conservatives have expanded one of their rare, small footholds in liberal academe...
...It's a constitutional issue, and has been a constitutional issue since the creation of the federal enclave 217 years ago when the District of Columbia was carved out of neighboring Maryland and Virginia...
...The Scrapbook concedes that the question of "voting rights for the District"—to use the local shorthand—is a complicated matter about which reasonable men may differ...
...Canadians should remember how lucky they are that they can get away with being so lovable...
...Smith joins three other insurgent board members (who won similar petition campaigns) on the 18-member panel—Silicon Valley tycoon T.J...
...Stephen Smith Wins...
...Translation: If people want a congressman and two senators for the District of Columbia, they will have to amend the Constitution...
...Here's another one for the files...
...Nor did it stop Jack Kemp from appearing before last week's meeting of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee to urge passage of the measure which would, he declared, give Republicans "a chance to be recorded on the right side of a civil rights issue...
...In the meantime, The Scrapbook welcomes the assistance of any bright 5th grader who would like to explain to Jack Kemp that the Republican party was founded in 1854 as the anti-slavery party (as opposed to the Democratic party, which was the pro-slavery party) and that modern civil rights legislation—in particular, the 1957 and 1964 Civil Rights acts—enjoyed near-unanimous Republican support and was opposed, almost exclusively, by Senate Democrats—including, incidentally, Sen...
...Shortly after 9/11, for instance, the Panafrican News Agency, a favorite Scrapbook news source, referred to Osama bin Laden as "the Saudi dissident blamed for the 11 September terrorist attacks in the U.S.," while Agence France-Presse called him "Osama bin Laden, the Afghan-based Saudi dissident...
...A Worthwhile Canadian Initiative The Scrapbook extends a welcoming tip of its homburg to the good crew putting out a new Canadian quarterly of conservative ideas, entitled c2c...
...The photo on the cover of this issue received the following caption from the Associated Press: "Some of the 40 passengers and crew of United Airlines Flight 93 are believed to have fought their hijackers and perhaps caused the plane to crash in a field near Shanksville...
...Yes, a bare majority of District residents are nonwhite, but that does not make this a civil rights issue...
...Canadians not only criticize the particular decisions Americans make in the defense of their nation and way of life...
...All that's missing is the word alleged before hijackers...
...Their republic has been preserved in part because they have been so wary of losing it...
...More information can be found at www.c2cjournal.ca...
...There can never be too many conservative journals, eh...
...The American founders knew that their republic was an 'experiment in freedom,' one that might not succeed or survive...
...Maybe French anglophobia really is a thing of the past...
...To have the opportunity now to return as a trustee to the College to which I owe everything is an honor beyond words...
...Of course, mere constitutionalism hasn't stopped this latest legislative subterfuge, which President Bush has pledged to veto...
Vol. 12 • May 2007 • No. 35
