Friday, July 12, 2002

OK, so... - I can admit when I'm wrong.

Yesterday, I asked, in effect, with "conservatives" like the President and Norm Coleman, who needed liberals? My initial take on the President's prescription drug plan, which he spelled out in yesterday's visit to Minneapolis, was...

...well, not wrong. It's typical of the President's brand of hybrid, triangulating, "compassionate" variety of conservatism, which means that while I, as a free-market conservative, can swallow it, it's got a bad aftertaste. It's also vastly better than Wellstone's plan.

Churchill may have stated the model for "compassionate conservative".social policy: "I propose not to level out the peaks to fill in the valleys, but to put a safety net over the abyss".

The President's plan strings that net - a clumsy, bureaucratic net, to be sure, but one that leaves intact the peaks from with the world's finest health care emanate.

Wellstone's plan warms up the bulldozers - and on their way to push the peak into the valley, they're going to level the pharmaceutical companies, without which there'd be no medicine worth rationing.

Jason Lewis said it yesterday: Rationing medicine (which is what the Wellstone Plan involves) is pennywise and pound foolish. He cited a study in New Hampshire, where the state rationed anti-schizophrenia medication. The state saved an average of $43 a year in medication per patient, by basically scrimping on giving it to schizophrenics on Medical Assistance. Each patient, by the way, went on to incur on average over a thousand dollars' additional hospital costs.

If you're a conservative and you're not actively supporting Norm Coleman - you need to. We need to get Paul Wellstone out of here.
posted by Mitch Berg 7/12/2002 07:46:21 AM

Mas Arifiq - So if I have a prejudice, it's that I tend to be more trusting - tend, mind you, not some absolute knee-jerk reaction, just a tendency - toward people of faith. Christians and Jews, obviously, but also Moslems, Hindus, and to some degree Buddhists.

I've had reason to stir that belief up a bit in the past ten months, of course. The Islam we see in the US, certainly, is a combination of the flaming-eyed zealots on the evening news, congratulating their children for blowing themselves up and demanding pyramids of Jewish skulls on the one hand, and the great tradition and, in many ways, beliefs similar to Christianity. Islam has been a great civilizing faith. It's also half Christianity's age - and remember what we were like a thousand years ago...

The temptation is there to try to read the Koran, to get the story direct from the horse's mouth, as it were.

Er, yeah. I'll get back to you on that. I'm as likely to do that as I am to memorize the Old Testament.

There are those better placed to analyze this - and John Derbyshire is one of them. This article is an excellent look at the subject. My favorite part:

A coherent and well-established religion like Islam is an asset to the human race, with the potential to soften the hearts and enlighten the minds of believers. It might be the instrument for lifting those believers out of the pit of lies, cruelty, intolerance and stagnation into which their tribal cultures seem have dragged them. If today Islam is showing an ugly face to the world, that is not a reason to give up on Islam. Christianity showed a pretty ugly face during the Thirty Years War (not to mention the Crusades). A few generations later it was ending the slave trade, providing spiritual fuel for a mighty commercial civilization, and bringing education and medicine to places that never had either.

Instead of mocking or dismissing Islam, we should appeal to believers to look to the nobler and more generous texts in their scriptures, the texts that emphasize a common humanity. We have nothing to gain from alienating honest Muslims, any more than they have anything to gain by being enemies of the West. If we can remember the first, and persuade them of the second, there might be some prospect of cutting off significant support to the legions of glittering-eyed Koran-waving murderers the world is currently infested with, and of averting the destructive clash that we are all, slowly but surely, coming to believe inevitable.

OK, I think the thought is right. OK, my only question: Precisely which Moslems who might be susceptible via Islam's "nobler and more generous texts" aren't already more or less on our side?

This debate'll go on a while, so I won't look for an answer just yet...
posted by Mitch Berg 7/12/2002 07:32:05 AM