»  Radio Derb — Transcript

01 — Intro.     Good day, conservative folk everywhere. That was one of Haydn's Derbyshire Marches and this is John Derbyshire bringing you a roundup of the week's news here on Radio Derb.

What a fun week it's been, hasn't it? Well, for everyone except poor Mrs Spitzer and those kids. Anyway, let's see what we can make of it.

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A meltdown like Eliot Spitzer's always generates a lot of cant about how it's a tragedy, how we should feel compassion, if not for the man himself then at least for the wife and children that he's wounded.

Well, there's something to that. No normal person likes to see other people suffering, and I bet Mrs Spitzer and her girls are suffering right now.

Let's not get carried away though. Spitzer's a rich man from a rich family. Mrs. Spitz's options of this point include some that will leave her rich beyond the dreams of avarice.

Something like the Spitzer disaster happens every day in the U.S.A. to people much less well-equipped to survive it. Even the girls, who must be shattered to have learned what an awful person their dad is, are not going to be hounded round the school by jeering bullies, not in today's culture of therapeutic compassion.

So a modicum of sympathy, sure, but we shouldn't let it spoil our fun. Eliot Spitzer was a simply terrible Governor, and New York State is well rid of him. He built a career on what John Podhoretz correctly calls "public sector blackmail": that is, threatening companies and individuals with all the might of state power if they didn't grovel to him.

He's treated everyone around him with contempt as long as he's been Governor, not that plenty of the Albany crowd aren't deserving of contempt, but there were better ways they could have been handled. Spitzer has treated the people of New York with contempt, pushing a plan to give the privilege of a state driver's license to people who are breaking the law just by being here.

Born rich and clever, Spitzer has not been able to conceal his contempt for the rest of us. If the contempt is flowing the other way right now — well, that's nothing but natural justice.

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Guess who's being spoken of here? Quote:

I love her. I am by her side. The family is supporting her. She is fine.

End quote.

Nope, that's not Mrs Spitzer. That is 22 year old Ashley Alexandra Dupré, listed here in America's Newspaper of Record as, quote, "an aspiring singer from the Jersey shore. Ashley is a/k/a Kristen, the lass for whose favors our ex-Governor, a/k/a Client Number Nine, paid $5,000 an hour.

The person being supportive of Ashley in that first quote is her brother, name of Kyle. Kyle and Ashley — boy, their parents didn't do a whole lot of agonizing over the baby-name book back in the 1980s did they?

Anyway, Kyle wants us to know that Ashley is bearing up well and will come through it all somehow with the help of her supportive family … and, no doubt, a twelve-step program of some sort — Whores Anonymous perhaps.

Oh, and also with the help of some attorneys. Here's a follow-up quote from the newspaper.

Kyle referred all of the questions to his sister's lawyer.

I bet he did. When you compare what Eliot Spitzer did to Ashley with what he did to New York State, which was basically the same thing, my guess would be that Ashley will come out of it far better than we poor New Yorkers will.

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For example: Why are Spitzer's private vices any concern of ours?

And then: Is he a victim of the Patriot Act?

And then there's all the amateur psychoanalyzing: Why does a guy with all that do stuff like this?

Well, to dispose of the three questions in order:

The private vices of public people are fair game for public comment because they illuminate a person's character, concerning which we have a right to know all we can find out without prurience. That's not to say that those vices are necessarily grounds for resignation. It depends on the vices. I still want to know them, and not just from idle curiosity.

In any case, Spitzer seems to have broken some laws. Now you may think the laws that he broke are silly laws and perhaps they are, but nobody has to break them and Spitzer shouldn't have. He's a lawyer, and Governor of a state. He shouldn't even be getting parking tickets.

Next, the Patriot Act. Andy McCarthy has cleared that up for us on The Corner. Quote from Andy who has actually toiled in the public prosecutor vineyards. Quote:

Currency transaction reporting requirements were enacted in the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 and money laundering was made a crime in overhaul of the federal narcotics laws that took place in 1986. Long before we had an international terrorism problem, these laws were developed to target domestic criminal enterprises. The biggest problem many of these syndicates have is hiding the mountains of cash that they generate, unexplained wealth being among the best indicators of criminal activity.

End of quote from Andy.

Finally, the psychoanalyzing. I pass, just not having much interest in the insides of other people's heads.

Jay Leno famously said that politics is show business for ugly people. Well, I don't know about ugly on the outside, but Elliot Spitzer is surely an ugly guy on the inside.

That should have been just a problem for him and those close to him. He had to go and make it a problem for twenty million New Yorkers. Shame on him, and good riddance.

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At long last reporters are very gingerly starting to look at the church that Barack Obama chose as his own, and at the guy who runs it. That would be the aforementioned Reverend Wright who is on record with the notion that we should sing not "God bless America" but "God damn America."

The Reverend Wright officiated at the Obamas' marriage; the title of Barack Obama's second book was taken from one of Wright's sermons; and the Obamas have made big donations to Wright's church as recently as 2006.

It's becoming daily more clear that Barack Obama has been hanging out for most of his adult life with people who are far, far to the left of the American mainstream. If Obama minded their views, he never showed any sign of it.

The open question is, will he continue to get away with this? Will he continue to smile his way through as people start to ask, more and more insistently, how a guy who never seems to have given the time of day to anyone further to the right than Michael Moore can present himself as a moderate, as a conciliating reformer.

My impression is that the smile is beginning to crack already. So how will Obama deal with these issues? Well, he will deal with them by yelling "racist!" at anyone who raises them, that's how he'll deal with them.

We already have an example of this. Geraldine Ferraro, who was doing work for Hillary Clinton's campaign, told a California newspaper that, quote: "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position."

Well, that's true. Of course it is. As a black man, Obama has a near-total lock on the votes of black Democrats, and also of guilty white liberal Democrats, who together make up a huge chunk of Democratic primary voters.

Do you want to tell me that there is some white candidate who would have got ninety percent of black Democratic votes in the Mississippi primary Against Hillary Clinton? Name one. [Crickets chirping.] Right.

Quote from Senator Obama, responding to Mrs Ferraro's true statement, quote:

The kind of slice and dice politics that's about race and about gender and about this and that — that's what Americans are tired of.

End quote.

Oh, so will you now repudiate your support for the "slice and dice politics" of affirmative action, Senator?

What this American is tired of is Barack Obama's haughty pretense to be above all this distasteful race stuff when in fact, as Mrs Ferraro correctly said, it's the race stuff that's put him where he is.

This is the U.S.A. The day that race doesn't matter here it'll be some other country.

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Ward Connelly's outfit, the American Civil Rights Institute, is pushing for ballot initiatives in five states to outlaw affirmative action by amending state constitutions. Two of the states, Colorado and Missouri, are key swing states where a good turnout to vote down affirmative action could make the difference. The other three states being targeted are Arizona, Nebraska, and Oklahoma.

The basic idea behind all these initiatives, and the reason that Connelly calls his outfit a civil rights institute, is to affirm the language of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, quote:

The state shall not discriminate against or grant preferential treatment to any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.

End quote.

Now, racist language like that is of course a red rag to a bull so far as the leftists are concerned. The ACLU is working hard to get these initiatives struck from state ballots. They know that if they get on the ballot, that will pass, because Americans like civil rights, we just don't like some people being entitled in law to have more civil rights than other people.

Of course, even if the initiatives do get on state ballots and do get passed by the voters, the ACLU and their wealthy enablers — people like the Ford Foundation, George Soros, and of course the next administration — will try to tie them up for ever with legal challenges.

After all, if equality under the law could be established just by citizens voting for it, we'd be a democracy, wouldn't we? Nobody wants that, certainly not the ACLU; and just as certainly not leftist multiculturalists like Clinton, Obama or McCain.

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It's not just that Clinton and Obama want to continue the affirmative action rackets either. I mean, of course they like affirmative action. They're the people affirmative action is for: poor women who had the doors of opportunities slammed in their faces, black people whose ancestors were slaves on southern cotton plantations. It's understandable they'd favor affirmative action. They're going to …

[Phone rings.]

Excuse me … Hello? … What's that you say? … Senators Clinton and Obama both come from prosperous middle-class families? … Mrs Clinton went to Wellesley before they had affirmative action? … None of Obama's ancestors was a slave? … Okay … All right … Sorry, I should have fact-checked … Yep, sorry … Okay, sorry about that.

Where was I? Oh yes. Well, the reasons why Clinton and Obama are so keen on affirmative action are apparently not as clear as I thought they were. I'll have to revisit that another time.

In any case, they're both leftists who want to hand the country over to tax-eaters and to do to us poor taxpayers what Eliot Spitzer did to young Ashley Dupré.

They will continue George W. Bush's great liberal project to bring democracy to people who don't want it at a cost of ten billion dollars a month out of the public fisc. They'll add another nine layers of bureaucracy to your health care, and they'll add another nine dysfunctional federal agencies for you to pay for. They'll wreck the economy by using federal funds to bail out anyone with a sob story and they'll take away your right to own a gun.

They are also deeply wrong-headed on the National Question, having no regard for U.S. citizenship, which they will hand out like free candy to anyone who asks for it, including scofflaws — in fact, especially scofflaws,

John McCain will at least let you keep your gun … maybe.

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Oh yes: The ChiCom Olympics are shaping up to be the biggest fiasco since the Great Leap Forward. And no, the Great Leap Forward wasn't an athletic event. It was a program pushed through by Mao Tse-tung in the late 1950s to industrialize China by hustling peasants into huge communes and melting down all their cooking pots to make steel in backyard furnaces. That was some fiasco. It led to famines in which tens of millions of people died.

Well, the same party is still in power in China and they are running the Olympics with that same level of organizational expertise and humanitarian concern; and there haven't been a lot of deaths yet unless you count the cats and dogs that are being rounded up and massacred by the authorities in Peking.

So far as the cats are concerned, by the way, your worst fears are confirmed by the London Daily Mail, which reports that, quote:

Hundreds of cats were being sent to Guangzhou in southern China, an area infamous for restaurants that serve meat from cats and dogs.

End quote.

Well, the authorities are telling Peking residents that cats carry dangerous diseases and must be handed in. Tens of thousands of them have been.

It's not the health hazard from cats that's worrying marathon runners, though it's Peking's appallingly polluted air. The Ethiopian marathon runner Haile Gebrselassie, widely regarded as the best in the world, has already said that he won't compete in Peking because of the air pollution. The Canadian Olympic team will spend the weeks ahead of the Games in Singapore, a city with much cleaner air whose heat and humidity closely resemble Peking's.

Wow. What's the Chinese word for "fiasco"? Hang on there. Let me consult Mr Liang Shih-chiu's excellent English-Chinese Dictionary. Oh, here we are. Fiasco, let me see … Fiasco: 完全失敗; 慘敗 … No, it doesn't really translate. Perhaps that's why they're not very good at seeing a fiasco coming.

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Item:  You think five thousand dollars an hour is a lot? Well, it depends on what you're paying for.

Here's a different Governor: Arnold Schwartzenegger of Nueva Aztlan — that's the state formerly known as "California" — flying home every day from Sacramento to his home in southern California in his private jet. That costs Arnold ten thousand dollars an hour an hour.

Now it's his own money, so why would anybody complain?

Well, the environmental lobbies are complaining. They say that Arnold is generating an awful lot of pollution by being flown around in that jet everyday.

Arnold retorts that he needs to be with his family at the other end of the state.

Why doesn't he just buy a house in Sacramento? There are plenty on the market in California, although the Governor might have trouble getting a subprime mortgage.

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Item:  Going back to the Empire State for just a moment: We of course have a new Governor now, the old one having moved on into his new career as a cartoonists' model.

The new guy is a left-wing Democrat, of course. What do you expect? This is New York. We only have two kinds of politicians here: left-wing Democrats and left-wing Republicans.

That aside, the new Governor seems to be pretty capable, and people who know him speak well of him. He's a black guy from Harlem named David Paterson. Paterson's had a pretty tough row to hoe in life, being nearly blind since infancy.

He comes to office just as New York's state legislature sits down to vote on next year's budget. Spitzer had responded to declining revenues in the traditional Democratic way by proposing increases in spending. If Paterson follows Spitzer's lead, we will just have traded a jerk with stupid policies for a regular guy with stupid policies.

I note with a sinking heart that Paterson's wife is named Michelle. Uh-oh …

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Item:  And now back to the ChiComs for just a moment. Last week was the 49th anniversary of their invasion of Tibet, which is still under Chinese military occupation today.

The Tibetans don't take kindly to having their country occupied by foreign troops. Who does? Last week, they made their unhappiness known with three days of demonstrations. In Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, Chinese shops were looted. The ChiComs responded by imposing martial law and ordering all foreigners to leave.

One Swiss reporter was beaten and robbed by the ChiCom police. Extra Chinese troops were brought in on the spiffy new railroad into Tibet that the ChiComs built last year. Well, now we know what they built it for.

The number of Tibetans killed in these disturbances is not known. The ChiComs were saying twelve by midweek, but nobody believes this. After all, these are the same people who assured us that nobody got killed in Tiananmen Square.

Let me just read you from the New York Times report. March 9th issue, quote:

An Australian traveler described Tibetans screaming with fear as Chinese troops pull them from their houses. "The truck kept coming back," The tourist said. "They would pick up a couple of people, drive off with a half dozen militia holding them down, and then come back."

End quote.

These are the people who are seeking to glorify their gangster rule via this summer's Olympic Games. Stay away. Don't watch. Write your congressmen, write letters to your newspaper.

Let these bastards choke on their damn games … which they will, anyway, if Peking doesn't get its air cleared up.

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Item:  How about some European news?

Here we are: Germany. A German chap is in a spot of bother for having engendered four children. The trouble was, you see, he engendered them with his sister.

Now incest is against the law in Germany, as it is pretty much anywhere else. So this fellow, whose name we're not allowed to know, has been doing some jail time.

He got out of jail pending an appeal, but the appeal's gone against him. The German High Court wants to keep the incest prohibition. Chances are this apostle of brotherly love — I mean the wrong kind — will be heading back to the slammer.

I wonder if he'll meet that other weird German, the one who ate his house guest a year or so ago. If so, let's hope that their weird preferences don't cross-fertilize with each other. Otherwise we could end up with someone eating his sister.

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Item:  Gold is a thousand dollars an ounce; oil is $110 a barrel; and in Japan for the first time in a decade, you can buy one of those dollars for less than a hundred yen.

You remember Japan. That's the country that's been jeered at as the sick man of the advanced world for the past few years.

My wife is grumbling about the cost of milk and bread and meat. Health insurance is through the roof. Can you spell "inflation"?

Oh, well. At least there are plenty of good cheap houses on the market

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Item:  In the Don't Know Whether To Laugh Or Cry department, this headline: Gates Predicts Big Technological Leaps.

Yes, folks: In a speech to the Northern Virginia Technology Council, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said he expects the next decades to bring even greater technological leaps than the past ten years. People will interact with computers in new ways: with speech recognition technology, with tablets that will recognize handwriting, and touch-screen surfaces that will integrate a wide variety of information.

Well, that's great, Bill. I just wasted half a morning finding a work-around for a bug in Internet Explorer. I have my task bar set to auto-hide so that when I mouse down to the bottom of the screen, the task bar should appear. And so it does … about half the time.

Task Manager still won't tell me things that I know are running in my machine. I can hear the damn things running, I can hear the disc heads seeking; but when I bring up Task Manager, nope, nothing running, nobody here but us "System Idle Processes."

And then when some program judders to a halt and I get "Program not Responding," which happens rather a lot, it takes me about two hundred clicks on the button before the thing finally ends.

Are you going to fix any of these things, Bill, with those battalions of low-wage programmers you hire in from Sri Lanka? No? Eh, that's what I thought.

Not to worry, though. Ten years from now we'll have voice and handwriting recognition. I'm sure that will work real well.

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Item:  You know, I think I've let you off easy this week. This broadcast hasn't been anything like gloomy enough. So here's the gloomiest story I could find from the week's news — actually, again, from the London Daily Mail. Here we go; long quote:

Britain should brace itself for a new wave of mass migration caused by global warming, a report warns today.

Climate change will drive millions of environmental migrants towards the EU. The report also warns of a potentially dangerous scramble between Russia and the West for the mineral deposits of the Arctic made accessible by the melting of the polar ice cap.

Famines, rising sea levels, loss of arable land and fresh water, and dangerous weather conditions will prevail. As climate change starts to take dramatic and unpleasant effect in other areas of the world, Britain and the rest of Europe will see an influx of migrants, the report claims.

A combination of farmland being turned to desert, shrinking coastlines, and harder-to-obtain fresh water will result in a vicious circle of degradation with migration and conflicts over territory threatening global stability, the document adds.

End quote.

Now that's my kind of news! Make no mistake about it, Radio Derb listeners: We are doomed, doomed.

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Radio Derb will be back again next week with more sour skepticism, dark humor, and dire predictions. You know how much you love hearing it.

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