This Week featured an interview with former President Jimmy Carter. First, the good: Carter talked about his foundation’s efforts to eradicate the Guinea Worm from villages in Africa. Carter said that with proper care (and enough money), the parasite could be wiped out in three years. For more information, check out the Carter Center’s website.
Of course, even in discussing the war against the Guinea Worm, Carter couldn’t help but take some shots at American foreign policy. At one point he (falsely) claimed that we need to “increase our amount of foreign aid; we’re in the bottom of all the developed countries in giving to other people.” This is simply untrue: America leads the world in charitable giving, providing over $27 billion in governmental foreign aid in 2005, more than twice the amount of the next leading country, Japan. The amount of private aid that Americans give dwarfs even that enormous figure: the Hudson Institute estimates that Americans privately donated a further $71 billion in 2004 alone. Know-nothing do-gooders will tell you that this country’s per capita giving level is unacceptable, but these people ignore two facts: One, Americans pay far less in taxes relative to Europeans, which allows for this country’s extraordinary level of private giving; and two, the United States devotes a far higher percentage of its GDP to defense, allowing our freeloading allies to allocate more money to foreign aid than they could otherwise afford.
Condoleezza Rice was also a featured guest on This Week. She hopes Congress doesn’t do anything to hamstring the president’s ability to wage war in Iraq: “Policies that diminish the flexibility of the commander–the commander in chief but especially the commanders in the field–that disrupt the normal process of allowing the executive branch to determine things like training times and so forth would be a problem.” Rice added to that on Fox News Sunday, saying “The consolidation of a stable and democratic Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein is a part of what America owes to the Iraqi people, owes to the region, and owes to ourselves, so that our own security is there.” She also touched on issues related to Russia, downplaying the recent outburst from Vladimir Putin. “Russia is not the Soviet Union, it’s a different place and we have a different relationship,” she noted, adding that she was hopeful for Russian assistance in dealing with the Iranian nuclear crisis. “We have a lot of areas of cooperation. We’re going to disagree sometimes.”
Fox News had an interview with two governors, Rick Perry from Texas and Ed Rendell from Pennsylvania. Perry was asked to defend his decision to require all girls entering the sixth grade to get vaccinated for HPV, the most common sexually transmitted disease and which has been linked to the onset of cervical cancer. “We spend about $350 million every two years, our biannual budget, on Medicaid costs to deal with cervical cancer,” Perry said. “This vaccine will cost us $35 every two years; so there’s a real fiscal reason.” Rendell said that while he supported such a vaccination program, he was uncomfortable with one aspect of it. “This is a good idea, we should inform parents about the risk factor, but it shouldn’t be mandatory,” Rendell told Chris Wallace, adding “it does save money, and even more important than that, it saves lives, but I don’t think we can make it mandatory, I think that’s a role the parents still have to play.”
Face the Nation‘s Bob Schieffer sat down with the most popular Republican in the country who is not running for president, Arnold Schwarzenegger. The governator called on the two parties to work together, “I always said–I always said that you don’t have to give up your principles, all you have to do is just serve the people. And when you have two parties, you have to compromise. It’s that simple. It’s never our way or the highway, it is working together, and finding, you know, common ground and finding solutions. The ultimate goal should always be what is best for the state, or what is best for the country, rather than what is best for my party. That is the key thing.” While he disagrees with President Bush’s current course in Iraq, he was hesitant to encourage the Congress in its current course either: “But they should cut the funding or let the president do what he needs to do. Because to micromanage a war is the worst thing. It’s the ingredient for a loss. That is an important thing.”
Meet the Press‘s roundtable took a look at the acrimony between the Obama and Clinton campaigns in the wake of last week’s comments by David Geffen. Dan Balz of the Washington Post said “this was another example of how extraordinarily intense and early this campaign has gotten under way. I mean, to have this kind of a soap opera in February of 2007 as opposed to November of 2007 or in the middle of the primaries is pretty shocking. The interesting thing about this is that I don’t think either campaign came out of this very well. On the one hand, Senator Clinton’s campaign seemed a little twitchy with the–with the trigger finger on this. They were quick to respond and, in a sense, overly harsh to respond, I thought. And Senator Obama, I think, missed an opportunity to project the kind of campaign that he says he wants to project, which is to get away from the politics of polarization and personalization.” Doris Kearns Goodwin reminded her compatriots to have a sense of history, however; things could be far nastier. “This is pretty mild. I mean, poor Andrew Jackson was [portrayed as] an adulterer, a murderer, a bigamist, and, in fact, it so hurt his wife that she died, he thought, because of it, between the election and the inauguration. Never forgave the opponent. So we’re still in pretty mild territory.”
Of course, the Academy Awards are tonight, with every responsible pundit predicting a victory for Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth for best documentary. For those interested in predicting the winners in the major categories, it’s always educational to take a look at the Hollywood Stock Exchange. According to the collective wisdom of the market, should your bookie be taking action on Tinseltown’s biggest night you could do worse than putting money on The Departed taking home best picture (and Martin Scorsese grabbing gold for his direction of that flick), Forrest Whittaker picking up the best actor statuette, and Helen Mirren winning for best actress.
Sonny Bunch is assistant editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
