Great development- Trashing of treaties that are bad for all

Who's the biggest loser of 2001? Good question, and one can summon plenty of nominees: John Walker, Enron executives or the Chicago Cubs who, surging last June -- this writer saw them finish a sweep of our beloved Redbirds up at Wrigley that month -- later did their usual fading number as the season wore on.

Writing for the Web site, nationalreview.com, the editor of TechCentralStation.com, Nick Schultz, nominates as the biggest loser "a less obvious suspect: the international treaty." Schultz first takes note of President Bush's rough treatment of the outdated and positively dangerous ABM treaty of 1972. Bush simply "ignored the protestations of the arms-control enthusiasts and withdrew the U.S. from the treaty." Indeed, it isn't sufficiently noted that the president did this with next to no protest from Russian president Vladimir Putin, with whom he has taken care to develop an especially close personal relationship, as when the president hosted Putin at his Texas ranch before Thanksgiving. Bush was right to do this, as he noted that the ABM treaty had been hammered out with a nation that no longer exists: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Good riddance.

There's more. Amid continuing war news and the tuning-out that comes with the holidays, it went hardly noticed that the Japanese, for their part, have tossed the infamous Kyoto Treaty on Global Climate Change on the ash heap of history. Good riddance II.

The Japanese economy, which much of the media's chattering class spent the 1980s telling us would leave Americans in the dust, has been in recession since 1989. Schultz writes that, "The New York Times reported last week that Japanese industrial production has fallen to a 14-year low. 'In comparison to this year, next year will be even worse,' said Yasu Goto, an economist with Mitsubishi Research Institute."

Noting that "Kyoto is a massive tax, one that is deliberately designed to slow and check economic activity," Schultz cites politicians and business leaders from Germany to Canada to New Zealand who are now much less enthusiastic about the mandated emissions cuts Kyoto would require. Speaking of a treaty voted down 98-0 by the U.S. Senate in a non-binding vote, Schultz writes cites studies that Kyoto would reduce the GDP of certain countries by 18-20 percent over the next 15 years.

These developments won't be cheered in certain faculty lounges of certain Biology departments. But they're being cheered by the American people. Just another reason for the president's historically high popularity.

At last, a legacy:

"Everything was more important to Bill Clinton than fighting terrorism. Political correctness, civil-liberties concerns, fear of offending the administration's supporters, Janet Reno's objections, considerations of costs, worries about racial profiling and, in the second term, surviving impeachment all came before fighting terrorism." -- Longtime Clinton political adviser Dick Morris, mastermind of his 1996 re-election, writing in his column entitled "Clinton's Priority: Political Correctness Over Fighting Terror."

Clinton, we are told, has long been desperately in search of a legacy. Now he has it. And this even before most of the tell-all books get written by former associates.

Peter Kinder is assistant to the chairman of Rust Communications and president pro tem of the Missouri Senate.