SIDESWIPE – One of the features of international travel today is the obligatory exposure to liberal politics that comes from CNN broadcasts in airport lounges and complimentary newspapers in hotels.  Today’s Asahi Shimbun offered three gems of liberal thought this morning as I consumed my Tokyo breakfast.  The newspaper somehow equated the policymaking that led to Japan’s limited deployment of its Self-Defense Forces to noncombat zones in Iraq to its actions in World War Two, drawing comparisons to political enquiries on the war underway in the UK and Netherlands and lecturing on the importance of learning lessons.  New York Times columnist Roger Cohen was waxing that national health care in America “would involve 300 million people linking arms”. What?  And the Times editorial writers were minimizing the damning data scandals that have undermined global warming advocacy as “apparently trivial errors”, lamenting that, “the United States, embarrassingly, has no national strategy” to reduce carbon emissions.   It is hard to escape Big Brother at the airports but at least we have the option of not reading the free newspapers.  Meanwhile, Alice is thriving in Wonderland.

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