BOBBY SOCKS 'EM:

Jindal takes 11-point lead in latest Kennedy poll (John Hill, October 30, 2003, Shreveport Times)

Jindal had 49 percent compared to Democrat Kathleen Blanco's 38 percent in the independent poll by Verne Kennedy of Marketing Research Insight of Pensacola, Fla.

Kennedy said Blanco's favorability rating - and her vote - has consistently dropped, from 66 percent on Oct. 13 to 58 percent on Oct. 22 to 47 percent this week.

Jindal's favorable rating has remained flat: 54 percent on Oct. 13, 54 percent on Oct. 22 and 55 percent today, Kennedy said.

The sample is small and the swing from prior polling ridiculous, but there's nothing harder in politics than moving your opponent's favorability rating without damaging your own. That Jindal managed it, at least in this poll, suggests he continues to run an especially good campaign. You'd still have to favor Blanco, but he's making it a race.

---

GOOD SIGN IN THE BID FOR 60:

Mo’ Money, Mo’ GOP GovernorsDotty Lynch, Douglas Kiker, Steve Chaggaris, Beth Lester, Sean Sharifi and Clothilde Ewing, 10/31/03, CBS News)

Three days before the Nov. 4 Mississippi and Kentucky gubernatorial elections, Mr. Bush will head to DeSoto, Miss., for a rally with GOP candidate and former RNC chairman Haley Barbour, who’s locked in a tight race with Democratic Gov. Ronnie Musgrove. The president will then fly to Paducah, Ky., for a rally with Rep. Ernie Fletcher, who’s running against Democrat Ben Chandler to replace scandal-plagued Democratic Gov. Paul Patton. Mr. Bush and Fletcher will then travel to London, Ky., for another event before the president heads back to Gulfport, Miss., to campaign again with Barbour.

The GOP is salivating at expanding their hold on governorships with wins in Mississippi and Kentucky and the Nov. 15 Louisiana runoff. Before the California recall, the number of statehouses were split, 26 held by Republicans and 24 by Democrats. If the Republicans win on Tuesday, and polls show Barbour and Fletcher with shots at taking over those statehouses, they’ll have a 29-21 edge over the Democrats. The GOP would hold onto that advantage if Bobby Jindal defeats Democratic Lt. Gov. Kathleen Blanco in Louisiana.

Once again we see Mr. Bush doing something all too rare in the modern presidency--putting his own reputation at risk in order to boost his Party and its candidates. The pay-off last November was huge, but if Democrats were to take these three races--certainly a possibility--you can be certain that the stories that followed would portray it as a personal repudiation for him.

---

THE DAMNABLE PERSISTENCE OF HUMAN NATURE:

The Opt-Out Revolution (LISA BELKIN, 10/26/03, NY Times Magazine)

Wander into any Starbucks in any Starbucks kind of neighborhood in the hours after the commuters are gone. See all those mothers drinking coffee and watching over toddlers at play? If you look past the Lycra gym clothes and the Internet-access cellphones, the scene could be the 50's, but for the fact that the coffee is more expensive and the mothers have M.B.A.'s.

We've gotten so used to the sight that we've lost track of the fact that this was not the way it was supposed to be. Women -- specifically, educated professional women -- were supposed to achieve like men. Once the barriers came down, once the playing field was leveled, they were supposed to march toward the future and take rightful ownership of the universe, or at the very least, ownership of their half. The women's movement was largely about grabbing a fair share of power -- making equal money, standing at the helm in the macho realms of business and government and law. It was about running the world. [...]

"I am so conflicted on this,'' says Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, an anthropologist and author of ''Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants and Natural Selection.'' Female primates, she says, are ''competitive'' in that they seek status within their social order. So it would follow that women strive for status too.

But there is an important qualifier. When primates compete, they do so in ways that increase the survival chances of their offspring. In other words, they do it for their children. ''At this moment in Western civilization,'' Hrdy says, ''seeking clout in a male world does not correlate with child well-being. Today, striving for status usually means leaving your children with an au pair who's just there for a year, or in inadequate day care. So it's not that women aren't competitive; it's just that they don't want to compete along the lines that are not compatible with their other goals. [...]

This, I would argue, is why the workplace needs women. Not just because they are 50 percent of the talent pool, but for the very fact that they are more willing to leave than men. That, in turn, makes employers work harder to keep them. It is why the accounting firm Deloitte & Touche has more than doubled the number of employees on flexible work schedules over the past decade and more than quintupled the number of female partners and directors (to 567, from 97) in the same period. It is why I.B.M. employees can request up to 156 weeks of job-protected family time off. It is why Hamot Medical Center in Erie, Pa., hired a husband and wife to fill one neonatology job, with a shared salary and shared health insurance, then let them decide who stays home and who comes to the hospital on any given day. It is why, everywhere you look, workers are doing their work in untraditional ways.

Women started this conversation about life and work -- a conversation that is slowly coming to include men. Sanity, balance and a new definition of success, it seems, just might be contagious. And instead of women being forced to act like men, men are being freed to act like women. Because women are willing to leave, men are more willing to leave, too -- the number of married men who are full-time caregivers to their children has increased 18 percent. Because women are willing to leave, 46 percent of the employees taking parental leave at Ernst & Young last year were men.

Such a target rich environment, one barely knows where to start. Human behavior so obviously departing from both evolutionary and Left/feminist theory seems inviting enough, but who could pass up the delightful irony that women's "liberation" has ended up letting men quit the rat race while their wives go to work?

---

NO MAN IS IMPARTIAL BETWEEN "US" AND "THEM"::

Why Be Partial to Israel? (Paul J. Cella, 10/20/2003, Tech Central Station) 

Patriotism is an understandable human sentiment. In its place, it is noble; though not as noble as Christian charity. But the problem with modern notions tracing their lineage from Christian charity is that they have abandoned its humanness in favor of abstract Humanity. The net is cast too wide. Men are asked to do something that is simply beyond most of them: for it is the very rare man indeed who cares intimately for those with whom he has no connection. It was not for nothing that Jesus Christ commanded us to love our neighbors, the word implying a certain nearness. Humanitarianism in the modern world lost its humanity, as it were. St. Francis was a real humanitarian: but he cared not one whit for Humanity, though he loved as a brother every human being he met; and his example set hearts aflame.
 
All this is to say that patriotism of that broader variety which includes the Jews of Palestine, whose society descends from our civilization, but excludes the Arabs of Palestine, whose society is part of our civilization's greatest historical rival and antagonist, is perfectly understandable, unavoidable, and ineffaceable. It is nothing to be ashamed of. To require of Americans that they hold out a fastidious abstract impartiality in this bloody conflict, a conflict so distant from them, is to simply misunderstand the nature of man. It is the victory of stale rationalism over sanity; abstraction over human sympathies. It is a very modern error.

Brother Cella brings up an important point--one that many on the Left, in Europe, and in the Islamic world seem not to have processed yet: the attitude on those who support the war on terror with regard to Islam might fairly be compared to that of Abraham Lincoln with regard to slavery when he reluctantly but forcefully prosecuted the Civil War:

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could do it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.

It would be preferable for Islam to reform itself and deal with the murderous thugs in its midst on its own. Failing that, it would be fine if a few wars and the application of moral, political, and economic pressure were to force a Reformation and bring the violence under control. But, let us have no illusions about it, if the violence continues or escalates--especially if the survival of Israel or any other Western nation were ever at stake--rather few will be troubled if the Israelis decimate the Palestinians and we the Sauds or the Pakistanis or the Syrians or whoever. The object of the struggle does not really concern Islam but the West. Islam, strange as it seems, is incidental to our ends.

---

THE FORGETTING MAN:

CBS Forgets to Tell the Truth (Michael Reagan, Oct 31, 2003, Human Events)

They want to talk about his forgetfulness, but he never forgot the people of this country. He gave us all a tax break, created 19 million new jobs, and restored our faith in ourselves. He never forgot the hostages in Iran, who were freed the day that he was sworn in as President.

He never forgot the suffering people behind the Iron Curtain, living in squalor and poverty and under the gun for all those many years. He did everything he could to free them.

And he never forgot who he was, and where he had come from. He remembered being poor. He remembered struggling.

The important things he needed to know he never forgot.

Even the "worst" moment of his presidency was a function of his empathy for others' suffering: IranContra was about freeing Americans held hostage in Lebanon and about freeing the people of Nicaragua from Communist tyranny. It may have been unwise as policy--though we'd argue otherwise--but there was no shame in it.

---

GLASS HOUSE:

Does the culture retain no sense of shame whatsoever?

---

THE AXIS OF GOOD GOING MAINSTREAM:

Cuddle up to India, US urged (Jim Lobe, 10/30/03, Asia Times)

Washington must devote "sustained and high-level attention" to India and Pakistan and be "more active" in helping the two nuclear-armed neighbors manage their conflicts, argues the "Chairmen's Report" of a joint task force on India and South Asia co-sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Asia Society. [...]

The group found that, after a long estrangement during the Cold War, US and Indian interests on all fronts "broadly coincide", to such an extent that Washington should treat India as a "friendly country", a status that would, for example, further ease restrictions on exports of sensitive "dual-use" technology that has military as well as civilian applications.

The report also called for a more sustained trade policy dialogue that could, among other things, result in a free trade accord on services, which could provide more hi-tech jobs for Indians in exchange for permitting US business to compete in finance, law, accounting and related professional services.

Potential obstacles to the consolidation of a "genuine partnership" with Washington over the coming years, the report says, include India's failure to further liberalize its economy; possible conflict with Pakistan; and the maintenance of India's social and communal peace, which, could be challenged by the rise of Hindu extremists in the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

Prospects for continued close ties with Pakistan, described as "one of the most complex and difficult challenges facing US diplomacy anywhere in the world today", are seen as considerably more problematic.

Perhaps it was necessary for them to do so for political purposes, but the report apparently leaves unstated the obvious point that India should be cultivated, the Pakistani military government tolerated, and the Afghan government propped up because they may all be helpful when the war on terror ends up in Western Pakistan, as it must. But among these three, India matters most because it can be counted on to enthusiastically help with the killing.

---

NEWSFLASH--MAJOR CONSTRUCTION CORPORATIONS HAVE TIES TO GOP!:

Study finds cronyism in Iraq, Afghanistan contracts (Bryan Bender, 10/31/2003, Boston Globe)

Many of the companies that have received government contracts to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan have collectively contributed more money to President Bush's election campaigns than to any other candidate in more than a decade, according to a study released yesterday.

In one of the most detailed studies of postwar contracts, the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit government watchdog, found that at least 70 companies have been awarded a total of $8 billion in contracts in the past two years.

While some of the contractors were previously known to have ties to White House officials -- such as Halliburton, formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney -- the group found several lesser-known firms that also are linked to senior government officials. One small company's sole employee is married to a deputy assistant secretary of defense, the study found.

Allegations of cronyism were quickly denied yesterday by government officials and company spokesmen. But the report raised new questions about whether political allies of the White House or Congress are being repaid for their support with lucrative, taxpayer-funded contracts. Most of the 70 contracts -- for tasks ranging from restoring electricity to rebuilding ports and schools -- were put out to bid, but some were not.

This report is done precisely backwards. The interesting question would be: Has any American company capable of doing large scale reconstruction work been shut out of Iraq and does it not contribute to the GOP? The point is that there are a few companies in the world capable of doing the kind of work a Halliburton does. Was the Administration supposed to award the contracts to companies incapable of fulfilling them?

---

TOO MUCH TO HOPE FOR?:

Analysis: Rumors of war (Claude Salhani, 10/30/03, UPI)

According to correspondents in Iraq, rumors are currently circulating around Baghdad that a major terrorist offensive against the U.S.-led coalition is imminent and could take place as early as this weekend.

Word has it that the armed resistance put up mainly by "foreign fighters" and remnants of the Iraqi Baath regime, are preparing "something big." The latter, the United States now believes, is being directed by Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, vice-chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council and one-time deputy commander of the Iraqi armed forces. Al-Douri, a former army general who rose to the highest ranks of the ruling Baath Party, was a long-time confidant of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. His daughter was married to Saddam's son, Uday, who was killed last July.

In the months leading up to the invasion, Saddam and his associates had ample time to prepare for the U.S. assault, to stockpile weapons, money and plans for the post-invasion period. [...]

But back to the rumors of the "Ramadan offensive." In more specific terms, word on the street has it that a Tet-like assault is about to take place with hundreds of armed insurgents attacking one of Saddam's palaces, the one where the U.S. administrator, Paul Bremer, is headquartered, secured behind concrete walls, concertina wire, and Abram M1-A1 tanks and heavy machine guns.

The "Flypaper Theory" has always seemed dubious, mostly because you'd like to think that evil masterminds aren't complete idiots and won't replicate the disaster that was Tet for the Vietcong (morons, after all, shouldn't have been able to kill 3,000 of our fellow citizens). However, the purveyors of terror have acted stupidly pretty much every chance they've had, so, while this rumor seems too good to be true, we can at least hope. One good Tet-offensive would likely conclude the after-war period.

---

JOIN THE NRA (THE NATIONAL RIGHT OF ASSOCIATION)

October Diary (John Derbyshire, National Review Online, 10/30/03)

One of my lesser ambitions was fulfilled this month: I have been banned from the campus of a U.S. college on the strength of my opinions. The college in question, though perfectly respectable, is not very big or important, but I am flattered nonetheless. . . .

I was coming to this college to talk about analytic number theory, not homosexuality or "straight flight." It was not the topic of my address that bothered the lady, but my opinions about unrelated matters. Her position was not: "Mr. Derbyshire is coming here to voice unacceptable opinions." (A position that would be deplorable enough in itself. As if the minds of Midwestern liberal-arts students are so delicate they need to be shielded from dangerous ideas!) Her position was: "Mr. Derbyshire holds some opinions I consider extreme, and so I do not want him on my campus at all, in any capacity." She would presumably object to me being hired as a janitor on her campus, because of my opinions.

I would pay money to hear Mr. Derbyshire speak on any subject he chose, even obscure issues in number theory. Preferably, this would take place in a small group of likeminded people, over a good single malt and fine cigars. Nonetheless, conservatives should immediately champion the right of this college to block any speaker they want for any reason. There is never a bad reason to try to resuscitate the right of association.

---

THEY ASKED FOR IT:

Lawmakers Are Negotiating Import of Prescription Drugs (ROBERT PEAR, 10/31/03, NY Times)

House and Senate negotiators say they are seriously discussing proposals to allow imports of less expensive prescription drugs from Canada, as well as a plan to give the Food and Drug Administration more money and more authority to police the market.

The negotiators have worked for more than three months on a bill to revamp Medicare and to add drug benefits to the program. But until this week, they largely avoided the explosive issue of drug imports.

Lawmakers said they discussed it on Wednesday night and again on Thursday at meetings with Tommy G. Thompson, the secretary of health and human services.

"We are considering it," said Representative Michael Bilirakis, Republican of Florida.

Since they both refused to support us at the Un in the Iraq war run-up, why not bankrupt Mexico and Canada by letting their taxpayers subsidize our drug dependency? They'll inevitably have to stop doing so and the program will die a natural death, but not before wiping out many National Health programs around the world. Plus you get the side benefit of a respite on R&D for new drugs as profit margins disappear. In one of those ironies that makes politics so much fun and human nature so amusing, reimportation is a totally counterproductive policy for the general purposes of those who support it.

---

THE PRESIDENT WENT TO IRAQ AND ALL I GOT WAS 7% GROWTH:

Are Happy Days Back for the Economy? Bush Hopes So (FLOYD NORRIS, October 31, 2003, NY Times)

Profits are soaring, the economy is expanding at its fastest rate in nearly two decades and there are signs that businesses are finally beginning to hire.

All that is in sharp contrast to the outlook just last winter. In February, share prices were falling, the economy was stumbling along at a growth rate of 1.4 percent and the talk among many seers was of the failure of cuts in taxes and interest rates to rescue the economy. Some feared the possibility of Japan-style deflation. [...]

The gross domestic product report showed that over the last six months, final sales to domestic purchasers rose at a 5.9 percent annual rate, well above the pace of late 1999, when growth was peaking.

Businesses were broadly unprepared for the recovery. The government guesses that inventories fell during the quarter, but there is a good chance that it is underestimating the decline. If so, the third-quarter growth rate will be revised down, but the needed inventory restocking will lift fourth-quarter growth.

This would be a good time for the media of the Right to begin pushing the term Bushonomics.

---

THE DYING CANARY:

Japan: the rising specter of unemployment (Hussain Khan, 10/31/03, Asia Times)

Higher labor costs, yen appreciation resulting in the outsourcing of production facilities and growing computerization all point to a long-term structural increase in Japan's jobless. Due to heavy losses in labor-intensive sectors, companies are planning further outsourcing of their production facilities to countries where labor costs are much lower.

It is difficult to describe how profound these changes are in Japanese society. [...]

The banks are not alone in their restructuring plans. Sanyo is emblematic of the new and unsettling Japan. In the electrical goods manufacturing sector, as a part of its effort to provide secure employment, Sanyo continued to produce white goods at its domestic plants. But with the white goods business unlikely to stop bleeding red ink in the immediate future, Sanyo has decided to downsize its operations in Hyogo Prefecture and another in Shiga prefecture. The Hyogo plant is to cease production of vacuum cleaners, massage chairs and all other products by year-end and focus on research and development. The Shiga plant is scheduled to stop making microwave ovens, washing machines and double-tub washing machines by the end of this fiscal year.

As a result, sales from domestic production are expected to account for about 20 percent of the firm's overall home appliance sales, down sharply from the current 60 percent. Sanyo intends to reduce employees at the two plants from the current 1,250 to around 900 by April 2004 through relocations to other divisions and transfers to subcontractors. The company plans to maintain its product lineup by outsourcing production at the two plants to outside firms and transferring it to overseas factories. [...]

The effect of computerization on employment cannot be neglected. On the second day of the Nikkei Global Management Forum, Scott McNealy, chairman and chief executive officer of US computer firm Sun Microsystems Inc, said information technology will bring about drastic changes in the corporate world. Since the spread of IT will render obsolete conventional ways of working, personnel ability and corporate activities, companies will have to adapt to the changes, for example, by reorganizing their employment structure, he said.

The Japanese economic miracle--built on the absurd notion that a developed nation could long endure as a mere assembly plant--has pretty much run its course. Now its core weaknesses--declining population, stifling of creative thinking and individuality, racism, centralized economic planning, lack of corporate transparency, etc.--come to the fore.

---

IT'S FOR YOUR OWN GOOD:

Life, Death, and Silence: Why the media elites won't tell the full story on Terri's prognosis and Michael Schiavo. (Wesley J. Smith, 10/31/2003, Weekly Standard)

[W]HY IS THE ESTABLISHMENT MEDIA covering the Schiavo story as if it wants Michael to succeed in his campaign to end Terri's life?

The establishment media usually reflects the attitudes of society's elites, who do generally believe that people like Terri are better off dead. On the other hand, talk-radio and the Internet--what I call dissident media--generated the unprecedented outpouring of support for Terri's life that culminated in Terri's Law. Members of the establishment disdain dissident media and perceive it to be a threat.

Thus, the Schiavo case has, for the mainstream media, become a potent symbol both of the culture wars--pro-life versus pro-choice--and an acute challenge by dissident media to its hegemony over news dissemination.

It's quite natural for the elites to support the notion that they should be allowed to choose who lives and who dies; it's just the ultimate expression of their intellectual arrogance: believing themselves capable of making all the important decisions in our lives--through big government--why shouldn't they end up at the point where they decide when those lives should end?

The problem though is that while abortion was supposed to be a way of controlling the reproduction of the poor--especially poor blacks--and was sold as a way of empowering women, it has instead had its worst subsidiary effect on the white middle class and on women in particular.

Similarly, medical killings were supposed to be a way of getting rid of those who the elites had judged were inferiors, leading lives not worth living, and is often sold as a way of liberating women, traditional caretakers for the dying, but on closer examination it becomes clear that its also a way for individuals to get rid of those they don't want around anymore. It's a disaster for them when a case like this comes along and demonstrates the truth that the designated decision-maker will often have divergent interests from the person they're trying to kill. Many of us would like to have the power of life and death over others; few care to have others wield that power over themselves.

---

FINNS TO THE LEFT, FINNS TO THE RIGHT... (via Buttercup):

Finland, U.S. Most Competitive Economies, Report Says (Reuters, 10/30/03)

Finland is the world's most competitive economy followed by the United States, Sweden, Denmark and Taiwan, according to a Global Competitiveness Report released Thursday.

The survey among business leaders measured economic competitiveness based on a combination of technology, the quality of public institutions and the macroeconomic environment. [...]

The United States scored high on technology but weak on the quality of its public institutions and economic environment, particularly public finances, where it ranked 50th.

Germany moved up one notch to 13th and France gained two places to 26th. The WEF said both countries showed improvements driven by better public institutions and technology, despite budgets troubles.

"If there is one lesson from our exercise, it is that the strength and coherence of government policies have an enormous bearing on a country's ranking," Augusto Lopez-Claros, chief economist of the WEF, said in a statement.

In her e-mail, Buttercup noted the hilarity of believing that the key to competitiveness is government policy. We're struck by the way their measure makes Germany, which is dragging all of Europe into recession (again) a model economy.

---

HERO OR GOAT?:

Leadership (Tony Blankley, October 29, 2003, Townhall)

President Bush continues to amaze, baffle and infuriate most of the Washington political class. Yesterday, he pronounced that "under my leadership America is more secure and peaceful ... the world is safer for having removed Saddam Hussein," even while the ambulances were still removing the dead and dying from suicide bombsites in Baghdad. The president's claim of more security and peace only makes sense if one understands to what he is comparing the current condition. Presumably, if we hadn't invaded Iraq (and Afghanistan), things would be more peaceful right now. American soldiers wouldn't be dying on foreign soil, and there would be no explosions on the streets of Baghdad. If we had let the U.N. quietly, politely and ineffectively continue to complain to Mr. Hussein and the Taliban for their various misdeeds, the French, Germans and many Muslim governments would not now be saying rude things about America. We might even be admired around the world for our forbearance, restraint and maturity after that tragedy in New York and at the Pentagon.

The president's statement makes sense only if one believes that the terrorist danger will not go away, but rather will grow ever worse until it reaches a genocidal level of applied WMD weaponry against Americans here at home. In that case, every day we delay our effort to suppress and extinguish terrorism at its heart in the Middle East, America and the world grows less secure and less full of peace. It is in that sense that the president was correct yesterday. Having started the process of rolling back terrorism (however falteringly or imperfectly), we are more secure than if we had not yet started. On Sept. 12, and for some months thereafter, most Washington politicians and journalists shared with the president that sense of the danger and urgency. But with the passage of months, and now years, for many the very idea of a war on terrorism has become prosaic. It has become a mere cliche, an abstraction, a political phrase to be tossed off without thinking.

But it is not so for George Bush.

The question is: when the next big terrorist strike comes--as it must--will George W. Bush receive credit for having kept his focus on terror or blame for not preventing the attack. He may well deserve a fair portion of both and deserve a somewhat nuanced judgment, but that tends not to be the way our politics works--we like to settle on a simpler storyline.

---

THE LOSING STREAK:

House, Senate move to OK $87.5B Iraqi package (AP, 10/30/03)

With the most contentious issue resolved, the House on Thursday moved to give final approval to the $87.5 billion package for Iraq and Afghanistan. The Senate was expected to follow suit quickly, and Congress could send the package to President Bush for his signature by Friday or possibly early next week.

House-Senate negotiators worked out the final details of the package Wednesday night, eliminating a Senate provision that would have required that half of the $18.4 billion for Iraqi reconstruction and security forces be given as loans instead of grants. [...]

The package worked out by House and Senate conferees cannot be modified. Most of the money in the package is to support U.S. military operations and both chambers passed their versions of the bill overwhelmingly: 303-125 in the House and 87-12 in the Senate.

The final version of the bill included $64.7 billion for military operations, just under the $65.1 billion Bush had sought. The $18.4 billion for reconstruction and Iraqi security was less than $20.3 billion requested. The bill would provide $1.2 billion for Afghanistan, compared with $800 million sought by Bush.

The legislative process is a wee bit complicated and can be terribly boring, but it's not all that hard to figure out and when it finally spits out laws some of them do matter. So it's a mystery why serious news outlets treated the loan provision as a major blow to the President or a victory for the Democrats when there was never any chance of its being in the final bill. On the one hand, you might assume that it was just bias, but, in the end, all they accomplished was to make it look like the President's veto threat made the opposition crumble. Perhaps that's as good as it gets for Democrats and the press these days--a temporary technical win (Jeffords party-switch, Texas Democrats hiding out, 9th Circuit stopping the recall, etc.) followed by an inevitable rout.

---

COAT TAILS:

GOP going for a Kentucky sweep (Jim Drinkard, 10/30/03, USA TODAY)

A Louisville Courier-Journal poll Sunday showed that the race, virtually a dead heat a month ago, now favors Fletcher by 9 percentage points over Democratic contender Ben Chandler, the state's attorney general. Voters appear sympathetic to Fletcher's call, repeated in a flood of TV ads, to "clean up the mess in Frankfort," the state capital.

Fletcher has embraced Bush, whose approval ratings have slipped but remain at 61% here, higher than his 53% rating nationally. The president is due to fly into the state on Saturday for turnout-boosting appearances in Paducah and in London, a Republican stronghold in southeast Kentucky.

"We called his bluff," Fletcher says of Chandler. "We said, 'You want to nationalize this election? We'll stand our national leaders up against yours.' "

Kentucky is one of three states with elections for governor in November. The other two:

-Mississippi. Republican lobbyist Haley Barbour holds a narrow lead in polls over incumbent Democratic Gov. Ronnie Musgrove.

-Louisiana. Republican candidate Bobby Jindal is running an aggressive race against Democratic Lt. Gov. Kathleen Blanco. The GOP currently holds the seat.

They're all tough races, but if the GOP can pull out one to add to CA they'll have had a great Fall. More than one and the Democrats are in big trouble.

---

THE SHALLOW POND:

Dean courts wide spectrum (Joey Bunch, October 29, 2003, Denver Post)

Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean tried to be all things, except George W. Bush, to all voters on fundraising stops in Boulder and Denver on Tuesday.

The pack-leading Democrat hit all the marks, courting fiscal conservatives and social liberals. He bashed the war and pumped up his plans for universal heath care, renewable energy and investments in schools, highways and broadband Internet for everyone.

Dean declared himself a "metrosexual," the buzz phrase for straight men in touch with their feminine sides, as he touted his accomplishments in "equal justice" for gay and lesbian couples.

But then he waffled.

"I'm a square," Dean declared, after professing his metrosexuality to a Boulder breakfast audience with an anecdote about being called handsome by a gay man. "I like (rapper) Wyclef Jean and everybody thinks I'm very hip, but I am really a square, as my kids will tell you. I don't even get to watch television. I've heard the term (metrosexual), but I don't know what it means."

Try to imagine Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush calling himself a metrosexual just so he could appeal to a given block of voters. Not easy, is it? You can run as a candidate defined by ideas--as they did--or as a constituency candidate, cobbling together the demands of various special interests, as Mondale and Dukakis did and Dean is now doing. But, if you choose the latter, you reach a terrible moment in your campaign where you show youreself to be a hollow man, waiting to be filled up by others, as you stand on stage and plead: "Just tell me who you want me to be..."

---

UNARGUABLE? (via Mike Daley):

Are Suicide Bombings Morally Defensible? (RICHARD WOLIN, Chronicle of Higher Education)

In recent weeks a publishing scandal involving charges of anti-Semitism has dominated the feuilleton sections of leading German dailies. The debate has embroiled one of the nation's most respected publishing houses, the Frankfurt-based, left-liberal firm of Suhrkamp Verlag. It has also implicated the world-renowned philosopher Jürgen Habermas for having made a controversial publishing recommendation. More generally, the dispute raises an issue of fundamental importance concerning the ground rules of the continuing, fractious debate over Middle East politics -- an issue familiar to American academics: At what point does vigorous criticism of Israeli policy dovetail with rank anti-Semitism?

At the center of the maelstrom in Germany is a slim volume by the philosopher Ted Honderich, who until his retirement taught at University College London. The book, After the Terror, is an attempt to reassess global politics in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Written in an offhand, chatty style, its main point -- unarguable, as far as it goes -- is that first-world nations bear responsibility for third-world nations' impoverishment.

Whahappen? In what conceivable sense is that "unarguable"? Third World nations were, for the most part, impoverished when the first world found them, were they not?

---

DON'T LOOK UNTIL AFTER YOU LEAP (via Mike Daley):

Through a Glass, Darkly: a review of A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love. Richard Dawkins (Michael Ruse, American Scientist)

In recent years, his attention has swung from writing about science for a popular audience to waging an all-out attack on Christianity. In the name of Darwinism, he has become the scourge of the religious, the atheist's answer to Billy Graham. At every opportunity, he preaches the hard truth-there is no God, religion is superstition, and Darwin proves just this. Essentially, what ties this volume together is the crusade of nonbelief, for just about every piece carries this same message. [...]

However, I worry about the political consequences of Dawkins's message. If Darwinism is a major contributor to nonbelief, then should Darwinism be taught in publicly funded U.S. schools? The Creationists say not. They argue that if the separation of Church and State keeps belief out of the schools, then it should likewise keep nonbelief out of the schools. There are issues
to be grappled with here, and Dawkins does nothing to address them. Does Darwinism as such lead to nonbelief? It is true that Darwinism conflicts with the Book of Genesis taken literally, but at least since the time of Saint Augustine (400 A.D.) Christians have been interpreting the seven days of creation metaphorically.

I would like to see Dawkins take Christianity as seriously as he undoubtedly expects Christianity to take Darwinism. I would also like to see him spell out fully the arguments as to the incompatibility of science (Darwinism especially) and religion (Christianity especially). So long as his understanding of Christianity remains at the sophomoric level, Dawkins does not deserve full attention. It is all very well to sneer at Catholic beliefs about the Virgin Mary, but what reply does Dawkins have to the many theologians (like Jonathan Edwards) who have devoted huge amounts of effort to distinguishing between false beliefs and true ones? What reply does
Dawkins have to the contemporary philosopher Alvin Plantinga, who argues that the belief that there are other minds and that others are not just unthinking robots requires a leap of faith akin to the Christian belief in the Deity? Edwards and Plantinga may be wrong, but Dawkins owes them some reply before he gives his cocky negative conclusions. Moreover, once he has proved the incompatibility of science and religion, I would like him to address the classroom issue. Would he keep evolution out of U.S. schools, and if not, what argument would he use? In one of these pieces, he complains that British A-level examination requirements necessitate coverage of so much other material that they exclude the proper teaching of evolution. What about the U.S. Constitution?

Finally, I don't want to sound paranoid or insecure, but I do wish that he and other science writers would cease assuming that philosophical issues can be solved by talking in a brisk, confident voice. I have no more liking of cultural studies than Dawkins, and I loved his talk of "the low-grade
intellectual poodling of pseudo-philosophical poseurs." But this rhetoric is no substitute for hard analysis. Postmodernists claim that science, no less than religion and literature and philosophy, is infiltrated with culture. How does Dawkins respond to this charge, given the undoubted significance in science of metaphors that are based on the culture of the day? One would have thought that the author of The Selfish Gene would be sensitive to questions like these.

There is more. I agree fully with Dawkins when he writes that

Modern physics teaches us that there is more to truth than meets the eye; or than meets the all too limited human mind, evolved as it was to cope with medium-sized objects moving at medium speeds through medium distances in Africa.

But how then does Dawkins respond to the obvious retort of the religious, who have always stressed mystery? Some of the fundamental problems of philosophy are no closer to being solved today than they were at the time of the Greeks: Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is this something not something else? What is mind, and are we unique? Perhaps one agrees that traditional religions-Christianity specifically-do not offer the full answers. But what is to stop a nonbeliever like myself from saying that the Christians are asking important questions and that they are right to have a little humility before the unknown? As Saint Paul said: "Now we see through a glass, darkly." That apparently includes Richard Dawkins.

Mr. Ruse's bewilderment answers itself: no one who has rejected God and placed his entire faith in religion can acknowledge that he's taken a leap, or else his whole worldview falls apart. He doesn't respond to awkward questions because he has no intelligent responses to make. Atheists of Mr. Dawkins's bent have to believe that the religionists' glass is dark, but the rationalists' glass is clear, and that requires one to ignore such fundamental issues as where the glass came from and why the view through any glass should be trusted; where the observer came from and why his observations should be trusted; etc. But, as Mr. Ruse notes, Judeo-Christianity has been wrestling with such issues for thousands of years and so finds them less threatening than science, which has been thoroughly disappointed in its ambition to answer them and now finds itself incapable of justifying its claims to primacy in the face of this abject failure. So folk like Mr. Dawkins just begin at a point after their faith entered the equation and then ignore all that has come before. It makes them ludicrous, but touchingly so.

---

THE TORIES TURN RIGHT?:

The night is drawing in: The prospect of Michael Howard's leadership spells danger for his own party - but also for New Labour (Polly Toynbee, October 31, 2003, The Guardian)

Few home secretaries are popular, certainly not with liberals. But the outrage Howard caused should not be forgotten. He took over from Douglas Hurd, one of the wiser pragmatic home secretaries of recent times. He was brought in as a political weapon to try to shore up the Major government's sinking fortunes, a challenge he took up with a vengeance. People imagine, wrongly, that all politicians are capable of almost anything in pursuit of power: it is rarely so. But Howard is an exception. As a home secretary and a QC, he was apparently reckless of legal propriety in pursuit of something that would turn a quick vote. He frequently flouted the law and was often rebuked by higher courts.

It scandalised the judiciary when he put two 10-year-olds on trial for murder in an adult court and himself upped their sentence to 25 years. The high court found his actions an "abuse of power" and "deeply flawed", but it was water off a duck's back. With his infamous "Prison works!" speech he sent the prison population soaring. To Labour's "tough on the causes of crime" his riposte was: "I know what causes crime: criminals!"

Right from his 1983 maiden speech advocating the restoration of the death penalty, he has courted cheap popularity. It was not being rightwing that worried people like Ann Widdecombe: it was his willingness to dabble in almost any unsavoury policy that looked like a winner. Europhobic, homophobic (he introduced Clause 28 and voted against gay adoptions), anti-abortion (he voted for the Alton bill to restrict it), he called for General Pinochet's release. As for wise policy-making, he was a key minister responsible for the poll tax. [...]

Max Hastings, late of the Telegraph, wrote in these pages this week: "Britain is now a social democratic country. Barring a national cataclysm, a visibly rightwing party will not again achieve power here." Those are words of profound truth. If only it was absolutely certain that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown thought so too. By May 1997, the people were already social democrats, but New Labour never dared believe that they really did want radical change.

Britain, like the rest of Europe, is in the midst of a cataclysm. Declining birthrates, burgeoning retirement costs, growing dependence on immigration, the dalliance with giving up national sovereignty that the EU represents, etc., etc., etc. These ugly truths can be ignored for awhile but not ignored in the long run. Many's the continental nation which too might have considered its Right to be a dead letter, its social democrats a permanent governing party. But when push comes to shove it turns out not to be so. A robustly nationalistic, anti-immigration, anti-European, Tory Party may not return to power immediately but will be well positioned to do so by the end of the decade.

---

WE NEED MORE INAPPROPRIATENESS:

'Patriotic' Stick Figure Drawing Troubles School (Fox News, 10/29/03)

A 14-year-old New Jersey schoolboy -- whose dad and stepdad are in the military -- was suspended for five days because he drew a "patriotic" stick figure of a U.S Marine blowing away a Taliban fighter, officials said yesterday.

"He's been punished for the drawing," said Tinton Falls school superintendent Leonard Kelpsh. "We felt it was highly inappropriate, and we took it very seriously."

Scott Switzer, of Colts Neck, was sent home last week from Tinton Falls Middle School after a teacher saw the image on a computer and described it to the principal.

Scott, who turned 14 Tuesday and was headed back to school Wednesday, said he was unjustly disciplined for his sketch of "a war scene."

"Truth be told, it's a Marine shooting a terrorist Taliban," he told The Post. "It's just a picture. What upsets me most is that the principal would dare say it's not normal. To me, it's patriotic."

When you hear the term school administration don't you just get a mental picture of the kids you used to give wedgies to in the school halls now grown up and running the place?

---

MISSISSIPIAN BURNING (via Glenn Dryfoos):

A Judge Who Did Justice: 'You Have Committed a Despicable Act,' Said Sentencing Judge Pickering (Nat Hentoff, October 24th, 2003, Village Voice)

When George W. Bush renominated Mississippi Federal District Judge Charles Pickering to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, the Democratic attack machine on the Senate Judiciary Committee, People for the American Way, and other liberal watchdogs of the judiciary went after Pickering again--just as the Republican artillery pursued some of Bill Clinton's nominees.

As before, the most insistent charge against Pickering was that, presiding over a cross-burning case in Mississippi as a district judge, he had gone way out of his way to get a lighter sentence than the federal prosecutors demanded for one of the three white defendants. At the October 2 Judiciary Committee hearing on Pickering, Senator Ted Kennedy declared the judge's behavior in that case shameful.

What follow here are the facts of the case as reported by a New York Times specialist in legal issues, Neil Lewis (May 28), and Bryan York in National Review Online (January 9 and 13) and Editor & Publisher (March 3). I am indebted to Lewis and York, and did my own reporting as well. Lewis's factual reporting on this case has been ignored by Times editorial writers as they repeatedly attack Pickering's action.

Except that it's not a question of whether the judge is just but of what Democrats have to do to keep their special interests satisfied.

---

CORRECT OR CHOSEN?:

Tour of U.S. Schools Reveals Why Zionism Is Flunking on Campus (NATAN SHARANSKY, October 24, 2003, The Forward)

When I got to Rutgers University in New Jersey last month, I almost forgot I was on a college campus. The atmosphere was far from the cool, button-down academic reserve typical of such institutions. It was more reminiscent of a battlefield.

My arrival was greeted by a noisy demonstration of Palestinian and Jewish students holding signs reading "Racist Israel" and "War Criminals," together with black-coated Neturei Karta members calling for the destruction of the blasphemous Zionist entity. Faculty members, predictably led by a former Israeli professor, had sent out e-mails protesting the granting of a platform to a representative of the "Nazi, war-criminal" state. Of course, there was the famous pie incident in which a member of a campus Jewish anti-occupation group made his way past my security guards and plastered me in the face with a cream pie while shouting "End the Occupation."

Opposed to them were hundreds of no less rowdy Jewish students, full of motivation to defend Israel and give the protesters back as good as they got. After the pie incident, when I returned to the hall and mounted the stage, the atmosphere was so electric, so full of adrenalin, that the Palestinians and their supporters who had come to disrupt the event had no choice but to abandon their plans for provocation.

Things were not much calmer at Boston University: An anonymous bomb threat brought swarms of police to the lecture hall and almost forced a cancellation of my appearance. But here, too, some good resulted when the bomb threat caused the lecture to be moved to a larger hall, which was quickly filled with some 600 listeners who were unwilling to accept the violent silencing of pro-Israel views.

These moments — the pie throwing, the bomb threat, the demonstration — as raucous, threatening and contentious as they were, are among the more pleasant memories from my 13-campus tour of the United States. Perhaps it is because at these moments I felt that there was some point to my trip, perhaps because the violent hostility had stirred the students and motivated them to want to fight and win — which I, of course, was delighted to see. [...]

For six days I traveled across the United States. I did not meet with administration officials or do any politicking. Just campuses. Meeting students, instructors, Jewish and non-Jewish activists. A marathon of 13 campuses in six days. I discovered an enormous thirst for knowledge, for straight answers about these supposed "human rights violations" and "war crimes." I learned that combining human rights, a popular, burning issue among students, and Israel, a very unpopular issue, works to Israel's advantage, because even the most pro-Palestinian students, including Arab students, had to back down when the discussion centered squarely and honestly on human rights and democracy.

But I also learned that every such victory was a limited one, like capturing a single hill in enemy territory. The overall picture is deeply worrying. On every campus I visited, Jewish students make up between 10% and 20% of the population, but no more than a tenth of them, by my estimate, take part in Jewish or pro-Israel activity. Another tiny but outspoken fraction serves as the spearhead of anti-Israel activity, for there is no better cover for hiding the racist nature of causes like an anti-Israel boycott than a Jewish professor or student eager to prove that he is holier than the pope. And the rest? The rest are simply silent. They are not identified, not active, not risk-takers. Nearly 90% of our students are Jews of silence.

In a perverse way, the uniquely pro-Israel and Jewish-friendly United States may prove the death of Judaism, just via assimilation.

---

DO THEY AGREE WITH DEMOCRATS ON ANYTHING?:

Queer Eye for the Black Guy: Fear of Gay Marriage Gives the GOP Another Chance at Minority Voters (Ta-Nehisi Coates, September 24 - 30, 2003, Village Voice)

[T]here is an underappreciated fact about black America that anyone armed with a decent survey could see: Black people vote like Democrats, but on social issues they think like Republicans. Whether the GOP can ever lure churchgoing African Americans from the revival tent to the party's so-called big tent remains a matter for debate. Now the controversy over gay marriage, a potent brew of religion and politics, is giving Republicans another shot--but don't bet on their converting it.

The votes are there to be gathered, or so the numbers would suggest. A July poll, by Gallup and CNN/USA Today, concluded that since the Supreme Court overturned Texas's anti-sodomy law in June, support for gay marriage has dropped precipitously in the black community. Before the decision, when African Americans were asked whether homosexual relationships should be legal, 58 percent said yes; afterward that figure dropped to 36 percent. [...]

The goal of transforming black fundamentalism into a black conservative voting bloc has proven elusive, however. Much of black history involves African Americans petitioning the government--with varying degrees of success--for protection against racism. Thus African Americans tend to have a progressive view of the role of government. "The difference is that black conservative Christians are more concerned about social and economic needs that the government can address," says Bositis. "Government is something that white Christian conservatives are against, except in trying to control people's lives through abortion curbs, etc."

Today, there simply is no black equivalent of the Christian Coalition. While the black church has been the source of some backward thinking on social issues, it's also been a hotbed of black leftism--just look at Martin Luther King Jr., Jesse Jackson, or Al Sharpton.

Conservatives have yet to outline for African Americans the benefits of shifting their vote rightward. For gay marriage to be a voting issue, they would have to see some sort of cost-benefit analysis. "What do you tell your kids when they ask about the schools?" Bositis says. " 'Yeah, but we kept those gay people from getting married'?"

How about: Republicans got you the voucher that put you in a decent school?

---

IT'LL BE VIETNAM TIL THE LAST WOODEN STAKE IS DRIVEN INTO THE LAST BOOMER HEART:

It's No Vietnam (THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, 10/30/03, NY Times)

Since 9/11, we've seen so much depraved violence we don't notice anymore
when we hit a new low. Monday's attacks in Baghdad were a new low. Just stop for one second and contemplate what happened: A suicide bomber, driving an ambulance loaded with explosives, crashed into the Red Cross office and blew himself up on the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. This suicide bomber was not restrained by either the sanctity of the Muslim holy day or the sanctity of the Red Cross. All civilizational norms were tossed aside. This is very unnerving. Because the message from these terrorists is: "There are no limits. We have created our own moral universe, where anything we do against Americans or Iraqis who cooperate with them is O.K."

What to do? The first thing is to understand who these people are. There is this notion being peddled by Europeans, the Arab press and the antiwar left that "Iraq" is just Arabic for Vietnam, and we should expect these kinds of attacks from Iraqis wanting to "liberate" their country from "U.S. occupation." These attackers are the Iraqi Vietcong.

Hogwash. The people who mounted the attacks on the Red Cross are not the Iraqi Vietcong. They are the Iraqi Khmer Rouge -- a murderous band of Saddam loyalists and Al Qaeda nihilists, who are not killing us so Iraqis can rule themselves. They are killing us so they can rule Iraqis.

Note the suggestion here--typical of so much of the repulsive generation of the 60s, which seems incapable of acknowledging its tragic error--that the Vietcong were basically a bunch of freedom fighters.

---

DON'T GO FRENCH ON US TIGER (via Glenn Dryfoos):

Money matters: Look for Woods to close out the year in winning fashion (Gary Van Sickle, October 28, 2003, ESPN)

Now that Tiger Woods has dropped to second place behind Vijay Singh on the PGA Tour money list following Vijay's win at Disney last weekend, Woods can say that winning the title doesn't mean that much to him. But he's wrong. The Player of the Year title sounds impressive, but who really remembers an award based on a vote by tour players or on a shaky points system (the PGA of America's award)? The money title, on the other hand -- now that's an honor with staying power. It's stronger than a Camel or a Chevy truck.

There are no fluke winners of this prize. Jack Nicklaus won the money title eight times -- even though, like Tiger, he played a limited schedule. Woods has won the money title four straight years, a record he shares with Tom Watson (1977-1980) at the moment. It would likely be six straight years if Tiger hadn't worked on swing changes in 1998, when he won only once and slipped to fourth on the money list -- although he would've needed one of his best years to top David Duval's career year.

While I wouldn't presume to know what Woods thinks about anything (since he keeps all us media types at arm's length) I can't help but feel that, if he winds up getting edged by Singh for the money title, Tiger is going to regret not playing at least one more tournament this year. No matter how you look at it, the 18 PGA Tour events Woods will have played this year is a light workload. The only place an 18-week work year is considered heavy lifting is in France.

No effect of the Iraq war run-up has been more salutary than the universalization of France-hatred.

---

FLOCCINAUCINIHILIPILIFICATION

The Bush Boomlet The economy just had a great quarter. Does that really mean it's booming? (Daniel Gross, Slate, 10/29/03)

When the Department of Commerce releases third-quarter gross domestic product figures Thursday morning, it will kick off one of the best days of the Bush presidency. As the Wall Street Journal reported, respected forecaster Macroeconomic Advisers believes the economy grew at an annual rate of 6.9 percent last quarter. . . .

But thus far, the Bush boom rests more on hope than hard data—and on a pretty weak definition of a boom. . . .

The Bush boom promoters also sidestep the real issue about the third-quarter growth. It would be hard for the economy not to surge when you consider how much money the administration has poured into it in the form of tax cuts and government spending. It remains to be seen whether the economy can produce jobs and growth without continual booster shots, and whether the massive deficits the administration is running will drag down growth for years to come. . . .

The Bush boom may or may not be a reality. I'd settle for several quarters of consistent growth, with job creation and GDP expansion at rates remotely close to those of the '90s. But that doesn't make for a particularly sexy book title, or for a compelling re-election slogan.

This article is splashed on the Slate homepage as Is The Economy Coming Back? Dan Gross on Bush's Bogus Boom.. The article, of course, doesn't say anything of the sort, concluding instead with "maybe, maybe not." There is no doubt, though, that Slate is hoping that there won't be any boom, and assumes that its readers are hoping the same thing.

This is the sort of "play-by-play" political reporting that drives me up the wall, because there is no point to it at all. Over the next 12 months, the economy will do whatever it does and the President's reelection will be easier or harder depending on its performance. But all the posturing now, by either side, is simply wasted.

Well, maybe not wasted. The Democratic voters who will soon be chosing their presidential nominee might well be effected by a belief that the economy is permanently crippled for '04. Such a belief would, I think, make Howard Dean seem just that much more electable and thus help his quest to be the Democratic Alf Landon. I would enjoy it immensely if all this doomsaying by the left lead the Democratic party to its richly deserved exile.

---

IT'S THE ECONOMY, STUPID

GDP Growth Strongest Since 1984 (REUTERS, 10/30/2003)

The U.S. economy rocketed ahead at its fastest pace in more than 19 years in the third quarter of 2003 as consumers, their wallets fattened by tax cuts, went on a buying spree, an unexpectedly strong government report showed on Thursday.
U.S. gross domestic product surged at a 7.2 percent annual rate in the July-September period, the Commerce Department said. It was the strongest advance since the first quarter of 1984 and more than double the second quarter's 3.3 percent rate.

---

A WORK IN PROGRESS:

Remaking the World: Bush and the Neoconservatives: a review of America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy by Ivo H. Daalder & James M. Lindsay (Joshua Micah Marshall, November/December 2003, Foreign Affairs)

Their emphasis on the president is no accident. According to the authors, Bush was no figurehead or pawn in the revolution that bears his name, but rather the key decision-maker. "Bush," they write, may not have spent any time consciously trying to develop a philosophy about foreign affairs. However, a lifetime of experience had left deeply formed beliefs -- instincts might be more precise -- about how the world works and, just as important, how it does not. ... The fact that Bush could not translate his gut instincts into a form that would please political science Ph.D.s really did not matter.

The book's central argument is simple and, by now, familiar: the president's unilateralist policies have produced quick victories in Afghanistan and Iraq but have also fractured the nation's alliances, and as a result the world system is more chaotic and unfriendly, and the United States is less secure. Daalder and Lindsay are concerned about more than the truculent face the administration sometimes shows abroad. "The deeper problem," they write in the book's concluding chapter, is that "the fundamental premise of the Bush revolution -- that America's security rested on an America unbound -- was profoundly mistaken." [...]

Another abiding characteristic of the administration's foreign policy, Daalder and Lindsay note, has been its belief that forceful U.S. leadership would cow the United States' enemies and bring wavering friends into line. Handwringing or grumbling from allies, the Bush team believed, stemmed not from too much American direction, but from too little. Vice President Dick Cheney summarized this view just before the outbreak of the Iraq war, when he told NBC's Tim Russert that he had no doubt that in the long run, after Saddam had been overthrown, "a good part of the world, especially our allies, will come around to our way of thinking." Readers can judge for themselves to what extent this prediction has been borne out.

We'll gladly concede Mr. Marshall's points that Saddam was not as well armed as the West had believed and that Iraq's Sunni seem to prefer power to freedom, but on the other points he seems--and presumably the authors are-- quite wrong. First the only genuine allies we have--the other members of the Anglosphere except for the one run by a Frenchman--were on board for the war, and other allies look to be getting involved in Iraq about as quickly as could be expected. The war did, of course, demonstrate fairly conclusively what has been obvious to the Right for over two hundred years: the French are an enemy, not a friend. So the division with the EU served a good purpose. But the key point they seem to have missed is that post-9/11 much of the Islamic world is engaging in attempts, however tentative, to reform itself. The most extravagant of the neocon claims would appear to be coming to fruition.

---

BROWN V. BD. OF DEMS:

Brown is Worth Fighting For (Marni Soupcoff, 10/20/03, The American Enterprise)

Janice Brown is perhaps best known, however, for her principled insistence on the government’s equal treatment of its citizens, regardless of race. In her majority opinion in Hi-Voltage Wireworks v. City of San Jose, Brown upheld California’s notorious Proposition 209—a ballot initiative that banned government racial preferences—and struck down a San Jose ordinance requiring government contractors to seek bids from companies owned by women and minorities. Brown concluded that “equality of individual opportunity”—not affirmative action—is what the Constitution requires.

And one has to conclude that Brown, a black sharecropper’s daughter who worked her way up from a childhood in the segregated south to a position on the highest court of the country’s largest state, knows whereof she speaks.

Now, President Bush has nominated Brown to a seat on the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, and her confirmation hearing is rapidly approaching. But liberal activists are trying vehemently to block her nomination, no doubt well aware that if Brown is elevated to a federal appeals court, she has an excellent chance at eventually landing a spot on the United States Supreme Court. This would be a serious blow to liberal special-interest groups—such as People for the American Way, one of Brown’s most vocal detractors. A Brown seat on the Supreme Court would mean one more vote for a jurisprudence of true equal rights, rather than one of forced racial and sex preferences. What poetic justice this vote for freedom would be, coming as it would from an articulate black female jurist.

It’s almost too much for the racial preferences crowd to bear, which explains their ongoing efforts to keep Brown off the DC Court of Appeals and the momentous fight they are waging to scuttle her nomination. But if any judicial nominee is worth fighting for, it is Janice Rogers Brown. [...]

If you would like to help support Justice Brown’s nomination, make your views known to your senators (http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm).

Democrats have to block the courthouse door with the ferocity of a George Wallace on this one, because they can't afford to have a black woman on the Supreme Court fast track.

---

MATERIAL WORLD OR SOUL-FILLED:

Hedonists R Us: Darwinism and Morality (BreakPoint with Charles Colson, September 23, 2003)

Ask someone who the first Darwinist was, and they’re likely to think it’s a trick question, like “Who’s buried in Grant’s tomb?” But as a recent book tells us, it’s not Darwin—at least not in regard to the way a materialistic worldview shapes our morals.

That book is Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists by Benjamin Wiker. Wiker of Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio, calls the Greek philosopher Epicurus, who lived in the third century before Christ, the “first Darwinist.” Actually, as Wiker says, it would be more accurate to say that Darwin was an Epicurean—probably the most influential one ever.

What he means is that Darwin represented the culmination of what Wiker calls “Epicurean Materialism.” While Epicureanism is commonly associated with hedonism, the fact is that Epicurus “offered the first thorough-going materialist view of the universe where the mere chance interaction of brute matter swirling about created all things.”

So, human beings are “just one more soul-less product of evolution,” and “there is ultimately no good and evil.” This account of the universe was the “foundation” of Darwin’s system and his materialistic explanation for the world.

Wiker writes that Epicurean materialism is “fundamentally antagonistic” to Christianity. For two thousand years, these worldviews have contradicted one another with regard to God, nature, human nature, and morality.

The last part is especially important. Just as Epicurean materialism provided the foundation for Darwinism, Darwinism is the foundation for “one of the two sides in the culture war”: the side “that champions sexual freedom, abortion, [and] euthanasia.”

A materialistic worldview undermines the very basis for morality by denying that we are distinct from the other animals and created in the image of God. Instead, we are considered the product of chance and impersonal forces. If that’s so, why prohibit murder? Nobody talks about “murdering” a dog or a fly. The very idea of “murder” assumes that there’s something unique about being human.

What’s true about murder goes double for human sexuality and familial relationships. If there is no God, soul, or afterlife, all that’s left, as Wiker’s subtitle tells us, is hedonism. In a world that is amoral, how we should live becomes a matter of “continually balancing bodily pleasures and pains.” Morality and the distinction between good and evil are purely human creations with no intrinsic authority.

This link between materialism and amorality, along with materialism’s account of the origins of the universe, makes attempts to “reconcile” Darwinism with Christianity—which some Christians try to do—wrong-headed. If there is one lesson to be learned from “moral Darwinism,” it is that Darwinism and materialism are not “morally neutral.”

Darwinists like to imagine that he discovered, explained, or popularized some important scientific insight, when in reality all he did was provide an undisprovable (and therefore unscientific) justification for an ideology that denies the possibility of morality. The realization that people--Americans mainly--are rejecting it for just that reason has sent the Robert Wrights of the world scrambling around trying to prove that evolution produces "morality" too but has rendered them so incoherent as only to appeal to the lunatic fringe and secular elites, if there's a difference.

---

PASS THE GEFILTE FISH:

Florida Dept. of Corrections will provide Kosher food to Jewish prisoner (The Beckett Fund for Religious Liberty, 10/28/2003)

Three years after Alan Cotton began his battle to get a Kosher diet while incarcerated at the Everglades Correctional Institution, the Florida Department of Corrections has finally agreed to his request. State prison officials have signed a Settlement Agreement (PDF format, 17K) and have begun providing him Kosher food, thereby settling a lawsuit filed on September 19, 2002. Cotton was represented in the lawsuit by The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and by attorneys Elliott Scherker and Susana Betancourt of the Miami office of the law firm of Greenberg Traurig.

Cotton is a 58 year old prisoner who began serving a life sentence in 1967. He was born and raised in the Jewish faith, and returned to serious religious practice during the 1990s. He first sought Kosher meals in an informal grievance on October 20, 2000. It was quickly denied, as was a formal grievance and an appeal.

Conspicuously absent here is the ACLU. Where are the champions of the separation of Church and State in this one? Meanwhile, what a wonderful legal system that can find it is good to extend special rights to humans whose rights should be forfeited, while denying basic rights to humans who aren’t old enough yet to commit crimes.

---

THE GREENING OF RED AMERICA:

Bush Faces Hostile Environment: His record has been distorted. From air and water pollution to forests and wildlife, things are getting better. (Gregg Easterbrook, October 14, 2003, LA Times)

Now it's true that there are some major defects in Bush's environmental policy — mainly its lack of global warming reform and its failure to seek meaningful fuel-economy increases for SUVs and the misnamed "light" pickup trucks that increasingly dominate auto sales. But otherwise most of the charges made against the White House are baloney — baloney being rolled and deep-fried with cheese for purposes of partisan political bashing and fund-raising.

Meanwhile, Bush has implemented three major new environmental reforms for which he has received zero credit. He ordered that diesel fuel be reformulated to reduce its inherent pollution content — over the howls of his natural constituency, Big Oil. He ordered that new diesel trucks and buses meet significantly stricter emissions standards — over the howls of House Speaker Dennis Hastert, in whose Illinois district sits an enormous diesel-engine factory. Third, he imposed new emissions standards on a range of previously unregulated machines — construction vehicles, outboard motors, all-terrain vehicles and others.

Taken together, Bush's three dramatic anti-pollution decisions should lead to the biggest pollution reduction since the 1991 Clean Air Act amendments.

Why is the Bush environmental record so relentlessly distorted? Because it could ruin the instant-doomsday script. Democrats are bashing the president for political reasons, just as Republicans bashed Clinton for political reasons. Environmental lobbies raise money better in an atmosphere of panic, and so they are exaggerating the case against Bush.

We've frequently argued at the environment, though not big "E" Environmentalism, should be a conservative issue.

---

PLEASE INTERVIEW JESUS OF NAZARETH NEXT:

Karl Marx (Prospect Magazine, Oct 2003; via Arts and Letters Daily)

Donald Sassoon: Well, Dr Marx, you are all washed up, aren't you? Fifteen years ago your theories ruled half the world. Now what's left? Cuba? North Korea?

Karl Marx: My "theories"-as you put it-never "ruled." I had followers I neither chose nor sought, and for whom I have no more responsibility than Jesus had for Torquemada or Muhammad for Osama bin Laden....

DS: How about John Stuart Mill?

KM He was a well-meaning plagiarist ...

DS: How about more recent thinkers?

KM: The fashion-following apologists of the propertied classes, now and again, try to find an adequate rival for me.... So they resurrect Hayek one summer and, by the next spring, they are all wearing Popper ...

DS: OK. No one underestimates your renown. But you must agree: Marxism is not what it used to be...

KM: In reality my work has never been as important as it is now. Over the last 40 years or so it has conquered the academy in the most advanced countries in the world. Historians, economists, social scientists, and even, to my surprise, some literary critics have all turned to the materialist conception. The most exciting history currently produced in the US and Europe is the most "Marxistic" ever. Just go to the annual convention of the American Social Science History Association, which I attend regularly as a ghost. There they earnestly examine the interconnection between institutional and political structures and the world of production. They all talk about classes, structures, economic determination, power relations, oppressed and oppressors. And they all pretend to have read me-a sure sign of success.

The currency of Marxist ideas suggests an intellectual form of Gresham's Law: in the academy, bad ideas drive out good.

---

NO CALMING THIS HYSTERIC:

After Strange Gods: a review of T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form by Anthony Julius (James Wood, New Republic)

T.S. Eliot was an anti-Semite. Anthony Julius's program is to assert the centrality of Eliot's anti-Semitism in his thought. Anti-Semitism, Julius says, was Eliot's inspiration, his muse. He was that rare anti-Semite, one who was "able to place his anti-Semitism at the service of his art"; he "trained himself to be an anti-Semite." To conjure this centrality, Julius argues that anti-Semitism occurs at the heart of some of Eliot's greatest poems. Julius is brave and
occasionally right. His anger has the glow of righteousness. But it is the color of simplicity. His book is tendentious, misleading and unremittingly hostile. He has written an unstable book about an unstable subject; reading it is like watching a maniac trying to calm an hysteric. [...]

Throughout his book, Julius is in such a rage that he whales his evidence into compliance. Consider this comment by Eliot on the poetry of Isaac Rosenberg, a celebrated British poet who died in the First World War, and whom Eliot called, in 1953, "the most remarkable of the
British poets killed in that war": "The poetry of Isaac Rosenberg ... does not only owe its distinction to its being Hebraic: but because it is Hebraic it is a contribution to English literature. For a Jewish poet to be able to write like a Jew, in western Europe and in a western European language, is almost a miracle." Eliot's meaning is clear. Rosenberg was a distinguished English poet, but his particular addition to English literature was that he retained a Jewishness that was not assimilated; and this retention, within the pressure that the English poetic tradition exerts to surrender one's literary Jewishness, was almost miraculous.

For Julius, however, this is an anti-Semitic "libel" that allows "Jews an aesthetic sense, and thus a measure of creativity, but deriving only from Jewish tradition." He follows Eliot's quote with this paragraph:

Eliot's eccentric praise of the Jewish poet is consistent with his larger deprecations. "That a Jew can do this!" registers the surprise of the anti- Semite. What is it to write like a Jew? Richard Wagner explains: "The Jew speaks the language of the country in which he has lived from generation to generation, but he always speaks it as a foreigner." A Jew cannot compose German music; when he purports to do so, he deceives. The Jewish composer could only compose music as a Jew by drawing on the "ceremonial music" of the synagogue service, a "
nonsensical gurgling, yodelling and cackling." These "rhythms ... dominate his musical imagination"; they are irresistible. So while the talented Jewish composer is disqualified by his race from composing German music, he is disqualified by his talent from composing Jewish music. Rosenberg was luckier. He was able, by "almost a miracle," to write in English "like a Jew." The difference between Eliot's anti-Semitism and Wagner's is defined, on this point, by the possibility of this " miracle."

This is characteristic of Julius's method. A passage of Eliot's is dropped into a stream of vicious anti-Semitic crudity, in the hope that the waters will mix. Almost every page of this book, which lavishly flows with examples of the anti-Semitism of people other than Eliot, attempts this guilt by immersion. But Julius makes Eliot mean the opposite of what he is saying. Wagner claims that the Jew tries to speak as a native but always reveals himself as a foreigner. For this reason he is incapable of great work. But Eliot praises Rosenberg for precisely the opposite quality. Rosenberg has retained a foreignness which Eliot considers a contribution and a miracle of self-preservation.

If anything, Eliot implies that the Jew will always speak as a native, and that the struggle will be to speak as a foreigner. And Eliot is careful to suggest that Rosenberg's foreignness is not his only quality: "does not only owe its distinction to its being Hebraic." Julius reads the passage as if the phrase "like a Jew" were simply not in the text, as if the passage read: "For a Jewish poet to be able to write in western Europe and in a western European language, is almost a miracle."
This may be Wagner's belief, but it is palpably the opposite of Eliot's. Eliot is not praising Rosenberg for being able to write at all. The difference between Eliot's anti-Semitism and Wagner's anti-Semitism is not defined by the word "miracle"; it is defined by Eliot's not being, in this instance, anti-Semitic. At worst, Eliot's comment suggests a heightened awareness of Jewishness.

A critic who is inattentive to language in this way will not seem trustworthy, and Julius's book contains many bullied readings.

It's several years old but this was a brave review by Mr. Wood.

---

TEN WAS TOO MANY:

The Seventeenth Amendment and the Death of Federalism (Ralph A. Rossum, October 3-4, 2003, Philadelphia Society)

My comments today are based largely on a book I recently completed for Lexington Books that explores the Seventeenth Amendment and the death of federalism. Entitled Federalism, the Supreme Court and the Seventeenth Amendment: The Irony of Constitutional Democracy, it is also a critical commentary on the spate of controversial federalism decisions recently handed down by an activist U.S. Supreme Court. Thirteen times since 1976 (and, with much-greater frequency, twelve times since 1992), the Court has invalidated federal laws--many of them passing both houses of Congress by wide margins‹in order to preserve what it has described as "the original federal design." In the book, I challenge the Court's fundamental jurisprudential assumptions about federalism and argue that (1) the framers did not expect federalism to be protected by an activist Court but rather by constitutional structure--in particular, by the mode of electing the United States Senate; (2) the political and social forces that culminated in the adoption and ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment eliminated that crucial structural protection and thereby altered the very meaning of federalism itself; and (3), as a consequence, the original federal design has been amended out of existence and is no longer controlling--in the post-Seventeenth Amendment era, it is no more a part of the Constitution the Supreme Court is called upon to apply than, for example, in the post-Thirteen Amendment era, the Constitution's original fugitive slave clause.

I argue in the book that the framers understood that federalism would be protected by the manner of electing (and, perhaps most importantly, re-electing) the Senate. However, the adoption and ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment, providing for direct election of the Senate, changed all that.

The Seventeenth Amendment was ultimately approved by the United States Congress and ratified by the states to make the Constitution more democratic. Progressives argued forcefully, persistently, and ultimately successfully that the democratic principle required the Senate to be elected directly by the people rather than indirectly through their state legislatures. The consequences of the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment on federalism, however, went completely unexplored, and the people, in their desire to make the Constitution more democratic, inattentively abandoned what the framers regarded as the crucial constitutional means for protecting the federal/state balance and the interests of the states as states.

Following ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment, there was a rapid growth of the power of the national government, with the Congress enacting measures that adversely affected the states as states--measures that quite simply the Senate previously would never have approved. For the initial quarter of a century following the amendment's ratification in 1913 and then again for the last quarter of a century, the United States Supreme Court's frequent reaction to this congressional expansion of
national power at the expense of the states was and has been to attempt to fill the gap created by the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment and to protect the original federal design. It has done so by invalidating these congressional measures on the grounds that they violate the principles of dual federalism; go beyond the Court1s narrow construction of the commerce clause; "commandeer" state officials to carry out certain federal mandates; exceed Congress's enforcement powers under Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment, or, most recently, trench on the states' sovereignty immunity. In so doing, it has repeatedly demonstrated its failure to appreciate that the Seventeenth Amendment not only eliminated the primary structural support for federalism but, in so doing, altered the very nature and meaning of federalism itself.

There is irony in all of this: An amendment, intended to promote democracy, even at the expense of federalism, has been undermined by an activist Court, intent on protecting federalism, even at the expense of the democratic principle. The irony is heightened when it is recalled that federalism was originally protected both structurally and democratically--the Senate, after all, was elected by popularly-elected state legislatures. Today, federalism is protected neither structurally nor democratically--the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment means that the fate of traditional state prerogatives depends entirely on either congressional
sufferance (what the Court calls "legislative grace") or whether an occasional Supreme Court majority can be mustered.

The book argues that federalism as it was understood by the framers‹i.e., the "original federal design"--effectively died as a result of the social and political forces that resulted in the adoption and ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment

To the extent that Mr. Rossum's argument is compelling it just confirms what an abomination the 17th Amendment is.

---

RAISE THE BAR:

MEAP SUCCESS: Holding kids back seems to pay off (PEGGY WALSH-SARNECKI, October 8, 2003, Detroit Free Press)

Poor MEAP test scores used to go hand-in-hand with poor students at Algonac's Pte. Tremble Elementary, where about one-fourth of the kids qualify for a free or reduced-price lunch. But four years ago, leaders in Algonac and Yale schools linked reading with passing. Kids in grades K-3 who weren't reading at grade level would flunk. And they meant all kids, including those in special education.

The idea sparked controversy and jitters among parents and teachers. T.J. Bucholz, until recently a spokesman for the Michigan Department of Education, said he hadn't heard of another district with a similar plan.

When MEAP scores were released Friday, 95 percent of Pte. Tremble's fourth-graders met or beat the state's reading standards.

Four years ago, only slightly more than half of the school's fourth-graders met the state's standards. Officials in the two St. Clair County districts say the Michigan Educational Assessment Program test results justify their leap of faith. In both districts, 83 percent of fourth-graders met the state's expectations in reading, up from 55 percent in Algonac Community Schools and 65 percent in Yale Public Schools in 1999. They also came in ahead of the state average, 75 percent.

The theory was simple: All kids can learn, but some kids need a little more time. The districts' challenge was to make sure children got that time. Failing a school year isn't a good option, but being unable to read is worse, educators thought. [...]

School officials had to face down more than a few angry parents. Some even moved their children to other districts.

"We learned from the time of trials and tribulations," Darin said.

But slowly, parents were won over. Michael Schrader, 7, barely met the minimum first-grade reading requirements last spring. His teachers suggested summer school to help him begin second grade with more confidence.

His mother, Lisa Schrader, said her initial reaction was that her son wouldn't have much of a summer. But the former preschool teacher knew children can forget skills over the summer and agreed to send Michael.

"I'm absolutely glad we did it," Schrader said. "I can already see the difference this year. He seems more confident. He takes more risks in terms of reading things that are not familiar to him.

"I don't think parents want to be told your child is going to be retained, that's a hard thing to hear," Schrader said. "But you know as a parent, if your son or daughter is struggling, you want what's best for them." Risk pays off.

This is what President Bush meant by "the soft bigotry of low expectations".

---

THE WEDGE SHOULDN'T SEPARATE YOU FROM THE VOTERS:

Racial dynamics of recall (Steve Sailer, 10/08/03, UPI)

Due to higher rates of citizenship, adulthood and turnout, whites are much more heavily represented among voters in immigrant-rich California than among residents. Non-Hispanic whites cast 69 percent of the votes Tuesday.

That's about average for the last three California elections, in which the white proportion ranged from 64 percent in 1998 (prompting numerous premature pronouncements about the end of white domination of the state's electorate) to 76 percent in last year's long and dull race between Davis and political novice Bill Simon, which resulted in a record-low turnout, especially among minorities.

In each of these elections, according to exit polls, the GOP candidate failed to win a majority of the white vote. On Tuesday, however, the two main Republican candidates combined to win a crushing 65 percent of the non-Hispanic white vote. That's the kind of enthusiasm for Republicans normally seen among whites in the South, not in California. [...]

The GOP total in this election clearly benefited from having two attractive candidates with views spanning much of the center and right of the ideological spectrum. The moderate Schwarzenegger is one of the world's most famous men, and the conservative McClintock emerged from the election with the highest favorability rating of the top three candidates (54 percent favorable, compared to 51 percent for Schwarzenegger and 37 percent for Bustamante).

One key event during the election was Davis' signing of a bill to give driver's licenses to illegal immigrants in early September. He had previously vetoed the bill because it did not included security checks he had said were necessary in the post-9/11 environment, but this time he signed it without the safeguards he had earlier demanded. Bustamante strongly supported the bill.

This backfired on the Democrats, proving unpopular with Californians. In the exit poll, voters opposed driver's licenses for illegal aliens 70 percent to 24 percent.

When you pick a wedge issue, it's generally helpful to be on the side that has overwhelming support. Unfortunately for them, Democrats are on the 25% on all the social issues nowadays. Gay marriage could be especially harmful for them in 2004.

---

THE PRINCELY PROTOCOLS:

Noble lies and perpetual war: Leo Strauss, the neo-cons, and Iraq: Are the ideas of the conservative political philosopher Leo Strauss a shaping influence on the Bush administration’s world outlook? Danny Postel interviews Shadia Drury – a leading scholarly critic of Strauss – and asks her about the connection between Plato’s dialogues, secrets and lies, and the United States-led war in Iraq. (Danny Postel, 10/16/2003, Open Democracy)

Danny Postel: The neo-conservative vision is commonly taken to be about spreading democracy and liberal values globally. And when Strauss is mentioned in the press, he is typically described as a great defender of liberal democracy against totalitarian tyranny. You’ve written, however, that Strauss had a “profound antipathy to both liberalism and democracy.”

Shadia Drury: The idea that Strauss was a great defender of liberal democracy is laughable. I suppose that Strauss’s disciples consider it a noble lie. Yet many in the media have been gullible enough to believe it.

How could an admirer of Plato and Nietzsche be a liberal democrat? The ancient philosophers whom Strauss most cherished believed that the unwashed masses were not fit for either truth or liberty, and that giving them these sublime treasures would be like throwing pearls before swine. In contrast to modern political thinkers, the ancients denied that there is any natural right to liberty. Human beings are born neither free nor equal. The natural human condition, they held, is not one of freedom, but of subordination – and in Strauss’s estimation they were right in thinking so.

Praising the wisdom of the ancients and condemning the folly of the moderns was the whole point of Strauss’s most famous book, Natural Right and History. The cover of the book sports the American Declaration of Independence. But the book is a celebration of nature – not the natural rights of man (as the appearance of the book would lead one to believe) but the natural order of domination and subordination.

The necessity of lies

Danny Postel: What is the relevance of Strauss’s interpretation of Plato’s notion of the noble lie?

Shadia Drury: Strauss rarely spoke in his own name. He wrote as a commentator on the classical texts of political theory. But he was an extremely opinionated and dualistic commentator. The fundamental distinction that pervades and informs all of his work is that between the ancients and the moderns. Strauss divided the history of political thought into two camps: the ancients (like Plato) are wise and wily, whereas the moderns (like Locke and other liberals) are vulgar and foolish. Now, it seems to me eminently fair and reasonable to attribute to Strauss the ideas he attributes to his beloved ancients.

In Plato’s dialogues, everyone assumes that Socrates is Plato’s mouthpiece. But Strauss argues in his book The City and Man (pp. 74-5, 77, 83-4, 97, 100, 111) that Thrasymachus is Plato’s real mouthpiece (on this point, see also M.F. Burnyeat, “Sphinx without a Secret”, New York Review of Books, 30 May 1985 [paid-for only]). So, we must surmise that Strauss shares the insights of the wise Plato (alias Thrasymachus) that justice is merely the interest of the stronger; that those in power make the rules in their own interests and call it justice.

Leo Strauss repeatedly defends the political realism of Thrasymachus and Machiavelli (see, for example, his Natural Right and History, p. 106). This view of the world is clearly manifest in the foreign policy of the current administration in the United States.

A second fundamental belief of Strauss’s ancients has to do with their insistence on the need for secrecy and the necessity of lies. In his book Persecution and the Art of Writing, Strauss outlines why secrecy is necessary. He argues that the wise must conceal their views for two reasons – to spare the people’s feelings and to protect the elite from possible reprisals.

The people will not be happy to learn that there is only one natural right – the right of the superior to rule over the inferior, the master over the slave, the husband over the wife, and the wise few over the vulgar many. In On Tyranny, Strauss refers to this natural right as the “tyrannical teaching” of his beloved ancients. It is tyrannical in the classic sense of rule above rule or in the absence of law (p. 70).

Now, the ancients were determined to keep this tyrannical teaching secret because the people are not likely to tolerate the fact that they are intended for subordination; indeed, they may very well turn their resentment against the superior few. Lies are thus necessary to protect the superior few from the persecution of the vulgar many.

The effect of Strauss’s teaching is to convince his acolytes that they are the natural ruling elite and the persecuted few. And it does not take much intelligence for them to surmise that they are in a situation of great danger, especially in a world devoted to the modern ideas of equal rights and freedoms. Now more than ever, the wise few must proceed cautiously and with circumspection. So, they come to the conclusion that they have a moral justification to lie in order to avoid persecution. Strauss goes so far as to say that dissembling and deception – in effect, a culture of lies – is the peculiar justice of the wise.

Strauss justifies his position by an appeal to Plato’s concept of the noble lie. But in truth, Strauss has a very impoverished conception of Plato’s noble lie. Plato thought that the noble lie is a story whose details are fictitious; but at the heart of it is a profound truth.

In the myth of metals, for example, some people have golden souls – meaning that they are more capable of resisting the temptations of power. And these morally trustworthy types are the ones who are most fit to rule. The details are fictitious, but the moral of the story is that not all human beings are morally equal.

In contrast to this reading of Plato, Strauss thinks that the superiority of the ruling philosophers is an intellectual superiority and not a moral one (Natural Right and History, p. 151). For many commentators who (like Karl Popper) have read Plato as a totalitarian, the logical consequence is to doubt that philosophers can be trusted with political power. Those who read him this way invariably reject him. Strauss is the only interpreter who gives a sinister reading to Plato, and then celebrates him.

Perhaps the most perplexing aspect of the Left's fear of Straussianism is their insistence that its elitist anti-democratic aspect is a dark and jealously guarded secret. It is, of course, the classic conservative critique of democracy that such a system is not necessarily liberal--does not protect liberty. No one was better aware of this than the Founders, who wrote a rather anti-democratic Constitution and created a Republic, based on those of ancient times, rather than a pure democracy. In order to believe the Straussian disregard for democracy to be unique to them and a secret, you not only have to ignore the Federalists themselves, but folks like de Tocqueville in the past and both the more popular writings of the neocons, like Fareed Zakaria's Future of Freedom, and the best writings, like Robert Kraynak's Christian Faith and Modern Democracy, of those the Straussians have influenced.

In fact, especially given the fact that so many neocons are Jewish, it's at least worth considering that the attempt to treat a rather open criticism of democracy as some kind of clandestine and totalitarian philosophy may be -- either intentionally or not -- based on classic anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. Ms Drury in particular has a tendency to treat Straussianism as if she'd personally uncovered the new Protocols of the Elders of Zion or is at least its Henry Ford.

MORE:
(via Political Theory):
The Leo-conservatives (GERHARD SPOERL, August 4, 2003, Der Spiegel)

Like Heidegger, [Leo] Strauss drew a radical consequence from the experiences of World War I and the constant threat to the Weimar Republic: In his view, this served as historical proof that the Enlightenment, with its positive view of human nature and its faith in progress, was an illusion. He also believed that faith in a liberal democracy as the governmental and social order of the future was invalid. And Strauss remained true to this theory until his death.

However, what displeased Strauss about Heidegger's principal work "Being and Time" (1927) was its existentialism, which abandoned any justification of morality and worshipped "death as God" (Strauss), making the philosopher from Todtnauberg susceptible to the National Socialists' nihilistic yearning for death. As a result of his conflict with Heidegger, however, Strauss developed a slightly eccentric theory, which was received with surprising enthusiasm many years later in America.

Religion is the opium of the people, but it is an indispensable opium.

As his theory goes, philosophers following in Nietzsche's footsteps could devote themselves to the question of how the death of God and the renunciation of religion impacts thought and being. But without the inner cohesiveness faith provides, states could not exist. For this reason, according to Strauss, religion serves as a binding agent in a stable social order. It is, admittedly, the opium of the people, but it is also an indispensable opium. In Strauss' view, liberal democracies such as the Weimar Republic are not viable in the long term, since they do not offer their citizens any religious and moral footings.

The practical consequence of this philosophy is fatal. According to its tenets, the elites have the right and even the obligation to manipulate the truth. Just as Plato recommends, they can take refuge in "pious lies" and in selective use of the truth.

It is precisely because of these fundamental elements of a political theory Strauss represented throughout his life that he is accused, in today's America, of having used the Nazis to study the methods of mass manipulation. And "Straussians," such as Wolfowitz and other proponents
of the Iraq war, are now suspected of simply having used the Strauss' political principles for their own purposes. When seen in this light, the partly fictitious reasons for the war against Saddam Hussein represent the philosophical heritage of an emigrant from Germany.

A conspiracy theory is developing in which Strauss is portrayed as the puppet master and the Bush administration as his puppets. The anti-Semitic overtones of this theory are obvious - Strauss as a "Nazi Jew" -, particularly as many of his students bear Jewish names: Paul Wolfowitz, Abram Shulsky, Harvey Mansfield, William Kristol.

Doesn't the felt necessity of morality and the necessity of God to that morality instead offer a means of rational access to faith even for the elite?

---

MASSACHUSETTS'S NEXT GROWTH INDUSTRY:

Sens. Kennedy, Kerry Support University of Massachusetts Marijuana Research Plan (Marijuana Policy Project press release, 10/23/2003)

Both U.S. senators from Massachusetts, Edward M. Kennedy and John F. Kerry, have asked the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to approve a groundbreaking proposal from the University of Massachusetts Amherst to manufacture marijuana for FDA-approved medical marijuana research.

At present, all U.S. medical marijuana researchers are required to obtain marijuana for medical studies from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. NIDA's marijuana, grown on a farm in Mississippi, has been criticized for its poor quality ...

This will not only create jobs, it will light a fire in UMass's research program. Nice work, Sens. Kennedy and Kerry.

I am a little curious about one thing. Complaints have also been lodged about the quality of Canadian government marijuana. In serious medical research such as this, is it really important that the test subjects have high quality marijuana? If medical scientists were to experiment on the effects of red wine, would it have to be Chateau Mouton Rothschild?

---

FIGURES HE'S A LEFTIST:

Man Accused of Stealing 440 Left Shoes (AP, 10/27/2003)

Police arrested a man for stealing shoes at a southern Japanese hospital then found a collection in his home of 440 women's shoes - all for the left foot....

The missing footwear was always for the left foot and in a women's shoe style, a local police spokesman said Sunday....

In Irie's home, police found a box in a closet overflowing with the left mate to 440 pairs of women's shoes, including high heels, patent leather pumps, sandals and nurses shoes.

What this guy did just isn't right.

---

U.S. OCCUPATION STILL A QUAGMIRE:

Hawaiians march for an independent state (SFGate, 10/19/2003)

Supporters of Hawaiian independence wearing bright, floral shirts marched through town Sunday, shouting "Aloha," and distributing flyers to passers-by, hoping to gather support for their cause....

Kaiopua Fyfe, an organizer who lives on the island of Kauai, said many Hawaiians consider the United States' governance of Hawaii to be an illegal occupation of a country, similar to the British Empire's colonization of India and the current situation in Iraq.

"They should allow us to participate in our own self-determination," he said.

The Hawaiian islands have been part of the United States since the U.S. military overthrew the last monarch, Queen Liliuokalani, in 1959....

"Everything we have has to be imported in," said Imaikakoloaenui Nauha, who lives in Modesto, but was born and raised in Honolulu. "Hawaii is one of the richest states, yet it's the poorest because of the state that America has left us in."

He said Hawaiian were able to support themselves long before becoming part of the United States and they have no need for the economic benefits the United States offers.

A few thoughts on this story:

Given the relatively free press in Hawaii, Reporters Without Borders should move us ahead of the Palestinian authority.

If Nauha has no need for the economic benefits the United States offers, why is he living in Modesto?

Maybe if the Hawaii public schools would explain that the U.S. takeover was in the 19th century, these young Hawaiians would not be so militant.

If we let them have self-determination, will they allow us to hunt the roosters?

Comments

---

TO ESTABLISH WMD AS A SIDESHOW:

Cheney's new adviser has sights on Syria (Jim Lobe, 10/21/03, Asia Times)

A neo-conservative strategist who has long called for the United States and Israel to work together to "roll back" the Ba'ath-led government in Syria, has been quietly appointed as a Middle East adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney.

David Wurmser, who had been working for the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, John Bolton, joined Cheney's staff under its powerful national security director, I Lewis "Scooter" Libby, in mid-September, according to Cheney's office. [...]

For the latter part of the decade, he wrote frequently to support a joint US-Israeli effort to undermine then president Hafez Assad, in hopes of destroying Ba'ath rule and hastening the creation of a new order in the Levant to be dominated by "tribal, familial and clan unions under limited governments".

Indeed, it was precisely because of the strategic importance of the Levant that Wurmser advocated overthrowing Saddam Hussein in favor of an Iraqi National Congress (INC) closely tied to the Hashemite monarchy in Jordan.
"Whoever inherits Iraq dominates the entire Levant strategically," he wrote in one 1996 paper for the Jerusalem-based Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS).

Wurmser, whose Israeli-born spouse Meyrav Wurmser heads Middle East studies at the neo-conservative Hudson Institute, was the main author of a 1996 report by a task force convened by the IASPS and headed by Perle, called the Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000. The paper, called "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm", was directed to incoming Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It featured a series of recommendations designed to end the process of Israel trading "land for peace" by transforming the "balance of power" in the Middle East in favor of an axis consisting of Israel, Turkey and Jordan.

To do so, it called for ousting Saddam and installing a Hashemite leader in Baghdad. From that point, the strategy would be largely focused on Syria and, at the least, to reducing its influence in Lebanon.

Among other steps, the report called for Israeli sponsorship of attacks on Syrian territory by "Israeli proxy forces" based in Lebanon and "striking Syrian military targets in Lebanon, and should that prove insufficient, striking at select targets in Syria proper".

"Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, even rolling back Syria," the report argued, to create a "natural axis" between Israel, Jordan, a Hashemite Iraq and Turkey that "would squeeze and detach Syria from the Saudi Peninsula". "For Syria, this could be the prelude to a redrawing of the map of the Middle East, which could threaten Syria's territorial integrity," it suggested.

One nice thing about taking down Syria is that it would establish that Ba'athism is a sufficient cause for regime change, never mind WMD.

---

PUMPKINNY GOODNESS:

Ginger Pumpkin Bisque (The Splendid Table, October 21, 2003)

Adapted from The Cape Cod Table by Lora Brody Chronicle Books 2003). Copyright © 2003 by Lora Brody

Serves 8

A velvet firecracker is what someone once called this smooth-as-silk soup with a bit of a bite. You can make it with fresh or canned pumpkin.

1 3-by-1-inch-piece fresh ginger, peeled and minced
Finely grated zest of 1 large orange
3 large carrots, peeled and cut into 1-inch slices
2 pounds sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into 2-inch cubes
2 10-ounce cans pumpkin puree, or 2? cups fresh pumpkin puree (see below)
1 large Spanish onion, peeled and diced
6 cups chicken or vegetable stock
1 cup orange juice
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
3 to 4 drops Tabasco sauce
Sour cream or plain yogurt for garnish (optional)
Toasted pumpkin seeds (see below) for garnish (optional)

Place the ginger, orange zest, carrots, sweet potatoes, pumpkin, onion, stock, and orange juice in a large, covered, heavy-bottomed nonreactive stockpot set over moderate heat.

Simmer until the vegetables are very tender about 30 minutes. Cool for 30 minutes before pureeing the soup, either in a blender or with a hand-held (immersion type) blender. Add salt, pepper, and Tabasco sauce to taste.

Garnish each bowlful with a dollop of sour cream or plain yogurt and top with toasted pumpkin seeds just before serving.

To Prepare Fresh Pumpkin Puree: Select a sugar pumpkin (the kind with the variegated vertical stripes). Scrub the surface, cut off the stem, cut the pumpkin in half, and remove the seeds and stringy pulp. Use a sharp knife to remove the outer skin. Cut the flesh into 2-inch chunks and place them in a large, heavy-bottomed pot. Add water to cover and set over high heat until the water comes to a simmer. Lower the heat, cover the pot, and simmer gently until the pumpkin is very tender about 20 minutes. Drain before using.

To Toast Pumpkin Seeds: Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line a heavy-duty baking sheet or shallow, rimmed pan with foil. Spray the foil with nonstick cooking spray or coat it lightly with vegetable oil. Spread the seeds and stringy pulp across the foil. Roast in the oven for 25 to 30 minutes, using a metal spatula to turn the seeds over halfway through the cooking time, until they are deep golden brown.

---

ARE INDIANS THE NEW JEWS?:

USINPAC's Puri: 'Sky's The Limit' For Bobby Jindal: With Republican Bobby Jindal, a 32-year-old second-generation Indian American, locked in a runoff to become Louisiana's next governor, NationalJournal.com's Jennifer Koons spoke with Sanjay Puri, who is in charge of Capitol Hill outreach for the U.S. India Political Action Committee, about the impact of Jindal's campaign on the broader Indian American community. (National Journal, Oct. 15, 2003)

Q. More than 1.7 million Indian Americans live in the United States today. Census results suggest Indian Americans are more educated and better off financially than many other groups. So why has there not been much news about Indian-Americans' active political involvement -- is this because they are not as involved as other demographics?

A. You're right, the census shows about 2 million Indian Americans. I think that the interesting part about that is that they're growing at the rate of 10 percent every year. They're doubling the numbers each census. Also, if you look at the breakdown of 2 million, there are close to 40,000 physicians in that group, half a million in the IT sector and then about half a million in the hospitality sector owning hotels and motels. It's a pretty highly educated group.

As far as the political process, why nobody's talked about it, because, you
know, it's the typical immigrant story -- when they came in they were
looking to build their homes, their families, to educate themselves, their
children, to fulfill the American dream.

There have been attempts at their participating, but it has been relatively
too far and too infrequent. I think now we are seeing the evolution and the
majority. I think it's just going to escalate in a tremendous manner as we
go forward in the future. [...]

Q. USINPAC is a bipartisan organization that supports Indian American
candidates for office regardless of their political affiliation. Many devout
Hindus have expressed extreme dissatisfaction with Bobby Jindal's
gubernatorial bid in Louisiana, saying that he is too Americanized or too
Christian. How has the organization successfully balanced these opposing
sides?

A. The way our organization is built we don't look at religion or any
of those issues. On the sum of it was, is Bobby a good candidate? Is he a
good American? Does he have the skills to be a great candidate? A person's
religous beliefs are really between a person and himself. We don't make
judgments on that.

Looking at the track record of Bobby Jindal and having had the chance to
meet him several times and talk to him, he is just an exceptional candidate
who has proven time and again that wherever he goes, he produces results.
And I think it's really a statement from the people in Louisiana that they
want a results-oriented person -- and a person's background in terms of his
international origin or whatever else really doesn't matter. So that's the
course we have taken during this race. [...]

Q. Your organization raised roughly $19,000 for both political parties in
2002. Will you continue to raise money for both President Bush and the
Democratic nominee in the 2004 election?

A. Well, we raised a lot more money since 2002, because we're almost at the end of 2003. So we will continue to raise money and continue to support candidates who support our issues.

As far as the presidential candidates, we have had the real privilege of
having most of the Democratic candidates come in and present their views on
the issues that are important to our community at meetings. We would love to
have President Bush also come in and talk to us, and that invitation is open
to him.

---

WHOEVER DEFINES THE TERMS, WINS THE DEBATE:

Silent Smile (Shawn Macomber, 10/6/2003, American Spectator)

[T]his weekend's pro-life conference hosted by The American Cause was definitely a step in the right direction. Aside from a few wild card panelists, (including one who said that Planned Parenthood centers are churches for pro-abortionists where babies are "sacrificed to Satan"), the conference was quite the forward looking affair. New ideas strategies were discussed with an admirable and undogmatic frankness that might have shocked outsiders.

Chief among these was the inclusion of women recounting the terrible fallout of their own abortions. The emotionally charged atmosphere sent many attendees into tears. Try maintaining your composure while a young woman describes Planned Parenthood staff advising her as a 16-year-old seeking an abortion (sans her parents' consent) to keep her crying down as she received the injection that would still the beating heart of her child.

"Is it a baby?" she asked the Planned Parenthood counselor, who, notably, refused to allow her to see the sonogram confirming her pregnancy. "No, it's just a clump of cells," she was told. "They tell you that, but they don't tell you what it’s like to have to abort your baby at home, alone," she said.

Most abortion is not murder; it's negligent homicide. Murder requires premeditation and an understanding that one is terminating a life. The trend in our society has clearly been toward getting over our "love affair with the fetus," as former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders so eloquently put it.

It is only much later, when the gravity and horror of the operation hits home, that the grief and penance come into play. Yet, the condemnation wing of the pro-life movement continues to frighten these women -- arguably its most valuable asset -- away. Combine their testimony with the technology that can pick up the first smiles in the womb, ever closer to the point of conception, and the entire debate shifts.

If Ms Elders had said we have to get over loving babies, even the Left might have been horrified. But because the Right had been losing for so long and the Left had been allowed to impose dehumanized terminology, folks could convince themselves she was talking about something unlike us. Creating this fiction of otherness is always a prerequisite for any systemic deprivation of one group's rights by another.

---

RATIONALIZING EVIL:

Measurements of evil: a review of Hitler's Scientists by John Cornwell (Alan Judd, 14/09/2003, Daily Telegraph)

Half of all Nobel prize-winners in the natural sciences and medicine during the first two decades of the 20th century were German. Germany was the Mecca of science, yet, from 1933 onwards, many of the intellectual inheritors of this great tradition - themselves no less gifted and educated, and including Heisenberg, of quantum physics fame - worked for a government that exterminated millions for being Jewish, developed an entire pseudo-science of racial hygiene and based much of its industrial and scientific effort on slave labour.

Some were passively co-operative but others were more enthusiastic, competing for funds and prestige - 44.8 per cent of German physicians joined the Nazi party, the highest representation of any professional group (lawyers were next, with 25 per cent).

This prompts big questions, which John Cornwell poses at the start of his thought-provoking account: "Can we by studying the history of science in Germany… draw significant conclusions about the relationship between science and the good society? Does doing science make human beings more rational, sceptical, internationalist, objective?" [...]

Cornwell makes some comparisons between the Nazi attitudes towards science and those of the democracies during the Cold War - and even now: "The Faustian bargains lurk within routine grant applications, the pressure to publish… the treatment of knowledge as a commodity." He might have developed this theme in relation to the former Soviet Union - particularly with regard to biological warfare - and he might have made more of 19th-century German attitudes towards the state and the professions, but his fundamental judgments are sound.

The brute truth is that science follows funding, that the greater the state's role, the more the state culture dominates; and that most scientists, like most non-scientists, co-operate with tyrannies because the consequences of not doing so are dire.

And where religion is allowed to atrophy there is no competing culture and when scientists personally abandon religion they've no moral compass to slow their surrender to the State. It's an ugly cycle that secular Statism establishes.

---

HIGH-WATER MARK:

The Night the Bed Fell (James Thurber, 1933-07-08, The New Yorker)

I suppose that the high-water mark of my youth in Columbus, Ohio, was the night the bed fell on my father. It makes a better recitation (unless, as some friends of mine have said, one has heard it five or six times) than it does a piece of writing, for it is almost necessary to throw furniture around, shake doors, and bark like a dog, to lend the proper atmosphere and verisimilitude to what is admittedly a somewhat incredible tale. Still, it did take place.

It happened, then, that my father had decided to sleep in the attic one night, to be away where he could think. My mother opposed the notion strongly because, she said, the old wooden bed up there was unsafe: it was wobbly and the heavy headboard would crash down on father's head in case the bed fell, and kill him. There was no dissuading him, however, and at a quarter past ten he closed the attic door behind him and went up the narrow twisting stairs. We later heard ominous creakings as he crawled into bed. Grandfather, who usually slept in the attic bed when he was with us, had disappeared some days before. (On these occasions he was usually gone six or eight days and returned growling and out of temper, with the news that the Federal Union was run by a passel of blockheads and that the Army of the Potomac didn't have any more chance than a fiddler's bitch.)

MORE:
-SHORT STORY: Mr. Preble Gets Rid of His Wife (James Thurber, 1933-03-04, The New Yorker)
-REVIEW ESSAY: THE YEARS WITH THURBER: The man and his letters. (ROBERT GOTTLIEB, 2003-09-08, The New Yorker)

---

SOVEREIGNTY (SECURITY) VS. LEGITIMACY (FREEDOM):

A Growing Euroscepticism (Hans Labohm, 10/20/2003, Tech Central Station)

European integration, of which the European Union offers the most visible institutional expression, has deep roots. It can be perceived as a successful, yes even magnificent venture to come to grips with Europe's erstwhile endemic internal power struggles, which since 1870 caused four Franco-German wars, two of which escalated into world wars, whereby entire generations of young men were butchered at the European battle fields.

This has now become a thing of a distant past. The older generation, which has consciously experienced World War II, saw a united Europe as the most effective response to prevent a recurrence of these dreadful events. Its attitude towards European integration is influenced by deep gratitude and emotional attachment to what has been achieved. Adherents
of a United Europe want to go even further and 'deepen' European integration. They disapprove of anything that might harm European cohesion and might divert from finding the Holy Grail of political finality (in French: finalité politique) of the EU, which, by the way, has never been properly defined. They abhor a businesslike assessment of each further step of European integration, based on sober, case-by-case, cost-benefit analysis. They believe that one should not mix ideals with petty national interests.

In their view, differences are not insurmountable. They believe that reaching the goal of a United Europe is so overriding that one should not quarrel too much about the sacrifices it entails. They keep unfolding grandiose institutional schemes in order to bring about a United Europe, which in many respects would mirror the United States. They sincerely regret the fading away of European idealism. They strongly disapprove of the bickering about the distribution of the
financial burden, especially initiated by countries which are net-contributors to the European budget, such as the UK and the Netherlands. They consider it as a lack of commitment and loyalty to the European cause - yes, even as anti-European. They equally loathe attempts of the smaller European members to prevent institutional changes which may give the bigger member states a dominant position. They believe that these attempts are thwarting the effectiveness of the decision-making process and the achievement of the political finality.

Their top-down view of the integration process contrasts sharply with the bottom-up approach of those who insist on subsidiarity, which was been laid down, for the first time, in the Treaty of Maastricht of 1982. Subsidiarity implies that decision-making should take place as close as
possible to the citizen. Only when local, regional or national decision-making is inadequate -- e.g., because they have external effects which exceed the level on which they are taken -- should it be lifted to the European level. It also implies that European policies should have value added.

This implicates what must be the single most important issue confronting liberalism (small "l"), whether the end of governance should be sovereignty or legitimacy. Here's a nice differentiation of the two, Legitimacy, Sovereignty and the Justice of War with Iraq (John Lewis, Dec. 5, 2002, The Collegian) :

Sovereignty refers to a government’s exclusive authority to enforce laws over a given geographic area.  Sovereignty can be established and maintained by a constitutional process, as in America.  However, de facto sovereignty can also be established by brute force, as Saddam Hussein holds power over Iraq.  Sovereignty means that the political authority has a monopoly on power.  It does not say whether the power is legitimate.
 
There is a parallel in economics.  A person may have a sum of money.  But, did he get it by theft?  If so, then he should be arrested and his claim to ownership disavowed.  The mere fact that he possesses the money does not legitimize his ownership of it.
 
But what constitutes political legitimacy?  A government is legitimate if it is proper.  But what constitutes proper?  To answer this depends upon one’s view of human nature, and of the purpose of government.  I have a benevolent view; I think people are good, and will prosper if the political system they live in protects their rights to think and act rationally.  A legitimate government defends these rights. [...]
 
Freedom defines the purpose, the means, and the moral status of a government.  Protecting freedom is its proper purpose, and its reason for existing.  A sovereign power is established and recognized as a means to that purpose.  Only a government that fulfills this purpose is legitimate.

One would suspect that many, if not the majority of those who are reading this do in fact believe that sovereignty is not sufficient, that a government must also be proper, must conform to certain pre-existing moral standards, in order to be legitimate. Certainly, the American Republic rests on the belief that only that government which meets such standards is legitimate. This is the plain meaning of both the Declaration:

WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness -- That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

and the Preamble to the Constitution:

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Obviously a number of presumptions underlie these statements, not least that we have broad agreement about what constitutes justice and liberty and that we share a faith that there is a Creator who did endow us with rights that predate the State. But so far those presumptions have held reasonably true.

This is not the only possible view of the state though, nor even the only liberal one, nor even the only reasonable and decent one. For as a general matter our system tends to favor only one of the two competing sources of human motivation--it favors freedom. But the attempt to guarantee security is certainly an honorable quest--peace and order are not things to be dismissed lightly. And if it is believed that they can best be achieved by a system that requires us to ignore whether the governments of other states are legitimate--to look only at whether they are sovereign states, and if they are leave them to deal with their own internal matters--that belief deserves due consideration. It is, after all, most likely the one held by the majority of people, states, and institutions in the world. Groups and individuals from the Pope to the UN to most of the American and European Left to Saddam Hussein himself, felt that the fact of Iraq having a sovereign state and orderly rule, and that it was not attacking any other sovereign state, should have sufficed to keep it inviolable. That's a fairly august collection of partisans.

But it's an interesting aspect of the alternative belief, the belief in legitimacy, that it is by its very nature universalist. And so, for the very reason that it requires a domestic government to behave in a legitimate manner, it feels unconstrained by the idea of sovereignty when it confronts illegitimate regimes.

The great battle that rages around us still--and we see it not just in the debate over invading Iraq but in regard to Kyoto and the International Criminal Court and the UN itself--is whether America should remain committed to its traditional demand of legitimacy, which leads us into unilateralism, or whether we should join Europe and the other transnationalists in accepting mere sovereignty as sufficient justification for all governmental exercises of power. The latter vision might even, though there's ample reason to doubt it, render a world that is more peaceful than current one. But it will do so at the cost of some considerable sacrifice of human freedom--we're such a bumptious lot that genuine peace requires that we be restrained to some substantial degree. The choice seems that simple: a peaceful security or a rather more violent freedom?

---

WHAT CONCERN ARE YOU OF MINE? (via Mike Daley):

Are All Religions Identical? (Phil Mole, Butterflies and Wheels)

Are all religions identical? Many people seem to think so, especially if they've taken a world religion course in college or read a Joseph Campbell book. They will tell you that all religions teach us to value life, to refrain from harming others, and to renounce selfishness. Therefore, so the thinking goes, all religions are identical in both content and purpose. The corollary assumption is that there can never be legitimate conflicts between religious beliefs, therefore all disagreements between followers of different religions must be fundamentally illegitimate. These conflicts allegedly stem from simple misunderstandings or unwillingness to admit common ground.

Such a view is certainly comforting, since it suggests that religious factions need only to listen to each other to find out they're not so different after at all. Then, as trendy therapists might say, the healing can begin. The only problem with this tidy, conciliatory view is that is utterly incorrect. A little knowledge of world religious traditions might convince us that they are identical, but a lot of knowledge tends to convince us that they are very different.

Many people who believe all religions are identical pay special attention to the similarities between Judaism, Christianity and Islam, or between ancient myths such as the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Biblical flood story included in Genesis. All of these describe the actions of a powerful deity who created the world by conquering the forces of chaos. But why is this similarity so surprising? All of these religions arose in the same tiny sliver of the world known as the Fertile Crescent, and their development often overlapped. The Babylonian Code of Hammurabi almost certainly inspired the Jewish Ten Commandments, which later found their way into both Christianity and Islam as those religions absorbed and reinterpreted Judaic religious concepts. Thus, it's hardly newsworthy that Near Eastern religions tend to resemble each other to some degree. [...]

People who assume a common ethical code across all religions tend to think that only good things follow from real religious beliefs, and overlook any aspects of religions that don’t conform with modern moral standards. They define religion as equivalent to goodness and virtue, so it's hardly surprising that all religions reflect these qualities back at them. This tautological view of matters prevents many people from asking if some religious beliefs might have inherent negative consequences as well as positive consequences. Christians, for example, do not often consider the possibility that monotheism may fuel intolerance of rival religious factions, and allow people to exterminate their neighbors in the name of piety. Christians often express sincere concern about events such as the Crusades and the Inquisition, but tend to see these events as aberrations of true Christianity rather than tendencies inherent within monotheism itself. Monotheism can also motivate good ethical conduct, of course, but that doesn't negate the existence of the bad conduct. Both are real parts of the legacy of world religions, and responsible scholarship should not ignore one at the expense of the other.

What Mr. Mole fails to consider is somewhat the opposite point: that a certain level of intolerance is necessary to a healthy society. Everyone recognizes this at least implicitly--consider, for example, how few voices were raised in protest when the Feds cracked down on militia groups after Oklahoma City. Speech, assembly, and gun rights justifiably took a back seat when those seeking to exercise them were racist separatists. Similarly, WWI and the Cold War brought Red Scares; WWII saw the incarceration of the Japanese-Americans and totally trumped up prosecutions of various Bundists; and 9-11 brought a massive roundup of Islamic immigrants. It's all well and good to protest that some or all of these were mistaken, but we keep doing it, don't we? We feel ourselves entitled to defend society from those who are most alienated from it and who openly threaten it. Moreover, the alternative to such intolerance is a society which does not even attempt to be decent in the way that most of us would define decency. Instead, mere peaceful coexistence is elevated from a means to an end in itself. It is detente on a personal scale, requiring one not to take notice of the intolerable conditions one's neighbor imposes on his family, because, after all, who are we to judge? It requires, in fact, that we deny that there is even such a thing as Good, or Evil, because recognizing them to be real then forms the basis for making judgments about others.

It seems implausible that any social structure could long endure which was truly tolerant --the notion depends too much on a Utopian belief in the essential decency of human nature. But the more basic issue is whether such a structure, even were it workable, is something that most of us would desire. Do we just want to be left alone, even if it means ignoring the sins and suffering of those around us, or are we, as Aristotle said and as Christ ordered us to be, social creatures?

---

OF THE PEOPLE, BY THE PEOPLE:

What became of the Israeli left? (Ian Buruma, Guardian, 10/23/2003)

The left in Israel always was the preserve of the European elite. Socialism did not grow out of the socio-economic problems of a local working class, but was transferred, along with Bauhaus, Chopin and Brahms, as part of Zionist idealism. Ideology was not the product of circumstances; it preceded them....

Yair Tzaban, a former cabinet minister under Itzhak Rabin, explains how his leftwing Zionist party, Mapam, is always mentioned in the polls as the party fighting hardest for social rights, but "can't capitalise on it because of our national problems". For "the working classes vote for the right".

This seems to be the end toward which many democracies are evolving: On the left is a party of the elite, who want to rule; on the right is a party of the people, who want liberty and law to restrain the powerful.

---

SCHIAVO CASE GETS CREEPIER:

Questions raised about Terri's collapse (World Net Daily, 10/26/2003)

Dr. Michael Baden, co-director of the Investigative Unit of New York State Police in Albany and former chief medical examiner for New York City, ruled out potassium imbalance and a heart attack as factors in Terri's mysterious collapse 13 years ago – which left her severely incapacitated and unable to speak – and pointed to head trauma and bone injuries as a more likely cause....

Baden said he studied a bone scan made in March 1991at a hospital that describes her as having a head injury.

If her husband does starve her to death while he's the guardian, can he avoid an autopsy?

---

WE HAVE ROOM, JANICE:

Bush judicial nominee slammed (Sacramento Bee, 10/23/2003)

California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown, President Bush's controversial nominee for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, ran into a firestorm of criticism from Democrats ...

In her questioning, Feinstein zeroed in on a speech Brown delivered three years ago to the Federalist Society at the University of Chicago Law School that the senator said was disturbing because of its anti-government tone.

In that speech, Brown said that "where government moves in, community retreats, civil society disintegrates, and our ability to control our destiny atrophies. The result is: families under siege, war in the streets, unapologetic expropriation of property, the precipitous decline of the rule of law, the rapid rise of corruption, the loss of civility and the triumph of deceit."

If judging doesn't work out, Ms. Brown, a judge after my own heart, can always write for the BrothersJudd. The pay isn't good, but we don't have to bow down to liberal idols.

---

REVERSE IMPERIALISM:

Defender of the Faith: Why all Anglican eyes in London are nervously fixed on a powerful African archbishop (Philip Jenkins, November 2003, The Atlantic Monthly)

The most important figure today in the Anglican Communion, a worldwide federation of churches with some 75 million adherents, is probably a man few people in the West know anything about: Archbishop Peter Jasper Akinola, of Nigeria. An uncompromising traditionalist, Akinola presides over the most vibrant and almost certainly the largest Anglican community in the world—at a time when the Anglican world's true center of gravity has shifted to Africa.

It was no small matter, then, when Akinola went public this past summer with blistering denunciations of proposals to consecrate openly gay bishops and to sanctify gay marriage. Commenting on the decision of the Canadian diocese of New Westminster to approve the blessing of gay unions, Akinola declared that the diocese had in practice seceded from the Anglican world. Reacting to a proposal in the Church of England to ordain a gay bishop (a proposal ultimately withdrawn after intense pressure from African and Asian leaders), Akinola thundered, "This is an attack on the Church of God —a Satanic attack on God's Church." And during the buildup to the U.S. Episcopal Church's controversial ordination of Gene Robinson as the bishop of New Hampshire, he announced, "I cannot think of how a man in his senses would be having a sexual relationship with another man. Even in the world of animals, dogs, cows, lions, we don't hear of such things."

American and European readers may be inclined to dismiss such remarks as coming from a hidebound bigot, or perhaps from a demagogue seeking attention—but they would be wrong to do so. In his attitudes toward sexuality, and above all in his attitude toward religious authority, Akinola represents a deep-rooted conservative tradition in African Christianity that is flourishing and growing, and that is simply not going to vanish as levels of economic growth and education rise in Africa. The prospect of imminent global schism in the Anglican Communion is therefore real.

If we've not become immune to irony, there's something delicious in the specter that Britain having brought Western civilization to its empire will now be summoned back to a vindication of that civilization's values by its former subjects.

---

THE SEA WE SWIM IN:

THE CULTURE OF DEATH (PEGGY NOONAN, 4/22/99, WALL STREET JOURNAL)

What walked into Columbine High School Tuesday was the culture of death. This time it wore black trench coats. Last time it was children's hunting gear. Next time it will be some other costume, but it will still be the culture of death. That is the Pope's phrase; it is how he describes the world we live in.

The boys who did the killing, the famous Trench Coat Mafia, inhaled too deep the ocean in which they swam.

Think of it this way. Your child is an intelligent little fish. He swims in deep water. Waves of sound and sight, of thought and fact, come invisibly through that water, like radar; they go through him again and again, from this direction and that. The sound from the television is a wave, and the sound from the radio; the headlines on the newsstand, on the magazines, on the ad on the bus as it whizzes by--all are waves. The fish--your child--is bombarded and barely knows it. But the waves contain words like this, which I'll limit to only one source, the news:

. . . was found strangled and is believed to have been sexually molested . . . had her breast implants removed . . . took the stand to say the killer was smiling the day the show aired . . . said the procedure is, in fact, legal infanticide . . . is thought to be connected to earlier sexual activity among teens . . . court battle over who owns the frozen sperm . . . contains songs that call for dominating and even imprisoning women . . . died of lethal injection . . . had threatened to kill her children . . . said that he turned and said, "You better put some ice on that" . . . had asked Kevorkian for help in killing himself . . . protested the game, which they said has gone beyond violence to sadism . . . showed no remorse . . . which is about a wager over whether he could sleep with another student . . . which is about her attempts to balance three lovers and a watchful fiancé . . .

This is the ocean in which our children swim. This is the sound of our culture. It comes from all parts of our culture and reaches all parts of our culture, and all the people in it, which is everybody. [...]

A man called into Christian radio this morning and said a true thing. He said, and I am paraphrasing: Those kids were sick and sad, and if a teacher had talked to one of them and said, "Listen, there's a way out, there really is love out there that will never stop loving you, there's a real God and I want to be able to talk to you about him"--if that teacher had intervened that way, he would have been hauled into court.

Yes, he would have. It occurs to me at the moment that a gun and a Bible have a few things in common. Both are small, black, have an immediate heft and are dangerous--the first to life, the second to the culture of death.

The Booker prize went to an author this year who imagines an American school shooting--one doubts he focuses on the culture of death we all share in the West, eh?

---

GLASS-OFF IN THE VALLEY:

Flying Humans: An Interview with David Glover (Astrobiology Magazine, Oct 20, 2003)

David Glover is the past President of the United States Hang Gliding Association. He holds a world record for distance hang gliding and has taken more people up for their first flight than almost anyone in the world. Glover is among the fewer than ten tandem hang gliding instructors who have more than 5000 flights with a passenger. Today, there are fewer tandem hang gliding instructors than astronauts. [...]

Flying flexible wing designs has a rich history among forward-thinking planetary explorers. The first flex wing hang glider patent by Dr. Francis Rogallo (NASA Langley wind tunnels, Virginia) dates all the way back to the late forties. Rogallo is considered "The Father of Hang Gliding", and his design is often hailed as a kind of original, not having any model in nature.

In contrast to other flexible aerial devices like parachutes, a load-bearing Rogallo wing produces more lift than drag, though not as much as a conventional wing. But rigid wings could not be folded neatly away when not in use, and they were inherently far heavier. Rogallo first realized what this might mean in 1952, when he chanced across an article on space travel: "with beautiful illustrations depicting rigid-winged gliders mounted on top of huge rockets. I thought that the rigid-winged gliders might better be replaced by vehicles with flexible wings that could be folded into small packages during the launching."

Although the light materials like bamboo and thin, strong cloth have been available for thousands of years, a practical design for human soaring was missing: the dream of foot-launched flight particularly seemed dauntingly difficult. Indeed, the Egyptians had all the items necessary to create a glider capable of carrying a person, but only the latter half of the twentieth century saw the full concept take shape.

As part of its Century of Flight commemoration, Astrobiology Magazine had the opportunity to talk with David Glover about human flight, on the one-hundredth anniversary of the Wright Brothers' famous first lift-off. [...]

AM: What is the moment of 'glass-off', in hang-gliding terminology?

DG: The sun can be down and you still are floating far above the ground. So 'glass-off' denotes an end of the day phenomenon where the latent heat trapped in a valley, usually in front of a mountain, releases a rush of rising air and provides buoyant lift for a pilot.

It is a very descriptive phrase, 'glass-off', because at the end of the day, over a valley, the air can become all lift. It gives the pilot a very smooth ride.

What a lovely phenomenon.

---

NUMBERS CRUNCH:

Demography, Disaster and Destiny (Megan McArdle, 10/21/2003, Tech Central Station)

To understand exactly why Social Security is so troubled, it's helpful to stop thinking about our looming fiscal crisis, and think instead about the demographic problem that's causing it. For all the exhaustive arguments about tweaking benefit levels, changing the structure of FICA, or raising taxes, the main problem with social security is devastatingly simple. While there are currently 3.3 workers in the workforce supporting every retiree, in the 2040's -- when the Social Security Administration's projections show the program falling off the cliff into insolvency -- there will be fewer than 2, due to a combination of falling birth-rates and longer lifespans. Any long term solution, therefore, must do one of two things: increase the ratio of workers to retirees, or increase the productivity of the workers so that they can support themselves, and the retirees depending upon them, in the style to which everyone has become accustomed.

Changing the ratio of workers to retirees is probably easier. Increasing the number of workers, indeed, could be a lot of fun; the most obvious way to do it is to make more babies. Barring that, we can import more workers. Social Security is basically a Ponzi scheme; we could keep it going for an indefinite period of time by adding fresh victims to the bottom of the pyramid. [...]

If we can't increase the size of the workforce that much, what about shrinking the number of retirees? Certainly, that would help. Various groups have already suggested two ways we could do this: means-testing benefits, so that the rich are disqualified; and raising the retirement age. [...]

Privatization will be a major component of any long-term solution to the Social Security crisis. Why? Because private accounts increase our national savings. Unlike money given to the government, which overwhelmingly goes into current spending, money invested in the private sector is used to do new research, invent new products, and buy new facilities and equipment -- all of which will eventually make our future workers more productive. When we've gone as far as we can go towards changing the ratio of retirees to workers, privatization can take us the rest of the way by increasing the output of the workers we have left so that both workers and retirees can continue to live in comfort. It can also improve the efficiency of our economy by stopping the Social Security surplus -- which people think is being saved for their retirement -- from being funnelled into wasteful spending by legislators, on things they presumably wouldn't fund if they had to beg their constituents for the tax increases to pay for them.

Of course, if you completely privatized the system then you could have a 1 to 1 ratio, because everyone would pay for themself--though obviously over the course of their lives the poor would have to have contributions made by the government.

---

A GASTRONOMICAL HATE CRIME:

Carp: It's what's for dinner -- and it's pretty good (Chuck Haga, October 20, 2003 , Minneapolis Star Tribune)

Using their special ingredient, the students in Doris Wang's food science class at the University of Minnesota, Crookston experimented last spring with a chowder, an enchilada and a quiche.

They formed balls for grilling and puree for chowder. They made tacos and a casserole.

All with carp. Ground carp.

Skeptical? Wait till we get to the artichoke hearts.

"The food bank people called and said they had all this ground carp and didn't know what to do with it," said Dina Van Dorsten, 31, a student in the class.

"At first, it was 'Oh, gross!' Nobody wanted to hear about ground-up fish. But it actually worked better than hamburger in some of the recipes.

"The best was the quiche," she said. "The worst was some kind of casserole we came up with."

Cheddar carp quiche

Shell: 1 cup all-purpose flour 1/4 teaspoon salt 3 tablespoons shortening 1/4 cup milk

Filling:

1 pound ground carp

1 cup (4 oz.) shredded cheddar cheese

1/4 cup chopped green pepper

1/4 cup chopped onion

1 tablespoon all-purpose flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/8 teaspoon pepper

3 eggs, beaten

1 1/4 cups milk

Brown ground fish in a small amount of oil, drain and set aside.

In a bowl, combine the flour, salt; cut in shortening till crumbly. Stir in milk. On a floured surface, roll dough into a 10-inch circle. Transfer to an ungreased deep-dish pie plate or quiche dish. Trim and flute edges. Bake at 350 degrees for 10 minutes.

In a bowl, combine browned fish, cheese, green pepper, onion, flour, salt and pepper; spoon into crust. Combine the eggs and milk, pour over fish mixture. Bake for 50-55 minutes or until a knife inserted near the center comes out clean. Let stand for 10 minutes before cutting.

Yield: 6 servings.

Recipe adapted and tested by dietetic technician students at University of Minnesota,Crookston.

That just ain't right.

---

WE REMEMBER STORIES, NOT FACTS:

The Fabulous Fabulists Mencken, Liebling, and Mitchell made stuff up, too. Why do we excuse them? (Jack Shafer, June 12, 2003, Slate)

Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, and Christopher Newton all fabricated details--mundane and spectacular--in their journalism. But why? Reaching for the simplest explanation, I previously wrote that fabulists make stuff up because they don't have the talent or industry to produce copy grand enough to satisfy their egos.

But if we agree that hacks and loafers resort to lies because they don't know how else to make great journalism, what can we say about reporters from the Pantheon who marbled their journalism with fiction? I'm thinking of H.L. Mencken, A.J. Liebling, and Joseph Mitchell, all of whom made stuff up. None of them suffered much in the way of reputation injury when their inventions were discovered. What sort of double standard is this? [...]

Liebling's colleague at the World-Telegram and New Yorker, Joseph Mitchell, also diluted fact with fib. In the mid-'40s, he wrote three New Yorker pieces about New York's Fulton Fish Market, which were presented as fact. Only when the stories were collected as a book, Old Mr. Flood, in 1948 did Mitchell offer this disclaimer: "Mr. Flood is not one man; combined in him are aspects of several old men who work or hang out in Fulton Fish Market, or who did in the past." In a 1992 article, the New Criterion catalogs a few of his embellishments: Mitchell assigned Flood his own birthday, July 27; his "gustatory predilections"; his love for the Bible; his high regard for Mark Twain; his taste for columnist Heywood Broun; and his affection for all things old.

If we insist on banishing Blair, Glass, Newton, and all the other confessed composite artists and embellishers (Michael Finkel, Christopher Jones, Jay Forman, Nik Cohn, Rodney Rothman) from journalism, why do we still honor Mencken, Liebling, and Mitchell? [...]

All fabricators share a common motive: They want to make their story better than the plain truth, which they think gives them license to blend characters into a composite, pipe in dialogue, and edit events into a more logical narrative. If the truth refuses to collaborate, they conjure up something more compelling. The leading exponent of this school of journalism was New Yorker staff writer Alastair Reid. In 1984, the Wall Street Journal reported that Reid had constructed numerous composite characters in his nonfiction New Yorker pieces, rearranging events and scenes and inventing conversations. A translator and a poet as well as a nonfiction writer, Reid rationalized every one of his embellishments. [...]

Joseph Mitchell anticipated Reid's grandiosity and self-regard in defending his Fulton Fish Market composite, writing in the preface to the book version, "I wanted these stories to be truthful rather than factual, but they are solidly based on facts." This caveat reveals Mitchell's disdain for the quotidian truths of newspapers. One suspects that Liebling's willingness to bend genres hails from the same territory. Reid spoke for all the arty fabricators working inside journalism when he told the Journal, "Readers who are factual-minded are the readers who are least important."

-Literary License: Defending Joseph Mitchell's composite characters. (Meghan O'Rourke, July 29, 2003, Slate)

Joseph Mitchell's Old Mr. Flood is a great book. It's as vivid a portrait of the Fulton Fish Market and of working-class life in New York City as any we have. Old Mr. Flood is also partly invented. Though it was first presented as journalism'Äîmost of it ran as magazine pieces in The New Yorker in 1944--Mitchell revealed in the book's preface some four years later that Mr. Flood was a composite character, as Jack Shafer recently noted in Slate.

With the reappearance of Stephen Glass and the dismissal of Jayson Blair, a certain kind of rule-bending literary journalism has taken it on the chin. Mitchell and other respected sometime-"fabulists"'--including A.J. Liebling and Ryszard Kapuscinski'--have been lightly tarred and feathered along with the black-listed young journalists. After all, the argument goes, the realms of Fact and Fiction are diametrically opposed. There is no truth but the plain truth. The very currency of journalism is fact; to toy with it once is to devalue it (and your integrity) permanently, whether you are a great stylist or a hack.

This line of reasoning is entirely logical. And yet too rigid an adherence to such standards would mean an impoverishment of American journalism'--one that seems unthinkable. There'd be no Old Mr. Flood, no The Honest Rainmaker, by A.J. Liebling; some work by New Journalists like Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, and Norman Mailer would go in the trash. John Hersey is said to have created a composite character in a Life magazine story; does this mean we should think differently of his masterpiece Hiroshima?

Of course, no one wants to encourage budding Jayson Blairs. There is a line between aesthetic enhancement and outright fabrication; what's at stake here is something closer to judicious manipulation of fact than to Stephen Glass' invention-stews. Newspaper journalism always ought to be thoroughly factual. (H.L. Mencken's fabrications in the Baltimore Herald, for example, are indefensible.) [...]

Indeed, there are times when the license of fiction, sparingly employed in the service of nonfiction, results in a great book with no negative effects on the lives of those involved. Old Mr. Flood seems precisely such a book. For one thing, no one real person is defamed in Mitchell's
composite of Flood (unlike Stephen Glass' untruths about Vernon Jordan). Nor does Mitchell's use of a composite detract from the realism of Old Mr. Flood's compassionate, elegant, reportorial portrait of the Fulton Fish
Market. Like a novelist, Mitchell takes license with dialogue in order
to dispense with some of the ancillary randomness that is part of everyday life and arrive at a more highly stylized portrait. The quotes in the Old Mr. Flood are models of eloquent compression, such as you rarely find in real life and usually find in fiction. The point? To create a work that provides more aesthetic pleasure than a less highly wrought one, a distillation that makes us feel something essential about the world described, and thus has a greater chance of being remembered, read, used.

After all, unlike newspaper stories, literary journalism seeks to make or "conjure up" a broader reality--îto bring us into a world. This isn't news of the who-what-when-how-why variety, but news of the kind that V.S. Naipaul said only the novel can deliver--news that resonates with the potency of its presentation. Strictly segregating fact from fiction hobbles literary journalists unnecessarily. Where fiction is an inclusive genre, one that allows for its conventions to be violated, journalism relies on a system of conventions intended to guarantee objectivity. But clearly even these conventions don't make for pure objectivity, which from the start compromises the sanctity of the fact/fiction opposition. [...]

So, perhaps the problem is partly that our culture has no label for this kind of work, and that, systematizing creatures that we are, we need labels.

Maybe we even need a new magazine genre, somewhere between fact and fiction. As for how and when it ought to be used, the only way to determine the answer would be on a case by case basis; in large part it depends on how worthwhile the result is. A system that asks writers to
evaluate their own self-worth (in advance) is not a simple one; take the fact that Truman Capote's rigorous notion of a factually accurate nonfiction novel has quickly given way to a less well-enforced sub-genre, one example of which is Maria Flook's new book about Christa Worthington, a journalist murdered on Cape Cod in 2002. But such a system is theoretically feasible: Fiction writers pillage the lives of friends all the time; we tend to shrug off the negative consequences when the result is Saul Bellow's Herzog or a Robert Lowell poem. Certainly when in doubt, a journalist should assume it's not OK to take licenses like those described here; they're tools to be used rarely. But let's not take Mitchell off the syllabi because other writers lack his judiciousness and talent.

There does seem an essential difference between day-to-day reporting, which should be as factually accurate as the journalist can get it, and essay writing, which seems as much an entertainment as a piece of reportage. Certainly no one reading Joe Mitchell or E.B. White or the other greats of the New Yorker would have thought that they were getting straightforward news coverage.

---

A DUD:

Thirty Years of Petro-Politics (Daniel Yergin, October 17, 2003, Washington Post)

The 1973 oil embargo was the unsheathing of "the Arab oil weapon." [...]

The whole international order seemed to have been transformed. Now politics was also about economics. On the day the embargo was announced, President Nixon told his advisers, "No one is more keenly aware of the stakes: oil and our strategic position." The vast flood of "petro-dollars" to the exporters turned "petro-power" into a central fact of international politics. [...]

Within less than a decade, the "permanent shortage" turned into a glut, triggering a price collapse that, among other things, hastened the end of the Soviet Union, which had been depending on its oil exports as the lifeline to keep its economy alive.

There are many lessons here. Nations that had taken their energy supplies for granted suddenly realized how important reliable, reasonably priced supplies were to their well-being. Oil became high politics, and energy became part of public policy.

One of the less obvious but lasting lessons is that markets work, even in circumstances as dramatic as these were.

Strangely missing is one of the--maybe the--key lessons of the use of oil as a weapon: even when it was wreaking economic havoc it failed utterly as a political weapon. American support for Israel has never wavered appreciably and the petro-nations never became a significant force in world affairs. Brandishing the threat of oil embargoes secured them no influence. You can't beat an idea--liberal democracy--with a commodity, no matter how much folks want it.

---

AT LEAST WE BEAT YEMEN:

Second World Press Freedom Ranking (Reporters Without Borders, 2003)

To compile this ranking, Reporters Without Borders asked journalists, researchers, jurists and human rights activists to fill out a questionnaire evaluating respect for press freedom in a particular country....

...
29. Benin
30. East Timor
31. Greece
31. United States of America (American territory)
...
130. Palestinian Authority
131. Morocco
132. Liberia
132. Ukraine
134. Afghanistan
135. United States of America (in Iraq)
136. Yemen
...

Special situation of the United States and Israel. The ranking distinguishes behaviour at home and abroad in the cases of the United States and Israel. They are ranked in 31st and 44th positions respectively as regards respect for freedom of expression on their own territory, but they fall to the 135th and 146th positions as regards behaviour beyond their borders.

I suspect if we ranked countries according to the criterion, "What would happen if we tried to publish the BrothersJudd blog within its borders?", U.S.-occupied Iraq would not rank below the Palestinian Authority, and the U. S. of A. would not rank below Benin.

However, Brian Leiter describes these rankings as "generous" to the U.S. Presumably he thinks the U.S. is worse than #34 Albania.

---

THE LEXICON OF THE LEFTY GHETTO:

Has George W. Bush Met His Own Ken Starr? (John W. Dean, Findlaw's Writ, 10/24/2000)

The Washington editor of The Nation, David Corn, has written a powerful -- not to mention disquieting -- 324-page polemic addressing the pervasive mendacity of George W. Bush's administration. It is entitled The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception.

Actually, calling the book a polemic is misleading. It may be more accurate to call it a bill of particulars -- the document that provides the specific charges underlying an indictment.

In this case, the charges are highly credible. Corn is an experienced and respected Washington journalist. His evidence is overwhelming ...

This is not a Bush-bashing book.

It would be interesting to know what, according to lefties, would qualify as a Bush-bashing book.

However, the important contribution of this article is that it helps us conservatives understand what lefties mean when they say, "He lied."

How should we judge Presidential lies?

Corn himself implicitly suggests a few criteria. He notes that it is not enough for a president and his principal aides to refrain from making knowingly false statements. Rather, they must find the truth, and if they can't, must say so. In addition, an error in a presidential statement, when discovered, is every bit equal to a false statement if not corrected immediately.

I agree. And that means that it is no defense that a President is unaware.... The obligation to find the truth remains.

In other words:

To fail to know the truth, and not pronounce one's ignorance, is a lie. [For "if they can't [find the truth], they must say so."]

To fail to know the truth, even if one pronounces one's ignorance, is a lie. [For "it is no defense that a President is unaware.... The obligation to find the truth remains."]

New knowledge which corrects old knowledge and is not revealed immediately, is a lie. [For "an error ... is ... a false statement if not corrected immediately."]

These assertions become all the more remarkable when one considers that we are at war, and all the most famous "lies" have to do with the war. In a past war, the slogan was, "Loose lips sink ships!" Now the left would substitute, "Tell all or be condemned of lying!" For if the president accurately and immediately limns the extent of his ignorance, he necessarily reveals the scope of his knowledge; if he immediately corrects any misimpression, he necessarily reveals the content of his knowledge.

In fact, especially in wartime, information is a President's chief asset, and it must be played out as carefully as a poker player's chips. Mr. Dean here is requiring George W. Bush to be incompetent at conducting the Presidency, or to stand condemned in his own eyes.

In the Christian tradition, one must never lie; but a lie is merely, and only, the making of a knowingly false statement. Contra Dean and Corn, it is enough "to refrain from making knowingly false statements." In fact, one can and should release true information selectively in order to create a false impression if that will serve the cause of goodness. A famous case was St. Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria in a time of persecution, who set forth on a boat on the Nile trying to escape Roman soldiers who would kill him. Seeing that he could not outrow his pursuers, he turned his boat and rowed directly toward them. As they drew near, a Roman called out, "Where is the traitor Athanasius?" Athanasius gaily called back, "Not far away!" The Roman soldiers rowed on.

The left, whose standard of honesty for the Clinton administration fell far short of this Christian position, is now proposing new standards of honesty for a Republican administration that are far more stringent than the Christian position. Yet leftists do not argue for these new standards in a way that would be persuasive to conservatives. Their writings seem to be directed solely at those who already agree with them -- at those who isolate themselves in the left's intellectual ghetto.

Comments

---

THE WATER IS WIDE:

The Nonreligious Left: Why do they fear the religious right? (DANIEL HENNINGER, October 17, 2003, Wall Street Journal)

In last fall's Public Interest quarterly, political scientists Louis Bolce and Gerald De Maio of Baruch College at the City University of New York argued in "Our Secularist Democratic Party" that the clearest indicator of party affiliation and voting patterns now is whether one is churched or unchurched, believer or agnostic. [...]

Democratic secularists are defined as agnostics, atheists or people who rarely attend church, if ever. According to the national convention delegate surveys, write Messrs. Bolce and De Maio, "60% of first-time white delegates at the [1992] Democratic convention in New York City either claimed no attachment to religion or displayed the minimal attachment by attending worship services 'a few times a year' or less. About 5% of first-time delegates at the Republican convention in Houston identified themselves as secularists."

In the 1992 election, Bill Clinton got 75% of the secularist vote, while the current President's father received support from traditionalists (churchgoers) by 2 to 1. That pattern held in the 2000 election. "In terms of their size and party loyalty," Messrs. Bolce and De Maio argue, "secularists today are as important to the Democratic party as another key constituency, organized labor."

In turn this single self-definition tracks political belief across the entire battlefield of the culture wars--abortion, sexuality, prayer in the schools, judicial nominations. Interesting as that is, what intrigues me more as simple politics is how a Howard Dean, John Kerry or Joe Lieberman can feed these creedal beliefs of the "un-religious left" without in time coming themselves to be known as leaders of the party of non-belief? Or hypocrites. It's a hard river to cross.

In an interview, Prestonwood pastor and SBC president Jack Graham said he expects evangelicals to go to the polls for Mr. Bush "in record numbers." "Our people didn't quite know George Bush in the last election, but they do now." Led through a list of voting issues for evangelicals, the Rev. Graham cites one above all: "that we have people of character in the White House."

What should really trouble the Democrats is the following, WHILE LIEBERMAN BREAKS "JEWISH BARRIER," POLL REPORTS NEARLY HALF OF AMERICANS WOULD NOT SUPPORT ATHEIST (Atheists.org, August 12, 2000)

A poll from the Gallup organization shows that Sen. Joseph Lieberman has made history in becoming the first Jewish American to run on a presidential ticket for either of the two major political parties, and that an overwhelming majority of those questioned say that his Orthodox faith is not an issue. The August 8 survey results show that 92% of respondents said they would vote for a "generally well qualified person for president" who happened to be Jewish, with only 6% saying they would oppose such a candidate. Similar percentages are reported when asked how they feel about a Roman Catholic or Baptist candidate as well.

A Mormon candidate generates a 79% approval rating, with 17% saying they would not vote for an LDS member.

Atheists do not fare as well, though, according to the Gallup survey, which finds "close to half of Americans, 48%, unwilling to support an atheist for president while 49% say they would."

The survey results were compiled between Feb. 19-21, 1999.

If the end of society and the State is to achieve the common good, but a significant portion of the populace disputes that otherwise widely accepted traditional good, can they be valued members of the body politic still?

---

IT COULD NEVER HAPPEN HERE...:

'It's a boy' is still what parents hope to hear (Marilyn Gardner, 10/08/03, CS Monitor)

For new parents, can there be any more beautiful colors than pink and blue? "It's a girl!" and "It's a boy!" - the announcements ring out joyously to relatives and friends, heralding a new generation and the continuity of a family's lineage.

Yet pink and blue are still not cheered and cherished in equal measure. Despite growing equality for girls and women, Americans continue to want sons over daughters. In a new Gallup Poll, 38 percent of respondents say they would prefer a boy if they could have only one child. Twenty-eight percent would choose a girl. Slightly more than a quarter express no preference. The rest have no opinion.

Among young people, the gap widens. Almost half of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 would prefer a son. Twenty-nine percent want a daughter, while 18 percent say it doesn't matter.

In other words, the generations that think in terms of only having one child do consider maleness important.

---

ANOTHER TIME FOR CHOOSING:

Self-Interest Versus Virtue: Conservatism and America's Divided Inheritance (Professor Barry Shain, October 4, 2003, The Philadelphia Society Regional Meeting)

To understand accurately Madison's political teachings...one must uncover what Madison proposed as solutions to the critical problems of govern-ment: (1) how to control the governed and prevent them from acting tyrannously against minorities, and (2) how to control the government so that no one branch would impose its will on another. In confronting a work with contradictory claims, one must develop some such analytic to allow one to discriminate between essential and unessential remarks (though this is so rarely done). And Madison's answers to these questions provide just such a key that will allow us to uncover his authentic political teachings. By proposing that the means by which the new American government would control these twin pathologies of popular government exploited self-interest and found little or no role for virtue, Madison made clear which discourse, that of self-interest or that of virtue, was essential.

The first of these problems was majority faction. To address this, Madison famously argued in The Federalist that the American system would be designed so that factions would be set against themselves so that none would be able to affect their will against deviant minorities or individuals. Madison argued that by extending the size of the polity and including within it numerous distinct economic and religious differences, and having these interests represented in a national representative legislative body, interest would offset interest. Strikingly, in the system as he defended it, there is no appeal to virtue in the people or any hope that the proper inculcation of it could prevent majoritarian tyranny. All that is expected of the people is that they honestly represent their self-interest when choosing representatives. Thus, in proposing a solution to the first of the most intransigent problems of popular government, Madison turned to well engineered political institutional mechanisms in a properly designed system that left no role for popular virtue. [...]

[H]is vision of self-interestedness and elite dominance would only be imposed on the entire country in the glow of the Incorporation Doctrine and its hyperbolic development under the Warren Court (surely Warren went further than even Madison would have gone). Curiously, though, it is only with something like the Warren Court that Madison's political vision finally found a vehicle to put in place the essential features of his plan of government in which a centralized elite would be able to suspend morally intrusive laws of local majorities, if you will of "moral majorities." Still, in spite of this and that almost no one understood or showed any interest in his argument in number 10 until Beard did in the beginning of the twentieth century, it is Madison's theory of the extended republic that is read by students today as characteristic of eighteenth-century thought and as providing a foundational logic to the Constitution. Such an understanding, though, is historically without any credibility and represents instead the hopes of those who wish to import into the eighteenth century liberal values more appropriately associated with the twentieth. This kind of dishonesty true conservatives must resist.

But to return to the two problems of popular government that Madison believes a defensible theory of government must solve, and that provide the key to discriminating between his authentic and unauthentic theories of government, we must also briefly consider his solution to the second problem, that of governmental tyranny. Here too, Madison proposes that virtue would be little needed. In fact, again, he offers a vision of government that will take as its basic engine the seeking after honor. Although this was more noble than that passion most readily associated with people -- avarice -- still it is a selfish passion and, thus, at a considerable remove from true virtue, be it Christian or republican. [...]

Thus, Americans have inherited two visions of republican government and conservatives do have a choice. We can celebrate and give voice to the most long-lived, one might suggest most authentic, American vision of republican self-government guided by a morally demanding vision of human flourishing, or we can follow neo-conservatives and defend the precocious liberalism of Madison and its denigration of the corporate commitment to human virtue. We have a choice: embrace local self-government and moral education as central to a well-lived human life, or choose Madisonian liberalism and its twentieth-century incarnation in something similar to the Warren Court and its embrace of centralization and individualism. Conservatives must understand Madison's vision for the liberal one that it is and, if they are truly conservative, painfully turn away from it and turn back to the long-lived vision of American republican government that is Christian and localist. One must choose, if you will, between adhering to American conservative ideals or idealizing those who stood against them, and have done much to undermine them. The choice is yours

That's why the Anti-Federalists were right.

---

EVERYONE'S A CRITIC

Lightning strikes Gibson's 'Christ' (CNN/Associated Press, 24th October 2003)

Actor Jim Caviezel, who plays Jesus in Mel Gibson's controversial film "The Passion of Christ" was struck by lightning during shooting.

Caviezel was uninjured, but a producer described how he saw smoke coming from the actor's ear.

An assistant director on the film, Jan Michelini, was also hit -- for the second time in a few months.

The first time, a lightning fork struck his umbrella during filming on top of a hill near Matera in Italy, causing light burns to the tips of his fingers, VLife, a supplement to Variety publications said in its October issue.

A few months later the second strike happened, a few hours from Rome.

Michelini was again carrying an umbrella, and standing next to Caviezel on top of a hill, the magazine said.

Both were hit, with the main bolt striking Caviezel while one of its forks hit Michelini's umbrella. Neither were hurt.

The film, which is spoken in Latin and Aramaic, has come in for criticism from some religious leaders. It portrays the last hours of Jesus, but some Jewish and Roman Catholic groups are concerned the film will fuel anti-Semitism.

It'd have been pretty darned impressive if Caviezel had died and come back to life at the premiere. Anyway be careful to keep away from anybody called Michelini during stormy weather.

---

CALLING SOMETHING A BUICK ISN'T BAD ENOUGH?:

Slang crosses up GM (MARYANNA LEWYCKYJ, October 16, 2003, TORONTO SUN)

It's game over for the Buick LaCrosse in Canada. A General Motors executive yesterday admitted that the future Buick model -- which is set to debut late next year -- will be re-named in Canada after GM learned LaCrosse is a Quebec slang term for masturbation.

The new mid-size sedan, which will replace the Buick Regal, will still go by the name LaCrosse in the U.S.

That's the verb form--used as a noun you'd say, "What a Chretien".

---

A NECESSARY HATRED:

A Dislike Unlike Any Other?: Writer Jonathan Chait Brings Bush-Hating Out of the Closet (Howard Kurtz, October 19, 2003, Washington Post)

The words tumble out, the hands gesture urgently, as Jonathan Chait explains why he hates George W. Bush.

It's Bush's radical policies, says the 31-year-old New Republic writer, and his unfair tax cuts, and his cowboy phoniness, and his favors for corporate cronies, and his heist in Florida, and his dishonesty about his silver-spoon upbringing, and, oh yes, the way he walks and talks.

For some of his friends, Chait says at a corner table in a downtown Starbucks, "just seeing his face or hearing his voice causes a physical reaction -- they have to get away from the TV. My sister-in-law describes Bush's existence as an oppressive force, a constant weight on her shoulder, just knowing that George Bush is president."

Has this unassuming man in a rumpled sports shirt lifted the lid on a boiling caldron of anti-Bush fury in liberal precincts across America? Or is he just an overcaffeinated, irrational liberal, venting to a minority of like-minded readers?

Ramesh Ponnuru, a soft-spoken conservative at National Review, pays Chait a backhanded compliment, writing that "not everyone would be brave enough to recount their harrowing descent into madness so vividly."

Ponnuru calls him "smart, funny and completely misguided." Since the president is so likable, he says, the outbreak of Bush hatred "just makes you scratch your head."

Far from being inexplicable, the Left's hatred of George W. Bush seems quite logical and even justified--that it's only emerged at this late date helps to explain its source. The problem is that they bought into their own rhetoric about Mr. Bush and came to believe him an inconsequential imbecile. But while they were dismissing him, he began what could end up being a radical transformation of the American state and society since FDR's. And, just as FDR was despised by the Right for the damage he was doing by vastly increasing the power of the State, so is it necessary for the Left to despise Mr. Bush as he seeks to transfer that power back to the people.

Today's hate-fest has accelerated and become public because the Left has finally figured out what should have been obvious to them as far back as 2001 or 2002, Mr. Bush is succeeding. Even after you set aside the most obvious successes--tax cuts and the war on terror--consider the series of other monumental victories: No Child Left Behind, which as they've only now realized is a voucher plan; the Faith-Based Initiative, which they've only just realized is being implemented by Executive Order; increasing privatization of the Federal work force; etc. Combine these policy achievements with the ahistorical midterm victories in 2002 and what looks to be a pretty good 2003 election cycle for the GOP (just winning CA would make it so, but MS, KY, and LA all have competitive races for governor), and you have the frightening prospect for the Left that far from turning voters off, this transformation is winning their support or at least their acquiescence.

Now we head into the 2004 election cycle and not only is the President going to be re-elected easily but the House is going to stay Republican, again, and Republicans will be closer to 60 than to 50 seats in the Senate.

Why does the Left hate George W. Bush so much? May as well wonder why the Right hated FDR so much in 1935.

---

THE RACETRACK PARTY LOOKS FOR NASCAR DADS:

Let Them Eat War: Why do the very Americans who have been hurt the most by George W. Bush's policies still support his presidency? (Arlie Hochschild, October 8, 2003, Mother Jones)

One possibility is that the Nascar Dad is not well informed; that indeed, like the rest of us, he's been duped. For example, he may have fallen for the Karl Rove-inspired bandwagon effect. "Bush is unbeatable," he hears, or "Bush has a $200,000,000 re-election fund. Get with the winner." It makes you a winner too, he feels. This might account for some blue-collar Bush support, but it doesn't explain why the Nascar Dad would be more likely to be taken in by the bandwagon effect than the professional or managerial dad. Anyway, most blue-collar men would seem to be no less likely than anyone else to vote their conscience, regardless of whom they think will win, and that's not even counting those who root for the underdog as a matter of principle.

But another kind of manipulation could be going on. A certain amount of crucial information has gone missing in the Bush years. As has recently become clear, information that would be of great interest to the Nascar Dad has been withheld. With jobs disappearing at a staggering rate, the Bureau of Labor Statistics ended its Mass Layoff Tracking Study on Christmas Eve of 2002, thanks to this administration. And although Congressional Democrats managed to get funding for the study restored in February of 2003, the loss of 614,167 jobs in those two months was unannounced.

Conveying the truth in a misleading manner is, of course, another way of manipulating people. As the linguist George Lakoff astutely observes, the term "tax relief" slyly invites us to imagine taxes as an affliction and those who propose them as villains. If we add in such distortions to the suppression of vital information, the Nascar Dad who listens to Rush Limbaugh on the commute home, turns on Fox News at dinner, and is too tired after working overtime to catch more than the headlines is perhaps a man being exposed to only one side of the political story.

But then Nascar Dad could always turn the radio dial. He could do a Google search on job loss on his kid's computer. He could talk to his union buddies -- if he's one of the 12% who are still unionized -- or to his slightly more liberal wife. It could be he knows perfectly well that he's being lied to, but believes people are usually being lied to, and that Bush is, in this respect, still the better of two evils. But how could that be?

Maybe it's because Bush fits an underlying recipe for the kind of confident, authoritative father figure such dads believe should run the ship of state as they believe a man should run a family. Republican rhetoric may appeal to the blue-collar man, Lakoff suggests, because we tend to match our view of good politics with our image of a good family. The appeal of any political leader, he believes, lies in the way he matches our images of the father in the ideal family. There are two main pictures of such an ideal American family, Lakoff argues. According to a "strict father family" model, dad should provide for the family, control mom, and use discipline to teach his children how to survive in a competitive and hostile world. Those who advocate the strict father model, Lakoff reasons, favor a "strict father" kind of government. If an administration fits this model, it supports the family (by maximizing overall wealth). It protects the family from harm (by building up the military). It raises the children to be self-reliant and obedient (by fostering citizens who ask for little and speak when spoken to). The match-up here is, of course, to Bush Republicans.

Then there is the "nurturing parent family" model in which parents don't simply control their children but encourage their development. The government equivalent would be offering services to the citizenry, funding education, health, and welfare, and emphasizing diplomacy on a global stage.) The core values here are empathy and responsibility, not control and discipline and the match up is to the pro-public sector Dean/Kucinich Democrats. Studies have shown that blue-collar ideals are closer to the strict father than to the nurturing parent model. But that's been true for a very long time, while the blue-collar vote sometimes goes left as in the 1930s, and sometimes goes right as it's doing now. So we can't simply pin the pro-Bush Nascar Dad vote on a sudden change in blue-collar family ideals.

Maybe, however, something deeper is going on, which has so far permitted Bush's flag-waving and cowboy-boot-strutting to trump issues of job security, wages, safety, and health -- and even, in the case of Bush's threats of further war -- life itself. In an essay, "The White Man Unburdened," in a recent New York Review of Books, Norman Mailer recently argued that the war in Iraq returned to white males a lost sense of mastery, offering them a feeling of revenge for imagined wrongs, and a sense of psychic rejuvenation." In the last thirty years, white men have taken a drubbing, he notes, especially the three quarters of them who lack college degrees. Between 1979 and 1999, for example, real wages for male high-school graduates dropped 24%. In addition, Mailer notes, white working class men have lost white champs in football, basketball and boxing. (A lot of white men cheer black athletes, of course, whomever they vote for.) But the war in Iraq, Mailer notes, gave white men white heroes. By climbing into his jumpsuit, stepping out of an S-3B Viking jet onto the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, Bush posed as -- one could say impersonated -- such a hero.

There's nothing on Earth more painful than the Left trying to figure out how men think. At least medieval cartographers, when they reached the limits of the world they knew, usually had the sense to put something like "Here Be Dragons", an admission they knew not what lurked beyond. The only thing the Democrats share with NASCAR is, as Senator Zell Miller says, they're always turning left.

---

THE NEXT POPE?:

Word From Rome (John Allen, National Catholic Reporter, 10/24/2003)

Also Oct. 17, CNN conducted an interview with Angelo Scola, the patriarch of Venice, who became a cardinal Oct. 21, and I was invited to tag along....

Scola's most fascinating comment came before the cameras rolled, while we were chatting in St. Peter's Square. As we stood there, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna approached and said hello. Schönborn is himself widely mentioned as a papal candidate, and as he walked away, Scola said unexpectedly: "He is the man of the future."

I immediately asked, "In what sense?"

"I think you understood me," Scola replied. "In every sense."

As a footnote, the next day I was with another cardinal chatting in an informal setting, when I happened to recount this exchange with Scola. The cardinal looked at me in great earnest and said: "He's absolutely right."

There is no more worthy successor to John Paul II than Cardinal Schönborn.

---

LIFE AND DEATH, BLESSING AND CURSE:

ACLU joins husband in battle to stop feeding of brain-damaged woman (South Florida Sun Sentinel, 10/24/2003; via Brian Hoffman)

The American Civil Liberties Union said Thursday that it will aid Michael Schiavo in his fight against Gov. Jeb Bush and the Florida Legislature, which earlier this week took the remarkable step of passing a law to prevent the Pinellas County man from disconnecting his brain-injured wife from a feeding tube....

By substituting his judgment for the judgment of the courts, the governor "set aside the role of the whole judicial system," [ACLU Florida Director Howard] Simon said, warning that a precedent has been set for Bush and legislators to write laws gutting any court decision they don't like....

"He's upset about what happened," [Michael Schiavo's other attorney, Deborah] Bushnell said. "It has raised this situation from one of personal importance to one of statewide and national importance. If this law is allowed to stand, it creates an incredible bad precedent. It potentially paralyzes the judicial system."

Now it's astonishing that these lawyers think the Florida legislature and governor have no role to play in defining the law that shall govern this case. In order to overrule Florida statutes on this matter, the Florida judiciary would have to rule that the Florida Constitution mandates Terri's death, regardless of statutory law. But surely Florida's Constitution does not mandate that husbands have the right to starve wives to death; surely also, given that Florida's longstanding laws against suicide have been regarded as constitutional, the Florida Constitution does not compel the state to respect Terri's own wishes in the matter -- even ignoring the lack of clear expression from Terri Schiavo of any desire to die in a case such as this.

To overrule the legislature and governor, therefore, would require an express act of judicial law-making predicated upon judicial supremacy over the elected branches.

The best part of the article is this:

Members of the Florida Bar Association's elder law section were planning an emergency telephone conference within the next few days to discuss whether they should get involved in the upcoming constitutional challenge, said section President Stephanie Schneider.

"We wonder if we'll see a domino effect," said Schneider, a Broward County elderlaw attorney. "If a party doesn't like what a court does, they'll say, `Let's just go to the governor's office.'"

Horrors! People might leave the judicial system and turn to the legislature and governor to obtain better laws! We can't have that. Judges must rule!

---

FAITH AND FREEDOM, part LCVI:

Does It Pay to Pray?: Evaluating the Economic Return to Religious Ritual (Bradley Ruffle, Harvard Business School, and Richard Sosis, University of Connecticut, Sept 2003)

Time-consuming and costly religious rituals pose a puzzle for economists committed to rational choice theories of human behavior. We propose that religious rituals promote in-group trust and cooperation ... We test this hypothesis ... [by] field experiments ... [on] religious and secular Israeli kibbutzim. Our results show that religious males (the primary practitioners of collective religious ritual in Orthodox Judaism) are more cooperative than religious females, secular males and secular females. Moreover, the frequency with which religious males engage in collective religious rituals predicts well their degree of cooperative behavior.

Never mind the rational choice jargon, the confounding influences not investigated (like the influence of moral norms promulgated by the religion in encouraging cooperation), or the impossibility of deducing directions of causation from observed correlations. The important finding is that practice of a Judeo-Christian religion is correlated with cooperative behavior -- and cooperation among citizens is what a free society needs to flourish, or even survive.

It should be no surprise, then, that it is in nations of Judeo-Christian faith that freedom developed and flourished; and that in countries where such faith has declined, freedom appears to be threatened.

---

SPIRIT OF MODERATION, WHERE ART THOU:

Xtreme Politics: You're Not A Voter, Just a Spectator (Daniel Henninger, WSJ, 10/24/2003)

[O]ur politics has never seemed more polarized. How did that happen?...

In some ways, America may now be closer to the England of the Stuarts, rife with religious and political animosity, than to the intentions at Philadelphia in 1789. If not, it is sliding toward reflexive strife.

I agree with the argument that this war of the cultures dates to the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision of 1973....

I think many people who don't get paid for waging politics are becoming quite frustrated with dysfunctional legislatures that are now polarized -- as in Congress or in California -- essentially along the cultural faultlines created by 30 years of allowing judges to preempt the broader community's ability to discover, or reexamine, its social beliefs. These legislators have become little more than clerks to judges and the complainants in their courts -- the law as not much more than a brief. When this happens, citizens lose their status as voters or electors and become mere courtroom spectators. How can this be good?

Continuing to use the courts in this way -- the ACLU boasting it will get a court to overthrow a law passed by Congress or any legislature -- and then demanding that large portions of American society simply shut up and swallow it is a recipe for a kind of war much more serious than the mere chattering crossfire of talk shows.

Mr. Henninger is quite right: as the 1996 First Things symposium, The End of Democracy? The Judicial Usurpation of Politics, showed, outrage over judicial law-making is growing; and the recent filibusters show that as more and more power is acquired by the judiciary, it becomes impossible for elected officials to agree on who should be a judge. Given the inability of judges to do more than decide individual cases, the after-the-fact nature of court cases, and the diversity of judges, judicial lawmaking leaves everyone uncertain about what the law will ultimately be found to have been. Effectively, judicial lawmaking destroys the rule of law.

In response, the whole political environment is becoming unstable. The best solution would be for judges to re-acquire the spirit of moderation:

If an independent judiciary seeks to fill [Constitutional imprecisions] from its own bosom, in the end it will cease to be independent. And its independence will be well lost, for that bosom is not ample enough for the hopes and fears of all sorts and conditions of men, nor will its answers be theirs; it must be content to stand aside from these fateful battles....

[T]he price of [judicial independence], I insist, is that [judges] should not have the last word in those basic conflicts of "right and wrong-between whose endless jar justice resides."... [T]his much I think I do know - that a society so riven that the spirit of moderation is gone, no court can save; that a society where that spirit flourishes, no court need save; that in a society which evades its responsibility by thrusting upon the courts the nurture of that spirit, that spirit in the end will perish. What is the spirit of moderation? It is the temper which does not press apart an advantage to its bitter end ...

Judge Learned Hand, The Spirit of Liberty (Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), pp. 162-65.

---

THINGS THAT MAKE YOU GO "HMMM"

Did anyone know that this is the flag of Malaysia. I didn't.

---

LET THE WORLD COME TO YOU:

The Clouds May Be Clearing for Bush and GOP: Progress in Iraq and the U.S. economy could leave the president sitting pretty for 2004. (Walter Russell Mead, October 19, 2003, LA Times)

Like the Chicago Cubs, though, the Democrats may have peaked too soon. Bush's poll numbers have stabilized. Arnold Schwarzenegger's victory in the California gubernatorial recall election has sent a thrill through the Republican Party. In Iraq, the violence continues, but the lights are now on, kids are returning to school, Turkey has agreed to send troops to the most dangerous part of the country (Sunni Iraq) — and the Bush administration won unanimous support from the U.N. Security Council for its plan for Iraq.
This doesn't mean Bush's problems in Iraq are over. The drumbeat of death will go on for some time. Discontent in the ranks and among reservists (and their families) will continue to rise. Questions about weapons of mass destruction will not go away — and, especially if Saddam Hussein is not captured or killed, the politics of Iraq will remain uncertain and potentially full of nasty surprises.
The new harmony at the U.N. Security Council is only skin-deep. Allied money and troops aren't flowing into Iraq yet — and may never. Old Europe and its friends aren't ready to kiss and make up with the Bush administration. The French, Germans and Russians still steam over the U.S.-led invasion. They remain worried that a new Iraqi government, with U.S. backing, may try to repudiate some of the debt Hussein contracted in cozy deals made with French, Russian and German companies. They want the U.S. to pay the highest possible price — in money and even in blood — for the invasion to lessen the chance that the Bush administration or its successors will ever act without their approval. "You broke it; you fix it," is Old Europe's basic attitude on Iraq — and it will never willingly do any favors for an administration it fears and despises.
Even so, time is on Bush's side. The distance between the U.S. and the rest of the world over Iraq will narrow. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Old Europe want Washington to draw up timetables and set dates for elections and a handover of power to a new Iraqi government. Although the U.S. believes that schedules are unhelpful, as time passes, the tasks will get easier. The reality is, the United States wants to do exactly what the rest of the world would like it to do in Iraq — hand control back to a freely elected, stable Iraqi government at the earliest possible moment.
Iraq is making progress toward forming a new government, and that government will be able to assume more and more security responsibilities. By next spring, the new Iraqi police and army will be deploying, enabling the administration to start pulling out U.S. troops well before the November elections.

The President's most admirable quality--very much a surprise given his well-deserved reputation as a hothead--is his political patience. He's had innumerable opportunities to panic and start flailing around in the past four years--from John McCain's victory in NH, to Florida 2000, to Jim Jeffords defection, to 9/11, to the economic slowdown, etc.--but he's not only stayed his course but followed the overall strategy he and Karl Rove charted before they ever began running for the presidency. One of their key insights was the understanding that the presidency itself is a form of political capital, which can all too easily be used up in a profligate manner, see particularly Bill Clinton. They've been very careful, therefore, to reserve the President's personal appearances and speeches for moments that really matter, rather than trotting him out everytime someone has a complaint.

This has been on display most recently in the almost serene indifference he's displayed to his dip in the polls and to dismay over the course of the peace in Iraq. In fact, there was a journalist on NPR yesterday talking about how upset the networks are that this is the second consecutive weekend that the administration hasn't made anyone available for the Sunday talk shows. Mind you, this is while every poundit and politico East of the Pecos is hysterically jabbering about how the administration hasn't done good enough sales job on the war. Either things will quiet down in Iraq and the economy will continue to improve or they won't, regardless of anything anyone says. The President's acting as if he believes they will. We expect he's right, but then we don't have to hold our ground amidst hailstorms of criticism.

---

STRANGE, WE THOUGHT THAT WAS EXACTLY WHAT HE SAID:

The Widening Crusade: Bush's War Plan Is Scarier Than He's Saying (Sydney H. Schanberg, October 15 - 21, 2003, Village Voice)

If some wishful Americans are still hoping President Bush will acknowledge that his imperial foreign policy has stumbled in Iraq and needs fixing or reining in, they should put aside those reveries. He's going all the way--and taking us with him.

The Israeli bombing raid on Syria October 5 was an expansion of the Bush policy, carried out by the Sharon government but with the implicit approval of Washington. The government in Iran, said to be seeking to develop a nuclear weapon, reportedly expects to be the next target.

No one who believes in democracy need feel any empathy toward the governments of Syria and Iran, for they assist the terrorist movement, yet if the Bush White House is going to use its preeminent military force to subdue and neutralize all "evildoers" and adversaries everywhere in the world, the American public should be told now. Such an undertaking would be virtually endless and would require the sacrifice of enormous blood and treasure.

Maybe something like this:

Tonight we are a country awakened to danger and called to defend freedom. Our grief has turned to anger, and anger to resolution. Whether we bring our enemies to justice, or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done. [...]

Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.

Americans are asking, why do they hate us? They hate what we see right here in this chamber - a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms - our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.

They want to overthrow existing governments in many Muslim countries, such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. They want to drive Israel out of the Middle East. They want to drive Christians and Jews out of vast regions of Asia and Africa.

These terrorists kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life. With every atrocity, they hope that America grows fearful, retreating from the world and forsaking our friends. They stand against us, because we stand in their way.

We are not deceived by their pretenses to piety. We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions - by abandoning every value except the will to power - they follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way, to where it ends: in history's unmarked grave of discarded lies.

Americans are asking: How will we fight and win this war? We will direct every resource at our command - every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence, and every necessary weapon of war - to the disruption and to the defeat of the global terror network.

This war will not be like the war against Iraq a decade ago, with a decisive liberation of territory and a swift conclusion. It will not look like the air war above Kosovo two years ago, where no ground troops were used and not a single American was lost in combat.

Our response involves far more than instant retaliation and isolated strikes. Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success. We will starve terrorists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from place to place, until there is no refuge or no rest. And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.

Our nation has been put on notice: We are not immune from attack. We will take defensive measures against terrorism to protect Americans. Today, dozens of federal departments and agencies, as well as state and local governments, have responsibilities affecting homeland security. These efforts must be coordinated at the highest level. So tonight I announce the creation of a Cabinet-level position reporting directly to me - the Office of Homeland Security.

And tonight I also announce a distinguished American to lead this effort, to strengthen American security: a military veteran, an effective governor, a true patriot, a trusted friend - Pennsylvania's Tom Ridge. He will lead, oversee and coordinate a comprehensive national strategy to safeguard our country against terrorism, and respond to any attacks that may come.

These measures are essential. But the only way to defeat terrorism as a threat to our way of life is to stop it, eliminate it, and destroy it where it grows.

Many will be involved in this effort, from FBI agents to intelligence operatives to the reservists we have called to active duty. All deserve our thanks, and all have our prayers. And tonight, a few miles from the damaged Pentagon, I have a message for our military: Be ready. I've called the Armed Forces to alert, and there is a reason. The hour is coming when America will act, and you will make us proud.

This is not, however, just America's fight. And what is at stake is not just America's freedom. This is the world's fight. This is civilization's fight. This is the fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom. [...]

After all that has just passed - all the lives taken, and all the possibilities and hopes that died with them - it is natural to wonder if America's future is one of fear. Some speak of an age of terror. I know there are struggles ahead, and dangers to face. But this country will define our times, not be defined by them. As long as the United States of America is determined and strong, this will not be an age of terror; this will be an age of liberty, here and across the world.

Great harm has been done to us. We have suffered great loss. And in our grief and anger we have found our mission and our moment. Freedom and fear are at war. The advance of human freedom - the great achievement of our time, and the great hope of every time - now depends on us. Our nation - this generation - will lift a dark threat of violence from our people and our future. We will rally the world to this cause by our efforts, by our courage. We will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail.

It is my hope that in the months and years ahead, life will return almost to normal. We'll go back to our lives and routines, and that is good. Even grief recedes with time and grace. But our resolve must not pass. Each of us will remember what happened that day, and to whom it happened. We'll remember the moment the news came - where we were and what we were doing. Some will remember an image of a fire, or a story of rescue. Some will carry memories of a face and a voice gone forever.

And I will carry this: It is the police shield of a man named George Howard, who died at the World Trade Center trying to save others. It was given to me by his mom, Arlene, as a proud memorial to her son. This is my reminder of lives that ended, and a task that does not end.

I will not forget this wound to our country or those who inflicted it. I will not yield; I will not rest; I will not relent in waging this struggle for freedom and security for the American people.

The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.

Fellow citizens, we'll meet violence with patient justice - assured of the rightness of our cause, and confident of the victories to come. In all that lies before us, may God grant us wisdom, and may He watch over the United States of America.

What, did the Schanberg's of the world think he was joking?

---

HOW LONG A TRUCE?:

Bird's Eye (Karl Zinsmeister, October/November 2003, American Enterprise)

For many God-fearing people, worship is the time when they feel most elevated, most removed from other creatures that lack spiritual discernment. Chimpanzees use tools. Dolphins play and gambol with each other. Every animal indulges in carnal life and communicates with fellow members of the species. Even the crudest organisms can breed and reproduce themselves. But only man is able to discern and embrace the universe’s higher order. Only man worships and gives thanks to his Creator. Only man practices altruism, exercises compassion, offers praise, and suppresses his own selfish interests to honor the God who exists beyond our immediate surface life.

The companionship of God offers much in return: chances to learn and practice moral action. Experiences that elevate one’s thinking. The power and peace that come from a Father’s constant presence. An abstract yet powerfully immediate fraternity with millions of other humans from different places and times. Opportunities to be holy. These are the truest rewards of faith.

Yet Christians and Jews are also enjoined to be distinctive in the routines of their day-to-day lives. In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul tells the first members of the church to live as “children of light” and pursue “goodness, righteousness, and truth.” A whole series of very specific injunctions follow: “He who has been stealing must steal no longer, but must work, doing something useful with his own hands, that he may have something to share with those in need.” Christians are told not to be angry or slanderous, to be kind, to avoid sexual immorality, drunkenness, and greed. “Be very careful, then, how you live,” instructs St. Paul -- because the everyday actions of Christians are their advertisement to the rest of the world.

Theoretically, then, in addition to their richer philosophical understandings Christians ought to be registering unusually wholesome earthly outcomes.

Does that happen in practice? The verdict of this issue of The American Enterprise is that, yes indeed, things generally go better with God. Societies are more prosperous and individuals more thriving where faith blooms.

Eventually one arrives at a rather important question: if the success of the American Republic is largely dependent on faith, and if a significant portion of the society has grown hostile to faith, need they be tolerated at the risk of losing the society entire?

---

APPARENTLY NOT:

Don’t the Democrats care even a little about terrorism? (Byron York, The Hill, 10/22/2003; via RealClear Politics)

There is some stunning — and so far unreported — news in a new poll conducted by Democratic strategist Stanley Greenberg.

The survey — sponsored by Democracy Corps, the group founded by Greenberg, James Carville and Robert Shrum — focused on Democrats who take part in the nominating process in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina....

In one question, pollsters read a list of a dozen topics — education, taxes, big government, the environment, Social Security and Medicare, crime and illegal drugs, moral values, healthcare, the economy and jobs, fighting terrorism, homeland security, and the situation in Iraq — and asked, “Which concern worries you the most?”

In Iowa, 1 percent of those polled — 1 percent! — said they worried about fighting terrorism. It was dead last on the list.

Two percent said they worried about homeland security — next to last.

In New Hampshire, 2 percent worried about fighting terrorism and 2 percent worried about homeland security.

In South Carolina ... the results were the same....

The bottom line is that if a Democrat wins the White House next year and listens to his party’s most ardent supporters, he will simply shut down the war on terrorism.

It's as if we're two entirely different peoples, living in one nation.

---

DEFINING ANTI-SEMITISM DOWN:

Are Suicide Bombings Morally Defensible? (Professor Richard Wolin, Chronicle of Higher Education, 10/24/2003)

Was Honderich's endorsement of Palestinian suicide bombing anti-Semitic? Technically, no.... [S]uicide bombings constitute a highly freighted act of political symbolism. They deliver an unambiguous message: All Jews -- men, women, children -- are legitimate targets of political murder.

When Daniel Moynihan spoke of "defining deviancy down", he probably didn't realize the lengths to which the professoriate could take these redefinitions. I wonder what sort of deviancy would qualify "technically" as anti-Semitism?

---

HOW CAN PARODY COMPETE WITH THIS?

'Humans could live for hundreds of years' (Ananva, 10/23/03)

Scientists say people could live active lives for hundreds of years if humans follow the same biological rules as laboratory worms.

Or would it just seem like hundreds of years?

---

TRUTH FROM ELLEN GOODMAN

Can our deity beat their deity? (Ellen Goodman, Boston Globe, 10/23/2003)

AT FIRST it sounded like satire. My God is bigger than yours? Did General William Boykin actually taunt his Islamic enemy with that muscular divinity? Not my weapons are bigger than yours. . . .

But for all we talk about the clash of civilizations, we know that the most important global struggle is not between one religion and another but between fanaticism and tolerance -- the two principles that cut across all borders and run through every religion. In the long struggle between theocracy and democracy, General Boykin has, I am afraid, thrown his lot in with the enemy.

If Americans are to stand for tolerance, it's more than a strategic error to say that my God is bigger than yours. It's a sacrilege to our civic religion.

There is about as much nonsense per column inch here as we have come to expect from Ellen Goodman, the AAA Maureen Dowd. There is at least one completely false statement and, tolerantly, a downplaying of Mahathir's antisemitism. But she is being admirably truthful when she accuses General Boykin of sacrilege to the established church of tolerance and I'm sure that OJ can but admire the forthright way she wishes to punish the General for his heresy.

---

MAYBE SHE SHOULD RETHINK THE NAME OF THE COLUMN

Dear Prudence (Slate, 10/23/03)

Dear Prudie,
I am 22 and recently met a 27-year-old man who seems to be wonderful. (I say "seems" because I've only known him a week.) He is attentive, has called me every day since we met, and genuinely seems to want to get to know me. My problem is that, in conversation, the subject of prostitution came up. I can assume from what he told me that he slept with prostitutes during his Navy days. This of course was an uncomfortable subject for him, and he didn't want to talk about it. I didn't push, but it bothers me. Granted, my past isn't exactly sparkling either, but I've never slept with someone in a foreign country for money! I also realize that what he did before me has nothing to do with me and, frankly, is none of my business. But it still bothers me. Should I just let it go and continue to try and have a relationship with him?

—Baffled

I'm not going to take the position that having gone to prostitutes while in the Navy makes a man ineligible for dating thereafter (except with any woman related to me). But where in the world does the idea that "what he did before me has nothing to do with me and, frankly, is none of my business" come from? Does any actual human being older than 22 live her life this way? We are what we have done and although past performance is no guarantee of future returns there is no other way to judge what we are capable of. Presumably, this woman is considering dating, trusting, sleeping with and, potentially, marrying and having children with this man. Can she possibly believe that she is somehow obligated not to find out everything she can about him because its not her business?

---

LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT?:

Aquinas and the Heretics (Michael Novak, December 1995, First Things)

Frederick II was held by many to be the Great Heretic of the epoch, who for nearly thirty years waged constant warfare throughout Italy, leaving a train of ruin, slaughter, humiliation, and misery. Just as St. Thomas was fortunate to know personally one king who was widely regarded as a saint, Louis IX of France, and at least two who were, on the whole, good kings, Edward Plantagenet of England and Charles of Anjou, so he knew through bloody experience a king who was-and rejoiced in being-an on- again, off-again foe of popes. When the term "heretic" was used, it was not for Thomas Aquinas or his contemporaries an abstraction.

Nevertheless, Frederick II was himself a foe of heresy. In his own legal code promulgated at Melfi in 1231, Frederick followed the legal precedents of the era, including those of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, in condemning heresy, sacrilege, treason, usury, and counterfeiting (in that order) as structural crimes against the state. Professor Abulafia, himself no admirer of the Church of Frederick's time, explains the rationale of the Melfi code:

Heresy, indeed, is presented as treason. Those who deny the articles of the Catholic faith implicitly deny the claims of rulers to derive their authority from God. They are enemies not merely of God and of the souls of individuals, but of the social fabric. Their questioning of religious truth involves a questioning of the monarch's command over the law; as enemies of the law, they are its legitimate targets, and the position of primacy accorded to legislation against heretics is thus entirely proper. [...]

With regard to heretics there are two points to be observed, one on their side, the other on the side of the Church. As for heretics their sin deserves banishment, not only from the Church by excommunication, but also from this world by death. To corrupt the faith, whereby the soul lives, is much graver than to counterfeit money, which supports temporal life. Since forgers and other malefactors are summarily condemned to death by the civil authorities, with much more reason may heretics as soon as they are convicted of heresy be not only excommunicated, but also justly be put to death.

But on the side of the Church is mercy which seeks the conversion of the wanderer, and She condemns him not at once, but after the first and second admonition, as the Apostle directs. Afterwards, however, if he is still stubborn, the Church takes care of the salvation of others by separating him from the Church through excommunication, and delivers him to the secular court to be removed from this world by death. The Decretum repeats Jerome's comment, Cut off the decayed flesh, expel the mangy sheep from the fold, lest the whole house . . . the whole body, the whole flock burn, perish, rot, die. Arius was but a single spark in Alexandria, but as it was not at once put out, the whole world was laid waste by his flame. To read this text, we must clarify what Aquinas means by heretic. He does not mean a Muslim or a Jew, an unbeliever or an infidel. He means a Catholic who has chosen to deny his faith, in whole or in part. For Jews and Muslims, Aquinas argues for toleration, not only of their persons but also of their public rites. It is true that from his viewpoint their faiths are incomplete and to that extent erroneous. It is also true that for Thomas toleration is a means for gaining respect for the true faith, rather than an end in itself, a duty simply owed to the conscience of others. But he does argue for toleration for Jews and Muslims in an emphatic way, as he does not for heretics. About the Jews, for example, he writes: "Among unbelievers there are some who have never received the faith, such as heathens and Jews. These are by no means to be compelled, for belief is voluntary." And about the religious rites of Jews and Muslims, he adds:

Thus from the fact that the Jews keep their ceremonies, which once foreshadowed the truth of the faith we now hold, there follows this good, that our very enemies bear witness to our faith, and that what we believe is set forth as in a figure. The rites of other infidels, which bear no truth or profit, are not to be tolerated in the same way, except perhaps to avoid some evil, for instance the scandal or disturbance that might result, or the hindrance to the salvation of those who, were they unmolested, might gradually be converted to the faith.

Similarly, Aquinas shows a great deal more respect for unbelievers, such as his beloved Aristotle, who knew nothing whatever about Christ and His revelation than he does for heretics. He admires in unbelievers how much of the truth about man revealed by Christ they had come to simply by studying the laws of their own being. (For Aquinas, it is inconceivable that there are two truths, one learned from the things that are, the other learned from faith. For him, the one God, the Creator, is the sole source of truth.) For that he respects them, acknowledging that by fidelity to truth they served the God they did not know, and so are dear to God.

The student of Aquinas already familiar with his teachings on individual personal responsibility, conscience, and the role of reason and will in free choice is likely to be surprised by his unremitting hostility to heretics. In a typical passage, Thomas wrote:

Every judgment of conscience, be it right or wrong, be it about things evil in themselves or morally indifferent, is obligatory, in such wise that he who acts against his conscience always sins. Or again, this passage from the Summa Theologica:

Since conscience is the dictate of reason, the application of theory to practice, the inquiry, whether a will that disobeys an erroneous conscience is right, is the same as, whether a man is obliged to follow a mistaken conscience. Now because the object of a volition is that which is proposed by the reason, if the will chooses to do what the reason considers to be wrong, then the will goes out to it in the guise of evil. Therefore it must be said flatly that the will which disobeys the reason, whether true or mistaken, is always in the wrong. Given such teachings as these, why could not Thomas respect the conscience of heretics?

By heretic, again, Aquinas meant a person of Catholic faith who deliberately and resolutely, even after having been called to reflect on the matter, has chosen to renounce that faith in some important particular. Aquinas points out that the word heresy comes from the Greek word for choice. Heresy for him is not a mistake of the intellect but a choice of the will. It is a choice of adherence to a proposition, or set of propositions, known by the chooser to contradict the Catholic faith. It is a choice to cut oneself off from communion in the Catholic faith, to put oneself in a sect-a thing cut off. It is right, insists Aquinas, that such choice be dealt with harshly.

Aristotle begins his Politics with a seemingly simple statement that may no longer be true for those who preach a kind of watered-down liberalism that elevates toleration above all else:

Every state is a community of some kind, and every community is established with a view to some good; for mankind always act in order to obtain that which they think good.

This seems a perfectly sensible notion, that a community or state, once organized to achieve a certain purpose, must be able to enforce that purpose on its members. Otherwise, how will the purpose be achieved, or, at any rate, how much harder will it be to achieve?

Now, when we truly feel our state or community threatened, as in the wake of Oklahoma City or 9-11, we almost all take rapid recourse to this notion--so that few will quarrel with the government locking up white separatists or Islamicists and crippling their organizations. But if we recognize this in extremity, mightn't we also have to recognize that in general we have a right to some degree of conformity to our founding principles? This is not to say that we need to burn folks who disagree with the original understanding of the Republic at the stake, but it does suggest that we can justly require that they conform or be banished.

---

SOMETHING THERE IS THAT DOESN'T LOVE A WALL:

 How Thomas Jefferson’s “Wall of Separation” Redefined Church-State Law and Policy (Daniel L. Dreisbach, October 4, 2003, The Philadelphia Society)

Metaphors are a valuable literary device.  They enrich language by making it dramatic and colorful, rendering abstract concepts concrete, condensing complex concepts into a few words, and unleashing creative and analogical insights.  But their uncritical use can lead to confusion and distortion.  At its heart, metaphor compares two or more things that are not, in fact, identical.  A metaphor’s literal meaning is used nonliterally in a comparison with its subject.  While the comparison may yield useful insights, the dissimilarities between the metaphor and its subject, if not acknowledged, can distort or pollute one’s understanding of the subject.  Metaphors inevitably graft onto their subjects connotations, emotional intensity, and/or cultural associations that transform the understanding of the subject as it was known pre-metaphor.  If attributes of the metaphor are erroneously or misleadingly assigned to the subject and the distortion goes unchallenged, then the metaphor may reconceptualize or otherwise alter the understanding of the underlying subject.  The more appealing and powerful a metaphor, the more it tends to supplant or overshadow the original subject, and the more one is unable to contemplate the subject apart from its metaphoric formulation.  Thus, distortions perpetuated by the metaphor are sustained and magnified. 

The judiciary’s reliance on an extraconstitutional metaphor as a substitute for the text of the First Amendment almost inevitably distorts constitutional principles governing church-state relationships.  Although the “wall of separation” may felicitously express some aspects of First Amendment law, it seriously misrepresents or obscures others.  In Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation Between Church and State, I contend that the wall metaphor mischievously misrepresents constitutional principles in at least two important ways: 

First, Jefferson’s trope emphasizes separation between church and state--unlike the First Amendment, which speaks in terms of the nonestablishment and free exercise of religion.  Jefferson’s Baptist correspondents, who agitated for disestablishment but not for separation,
were apparently discomfited by the figurative phrase and, perhaps, even sought to suppress the president’s letter.  They, like many Americans, feared that the erection of such a wall would separate religious influences from public life and policy.  Few evangelical dissenters (including the Baptists) challenged the widespread assumption of the age that republican government and civic virtue were dependent on a moral people and that morals could be nurtured only by the Christian religion.

Second, a wall is a bilateral barrier that inhibits the activities of both the civil government and religion--unlike the First Amendment, which imposes restrictions on civil government only.� In short, a wall not only prevents the civil state from intruding on the religious domain but also prohibits religion from influencing the conduct of civil government.  The various First Amendment guarantees, however, were entirely a check or restraint on civil government, specifically on Congress.  The
free press guarantee, for example, was not written to protect the civil state from the press, rather it was designed to protect a free and independent press from control by the national government.  Similarly, the religion provisions were added to the Constitution to protect religion and religious institutions from corrupting interference by the national government and not to protect the civil state from the influence of, or overreaching by, religion.  As a bilateral barrier, however, the wall unavoidably restricts religion’s ability to influence public life, and, thus, it necessarily exceeds the limitations imposed by the Constitution.

Herein lies the danger of this metaphor.  The “high and impregnable” wall constructed by the modern Court has been used to inhibit religion’s ability to inform the public ethic, deprive religious citizens of the civil liberty to participate in politics armed with ideas informed by their spiritual values, and infringe the right of religious communities and institutions to extend their prophetic ministries into the public square.  The wall has been used to silence the religious voice in the public marketplace of ideas and to segregate faith communities behind a restrictive barrier.

You can see just how corrupted our law and culture became during the long hegemony of the Left-- beginning with the Depression--by the fact that such an extraconstitutional bit of boilerplate became an accepted constitutional standard. Most folks probably even think the wall is mentioned in the Constitution itself.

---

HECK HATH NO FURY LIKE A PUNDIT SCORNED:

Bush's Filtered News (Michael Kinsley, October 17, 2003, Washington Post)

Every president complains that the media are blocking his message, and the media complain that every administration wants to manage the news. It's not only presidents. Everyone who has something to say in our media-saturated culture (and who doesn't?) longs for ways to get that message out unmediated by someone else. In this media cacophony the president probably has more ability to deliver his message without a filter than anyone else on Earth. Anything the president says is automatically news. If he wants to commandeer all the TV networks for a speech in prime time, he can usually do it. The president can even hold a news conference, although this president rarely bothers. [...]

Bush doesn't really want people to get the news unfiltered. He wants people to get the news filtered by George W. Bush. Or, rather, he wants everyone to get the news filtered by the same people who apparently filter it for him. It's an interesting question how our president knows what he thinks he knows and why he thinks it is less distorted than what the rest of us know or think we know. Every president lives in a cocoon of advisers who filter reality for him, but it's stunning that this president actually seems to prefer getting his take on reality that way.

Bush apparently thinks (if that is the word) that the publicly available media contaminate the news with opinion but Condi Rice and Andy Card are objective reporters. Anyone who has either been a boss or had a boss will find it easier, knowing that Bush believes this, to understand how he can also believe that things are going swimmingly in Iraq. And where does the Rice-Card News Service obtain its uncontaminated information? Bush conceded his shocking suspicion that Rice and Card "probably read the news themselves." They do? Whatever's next?

The president noted, though, that Rice and Card also get "news directly from participants on the world stage." ("Hi, Ahmed -- it's Condi. What's going on there in Baghdad? What's the weather like? And how's traffic? Thanks, I'll go tell the president and call you again in 15 minutes.") The notion that these world stagers are sources of objective information while newspaper reporters are burdened by unsuppressible opinions and hidden agendas is another odd one.

Mr. Kinsley's frustration -- at the fact that he studies and opines about the President but the President blithely ignores him -- just comes shrieking out of this essay. No small part of the reason the press admired Bill Clinton was that they mattered to him.

---

W.I.N.:

Grade inflation takes a toll on students (Fredreka Schouten, Gannett News Service)

Around the country, even students with stellar high school records have discovered that they don't have all the skills to survive in college. In Georgia, for instance, four out of 10 students who earn the popular Hope Scholarships to the state's university system lose the
scholarship after they earn about 30 credits — roughly a year's worth of work — because they can't keep their grades up.

Performances on college admissions tests point to possible grade inflation. Fifteen years ago, students with A averages accounted for 28% of SAT test takers, says Wayne Camara, who oversees research for the College Board.

Today, 42% of college-bound seniors have A averages, but they score no better on the college admissions tests than did A students a decade earlier.

Some education experts say the trend is a clear sign that high school teachers are handing out high grades for weak work. But many say the real culprit is the typical high school course load. Students just aren't taking the rigorous math, science and writing classes in high school that they need to succeed in college and the workplace.

Only 1 in 3 18-year-olds is even minimally prepared for college, according to a report by the Manhattan Institute, a New York-based think tank. The picture is even bleaker for minorities: Only 20% of black students in the class of 2001 were college-ready.

No problem; the colleges inflate them too and then you're just not ready for the workplace.

---

ARE THERE THREE PEOPLE IN THE COUNTRY WHO KNOW THIS?

Traveling with the SECDEF (Impromptus, Jay Nordlinger, NRO, 10/22/03)

"Or take the coalition in Iraq. It now includes military forces from 32 nations. Consider some of the countries that are contributing troops in Iraq today: Albania, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, El Salvador, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Nicaragua, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Ukraine. They all have forces in Iraq assisting the coalition. There are others, as well, but I just mention these because those are the nations helping in Iraq today that President Reagan helped to make free."

---

WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE . . .

Mideast peace as cause celebre (Bradley Burston, Haaretz, 10/22/03)

Driven to distraction by the tragedies of eternal warfare and the burdens of economic strife, Israelis woke Wednesday to a peace initiative so outlandish as to accomplish the impossible - defy immediate condemnation.

Heralded by a literally star-spangled flourish in the popular press, an organization called OneVoice Israel announced that a red carpet list of marquee actors - Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston, Jason Alexander, Danny De Vito and Rhea Pearlman - had signed on for a decidedly unorthodox mission: coming to the Holy Land in an effort to make peace. . . .

Security permitting, the stars are to arrive in Israel at the end of the year or the beginning of 2004, said OneVoice Israel Executive Director David Leffler, a one-time aide to Yitzhak Rabin, and more recently, Director-General of Israel's Ministry of Science, Culture and Sport.

Leffler said the group's goal is to promote a referendum, in which "very large numbers" of both Israelis and Palestinians would take part. . . .

Through the results of the referendum, "We want each side to see that the other side has a moderate majority," Leffler said.

Its hard not to make fun of this and I'm skeptical that the referendum will show that each side "has a moderate majority." But something's got to give and celebrities will focus attention on the referendum, so more power to them.

---

REMAKING HIM WORSE, DUMBER, SLOWER.

Jim Carrey Goes Bionic (Josh Grossberg, E! Online, 10/22/03)

Jim Carrey is normally one of Hollywood's $20 million men. Looks like he's taking a huge paycut.

The rubbery-faced funnyguy is ready to go bionic in a send-up of The Six Million Dollar Man.

Unlike the classic 1970s ABC sci-fi series starring Lee Majors, the movie--which has long been in development as a by-the-numbers suspense thriller--will now be transformed into a comedy vehicle, allowing Carrey to parody the action genre much in the way Mike Myers (news) poked fun at James Bond movies in Austin Powers.

I heard Lindsay Wagner on the radio yesterday doing a commercial for the Sleep Comfort bed. Twenty-five years ago the combination of the ideas "Lindsay Wagner" and "bed" could have powered a small city, if that energy had been harnessed. Hmm . . . "harnessed".

---

WANT RIGHTS? ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITIES:

Trend to live together, not marry, puts kids at risk (USA Today, 10/20/03)

USA TODAY research this month showing that civil marriages are increasing while church weddings are declining raises questions about which type of marriage is better. The answer from family researchers: Whether couples tie the knot in a courthouse or a church is less important than that they are married while raising children.

What worries researchers who study family structures is the growing trend of couples choosing to live together outside of marriage while raising children. Divorce and out-of-wedlock birth rates leveled off years ago, but families in which parents cohabit are on a steady climb. More than 40% of all live-in households in 2000 included a child under 18, up from 21% in 1987, according to the latest U.S. Census figures.

While an unmarried mom and dad living together might look like the married couple down the block, unions lacking formal long-term commitments have been found more likely to create problems for kids. Sociologists cite evidence that children raised by live-in parents have a greater likelihood of emotional troubles and poor school performance. A major reason is that unmarried couples are more likely to break up.

Certainly, adults have every right to choose their living arrangements and expect social tolerance of their choices. But when the choices have a negative impact on dependents in their care, the government and other institutions have sound reasons to promote marriage as a social good.

The notion that we need honor these individual choices even though they put children and the health of our society at risk is simply ridiculous. There is an entire range of sensible steps we should take to make the cost of not marrying or of divorcing prohibitive, especially for parents.

---

THANKS, OSAMA!:

Whispers of democracy across the Middle East (John Hughes, 10/22/03, CS Monitor)

Ever so gently, the breezes of change - we can't yet call them "winds" - are rippling across hitherto repressed parts of the Islamic world.

• Saudi Arabia announced last week it will hold elections for municipal councils within a year - its first flirtation with real elections.

• In Morocco, King Mohammed VI outlined sweeping changes in polygamy, marriage, and divorce laws, proclaiming: "How can society achieve progress while women, who represent half the nation, see their rights violated and suffer as a result of injustice, violence, and marginalization?"

• In Iran, the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi - the first Muslim woman to win it - gave heart and a fillip to the embattled reform movement. Ten thousand Iranians turned out at the Tehran airport to welcome her home.

• Arab intellectuals, in cooperation with the UN, released a report Monday calling for reforms that would advance the cause of women's rights in Arab lands and make governments more accountable.

• Afghanistan has virtually finished a constitution that will affirm adherence to Islam, but provide for national elections in 2004, and set up a two-chamber parliament in which women would have a significant role. The draft constitution guarantees the protection of human rights.

• In Iraq there's movement toward swifter empowerment of the Iraqi Governing Council, to be followed by a new constitution and national elections, perhaps in 2004.

We can be heartened, but not too euphoric.

The most important thing to realize is that only the events in Morocco would be proceeding had 9-11 never occurred, and perhaps not as quickly there.

---

MEANS AND ENDS:

'Means Test' Deal Near On Medicare: Wealthy Seniors Would Be Charged More Under Plan (Amy Goldstein, October 16, 2003, Washington Post)

The agreement's basic contours, reached during a bargaining session yesterday, would take Medicare in a direction not envisioned by the House or the Senate in June, when each chamber passed legislation to add a prescription drug benefit and a larger role for private health plans to the insurance program for the elderly and disabled.

The idea of creating a "means test" with less help for affluent patients has surfaced in every major discussion of Medicare's future for nearly two decades. Policymakers have regarded it as one of the most effective steps they could take to improve the system's fragile financial health. But liberal Democrats and others say it would undermine a central principle on which the 38-year-old program was founded: universal health insurance for all people 65 and older. [...]

The Senate included an income-related provision in 1997 legislation to balance the federal budget, but it was dropped in a final budget agreement with the House. President Bill Clinton included the strategy in his failed attempt to revise the nation's health care system in the early 1990s, but he abandoned it as politically unworkable in a Medicare proposal to Congress several years later. And in the late 1990s, leaders of a high-level advisory commission on Medicare's future favored the idea, but excluded it from final recommendations.

It's decades past time to means-test all government welfare programs, but they'll almost certainly fold under pressure yet again. This is one of the many ways in which Bill Clinton's unwillingness to Nixon-go-to-China cost the nation dearly.

---

HEY, LOOK, NEWS!:

Yes Virginia, There Are Elections This Year (Dotty Lynch, Douglas Kiker, Steve Chaggaris, Beth Lester, Clothilde Ewing and Beth Brenner, 10/22/03, CBS News)

In Philadelphia's mayoral race, a Tuesday night debate featured sharp exchanges over the ethical questions that have come to dominate the contest. Incumbent Mayor John Street underlined his belief that the current FBI investigation of his office is an attempt to manipulate the election’s results, while Republican Steve Katz countered that the probe was an "exclamation point" on the city’s history of corruption. [...]

As the debate took place, many voters seemed to agree with the mayor that he is the victim of political manipulation. Far from hurting the mayor, the FBI investigation seems to be creating a "dramatic up-tick" in his support, according to Street campaign spokesman Dan Fee. And polls (Temple University, Keystone) show the mayor pulling decisively ahead. As Larry Sabato, a professor at The University of Virginia, told CBS News, "Should John Street win re-election, his first thank you should not go to his staff but to the FBI."

In Mississippi, it's third parties instead of the FBI ruffling political feathers. As the Biloxi Sun Herald reports, John Thomas Cripps of the Constitution Party and Sherman Lee Dillon of the Green Party are increasing chances that neither the incumbent, Democrat Ronnie Musgrove, nor Republican challenger Haley Barbour will get a majority in either the popular or electoral (measured by House districts) votes. Cripps' support for the Confederate flag may take votes from Barbour, while Dillon’s progressive stances appeal to potential Musgrove backers. If Cripps and Dillon do well enough to deny a major party candidate the majority, the Mississippi House of Representatives will pick the governor. In 1999, that process took almost two months.

Maybe coverage of actual elections could take the place of Boondocks?

---

RUMMYGRAM:

Rumsfeld's war-on-terror memo: Below is the full text of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's memo on the war on terror (USA Today, 10/22/2003)

October 16, 2003
TO: Gen. Dick Myers
  Paul Wolfowitz
  Gen. Pete Pace
  Doug Feith

FROM: Donald Rumsfeld

SUBJECT: Global War on Terrorism

The questions I posed to combatant commanders this week were: Are we winning or losing the Global War on Terror? Is DoD changing fast enough to deal with the new 21st century security environment? Can a big institution change fast enough? Is the USG changing fast enough?

DoD has been organized, trained and equipped to fight big armies, navies and air forces. It is not possible to change DoD fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror; an alternative might be to try to fashion a new institution, either within DoD or elsewhere — one that seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies on this key problem.

With respect to global terrorism, the record since Septermber 11th seems to be:

We are having mixed results with Al Qaida, although we have put considerable pressure on them — nonetheless, a great many remain at large.

USG has made reasonable progress in capturing or killing the top 55 Iraqis.

USG has made somewhat slower progress tracking down the Taliban — Omar, Hekmatyar, etc.

With respect to the Ansar Al-Islam, we are just getting started.

Have we fashioned the right mix of rewards, amnesty, protection and confidence in the US?

Does DoD need to think through new ways to organize, train, equip and focus to deal with the global war on terror?

Are the changes we have and are making too modest and incremental? My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?

Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?

Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions.

Do we need a new organization?

How do we stop those who are financing the radical madrassa schools?

Is our current situation such that "the harder we work, the behinder we get"?

It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog.

Does CIA need a new finding?

Should we create a private foundation to entice radical madradssas to a more moderate course?

What else should we be considering?

Please be prepared to discuss this at our meeting on Saturday or Monday.

Thanks.

Excellent questions all, but in sum the likely answers appear to put places like Egypt, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia--where the intellectual power of Islamicism is centered--in the crosshairs, rather than just focusing on where the terrorists are physically. This is a logical, long overdue, next phase of the war.

---

MOVEON.TREATYORG:

Is NATO Over?: The EU challenge. (Jed Babbin, October 22, 2003, National Review)

The Euromob in Brussels is putting the finishing touches on the thousand-page constitution for the European Union. One of the many mischievous tasks they've undertaken is to create a European defense establishment that will weaken, if not destroy, NATO. The Cold War is over. Do we really care if NATO joins the Evil Empire on the ash heap of history? We do, and whatever Brussels brummagem results, we must work hard to reform and maintain NATO. [...]

First, the EUnuchs want to subordinate their treaty obligations under the NATO treaty to a similar mutual-defense obligation among themselves. Back in the 1960s, the original Gaullist pulled French military forces out from the NATO command structure, but managed to do so without destroying the alliance. His progeny have no such scruples. One of NATO's finest moments was after 9/11, when for the first time the mutual-defense obligation was invoked. This will not happen again if the EU's decision makers will be able to decide — on an ad hoc basis — how and when any of the EU nations will defend any NATO ally, or fight any NATO foe.

The second danger is in splitting the EU from the NATO command structure. The French and Germans apparently are advocating a military command headquarters — and structure — separate from NATO. Prior to this week's meetings, Burns called this idea, "...the greatest threat to the future" of NATO. Burns is right to be concerned. Last week U.S. ambassador to NATO Nicholas Burns called an emergency meeting of NATO to deal with the direct challenge to NATO's future posed in the newly drafted EU constitution. That meeting began on Monday, and so far the results are not at all satisfying.

A variety of reports from the past year indicate that the French, leading the pack, want to make the mutuality of defense obligation in the EU superior to the obligation to NATO, thus blockading American participation in decisions on military deployments. A separate command structure — again independent of NATO — is being advocated strongly.

So what? Without us to provide their backbone any European force--which will necessarily be under-funded because of their social welfare obligations and undermanned because they can't afford to have people of tax-paying age in the military instead of the workforce--will be a joke. Europe is done for; untie the anchor before we get dragged down too.

---

THE PUP TENT PARTY?:

Day of the Spoiler: Inside Joe Lieberman's Kamikaze Campaign (Rick Perlstein, October 22 - 28, 2003, Village Voice)

The year was 1987, an October much like this one, with a crowded Democratic field usefully united on many, if not most, issues, but for a single irritant: Al Gore, who, determined to distinguish himself from the field by a supposedly sage and mature moderate conservatism, stepped up to the microphone at the National Press Club and read his fellow Democratic candidates clear out of the United States of America. "The politics of retreat, complacency, and doubt may appeal to others," he said, "but it will not do for me or for my country." He had already bragged in a Des Moines debate about his support for the Reagan administration's position on the B-1 bomber and the MX missile, even on chemical weapons, accusing his opponents of being "against every weapons system that is suggested"; at the next forum, he lectured his fellows on the imperative of invading Grenada and supporting the Contras. For that, some Democratic insiders were whispering, was just what it would take to be electable.

And even though the message hardly took with voters--party conservatives had scheduled a cluster of Southern primaries early in 1988 specifically to favor a candidate like Gore, but the dead-fish Tennesseean still got skunked on "Super Tuesday" by the most liberal candidate, Jesse Jackson--Gore stuck around just long enough to run a vicious campaign in the late-inning New York primary, in which he grilled front-runner Michael Dukakis for his apparent support of "weekend passes for convicted criminals."

In Washington, opposition researchers for the Republican front-runner, George Herbert Walker Bush, were taking notes.

"I thought to myself, 'This is incredible,' " Bush staffer Jim Pinkerton recalled of Gore's tarring the Massachusetts prisoner furlough program as if it were the idea of Michael Dukakis, when in actuality the program had been initiated by the Republican governor who preceded him. "It totally fell into our lap." Dukakis emerged from the convention that nominated him with a 17-point lead. Then Gore's million-dollar lines, so self-consciously crafted to make himself "electable," began finding their way into George H.W. Bush's mouth. Bush was able to successfully paint Dukakis as a dangerous radical. Al Gore had provided the palette--his smears having had nearly a year to sink into the American psyche.

Think about that next time you're watching one of the Democratic debates and hear Joe Lieberman say, as he did at one, that if Vermont's former governor won the presidential election, "the Bush recession would be followed by the Dean depression." Or say, as Lieberman did at his own National Press Club policy address this year, that his opponents disastrously "prefer the old, big-government solutions to our problems," even though "with record deficits, a stalled economy, and Social Security in danger, we can't afford that."

For partisans of the Democratic Leadership Council, the rigidly anti-liberal pressure group that Al Gore helped found and that his vice presidential candidate, Joe Lieberman, chaired from 1995 to 2001, the moral of this little parable of 1988 is apparent: The Democratic Party should have saved itself the heartache and nominated Gore in the first place, just as it should nominate Lieberman now. But that won't solve the problem, either. The myth that tacking right makes a Democrat inherently more successful in a general election is, put simply, built on a foundation of quicksand. [...]

Joseph Lieberman adds nothing to the Democrats' chances in 2004. He does, however, take things away. In fighting to the finish and losing the nomination, he will have irreparably weakened the winner. If he wins it, he will suck out something precious: the active enthusiasm of the unwealthy that is a center-left party's only natural advantage against a party of money, the Republicans.

It doesn't seem likely that Mr. Perlstein will find much to like in Zell Miller's new book, A National Party No More, which argues quite forcefully that the Party needs to tack Right or keep losing. But it does seem a tough fact to get around that the last four Democrats to get more votes than their Republican opponents in a presidential race were all Southern white men--LBJ, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Al Gore--and two of them--Carter and Clinton--ran well to the Right of the national party.

That's not to say Joe Lieberman is doing himself or the Democrats any good by running--we've been noting for some time that he doesn't seem serious about his own campaign, considering it more a vanity thing, to get to be the Jewish guy who ran for the presidency. (Mr. Perlstein in very amusing fashion makes it clear that there is hardly any Lieberman campaign at ground level.) But the idea that no one on the Right (or pretending to be on the Right) should run in Democratic primaries because they end up doing the GOP's spadework seems kind of dangerous for a party that's already becoming nothing more than a coalition of special interest groups with a shrinking geographical appeal. Simply running for president as Democrats has already been sufficiently leftifying to force Bob Graham and John Edwards to abandon their Senate seats--because the positions you have to take nationally are anathema at home--imagine what the primary process would become if there weren't even any moderates (which Lieberman should probably be considered) allowed to run, if the race to the Left started from a John Kerry's positions instead of a Joe Lieberman's?

Perhaps the Democrats' problem runs deeper. It would appear that a Republican can win the presidency after a tough primary fight in which he's correctly portrayed as well to the Right even of the GOP--witness Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush--but that a Democrat can't win if they are accurately portrayed as to the Left of the nation entire.

MORE:
-Ga. Senator Lambastes Fellow Democrats (Jeffrey McMurray, October 22, 2003, AP)

In "A National Party No More: The Conscience of a Southern Democrat," Miller analyzes how he believes Democrats slipped from the majority to the minority in national opinion polls and predicts they will stay there for a long while. Some stores were stocking the book yesterday, with the official release set for early November.

"The biggest problem with the party leadership is that they know nothing about the modern South," Miller writes. "They still see it as a land of magnolias and mint juleps, with the pointy-headed KKK lurking in the background, waiting to burn a cross or lynch blacks and Jews."

-ESSAY: The Democrats Can Win without a Southerner at the Top of the Ticket (Martin Halpern, 10/20/03, History News Network)

Although media and public attention has focused on retired General Wesley Clark's military credentials and his dramatic late entry into the presidential race, in one key respect his candidacy as a Southerner represents something familiar in Democratic presidential politics. In the past three decades, the Democrats have nominated Southerners for president five of seven times. What's more significant, they've won only with Southerners. [...]

A trustworthy Democratic presidential candidate who pursues a consistent left-of-center course could galvanize a grass roots campaign in the women's, environmental, peace, civil rights, and labor movements. Such a campaign could bring many low income non-voters and youth into the political process. The Democrats can win the White House and a Congressional majority with a coalition of new voters, Greens, and the Democratic party's core constituencies.

The Democrats' strategy of nominating moderate Southerners brought some victories but not long-term progress for the party or the country. Rather than focusing on turning again to a moderate Southern nominee in hopes of preventing a Southern sweep by George W. Bush, the Democrats should instead focus on developing a strategy for effective governance. They need to explain how they will promote peace and security, provide jobs, and achieve new social reforms such as national health care. Putting forward a feasible plan would energize and expand the Democratic party's social base everywhere, including the South.

---

WHY NOT JUST STOP CARRYING THE STRIP ALL TOGETHER?:

Controversial comics raise serious dilemmas (Mark Jurkowitz, 10/22/2003, Boston Globe)

In an unprecedented move that angered readers and generated industry criticism, The Washington Post recently killed an entire week of "The Boondocks" comic strip with a story line suggesting the world might be a safer place if national security adviser Condoleezza Rice had a more active love life.

Addressing the subject in his column, Post ombudsman Michael Getler quoted executive editor Leonard Downie Jr.'s view that the strip "violated our standards for taste, fairness and invasion of privacy," before adding his dissenting opinion. "Boondocks" creator Aaron McGruder was "being mischievous and irreverent . . . about a high profile public figure," Getler declared. "And that seems okay to me."

Perhaps the world would be a better place if Mr. McGruder's parents had enjoyed a less active love life?

---

PREDICTABLE AND EXCUSABLE SELF-INTEREST:

Of Kurds and Madrid (WILLIAM SAFIRE, October 22, 2003, NY Times)

That unanimous U.N. vote surprised doubters everywhere. Its genesis, I suspect, was at the Bush-Putin meeting two weeks ago in Camp David. Bush lavished fulsome praise on Russia's semi-dictator for his supposed vision of freedom and the rule of law; Vladimir Putin, after gladly joining Bush in sinking the Kyoto global warming treaty, agreed not only to vote our way in the U.N. but also to broker a compromise that would induce France and Germany not just to abstain, but to grudgingly support our occupation.

Just as Turkey delivered on troops, so did Putin on votes. China, as usual, wanted to be part of the majority it could see forming. But France, meekly followed by Germany, wanted an immediate, sovereign provisional government in Iraq, stripping the U.S. of control. When we said no, Putin passed along words to save Jacques Chirac's face: that the interim administration we appointed would "embody the sovereignty" of Iraq "without prejudice to its further evolution" — thereby kicking the can of our control well into next year.

The bandwagon that started in Camp David and gained speed in Ankara rolled through Damascus. Rather than be isolated, Syria — always nervous about the Turks and suddenly worried about the Israelis — made our U.N. resolution unanimous.

That set the stage for this week's Madrid donors' conference. With the French, Germans and Russians refusing to ante up a plug dinar, and with the E.U. offering peanuts, we've been low-balling estimates of aid. But I suspect it will get into the double-digits of billions, especially since contributors can steer contracts to their own nationals.

But here come Iraqi Arabs, using the Kurdish leader Barzani as their wedge to evoke faded memories of the Ottoman Empire and to look the Turkish gift horse in the mouth.

Just as Turkey was only acting in its own national interest when it was uncooperative on the war, so too the Kurds are merely acting in their national interest now. You can't get too upset with folks for that.

---

BLESSED NATION:

Case involving pledge should be easy for justices to decide (Terry Eastland, 10/22/03, Jewish World Review)

[I]t certainly is wrong to understand "under G-d" in isolation. The pledge needs to be taken in its entirety.

As such, it still is a pledge to the flag and the republic for which it stands.

It still is a patriotic statement and not a religious one, the words "under G-d" accomplishing the congressional intention of affirming the role of religion in the life of the nation.

That role traces back to Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg ("that this nation, under G-d, shall have a new birth of freedom") and to the Declaration of Independence ("endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights").

And to the Constitution's express purpose to "secure the Blessings of Liberty".

---

FOLLOWING THE MONEY:

Linkage logarithms (Mark Steyn, 10/21/03, Jewish World Review)

Here's an easy way to make an effective change: Less Wahhabism is in America's interest. More Wahhabism is in the terrorists' interest. So why can't the U.S. introduce a policy whereby, for the duration of the war on terror, no organization directly funded by the Saudis will be eligible for any formal or informal role with any federal institution?

That would also include the pro-Saudi Middle East Institute, whose "adjunct scholar" is one Joseph C Wilson IV. Remember him? He's the fellow at the center of the Bob-Novak-published-the-name-of-my-CIA-wife scandal. The agency sent him to look into the European intelligence stories about Saddam trying to buy uranium in Africa. He went to Niger, drank mint tea with government flacks, and then wrote a big whiny piece in the New York Times after the White House declined to accept his assurances nothing was going on. He was never an intelligence specialist, he's no longer a "career diplomat," but he is, like so many other retired ambassadors, on the House of Saud's payroll. And the Saudis vehemently opposed war with Saddam.

Think about that. To investigate Saddam Hussein's attempted acquisition of uranium, the United States government sent a man in the pay of the Saudi government. The Saudis set up schools that turn out terrorists. They set up Islamic lobby groups that put spies in our military bases and terror recruiters in our prisons. They set up think tanks that buy up and neuter the U..S diplomatic corps. And their ambassador's wife funnels charitable donations to the September 11 hijackers.

But it's all just an unfortunate coincidence, isn't it? After all, the Saudis are our friends. Thank goodness.

The dots don't necessarily all connect, but they're still dots.

---

STRANDED:

Evidence Of Things Unseen: The Rise of a New Movement (Tom Hayden, October 20, 2003, AlterNet)

There is rising a new movement in the world. It is bigger than the movement of the 1960s. Yet it is barely seen by the experts and analysts. They look only at the behavior of institutions and politicians, not the underlying forces that eventually burst into visibility.

The first strand of this new movement is the global opposition to the war in Iraq and to an American empire. [...]

The second strand is the global justice movement, which began with the Zapatistas on the day NAFTA took effect, then surfaced in Seattle in 1999. Those were called isolated events. Then came Genoa, Quebec City, Quito, Cancun, the world social forums in Porto Allegre. Far from isolated events, these were the historic battlegrounds of a new history being born.

Together these movements mount a challenge to an entire worldview. We are experiencing an enlargement of dignity, an enlargement of what we consider sacred and therefore off the table, not negotiable. The purported Masters of the Universe are becoming as obsolete as those who once claimed the divine right of kings. The earth and its people are not for sale; the environment is not just a storehouse of materials for utilitarian exploitation; and cultural identities can't be replaced as if they were commodities, whether the treasures of Babylon or the rainforests of the Amazon. This movement is saying that diversity will not be looted.

Why is this happening? No one really knows. Movements arise in mystery at the margins, eventually change the mainstream, are repressed or co-opted, and return to the oblivion we call official history.

One explanation is that the globalization of US military and economic power is globalizing an opposition. It's a dialectic and, as it swirls and intensifies it can even bring down George Bush.

Saddam is gone. We have new bilateral trade treaties with Chile and Singapore and more in process. The Japanese and Chinese are negotiating bilateral treaties too. The Kyoto treaty is dead. George W. Bush is headed for a landslide victory. Etc., etc., etc... If this is what we get from the "new movement", we're all for it.

---

JUST ABOUT SEX:

The Affair of the Fifteen Women (J. Douglas Allen-Taylor, October 21, 2003, Berkeley Daily Planet)

As far as I can tell from the public record -- and the public record here is more extensive than one might desire -- Bill Clinton was never accused of putting his hands on a woman who did not so desire. Schwarzenegger was, and is. The difference is enormous. This does not mean that Clinton was not wrong. It merely means that Mr. Schwarzenegger -- if he did, indeed, do the things of which he stands accused -- was wronger.

Arnold's behavior towards those women was despicable and they should sue him or press charges. However, that's no reason to rewrite history. Kathleen Willey certainly described unwanted contact and Juanitta Broaddrick says Bill Clinton raped her, a charge which the Clintons never denied. Democrats having dismissed even rape as just cause for judging a political figure have left themselves in an at best awkward spot where Arnold is concerned.

---

SECRET BALLOTS NO MORE:

Louisiana Gubernatorial Election: Election Date: November 15, 2003

Kentucky Gubernatorial Election: Election Date: November 4, 2003

Mississippi Gubernatorial Election: Election Date: November 4, 2003

These three races, all of which could go either way, have been so hard to find news on, bless the folks at Real Clear Politics. They've got bios, polls and links to stories.

---

DOWN TO TWO (OR ONE):

Early Primary Predictions Are Anyone's Guess (Charlie Cook, Oct. 21, 2003, NationalJournal.com)

Suffice it to say that Dean and Gephardt are locked into a close fight for first place in Iowa, with Kerry in third -- though how close he is to the front-runners is a matter of some dispute. No one else is a significant factor in the state.

In New Hampshire, both polls agreed that Dean was the overwhelming favorite, with Kerry in second place and Clark in third. It should be kept in mind, however, that New Hampshire results are sometimes by what happens in Iowa. In the Bread for the World survey, Dean had 33 percent, and Kerry came in second with 18 percent. It is worth noting the obvious: Both men are from neighboring states. Clark came in third with 9 percent, while Lieberman was fourth with 6 percent. In the Democracy Corps survey, Dean had a whopping 38 percent of the vote, with Kerry in second with 21 percent, Clark third with 11 percent and Gephardt fourth with 8 percent.

It was the Democracy Corps poll in South Carolina that was the most interesting, perhaps because we have seen less polling in the Palmetto State than in Iowa and New Hampshire. In South Carolina, Sen. John Edwards -- who hails from neighboring North Carolina -- held the first place slot with 14 percent, but Gephardt was just a point behind at 13 percent, with Clark another point behind him at 12 percent. Lieberman was in fourth place at 11 percent, Dean was tied for fifth place with the Rev. Al Sharpton at 10 percent, and the rest of the field was in single digits.

The only clear conclusion from these data is that Dean is in a formidable position in New Hampshire, but locked into either a two- or three-way fight in Iowa. In South Carolina, the race looks wide open, with Edwards possibly ahead but four other candidates within four points of first place. It is the very definition of a wide-open contest.

The idea that a candidate who doesn't finish on the radar screen in IA or NH is then going to win SC or anywhere else just seems ridiculous. If Gephardt can pull out IA, he's the opposition to Dean. If not, Dean is home free. Unless, of course, another candidate gets in the race...

---

PROTECTING THEIR OWN:

THE TIMES' SECRET CLINTON LINK (Page Six, 10/21/03, NY Post)

THE New York Times had a big conflict of interest on Sunday.

The Gray Lady's review trashing "Bill Clinton: An American Journey. Great Expectations" was written by Todd S. Purdum, the husband of Clinton's first White House press secretary, Dee Dee Myers - though Times readers weren't informed of his connction to Clinton.

"It is the equivalent of allowing the wife of Ari Fleischer to review an anti-Bush book," said one observer. [...]

Purdum wrote that the Clinton book "offers only the faintest pretense of originality. It is almost completely a reheated buffet of previously published material from the already groaning steam table of Clinton scholarship, scandal-mongering and supposition."

But Purdum found a quote from Betsey Wright, Clinton's former chief of staff, worth repeating.

Wright, who coined the term "bimbo eruptions," said Clinton's womanizing had "nothing to do with sex" and everything to do with "this inferiority complex . . . I think he's spent his entire life being scared that he was white trash."

The Times had no comment.

Maybe they'll let Mike Deaver review the CBS miniseries on the Reagans?

---

SO MUCH DONE, SO MUCH YET TO DO...:

FEDERAL INCOME TAXES, AS A SHARE OF GDP, DROP TO LOWEST LEVEL SINCE 1942, ACCORDING TO FINAL BUDGET DATA: Erosion of income tax base drives other key budget developments (Isaac Shapiro, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities)

The final budget figures for fiscal year 2003 were released on October 20 by the Treasury Department.  They indicate that income tax receipts (including receipts from both the individual and corporate income tax) equaled just 8.6 percent of the Gross Domestic Product.  This is the lowest level of income tax collections, as a share of the economy, since 1942.  The decline in income taxes as a share of the economy to a level last seen six decades ago helps explain several other key findings about the final budget tally.

* In 2003, total federal revenues as a share of the Gross Domestic Product dropped to 16.6 percent.  The last time that total revenues as a share of the economy fell below 17 percent was in 1959, near the end of the Eisenhower Administration.  (The Gross Domestic Product is the basic measure of the size of the U.S. economy.)

* Not only are income taxes at historically low levels relative to the size of the economy, they are also at historically low levels as a share of all federal revenues.  In 2003, the share of federal revenues consisting of income taxes fell to its lowest level since 1941.  Conversely, the share of federal revenues consisting of payroll taxes reached the highest level in the history of the tax system.

* The sizable federal deficit in 2003 of 3.5 percent of GDP is more directly a reflection of diminished revenues than of increased spending.  While revenues as a share of GDP fell to their lowest level in 44 years, spending as a share of GDP was below its level in any year from 1980 to 1996, and far below its levels during the downturns of the early 1980s and early 1990s.

* The federal deficit would have been much larger in 2003 except for the fact that receipts going into the Social Security system exceeded Social Security expenditures.  The “on-budget” deficit in 2003 — the government’s measure that excludes consideration of Social Security receipts and expenditures — was 5.0 percent of the economy.

When we get to the tax and spending levels of the 1920's we'll have succeeded.

---

CONSERVATIVE TRIUMPH MUST BE NEAR ...

... when Cambridge, Massachusetts honors the BrothersJudd blog:

---

THE "MADMAN" NIXON STRATEGY IN ACTION:

Iran to Suspend Uranium Enrichment, Permit U.N. Inspections of Nuclear Program (Ed Johnson, October 21, 2003, The Associated Press)

Iran will suspend uranium enrichment and allow unrestricted inspections of its nuclear program, as sought by the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency, a senior Iranian official said Tuesday after three European foreign ministers came to Tehran to press the international community's case. Iran set no date for the steps.

Iran faces an Oct. 31 deadline, set by the International Atomic Energy Agency, to prove its does not have a nuclear weapons program as the United States alleges. Otherwise, the IAEA will likely turn to the U.N. Security Council, which could impose sanctions.

Iran also pledged to hand over long-sought information to the IAEA that should help it determine whether Tehran has tried to make nuclear weapons, diplomats said Tuesday in Vienna, where the agency is based.

You can just hear these foreign ministers saying: "Bush is crazy. He wants to nuke you and we can't stop him unless you comply."

---

CHOOSING LIFE:

Senate Passes Ban on Partial Birth Abortion, Sends Bill to Bush for Signature (The Associated Press, 10/21/03)

The Senate on Tuesday voted to ban the practice that critics call partial birth abortion, sending President Bush legislation that both supporters and foes said could alter the future of U.S. abortion rights. A court challenge is certain.

The 64-34 vote came three weeks after the House passed the same measure by 281-142.

Gov. Bush orders effort to save comatose woman: He signs bill to reinsert Terri Schiavo's feeding tube (October 21, 2003, CNN)

Florida Gov. Jeb Bush ordered a feeding tube reinserted into a brain-damaged woman Tuesday afternoon, shortly after the Legislature passed a bill allowing him to do so.

Florida lawmakers gave Bush the authority in an effort to keep Terri Schiavo alive nearly a week after the tube was removed, effectively overturning a court ruling that she be allowed to die.

The state Senate voted 23-15 on Tuesday to approve a measure allowing Bush to issue the one-time order. The tube was removed after a lengthy court battle between Terri Schiavo's husband, Michael, and her parents, Bob and Mary Schindler.

The bill also allows a judge to appoint an independent guardian for Schiavo, taking away guardianship from Michael Schiavo, who has been fighting to remove the tube.

They're too few and too far between, but every once in a great while the culture of death has a bad day.

MORE:
-ESSAY: What if There Is Something Going On in There? (CARL ZIMMER, 9/28/03, NY Times Magazine)

Daniel Rios is 24 years old, with wavy black hair, a thick mustache and a glassy stare that seems to look both at you and through you. One day almost four years ago, while he was taking a shower, a blood vessel ruptured in his brain, and he collapsed on the bathroom floor. After emergency surgery, he lay in a coma for three weeks. When he finally opened his eyes, he could not speak or move his body; his head simply lolled. In the months that followed, the doctors monitoring him at the Center for Head Injuries at the J.F.K. Johnson Rehabilitation Institute in Edison, N.J., saw few signs that he had any meaningful mental life. Sometimes he looked as if he were crying. Other times his eyes would follow a mirror passed before his face. On his best days he was able to close his eyes on command. But those days were rare. For the most part he lay unresponsive, adrift in a neurological twilight.

One morning just over a year after his accident, Rios was taken to the Sloan Kettering Institute on Manhattan's East Side. There, in a dim room, a group of researchers placed a mask over his eyes, fixed headphones over his ears and guided his head into the bore of an M.R.I. machine. A 40-second loop of a recording made by Rios's sister Maria played through the headphones: she told him that she was there with him, that she loved him. As the sound entered his ears, the M.R.I. machine scanned his brain, mapping changes in activity. Several hours afterward, two researchers, Nicholas D. Schiff and Joy Hirsch, took a look at the images from the scan. They hadn't been sure what to expect -- Rios was among the first people in his condition to have his brain activity measured in this way -- but they certainly weren't expecting what they saw. ''We just stared at these images,'' recalls Schiff, an expert in consciousness disorders at Weill Medical College of Cornell University. ''There didn't seem to be anything missing.''

As the tape of his sister's voice played, several distinct clusters of neurons in Rios's brain had fired in a manner virtually identical to that of a healthy subject. Some clusters that became active were those known to help process spoken language, others to recall memories. Was Rios recognizing his sister's voice, remembering her? ''You couldn't tell the difference between these parts of his brain and the brain of one of my graduate students,'' says Hirsch, an expert in brain imaging at Columbia University. Even the visual centers of Rios's brain had come alive, despite the fact that his eyes were covered. It was as if his sister's words awakened his mind's eye.

To the medical world, Rios and the hundreds of thousands of other Americans who suffer from impaired consciousness present a mystery. Traditionally, there have essentially been only two ways to classify them: as comatose (eyes closed and responses limited to basic reflexes) or vegetative (eyes opening and closing in a cycle of sleeping and waking but without any sign of awareness). In either case, it has been assumed that they have no high-level thought. But Schiff, Hirsch and a small group of like-minded researchers are studying people like Rios and finding that the truth is far more complicated. Their evidence suggests that even after an injury that leaves a brain badly damaged, even after months or years with little sign of consciousness, people may still be capable of complex mental activity.

---

ONLY THE LONELY CAN'T WAIT (via Rick Turley):

Ann Coulter Talking Action Figure (TalkingPresident.com)

Accepting Pre-Orders Now!
Orders will ship first week of November, 2003.
Please be advised, if you order other products, the entire order will not ship until then.

Listen To Her speak!
Below are only a few of the 14 different phrases that the Ann Coulter Action figure says when you press her button.
Batteries Included

DON'T FORGET EXTRA BATTERIES!

Of all the functions that an Ann Coulter doll could have, why does one suspect that the one her legion of male fans are interested in least is the capacity to talk?

---

4.5 BILLION YEARS TO PRODUCE THIS?:

Police will charge man after Niagara Falls stunt (Carolyn Thompson, 10/21/2003, AP)

A man who went over Niagara Falls with only the clothes on his back will be charged with illegally performing a stunt, Niagara Parks Police said Tuesday.

Kirk Jones, 40, of Canton, Mich., faces a maximum $10,000 fine after entering the Niagara River Monday afternoon and plunging over the Canadian Horseshoe Falls in front of stunned witnesses.

Jones, who was not seriously injured, remains hospitalized in Niagara Falls in stable condition. Police said Jones will remain in custody pending a bail hearing. A date for the hearing has not been set.

Niagara Parks Police Inspector Paul Fortier said the police have a videotape in their possession because they believe Jones was accompanied by another person. The other person has not been charged but they believe he videotaped the act, Fortier said.

Well, it's something to tell the grandkids. On the other hand, if there's anything to that Darwinism deal he shouldn't be allowed to breed.

---

BILE BY THE BARREL:

The Natural History of Bush-Hating (Keith Burgess-Jackson, 10/21/03, Tech Central Station)

The signs of Krugman's hatred are there for all to see. First, he is obsessed. Nearly every column for the past year has been about the Bush administration, and often about the president personally. I assume that Krugman has free rein as far as column topics go (just as I do at TCS), so why he focuses almost exclusively on President Bush requires explanation. Hatred explains it. Second, I have never seen Krugman make a favorable comment, even grudgingly, about President Bush. Someone might say that there is nothing favorable to be said, but that is disingenuous. Nobody is perfectly bad (omnimalevolent) and nobody performs only evil deeds (omnimaleficence). Krugman could prove me wrong by writing an occasional favorable column about the president or his administration. I will not hold my breath waiting for it.

Third, he systematically questions President Bush's motives. If the president says he did X for reason Y, Krugman says it was really for reason Z. Awarding a contract to Halliburton cannot possibly be legitimate; it must be a case of cronyism. Reducing taxes cannot be based on principle (e.g., that people are entitled to the fruits of their labor; that self-sufficiency is intrinsically good); it is calculated to "secure a key part of the Republican party's base," namely, the wealthy. To read Krugman is to see only corruption and deceit on the part of the president and his staff. It's not that the president's good intentions go awry, mind you. That would be a legitimate criticism. The president has bad intentions. Fourth, Krugman gives every indication of wanting the Bush administration's policies to fail, even if this redounds to the detriment of the American people. Krugman's incessantly negative and increasingly shrill and virulent columns about the war in Iraq, for example, come across as positively gleeful. One senses a hope, on his part, that the American reconstruction of Iraq fails. [...]

There is another and even better reason to refuse to read Krugman: He expounds on matters outside his field of expertise. Krugman's "economic" columns consist, in the main, of criticisms of President Bush's policies. The recent blackout, for example, was President Bush's fault. The California electricity crisis was President Bush's fault. Everything that happens in Iraq (or the Middle East generally) is President Bush's fault. Where did an economist get normative expertise? Graduate school? If so, which course or seminar, specifically? Was it during the research for and writing of the Ph.D. dissertation? But how does that work? I wrote a Ph.D. dissertation. It didn't make me wise(r). Economists are technicians, not moral preceptors. They can tell policymakers what they must give up in order to get this or that. They are not equipped, even if they are so inclined, to decide which action to take. [...]

Unfortunately, some of Krugman's readers may unwittingly infer normative authority from his authority in the technical realm of economics.

One thing about the Times is that its two ostensibly conservative columnists openly supported Bill Clinton over George Bush Sr., on the one hand (Bill Safire), and John McCain over George W. Bush, on the other (David Brooks). You'd think their Op-Ed page would be more interesting, if nothing else, were they to hire a real red-meat conservative and turn him loose. Don't even the editors there have to get tired of Krugman and Dowd obsessing over George W. Bush as the focus of evil in the modern world?

---

SHOTGUN WEDDING?:

Friend H. D. Miller has some questions about the marriage of convenience between: Michael Moore and Wal-Mart.

---

WHO DOES HE THINK HE IS, DOC SAVAGE?:

The Truth Is … Don’t Jump Onto a Moving Truck: Howard Dean Decides to Have Some Fun … But it Backfires (Marc. J. Ambinder, 10/20/03, ABCNEWS.com)

The former governor had arrived a few minutes before he was scheduled to speak to an organizing conference at St. Anselm College near Manchester. He was chatting along the side of the entrance road with a throng of college students, all Dean supporters, when a large red box truck began a slow turn into the parking lot.

By Dean's own recounting, he saw the truck slow down, and "decided to have a little fun." As the truck swung by, Dean hopped onto a running board on its rear.

"I thought the guy was going to pull up 5 feet and I was going to get off and say, 'Ha ha ha,' " he said. A playful prank for the benefit of a friendly crowd.

But then the truck took off. It accelerated to about 20 miles per hour, and zoomed out around the corner.

"I was stuck, clinging to the back of the truck," Dean said.

And people wonder why campaign staff try to make their candidate stick to the script...

---

COME INTO MY PARLOR SAID THE SPIDER TO THE FLY:

Bait-and-Switch on Public Education (NY Times, 10/21/03)

The new law is supposed to place a qualified teacher in every classroom and wipe out the achievement gap between rich and poor children. Schools that fail to make steady progress are labeled deficient and required to provide students with costly tutoring and allow them to transfer to more successful public schools in the same district.

In some districts, more than 40 percent of the schools are called "in need of improvement." The lack of money from Congress has licensed a backlash by states that never wanted to comply with the law anyway, especially the provision that requires ending the achievement gap between rich and poor.

Right on cue, these states are pressing Congress to suspend the new standards and accountability measures — until full financing is made available. A few brave lawmakers, like the Democratic whip, Representative Steny Hoyer of Maryland, have taken a strong stand against this. While criticizing the G.O.P. for failing to fully finance the new law, Mr. Hoyer and others have urged the states to stay the course and to discontinue the practice of educating affluent children while letting the poor fall by the wayside.

The Bush administration wanted to trumpet No Child Left Behind, then fail to pay for it — without the voters taking notice.

Boy, you can't sneak anything past the Times, can you? The point of the law--and it represents a signal victory for the President, one that was obvious even as it was being negotiated--is to force vouchers locally, not to fund education nationally. Meanwhile, how much would Karl Rove love it if Ted Kennedy, congressional Democrats, and some weak-kneed Republicans pass a bill that lowers education standards so that the President can veto it?

---

DWARF TOSSER:

Is the Democratic Party clueless about the modern South? (Bill Cotterell, Oct. 21, 2003, Jewish World Review)

"But Lord, those current presidential candidates in my party!" [Senator Zell] Miller writes. "They are good, smart and able folks but if I decide to follow any of them down their road, I'd have to keep my left turn signal blinking." Among his Senate colleagues, Miller sees John Edwards "shooting brightly through the skies like Halley's Comet," Joe Lieberman "steadily and surely plodding along … like Aesop's tortoise" and John Kerry "posing for Vogue in an electric blue wet suit with a surfboard tucked up under his arm like a rail just split. It made me wonder, are there more surfboards or shotguns in America?

"There's also Bob Graham, who made Florida a great governor, and Howard Dean of Vermont, with whom I served as lieutenant governor and governor," says Miller. "Clever and glib, but deep this Vermont pond is not."

The kind folks at Stroud & Hall just sent us Senator Miller's very amusing book, A National Party No More, amusing to a Republican anyway; for Democrats who'd like to win elections it must be heartbreaking. Mr. Miller combines a folksy memoir of his inordinately successful political life with an impassioned polemic against the special interests and ideologues who have driven his beloved party so far out of the mainstream that it has virtually ceased to be a viable party in the South.

There are many great lines, but that assessment of Howard Dean is really devastating.

---

AMERICA'S VIRGIN EARS:

Muzzling the wrong dog (Cal Thomas, Oct. 21, 2003, Jewish World Review)

The Bush administration is making a fundamental mistake when it promotes the fiction that our enemies can be made less threatening by what America says and does. That should now be obvious to Democratic senator and presidential candidate Joseph Lieberman, who spoke last Friday (Oct. 17) to an Arab American Institute meeting in Dearborn, Mich. Lieberman, who is Jewish, noted that Jews and Muslims are descendants of Abraham. "I am your brother," he said, and added, "Whatever differences we may have on the issues of the day are differences of ideas, not of religion or nationality." Members of the audience heckled him.

This notion that religion is not at the heart of the hatred directed at America from outside and now inside the country qualifies as extreme denial. Throughout the Muslim world, America is condemned not mainly because of its ideas but because Islamists believe we are infidels opposed to G-d. [...]

The problem is illustrated by this story: There are two dogs; one is vicious and the other friendly. The vicious dog regularly attacks the friendly dog. The owner of the friendly dog decides to muzzle his dog, hoping this will demonstrate to the vicious dog that the friendly dog means him no harm. The vicious dog sees his opportunity and kills the muzzled friendly dog.

In muzzling Boykin, the Pentagon has not converted those who believe they have a religious mandate to destroy us. It is silencing, instead of sounding, the alarm that this enemy is bigger than any threat America has ever faced.

If an American general gave this speech (warning: scatology alert) today, more than one of the Democratic candidates would call for him to be court-martialed.

---

THE REVERSE DUST BOWL:

It's Arnold v. the 'U-Haul indicator' Popular economics (Jason Chow, , October 21, 2003, Financial Post)

The cost of renting a 26-foot U- Haul moving truck for a one-way trip from Los Angeles to Las Vegas is US$1,080. The same move in the opposite direction costs only US$133.

To economist Brian Wesbury, the difference in cost is an accurate snapshot of the economic climate in California: People are moving out of the state as opportunity diminishes and few want to move into a slumping economy.

A one-way U-Haul move from Los Angeles to Phoenix costs US$837 while the return costs US$116. San Francisco to Boise: US$2,024. Return trip: US$310.

Compare those rates to what U-Haul charges for the same truck between two Midwestern cities. A U-Haul rental from Chicago and Detroit costs US$419. The return rental is almost identical in price at US$449.

"Obviously, California is having a hard time keeping U-Haul trucks in the state," wrote Mr. Wesbury, in a note to clients.

Quite possibly the first economic indicator in the history of mankind that makes any intuitive sense.

---

UNFREAKINBELIEVABLE:

Anti-Semite berated by Bush, greeted by PM Choices at APEC summit (Mike
Blanchfield, 10/21/03, CanWest News Service)

Jean Chretien shook hands with the Malaysian Prime Minister yesterday but did not condemn him for anti-Jewish remarks that provoked international outrage and earned a personal rebuke from the U.S. President. [...]

Mr. Chretien failed to add his voice to those of the leaders of Australia, Germany, Italy, Spain and the European Union, who have condemned Mr.
Mahathir for saying that Jews "rule this world by proxy" and that Muslims should rise against them for a "final victory."

"He was there. I shook hands with him like with everybody else," Mr. Chretien said after meeting Mr. Mahathir at the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit of 21 world leaders.

Mr. Chretien would not offer an opinion on Mr. Mahathir's remarks when he met later with Canadian reporters.

Later they chatted over a bowl of Vichyssoise...

---

WE'VE POPGUNS; THEY CANONS:

Grumbling Trickles Down From Reagan Biopic (JIM RUTENBERG, 10/21/03, NY Times)

"The Reagans," according to the final version of the script obtained by The New York Times, does give Mr. Reagan most of the credit for ending the cold war and paints him as an exceptionally gifted politician and a moral man who stuck to his beliefs, often against his advisers' urgings.

But there is no mention of the economic recovery or the creation of wealth during his administration, key accomplishments to his supporters. Nor does it show him delivering the nation from the malaise of the Jimmy Carter years, as his supporters say he did.

The details the producers do choose to stress — like Mr. Reagan's moments of forgetfulness, his supposed opinions on AIDS and gays, his laissez-faire handling of his staff members — often carry a disapproving tone.

Nancy Reagan, who is played by Judy Davis, does not get light treatment either. While the script portrays Mrs. Reagan as a loyal and protective wife, it also shows her as a control addict, who set the president's schedule based on her astrologer's advice and who had significant influence over White House personnel and policy decisions.

The portrayal sounds well within the realm of fairness, if somewhat negative in approach--of course, they tipped their hand early when they hired Mr. Streisand to play Ronald Reagan. But far more people will watch this than have read all the positive assessments of the Reagan presidency. It's well to remember that even though the Right is no longer silenced on the air waves and in magazines and publishing, the real mass media is still the bailiwick of the Left.

---

THE DEMOCRATS VS. REALITY:

Improvement in Bottom Lines Pumping Up Investors' Hopes (JONATHAN FUERBRINGER, 10/21/03, NY Times)

After a long nightmare on Wall Street, the latest profit figures from corporate America have been the stuff of investors' dreams.

Corporate earnings are set to have their best quarter since the spring of 2000, with initial estimates of a 21 percent jump over last year's third quarter. Strong consumer spending, a weakening dollar and further cost- cutting all helped to improve the bottom line for companies that have already reported for the quarter, which ended Sept. 30.

One interesting aspect of investor willingness to hop back into the market so soon is that Democrat opposition to privatizing Social Security has over the past two years been predicated on how the bursting of the last bubble proved such a personal investment plan too risky. Folks seem instead to have a reasonably high level of faith that the market goes up over the long term.

---

HIS HALITOSIS WOULD HAVE BEEN SUFFICIENT JUSTIFICATION:

Richard Perle's Horizons (Bret Stephens and Michael Oren, Oct. 19, 2003, Jerusalem Post)

Perle: The justification was never restricted to weapons of mass destruction. The president talked about regime change very early on. The regime change argument was eclipsed by the weapons of mass destruction argument partly because the Department of State was always uncomfortable talking about regime change... [because] that it is outside what is today the accepted notion of legitimacy in international terms.... But weapons of mass destruction and violations of UN resolutions are a solid basis for reaction and the State Department gravitated toward the legally correct view.

If someone were to go back and look at all of George Bush's statements on Iraq he would find that at a certain point he stops talking about regime change and talks almost exclusively about violations of UN resolutions, some of which, by the way, centered on human rights. Not all of them centered on weapons of mass destruction. Now that's been forgotten and I hear it said all the time that the basis was the weapons of mass destruction. In any case, we know that Saddam had a weapons of mass destruction program. Although we haven't found stockpiles, I don't believe that Saddam was significantly less dangerous because he didn't have a stockpile.

The reality is that in the aftermath of September 11 Bush became seized with the idea of not waiting too long. The problem was compounded by the decline in support for the containment policy, which was no longer merely containment. The sanctions regime was falling apart.... There was the very real prospect that Saddam was going to emerge as a great hero, having outlasted the sanctions regime, having outlasted the West, having violated the cease-fire, any number of UN resolutions and getting away with it and this became increasingly intolerable. So we had to do something. The fact that we have not found the stockpile in no way diminishes the justification for taking that action....

We many not and need not always choose to do so, but is there ever a bad reason for the West to depose a totalitarian dictator?

---

ON NOT TREATING MEN LIKE ANGELS:

The Rise of Illiberal Democracy (Fareed Zakaria, November 1997, Foreign Affairs)

FROM THE TIME of Herodotus democracy has meant, first and foremost, the rule of the people. This view of democracy as a process of selecting governments, articulated by scholars ranging from Alexis de Tocqueville to Joseph Schumpeter to Robert Dahl, is now widely used by social scientists. In The Third Wave, Samuel P. Huntington explains why:

Elections, open, free and fair, are the essence of democracy, the inescapable sine qua non. Governments produced by elections may be inefficient, corrupt, shortsighted, irresponsible, dominated by special interests, and incapable of adopting policies demanded by the public good. These qualities make such governments undesirable but they do not make them undemocratic. Democracy is one public virtue, not the only one, and the relation of democracy to other public virtues and vices can only be understood if democracy is clearly distinguished from the other characteristics of political systems.

This definition also accords with the commonsense view of the term. If a country holds competitive, multiparty elections, we call it democratic. When public participation in politics is increased, for example through the enfranchisement of women, it is seen as more democratic. Of course elections must be open and fair, and this requires some protections for freedom of speech and assembly. But to go beyond this minimalist definition and label a country democratic only if it guarantees a comprehensive catalog of social, political, economic, and religious rights turns the word democracy into a badge of honor rather than a descriptive category. After all, Sweden has an economic system that many argue curtails individual property rights, France until recently had a state monopoly on television, and England has an established religion. But they are all clearly and identifiably democracies. To have democracy mean, subjectively, "a good government" renders it analytically useless.

Constitutional liberalism, on the other hand, is not about the procedures for selecting government, but rather government's goals. It refers to the tradition, deep in Western history, that seeks to protect an individual's autonomy and dignity against coercion, whatever the source -- state, church, or society. The term marries two closely connected ideas. It is liberal because it draws on the philosophical strain, beginning with the Greeks, that emphasizes individual liberty. It is constitutional because it rests on the tradition, beginning with the Romans, of the rule of law. Constitutional liberalism developed in Western Europe and the United States as a defense of the individual's right to life and property, and freedom of religion and speech. To secure these rights, it emphasized checks on the power of each branch of government, equality under the law, impartial courts and tribunals, and separation of church and state. Its canonical figures include the poet John Milton, the jurist William Blackstone, statesmen such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, and philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Adam Smith, Baron de Montesquieu, John Stuart Mill, and Isaiah Berlin. In almost all of its variants, constitutional liberalism argues that human beings have certain natural (or "inalienable") rights and that governments must accept a basic law, limiting its own powers, that secures them. Thus in 1215 at Runnymede, England's barons forced the king to abide by the settled and customary law of the land. In the American colonies these laws were made explicit, and in 1638 the town of Hartford adopted the first written constitution in modern history. In the 1970s, Western nations codified standards of behavior for regimes across the globe. The Magna Carta, the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, the American Constitution, and the Helsinki Final Act are all expressions of constitutional liberalism.

THE ROAD TO LIBERAL DEMOCRACY

SINCE 1945 Western governments have, for the most part, embodied both democracy and constitutional liberalism. Thus it is difficult to imagine the two apart, in the form of either illiberal democracy or liberal autocracy. In fact both have existed in the past and persist in the present. Until the twentieth century, most countries in Western Europe were liberal autocracies or, at best, semi-democracies. The franchise was tightly restricted, and elected legislatures had little power. In 1830 Great Britain, in some ways the most democratic European nation, allowed barely 2 percent of its population to vote for one house of Parliament; that figure rose to 7 percent after 1867 and reached around 40 percent in the 1880s. Only in the late 1940s did most Western countries become full-fledged democracies, with universal adult suffrage. But one hundred years earlier, by the late 1840s, most of them had adopted important aspects of constitutional liberalism -- the rule of law, private property rights, and increasingly, separated powers and free speech and assembly. For much of modern history, what characterized governments in Europe and North America, and differentiated them from those around the world, was not democracy but constitutional liberalism. The "Western model" is best symbolized not by the mass plebiscite but the impartial judge.

It is odd that the United States is so often the advocate of elections and plebiscitary democracy abroad. What is distinctive about the American system is not how democratic it is but rather how undemocratic it is, placing as it does multiple constraints on electoral majorities. Of its three branches of government, one -- arguably paramount -- is headed by nine unelected men and women with life tenure. Its Senate is the most unrepresentative upper house in the world, with the lone exception of the House of Lords, which is powerless. (Every state sends two senators to Washington regardless of its population -- California's 30 million people have as many votes in the Senate as Arizona's 3.7 million -- which means that senators representing about 16 percent of the country can block any proposed law.) Similarly, in legislatures all over the United States, what is striking is not the power of majorities but that of minorities. To further check national power, state and local governments are strong and fiercely battle every federal intrusion onto their turf. Private businesses and other nongovernmental groups, what Tocqueville called intermediate associations, make up another stratum within society.

The American system is based on an avowedly pessimistic conception of human nature, assuming that people cannot be trusted with power. "If men were angels," Madison famously wrote, "no government would be necessary." The other model for democratic governance in Western history is based on the French Revolution. The French model places its faith in the goodness of human beings. Once the people are the source of power, it should be unlimited so that they can create a just society. (The French revolution, as Lord Acton observed, is not about the limitation of sovereign power but the abrogation of all intermediate powers that get in its way.) Most non-Western countries have embraced the French model -- not least because political elites like the prospect of empowering the state, since that means empowering themselves -- and most have descended into bouts of chaos, tyranny, or both. This should have come as no surprise. After all, since its revolution France itself has run through two monarchies, two empires, one proto-fascist dictatorship, and five republics.

Of course cultures vary, and different societies will require different frameworks of government. This is not a plea for the wholesale adoption of the American way but rather for a more variegated conception of liberal democracy, one that emphasizes both parts of that phrase. Before new policies can be adopted, there lies an intellectual task of recovering the constitutional liberal tradition, central to the Western experience and to the development of good government throughout the world. Political progress in Western history has been the result of a growing recognition over the centuries that, as the Declaration of Independence puts it, human beings have "certain inalienable rights" and that "it is to secure these rights that governments are instituted." If a democracy does not preserve liberty and law, that it is a democracy is a small consolation.

Our local citizens' group recently discussed Fareed Zakaria's The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad , in which he expands on this essay. We'd be intereseted in folks' thoughts on the book or on our review. You can actually get most of his argument from the original essay, above.

---

AND HE CAN DO HIS CONVENTION SPEECH IN UNDER A MINUTE:

Bobby Jindal's Rise: Louisiana's next governor may be an Indian-American Republican. (John Fund, October 9, 2003, Wall Street Journal)

The young Mr. Jindal faced enormous skepticism that a person with dark skin could succeed in Louisiana, a state in which David Duke was the runner-up for governor just a dozen years ago. Indeed, when state Rep. Jay Blossman dropped out of the race last month, he endorsed another Republican with a reference to Mr. Jindal's ethnic background: "It's unfortunate, but it is a fact, that Jindal has no chance of winning a runoff."

But the candidate has already confounded experts who predicted he would never make it past the primary. "What he's done so far has been amazing," says Wayne Parent, a political scientist at Louisiana State University. Mr. Jindal scored points by touting his political inexperience: "I'm not a politician, I'm a problem solver." His impressive machine-gun like recitations of how he would shake up state government and attract industry became the highlight of candidate debates.

He treats his Indian background as an overall plus but won't trade on it. He left the space for "race" on his qualifying papers blank and attacks the division of people along racial lines. "I'm against all quotas, all set-asides," he says. "America is the greatest. We got ahead by hard work. We shouldn't respond to every problem with a government program. Here, anyone can succeed."

Mr. Jindal certainly has. He was born in Baton Rouge in 1971, shortly after his parents moved to the U.S. His father took a job as an engineer at Exxon so that Bobby's mother could earn a degree in nuclear physics at Louisiana State University. At the age of four he dropped "Piyush" as his first name in favor or "Bobby" after a character on "The Brady Bunch." He was raised a Hindu but converted to Catholicism at Brown University. He was admitted to medical school but dropped plans to be a doctor after winning a Rhodes Scholarship. His academic background in health-care administration impressed Gov. Mike Foster, who named him to head the state's $4 billion Department of Health and Hospitals. Mr. Jindal imposed budget discipline and rooted out so much fraud that he was able to turn the state's $400 million Medicaid deficit into a surplus.

Seems wildly overqualified to be a governor of LA.

---

THE CRICKET IN TIMES SQUARE:

Waiting for Democrats on Iraq (NY Times, October 20, 2003)

Virtually all the Democratic presidential contenders are now skewering one or another aspect of the administration's flawed postwar policies. But many of these same candidates voted for the war. (Representative Richard Gephardt even appeared beside Mr. Bush in the Rose Garden last fall to urge Democrats to vote for a war resolution.) Mainstream Democrats did the country no favor by failing to raise more questions earlier about the administration's unilateral approach to Iraq. Those who want to take over the making of foreign policy should spell out their own ideas for fixing what is wrong in Iraq and suggest how they would respond to similar crises.

Almost all the Democratic contenders talk about enlisting more help from America's allies and the United Nations. What's missing is an explanation of how they would achieve this desirable goal given the obvious reluctance of many countries to contribute troops as long as America retains exclusive political control. Senators John Kerry and Joseph Lieberman are headed in the right direction when they suggest putting the U.N. in charge of Iraq's political reconstruction and transferring more authority to Iraqis. Sharing power might also bring more competitive bidding for contracts.

On another big issue, Senators Lieberman and Kerry are right to call attention to the strain Iraq places on the army and reserves. Senator Kerry usefully suggests expanding the active-duty force by 40,000, half of them specialists in the postconflict assignments now falling to the reserves. Other candidates need to address this issue. One of them in particular, Gen. Wesley Clark, has the expertise to speak knowledgeably about it.

The candidates also need to tell Americans where they stand on the larger issue of preventive war. The prewar intelligence failures in Iraq and the failure, so far, to find threatening unconventional weapons strike at the basic premises of Mr. Bush's alarmingly novel strategic doctrines. What alternative ideas do the Democratic contenders have for handling threats like North Korean, and possibly Iranian, nuclear weapons programs and for dealing with countries that give aid and sanctuary to international terrorist groups? And what would they do to keep Afghanistan, the scene of America's first post-9/11 war, from falling back into chaos with a revived Taliban?

This is all certainly true, but where are the bold ideas of the Times editorial board, which has felt no compunction about back-biting at a commander-in-chief in time of war?

---

NEXT!:

Putting Syria in the dog house (Claude Salhani, 9/22/2003 , UPI)

Again last week friends of Israel and enemies of Syria stepped up their efforts to pass the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act of 2003, in a renewed effort to have sanctions imposed on Syria as punishment for failing to toe the U.S. line. Marc Ginzburg, a former U.S. ambassador to Morocco, said, "Syria continues to believe it can ignore any threat from the U.S."

Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Shara, however, said earlier Syria would meet any "reasonable" U.S. request for help following U.S. accusations that Damascus was not doing enough to end support for "terrorist activity."

It would be worth looking at what those sanctions would in fact accomplish should President Bush, who last year opposed passing the act, now decided to sign it. Undersecretary of State John Bolton announced last week that the administration had dropped its objection to the bill and Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., said, "I think it's time to pass this important legislation." Engel says the bill has the support of the majority of the House (266) and the Senate (73), including the majority of Democrats and Republicans. [...]

While the economic sanctions that would accompany the Syria Accountability Act does somewhat worry the Syrians, its ramifications are not all that devastating, seeing the current level of trade between Syria and the United States is not all that important in the first place. According to the U.S.-Arab Chamber of Commerce and the U.S. Census Bureau, exports to Syria from the United States in 2002 amounted to a pitiful $274.1 million while imports from Syria for the same year were only $148.1 million.

And sanctions aimed at keeping technology out of Syria would simply not work. "If Syrians need a computer they would simply drive to Beirut," said a veteran U.S. diplomat, intricately familiar with the area. Smuggling banned items into Syria from Lebanon would be all the more simplified by the fact that Syrian troops still control large chunks of Lebanon, especially along the border between the two countries.

There's still one Ba'athist regime too many.

---

ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE?:

Bleak Arab progress report: The second in a series of UN reports is short on solutions for the region. (Nicholas Blanford, 10/21/03, The Christian Science Monitor)

Findings of the Arab Human Development Report 2003
• The number of Arab students in the US dropped by 30 percent between 1999 and 2002.

• Public spending on education in Arab countries has declined since 1985, and enrollment in higher education has fallen. Among women, high illiteracy rates persist.

• There are less than 53 circulating newspaper copies per 1,000 Arab citizens, compared with 285 per thousand in developed countries.

• There are 18 computers per 1,000 people in Arab countries, compared with a global average of 78.3 per 1,000.

• Internet access is available to 1.6 percent of the population in Arab countries. Telephone line access in the countries is barely one-fifth that of developed countries.

• Just 4.4 translated books per 1 million people were published between 1980 and 1985. The corresponding rate for Hungary was 519 books per 1 million people, and in Spain, 920 books.

• The number of scientists and engineers working in research and development is 371 per 1 million people, compared with the global rate of 979.

• The production of literary and artistic books in 1996 did not exceed 1,945 books, representing just 0.8 percent of world production. Religious books account for 17 percent of the total.

Geez, that's depressing.

---

ALL COMMON KNOWLEDGE IS WRONG FILES:

Prolonging the Depression: The New Deal: Time for a new look. (ROBERT L. BARTLEY, October 20, 2003, Wall Street Journal)

[Jim Powell of the Cato Institute] adopts the Milton Friedman view of the Depression--that it resulted primarily because an ignorant Federal Reserve let the money supply shrink, instead of maintaining steady growth. This view is for sure a big advance on the conventional wisdom. That is, it sees the Depression as the result of policy mistakes, not a spontaneous market failure.

I prefer the explanation offered by Robert Mundell, another Nobel Prize economist and my own longtime guru. In his Nobel lecture he stressed the failure of the international monetary mechanism; World War I disrupted the gold standard, and leading central banks had not constructed a good alternative. The result was a shortage of world liquidity, setting off a chain reaction of bad policies around the globe.

From this viewpoint, I would lay the first blame not on FDR but on Herbert Hoover, who was after all on watch when disaster struck. Mr. Powell ably recounts Hoover's mistakes in signing the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, and in vainly trying to balance the budget by raising taxes in 1932. The Republican president boosted the top marginal rate to 63% from 25%; Roosevelt took it to 75% and then 91%.

Hoover also started many of the New Deal measures, for example the Federal Home Loan Bank System that melted down in the 1990-91 recession. Most importantly, he was the original proponent of the notion of spontaneous market failure. In my view the decisive turn was not FDR's electoral landslide, but Hoover's rejection of his first Treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon.

The idea that Hoover was a big government liberal who responded to the incipient Depression with activist policies would not have fazed his contemporaries, but has been anathema to the Academy for decades for for two reasons:

(1) The Right has to have caused the Depression.

(2) The Left has to have cured it.

Thus, it was a great pleasure and a pleasant surprise when David Kennedy, in his entry for the Oxford History of the United States, Freedom From Fear, honestly presented the facts very much as above or as in Paul Johnson's indispensable Modern Times.

---

LIBERTY FOR ALL? (via Mike Daley):

The Soul of a Nation (Vaclav Havel, October 12, 2003, Washington Post)

There are many politicians in the free world who favor seemingly pragmatic cooperation with repressive regimes. During the time of communism, some Western politicians preferred to appease the Czechoslovak thugs propped up by Soviet tanks rather than sustain contacts with a bunch of dissidents. These status-quo Western leaders behaved, voluntarily, much like those unfortunate people who were forced to participate in the massive government rallies: They allowed a totalitarian regime to dictate to them whom to meet and what to say. At that time, people such as the French president, Francois Mitterrand, and the Dutch minister of foreign affairs, Max van der Stoel, saved the face of the Western democracies by speaking and acting clearly. By the same token, politicians such as Japan's Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and Philippine Foreign Secretary Blas Ople redeem the Asian reputation by not hesitating to speak the truth. The regime in Burma is, as a matter of fact, the disgrace of Asia, just as Alexander Lukashenko's regime in Belarus is the disgrace of Europe and Fidel Castro's regime in Cuba of Latin America.

In Burma, thousands of human lives have been destroyed, scores of gifted people have been exiled or incarcerated and deep mistrust has been sown among the various ethnic groups. Human society is, however, a mysterious creature, and it serves no good to trust its public face at any one moment. Thousands of people welcomed Suu Kyi on her tours, proving that the Burmese nation is neither subjugated nor pessimistic and faithless. Hidden beneath the mask of apathy, there is an unsuspected energy and a great human, moral and spiritual charge. Detaining and repressing people cannot change the soul of a nation. It may dampen it and disguise the reality outwardly, but history has repeatedly taught us the lesson that change often arrives unexpectedly.

"To talk about change is not enough, change must happen," said Suu Kyi during a tour among her people. The Burmese do not require education for democracy; they are and have always been ready for it.

This is certainly what we on the Right believed of Eastern Europe all through the Cold War, but the docility, even resentment, of the post-war Iraqis has to shake your faith at least a little, doesn't it? Might people whose faith does not demand freedom in fact tend to become apathetic under tyranny? Or is the desire for freedom, as we'd like to believe, the birthright of all men? On the answer to these questions will turn the decision of whether we can just wait for the end of history to work itself out or whether it will be necessary to forcibly convert sufficiently divergent cultures to our Western faith in liberal values. That's a decision of awesome moment, so we'd do well to get it right.

Comments

---

CHIN TO CHIN MUSIC:

Bush Condemns Malaysian Remarks on Jews (PATRICK McDOWELL, 10/20/03, Associated Press)

President Bush on Monday personally condemned the Malaysian prime minister for his statement that Jews rule the world, pulling Mahathir Mohamad aside at an international economic meeting to tell him the remarks were "wrong and divisive," Bush's spokesman said.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan quoted Bush as telling the Malaysian leader, "It stands squarely against what I believe in."

Bush confronted Mahathir between meetings of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, McClellan said, inserting himself into a simmering controversy.

Jacques Chretien was overheard plaintively saying: "He doesn't even scold me face to face anymore..."

---

ELECTED RANTING:

California comic eyed for Senate (James G. Lakely, 10/19/03, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

If Arnold Schwarzenegger can be elected governor of California, can comedian Dennis Miller unseat Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer?

Some Republicans in the Golden State think so, and quietly hope they can persuade the sharp political wit — and registered Santa Barbara Republican — to take on the liberal senator. Variety magazine reported this week that Mr. Miller has contacted California Republican consultants to feel out a campaign. [...]

Hugh Hewitt, a popular conservative radio personality credited by many for helping to spur the California recall, has doubts that celebrity political magic could strike twice.

"A Miller candidacy guarantees the ability to get a message past gatekeepers like the Los Angeles Times. That's a huge plus," Mr. Hewitt said. "But the message also has to work in a Republican primary, and I'm not sure what Miller believes outside of a very appealing understanding of the war on terror. So there's a lot of potential there, but some questions as well."

The contrast of one of the wittiest guys in America against a Senator almost universally recognized as a few slices shy of a loaf would just be painful to watch--we'd pay money to see it.

MORE:
-INTERVIEW: "Live" with TAE--Dennis Miller: He’s a Hollywood celebrity. And he’s smart. He’s one of the country’s favorite comedians. And he’s a conservative. Wipe that smirk off your face and meet a patriotic entertainer. (The American Enterprise, Oct/Nov 2003)

---

WHAT WAR?:

Reduction in U.S. Troops Eyed for '04: Gradual Exit Strategy Tied to Iraq's Stability (Thomas E. Ricks, October 19, 2003, Washington Post)

U.S. military commanders have developed a plan to steadily cut back troop levels in Iraq next year, several senior Army officers said in recent interviews.

There are now 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. The plan to cut that number is well advanced and has been described in broad outline to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld but has not yet been approved by him. It would begin to draw down forces next spring, cutting the number of troops to fewer than 100,000 by next summer and then to 50,000 by mid-2005, officers involved in the planning said.

The plan, which amounts to being the first formal military exit strategy for Iraq, is designed to show how the U.S. presence might be reduced without undercutting the stability of the country. Military officials worry that if they do not begin cutting the size of the U.S. force, they could damage troop morale, leave the armed forces shorthanded if crises emerge in North Korea and elsewhere, and help create a long-term personnel shortage in the service.

What was that you were saying, Mr. Dean?

---

NOT WHETHER IT'S TRUE, BUT WHETHER IT'S PLAUSIBLE:

THE STOVEPIPE: How conflicts between the Bush Administration and the intelligence community marred the reporting on Iraq’s weapons. (SEYMOUR M. HERSH, 2003-10-27, The New Yorker)

Who produced the fake Niger papers? There is nothing approaching a consensus on this question within the intelligence community. There has been published speculation about the intelligence services of several different countries. One theory, favored by some journalists in Rome, is that sismi produced the false documents and passed them to Panorama for publication.

Another explanation was provided by a former senior C.I.A. officer. He had begun talking to me about the Niger papers in March, when I first wrote about the forgery, and said, “Somebody deliberately let something false get in there.” He became more forthcoming in subsequent months, eventually saying that a small group of disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators had banded together in the late summer of last year and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves.

“The agency guys were so pissed at Cheney,” the former officer said. “They said, ‘O.K, we’re going to put the bite on these guys.’” My source said that he was first told of the fabrication late last year, at one of the many holiday gatherings in the Washington area of past and present C.I.A. officials. “Everyone was bragging about it—‘Here’s what we did. It was cool, cool, cool.’” These retirees, he said, had superb contacts among current officers in the agency and were informed in detail of the sismi intelligence.

“They thought that, with this crowd, it was the only way to go—to nail these guys who were not practicing good tradecraft and vetting intelligence,” my source said. “They thought it’d be bought at lower levels—a big bluff.” The thinking, he said, was that the documents would be endorsed by Iraq hawks at the top of the Bush Administration, who would be unable to resist flaunting them at a press conference or an interagency government meeting. They would then look foolish when intelligence officials pointed out that they were obvious fakes. But the tactic backfired, he said, when the papers won widespread acceptance within the Administration. “It got out of control.”

Like all large institutions, C.I.A. headquarters, in Langley, Virginia, is full of water-cooler gossip, and a retired clandestine officer told me this summer that the story about a former operations officer faking the documents is making the rounds. “What’s telling,” he added, “is that the story, whether it’s true or not, is believed”—an extraordinary commentary on the level of mistrust, bitterness, and demoralization within the C.I.A. under the Bush Administration. (William Harlow, the C.I.A. spokesman, said that the agency had no more evidence that former members of the C.I.A. had forged the documents “than we have that they were forged by Mr. Hersh.”)

The F.B.I. has been investigating the forgery at the request of the Senate Intelligence Committee. A senior F.B.I. official told me that the possibility that the documents were falsified by someone inside the American intelligence community had not been ruled out. “This story could go several directions,” he said. “We haven’t gotten anything solid, and we’ve looked.” He said that the F.B.I. agents assigned to the case are putting a great deal of effort into the investigation. But “somebody’s hiding something, and they’re hiding it pretty well.”

The CIA forging them seems unlikely, but the fact its interests are considered opposed to the Administration's seems undeniable and suggests there's ample reason to believe that the manner in which Joe Wilson was chosen for the Niger mission matters very much.

---

MOURNING BECOMES NEW ENGLAND:

Damn Yankees: A tragedy in Eleven Innings (Paul Greenberg, 10/20/03, Jewish World Review)

Imagine what Sophocles could have done if he'd had some real material to work with - like the Red Sox instead of a faded Theban legend about a blind king.

Then he might have written like A. Bartlett Giamatti, president of Yale, commissioner of major league baseball, Red Sox fan and therefore a man well acquainted with tragedy. Professor Giamatti needed no chorus to set the scene; he got right to the point that dreary Sunday after the big game:

"It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. Today . . . a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped and summer was gone."

As every baseball fan knows, there is life and there is the off-season. There is hope and there is baseball in Boston. And always, as in the Gwen Verdon musical and real heartbreaking life, there are the Damn Yankees, waiting to bring the curtain down and cackle gleefully, the demons.

Once again the tragedy has been faithfully performed, the rites of fall duly observed, and the bright season closed and put away, the soul cleansed of foolish hope. It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. Again everything is as it must be, as it should be, as it always is. And the curtain falls, like a fan's hopes.

You don't have to be Presbyterian to appreciate predestination; you only have to follow the Red Sox. It's not sad, really, it's kind of uplifting, the sheer certainty of the outcome every year. "Hardship to those resigned," pronounces Oedipus in exile, "is no dismay." He must have been a Red Sox fan.

At least Oedipus has the decency to poke his own eyes out for his sins.

---

RIGHTING THE SHIP?:

Alliance MPs vote 51-1 for Tory union: Harper gets standing ovation for deal, but MPs admit they still have concerns (Joe Paraskevas, October 20, 2003, The Ottawa Citizen)

Canadian Alliance Members of Parliament gave party leader Stephen Harper a standing ovation before a special meeting yesterday, then voted strongly in favour of a plan to create a new conservative party out of the Alliance and the Progressive Conservatives. [...]

"After 16 years we continue to move forward," Mr. Harper told the MPs at the outset of the meeting, a comment aimed at showing the Alliance, and its predecessor the Reform party, formed in 1987, would be alive and well in the proposed Conservative Party of Canada.

Mr. Harper also joked that the plan for the new party he and Tory leader Peter MacKay signed last week did not violate Alliance MPs' position against same-sex marriage. It was rather "a civil union," he said.

But the remark hinted at a problem: a fear the Alliance's social conservatism won't appeal to moderate Tories -- that could thwart ratification of the merger.

Alberta MP Myron Thompson, one of the Alliance's staunchest social conservatives, voted for the plan, but he also warned that some voters in his riding feared the new entity would abandon the original goals of Reform : to give Western Canada a strong voice and make fundamental changes to the way government operates.

"A lot of them are the old diehard Reformers who are afraid they're going to lose what the intention was like from the very beginning," said Mr. Thompson, who was then asked what place there would be for moderate -- or red -- Tories in the proposed new party.

It's great if they unite and move the Tories to the Right, offering a genuine and unified conservative alternative, but we'll see.

MORE:
Raining on the euphoria of the merger (Jackson Murphy, October 20, 2003, Enter Stage Right)

Loveable losers though the two parties are two questions remain. Will the new Conservative Party snatch victory from the jaw of defeat, or rather defeat from the jaws of victory?

"The notion that the Liberals have been maintained in power only by the splitting of the right-of-center vote has been a source of immense solace to conservatives," writes Andrew Coyne in The National Post. "[R]ather as the ‘Curse of the Bambino' has been to Boston Red Sox fans over the years: It's a happier explanation than mere incompetence." [...]

On one hand the new party must be on some sort of right track to begin with. It has angered the progressive part of the PC Party as David "Kingmaker" Orchard and "Jurassic" Joe Clark have already condemned the proposal. If you want to galvanize the right there is no better way than trotting out the reddest of Red Tories.

Perhaps the betrayal of Clark, and David Orchard, especially old Joe is the political equivalent of digging up Babe Ruth's body from the cemetery in New York, apologizing for trading him, and reburying him under the pitcher's mound at Fenway Park. It is a curse breaker, or at least in this case a good start.

On the other hand it is still dangerous and wishful thinking to think that a merge alone will mean instant victory. More important is finding someone to lead this rag tag group of anyone but the Liberals out of the wilderness and back into power. Getting someone like Red Sox manager Grady Little, or that Cub fan with the wandering arms, will get front row seats only to the next Liberal Throne Speech not a Conservative victory party.

-The different styles of conservatism in Canada (Mark Wegierski October 20, 2003, Enter Stage Right)

There are many different, broadly right-wing factions in Canada, however most of them have a comparatively minor influence on the public scene. The perennially ruling Liberal Party has a 'right-wing' which has embraced a degree of fiscal sense, but remains thoroughly socially-liberal. The federal Progressive Conservative party, which currently has 15 MPs, has often had 'ultra-moderates' or 'Red Tories' exerting the most influence on it. The Progressive Conservative parties in the various provinces are of varying ideological complexions. Mike Harris, the former Premier of Ontario (elected in 1995 and 1999) was able to drag the provincial Progressive Conservative party in a right-wing direction, although his activism was mostly confined to economic and fiscal issues. The Canadian Alliance (which elected 66 MPs in the November 2000 federal election, mostly from Western Canada) (and which exists solely at the federal level) is probably the main home for so-called small-c conservatives today. (The term 'small-c conservative' arose in Canada as a result of the fact that the Progressive Conservative party -- or 'big-C' Conservatives -- had almost entirely abandoned conservatism.)

---

LASALLE, WE AREN'T HERE:

Bush snubs PM at APEC meeting: U.S. trying to shift group's focus from finance to security (Scott Stinson, October 20, 2003, National Post)

Jean Chretien has been rebuffed in an attempt to meet formally with George W. Bush at the APEC summit of world leaders, a further sign the U.S. President plans to wait until the Prime Minister leaves office before renewing warm relations with his northern neighbour.

Although Mr. Bush has met with the South Korean President, the Thai Prime Minister and the Chinese President in advance of the two-day Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit that begins in Bangkok today, his office has not responded to a Canadian request for a face-to-face meeting. [...]

Mr. Bush has not visited Canada since he became President in 2001.

---

SURE HE GOT WAXED ON SUPER TUESDAY, BUT HE CARRIED GUAM!:

2 Top Democrats Will Not Contest Iowa's Caucuses (ADAM NAGOURNEY, October 20, 2003, NY Times)

Two prominent Democratic presidential candidates, Gen. Wesley K. Clark and Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, have decided to bypass Iowa's presidential caucuses, angering some party leaders there and signaling what could be a very different nomination battle next year. [...]

"What we'll do is what I call the General MacArthur strategy," a senior Clark adviser said. "General MacArthur was very successful in World War II because he skipped over the Japanese strongholds, where they were more organized, and instead picked islands that were favorable or neutral terrain. Which means we would choose not to focus resources on Iowa and instead focus them on New Hampshire and on Feb. 3," when there are Democratic contests in seven states.

Mr. Lieberman's advisers said his moderate stances on issues that are big in Iowa now, including his strong support for the war in Iraq and support of treaties lowering trade barriers, were problematic in a contest that attracts many liberal and blue-collar voters. His decision marks something of a retreat by the man who was his party's vice-presidential candidate in 2000; Mr. Lieberman has spent 15 days campaigning in Iowa this year.

"I think it's pretty safe to say that there's recognition inside the campaign that Iowa is not now, and will never be, Lieberman country," one adviser said.

Another adviser said on Sunday, "There's no victory in being fourth in Iowa."

John McCain was able to ignore Iowa because he was going to do very well or even win NH. The strategy of the current crop of Democrats--John Edwards and his SC fire wall; Joe Lieberman trying to make AZ matter; etc.--asks supporters, donors, staff, and the press to keep the faith longer than seems likely.

---

EVEN PAT'S ON BOARD:

Is it Bush vs. Dean? (Pat Buchanan, October 20, 2003, Townhall.com)

With an uptick in his approval rating to 56 percent -- higher than Reagan at this point in his presidency -- George W. Bush seems to have weathered his summer squall and to be well-positioned to do what his father failed to do: Win a second term. [...]

If Wall Street remains the lead indicator it has usually been -- a predictor of what is to come in the economy six to 12 months out -- Bush could be presiding over good times in 2004.

Moreover, with the dollar sinking, aiding U.S. exports, with most Bush tax cuts taking effect before November '04, with Alan Greenspan gunning the money supply and with a $550 billion deficit pumping out cash, the economy has all the steroids it needs for an Olympic performance in 2004.

Then there is Iraq, about which a consensus seems to be emerging. Those who opposed the war do not want to cut and run and leave Iraq to chaos and civil war. Those who supported the war do not want to stay on forever and fight an Iraqi intifada.

The consensus appears to be this: America will not send fresh new divisions to fight a five- or 10-year war. Iraq will be helped onto its feet and power transferred as soon as possible, so Iraqis themselves can take responsibility for their own independence. And then, the Americans go home.

The absence of a Buchanan-like challenger helps too.

---

WAR ALWAYS WIDENS:

Behind a widening US-Arab clash: US stature in Middle East is eroding, resulting in increasingly open attacks against American targets. (Peter Grier, 10/17/03, The Christian Science Monitor)

Two years into the war on terrorism, the US and the Arab world are as estranged as ever, and appear to be drifting further and further apart.

The situation may not yet be the "clash of civilizations" foreseen by Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington in a now-famous 1993 journal article. But on both sides, opinions seem to be hardening, while conflict spreads to new fronts:

• In Gaza, Palestinian militants targeted Americans for the first time in their three-year uprising with this week's fatal attack on a US diplomatic convoy.

• In Washington, the House Wednesday overwhelmingly approved a measure that calls for economic sanctions against Syria until the White House certifies that Damascus no longer supports terrorists.

• Throughout the Middle East, Arab publics increasingly see the US presence in Iraq as one step short of colonial.

The relationship may only get worse, if a front-page editorial in Lebanon's main daily paper, As-Safir, accurately reflects the region's mood.

"One does not reveal a secret by saying many Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims kill an American every day in their dreams," said As-Safir following the Gaza attack. "The United States is responsible for massive catastrophes that have befallen this region and its people...."

Whatever those catastrophes are, they're nothing compared to the one that will be visited on them if they really decide to generalize this conflict.

---

WHERE THE FIGHT LEADS & ENDS:

Tribes inflamed by Qaeda hunt: Waziristan is notoriously independent and shares an ideological bond with Osama bin Laden. (Owais Tohid, 10/20/03, The Christian Science Monitor )

Early this month, hundreds of Pakistani commandos, aided by helicopter gunships, fought a pitched battle with Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters amid the mud-walled homes in Baghar village, a few miles from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Eight Al Qaeda men were killed, and 18 captured; among the dead were Chechens and Arabs. Two Pakistani soldiers also died.

Since then, Pakistani troops have been patrolling the region in armored vehicles, and on horseback in South Waziristan, where troops and paramilitaries stand guard in new bunkers.

More than 50 tribesmen have been arrested in recent days, their shops sealed and warnings issued to turn over 13 locals believed to have provided shelter to Al Qaeda and Taliban "terrorists" fighting against the US-led coalition forces.

"We have told the tribal chiefs to immediately hand over the men who harbored Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists and assisted them in fighting against US forces across the border or be ready for a massive operation," says a senior administrative official, Pir Anwer Ali Shah. "We will not let anybody harbor terrorists in our territory."

Pakistan's tribal belt still follows the format established by colonial officers prior to the end of British rule in 1947. The federal government "administers" the independent tribal belt, but Pakistani laws do not apply to the tribesmen. The administration uses the dated British-era Frontier Crimes Regulations, under which tribal elders have to hand over wanted criminals at the request of the federal government. So far, tribal chiefs have handed over three alleged hosts of Al Qaeda to the authorities.

"It is a political game between the authorities and tribal chiefs," says Waziristan-based writer and sociologist Sailab Meshud. "The authorities are pressuring the tribesmen, and the tribal chiefs are buying time [for] Al Qaeda fighters and their local agents to slip away and prevent clashes between the tribesmen and the Pakistan Army," Mr. Meshud says.

But the tribesmen are enraged, and accuse President Pervez Musharraf of conspiring against the tribesmen at the behest of Washington.

If they're helping our enemy and share the same ideology, are they not our enemy?

MORE:
Religious killings on the rise in Pakistan despite crackdown Killings among rival Sunnis and Shi'ites have left 76 dead, casting doubts over anti-militant drive (Straits Times, 10/20/03)

The resurgence of killings among the rival Sunni and Shi'ite sects of Islam, climaxing with the murder of Sunni icon Azam Tariq, has underscored long-held doubts about the direction of Pakistan's crackdown on Islamic militancy, analysts say.

Tariq's death 'was the most foretold in Pakistan', the Daily Times newspaper said, questioning how one of the most high-profile sectarian leaders could be gunned down in broad daylight as he entered the nation's capital.

To date, no one has been arrested for the Oct 6 killing, the most high-profile of at least 76 Shi'ite and Sunni deaths this year.

---

FROM LOSERMAN TO TAXMAN ISN'T EXACTLY PROGRESS:

Taxman and Robin (E.J. Dionne Jr., October 17, 2003, Washington Post)

How does it feel for cautious, moderate, mild-mannered Joe Lieberman to find himself suddenly compared to Robin Hood? [...]

What Lieberman proposed is a version of tax reform aimed at shifting the burden toward the wealthy -- exactly the people who have benefited the most from President Bush's program -- and away from poor and middle-class taxpayers. [...]

For married couples with taxable incomes of $56,800 or less, the 15 percent income tax rate would fall to 12.5 percent. For incomes between $56,800 and $114,650, the rate would drop from 25 percent to 22.5 percent. The rate reductions kick in for single taxpayers at roughly half those amounts.

Lieberman estimates that a married couple earning $50,000 a year could save as much as $1,000 from his plan; at double that income, the savings would roughly double.

For poorer Americans, he would fix the earned-income tax credit, the program that raises the incomes of the working poor, by eliminating biases in its rules against married people and larger families. Score one for pro-family progressivism.

But Lieberman then turns around and restores part of the inheritance tax that is in the process of being repealed. He gets rid of Bush's dividend tax cut, raises the top rate back to 39.6 percent and applies it to married couples earning $150,000 or more. And -- here's the Robin Hood part -- he levies a 5 percent surtax on families with incomes of over $250,000. (Interestingly, Lieberman keeps the capital gains tax cuts because he thinks they promote growth.)

Because all these numbers are based on taxable rather than gross income -- and because higher-income taxpayers would derive some benefit from Lieberman's rate cuts -- his staff reckons that all Americans earning less than $200,000 a year would benefit from his plan. Lieberman estimates that netting out the cuts and increases, the plan would yield between $600 billion and $700 billion in additional tax revenue over the next decade.

There's much to argue about here, and we'll get to that. But at least Lieberman has joined Rep. Richard A. Gephardt in competing for the bold ideas award.

Setting aside for a moment both the Marxist interpretation of Robin Hood and the question of whether taxing the rich is good policy, what matters here is this: no bold political idea is that hard to explain and process. When Ronald Reagan ran on tax cuts he proposed cutting rates by 30%. That's pretty easy to grasp anyway, but what came through was just the idea that he'd cut taxes. When George W. Bush ran on cutting taxes, his plan was way too convoluted, but the message was easy: he'll cut taxes. Joe Lieberman is saying that he'll raise taxes but that he'll shift the burden around, which means folks are both going to hear an initial message that scares them and have to know the specific details about the plan. That seems dubious politics.

---

SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY:

The Jewish Love Affair with the Democrats (Jason Maoz, October 17, 2003, JewishPress)

Surprising as it might seem from our vantage point, the Jews who came to the U.S. prior to the great waves of immigration from Eastern Europe tended to look askance at the Democratic party, which was identified in the popular mind with Tammany-style political bossism, support for slavery, and an agrarian populism that often seemed indistinguishable from the rawest
anti-Semitism.

That attitude changed with the arrival of the Eastern European Jews who crowded into the big cities at the turn of the century and quickly learned that their very livelihoods were dependent on the good will of those Tammany-like political machines, which were invariably Democratic and
invariably corrupt.

Jobs and basic amenities were used as barter to purchase party loyalty, and bribery was the order of the day - the late New York senator Jacob Javits told the story of how his father loved Election Day because the saloonkeepers would pay $2 (double a day`s wages at the time) to anyone who promised to vote Democratic.

Although the dominance of the big city bosses was an inescapable fact of life for the new Jewish immigrants, the pressure to vote the party line was felt most keenly in local elections. When it came to presidential politics, Jews were far less wary of voting their conscience.

In 1916, for example, Republican candidate Charles Evan Hughes received 45 percent of the Jewish vote, and four years later Republican Warren Harding actually won a plurality among Jews - 43 percent as opposed to 19 percent for Democrat James Cox and 38 percent for Socialist Eugene V. Debs.

That last figure - nearly 4 in 10 Jews voting for the Socialist candidate - tells a story in itself, a story not to be ignored when seeking to understand Jewish voting habits. Many of the Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe came to America with a passionate belief in one form or another of socialism, and those Jews tended to vote for third party left-wing candidates when offered the choice. Though their candidates were, with the exception of some local races in immigrant neighborhoods, roundly unsuccessful, Jewish socialists and communists left a seemingly indelible stamp on the collective political identity of American Jews.

Most Jews, however, whether out of political moderation or fear of wasting their vote on a long shot, cast their ballots for either Democrats or Republicans. And though the Republicans lost a significant number of votes in 1924 to the third party candidacy of Progressive Robert LaFollette, it was not until the election of 1928 that the relationship between Jews and the Democratic party became the inseparable bond that still exists nearly 75 years later.
The Affair Commences
It was in 1928 that Democratic presidential candidates first began polling landslide numbers among American Jews, as New York governor Al Smith, a Roman Catholic of immigrant stock (whose campaign manager happened to be Jewish) captured 72 percent of the Jewish vote. Despite his overwhelming Jewish support, and the equally strong backing of fellow Catholics, Smith carried only 8 states against Republican Herbert Hoover and failed to win his own home state of New York.

The nascent trend of lopsided Jewish support for Democratic presidential candidates solidified four years later when another New York governor, Franklin Roosevelt, won the votes of better than 8 in 10 American Jews. Roosevelt, whom Jews idolized more than any other politician before or since, went on to win 85 percent of the Jewish vote in 1936 and 90 percent in both 1940 and 1944.

The question really is less why the party loyalty than the rigid adherence to a far left ideology. The former simply follows from the latter. Mr. Maoz doesn't seem to have the answer.

---

NO, NO, WE ARE SWISS, SWISS:

Swiss Right Wing Win Challenges Political Stability (Reuters, October 19, 2003)

The Swiss right wing raced ahead in general elections on Sunday in a move which could unsettle the neutral nation's renowned political stability by rocking the foundations of the 44-year-old coalition government.

A polarization in voter sentiment saw support swing behind the anti-immigrant Swiss People's Party (SVP), which edged out the left-leaning Social Democrats (SP) to become the nation's most popular group, a Swiss television projection showed.

Proud of its neutrality and impeccable democratic credentials, Switzerland has long played on its strength as a stable political nation, building up a reputation as a safe haven for offshore wealth in turbulent times.

But strong gains for the SVP point to increasing concerns in the recession-hit nation of rising unemployment and a falling standard of living. The party also reinforced Switzerland's isolation by campaigning against closer ties with EU neighbors.

Seems pertinent to the story below about how the Tories are done as a major party--the path back to power is pretty obvious.

---

WHERE'S THE BEEF?:

2004 Democratic Candidates Still Mostly Unknown (Dana Blanton, October 18, 2003, Fox News)

Over a third (37 percent) of Americans say there is a Democratic candidate they would vote for over President Bush, 44 percent say there is not an announced candidate they would vote over Bush, and 19 percent are unsure, according to this week's FOX News poll. Of those saying there is a Democrat they would support over Bush, a plurality says they would vote for "any or several" of the Democrats rather than the president.

Retired Gen. Wesley Clark bests Lieberman by only two percentage points (well within the poll's margin of error) on the question of which Democrat running has the strongest leadership qualities. Lieberman is the only candidate to receive double-digits on the questions of which Democratic candidate is the most honest and trustworthy (16 percent) and which has the best knowledge of the issues (18 percent).

Most strikingly, over half of voters are unsure or have no opinion on these candidate questions. [...]

Support for Clark is down seven percentage points from September polling, when he was receiving considerable media coverage following his announcement to join the race. Now retired, Clark was a general in the U.S. Army and is still referred to as Gen. Clark. Over half of the public (56 percent) think people are more likely to vote for Clark because of his title, 18 percent say people are less likely, and 16 percent think Clark's title will not make any difference.

It seems even more striking that the better folks get to know these candidates the less they like them. It seems about time for the press to try and force an Edwards boomlet--based mostly on his polls in SC and the delusion that he'll still matter after IA and NH--because neither Dean nor Clark has weathered their 15 minutes well.

---

WOULDN'T DEAN HAVE OPPOSED KING PHILIP'S WAR?:

Is Howard Dean a modern Puritan? (Steve Sailer, 10/16/03, UPI)

Is Howard Dean of Vermont, the current frontrunner for the Democrat Party presidential nomination, a 21st-century version of the New England Puritan? According to historian David Hackett Fischer, cultural patterns laid down by different groups of British settlers
before 1776 explain much about the extent and limits of Dean's appeal.

According to Fischer, a Brandeis University professor who is the author of the landmark 1989 book, "Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America," Dean has positioned himself as a "classic New England candidate who closely fits the cultural framework that evolved out of 17th-century Puritanism."

Fischer noted in a telephone interview from his home in Massachusetts that Dean's followers admire him for what they see as "a very strong moral impulse, an intellectual quality that sets him apart from the others, and a particular quality of striving." These are all traits associated with the
old New England WASP culture, Fischer told United Press International.

Commenting on Dean's opposition to President Bush's pre-emptive attack on Iraq, Fischer said, "New Englanders are apt to make very strong moral judgments on just versus unjust wars. New Englanders haven't had an anti-war tradition in general. They strongly supported the Revolution, the Civil War and WWII. Yet, they were also the strongest center of opposition to the War
of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War and Vietnam."

Fischer contended that the Bush administration's doctrine of pre-emptive war on Iraq was foreign to New England's traditional self-image. "It's very important to New Englanders not to fire the first shot," he said.

The notion that Howard Dean -- whose appeal to the Left of his party rests largely on his support for buggery, Ba'athism, and big government -- is the Puritan candidate in this race seems more than just a stretch. Here's how Edmund Morgan famously described the Puritan dilemma:

Superficially Puritanism was only a belief that the Church of England should be purged of its hierarchy and of the traditions and ceremonies inherited from Rome. But those who had caught the fever knew that Puritanism demanded more of the individual than it did of the church. Once it took possession of a man, it was seldom shaken off and would shape--some people would say warp--his whole life. Puritanism was a power not to be denied. It did great things for England and America, but only by creating in the men and women it affected a tension which was at best painful and at worst unbearable. Puritanism required that a man devote his life to seeking salvation but told him he was helpless to do anything but evil. Puritanism required that he rest his whole hope in Christ but taught him that Christ would utterly reject him unless before he was born God had foreordained his salvation. Puritanism required that man refrain from sin but told him he would sin anyhow. Puritanism required that he reform the world in the image of God's holy kingdom but taught him that the evil of the world was incurable and inevitable. Puritanism required that he work to the best of his ability at whatever task was set before him and partake of the good things that God had filled the world with but told him he must enjoy his work and his pleasures only, as it were, absent-mindedly, with his attention fixed on God.

That's deuced hard to square with the kind of self-centered search for easy gratification that Mr. Dean's advocating. In fact, not only is Mr. Dean not a moralist, he's an amoralist--it being his position that we can judge neither the sexual behavior of fellow citizens nor the political regime or rival nations.

Even down to the time of Jonathan Edwards, the Puritans and their successors were terrified of the savages they found in New England and torn between the desire to convert them and the seeming necessity of killing them. It's easy enough to see the parallels to our own war on terror. But neither of those impulses, the one to bring the Bible, the other to bring the sword, is currently on display in the Democratic Party, which has instead adopted a kind of "the Islamic world is none of our business--leave them alone and they'll leave us alone" attitude. Such a disinterested "live-and-let-live" posture is quite foreign to Puritanism, especially as applied to obvious heretics.

---

IF YOU'RE PRO-POST-HUMAN AREN'T YOU ANTI-HUMAN?

The Pursuit of Biohappiness (Leon R. Kass, October 16, 2003, Washington Post)

To be sure, there are questions about the safety of new biotechnologies and about equality of access to their use. But these familiar concerns do not reach either the true promise or deeper perils of the biotechnology revolution. Our hopes for self-improvement and our disquiet about a "post-human" future are much more profound. At stake are the kind of human being and the sort of society we will be creating in the coming age of biotechnology.

On the optimistic view, the emerging picture is one of unmitigated progress and improvement. It envisions a society in which more and more people are able to realize the American dream of liberty, prosperity and justice for all. It is a nation whose citizens are longer-lived, more competent, better accomplished, more productive and happier than human beings have ever been. It is a world in which many more human beings -- biologically better-equipped, aided by performance-enhancers, liberated from the constraints of nature and fortune -- can live lives of achievement, contentment and high self-esteem, come what may.

But there are reasons to wonder whether life will really be better if we turn to biotechnology to fulfill our deepest human desires. There is an old expression: To a man armed with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To a society armed with biotechnology, the activities of human life may seem more amenable to improvement than they really are. Or we may imagine ourselves wiser than we really are. Or we may get more easily what we asked for only to realize it is much less than what we really wanted.

We want better children -- but not by turning procreation into manufacture or by altering their brains to give them an edge over their peers. We want to perform better in the activities of life -- but not by becoming mere creatures of our chemists or by turning ourselves into tools designed to win and achieve in inhuman ways. We want longer lives -- but not at the cost of living carelessly or shallowly with diminished aspiration for living well, and not by becoming people so obsessed with our own longevity that we care little about the next generations. We want to be happy -- but not because of a drug that gives us happy feelings without the real loves, attachments and achievements that are essential for true human flourishing.

For the past 16 months, the President's Council on Bioethics has explored the ethical and social meanings of using biotechnologies for purposes "beyond therapy." Our report, released today, tries to show what is increasingly at stake when biotechnology meets the pursuit of happiness. Lacking prophetic powers, no one can say for certain what life in the age of biotechnology holds in store. Most likely it will be the usual mix of unforeseen burdens and unexpected blessings. But we must begin thinking about these issues now, lest we build a future for ourselves that cheapens, rather than enriches, America's most cherished ideals.

Bush's Advisers on Biotechnology Express Concern on Its Use (NICHOLAS WADE, October 17, 2003, NY Times)

Laying a broad basis for possible future prescriptions, the President's Council on Bioethics yesterday issued an analysis of how biotechnology could lead toward unintended and destructive ends.

Called "Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness," the council's report concerns present and future interventions intended not to restore health but rather to alter genetic inheritance, to enhance mind or body, or to extend life span beyond its natural limits. [...]

The report's overall thrust is that people's desire to improve themselves or to give their children an edge carries the risk of putting strain on human nature in many unintended ways. The council expresses concern at "the attractive science-based power to remake ourselves after images of our own devising." It asks if the purpose of medicine is "to make us perfect, or to make us whole?" It concludes that "the human body and mind, highly complex and delicately balanced as a result of eons of gradual and exacting evolution, are almost certainly at risk from any ill-considered attempt at 'improvement.' "

One attempt, where individuals' interest may clearly differ from society's, is that of choosing the sex of one's children — to balance the sexes within a family in some cultures, to obtain a son in others.

The report notes that a sex ratio of more than 106 boys to 100 girls can be regarded as evidence of sex selection — usually achieved by sonogram and abortion, though sperm-sorting methods developed from animal husbandry are also available. In Cuba the sex ratio is now 118, in China 117, in Egypt 108.7 and in Venezuela 107.5. There have also been significant changes in the ratio among two American ethnic groups: over the last 20 years, the sex ratio for Chinese-Americans has risen to 107.7 from 104.6, and for Japanese-Americans to 106.4 from 102.6.

What could possibly be wrong with wanting to remove one little birthmark?

---

THE DON IS DEAD:

Hating women (Shmuley Boteach, Oct. 19, 2003, Jerusalem Post)

The awarding of this year's Nobel Peace Prize to Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian judge and women's rights activist, was as courageous as last year's to Jimmy Carter was cowardly. While Carter, of course, deserves a Nobel Appeasement Prize, the peace prize belongs to those who fight for the disenfranchised rather than those who stand up for the dictators who do the disenfranchising. And what group today is more discriminated against than women, both in Islamic culture and in the West? [...]

When Moses first encounters God in the desert, he is commanded to take off his shoes lest he trample on holy ground. Chivalry too was once predicated on the idea that men had to mind their manners in the presence of creatures that reflected the divine spirit. Only feminine sanctity can recreate masculine dignity.

Some suggestions in that direction include a return to single-sex education where girls can learn to discover their identities as individuals before being immersed in an environment where popularity among the boys is the determining factor of their significance.

Likewise, boycotts organized by women leaders, who thus far have been shamefully silent, against companies and TV networks that move products by demeaning and exploiting women would be welcome. Finally, an emphasis on the ability for attentive fathers to provide their daughters with a healthy form of male attention that will make their daughters less dependent on pimply pubescent boys is a really good idea.

Most urgent of all, Islamic imams must emerge to state that it is bad enough that their once glorious faith has instilled such hatred in young men that they are willing to sever the arms and heads of little children in buses. But if even their women become murderers, who will ever save them?

If you're writing about the exploitation of women in the West, abortion, abandonment and divorce seem more significant than reality TV shows.

---

ANGLER UP:

Fish Fry: Why Marlins fans should root for the Yankees. (Sam Eifling, October 17, 2003, Slate)

Where the Cubs and Red Sox are cursed with never winning the big game, the Marlins are cursed with never losing it. In playoff series, Florida is now 5-0 all-time, and I use that term loosely, considering the franchise started playing way back in 1993. Another title would be the second in six years. They've never lost a deciding game, never watched anyone but their Scrooge ex-owner rip out their guts. These are formative experiences for any fortified fan, and their absence is the No. 2 reason, behind that nefarious fire sale, why a recent World Series champion playing in the middle of 5 million people (including almost 2 million of Hispanic origin, many of whom serenade the team with that haunting "Maaaar-leeeeen" call) drew only 16,290 fans a game this season, third-lowest in the majors. (It was, however, a 60 percent increase from 2002.) Another World Series win, and what's the lesson for Fish fans? Come back in six years to pick up another commemorative hat?

Dan Levatard was on NPR's Only a Game yesterday, talking about how amusing South Florida finds it that they've been paying attention to the Marlins for about eight minutes and they're in a World Series, while obsessive Cubs and Red Sox fans are shut-out again. He also talked about how clueless theur young team is about baseball history and whatnot, Luis Castillo in particular. He's apparently a notorious spaceshot, who loses his mitt between innings, gets on team planes not even knowing where they're going, and heading to the batter's box with no idea what they guy on the mound throws. So they were in St. Louis during an Old-Timer event and someone asked the little speedster if he'd like to meet one of the all-time stolen base greats--Lou Brock. Castillo apparently had never heard of him. But a few minutes later, someone walks up to introduce a distinguished older gentleman and Castillo gushingly greets "Lou Brock!" But it was Stan Musial.

---

IDS OVER:

Tory fears as IDS probe widens its net: Investigation will dig deeper into funding of opposition office (James Cusick, 10/19/03, Sunday Herald)

The parliamentary investigation into allegations that Iain Duncan Smith’s wife was paid a salary from public funds for work she did not do, will now dig far deeper into the overall financial running of the Tory leader’s office than initially expected.
With IDS’s hold on the leadership already suffering from a widespread whispering campaign to unseat him, loyalists fear the wider inquiry only offers the prospect of further damage being inflicted on the Tory party itself.

Sir Philip Mawer, the parliamentary standards commissioner, has begun looking at the running costs of the opposition office – including the roles, functions and expenses of all key staff – in order to discover precisely what work was done by Betsy Duncan Smith as his diary secretary following her husband’s jump from back-bencher to Tory leader. [...]

The inquiry – which was initiated after a dossier of evidence on IDS’s office was handed to Sir Philip last week by the BBC journalist, Michael Crick – appears to have left dissident Tory MPs in a mood of temporary retreat.

Last week, it was widely expected that “substantially more than 25” Tory MPs would mount a formal challenge to Duncan Smith.

Many are now hoping that would no longer be necessary as even a mildly critical report from Sir Philip will be enough to leave IDS wounded and with little option but to resign.

As one supporter of IDS said: “The plotters, these cowards, are clearly hoping Sir Philip does their work for them. We shall have to wait and see.”

At least it gets the BBC back on Labour's good side.

MORE:
Can anyone save the Tory party?: They admit their great days are past, that even Disraeli and Churchill couldn’t run them now. James Cusick, Westminster Editor, asks if the Tories can ever recover (James Cusick, 10/19/03, Sunday Herald)

Relegated to being not one of the great parties of today, but simply “one of the great political parties of history” ... this was the sad lament for the Conservative Party delivered last week by the former Tory leader and prime minister John Major. “Heartbroken” at the current state of his party, and almost reaching for the Kleenex, Major said that unless it stopped its internal feuds it would be condemned to the electoral wilderness.
At the end of the 19th century, Benjamin Disraeli, fearing much the same outcome as Major, put his case more succinctly. Disraeli told a feuding Tory friend: “Damn your principles. Stick to your party.”

Actually, what the Tories need now is the opposite advice: Damn the Party. Return to principles! It has been obvious for almost fifteen years now--since Margaret Thatcher was tossed over--if not more, that the future of Britain's conservative movement lies in three things: re-privatization of the State; traditional morality; and defense of British sovereignty against Europeanists.

---

THERE'RE BILLIONS ALL OVER THE PLACE:

Why Arnold is unlikely to raise taxes and spending (Daniel Weintraub, October 19, 2003, Sacramento Bee)

If he's not going to raise taxes, then, what can Schwarzenegger do to balance the budget? He can start by cutting spending. While the Democrats in the Legislature will resist, Schwarzenegger can begin with about $2 billion in spending cuts proposed earlier this year by Gov. Gray Davis that were never enacted. He can probably credibly propose another $2 billion from his plans to cut waste and restructure government.

Schwarzenegger is also going to look to the federal government to reimburse California for some of the cost of providing services -- schools, health care, incarceration -- to illegal immigrants. And he wants to negotiate new deals with the Indian gaming tribes, allowing them more slot machines in return for a contribution to the state's general fund. These two sources could yield several billion dollars combined.

Finally, Schwarzenegger has said he wants to restructure the state's debt and seek voter approval for borrowing that Davis and the Legislature approved earlier this year, possibly in violation of the state constitution. Refinancing that debt over a longer period could provide short-term savings of as much as $2 billion annually.

People keep saying that Arnold can't balance the CA budget, but if Mr. Weintraub thinks he can then we do to.

---

LUCKY DOG:

Not such a funny girl (Scotland on Sunday, 10/19/03)

THE most horrifying sentences in the English language (in ascending order of terror) run as follows. Your bank card has been withheld. This figure is only an estimate. I have written a novel, would you give it a look? The boss wants to see you. This is going to hurt a bit, I’m afraid. Come and see Barbra Streisand sing a song to her dead dog on television.

With huge pictures of her ex-poodle Sammy projected behind her, Barbra Streisand last week launched her 60th album, a collection of film tunes, with a rare television appearance, crooning Smile in tribute to her pet, who had been dispatched to the great kennel in the sky 12 months earlier. Here was a showbiz legend taking us through every furball of her deceased dog. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde on the death of Little Nell: it would take the heart of Carla Lane not to laugh out loud.

Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the day a gawky Streisand made her debut in London. The Daily Mail told its readers to remember the young American’s oddly spelt name. However, their prescience did not extend to telling cabaret drag artistes, nail technicians and comedy writers that a major meal ticket had just arrived.

---

NEW DEFENDERS OF THE FAITH:

What It Takes to Be a Neo-Neoconservative (JAMES ATLAS, 10/19/03, NY Times)

Among the enduring legacies of the earlier [Vietnam] era was the split between liberals who opposed the war and the small splinter group that would become known as the neoconservatives. The group's decision to support the Vietnam War — or at least to oppose those who opposed it — was a shift that would lead them to a new level of power and influence.

The war in Iraq has shown signs of a similar split: a pro-war faction of the liberal intelligentsia has rejected a reflexive antiwar stance to form a movement of its own. The influence of these voices isn't to be underestimated. The marginality of intellectuals is a myth; even in the resolutely hermetic world of Washington, their voices are heard.

For the liberal intellectuals of this generation, the war in Iraq has required nuanced positions. Michael Ignatieff, director of the Carr Center at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and a self-styled "liberal centrist," focused on the human rights issue: if liberating Iraq from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein saved opponents of the regime from torture or death, that in itself justified the war.

The political philosopher Michael Walzer, the editor of Dissent magazine, was ambivalent, but directed much of his anger at the rigid politics of the anti-interventionist left in the face of Sept. 11.

Christopher Hitchens, a columnist for Vanity Fair who had disapproved of United States intervention in the first Persian Gulf war, was excited about Americanization as a revolutionary force. Calling himself a "Paine-ite," he saw the new war as an uprising against an illegitimate state.

The writer Paul Berman forcefully expressed the opinion that not only was President Bush justified in his prosecution of the war but that he had dragged his feet. Terrorism, Mr. Berman wrote in his book "Terror and Liberalism," is a form of totalitarianism; the war in the Middle East is a war to defend liberal civilization. [...]

In the early stages of their ideological development, neoconservatives saw themselves more as reformed liberals than as true conservatives. Mr. Bell, who predicted "the end of ideology," identified himself as a socialist; Mr. Kristol identified himself -- in a famous formulation -- as a liberal who has been "mugged by reality."

Yet in the end, all were liberals who, by the 1970's and the midpoint in their careers, were proud to identify themselves as neoconservatives, who were not the heirs of classical conservatism but rather had discovered the limitations of liberalism. A neoconservative, it might be postulated, is one who read and repudiated Marx; a conservative, one who read and embraced Hume, Locke and Hobbes.

This generation of liberal intellectuals, like its precursors, prefers to see itself less as a political coalition than as an assemblage of writers with diverse views — which of course it is. Ideological labels are always provisional. Yet however much their attitudes toward the war in Iraq differ from those of such contemporary neoconservatives as William Kristol and Robert Kagan, they are heirs of the same intellectual tradition. Given this, can they still be classified as liberals? Or could it be that they've become . . . neoconservatives?

It's an interesting dynamic that takes hold in such situations: they begin by recognizing--perhaps with some surprise--that they actually like our culture well enough to want to defend it against external enemies, and as time goes by they realize that if it really is worth preserving it has to be defended from internal enemies too.

---

HIS FINAL GIFT TO US:

Unraveling the Mortal Coil, in Plain View (FRANK BRUNI, 10/19/03, NY Times)

[C]atholic leaders and people who know the pope say he also believes that any suffering he endures has value, providing people with an inspirational image of courage. Experts on aging say John Paul is providing people with something else as well: a reminder and warning of questions that society must confront as medical advances prolong people's lives.

What is the proper way to respect older people and reap the benefits of their perspectives while also making adjustments for their possibly diminished abilities? What belongs in public, and what is better left in private?

"In a sense, he really captures a dilemma," said Harry Moody, a senior researcher at the International Longevity Center in New York, a policy analysis group. "If we do prize and value the contributions and the wisdom of elders, how do we reconcile that with the dignity we want to give them?"

Mr. Moody said the prominence of the pope's stooped, largely immobile figure in the news media was "certainly unprecedented in political terms, in religious terms."

But, he added, "It's not without implications in an aging society."

As if the Pope hasn't already done more than his share to try to shore up the rickety moral framework of the West, his conscious decision to die in full view may be as important as anything he's ever done. In an age when people blithely assume that some lives are not worth living -- and act on that belief by killing the very young, the old, the infirm, and the handicapped -- he's demonstrating the essential dignity that a suffering soul retains.

---

REALITY COMES TO CALIFORNIA:

Wal-Mart, Driving Workers and Supermarkets Crazy (STEVEN GREENHOUSE, 10/19/03, NY Times)

In February Wal-Mart will open its first grocery supercenter in California, offering everything from tires to prime meats, and that could be a blessing for middle-class consumers. The reason is simple: Wal-Mart's prices are 14 percent lower than its competitors', according to a study by the investment bank UBS Warburg. [...]

Many factors explain Wal-Mart's ability to charge low prices, including economies of scale, the pressures it puts on suppliers and its embrace of imports — it imported $12 billion in goods from China last year, one-tenth of American imports from China.

Another big factor is Wal-Mart's relatively low wages. Its sales clerks average about $8.50 an hour, or about $14,000 a year, while the poverty line for a family of three is $15,060. In California, the unionized stockers and clerks average $17.90 an hour after two years on the job. Mr. Flickinger said wages and benefits for Wal-Mart's full-time workers average $10 to $14 per hour less than for unionized supermarket workers.

"The strike out here involves workers who enjoy decent wages, vacations and health benefits," said Kent Wong, director of the Center for Labor Research and Education at the University of California at Los Angeles. "These things were taken for granted, they made them part of the middle class, but now these workers are threatened with having these things taken away."

A big savings for Wal-Mart comes in health care, where Wal-Mart pays 30 percent less for coverage for each insured worker than the industry average. An estimated 40 percent of employees are not covered by its health plan because many cannot afford the premiums or have not worked at Wal-Mart long enough to qualify.

"What this means is, if I'm a Wal-Mart employee and I hurt my hand and go to the emergency room, who's going to pay for it? The taxpayer is," said Mr. Brown, the supermarket executive. "Wal-Mart's fringe benefits are being paid by taxpayers."

Hard to believe any rational economy can afford a regime where one essentially unskilled laborer working just 40 hours per week makes enough to lift a family over the poverty line.

---

WHAT PROFIT IT THE DEMOCRATS?:

The stars are aligned, market's up. Go profits! (Charles Stein, 10/19/2003, Boston Globe)

It is a good bet that no one running for president -- not even President Bush -- will make a speech applauding the strong corporate profits that have been reported lately. The phrase "fatter profits" conjures up an image of a greedy chief executive stuffing his pockets, perhaps illegally. But the truth is the earnings numbers are good news and important news -- not just for chief executives and investors, but for the rest of us. Profits always matter. Given the events of the past three years they matter more than ever. The economic slump that began in 2000 was first and foremost a profits recession. During the boom of the late 1990s corporate America overspent and overinvested. When the slowdown hit, companies were stuck with expenses that were far out of line with sales. The result: a profits meltdown. Allen Sinai, the chief economist with Decision Economics, says the profit decline of the past few years was the steepest since World War II. In 2001 profit margins -- profits divided by sales -- reached their lowest level on record.

Businesses reacted predictably. They stopped spending money -- on people, computers, air travel, and paper clips. When they did spend money it was for technology that further cut their costs and allowed them to get more out of their existing work force. Ken Heebner watched the retrenchment process and sensed opportunity. Heebner, who is with CGM Funds, is one of Boston's smartest money managers. Heebner figured that the belt-tightening and productivity improvements meant that corporate America was sharply reducing its break-even point. Heebner reasoned further that once the economy picked up even modestly -- a sure thing given lower interest rates, tax cuts, and a weaker dollar -- profits wouldn't just grow. They would explode.

EMC Corp. offers a textbook case of what Heebner was talking about. Last Thursday, the Hopkinton technology company reported that its sales rose 20 percent in the third quarter. Yet profits rose 650 percent, thanks to several years of cost-cutting, including a reduction in staff of 7,000 people. Profits for the firms in the Standard & Poor's 500 index are expected to be up 16 percent in the third quarter from the same quarter a year ago, the best performance in three years. The profit bump explains why the stock market is up almost 20 percent this year.

By now you are asking the question: What does all of this have to do with me? The answer is pretty straightforward. If the disappearance of profits caused companies to spend less, the return of profits should prompt them to spend more.

October just gets blacker and blacker for the Democrats...

---

IS THE ANTI-ANTI-COMMUNIST PARTY BECOMING THE ANTI-ANTI-TERROR PARTY?:

Key voter bloc looks beyond Bush: Arab Americans turning Democratic (David S. Broder, October 19, 2003, Washington Post)

An assemblage of politically active Arab Americans gave presidential candidate Howard Dean repeated ovations Saturday at the windup of a two-day meeting that marked a clear shift of allegiance from President Bush to his Democratic rivals.

Dean got by far the warmest response of any of the seven presidential hopefuls who addressed the 300 people attending the national leadership conference of the Arab American Institute, a Washington advocacy group.

But every Democratic speaker was applauded for criticizing the administration's policies in the Mideast and especially for the anti-terrorism tactics of Attorney General John Ashcroft, condemned by participants in a morning panel as targeting immigrants from Muslim countries and routinely violating their civil liberties. [...]

John Khamis, a San Jose GOP activist, said Bush's Mideast policy and Ashcroft's use of the Patriot Act means that "the attractive parts of the Republican agenda, our economic policies, are falling on deaf ears."

Asked if he thought Bush could regain support among Arab Americans before next year's election, Khamis said, "I don't know. It's going to take a real effort, and the odds are against him. I've had 30-year Republicans tell me they are re-registering as independents."

The economically and socially conservative policies that made the GOP attractive to Arab-Americans are, of course, unchanged. What has changed is that the President and his administration are waging a war on terror, at home and abroad. Implicit in the Democratic appeal to Arab-Americans must be the notion that they'll not pursue such anti-terror policies. That seems dangerous territory for the party to wander into.

---

WAS JUSTICE SERBED?

Clark's war: The Democrats' new hopeful claims he can win wars -- and keep the peace -- more effectively than the Bush administration. Does the record of his controversial victory in Kosovo back him up? (Laura Secor, 10/19/2003, Boston Globe)

IN HIS NEW BOOK, "Winning Modern Wars," recently excerpted in The New York Review of Books, former NATO commander and current Democratic favorite Wesley K. Clark took the Bush administration to task for its performance in Iraq. It was, he wrote, "all too easy to concentrate on the fighting, killing the enemy and destroying his forces. But every serious student of war recognizes that war is about attaining political objectives -- that military force is just one among several means, including diplomacy, and that all must be mutually reinforcing."

Clark held up his own experience as an example of such work done right. After all, Clark was the general who won NATO's only war handily in 1999, working with allies to pry Kosovo away from Slobodan Milosevic's Serbia and turn it over to the United Nations, NATO-led peacekeepers, and grateful Kosovar Albanians.

Just last month, however, H. Hugh Shelton, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, publicly impugned Clark's "integrity and character." The remark set reporters and commentators to wondering: Does Clark's record show the mix of idealism and forcefulness his admirers celebrate, or the reckless grandstanding his detractors decry?

Although Kosovo looks like an impressive victory in retrospect, the intervention was not especially popular at the time. Clark navigated an unwieldy NATO alliance and an ambivalent American military establishment. Throughout the bombing campaign against targets in Serbia and Kosovo, he regularly clashed with the Pentagon over resources, tactics, and the boundaries of his job. These conflicts would become the unspoken grounds for the Pentagon's decision to remove Clark from his post directly after the war. He won the war in Europe, and won the respect of civilian colleagues in government, but he lost his military position.

In an otherwise fine discussion of the tactics of the war and of bureaucratic in-fighting, there's a strange failure to consider the broader strategic question. If the United States and a few allies have been in a state of undeclared confrontation with Arab nationalism/Islamism for a period of decades now (since Israeli statehood? since Suez? since the embargo? since al Qaeda was formed? whenever), did it make any sense to attack our own frontlines in that conflict? Or were the Serbs merely ahead of us on the learning curve?

---

WHAT WOULD THEY HAVE DONE?:

Why the War Was Right: We had to move. Either we could welcome Saddam back into the community of nations, or we could rid Iraq of an evil dictatorship (Fareed Zakaria, 10/20/03, Newsweek)

Those who now oppose the war must recognize that there was no stable status quo on Iraq. The box that Saddam Hussein had been in was collapsing. Saddam's neighbors, as well as France and Russia, were actively subverting the sanctions against Iraq. And yet, while the regime was building palaces, the restrictions on Iraqi trade had a terrible side effect. UNICEF estimated that the containment of Iraq was killing about 36,000 Iraqis a year, 24,000 of them children under the age of 5. In other words, a month of sanctions was killing far more Iraqis than a week of the war did. This humanitarian catastrophe was being broadcast nightly across the Arab world. Policy on Iraq was broken. We had to move one way or the other. Either we could lift sanctions and welcome Saddam back into the community of nations, or we could rid Iraq and the world of one of the most evil dictatorships of modern times. One of The New York Times's best war correspondents, John Burns, made this latter point as well as anyone: "Terror, totalitarian states and their ways are nothing new to me," he said in an interview, "but I felt from the start that [Iraq] was in a category by itself."

Iraq was a threat, but more important, it was an opportunity. "A pre-emptive invasion of a country gives one pause," I wrote in that August 2002 column, "but there is another massive benefit to it. Done right, an invasion would be the single best path to reform the Arab world. The roots of Islamic terror reside in the dysfunctional politics of the region, where failure and repression have produced fundamentalism and violence. Were
Saddam's totalitarian regime to be replaced by a state that respected human rights, enforced the rule of law and created a market economy, it could
begin to transform that world." I still believe that.

We've yet to hear any of the Democratic candidates explain just what they'd have done to contain Saddam Hussein's anti-Western ambitions without either a war or prolonging the agony of the Iraqi people. "End the sanctions and acknowledge that he won the post-war manuevering from 1991" seems unsatisfactory. "Maintain sanctions forever" seems to ignore the reality of Franco-Russo-German perfidy and to suggest a lack of empathy.

---

INDISCRIMINATE:

Nasty, brutish and on credit: Theodore Dalrymple has discovered Britain's spiritual centre, and finds it ugly, aimless and noisy (The Spectator, 9/20/03)

The unutterably hideous Bull Ring (on the site of which there has been a market for 800 years) has been torn down, except for the Rotunda -- a horrible 1960s monument to British architects' incessant search for originality in the absence of taste or imagination -- which has been preserved by the kind of criminals who allowed it to be built in the first place, in the hope that by doing so their own lack of taste and imagination will be justified or overlooked. The only suitable penalty for the architects, town-planners and city councillors of the Birmingham of the 1960s is death.

A vast modern shopping centre that has been erected on the site is meretriciousness made flesh, or rather breezeblock, steel and glass. As one
would expect, the buildings lack overall unity of conception and do not blend in any pleasing manner: they are rather the architectural equivalent
of MTV, a series of images that arbitrarily succeed one another. They are buildings for people without a concentration span.

It is hardly surprising that the buildings are meretricious: planning permission demands that they have a lifespan of only 30 years, after which
they may be pulled down and something else equally transient erected in their place. (Birmingham's Central Library, a preternaturally ugly and
uncleanable inverted step pyramid of concrete, which replaced the magnificent and thoughtlessly demolished Victorian library, is to be pulled
down after about 30 years.) This is not the way to build a civilised city. Selfridges & Company's new department store, which gives on to the thoroughfare called Digbeth, is now known locally by some as the Digbeth Dalek, on account of its wavy external wall of blue punctuated by large silvery buttons. There isn't anything else like it in the world, nor should there be: uniqueness in art or architecture is no guarantee of merit or virtue in itself, and in the hands of British architects is usually a guarantee of their very opposite. [...]

Shopping -- in the sense of the ceaseless search for the next object that will thrill for a moment and satisfy for a minute -- is the main interest of
people without purpose. The problem with the British is that they are not even very good at shopping, just as they are not very good at their other
passion, football, to judge by the results. For to be good at shopping requires discrimination, which itself requires some mental cultivation. And
it is precisely the lack of this that makes British shops (on the whole -- of course, there are exceptions) so deeply dispiriting. [...]

Of course, crime is never far away in Britain. The British being a nation of shoplifters, security guards were everywhere: you could tell them by their dark glasses and their earpieces and microphones connected to a command centre somewhere, looking like hi-tech Tontons Macoutes.

After ten years living in central NH, and despite having grown up in Northern NJ, on my yearly visit to the Mall it has struck me that it is where peoples' souls go to die.

---

BOOKNOTES:

Evil: An Investigation by Lance Morrow (C-SPAN, October 19, 2003, 8 & 11pm)

Long couched only in theological terms, and popularly personified by the despots of history, the nature of evil has resisted explanation. In this singular survey of this mysterious but all too often palpable force, veteran Time magazine writer Lance Morrow examines the unmistakable ways evil influences our global culture-and how that global culture in turn has magnified evil's menace. Its dramatic reemergence in the national consciousness-against a backdrop of high-tech, sensationalized violence-makes his updated understanding both timely and absolutely necessary. Drawing on examples both obscure and splashed across the headlines, Morrow seeks to understand how evil works, and what purpose, if any, it serves. From the heartrending to the harrowing, from quiet lies to catastrophic acts, his stories are drawn from over thirty years of experience as a revered journalist and essayist. The result is a brilliant synthesis of a lifetime of observation that elegantly illuminates a chronically elusive but fascinating subject.

One of the seminal 9-11 moments came on September 12th, on PBS, when Bill Moyers was talking to Andrew Delbanco. Mr. Delbanco had argued in his book, The Death of Satan, that:

[T]he work of the devil is everywhere, but no one knows where to find him. We live in the most brutal century in human history, but instead of stepping forward to take the credit, he has rendered himself invisible. Although the names by which he was once designated (in the Christian lexicon he was assigned the name Satan; Marxism substituted phrases like 'exploitative classes'; psychoanalysis preferred terms like 'repression' and 'neurosis') have been discredited to one degree or another, nothing has come to take their place. The work of this book is therefore to think historically about the shrinking range of phenomena to which accusatory words like 'evil' and 'sin' may still be applied in contemplatory life, and to think about what it means to do without them.

I have written it out of the belief that despite the shriveling of the old words and concepts, we cannot do without some conceptual means for thinking about the sorts of experiences that used to go under the name of evil. Few people still believe in what the British writer Ian McEwan has recently called the 'malign principle, a force in human affairs that periodically advances to dominate and destroy the lives of individuals or nations, then retreats to await the next occasion.' We certainly no longer have a conception of evil as a distributed entity with an ontological essence of its own, as what some philosophers call 'presences.' Yet something that feels like this force still invades our experience, and we still discover in ourselves the capacity to inflict it on others. Since this is true, we have an inescapable problem: we feel something that our culture no longer gives us the vocabulary to express.

Now, Mr. Delbanco is really only speaking for the intellectual class there. Most of us, still faith-filled, have no problem comprehending and speaking about evil, but Mr. Delbanco has said that: "[religious] belief is really not an option for thinking people today." Okay, but that leaves about 90% in the unthinking category.

Of course, here's the only vocabulary he had to express himself with after 9-11:

BM: Do you believe in evil?

AD: I don't see how anyone can have experienced even indirectly as you and I sitting here have the events of the last last day and not take seriously the existence of evil. One of the things that a number of writers have said about the devil-- some people believe in him as a literal being, some people believe in him as a metaphor or an image or a representation of these dark, human capacities-- one thing that a number of writers have said is that the cleverest trick of the devil is to convince people that he does not exist. We saw evil yesterday. We have to confront it. We have to face it.

BM: Evil is defined as?

AD: Well, for me I think the best I've been able to do with that question is to try to recognize and come to terms with the reality of the fact that there are human beings who are able, by convincing themselves that there's some higher good, some higher ideal to which their lives should be dedicated, that the pain and suffering of other individuals doesn't matter, it doesn't have to do with them or that it's... That they're expendable, that it's a cost that's worth making in the pursuit of these objectives. So evil for me is the absence of the imaginative sympathy for other human beings.

BM: The absence of a moral imagination, the ability to see what the consequences of your actions are to someone else?

AD: Yes, the inability to see your victims as human beings. To think of them as instruments or cogs or elements or statistics but not as human beings.

BM: You have written about your concern that Americans have lost the sense of evil. Is what happened in the last 36 hours going to bring us back or is it too deep for that, our absence, our loss of memory.

AD: I think it simmers. It's dormant in all of us. We don't want to acknowledge it. We want to explain it away. We want to find explanation for it. In a modern world we mostly live in a place where the terrible suffering of the world seems far away-abstract and unreal and we can somehow imagine that it hasn't anything to do with us. It came home yesterday. I think a lot of people in this city and in this country are searching their souls.

"Evil" "The Devil" "The Soul" "Morality" ...

Quite.

MORE:
-BOOK SITE: Evil: An Investigation by Lance Morrow (Perseus Book Group)

---

LET IT SNOW:

Courageous Arab Thinkers (THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, 10/19/03, NY Times)

Most people thought it would snow in Saudi Arabia before there would be elections. So what's up?

What's up are three big shocks hammering the Arab system. First, with oil revenues flat, there isn't enough money anymore to buy off, or provide jobs to, the exploding Arab populations. Hence the growing need for wives with work. The second is the Iraq war shock. Even with all the problems in Baghdad now, virtually every autocratic Arab regime is starting to prepare for the uncomfortable possibility that by 2005 Iraq will hold a free election, which will shame all those who never have. As Lawrence Summers, Harvard's president, likes to say, "One good example is worth a thousand theories." Iraq — maybe — could be that example.

But there is another tremor shaking the Arab world. This one is being set off by a group of courageous Arab social scientists, who decided, with the help of the United Nations, to begin fighting the war of ideas for the Arab future by detailing just how far the Arab world has fallen behind and by laying out a progressive pathway forward. Their first publication, the Arab Human Development Report 2002, explained how the deficits of freedom, education and women's empowerment in the Arab world have left the region so behind that the combined G.D.P. of the 22 Arab states was less than that of a single country -- Spain. Even with limited Internet access in the Arab world, one million copies of this report were downloaded, sparking internal debates.

Tomorrow, in Amman, Jordan, these Arab thinkers will unveil their second Arab Human Development Report, which focuses on the need to rebuild Arab "knowledge societies." The report is embargoed until then, but from talking with the authors I sense it will be another bombshell.

Arab society will change for the same reason Soviet society did--not because the leadership wanted to nor even that the people forced it--but because you can't keep up with the U.S. if you have a totalitarian system and if you do have one you are naturally measured against us, your antithesis.

---

WELL, YOU CAN'T SAY HE'S PANDERING FOR THE JEWISH VOTE:

Dean Gets Standing Ovation from Arab-Americans (Tom Brown, October 18, 2003, Reuters)

Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean received a standing ovation from an Arab-American audience on Saturday when he attacked leading conservatives and figures from the religious right. [...]

His speech was repeatedly interrupted by applause as he condemned violations of civil liberties, racial profiling and abuse of authority under the USA Patriot Act, the anti-terror legislation championed by Ashcroft that passed after the Sept. 11 attacks. [...]

"Today we see another shameful chapter in American history. Because John Ashcroft touts the Patriot Act around this country does not make John Ashcroft a patriot," he said. [...]

Dean also won applause by reiterating his recent promises to send former President Bill Clinton to the Middle East as his peace broker if he is elected next year.

Never mind his impugning peoples' patriotism, what wouldn't you give to see the Israeli government's reaction if Bill Clinton showed up as our Middle East peace representative?

---

THE LAW, ONCE AGAIN, IS AN ASS:

Jeb Bush 'fails' Terri (World Net Daily, Starvation Watch Day 4)

With Terri Schindler-Schiavo's judge-ordered starvation well into its fourth day, it is clear to her family and supporters that Florida Gov. Jeb Bush probably will not step in and prevent her death ...

The removal of Terri's feeding tube is the final victory for Michael Schiavo in a battle with Terri's family that has gone entirely in his favor.

[T]he Schindlers had been fighting their son-in-law for 10 years over the lack of care and therapy provided for their daughter ...

The ongoing dispute escalated five years ago when Schiavo petitioned the court for permission to end his wife's life by removing her feeding tube ... Although Terri breathes on her on and maintains her own blood pressure, she requires a simple tube into her abdomen to her stomach for nourishment and hydration. The Schindlers and many medical professionals believe that with therapy she could eat and drink without the tube, but Schiavo consistently has prevented that....

Bush's handling of this case is unlikely to win him respect or friends in either camp.

The Clearwater Bar Association denounced him earlier this month for sending a letter in late August to Greer, asking the judge to delay the date for removal of Terri's feeding tube ...

Greer said he ignored the letter....

The directors and officers of the Clearwater Bar Association were outraged at the governor's letter-writing, seeing it as an intrusion not only on its turf in Pinellas County, but upon the judiciary branch as a whole and a threat to the constitutional structure of American government.

Here, in brief, are the key facts: Terri Schiavo's parents are eager to feed and care for her. Deprived of care, she will starve to death. Judge Greer has ordered that starve to death she must, and has barred anyone from feeding her, including her parents. Her husband's motives in seeking the judge's order are suspect. He won a lawsuit over Terri's medical care that has $750,000 in escrow to pay for her care, and he stands to inherit the money if Terri dies while they remain married. He is engaged to another woman and has fathered a child by her, but he has refused to divorce Terri. Nurses have testified that he complained to them, "When is that bitch going to die?", and that Terri has said to them, "Help me."

It seems to me that as a matter of justice, if in the whole world 6 billion people want to see a woman starve to death, and one -- just one -- wants to feed her, that one ought to be free to feed the woman. To use the power of the state to prevent such feeding is a gross abuse of the police power.

The argument that writing a letter to a judge expressing an opinion on a case is "a threat to the constitutional structure of American government" is so ludicrous it beggars the imagination. Apparently the judicial power is so far above the people, even the executive branches of government, that it must not even be questioned. And if Jeb Bush lacks the courage to refuse to enforce a vicious judicial order, shame on him.

Though men may not care for Terri Schiavo, God will. May God bless her.

---

BET CLINTON ASKED FOR SUSHI:

Interview Solves the `beef Man' Mystery (TOM RAUM , October 18, 200, Associated Press)

The White House on Saturday released the transcript of a Fuji TV interview with President Bush that let Americans in on the joke that Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi shared so publicly Friday with Bush.

Koizumi had teasingly referred to Bush as ``beef man'' as they talked to reporters after dining at Tokyo's Akasaka Palace. The remark had Bush chuckling and repeating the moniker. ``Beef man,'' he agreed with a laugh.

But even though the main course that night had been Japanese beef steak, Koizumi's joke baffled Bush's traveling press corps. [...]

It appears the origin of the joke is a question from Tarao Kimura, who asked Bush in the Fuji TV interview about the president's well-known dislike of sushi.

"I wonder whether you will bear tasting sushi this time,'' the reporter asked the president after earlier queries on Iraq, North Korea and currency policy. ``I know you're not really particularly in favor of the raw fish.''

"Well,'' Bush replied, ``I'm a beef man.''

"I'm also,'' the president added diplomatically, ``hopefully a good enough guest not to demand a particular menu from my host.''

---

MAKE ROOM FOR GRADY:

Now this is funny.

---

DID THEIR OWN WIVES VOTE FOR BUSTAMANTE AND DAVIS?:

Lockyer: I voted for Arnold (Daniel Weintraub, October 18, 2003, California Insider)

Democrat Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer says he voted for Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger for governor. Lockyer, speaking at a recall post-mortem at UC Berkeley, said he opposed the recall but chose Schwarzenegger in the replacement election because he stood for "hope, change, reform, opportunity, upbeat problem solving."

Obviously it's in his interest not to have a Democrat incumbent, but still pretty funny.

---

YET PEOPLE CONSIDER THAT A VICTORY STILL:

THE PRESENT SITUATION IN GERMANY (Digest of a meeting with Allen W. Dulles at the Council on Foreign Relations, December 3, 1945)

Germany today is a problem of extraordinary complexity. For two and one-half years the country has been a political and economic void in which discipline was well-maintained. There is no dangerous underground operating there now although some newspapers in the United States played up such a story. The German leaders, of course, could not admit defeat and today the attitude of the people is not so much a feeling of shame and guilt as one of having been let down by their leaders.

Economically and industrially, Germany has scraped the bottom of the barrel, and there are few shops with anything to sell. As soon as you attempt to get Germany to tick and to make arrangements for a government, the lack of men becomes apparent at once. Most men of the caliber required suffer a political taint. When we discover someone whose ability and politics are alike acceptable, we usually find as we did in one case that the man has been living abroad for the past ten years and is hopelessly out of touch with the local situation. We have already found out that you can't run railroads without taking in some Party members. [...]

In the zone being turned over to Poland there is a good deal of buck passing. It is difficult to say what is going on, but in general the Russians are acting little better than thugs. They have wiped out all the liquid assets. No food cards are issued to Germans, who are forced to travel on foot into the Russian zone, often more dead than alive. An iron curtain has descended over the fate of these people and very likely conditions are truly terrible. The promises at Yalta to the contrary, probably 8 to 10 million people are being enslaved. Unquestionably Germany should be punished. In this instance, however, I think there will remain a legacy of bitterness which will not bode well for the future.

I have already said that the problem of Germany very nearly defies a successful solution. The question is: What can we do? The first step is to get together in dealing with what is at bottom a common problem. Next, we must find people we can use. We might use the churches which did not knuckle under to Hitler, although it is questionable in the minds of some people whether churches should get into politics. We might also consider the survivors of the affair of July 20* and see what material the trade unions can furnish. Finally, we can screen the prisoners of war.

The women will not be much help to us, although in theory they could be. A saying now current in Germany is that today most of the able-bodied men are women. Hitler had an enormous hold over them and Eva Braun's existence appeared to be unknown to most of them. They are extremely bitter. Altogether the problem deserves very careful study.

I think it may well become necessary for us to change the form of our occupation. Thus far there has been very little disturbance or misbehavior on the part of our troops. I think we ought to use small, highly mechanized units and put our reliance on planes. These forces I would quarter outside of the cities, lest their presence create a talking point for German propaganda against the occupation.

Trying to arrive at figures in order to set up a standard of living in Germany is a difficult and almost hopeless problem, and one perhaps beyond the ingenuity of man. And yet we must somehow find a solution.

Germany ought to be put to work for the benefit of Europe and particularly for the benefit of those countries plundered by the Nazis. If we do not find some work for the Germans and if we do not solve the refugee problem, the Germans will have their revenge in one form or another though it takes a hundred years.

Puts paid to the canard that we didn't realize the Soviets would betray their promises until much later.

---

HOT AIR:

Media Matters: Gross vs. O'Reilly: Culture Clash on NPR (Jeffrey A. Dvorkin, Ombudsman: National Public Radio, October 15, 2003)

On October 9, Terry Gross, longtime host of NPR's Fresh Air aired her interview with populist political talk show host Bill O'Reilly. The e-mails and phone calls of outrage are still arriving.

The interview was taped the day before on October 8. The ostensible reason was to talk about O'Reilly's latest book, Who's Looking Out For You? The book is about, among other things, the claim that America is in the midst of what O'Reilly calls a "cultural war between left and right." And he says the battle is being fought in bookstores by pitting sales of his book against those by liberals.

In the Fresh Air interview, the tone was intense from the beginning. By the end of the interview, O'Reilly said he found Gross' line of questioning objectionable and hostile. He walked out of the interview, but not before he accused Gross of conducting the interview "in attack mode" and "full of typical NPR liberal bias." He also told her to "find another line of work."

Knowing that the interview would air the next day, O'Reilly used his October 8 television program to alert his viewers about what would happen the next day on NPR

As Gross mentioned in the interview, Bill O'Reilly was invited on Fresh Air in part because of his new book. She began by asking O'Reilly to respond to accusations made against him in a book by Al Franken, the politically liberal comedian. Franken's book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, is devoted in part to going after O'Reilly's credibility and his conservative opinions. In his book and on Fresh Air, Franken accuses O'Reilly of mistakes, distortions and outright lies.

If you missed the show it's worth a listen. Ms Gross administers a pretty biased hatchet-job, repeatedly asking him to respond to other peoples' criticisms, rather than focusing on his book itself. On the other hand, it's nothing O'Reilly doesn't do on his own show too. The main difference is he had sense enough to walk away.

---

MANGLED:

AN APOLOGY (Gregg Easterbrook, 10/16/03, Easterblogg)

Nothing's worse, as a writer, than so mangling your own use of words that you are heard to have said something radically different than what you wished to express. Of mangling words, I am guilty.

Monday I wrote an item about the disgusting movie Kill Bill, which so glorifies violence as to border on filth. I was indignant that a major company whose work is mainly good, Disney, would distribute such awfulness, in this case through its Miramax subsidiary. I wondered how any top executive could live with his or her conscience by seeking profits from Kill Bill, oblivious to the psychological studies showing that positive depiction of violence in entertainment causes actual violence in children. I wondered about the consciences of those running Disney and Miramax. Were they Christian? How could a Christian rationalize seeking profits from a movie that glorifies killing as a sport, even as a form of pleasure? I think it's fair to raise faith in this context: In fact I did exactly that one week earlier, when I wrote a column about the movie The Passion asking how we could take Mel Gibson seriously as a professed Christian, when he has participated in numerous movies that glorify violence.

But those running Disney and Miramax are not Christian, they're Jewish. Learning this did in no way still my sense of outrage regarding Kill Bill. How, I wondered, could anyone Jewish--members of a group who suffered the worst act of violence in all history, and who suffer today, in Israel, intolerable violence--seek profit from a movie that glamorizes violence as cool fun? Below is the paragraph I wrote that's causing the stir (to read the item in its entirety from the beginning click here). I quote it verbatim so that you can see how easy it is, on subjects like these, for good righteous anger to turn offensive by a careless choice of words:

Set aside what it says about Hollywood that today even Disney thinks what the public needs is ever-more-graphic depictions of killing the innocent as cool amusement. Disney's CEO, Michael Eisner, is Jewish; the chief of Miramax, Harvey Weinstein, is Jewish. Yes, there are plenty of Christian and other Hollywood executives who worship money above all else, promoting for profit the adulation of violence. Does that make it right for Jewish executives to worship money above all else, by promoting for profit the adulation of violence? Recent European history alone ought to cause Jewish executives to experience second thoughts about glorifying the killing of the helpless as a fun lifestyle choice. But history is hardly the only concern. Films made in Hollywood are now shown all over the world, to audiences that may not understand the dialogue or even look at the subtitles, but can't possibly miss the message--now Disney's message--that hearing the screams of the innocent is a really fun way to express yourself.

I'm ready to defend all the thoughts in that paragraph. But how could I have done such a poor job of expressing them? Maybe this is an object lesson in the new blog reality. I worked on this alone and posted the piece--what you see above comes at the end of a 1,017-word column that's otherwise about why movies should not glorify violence. Twenty minutes after I pressed "send," the entire world had read it. When I reread my own words and beheld how I'd written things that could be misunderstood, I felt awful. To anyone who was offended I offer my apology, because offense was not my intent. But it was 20 minutes later, and already the whole world had seen it.

It might be better next time, upon realizing you've mangled your own intent, to take down the post and rewrite it immediately. Though Brother Cohen was offended by the original, personally I thought it inartfully stated but accurate. Certainly with a mild amount of revision it would not even have been offensive.

MORE:
pchuck mentioned in the comments that Mr. Easterbrook has been fired from his wonk favorite Tuesday Morning Quarterback gig at ESPN.com. I just went to the page there of his archived columns and the links don't seem to work. Are they scanning his work for secret anti-Semitic code words or something? Exactly how thin-skinned are we becoming?

-Writer Takes Jews to Task for 'Kill Bill' (BERNARD WEINRAUB, 10/17/03, NY Times)

In a joint Disney-Miramax statement, Matthew Hiltzik, a Miramax spokesman, said, "It is sad that these terrible stereotypes persist and that these comments are receiving a wider platform. It does not deserve any further attention."

Peter Beinart, the editor of The New Republic, said: "Gregg made a mistake. He recognizes that. He's a very valuable member of the staff. And I don't think he's the least bit prejudiced." [...]

Mr. Easterbrook said he planned to apologize in his Web site column on Friday for "stumbling into a use of words that in the past people have taken as code for anti-Semitic feelings."

Mr. Easterbrook said he wrote a column last week about Mel Gibson's coming film "Passion," and added: "I rai