EVEN THE FRENCH KNEW BETTER

Picasso in Paris: A Suspect, Never a Citizen (ALAN RIDING, 5/28/03, NY Times)

After his death in 1973, France honored Pablo Picasso with the museum that carries his name in Paris. Yet during his first four decades as a French resident, the Spanish-born Picasso was viewed with suspicion by the French police and intelligence services. When he sought French nationality in 1940, he was turned down on the ground that he was an anarchist with Communist tendencies.

The extent of French misgivings about Picasso's politics have just become known with the discovery of the artist's police files from 1901 to 1940. They were among millions of French documents seized by German occupation forces in 1940 and transferred to Berlin. After the defeat of Germany in 1945, they were taken to Moscow. Only since the collapse of the Soviet Union have they been gradually returned to France. [...]

On April 3, 1940, Picasso wrote to the minister of justice requesting naturalization. He was also required to swear he had no criminal record, to demonstrate he was up to date on his tax payments and to show the lease for his two apartments at 23 rue de la Boetie. He was then summoned for interrogation by the neighborhood's police commissioner, who in a report dated April 30, 1940, concluded: "Good information. Favorable recommendation."

But a separate report by the General Information Directorate, dated May 25, was hostile to Picasso. It recalled that Picasso was "identified as an anarchist" in 1905, and it noted acidly that in 1914 "he offered no service to our country during the war." It called him "a so-called modern artist," accused him of sending his wealth abroad and declared that "Picasso has retained extremist ideas evolving toward Communism." The report noted that Picasso sent money to the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War, that he had recently been heard criticizing French institutions and praising Moscow and that he had told friends that he would bequeath his works to the Soviet Union, not France. The report said little had been learned from Picasso's neighbors. "Because of his arrogant and stuffy character, he is little known in his neighborhood," it added.

The report's conclusion is unsurprising: "As a result of all the information gathered, this foreigner has no qualification to obtain naturalization. Further, in the light of the above, he should be considered suspect from a national point of view." There is no evidence that Picasso was informed of the rejection of his request. Three weeks after the second report was completed, German troops entered Paris.

Mr. Daix and Mr. Israil write, "France lost a celebrated man whom it could have been proud to have included among its citizens." And the absurdity, they point out, is that this ruling was rooted in misinformation about Picasso's anarchic sympathies gathered by a police agent in 1901.

What is not known is whether France opened a fresh police file on Picasso after World War II, but on Oct. 5, 1944, just six weeks after the liberation of Paris, Picasso formally joined the French Communist Party.

"Proud to have included among its citizens"? He was a Stalinist and a particularly vile person. Even the French couldn't be proud of him.

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THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS

The Force That Drives the Flower: What is it about fecundity that so appalls? Is it that with nature's bounty goes a crushing waste that threatens our own cheap lives? (Annie Dillard, November 1973, The Atlantic Monthly)

The growth pressure of plants can do an impressive variety of tricks. Bamboo can grow three feet in twenty-four hours, an accomplishment that is capitalized upon, legendarily, in that exquisite Asian torture in which a victim is strapped to a mesh bunk a mere foot above a bed of healthy bamboo plants whose woodlike tips have been sharpened. For the first eight hours he is fine, if jittery; then he starts turning into a colander, by degrees.

Down at the root end of things, blind growth reaches astonishing proportions. So far as I know, only one real experiment has ever been performed to determine the extent and rate of root growth, and when you read the figures, you see why. I have run into various accounts of this experiment, and the only thing they don't reveal is how many lab assistants were blinded for life.

The experimenters studied a single grass plant, winter rye. They let it grow in a greenhouse for four months; then they gingerly spirited away the soil--under microscopes, I imagine--and counted and measured all the roots and root hairs. In four months the plant had set forth 378 miles of roots--that's about three miles a day--in 14 million distinct roots. This is mighty impressive, but when they get down to the root hairs, I boggle completely. In those same four months the rye plant created 14 billion root hairs, and those little things placed end to end just about wouldn't quit. In a single cubic inch of soil, the length of the root hairs totaled 6000 miles.

Other plants use water power to heave the rock earth around as though they were merely shrugging off a silken cape. Rutherford Platt tells about a larch tree whose root had cleft a one-and-a-half-ton boulder and hoisted it a foot into the air. Everyone knows how a sycamore root will buckle a sidewalk, a mushroom will shatter a cement basement floor. But when the first real measurements of this awesome pressure were taken, nobody could believe the figures.

Rutherford Platt tells the story in The Great American Forest, one of the most interesting books ever written:

In 1875, a Massachusetts farmer, curious about the growing power of expanding apples, melons, and squashes, harnessed a squash to a weight-lifting device which had a dial like a grocer's scale to indicate the pressure exerted by the expanding fruit. As the days passed, he kept piling on counterbalancing weight; he could hardly believe his eyes when he saw his vegetables quietly exerting a lifting force of 5 thousand pounds per square inch. When nobody believed him, he set up exhibits of harnessed squashes and invited the public to come and see. The Annual Report of the Massachusetts Board of Agriculture, 1875, reported: "Many thousands of men, women, and children of all classes of society visited it. Mr. Penlow watched it day and night, making hourly observations; Professor Parker was moved to write a poem about it; Professor Seelye declared that he positively stood in awe of it."

All this is very jolly. Unless perhaps I were strapped down above a stand of growing, sharpened bamboo, I am unlikely to feel the faintest queasiness either about the growth pressure of plants or their fecundity. Even when the plants get in the way of human "culture," I don't mind. When I read how many thousands of dollars a city like New York has to spend to keep underground water pipes free of ailanthus, ginko, and sycamore roots, I cannot help but give a little cheer. After all, water pipes are almost always an excellent source of water. In a town where resourcefulness and beating the system are highly prized, these primitive trees can fight city hall and win.

Magazines like The Atlantic, the New Yorker, The Nation, New Republic, TIME, and others, that have been publishing for decades and longer, have so much great material in their archives, it's too bad they don't post more of it.

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"WEEPY MOJO"

How do chick flicks make women weep?: University study says it's all about the 'power of emotion' (Chris Lackner, May 30, 2003, National Post)

The common, stereotypical definition of a chick flick is simple: a film that will reduce its female audiences to tears while keeping men away in droves. How and why this exactly happens is the subject of ongoing research at the University of Manitoba.

According to a study by Brenda Austin-Smith, a professor of English and film studies, classic chick flicks act as a psychological release for their female audience, even though women realize they are being manipulated by Hollywood gender stereotypes and emotional cues.

"A lot of research has been done on the patriarchal stereotypes and pop-cultural messages in films that [cater to a female audience], but they never directly talk about the power of emotion," said Austin-Smith. "What makes women weep?"

Her research focused on classic Hollywood weepies produced between 1920 and 1940, such as 1939's Dark Victory featuring Bette Davis as a woman battling blindness, 1937's Stella Dallas starring Barbara Stanwyck as a mother fighting to provide her daughter with a future, and Madame X starring Lana Turner as a scorned wife forced into prostitution and charged with the murder of a crook.

These films always portrayed woman as a tragic heroines, battling issues such as the loss of a child or spouse, raising a child on their own, or terminal illness, she explained.

Austin-Smith has done extensive interviews and film screenings with 37 women whose ages range from 35 to 83. She focused on women who either lived in the era in which classic weepies were released or who may have grown up watching them with their mothers.

These movies had the tendency to be more reality-driven, and often captured the life experience of the women who lived during their era, she noted.

"These films gave women a safe place to cry," she said, adding her study also set out to determine whether such films still have the same emotional impact on modern audiences. "I found these films still have their weepy mojo."

Most women can not afford to be emotional because they need to be strong for their families, partners, children or careers, but weepies offer them a cathartic release from life's burdens, she explained.

Is there a man anywhere who wouldn't build a special room onto his house so his wife could have a "safe place to cry" if she'd just stop making him watch these insipid movies?

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WHAT WMD?

INSIDER INTERVIEW: House Minority Leader Pelosi: 'One District At A Time' (National Journal, May 28, 2003

Q: What would your response be if no weapons of mass destruction are found in Iraq?

A: People have lost their lives. I would not want to leave the impression that because we have not found weapons of mass destruction, it was not a worthy sacrifice. So, I don't place a high premium on it. I said from day one that the intelligence did not support the threat [from Iraq] that the administration was putting forth, in terms of weapons of mass destruction. As far as chemical and biological weapons, it's a very dangerous neighborhood. A number of countries in the region are developing those programs. It would be likely that Iraq would have them too. They may be found. They may not. But I would not want to diminish in any way the sacrifice of those who went and fought.

Q: Did the president mislead us?

A: I would never characterize the president taking us into war as misleading us, because it's just too serious a decision for him to make. We just have to go beyond this, though other countries will not. But the sacrifice has been made.

The press may not have figured out yet that the presence or absence of WMD in Iraq doesn't much matter, but the Democrats who have to try and win back the Congress certainly have.

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ONE CASUALTY TOO MANY

Jihad's Hidden Victim: The Casablanca bombings destroyed not just life and property, but a tolerant nation's view of itself (BRUCE CRUMLEY, 6/02/03, TIME Europe)

When the smoke had cleared and the wreckage and bodies were being carted away, stunned Moroccans turned their attention to another casualty of the May 16 Casablanca terrorist bombings: the nation's sense of itself. Morocco has long tried to occupy a middle ground between its European and North American allies on one side and the conservative, Islam-dominated societies of fellow Arab countries. Now Moroccans fear they may have the worst of both worlds: the strain of jihadist militancy rooted in the affluent nations of the Middle East, and the vast, economically stricken populations from which al-Qaeda networks have so effectively recruited in the West. [...]

The goals of greater democracy and tolerance of all religions are at the heart of King Mohammed VI's social program. But there is now ample reason for the government to crack down on Islamist groups, and a long-stalled antiterrorism law--decried as authoritarian and repressive--got new life in the wake of the attack, clearing a major legislative hurdle last week. Even before the bombings, expected advances by Morocco's two Islamic parties led the government to postpone nationwide local elections slated for June.

Moroccan democracy might be further undermined if foreign tourists and investors steer clear of the country and deprive it of resources needed to battle poverty. That "would have dire consequences for everyone," warns Andre Azoulay, an adviser to Mohammed VI. "It would demonstrate that Western examples of democracy, plurality and economic modernity couldn't be applied to the world's most progressive Arab state--and indeed aren't compatible with Arab society. The only people who would benefit from that are the Islamist radicals." Moroccans are desperate to prevent that: millions of employees respected a five-minute work stoppage Friday to pray for victims of the attacks, and hundreds of thousands were expected in Sunday's marches denouncing religious extremism and terror. Now Morocco and the world must demonstrate to people like those in Sidi Moumen that they have more to live for than kill for--and then begin to make the same point in Arab and European ghettos where radical Islamists cultivate jihad.

It seems well worth it to pump US aid into the all too few Arab states that are moving in a Westerly direction.

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I PULL THE STRINGS

To believe that we can end tyranny by self-improvement and restraint (Amity Shlaes, Jewish World Review)

This past winter I returned to Berlin to find the locals pessimistic. My friends and I chatted about different things, but our conversations always ended up at a single place: Iraq. At dinners in the new Berlin Mitte (yesterday's news to them, but still amazing to me) one Berliner or another shouted about the "impossibility" of the Iraqi project. My friends seemed to believe that the best thing they could do was to retreat to that 1950s nuclear freeze motto, ohne mich, "without me".

They seemed to assume that the more modest, the smaller Germany made itself, the safer it and the rest of the world would be. On the sixth week of my visit, 500,000 Berliners protested against the war in Iraq, lining streets from Alexanderplatz into the west. If only we can mount a demonstration big enough, they seemed to be saying, we can improve life the globe over. To many of us - British and Americans - this attitude was irritating.

Where was all the good will our governments had earned through aid and restraint? Where was the lesson of Yugoslavia, which showed that blue helmets alone could not prevent massacres, and that regime change was necessary? But the real problem with this view was that it seemed a fallacy. Germany might want to pretend it is Switzerland. But this is as pointless as an elephant hiding behind a slender palm. For there is, alas, no such thing as a big neutral country. As much as Germany wishes not to take sides, it is, in effect, taking sides no matter what it does.

And no matter how much one disapproved of the Bush administration, one could not help but see that Saddam Hussein was emboldened by his discovery that there was a gap to be exploited between the US and its allies. In this context the mid-war discovery that Russian generals had helped Saddam did not come as a complete surprise. But where did this experience leave me and my friends? For the first time in my long relationship with Germany, the differences began to feel serious.

For me and for many American and British people, the second world war seemed a legitimate and powerful argument for the war in Iraq. For Berliners, it was not. The arguments of my friend Karin were, as usual, the clearest. Hardly a a day went by, she said, that she did not think of "it" - "it" being the second world war of her childhood. She had believed the crumbling of the wall to be the end of that war; now we, the Americans and British, were starting just such a war again. Pondering all this, I cycled one morning to Glienicke. There, for the first time, I noticed a plaque commemorating the return of the bridge to everyday life after so many years. "Glienicke Bridge," it read, "open as a result of the peaceable revolution in the GDR." How wonderful it must be, I thought without irony, to believe that by self-improvement and restraint, we can end tyranny. Would that it were so.

We noted earlier in the week that this notion, though it appears to be grounded in powerlessness, is actually a claim of extravagant power over the behavior of others. The idea in this case is that Germans can control the behavior of others towards them by modifying their own behavior. If only they stay out of the rest of the world's business, the world will leave them alone. Not only is this a dangerous form of egomania and a denial of reality, it is also put to the lie by their own recent history, when much of the West tried to convince itself that if the Germans were left alone they'd leave others alone.

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DO NOT GO GENTLE

The Incredible Shrinking People: The fact that there are so few Jews in the world places a great responsibility on the Jews that do exist. (Rabbi Berel Wein, Jewish World Review)

In 1950, according to the census of the Jewish Federations in North America at that time, the Jewish population of North America was approximately six million people. That meant that there were six million people in North America who identified themselves as Jews.

According to the natural increase in population as exhibited in the general population in North America there should now be at least fifteen million people in North America who identify themselves as Jews.

In stark reality, however, there are barely five million people in North America who do so.

That means that there are ten million people--potential Jews--who have disappeared in the last half-century, and their absence is out of personal choice and not external enmity. That statistic is certainly one of the saddest ones for Jews in this doleful past century.

Sixty years ago, there were nineteen million Jews in the world. Today, there are approximately thirteen million Jews in the world. A half-century after the Holocaust, we have not replenished the numbers that the Germans and their cohorts extinguished. This ugly and sad fact only intensifies the tragedy of the Holocaust in the current Jewish world.

It would be a world historical tragedy if all Jews were to take away from these numbers is the lesson that Rabbi Wein seems to be teaching--that the shrinking few realize how special they are. The end point such a teaching is fairly obvious: the fewer there are the more special each is, until the point when the last one left is the most special of all. Unfortunately, shortly thereafter the Jews, who brought us Judaism--the single most important set of ideas in human history--will pass from existence. On that day, in the all too imaginable future, the world will be a colder, darker place and we will all be diminished as a species.

This end should therefore be intolerable to us all, but must obviously be most intolerable to Jews themselves. This is no time to turn inward, to gaze at your navel and say how special you are, but a time to turn outward, to renew the people, to strengthen belief, to be fruitful and multiply, to rage against the dying of the children of the light.

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ALL YOU NEED IS FIVE FINGERS, A FOE, AND A FROSTY BEVERAGE

School Holds Rock-Paper-Scissors Contest (The Associated Press, May 29, 2003)

Thomas Shaffer, who organized a rock-paper-scissors tournament at his high school, says the game is based on patterns, so the odds of winning increase when a player better observes his opponent.

"At first I was one of the believers that it is a game of luck," Shaffer said. "I'll let you in on a little secret: Most people open with scissors. Novice players rarely throw the same thing twice in a row."

Shaffer recruited 75 classmates at Elizabethtown Area High School to compete, got the school to let him hold the contest in the gym and even convinced a sponsor to donate money for trophies. A dairy donated chocolate milk.

Shaffer managed to back up his bluster about the game's intricacies, making the final round by winning 19 matches in a row.

Though inexplicably underappreciated, Rock-Scissors-Paper is the perfect drinking game. It has two great advantages over all others: (1) you always have the required equipment with you; (2) because it's non-verbal it can be played at the loudest party or tavern.

DISCLAIMER: This is for information purposes only and should in no way be taken as a Brothers Judd recommendation that you try such a thing. Alcohol is dangerous when consumed in large amounts and is nothing to be toyed with. In addition, if you drink too much in college and law school, the Red Cross may refuse to accept blood donations because of elevated liver enzymes. Or so we hear...

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TOO BAD "NAACP" IS ALREADY TAKEN.

Socially Acceptable Bigotry (Willy Stern, Metro Pulse Online, 5/29/03)

Because of my background and my appearance--dark curly hair and a fairly sizable proboscis--most of the world reaches similar conclusions as to my political leanings as did Suzi. Scarcely a week has gone by since I hit 7th grade at Edgemont High School during which somebody did not make a derogatory comment about Republicans in my presence. I hear them, well, practically everywhere...at Starbucks, at job interviews, and while picking up my son at Congregation Micah, Nashville's open-minded reform synagogue. I hear them in the hallways of Vanderbilt University (where I teach part-time), around the copy machines at the Nashville Scene (the alternative newspaper which employs me) and in the carpool line at the University School of Nashville, (the progressive private school which my older child attends).

Press me and you'll learn that—to the degree one can be labeled--I reside in the liberal wing of the Republican Party. I believe in free markets and free people. Social issues notwithstanding, that generally lines me up with the Republicans.

When somebody makes a prejudicial comment about Republicans in my presence, I play a private game. I replay the sentence in my mind—only I substitute a word like "black" or "lesbian" or "Mexican" in place of the word "Republican." In performing this verbal sleight-of-hand, it becomes increasingly apparent that the speaker of the sentence may harbor views not generally considered to be tolerant or open-minded.

But are they bigots? Bigot, after all, is a strong and charged word. And how about Suzi? Is she a bigot? . . . There is no group better qualified to answer that question than the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a not-for-profit group respected around the globe for its authoritative work to counteract discrimination and anti-Semitism. So are comments like "All Republicans are assholes," expressions of bigotry? According to Caryl M. Stern, ADL's associate national director (and no relation to the author), the answer is yes.

To be sure, in this era of diversity and sensitivity, a veritable cottage industry has sprung up to stamp out bigotry and intolerance. Many of those who have dedicated themselves to the eradication of bigotry tend to be Left-leaning, self-styled progressives. In researching this essay, I interviewed a number of these tolerance gurus. Interestingly, most had no problem labeling all Republicans "a--holes." One prominent sociologist at a top university explained earnestly that he was no bigot but, of course, wouldn't want his sister to marry a Republican.

This is fundamentally silly. Although these leftists are prejudiced, by the exact definition, they are not bigots, nor are Republicans or conservatives an oppressed minority. Not only should we conservatives be reluctant to expand the scope of minorities to be protected, we should welcome the close-mindedness of our adversaries, which makes them that much weaker, as well has hypocrites.

But I also have to say that Mr. Stern's experience has not been mine, though I'm a Massachusetts Jew living among five of the more leftist colleges and universities in the country. I never hear comments like this. My guess is that other people can't spend any great length of time with me without figuring out where I stand on the issues of the day. This may be because, unlike Mr. Stern, I'm not embarassed by my beliefs. (Let's face it, "I'm Republican because my parents were" is pretty weak.) Nonetheless, this type of reaction -- based as it is on the refusal to even learn about Republicans -- does ring true. Modern liberalism is founded on ignorance and a general desire, where personal knowledge is lacking, to simply accept the "compassionate" view without investigation. Time and again, I have found that, with the exception of politicians, public school teachers and academics, even the most liberal people are conservative when it comes to the issues they know the best, or which personally effect them. They're often glad to find a sympathetic ear in which to confess their apostasy. So, I say to Mr. Stern and others, rightists of the world unite, you have nothing to lose except listening to a lot of mindless blather.

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QUO VADIS?

Clymer to co-workers: Stop feeding this monster (Posted By: Jim Romenesko, 5/30/2003, Poynter.org)

To: xxxxx@nytimes.com
From: Adam Clymer (xxxx@nytimes.com)
Subject: The Times
Colleagues,

I think it's time to take a deep breath and think about the New York Times.

I share your contempt for Jayson Blair and Rick Bragg. And I share your anger at some of the failures of management that enabled them. I agree with a lot of what Times people have told outside reporters, either directly or in internal E-mails that have quickly found their way to the Internet. In particular, Peter Kilborn made the case against Bragg's excuses with telling effect.

But I think by now we have hit back, fairly and convincingly, and Blair and Bragg are gone, belatedly, from our ranks. The time has come to stop feeding this destructive monster. The Times that we are honored to work for will be damaged if we continue to fight with each other in public. And that's more important than our own grievously, justifiably injured pride.

Like any conservative, but especially those who came of age in the 60's and 70's, I've a great deal of contempt for the press and for no press outlet more than the Times. So it has been a tremendous pleasure, not at all guilty, to watch the Gray Lady implode over the last few weeks.

Mr. Clymer's letter captures, almost accidentally, something of the reason why this is so. The "beast" to which he refers is, ironically enough, the very media that the Times is a part of. Like so many institutions before it, but usually at its own hands, the Times has discovered that once there's blood in the water the sharks go into a feeding frenzy and no one really gives a good goddamn about collateral damage, reputations, strict adherence to the facts, etc. [One story in particular that has always infuriated me concerns Oliver "Billy" Sipple, who struck at Sarah Jane Moore as she fired a gun at Gerald Ford, perhaps saving the President from assassination. How was this ex-marine repaid for his heroic act? The SF Chronicle revealed that he was, unknown to friends and family, a homosexual and destroyed his life.] What makes the Times' agony so enjoyable though is that the insufferable mavens of the press have been telling us all for thirty-plus years--ever since they decided they didn't much care for Vietnam or Nixon--that it is their solemn duty to pursue the story no matter where it leads and no matter who gets hurt, because the "truth" must out (so to speak).

Indeed, in one of the most appallingly self-righteous moments in television history, several newmen explained how their precious code of ethics would even prevent them from saving the lives of American soldiers if it might interfere with their story. Here's an account from MediaWatch:

In a future war involving U.S. soldiers what would a TV reporter do if he learned the enemy troops with which he was traveling were about to launch a surprise attack on an American unit? That's just the question Harvard University professor Charles Ogletree Jr, as moderator of PBS' Ethics in America series, posed to ABC anchor PeterJennings and 60 Minutes correspondent Mike Wallace. Both agreed getting ambush footage for the evening news would come before warning the U.S. troops.

For the March 7 installment on battlefield ethics Ogletree set up a theoretical war between the North Kosanese and the U.S.-supported South Kosanese. At first Jennings responded: "If I was with a North Kosanese unit that came upon Americans, I think I personally would do what I could to warn the Americans."

Wallace countered that other reporters, including himself, "would regard it simply as another story that they are there to cover." Jennings' position bewildered Wallace: "I'm a little bit of a loss to understand why, because you are an American, you would not have covered that story."

"Don't you have a higher duty as an American citizen to do all you can to save the lives of soldiers rather than this journalistic ethic of reporting fact?" Ogletree asked. Without hesitating Wallace responded: "No, you don't have higher duty... you're a reporter." This convinces Jennings, who concedes, "I think he's right too, I chickened out."

Ogletree turns to Brent Scowcroft, now the National Security Adviser, who argues "you're Americans first, and you're journalists second." Wallace is mystified by the concept, wondering "what in the world is wrong with photographing this attack by North Kosanese on American soldiers?" Retired General William Westmoreland then points out that "it would be repugnant to the American listening public to see on film an ambush of an American platoon by our national enemy."

A few minutes later Ogletree notes the "venomous reaction" from George Connell, a Marine Corps Colonel. "I feel utter contempt. Two days later they're both walking off my hilltop, they're two hundred yards away and they get ambushed. And they're lying there wounded. And they're going to expect I'm going to send Marines up there to get them. They're just journalists, they're not Americans."

Wallace and Jennings agree, "it's a fair reaction." The discussion concludes as Connell says: "But I'll do it. And that's what makes me so contemptuous of them. And Marines will die, going to get a couple of journalists."

No one who saw the show--at least no one with a scrap of human decency, an iota of moral sense, and a smidgen of patriotism--will ever forget how this contemptible performance by two of America's most celebrated newsmen made the gorge rise in one's throat.

So as the press now becomes Oroborus, the beast that feeds on itself, you'll pardon us if we crack open a Pabst, open a bag of Cheez-Waffles, and enjoy the spectacle. We feel like Christians getting to watch the Romans be fed to the lions.


MORE:
Fresh embarrassment for New York Times (Ciar Byrne, May 29, 2003, The Guardian)

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UM, THIS REALLY ISN'T HELPING.

Firestorm in the Newsroom (Seth Mnookin, Newsweek Web, 5/28/03).

Infuriated by Rick Bragg's description of the workhabits of New York Times national correspondents, Peter Kilborn defends himself and his fellows as follows:

"I was really offended," Kilborn said in a phone interview on Wednesday. "I bust my ass chasing facts and I go to weird places I've never been and I have to root around to get the story. The whole idea [of using stringers to do the bulk of the reporting] is anathema to decent journalism."

Kilborn goes to "weird places." Kilborn is a national correspondent; the places he goes are all within the country.

Now, it's no surprise that Manhattanites think that the rest of the country (absent maybe Westchester County, the Hamptons, Fire Island and parts of Los Angeles) is weird. But is this really a defense the New York Times wants to promote: The National Paper That Even Sends Famous Reporters To Weird Places. And, by the way, has anyone ever made a stronger case for New York parochialism than Kilborn has made inadvertantly?

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BECAUSE I SAID I WOULD

Bush's Road Map: A post-Iraq journey to mend fences in Europe, Mideast (Ken Fireman, May 31, 2003, Newsday)

One of President George W. Bush's most cherished maxims, according to aides, is that political capital must be used rapidly to promote a leader's goals or it will soon dissipate.

With that in mind, the president began an ambitious trip Friday aimed at applying prestige from the victory in Iraq to the effort to solve one of the world's most intractable problems: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The trip's high point is expected next week when Bush meets with Arab leaders in Egypt, and with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his Palestinian counterpart, Mahmoud Abbas, in Aqaba, Jordan. [...]

Several factors have convinced Bush that it is time for a major commitment of presidential prestige. First, the Palestinian Authority recently met one of his key demands by naming a prime minister, Abbas, who is formally committed to squelching terrorism and overhauling the authority's political and economic structures.

Second, in the runup to the Iraq conflict, Bush made commitments to key allies, Tony Blair of Britain and Jose Maria Aznar of Spain, and to Arab leaders, that he would release the long-planned road map at a propitious moment and press a reluctant Sharon to support it. That moment came earlier this month, and Sharon got a divided Israeli cabinet to give provisional backing.

Finally, administration officials believe that the U.S. ouster of Saddam Hussein changed the power balance in the region in Washington's favor - but that this will not last forever.

For all these reasons, Bush said in an interview with foreign journalists shortly before departure, he decided it was time to act.

"I believe in the possibilities of peace," he said. "I trust the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority when he condemns terror. I believe that provides an opening for the United States and others to expend the necessary energies to move the process forward."

Bush added that his trip may help to mitigate what he acknowledged was Arab skepticism about his commitment to pursue the peace process. "I told a lot of the leaders that after the Iraq situation I would work toward peace in the Middle East," he said. "I want them to look me in the eye so they can see that I am determined to work to make this happen."

President Bush continues to use the cunning ploy of saying what he's going to do and then doing it...positively fiendish...

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Today's Senate Confirmation Battles and the Role of the Federal Judiciary (Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain, Ninth Circuit Judge)

In short, to contend that the Constitution is an eminently mutable document ... renders the central fact of our nation’s founding -- namely, the promulgation of a written document designed to bind the will of future majorities -- a mere afterthought, if not a nullity. In so doing, it threatens to undermine the long-term health of the unique polity established by that great charter.

Judge O’Scannlain's speech is outstanding -- read the whole thing -- but here is one of the main points. The contention over judicial nominees is merely the natural consequence of the overthrow of the written Constitution and its replacement by judicial fiat. Once the judiciary is a law-making branch, then everyone else must contend to influence it, however they can. Confirmation is simply the most obvious point of influence.

Justice Scalia has clearly explained the link between judicial activism and contentious confirmations. See, for instance, Scalia: Politics play role in judiciary (Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, 5/10/2003):

The appointment of judges is an increasingly political process in which applicants personal views are becoming more important than their legal expertise, a panel of prominent judges led by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said Friday in Fairbanks....

Scalia ... said he's not surprised that judicial applicants' political views have become the major consideration in whether they are confirmed by the Senate.

"I've been predicting the current crisis for 20 years," Scalia said. "I don't think it's extraordinary that members of the Senate want to ask new judges what new rights will they acknowledge."

He added there's little that can be done to change the current situation, considering the checks and balance system for federal courts is the judicial selection process.

"You're not looking for good lawyers anymore; you shouldn't be looking for good lawyers," Scalia said. "You should be looking for people that agree with you."

Yet this contention, I think, will be the fever that breaks the infection. The judicial activists on the left will never change their behavior as long as it continues to work -- that is, as long as judicial fiat is treated as binding law, and leftists allowed to dominate the judiciary. Once those conditions change, they will reconsider their position. And judicial activism is so destructive of the rule of law that, I believe, liberals and moderate Democrats (spurred by Republican political majorities) will soon reverse their support for it.

So, onward! The more conservative the nominees, the sooner the fever breaks.

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WHAT ARE THE OTHER SIGNS OF THE APOCAPLYPSE?

Scott Simon Essay: Weapons of Mass Destruction, (Scott Simon, Weekend Edition Saturday, 5/31/03).

Although you wouldn't guess it by the title, and it doesn't seem to be available online, in this commentary Scott Simon comes perilously close to endorsing the Brothers Judd view of the Iraqi war and weapons of mass destruction: who cares? Now that "human rights groups" have now increased the number of victims they estimate the Iraqi Ba'athists tortured, Mr. Simon concludes that the regime was evil. It was, in his words, the biggest weapon of mass destruction. He even admits that it's unlikely the President Bush and Tony Blair were out and out lying about wmds, though of course he is concered that serious allegations have been raised and believes that an investigation is warranted. He will back away from this sentiment sometime in the next week, but the point remains: if the Democratic refuseniks have lost NPR, do they have any chance of winning over America?

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DON'T THROW ME IN THAT BRIAR PATCH, BR'ER FOX!

Kerry promises Iowans that war on terror will be key issue (Boston Herald, 5/31/2003)

Sen. John F. Kerry accused President Bush yesterday of failing to protect Americans at home and promised to make the war on terror a major issue in the 2004 presidential race.

"I think this administration has not done what's necessary ...," Kerry said.

"So I intend to make it an issue."

Come into my parlor, said the spider ...

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MANUFACTURED EVIDENCE

Lacking Evidence (Valley News, 5/30/03)

A recent report that compared the effectiveness of job-training programs run by faith-based charities with those run by secular organizations is surprising, not so much for what it concludes as for what it is unable to conclude.

The Indiana study, reported in a Washington Post story that appeared in the Valley News earlier this week, looked at government-funded job training programs run by 11 religious and 16 secular organizations in two counties, from 2000-2002. It found no difference between the programs when it came to job-placement rates or starting wages, but clients of the faith-based groups worked fewer hours, on average, and were less likely to receive health insurance.

Now certainly this seems to undercut the premise of President Bush's faith-based initiative, which is that religious charities can provide many social services at lower cost and more effectively than secular organizations. But the university investigators who did the study were appropriately careful to warn against drawing broad conclusions from their research, noting that they dealt with only two urban counties and one type of social service.

With so much ignorant opinion around it's sometimes hard to tell what is genuine and what is willful obfuscation, but givenn how consistently organs of the Left have gotten this story wrong it seems more intentional than not. The editorialist conflates two issues here in order to attack a straw man. What conservatives actually say is that social services can be provided more effectively by non-governmental institutions and that once government starts funding such organizations, religious groups should be eligible. There are some services that it is indeed claimed are best provided by religious groups--including substance abuse and the like--but job training, considered generically, is not among these. This study then seems to seek to disprove something that no one says is true.

A more useful study might be done though--even in the discrete area of job placement--one which would look at three questions: (1) how do non-governmental programs compare to government programs?; (2) do similar clients have significantly different placement experiences depending on which type of program they are placed in?; and (3) is the clientele different for the three? It's is entirely possible, though we doubt it, that government run progtrams do the best job of the three, at the lowest cost, and do so regardless of how difficult a case the client presents. If that is the case, it would be an excellent though not dispositive argument for bigger government even at the expense of the social/religious sphere. The cited study though tells us nothing of the kind.

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AS JEMMY SPINS IN HIS GRAVE

Madison Versus Bush: The United States is at a crossroads. It can either continue in a policy of unilateralism and projection of raw power. Or it can realize that it needs to coexist within a multilateral world framework. Edward Goldberg explains how the origins of the U.S. constitution play into this choice. (Edward Goldberg, May 19, 2003, The Globalist)

Americans like to see their country as earnest, optimistic and youthful, individualistic, idealistic, and a team player. "We give the underdog a chance" and "We play by the rules," Americans tell themselves.

Fortunately for America, a wise group of men came together 214 years ago to establish the rules that would make it safe for these attractive traits to blossom.

The checks and balances in the Constitution which these men created would not only protect the rights of the individual.

But, it would also force conflicting power bases within society toward compromise in order for society as a whole to be able to move forward.

The U.S. Constitution safeguarded the political system from abuse of power and from abuse of dogma. It forced each side's concepts to face the light of pragmatic concerns. James Madison and his friends knew well that, to preserve liberty, power needed to be balanced and checked.

This concept of checks and balances is integral to American political philosophy. But strangely, it is apparently not considered relevant by the Bush Administration in the formation of its foreign policy.

As far as I can tell, this guy's serious, though we'd be easy to convince that this is meant to be a parody.

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CHIDING THE PILOT FISH

'It will take some time' to mend this fence: In interview with Post, Rice lays bare U.S. disappointment with Canada: Divided on war, deficit (Peter Morton, May 31, 2003, National Post)

Washington has not forgotten Canada's refusal to support its campaign against Iraq and will need "some time" to heal the wounds inflicted by Ottawa's repeated criticisms, Condoleezza Rice, the U.S. national security advisor, told the National Post.

"I think there was disappointment in the United States that a friend like Canada was unable to support the United States in what we considered to be an extremely important issue for our security," Ms. Rice said in an interview before joining George W. Bush at this weekend's G8 summit in Evian, France.

"That disappointment will not go of course away easily and it will take some time [to heal].

"When friends are in a position where we say our security's at stake, we would have thought, as we got from any of our friends, that the answer would have been, 'Well, how can we help?' " she said in the most expansive expression yet of U.S. unhappiness over the Canadian position.

She said Mr. Bush is also puzzled by this week's comments by Jean Chretien, the Prime Minister, who criticized the U.S. President's economic policies and suggested he himself has done a better job.

Ms. Rice said the US$330-billion tax-cut package and other stimulus measures taken by the Bush administration will lead to greater economic growth and more jobs. "And one of the great beneficiaries of that, of course, will be Canada because it is an economy that is extremely connected to the American economy and so the President is doing what he can to stimulate economic growth.'' [...]

Ms. Rice said a "disproportionate" share of dealing with international terrorism fell on the shoulders of the United States, which looked for allies in the battle because "these are values we share with our long-time friends."

"So, yes, there was some disappointment that there seemed to be some questioning of American motives and some lack of understanding that we were simply trying to do in support of our own security and support of everyone's else security," she said.

Note the subtlety with which she makes it clear that Mr. Chretien is only in a position to criticize Mr. Bush because Canada gets to ride the gravy train of the U.S. economy without sharing the security burden that it benefits from.

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TORIES--THE LESS LEFT

Tory leadership convention filled with pretty faces lacking vision (Susan Riley, May 31, 2003, The Ottawa Citizen)

All the federal Tories can hope is that Peter MacKay, who is expected to win today's leadership vote at yet another pivotal party convention here, will keep the seat warm for Catherine Clark -- or for some other future leader with a lot more poise and depth than the leading contenders to replace her father have displayed so far.

This convention is supposed to showcase a "new generation of leadership," but what we are seeing is the party's B-team -- public-spirited, intelligent and hard-working candidates whose only virtue appears to be their youth.

The 37-year-old MacKay, a Nova Scotia MP and son of former Mulroney minister Elmer, was the most professional in his delivery, but his speech confirmed the worst fears of his critics -- that the party's caucus star is a pretty face void of vision. Even by the undemanding standards of the genre, MacKay's effort was more worthy of a candidate for student council than of a prime ministerial hopeful.

He would "restore Canada's place in the world," offer "leadership that listens to an engages Canadians" and, quite honestly, it is hard to find any quotes more penetrating than that. [...]

Predictably, it was David Orchard -- a strong and visible second place here, but too uncongenial to diehard Tories to muster enough support to win -- who delivered the most thoughtful, coherent speech (albeit to the wrong convention), replete with quotations and curious historical asides.

If Orchard is looking for work next week he should apply to run the new Canada History Centre. Few contemporary politicians communicate the ideas and personalities of our history as passionately.

Why are Canadian and British Tories members of their respective parties if not to run as conservatives? Take a look at this essay by Mr Orchard--What makes me a Conservative--and try to figure out how he'd be any different than Jacques Chretien? Meanwhile, Mr. MacKay, supposedly writing about social capital, somehow manages to call for its exact opposite, government actions, rather than social networks. And, of course, the single payer health care system is holier than a cow is to a Hindu. These guys are hopeless.

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CUT THOSE SALARIES

Concerns grow over pay gaps between professional-school professors and everyone else (Chronicle of Higher Education, )

The way Marvin Johnson sees it, business professors at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa get up every morning, teach classes, do their research, and advise students -- just as he does in the university's music school.

So when he learned last fall that the average assistant professor in the business school was earning $72,691, while the average full professor in the humanities made $63,531, he was shocked, he says. "It seemed completely out of whack."

As he began poring over salary records that were provided by the university's institutional-research office, he discovered that the spread between some disciplines was even larger. For example, he learned that the highest-paid faculty members -- those in the law school, with an average salary of $102,462 -- were earning nearly three times as much as those in library science, the lowest-paid discipline at $35,991. (The university's medical school, which is on a different campus, was not included in the data.)

He decided that something had to be done. At his urging, the university's Faculty Senate voted last month to endorse a proposal that would put a cap on raises for the most highly paid professors on the campus, many of whom are in law and business.

It is truly shocking that English professors get paid $63,000 a year to read novels, while other English Ph.D.'s, equally talented, wait tables. Universities should reduce these salaries until the supply of would-be professors equals the demand for novel-readers. I expect this would happen at about $5,378 per year. Anything more than that is a gross injustice.

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CONSERVATIVISM IN WOODEN SHOES?

New government in The Netherlands (Radio Netherlands Wereldomroep, 6/1/2003, via PoliticalTheory.info)

Prime Minister Balkenende said, for instance, that we have to discuss norms and values. At first everybody laughed, but then people said: 'He has a point. There is senseless violence in society. And of course the government has to uphold the law, but we have to do something ourselves, too. We have to go back to the ideas of responsibility, social cohesion, social trust.'

We can recognize both the mocking spirit of fashionable liberalism and the good sense of conservatism. Perhaps there is hope for Europe.

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THE LEFT'S NATIONALISM PROJECT

Historians Trace an Unholy Alliance: Religion and Nationalism (ALEXANDER STILLE, 5/31/03, NY Times)

When Shiite Muslims in Iraq took to the streets to protest the presence of American troops as well as Saddam Hussein, was the world witnessing the birth of nationalism? When President Bush used the term crusade to describe the war on terrorism, was he inadvertently revealing religious roots in American patriotism? In short, is religious sentiment, long considered the prime enemy of nationalism, actually one of its founding elements?

This iconoclastic theory has been gaining ground among historians. Until recently, there was a growing scholarly consensus that nationalism was a distinctly modern phenomenon, a product of post-Enlightenment culture. Public celebrations of the Fatherland, the creation of national anthems and devotion to the flag all occurred in the wake of the French and American Revolutions. [...]

[P]eter Sahlins, a historian at the University of California at Berkeley, who is working on a book on the nature of citizenship in early modern France, says the idea that religious intolerance is the "original sin" of nationalism is getting more and more attention. "I think it's a healthy corrective to the modernist consensus," he said.

Mr. Sahlins notes that prevailing theories of nationalism have a way of following the mood of the times. When Serbs, Croats and Muslims were killing one another in the Balkans, many commentators originally pointed to the eternal and atavistic origins of ethnic violence, not recognizing that the different groups had lived in relative harmony under the Ottoman Empire and even under Tito.

"Now the context in which we see nationalism has completely changed," he said. Faced with the threat of Islamic fundamentalism, the West is more open to looking at the role of religion in the formation of nationalism. [...]

Linda Colley, a historian at the London School of Economics and the author of the 1992 book "Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837" (Yale University Press), agrees that religion is central to nationalism.

According to Ms. Colley and Mr. Marx, nationalism begins with an act of demonizing a religious "other" and creating a sense of community by defining an "us" and a "them." Recognizing this, they argue, may help Westerners better understand, for example, the contemporary phenomena of Islamic fundamentalism and Arab nationalism

Suddenly the incomprehensibility of yesterday's patriotism is nationalism essay becomes clearer. Note the oddity here of defining Islamicism/pan-Arabism as "nationalism". What nation?

Religious fundamentalism [or any universalist ideology, from liberalism (in the classic sense) to Marxism] may be problematic, but it is a far different problem than nationalism. It is the peculiar power of ideology that it can unite people across national borders--so, for instance, al Qaeda can see the "struggle" of a Mohammed Farah Aidid in Somalia and of a Jemaah Islamiyah in Indonesia and of an Abu Sayyaf in the Phillipines as its own, despite obvious national differences.

If you want to criticize religion, that's a reasonably good hook to hang your case on. But nationalism, particularly in its most virulent form, would appear to be a quite different beast, one based on a kind of tribalism, an identification of a given ethnicity as superior to others within and without the nation. Indeed, if we look for the likely wellspring of nationalism we could do worse than seek it in scientific materialism. If Darwin is right and even minor differences in genetic makeup render us significantly different than one another and therefore competitors for survival, then such ethnic hatreds are natural. But even if Darwinism overstates or misstates the case, so long as we accept it as true it can form the the perfect basis of ethnic hostility.

Unfortunately, the idea that the main alternative to religious belief is likewise responsible for violence between peoples hardly advances the Left's cause, so it would appear a sytstematic attempt is being made to simply redefine nationalism in a variety of dubious ways in order to escape its implications.

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HERE'S YOUR RECIPE, IF ONLY YOU HAD THE INGREDIENTS...

Constitutionally, a Risky Business: Drafting a constitution is often the first step in transforming a country to democracy, but the questions seem to be endless. (FELICIA R. LEE, 5/31/03, NY Times)

In the last 35 years, more than 100 countries have tried to accomplish what Iraq is trying to do: create a democratic constitution.

While some countries have succeeded, many others have been stymied by ethnic and religious hatreds, differences over power divisions and deeply rooted corruption or violence.

Drafting a constitution is often the first step in transforming a country to democracy, but the questions seem to be endless.

If you start a democracy with a constitution you've already gone tragically wrong. A functional constitution is necessarily a conservative document--restraining change and providing predictability--so it must be preceded by the development of a series of social and governmental institutions that are worth preserving. Among these are family, neighborhood associations, churches, unions, a military, a precedential legal system (with property rights), a relatively market-oriented economy, etc.. It is the desire to protect these things that gioves the citizenry a vested interest in the success of the constitutional order. In the absence of these things, all a constitution is likely to do is determine who will get to exercise authority over the nation or, in some ways worse, who will hold office but not have the actual authority to govern. Either of these alternatives naturally tends to undermine the people's faith in constitutionalism itself.

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FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE DIXIE CHICKS

Weimar Whiners (JAMES TRAUB, June 1, 2003, NY Times Magazine)

Have you heard that it's 1933 in America? God knows I have. Three times in the last few weeks I have been told -- by a novelist, an art historian and a professor of classics at Harvard, none of them ideologues or cranks -- that the erosion of civil liberties under the Bush administration constitutes an early stage, or at least a precursor, to the kind of fascism Hitler brought to Germany. I first heard the 1933 analogy a few months back, when one of the nation's leading scholars of international law suggested at a meeting of diplomats that Bush's advisers were probably plotting to suspend the election of 2004.

Now, I think I understand the argument that compares the United States with imperial Rome, or with one of the unwitting great powers of 1914. But 1933? Hitler? That's grotesque; and the fact that is has achieved such currency among what the French call the bien pensant is vivid proof that in much of the left, 9/11 and its aftermath have increased the visceral loathing not of terrorism or of Islamist fundamentalism but of President George Bush.

Like all forms of reductio ad Hitler, the 1933 analogy constitutes a gross trivialization of the worst event in modern history. Do we remember what actually happened in 1933? Hitler ascended to the chancellorship, suspended constitutional rights and banned all opposition political parties, sent the Brown Shirts into the streets and issued the first decrees stripping Jews of their rights. To compare the passage of the U.S.A. Patriot Act and the proposed -- but scotched -- program to get ordinary citizens to pass along tips about suspicious dark-skinned strangers, not to mention the cancellation of Tim Robbins's invitation to appear at the Baseball Hall of Fame because he might criticize the war in Iraq -- to compare these and other inroads on our liberties to Hitler's budding terror state is repellent.

But 1933 theorists, at least the more sophisticated ones, look beyond current policy to what they consider the structural similarities between contemporary America and various fascist states. In a recent article in The Nation, Sheldon Wolin, an emeritus professor of politics at Princeton, described the contemporary Republican party as ''a fervently doctrinal party, zealous, ruthless, antidemocratic and boasting a near majority.''

That last bit from Mr. Wolin is particularly delicious: just because the majority is not Democratic does not mean they aren't democratic. Fascist is not the opposite of Leftist.

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BALL OF CONFUSION, THAT'S WHAT THE WORLD IS TODAY, HEY, HEY

-REVIEW: of Hobbes, Locke, and Confusion's Masterpiece: An Examination of Seventeenth Century Philosophy by Ross Harrison (Duncan Ivison, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews)

The title of the book is taken from Shakespeare's Macbeth, and Macduff's lament for the murder of King Duncan, the consequence of which is that "Confusion now have made his masterpiece!". For Harrison, Shakespeare's portrayal of the undermining of moral and political order provides a leitmotif for thinking about seventeenth century political philosophy in general. The greatest works of this century--here meaning those of Hobbes and Locke--emerged out of moral and political confusion. Religious disputes over the nature of belief and religious practice generated murderous civil and international conflict. Philosophical disputes, and especially the revival of ancient skepticism and newer forms of modern skepticism, sowed deep philosophical doubts about the possibility of knowledge, natural or otherwise. Older philosophical frameworks, such as Aristotelianism and Thomism, were found wanting, and philosophers struggled to find new arguments to arbitrate between various warring doctrines, or indeed to transcend them.

For Harrison, skepticism is the most pressing moral and political problem faced by seventeenth century philosophy, and especially by Hobbes and Locke. And the problem of skepticism infects "the most fundamental problem in political philosophy" - the problem of political obligation. At times Harrison seems to suggest these are still our problems, and that one way we gain insight into them is by seeing the various options for their resolution as presented by Hobbes, Locke, and Grotius, among others. We gain this kind of insight by taking the history of philosophy seriously, and especially the contexts within which moral and political arguments are formed. Not surprisingly, since these remain our problems, Hobbes emerges as the most clear-headed in this history since he seems most willing to bite the bullet when it comes to the clash between self-interest, politics and morality. We need politics (the commonwealth) to solve the moral problem, given his subjectivist account of what is good and bad and of moral judgment. In a lovely aside, Harrison tells us that at one point he contemplated calling the last chapter "What's the Use?" in order to "reflect more generally on the possibility of political philosophy and on the use for political philosophy of the historical philosophers I have been describing". His answer to this question is rather elusive, but I take it that it is Hobbes? insight about the need for politics to help solve our moral conflicts that Harrison is suggesting is the master stroke of the "new" natural law. This and the various attempts at refuting Hobbes' argument, such as Cumberland's, point to the "beginnings of the contractualist method" of discovering the good by discovering those things into which everyone would contract. Harrison even suggests that Locke gestures at something like it in his 1692 note "Ethica A". But in another much bleaker note written the following year (which Harrison doesn't cite), Locke suggests that without God and his divine law what we get is moral chaos. Harrison admits that Locke is only "waving" at something about which Hobbes is much clearer.

As it stands, the main claims of the book are hardly novel. The central focus on skepticism fits into a pattern of thinking about the history of the seventeenth century that has its roots in Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy, and which has been central to the work of historians of philosophy like Richard Popkin, amongst others. Richard Tuck and Knud Haakonssen have also argued recently at great length and with great skill that the political thought of the seventeenth century--especially that of Hobbes and Grotius--was profoundly shaped by the challenge of skepticism mounted by writers such as Montaigne and Charron. But what is interesting about the book, at least for me, is the way it tries to balance historical and philosophical approaches to these questions in a manner not often attempted in the existing literature. To over-generalize somewhat, historically minded scholars often provide beautiful reconstructions of the context of an argument or period, but avoid asking the kinds of philosophical questions that inevitably emerge as one reflects on the relation between arguments then and now. On the other hand, and much more frequently, contemporary philosophers tend to wrench early modern arguments out of context altogether, and criticize or put them to work in modern guise without any hesitation whatsoever. Harrison tries to strike a balance between these two extremes, and it provides an interesting background for the work as a whole. [...]

Now Harrison argues that political philosophy has essentially three tasks. First, the task of explanation, that is, "promoting understanding of political aspects of our (social) world". Second, the "task of justification . . . we want to know why or whether we should have it, or in what way", and in this sense political philosophy is a normative subject, "a part of applied ethics". Third, it must explain motivation, that is, why people are or could be motivated to "produce" the desired outcomes or institutions. These various aspects can come apart and combine in various ways, as Harrison shows very nicely with regard to both Hobbes and Locke. But the crucial task for political philosophy is justification--in fact, the need for justification is entailed by the confusion caused by skepticism, and the responses by Hobbes and Locke are "masterpieces of justification". The structure of justification that Harrison presupposes goes something like this. Rationally binding norms are either self-grounding, on the basis of some account of self-interest, moral realism, or a conception of man as a rational self-governing being, or they bind in virtue of the superior wisdom and/or power of God.

It is the failure to find a "self-grounding" justification that has left us with only two alternatives: either morality must be grounded in God or else all behavior must be regulated by the State (this is regulation rather than morality precisely because it proceeds from the abandonment of the attempt to find justification). The main differences among the several nations of the West seem to be a function of how far along the path from Godish morality to Statism they find themselves, with America having proceeded the shortest distance and therefore being the most free of State control.

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VICTORY IS ITS OWN JUSTIFICATION

Europe Awaits, With Bated Breath (RICHARD BERNSTEIN, May 31, 2003, NY Times)

Referring to "weapons of mass destruction," the conservative newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote in an editorial today:

"America and Great Britain grounded their military operation on the argument that the dictator in Baghdad was building W.M.D., that no inspections regime could really do anything about it and, given the seriousness of the threat, there was no time to lose. Since the end of the war, much has been unearthed to show the criminal nature of the Hussein regime, and that gives moral justification to a regime change. But up to now there has been no evidence for the W.M.D. that were used as grounds for war."

The newspaper argued that the Bush administration's justification for the war had crumbled, and American "credibility and legitimacy" were therefore weakened.

Mr. Bush arrives in a Europe whose various publics generally opposed the Iraq war, regardless of the position taken by their governments - France and Germany loudly opposed, and Britain, Spain and Italy in support. Still, as time has passed, and as reports of the horrors of life in prewar Iraq have appeared, some of the antiwar passion of ordinary Europeans seems to have dissipated.

There were, for example, no large demonstrations being planned to coincide with Mr. Bush's visit, which would probably not have been the case only a few weeks ago.

The lack of protesters effectively denies the notion that the lack of WMD matters. Even the Left tends to have some trouble turning out the crowds once the killing fields are exposed and the argument that war was justified but on different grounds is unlikely to move the masses. We're right back where we started. The diehards on one side don't care whether there was WMD or not (that's us); those on the other don't care how murderous Saddam was. Folks in the middle are happy to have won so easily but will have forgetten the war and Iraq by the 4th of July. On to North Korea.

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THE REAL SOLZHENITSYN

-REVIEW: of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent from Ideology By Daniel J. Mahoney (Robert P. Kraynak, First Things)

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian writer and former Soviet dissident, is not yet dead, but he is in danger of fading into oblivion in the West and of being dismissed as a crank in his own country. This is a terrible shame. For Solzhenitsyn is one of the giants of the twentieth century-a heroic witness to truth who resisted Communist tyranny and exposed the horrors of Soviet forced-labor camps in The Gulag Archipelago. He is also a powerful novelist whose works of historical fiction-The First Circle, August 1914, Cancer Ward, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich-depict the enduring struggles between good and evil in the human heart.

If these achievements are not enough to save Solzhenitsyn from premature death, then one can read Daniel Mahoney's inspiring new book Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent from Ideology to appreciate the philosophical and spiritual reasons for keeping him alive. The most important reason, Mahoney tells us, is Solzhenitsyn's understanding of "the permanent propensities of the modern mind"-namely, the fatal attraction to utopian ideologies and the totalitarian temptation to radically alter human nature. Solzhenitsyn not only dissects these propensities; he also provides a way out-an "ascent from ideology," in Mahoney's words, that aims at healing the human soul by recovering the God-given natural order of things as well as the spiritual basis of political freedom.

In presenting a reasoned defense of Solzhenitsyn, Mahoney joins a distinguished group of scholars, including Edward Ericson and Alexis Klimoff, whose mission is to rehabilitate Solzhenitsyn in Western eyes. Their task is formidable, because most Westerners have accepted the demonized caricature of Solzhenitsyn as a Russian "ayatollah," a Tsarist reactionary, a nationalistic extremist, and, to boot, an anti-Semite.

These scholars must also contend with the bias of modern intellectuals against any attempt to portray Solzhenitsyn as a spokesman for responsible political freedom. As Mahoney points out, "Contemporary intellectuals and journalists will not tolerate any serious challenge to the enlightenment or progressivist assumptions underlying modern liberty." What he means is that Western intellectuals are intolerant because they are hardly aware of decent alternatives to the secular theories of freedom and rights flowing from the Enlightenment. Hence, it is almost inconceivable to them that Solzhenitsyn could hold traditional beliefs about God, Orthodox Christianity, the mystical basis of the Russian nation, and the soul's eternal destiny while also being a spokesman for responsible political freedom (meaning constitutional limits on power, moderate nationalism, private property, and local self-government). And yet this is the real Solzhenitsyn, according to Mahoney, not the demon of Western journalism. [...]

Mahoney begins by arguing that the most reliable statement of Solzhenitsyn's political views is not the sensational Harvard Address of 1978 but rather the largely ignored Liechtenstein Address of 1993. This is a bold and original way to interpret Solzhenitsyn. The Harvard Address created a huge stir because it criticized Western liberal democracies for their loss of courage during the Vietnam War and for their adherence to legalistic rights without moral restraints. The Harvard Address was strident (though also powerful and inspiring, in my view) and seemed to offer no third way between the spiritual exhaustion of Western democracy and the tyranny of Soviet communism.

The later Liechtenstein Address continues the criticism of modern Western life, challenging its notion of progress for diminishing the human soul by glorifying materialism and trivializing death. Yet the address also sounds a new theme by praising the moral strengths of Western democracy-especially Ronald Reagan's inspiring political leadership that enabled the West to win the Cold War, as well as the constitutional restraints on power that protect personal liberty. The mature Solzhenitsyn, Mahoney demonstrates, is a man capable of prudent political judgment who clearly recognizes that political freedom is indispensable for survival as well as for spiritual renewal.

Mahoney locates a crucial element of Solzhenitsyn's political teaching in his analysis of Peter Stolypin, the Prime Minister of Russia from 1906-11. Solzhenitsyn's appreciation of Stolypin has been largely unknown because it appears in the second edition of August 1914: The Red Wheel I (1989), which few have read. What Solzhenitsyn claims in the Stolypin chapters is that a moderate alternative to Tsarist autocracy existed in Russia in the early twentieth century-namely, a peaceful evolution toward a European-style constitutional monarchy under the enlightened statesmanship of Prime Minister Stolypin.

The main features of Stolypin's plan were the preservation of the Romanov dynasty and Orthodox Church, combined with economic and political reforms-reforms that would have given land to peasants and established local self-governing councils. Tragically, Stolypin was assassinated by terrorists who feared the success of his plan (which Solzhenitsyn estimates could have created an independent peasantry in twenty years and prevented Communist revolution). Mahoney's analysis shows Solzhenitsyn to be a Burkean-style admirer of constitutional monarchy that gradually evolves toward ordered liberty while preserving his nation's distinctive traditions.

Had Mr. Solzhenitsyn been content to demolish the legitimacy of the Soviet Union, his contribution to mankind would have been more than sufficient. That he also showed us the rot creeping into the foundations of our own culture makes him one of the most extraordinary men of our time.

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TOFU IS MURDER

The Paradoxes of American Nationalism: As befits a nation of immigrants, American nationalism is defined not by notions of ethnic superiority, but by a belief in the supremacy of U.S. democratic ideals. This disdain for Old World nationalism creates a dual paradox in the American psyche: First, although the United States is highly nationalistic, it doesn't see itself as such. Second, despite this nationalistic fervor, U.S. policymakers generally fail to appreciate the power of nationalism abroad. (Minxin Pei, Foreign Policy)

Nationalism is a dirty word in the United States, viewed with disdain and associated with Old World parochialism and imagined supremacy. Yet those who discount the idea of American nationalism may readily admit that Americans, as a whole, are extremely patriotic. When pushed to explain the difference between patriotism and nationalism, those same skeptics might concede, reluctantly, that there is a distinction, but no real difference. Political scientists have labored to prove such a difference, equating patriotism with allegiance to one's country and defining nationalism as sentiments of ethno-national superiority. In reality, however, the psychological and behavioral manifestations of nationalism and patriotism are indistinguishable, as is the impact of such sentiments on policy. [...]

American nationalism is hidden in plain sight. But even if Americans saw it, they wouldn't recognize it as nationalism. That's because American nationalism is a different breed from its foreign cousins and exhibits three unique characteristics.

First, American nationalism is based on political ideals, not those of cultural or ethnic superiority. That conception is entirely fitting for a society that still sees itself as a cultural and ethnic melting pot. As President George W. Bush said in his Fourth of July speech last year: "There is no American race; there's only an American creed." And in American eyes, the superiority of that creed is self-evident. American political institutions and ideals, coupled with the practical achievements attributed to them, have firmly convinced Americans that their values ought to be universal. Conversely, when Americans are threatened, they see attacks on them as primarily attacks on their values. Consider how American elites and the public interpreted the September 11 terrorist attacks. Most readily embraced the notion that the attacks embodied an assault on U.S. democratic freedoms and institutions.

Second, American nationalism is triumphant rather than aggrieved. In most societies, nationalism is fueled by past grievances caused by external powers. Countries once subjected to colonial rule, such as India and Egypt, are among the most nationalistic societies. But American nationalism is the polar opposite of such aggrieved nationalism. American nationalism derives its meaning from victories in peace and war since the country?s founding. Triumphant nationalists celebrate the positive and have little empathy for the whining of aggrieved nationalists whose formative experience consisted of a succession of national humiliations and defeats.

Finally, American nationalism is forward looking, while nationalism in most other countries is the reverse. Those who believe in the superiority of American values and institutions do not dwell on their historical glories (though such glories constitute the core of American national identity). Instead, they look forward to even better times ahead, not just at home but also abroad. This dynamism imbues American nationalism with a missionary spirit and a short collective memory. Unavoidably, such forward-looking and universalistic perspectives clash with the backward-looking and particularistic perspectives of ethno-nationalism in other countries.

This is a fairly odd essay. It ignores what has always been understood as the difference between Nationalism and American patriotism--that the former is ethnicity-based while the latter is ideology-based--so that the author can then read the differences between the two into a sweeping definition of Nationalism and then castigate Americans for not recognizing that they fit this newly coined definition. Most bizarre of all, she does this even as she notes the signifigance of each difference.

One might just as well redefine vegetables as meat and then chide those who call themselves vegetarians for deluding themselves.

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ORDERED LIBERTY STARTS WITH ORDER

What Palestinians Can Learn From a Turning Point in Zionist History (ETHAN BRONNER, May 30, 2003, NY Times)

In the final years of the British mandate in Palestine, there was not one Jewish militia but several, just as there are competing Palestinian groups today. The main one, the Haganah, was led by Mr. Ben-Gurion. A more violent and radical one, the Irgun Zvai Leumi, often called simply the Irgun, was led by Menachem Begin. The Irgun, along with an even more radical group, the Stern Gang, was responsible for a massacre of more than 200 Palestinians in the village of Deir Yassin in April 1948.

A month later, after the British walked out of Palestine and Mr. Ben-Gurion declared the state of Israel, Arab armies attacked. On June 1, the Haganah and Irgun agreed to merge into the Israel Defense Forces, headed by Haganah commanders. The accord called on Irgun members to hand over arms and terminate separate activity, including arms purchases abroad.

But there remained the question of an old American Navy landing vessel bought by the Irgun's American supporters and renamed the Altalena. The ship, whose purchase had predated the June 1 agreement, was packed with 850 volunteers, 5,000 rifles, 3,000 bombs, 3 million cartridges and hundreds of tons of explosives.

Mr. Ben-Gurion wanted every soldier and bullet he could get and ordered the ship to dock. But Mr. Begin said the arms should go to Irgun troops. Mr. Ben-Gurion refused; at that point, Irgun men headed to the beach to unload the arms.

Mr. Ben-Gurion realized the challenge he faced. As he put it in his memoir, "I decided this must be the moment of truth. Either the government's authority would prevail and we could then proceed to consolidate our military force or the whole concept of nationhood would fall apart." [...]

The point for the Palestinians is that until their radical militias are put out of action, those groups will always be in the position of spoilers. In 1996, the Palestinian Authority showed itself capable of confrontation, making widespread arrests of extremists in the wake of several suicide bombings. Thousands of militants were arrested. But most were eventually let go. The Palestinians must do it again and in a definitive manner. The Altalena is a symbol of that task because it involved genuine confrontation yet little loss of life.

It is the essence of the State that only it be allowed to mete out death. Sooner or later--hopefully sooner--Mr. Abbas will have to establish the existence of this kind of monopoly power if the idea of a Palestinian nation is to be taken seriously.

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BREAKER WEPT

It'd pay for blokes to have the babies (Richard Glover, May 31 2003, Sydney Morning Herald)

Sydney filmmakers, it has emerged this week, are making a documentary about fathers who pretend to breastfeed their new babies. Apparently, the fathers believe that this aids the bonding process.

At the same time, a Herald report claims men will soon be able to create babies, without the assistance of any female genetic material.

It's great that men want to be women, and women want to be men, but what will it all mean? Here's a list of just some of the ways the world would change if men and women swapped roles: [...]

People would stop publishing baby manuals, since no man has ever started a job by reading the instructions.

Instead of the question "Do I look good in this dress?", there would always be a statement: "You've got to admit I look great in this dress."

The length of the labour would be recorded on the child's birth certificate; rather like the way big-game fishermen record the length of battle for a particularly fine marlin.

Workplace productivity would fall to new lows as men everywhere were distracted by the alluring sight of their own breasts.

Apparently Aussie men don't have the same masculinity problem as Canadian men.

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TRANSPARENCY

Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz Interview with Sam Tannenhaus, Vanity Fair (United States Department of Defense, May 9, 2003)

Q: Since you brought that up let me ask you something related to that. I've looked at the remarkable Defense Policy Guidance of 1992 --

Wolfowitz: Wait a minute. Did you look at the guidance or did you look at the draft that was leaked before I saw it?

Q: That's a very good point. Actually all I saw were summaries of it. Is there a big discrepancy as to what was reported and what was in it?

Wolfowitz: Yes. In short. At some point I guess it's acquired such a life of its own I ought to go back and refresh my memory.

But the way I remember it approximately is as follows. I gave a quite substantial briefing to Secretary Cheney and what was then called I guess the Defense Resources Board on a post-Cold War defense strategy, the essence of which was to shift from a strategy for being prepared to fight a global war, to being focused on two possible regional conflicts. And to downsize the U.S. military by some 40 percent.

That was sort of taken to the President, promulgated in a speech in Aspen on August 2, 1990, which you may recall happened also to be the day that Iraq invaded Kuwait. In fact we had, in that briefing that I gave in May I think, it focused on the Iraqi threat to the Arabian peninsula as one of the regional problems we needed to be prepared to deal with. At the time that was considered a revolutionary idea. By the time the President gave the speech it had already happened. [Laughter]

Then that general briefing had to be translated into a guidance document for the department. Some people on my staff wrote a draft. Before I even got to see the draft someone leaked it to the New York Times, apparently because they didn't like it. The New York Times then wrote about the draft.

If you go back, and you can do this with Lexis/Nexis. If you go back, the excerpts from the draft are nowhere near as hysterical as the way the New York Times reported it. So people in the first place were reacting to the New York Times description of the draft as opposed to the actual text of the draft which the Times in fact did publish.

I repeat, it was not a draft that I'd even reviewed yet.

As I recall, one of the pieces of hysteria was the idea that this is a blueprint for a massive increase in U.S. defense spending, when in fact it was a blueprint for a 40 percent reduction in U.S. defense spending. It goes on from there.

When we did a revised draft that in fact I had reviewed carefully, the State Department initially didn't want us to put it out, I think because it was a little too much. Well, I don't know why. They didn't want us to put it out. I don't want to speculate on motives. But in January of 1993 as we were about to leave, I said to Cheney don't you think we should publish it? And he said yes, we should. So it's available in the full text as the Regional Defense Strategy of January, 1993.

I know people say oh well, they just sanded off the corners because the real thing received such an adverse reaction. But the truth of the matter is what the Times was writing about was something that I'd never seen. What is published, while I will admit some of the corners are rounded off on it, reflects my views. [...]

Q: [Y]ou have been skeptical about Clinton's, the sentimental liberalism in his ideas, his approach to foreign policy, right?

Wolfowitz: Well, yes but let's remember that -- I think they made a serious over-reach in Somalia when they went beyond just ending starvation and tried to do nationbuilding. I think Haiti was a waste of American effort. I think, as we've learned, the North Korea Framework Agreement was delusional. But on two of the key things they did, namely Bosnia and Kosovo, Bob Dole supported Clinton quite strongly and I would say courageously on Bosnia and I'm proud to claim some credit in having advised --

Q: You did too.

Wolfowitz: I did too, but I also was there when Dole was being pushed by some of his Republican colleagues to go after Clinton saying this would be a catastrophe. I said no it won't be, and moreover, it's the right thing to do.

If they had dropped the arms embargo on the Bosnians as they promised to do when they came into office it might not have been necessary to still have thousands of foreign troops in Bosnia. But by the time you got to it in 1995 it was the only alternative.

And similarly, on Kosovo, when Bush was deciding whether to support it or not, I was strongly urging him to do so. When some Republicans tried to undercut Clinton on Kosovo, it was Bush and McCain together who told them don't do that. It's wrong.

So it's not that everything they did was wrong, but I think things like Haiti and Somalia were over-reached and generally there was, I think, a difficulty in distinguishing what was American interest from what were sort of vaguely seen as international community preferences. But I'm not a unilateralist by any means. In fact I don't think you can get much done in this world if you do it alone.

Q: Do you think there was a reluctance on their part even to use the threat of force? To make force an option in the way that it's now become -- I think about North Korea, Syria and Iran, and actually --

Wolfowitz: And Iraq.

Q: And Iraq. When I think about it, these other three that have now been brought up, being discussed, have actually been very kind of multinational and diplomatic and yet it's partly the threat of force that seems to strengthen the approach, doesn't it?

Wolfowitz: There's no question that in certain -- First of all, diplomacy that it's just words is rarely going to get you much unless you're dealing with people who basically share your values and your interests. I'm not against, I mean sometimes it does help to just have a better understanding.

But if you're talking about trying to move people to something that they're not inclined to do, then you've got to have leverage and one piece of leverage is the ultimate threat of force. It's something you need to be very careful about because, as Rumsfeld likes to say, don't cock unless you're prepared to throw it.

By the way I think there was a tendency to cock it too often with Kosovo. If you go back and look at the year and a half or so leading up to when we finally did use force there were so many empty threats issued that Milosevic clearly concluded, ultimately wrongly, that we weren't serious.

So I think yeah, I think the threat of force is one of the instruments of diplomacy, but it's one that needs to be used carefully.

It's hard to recall a public official who has ever been portrayed quite so ominously in the media but who comes across so well when the media actually talk to him.

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)

Jesus was gay - $51,000 says so (News.com.au, 5/29/2003)

JESUS was gay – the University of Queensland gave $51,000 of public money to a PhD student to reach that conclusion....

As well as his revelation about Christ, Dr McCleary has also reached the conclusion that three – or possibly four – of Jesus's chosen disciples were also gay....

Dr McCleary also believes that gay people find it easier to be Christian. "You don't have to be gay to be Christian, but it would be easier," he said....

He said Jesus's astrological chart, clues in the scriptures to which the churches had been blind and accurate biblical translations had all played a part in his conclusions. "The starting point is the matter of John, who always referred to himself as Jesus's beloved disciple," Dr McCleary said.

I, frankly, don't want to know Dr. McCleary's interpretation of Jesus's last commandment, the mandamus ("Love one another as I have loved you," John 15:12). But I will say this: he makes a good case for separation of church and state. Also for separation of education and state, and separation of historical research and state.

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VOTE DEMOCRAT IN '04--WE NEED MORE MANSONS

Dem Blues: The left, turning right, was plain wrong to attack pop culture (Robert Wilonsky, 5/29/03, Dallas Observer)

You've been warned: This is a column about politics wherein a popular-culture critic (dunno what that is either, but says so on my tax returns) interviews a former rock journalist-turned-publicist-turned-band-manager-turned-record-label-executive about how the Democratic Party alienated everyone under the age of death. You may take this with a grain of salt; you may take it with an entire salt lick. Wouldn't blame you a bit, as all I know about politics could fit inside the head of the Green Lantern action figure sitting on my desk, and the record-label exec in question did sign Jewel to a major-label deal, which should make you immediately suspicious of anything he has to say, think, write or, for that matter, do.

All that said, Danny Goldberg is probably the perfect guy to talk Democratic politics with when all you know about Democratic politics is that Joe Lieberman's going to get his salami handed to him on a seder plate come Election Day 2004. The 52-year-old Goldberg is not only the quintessential liberal--supports higher taxes to fund national health care and better pay for teachers, has been an officer in the American Civil Liberties Union since the mid-1980s, believes labor unions should be stronger--but he's also a longtime rock-and-roll pusher man. He's worked with Led Zeppelin (as publicist and head of Swan Song, the band's label), Nirvana and Sonic Youth (as manager, when he owned Gold Mountain), Elvis Costello and Lucinda Williams and R.E.M. (as the head of one of several labels for whom he's worked, including Warner Bros., Mercury and Atlantic) and now Warren Zevon and Steve Earle (as owner of his own label, Artemis Records).

Ever since Robert Plant was a golden god, Goldberg has been selling culture to kids. He has been witness to rock's occasional revolutions and a party to its intermittent downward slides (he signed Hootie and the Blowfish); he helped organize the No Nukes concert in 1980 and was on the front line of the Culture Wars long before Tipper Gore ever fired a shot. And from his vantage point, the war's going badly for his side: Used to be it was only right-wingers who hated what he was selling. Now you can't find a Democratic candidate, outside of maybe Al Sharpton, who'll own up to owning music you can move to.

As Goldberg insists in his book Dispatches from the Culture Wars: How the Left Lost Teen Spirit, which arrives in stores in two weeks, Democrats can't get kids to vote anymore because they've spent the last decade, if not longer, attacking young voters and those coming of political age--especially Democrat front-runner Lieberman. It was Lieberman who, along with Hillary Clinton, introduced the Media Marketing Accountability Act of 2001, which wanted the Federal Trade Commission to go after record companies selling rock and rap records to kids under 17. Lieberman insisted, hey, he just wanted to put "ratings" on CD covers; what he really wanted was to make it a criminal act to sell Eminem and "the vile, hateful and nihilistic" Marilyn Manson to kids. Lieberman--don't kid yourself, he's Bill Bennett in a yarmulke.

Well, Mr. Wilonsky does start by warning us he knows not whereof he speaks. but by the time he gets to the point where he thinks Joe Lieberman did himself political damage by attacking the likes of Marilyn Manson he might have thought better of handing in the column.

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"PROGRESS"IVES

DNC Proposal Raises Controversy (Brain Faler, May 30, 2003, Washington Post)

The Democratic National Committee backed away yesterday from reports that it plans to lay off nearly a dozen minority staffers -- a proposal criticized by several prominent black politicians -- saying it has not made any decisions on its staffing.

The DNC had proposed laying off 10 African American staffers as its retools the party in preparation for the 2004 campaign. But that plan was roundly condemned by several prominent black leaders, including party strategist Donna Brazile, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Tex.) and DNC executive committee member Minyon Moore.

"I'm just outraged," Brazile had told the Associated Press on Wednesday. "They started reading me the names and I said, 'Oh, oh -- they're all black.' I went through the roof."

DNC communications strategist Jim Mulhall said yesterday that his party has not made any decisions on who it might dismiss and when. He called the number of staffers cited in the reports "inaccurate," but declined to estimate how many might lose their jobs or when the party might make its decisions. "It's a work in progress," he said.

Tell Old Pharoah, let my people go...

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RAVING IDIOCY

When Holding a Party Is a Crime (JACOB SULLUM, May 30, 2003, NY Times)

During Prohibition, the government required that industrial alcohol be poisoned, typically with methanol, to keep it from being converted into cocktails. If bootleggers did not completely remove the adulterant, it could cause blindness, paralysis and death. Thus a measure aimed at discouraging alcohol consumption made it more hazardous for those who continued to drink.

A similar dynamic can be seen in today's war on drugs. The latest example is a law President Bush signed last month. The measure, attached to the Amber Alert bill by Senator Joseph Biden, Democrat of Delaware, holds club owners responsible for drug use on their property. The main target--reflected in the rider's original name, the Reducing Americans' Vulnerability to Ecstasy (RAVE) bill--is the all-night dance parties, or raves, where the drug MDMA, also called Ecstasy, is popular.

The act prohibits "knowingly opening, maintaining, managing, controlling, renting, leasing, making available for use, or profiting from any place for the purpose of manufacturing, distributing or using any controlled substance." Given this broad language, anyone who organizes or rents space for an event where drug use takes place could face criminal charges. Not only is the law unlikely to keep people from using Ecstasy, it could magnify the drug's dangers by pushing raves further underground and discouraging voluntary efforts to protect users from serious harm.

One of the lynchpins of libertarian orthodoxy is that people are rational actors. This is necessary in order to argue that if I leave you alone you too will leave me alone and that we don't need the state to intervene between us. Of course, the lynchpin gets heaved out the window when it's inconvenient to other libertarian arguments. For example, Mr. Sullum asks us to accept the contradictory notion that this act will make Ecstasy use more dangerous, even lethal, but that this fact won't affect usage. Is he asking us to believe that people do not behave rationally or that Ecstasy is so seductive and addictive that users can't stop? Of course, it hardly matters because either is an argument for more rigorous control of a damaging substance, not less.

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MASCULINITY IS HATRED

Men's groups promoting hatred, federal report says (Michael Higgins, May 30, 2003, National Post)

A federally funded report says "masculinists" are orchestrating a backlash against feminism and blaming women for oppressing and discriminating against men.

The report's authors claim that masculinists portray men as victims and link feminism with boys' poor performance in schools, male suicide, loss of male identity and discriminatory divorce and child custody laws.

"A process of levelling the power relationships of men over women is taking hold, not only to mask continued inequality but also to attack some of the gains made by the women's movement," says the $75,000 report, School Success by Gender: A Catalyst for the Masculinist Discourse.

The report says "masculinist discourse" aims to discredit feminism and challenge the gains made by women in education, at work and in family life.

The feminists may well be right, but if we're having a gender war mightn't they want to think about the imbalance in gender ratios that the abortion of female fetuses is creating? Uniltateral disarmament seems a bad idea in the midst of a war.

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COMITY COMEDY

Bush-GOP ferocity alters American politics (E.J. Dionne, 5/30/03, Washington Post)

President Bush's signature on his big tax cut bill Wednesday marked a watershed in American politics.

The rules of policy-making that have applied since the end of World War II are now irrelevant. A narrow Republican majority will work its partisan will, no matter what. Democrats, at least until 2004, will have the grim satisfaction of being a relatively unified opposition that will suffer just enough defections to fail at the finish line.

Until now, Congress was a forcefully independent branch of government. Presidents as diverse as Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Carter, Clinton and even Reagan could not count on automatic support from members of their own party in the House and Senate.

Only President Lyndon B. Johnson had the power to see his programs to passage largely unscathed. And he had that power for only two years, 1965 and 1966, when Democrats enjoyed 2-1 majorities in both houses.

With a very slim congressional majority, Bush would have been expected to seek genuine compromise--under the old rules. But Washington has become so partisan and Bush is so determined to push through a domestic program based almost entirely on tax cuts for the wealthy that a remarkably radical program is winning despite the odds against it and lukewarm public support.

This is a shock to congressional Democrats, most of whom came to political maturity under the old arrangements that placed a heavy emphasis on comity and the search for the political center. In all the years when progressive interest groups and foundations were attacking partisanship as a dismal force in politics, conservatives such as presidential adviser Karl Rove, antitax activist Grover Norquist, Tom DeLay and, yes, Newt Gingrich, were building a great Republican machine. The new tax bill is a monument to their success.

Faced with an administration intent on moving the political center to the right, Democrats are torn between old impulses and a recognition of the new order. This week, Democrats were by turn patting themselves on the back for their own unity and acknowledging the new world Rove, Norquist and Co. have created.

HaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHa

Oh my stars and garters..that's just hilarious. Don't we all pine for the days of bipartisanship and comity when Democrats ditched the South Vietnamese and the Contras, despite the pleas of Republican presidents and the congressional minority, and all those other non-partisan moments....

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ROUSSEAU, NOT LOCKE; VOLTAIRE, NOT LUTHER; EURIPIDES, NOT JESUS

Draft Preamble of Euro-Constitution Omits Mention of Christianity (Zenit, 5/29/2003)

The draft Preamble of the future European Constitution fails to mention the Christian roots of the Old World.

The draft, published Wednesday, refers to "the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe which ... [was] nourished first by the civilizations of Greece and Rome" and "later by philosophical currents of the Enlightenment."

According to the document, this foundation "has embedded within the life of society its perception of the central role of the human person and his inviolable and inalienable rights, and of respect for law" ...

Giorgio Rumi, professor of contemporary history at the University of Milan, told the Italian newspaper Avvenire: "I feel profoundly offended as a European citizen and as a historian."

"I think that between Athens, Rome and the Enlightenment -- the three mentioned -- there is something decisive in-between," he said. "I am not speaking of confessional pretensions, but of that name in which whole generations have lived and hoped. Is it possible that the mention of Christ causes so much fear still today?"

Professor Rumi offers an insightful suggestion: Europe's secularists fear Christ. The ancient Greeks are safely dead, but Christ lives, and may yet frustrate their project.

But there is happy news in the Constitution's list of philosophical fathers. They left out Marx.

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IT WAS THE BEST OF TIMES...

Layton calls caucus deal a Martin coup d'etat (Anne Dawson and Bill Curry, May 29, 2003, National Post)

With Jean Chretien out of the country, the Liberal caucus yesterday hammered out a backroom deal that would delay the Prime Minister's political financing law until 2005, a year after he retires.

Emerging from yesterday's weekly closed-door caucus meeting, Stan Keyes, chairman of the Liberal caucus, announced the ''vast majority'' of Liberal MPs will allow the bill through Parliament by the summer recess providing there are changes to the law that would see their party receive another $2.5-million annually in public funds, or allow it to receive more corporate money.

The proposal was immediately criticized by Jack Layton, the NDP leader, who accused Paul Martin supporters of ''hijacking'' the Liberal caucus while the Prime Minister is away, to ensure ''big money'' remains a fixture in federal politics. Mr. Layton called on the Prime Minister to carry through with his threat to call a snap election on the issue.

''Well, the Prime Minister leaves and Paul Martin takes over. It's a little coup d'etat for big money in politics evidently in the Liberal caucus this morning. It's completely unacceptable. If the Prime Minister was serious about getting money out of politics, he should show up and insist that the caucus vote for his bill and if not, we should have an election. We would support a call for an election,'' Mr. Layton said.

''He's clearly lost control of his caucus. If they can't even pass something as basic as democratic reform to get big money out of politics, then he should go to the public for a vote to determine who's right.''

One would have hoped that when the coup came Mr. Chretien would have been taken to where Madame LaFarge waits, aknitting, but this is a start...

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HOW FRANCIS FUKUYAMA RESEMBLES BILL JAMES

New Europe Old Economy: Poised to join the E.U., Poland is America's new best friend. But the country is also in deep distress. (ANDREW PURVIS, TIME Europe)

The war in Iraq may have raised temperatures in Europe and America and opened a dangerous new rift in the transatlantic alliance, but in Poland there was never much question about w