OH, BRAVE NEW WORLD.

Spectre of babies from the unborn (David Derbyshire, Telegraph.co.uk, 7/01/2003).

Women seeking fertility treatment could one day be offered donor eggs grown from the tissue of an aborted foetus, researchers said yesterday.

In an experiment that raises the prospect of babies with "unborn mothers", ovarian tissue was removed from seven dead foetuses and kept alive in a laboratory for four weeks.

The egg-producing follicles in the tissue continued to develop normally but did not reach the stage at which they released a healthy egg cell.

One of the scientists working on the experiment said the study could help solve the worldwide shortage of donor eggs for fertility treatment and medical research.

"You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings."

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DOOMED EITHER WAY

The Baathists' Blundering Guerrilla War (Gary Anderson, June 26, 2003, Washington Post)

If the Baathists had followed the classic insurgency doctrines preached by masters such as Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh, they would have kept a low profile, spreading agitation and propaganda while the U.S. occupation forces waned in strength. They should have waited for a struggling, post-Saddam Hussein Iraqi central government to try to take control in the region before striking. Instead of a weak, fledgling democratic Iraqi regime, the Baathists are facing a seriously aroused U.S. liberation force still at the height of its power and competence.

In the classic first stage of an insurgency, the rebels build on public discontent to create local covert sanctuaries and muster their strength. They engage in hit-and-run attacks to show the population that they exist, but they try not to draw undue attention to their activities. The high-profile attacks on U.S. forces and Iraqi allies in recent weeks are more like the second stage of a classic insurgency, in which the guerrillas have established a base of public support and have covert sanctuaries among the general population. The Baathists have neither. They remain unpopular, a residual cancer, operating only in the region where they have some civilian support. And they have many enthusiastic enemies among the civilian population, backed up by American firepower that is increasingly in search of retribution. This is not the way to start a popular revolution.

Any successful revolution needs a popular cause. The Baathists want the Americans out of Iraq. But if there is a popular sentiment in Iraq that trumps a desire to see an eventual U.S. withdrawal, it is the desire of the vast majority of people to have seen the last of the Baath Party. Again, this is not a promising building block for a popular liberation front.

The structure of this essay is quite strange because he nboth counsels that the Ba'athists should be fighting their insurgency differently and explains why it would be doomed if they did.

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CULTURAL IDEALS

Where Hatred Trumps Bread: What does the Palestinian nation offer the world? (CYNTHIA OZICK, June 30, 2003, Wall Street Journal)

The salient attribute of any culture is originality and its legacies. Genius, no matter how rare, is a human universal. It sends into the world new perception and new experience, inspiring duplication: Out of Israel came monotheism, out of Greece philosophy, out of Arab civilization science and poetry, out of England the Magna Carta, out of France the Enlightenment. What has been the genius of Palestinian originality, what has been the contribution of the evolving culture of Palestinian sectarianism? On the international scene: airplane hijackings and the murder of American diplomats in the 1970s, Olympic slaughterings and shipboard murders in the 1980s. And toward the Jews of the Holy Land, beginning in the 1920s and continuing until this morning, terror, terror, terror, terror.

But the most ingeniously barbarous Palestinian societal invention, surpassing any other in imaginative novelty, is the recruiting of children to blow themselves up with the aim of destroying as many Jews as possible in the most crowded sites accessible. These are not so much acts of anti-history as they are, remarkably, instances of anti-instinct. The drive to live is inherent: The very mite crawling on this sheet as I write hastens to flee the point of my pen. The child who has been taught to die and to kill from kindergarten on, via song and slogan in praise of bloodletting, represents an inconceivable cultural ideal. And it is a cultural grotesquerie that Dr. Abdel Aziz Rantisi, a pediatrician entrusted by his vocation with the healing of children, is in fact a major recruiter of young suicide bombers. (When his wife was asked by a neighbor why her husband did not outfit his own teenage son in a bomber's vest, the good doctor instantly sent the boy abroad.)

Confronted by this orgiastic deluge of fanaticism and death, there are some who would apply the term psychopathological. But it is metaphysics, not Freud, that is at stake: the life force traduced, cultism raised to a sinister spiritualism--not because the "martyrs" are said to earn paradise, but because extraordinary transformations of humane understanding are hounded into being. A Palestinian ethos of figment and fantasy has successfully infiltrated the West, particularly among intellectuals, who are always seduced by novelty. We live now with an anti-history wherein cause and effect are reversed, protection against attack is equated with the brutality of attack, existential issues are demoted or ignored--"cycle of violence" obfuscations all zealously embraced by the State Department and the European Union.

The Road Map permits no contradiction to the Palestinians' emerging nationhood. But if it is teachings and usages that characterize a nation, then what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches out of Bethlehem to be born?

One would find Ms Ozick's anti-instinct argument more compelling if the West weren't murdering its own children at such a horrific pace. Forty million abortions after Roe v. Wade who are we to tell the Palestinians that they don't value their children sufficiently?

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WHICH CAME FIRST

LAW OR THE STATE?:NATURAL LAW AND THE RULE OF LAW (Joseph F.  Johnston, Jr., April 26, 2003, The Philadelphia Society National Meeting)

When America's founders adopted the Declaration of Independence in 1776, they based their action on certain "self-evident" truths, specifically, that men are endowed by God with inalienable rights, including the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and that governments are instituted to secure these rights.  From the very outset of the nation, therefore, its independence was based upon the tradition of natural law, which holds that there are objective rights of liberty and property, and that these rights in turn rest upon a higher moral law.  The natural law is in sharp contrast to the opposing theory of legal positivism, which asserts that law is merely the will of the sovereign.  In the real world of today, the will of the sovereign means the power of the state.  The difference between these views of law is critical: if there is no "higher law," then there is no conceptual basis for arguing that any human law is unjust.

We live in an age in which the public is understandably captivated by the achievements of science and technology.  Sometimes this attachment to science becomes excessive and results in attempts to apply scientific method to subjects that cannot be quantified or tested by the methods of experimental science.  One of these subjects is the law.  Ever since the late nineteenth century, a series of doctrines has appeared purporting to reduce law to an empirical or experimental discipline using, to the maximum extent possible, the methodology of science.  These efforts have proceeded under a number of labels, including legal positivism, sociological jurisprudence, legal realism and, more recently, "law and economics."  All of these variations are "positivist" in the sense that they tend to separate law from its moral sources.

In this cultural climate, natural law appears to many lawyers to be a throwback, an obsolete category that ought to be discarded altogether.  If confronted with the term "natural law," a practicing lawyer today is likely to say that there is no such thing, or that it is a religious notion that has no place in legal analysis.  On the other hand, if you mention "the rule of law," he will probably indicate that he knows what this refers to, that it is a good thing and that we ought to preserve it.  And yet many if not all of the basic principles that we usually include under the rubric "rule of law" can be derived directly or indirectly from natural law sources.  Today, unfortunately, the connection between natural law and the rule of law, which formerly was so close as to amount to virtual identity, is largely neglected by the law schools and the legal profession.

This is a great shame, because the defense of the rule of law becomes much more difficult when it is unhinged from its intellectual, historical and moral roots.  As Professor Ellis Sandoz has argued in a recent paper, under the rule of law "there is an appeal to a higher standard of law and justice than the merely mortal or, at the least, than the enacted law of merely contemporary rulers."

In the end this is very nearly all that the argument between conservatives on the one side and libertarians, the Left, atheists, etc. on the other comes down to: do our rights and responsibilities precede or are they created by the state? The Founders explicitly stated the former, which is what conservatism assumes, but this depends on a belief in God who sets absolutes that govern our behavior. Deny those absolutes, deny God, and you are left with only the State, are in fact a statist.

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IT'S ALL IN THE QUESTIONS

Six in 10 Americans Agree That Gay Sex Should Be Legal (Frank Newport, June 27, 2003, GALLUP NEWS SERVICE)

The Supreme Court decision is not a political one, of course, but there are other laws and proposed laws that are political -- including in particular those relating to gay civil unions and marriages.

An appeals court in Ontario, Canada recently changed the definition of marriage to include "two people" rather than a man and a woman, and there are indications that the Canadian government will pass laws legalizing same-sex marriage across Canada in future months.

Conservatives reacting to Thursday's Supreme Court decision have argued that it could lead to a higher probability of legal sanctioning of gay marriage or gay civil unions.

Our latest poll shows great ambivalence on the issue of gay civil unions that have "some of the legal rights of married couples," although the percentage of the public favoring such arrangements has increased over the last three years:

Would you favor or oppose a law that would allow homosexual couples to legally form civil unions, giving them some of the legal rights of married couples?

Favor 49%
Oppose 49%
No opinion 2%

Wow, could that question be any more wishy-washy? Given that one of the legal rights of the married is to engage in sexual congress and you've just gotten 60% of respondents saying they favor granting homosexuals that right it's hardly surprising that many favor some kind of civil sanction. The real question though is: Would you favor or oppose a law that would allow homosexual couples to marry, giving them all of the legal rights of married couples? Because the answer to that is likely still 60% "No" or higher (note that there's still a majority willing to say that homosexual behavior is immoral), this is still a good political issue for conservatives, as Bill Frist demonstrated by calling for a constitutional amendment defending marriage. It's especially useful because the Democratic presidential candidates can't afford politically to oppose gay marriage, which will show them to be extremists.

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ALANIS MORISSETTE ISN'T AMERICAN?

The final irony: 'Isn't it ironic?' You hear it all the time - and, most of the time, actually no, it isn't. Hypocritical, cynical, lazy, coincidental, more likely. But what is irony and why did pundits think it would die two years ago, after September 11? (Zoe Williams, June 28, 2003, The Guardian)

There are a few reasons why we think the Americans have no sense of irony. First, theirs is rather an optimistic culture, full of love of country and dewy-eyed self-belief and all the things that Europe's lost going through the war spindryer for the thousandth time. This is all faith-based - faith in God, faith in the goodness of humanity, etc - and irony can never coexist with faith, since the mere act of questioning causes the faith fairy to disappear. Second, they have a very giving register that, with a sense of irony, would be unsustainable (how can you wish a stranger a nice day with a straight face?). Third, because we think Canadian Alanis Morissette is American, and she proved some time ago, with her song Ironic, that she didn't know what irony meant (this is so ironic - first, because we think we're the more sophisticated and yet don't know the difference between America and Canada, second because America sees Canada as such a tedious sleeping partner, and yet Canada is subversively sending idiots into the global marketplace with American accents. Of course, I'm being ironic. Canadian accents are not the same as American ones!)

...and what would the fact that someone's a stranger have to do with whether you hope they have a nice day?

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DON'T KNOW MUCH ABOUT THE FRENCH I TOOK

For Jefferson, Liberty Without Learning Was Unthinkable (Terrence Moore, June 2003, John M. Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs)

Anyone who doubts the power of ideas or the efficacy of a classical education should consider these words: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." [...]

On the national holiday, let us take a brief history quiz. Ask your children these questions.

1. From where are the lines in the first paragraph above taken?
2. Who wrote them?
3. Fill in the blank. "And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each
other our _____, our ________, and our sacred _____."
4. What English philosopher most influenced Jefferson's writing of the Declaration?
5. Who was King of Great Britain at the time of the American Revolution?
6. What is the legislature of Great Britain called, on which our Congress is modeled?
7. True or False: Jefferson also wrote an influential pamphlet titled Common Sense.
8. True or False: The first government of the United States was the present Constitution.
9. Thomas Jefferson was the ___ President of the United States elected in ____.
10. Jefferson helped found which university?

If your children score below 70%, we have a lot of work to do as a nation.

The children? How may parents would get 70%?

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THE FUTURE OF THE WEST LIES ELSEWHERE

The African Lion Roars in the Western Church: Anglican liberals are fretting, conservatives rejoicing, and all are scrambling to their history books: whence this new evangelical force on the world scene? (Chris Armstrong, 06/27/03, Christianity Today)

Five summers ago, the lion of African Anglicanism roared. This week, it has bared its claws.

The summer of 1998 saw the every-ten-years Lambeth Conference of the worldwide Anglican communion absorbed with issues of human sexuality. At its meetings, African Anglicans led a campaign against the liberalizing of the church's teachings on homosexuality.

Joining in the African "roar" was Bishop John Rucyahana of Shyira, Rwanda, who issued this warning to the liberalizing contingent in Western Anglicanism: "We don't like your First World way of speaking ambiguous words and not being straight on the issues." Rucyahana and his colleagues were heard, and heeded: the conference passed a resolution (526 to 70, with 45 abstentions) that homosexual practice is "incompatible with Scripture."

In the wake of Lambeth, liberals in American Anglicanism (the Episcopalian Church) resented this new voice of "African fundamentalism," while a conservative like bishop Jack Iker of Ft. Worth, Texas could observe with some satisfaction: "No longer does the United States or England speak for the Anglican Communion but the church in Africa and Asia does."

This week, one branch of African Anglicanism seems to be moving from rhetoric to action in the conservative cause. In a letter to Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of the Nigerian Church (Anglican Communion)—a church representing 17 million of Anglicanism's 70 million members—has threatened to break communion with the worldwide body over the same issue that dominated discussion at Lambeth: Williams has supported the appointment of the openly gay Dr. Jeffrey John as Bishop of Reading, in England.

Said Nigerian Archbishop Peter Jasper Akinola: "We cannot continue to be in communion with people who have taken a step outside the biblical boundaries."

We noted below the delightful irony that even as Europe commits suicide the Christianization of the Third World means that Western ideas will be kept alive by non-Westerners.

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CORRECTION

Last week I posted a gripe about the bad manners of Mr. Harry Potter, wizard-hero. I wrote,

There is not one "I'm sorry; please forgive me" in the whole book....

I do not recall an instance of "please" or "thank you" in the book.

My niece informs me that the word "sorry" appears on pages 66, 81, 233, 292, and 293; and the word "thanks" appears on pages 182, 185, 249, 262, and 285. She reports no sightings as yet of "forgive" or "thank you."

I offer Ms. Rowling my sincere apologies for exaggerating the facts, and beg her forgiveness.

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I'VE LOOKED AT LIFE FROM BOTH SIDES NOW...THIS ONE SUCKS

Two Sides of Political Reality for New Lawmakers (SHERYL GAY STOLBERG, 6/30/03, NY Times)

Candice S. Miller was riding high last week, flush with the glow of being a freshman Republican in the House of Representatives.

On Thursday, she dipped into Washington's famous pork barrel, when the House approved a military construction bill that included $9.6 million for a new health care center at a base in her Macomb County, Mich., district. Next, in the wee hours of the morning on Friday, her party squeaked out a one-vote victory on the Medicare prescription drug benefit bill.

Then Representative Miller jetted off to Rome, to spend the early part of her July 4 recess talking with European leaders about hydrogen fuel and bioengineered foods as part of her first "Codel" --a taxpayer-financed trip abroad by a Congressional delegation.

"I feel very optimistic," she said shortly before she left.

Optimistic is not exactly the word one would use to describe Raul M. Grijalva these days. Resigned is more like it. Representative Grijalva, a freshman Democrat from Tucson, voted against the prescription drug bill, just as he voted against the repeal of the estate tax and every other piece of legislation Republicans have pushed through this year. For the July 4 recess, he is going home to Tucson, where he expects to tell constituents, "We're putting up a fight."

For Mrs. Miller, a self-described "George W. Bush Republican" from a middle-class neighborhood outside Detroit, and Mr. Grijalva, an unabashed liberal from one of the poorest corners of Tucson, the last week was not much different than any other since they joined Congress in January. These lawmakers, whose first year is being chronicled by The New York Times, represent a microcosm of life in the House, where the political reality these days is stark and simple: Republicans win and Democrats lose.

People have been wondering in recent weeks iif Democrats aren't becoming more frantic and hysterical in their hatred of George W. Bush. Given the President's rather pleasant demeanor and the lack of hugely controversial issues at the moment it seems like on odd time for the Democrats to go postal. To the contrary, as stories like this and the one last week in the Post, on the takeover of lobbying by the GOP, suggest, Democrats are waking up to the cold hard reality of what it's like to be the permanent minority party, a reality that Republicans had to live with for sixty dispiriting years. You can hardly blame them for raging at the dying of the light.

MORE:
Republicans Rule (Howard Kurtz, June 30, 2003, Washington Post)

Is D.C. becoming a one-party town?

With the Republicans controlling all the levers of power -- 1600 Penn, both Hill chambers and the high court -- have Democrats slid into a state of near-irrelevancy?

That's debatable, to say the least, but it's hard to think of a time in the past half-century -- even during the Reagan years, they controlled the House -- when the Dems had less power inside the Beltway. The only Democratic weapon of any potency at the moment seems to be a Senate filibuster. And the party is not wildly optimistic about ousting Bush in '04.

Now the question is whether GOPers are cementing their hold on power by installing their folks in a sort of quasi-permanent government around these parts: the lobbying community.

On one level, Republicans aren't doing anything different than the Democrats did when they ruled Congress. You try to use your clout to soak up the available sources of big corporate cash, and you try to strong-arm the trade associations to support your legislative needs. The lobbying firms, in turn, realize that they need to hire folks (often former officials) with high-level entree to the party that controls the Hill machinery, including such basics as which bills get brought to the floor.

But the Republicans have gotten really, really good at this.

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COURT COMMANDED CULTURAL CONSENSUS

How the Supremes Redeemed Bush: The conservative court's decisions on homosexuality and affirmative action boost Bush's image with moderates (Joe Klein, Jun. 29, 2003, TIME)

Most Americans aren't extremists, and they are not at war. The lovely paradox of 21st century America is that we seem to be
increasingly united by the celebration of our differences. That is what the Supreme Court acknowledged in its decisions on homosexuality and affirmative action last week.

"The court legitimized and endorsed a cultural consensus," says Paul Gewirtz, a professor of constitutional law at Yale University. That consensus walks a socially sensible but legally clumsy line between tolerance and outright acceptance. Scalia noted that many Americans might not be comfortable with an openly gay business partner, scoutmaster, schoolteacher or boarder. True enough, but most people would also say that what Tyron Garner and John G. Lawrence did in the privacy of their Texas bedroom is none of our business. The court's affirmative-action decision was just as pragmatic. Most Americans disapprove of specific, codified racial preferences, like the now famous 20 points granted minority applicants to the University of Michigan. But American life, happily, is no longer plain vanilla. Anything all-white--law-school classes, corporate suites or presidential Cabinets--is not merely aesthetically displeasing, as Clarence Thomas asserted in his dissenting opinion, it is also considered socially deficient, inappropriate, un-American. Our diversity is the wellspring of American creativity, one of our competitive advantages in a global economy.

There is also a consensus on abortion: tolerable during the first few months of pregnancy but with severe limits after that. In fact, the rationale for Roe v. Wade--the right to privacy--was cited in the gay-rights decision. That the court's controversial abortion decision is now being used as a template for privacy cases is remarkable. It means that Roe is probably settled for the foreseeable future.

The political implications of all this are, I suspect, good for both the Republic and George W. Bush. The Republic is always strengthened by a reassertion of sanity.

Perhaps in order to be a liberal it is necessary to deny reality, because if Mr. Klein believes that there are currently any limitations, never mind "severe limits", on abortion after the first trimester he's delusional. And the Court's ruling on homosexuality is a disaster for the Republic for precisely the same reason: it removes from the political process our right as a society to legislate morality and turns an already overly-permissive culture into one where such moral laxity is required by law. Far from indicating that Roe v. Wade is settled law, this makes it all the more important for Republicans to appoint justices who will obliterate the notion that there is a right of privacy in the Constitution. Contrary to Mr. Klein's assertion, the Republic is always weakened when intellectual elites find it necessary to impose via judicial fiat that which they are incapable of securing through the political process. This is not only socially divisive but serves to alienate Americans from their own government and its institutions.

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OUT IT

Sorting through a shift toward a consumption tax (David R. Francis, 6/30/03, CS Monitor)

Conservatives are rejoicing. They see the United States already on a path of fundamental tax changes that will accelerate economic growth.

"Stealth tax reform," it has been called. That's because relatively few voters are aware of the significance of the changes in the system proposed by President Bush and incorporated in the three tax-cutting measures passed by a Republican-led Congress since he took office.

"George W. Bush is the first president to actively understand and embrace the fundamental core principles of tax reform," says Ernest Christian, a founder of the Center for Strategic Tax Reform in Washington. [...]

The next likely "baby step" is the revival of the Lifetime Savings Account proposed by Bush last January, and later dropped for fear it would distract from the White House goal of selling its main tax package. The radical measure would allow taxpayers to contribute up to $7,500 a year of after-tax income into an investment account where it could grow untaxed and be withdrawn tax-free later for retirement, education, or other purposes.

"That is coming back," says Chris Edwards, a fiscal expert at the Cato Institute in Washington. He sees it as having political appeal in an election year. And its revenue loss is small in the 10-year window used by Congress in looking at tax bills.

The measure would also move toward a consumption tax by easing the tax burden on money not spent, that is, savings.

This seems like a worthwhile national goal, but one that should be talked about in this coming election.

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NOT EITHER/OR

G.O.P. Senate Bid May Take the Fall, for Bush's Sake (RAYMOND HERNANDEZ, 6/30/03, NY Times)

Gov. George E. Pataki and the Republican machinery he controls are determined to rally a huge voter turnout for President Bush next year, in a bid meant to bring New York Republicans the sort of national stature that has eluded them since the days of Nelson A. Rockefeller.

But in an intriguing subplot, Mr. Pataki and his advisers appear to have all but abandoned plans to seriously challenge Senator Charles E. Schumer, a popular Democrat, mindful that it would mobilize the opposition and thus undermine Mr. Bush's prospects in New York. [...]

[R]epublicans say the sudden shift in the party's priorities reflects the surprising level of support that Mr. Bush has picked up in New York, a heavily Democratic state that no Republican presidential candidate has won since Ronald Reagan swept it in 1984.

A poll recently released by Marist College, for example, showed that 58 percent of voters who were surveyed in New York rated Mr. Bush's job performance as good or excellent.

But as much as anything else, the strategy also underscores another hard political reality that New York Republicans have been forced to reckon with: the early electoral strength of Mr. Schumer, who has already amassed nearly $15 million in his war chest and whose job-approval rating is at an impressive 58 percent in recent polls.

This is on the one hand the classic mistake that the GOP made in 1980 and 1994 and, on the other, the mistake that Ronald Reagan made in 1984 and one would hope that Republicans and Mr. Bush will avoid repeating past errors. When the landslide is coming you need to recruit the best candidates possible so that they can win re-election. The crop of nitwits, weirdos, and shut-ins who were carried in by the two juggernaiuts of '80 and '94 ended up having great difficulty defending their seats, even though they had initially beaten seemingly invincible incumbents. You don't look at a Chuck Schumer, a Barbara Boxer, etc., and decide to toss up a scarificial lamb because of the unique circumstances in their liberal states. National tides sweep out even such "safe" Senators. But six years from now, in an off year election after 14 years of GOP rule, it will be hard to maintain these seats if you've elected knuckleheads this time around. So go with the best you've got.

Meanwhile, the Bush campaign needs to run as if they're going to win and win big, because they're going to, and that means crafting the party, the agenda, and the Congress that you want to head into the coming years with. Losing NY is an unlikelihood but it wouldn't matter in the bigger picture. Mr. Bush will still win re-election. But getting that seat for the GOP, getting closer to a veto-proof majority, and putting a potential star in office--say Rudy Guiliani--could be huge.

---

)

The Everything Expert: a review of My Brother's Keeper: A Memoir and a Message by Amitai Etzioni (ROBERT S. BOYNTON, July 14, 2003, The Nation)

Etzioni's media profile faded in the late 1990s. The communitarian message didn't feel so fresh, and some of its policies seemed downright creepy. Despite Etzioni's embrace of Buberian "dialogue," his presentations felt more like monologues: No matter what the subject, "balancing rights and responsibilities" was always the answer. In 1994 the Guardian asked, "Is Etzioni just a Jerry Falwell in cap and gown? Could communitarianism be a thinking person's Moral Majority?" Etzioni dutifully records that the movement's media citations peak in the mid-1990s. "By the late 1990s, there were more and more days, then weeks, when no one called. Invitations to speak and to attend conferences ceased to pose scheduling problems; there were no longer any who wanted me to be in two places at the same time."

Much of the difficulty had to do with his "third way" communitarian message. The political blood-sport of the Clinton era made Etzioni's plea for nonpartisanship sound naïve, if not disingenuous. If Clinton could gut welfare while simultaneously praising communitarianism ("You are my inspiration," Clinton told Etzioni one New Year's Eve), maybe the movement was more style than substance. Were communitarian ideas merely protective coloration for politicians of the left and right? Was a movement admired by Bill Bennett, Dick Morris and George W. Bush itself worth admiring?

And the more closely people considered Etzioni's proposals, the more it became apparent that many were either stunningly obvious ("If the advocates of civil rights and those of public safety would stop butting heads, we would see all kind of ways to advance our security while minimizing intrusions on our liberty") or absurdly utopian (a "megalogue" on values between members of a super "community of communities"). Wish-and-make-it-so public policy.

I think the reason communitarianism never had the impact of, say, neoconservativism has to do with its message as well as its method of
implementing its ideas. Communitarianism speaks the language of reform, not revolution. It seeks to temper the primacy of the individual, to tame the logic of the market, to alleviate our reliance on government and its laws. It is more "liberalism rightly understood" than an ideology in its own right. Etzioni is less a prophet for a new idea than a publicist for a worthy, but not particularly novel, point of view.

Liberalism rightly understood--a liberalism which supposes responsibilities as well as recognizing rights; which tempers individuality; which tames logic of the market; which doesn't rely on government--is indeed a worthy, even a classic philosophy, that of our Founders and of Adam Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville and Albert Jay Nock and myriad other great figures in the history of Anglo-American thought. It is reformist, even counter-revolutionary, precisely because the democratic revolution had already been won (largely in Britain in the 17th Century) by the time they all wrote. Our task as citizens of liberal societies is not revolution but perfection of the revolution already won.

If communitarianism has a great weakness though--and I believe it does, despite the generally high regard in which I hold Mr. Etzioni and his fellow believers--it lies in the failure to recognize that it must be essentially a retrograde rather than a progressive movement if it is to vindicate its eminently sensible critique of modernity. The community and civil society in which they rightly place so much faith are competitors with government and in particular with the social welfare state. The Communitarian Epoch can not be realized in conjunction with an era of big government, but will only come as we return to the social structure of an earlier day, when individuals, families, neighborhoods, communities, churches, and the like resume their place at the center of our lives and the role of government is drastically diminished. That's a difficult reality for folk of the Left--which most communitarians are or were--to grapple with and they've by and large failed to do so.

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THE WRITER VS. THE MAN

-TRIBUTE: A Seer's Blind Spots: On George Orwell's 100th, a Look at a Flawed and Fascinating Writer (Glenn Frankel, June 25, 2003, Washington Post)

"Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent," George Orwell wrote in 1949. He was referring to the recently assassinated Mohandas Gandhi, but these days the same test might well apply to himself, for in the 53 years since his death Orwell has become a secular saint, acclaimed by the political left and right and many in between, revered as a seer and truth-teller, honored for his moral courage, his razor-sharp intellect and his diamond-hard prose.

"The first saint of our age," as social historian Noel Annan once described him, "quirky, fierce, independent and beholden to none."

Somewhere along the way, however, amid all of the hero worship, the real man -- the idiosyncratic, squeaky-voiced, tubercular Englishman who dressed like a pauper, rolled his own cigarettes, chased after women and practiced a wobbly but sincere brand of socialism -- seems to have gotten lost, and perhaps the real writer has as well. Orwell has suffered the famous author's ultimate fate: He is revered and invoked more than he is read. [...]

But even while the orgy of praise and hagiography gathers steam, let's pause for a moment to remember the man himself, starting with all of the flaws that made him human. Based upon his self-critical writings and the accounts of those who knew him, Orwell was a strange and difficult person who had few friends, mistrusted foreigners and harbored a streak of self-righteousness. The characters in his novels are stiff and unconvincing, his portraits of women are one-dimensional and bear the distinct odor of unrepentant misogyny, and his occasional references to Jews are uncomfortable at best. And, oh yes, let's not forget this: As a prophet he was almost always wrong; 1984, as we now know, looked nothing like "Nineteen
Eighty-Four."

Notice how you have to seek outside the text to make Orwell complex and contradictory? The writings speak for themselves and say something quite other than his personal life and purported politics.

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WHAT RIGHT?

Bush, Looking to His Right, Shores Up Support for 2004 (ADAM NAGOURNEY, 6/30/03, NY Times)

Again and again in interviews, leading conservatives drew favorable contrasts with the first President George Bush, who endured a debilitating primary challenge from Patrick J. Buchanan, contributing to his defeat by Bill Clinton.

"It's night and day," said Grover G. Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, a conservative group. "Every group that this president has kept faith with, the previous president double-crossed."

David A. Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, said: "In the first Bush administration, the conservatives were asked to be
spectators--and it was hoped that they would applaud the action in the field. In this one, they have a president who wants them to be part of the team."

Mr. Bush's effort to tend to the conservative wing of his party has emerged as a crucial part of his early campaign preparations.

The Bush campaign has begun sending a representative to a meeting of conservative leaders that takes place in Washington every Wednesday, joining
a delegation of as many as eight administration officials.

Party officials say Mr. Bush's advisers--starting with Karl Rove, his senior political adviser, and Ken Mehlman, his campaign manager--are now in regular contact with about 60 conservative leaders across the nation, discussing issues of concern to the White House and the re-election campaign.

Mr. Bush has named Ralph Reed, who first rose to prominence as executive director the Christian Coalition, as a senior member of his campaign team. Beyond that, Mr. Rove and Mr. Mehlman are viewed by conservatives as advocates for their point of view in the White House.

Asked about efforts to mobilize conservative support, Mr. Mehlman responded: "Ultimately good policy is good politics. This is a president who has strongly pushed numerous policies that appealed to a lot of different groups--including conservatives."

Many conservatives say Mr. Bush's alliance with their wing of the Republican Party is as solid as that enjoyed by Ronald Reagan. Some suggest it is even stronger.

If you didn't know better, you might think Mr. Bush himself is conservative...

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U.S. OUT OF IRAQ NOW

Who's killing Americans? Loyalists, Islamists, criminals (AP, June 30,
2003)

The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.

Lt. Gen. John Abizaid, confirmed Friday to replace war commander Gen. Tommy Franks as head of U.S. Central Command, told the Senate that there are three main groups causing the violence:

**Leftover cells from Saddam's Baath party in a triangle bounded by Baghdad, Ramadi and Tikrit.

**Anti-American fundamentalist Islamists, including some foreigners.

* A criminal element including some of the 100,000 prisoners Saddam freed from jail before the war.

Three groups that we are ill-equipped to identify but the Shiites are easily able to--turn the country over to them and they'll handle it.

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IF RACE IS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT THEN CONSTRUCT YOUR OWN

What the Supreme Court doesn't know about race (Paul Greenberg, June 30, 2003, Jewish World Review)

I am sitting here tying to think of when I became race-conscious. And I can't. Maybe I never did - another of my numerous failings. I've gone all the way back to childhood, to the kitchen behind the shoe store on Texas Avenue in Shreveport. And I can't find that one decisive moment, that loss of innocence recorded in portentous tones in one Southern novel after another.

Now, roughly ages later, I sit and read a Supreme Court decision that says race matters after all. It matters so much that you need a certain number of this race and that race in law school classes in order to, yes, break down artificial racial categories. You've got to discriminate in order to end discrimination. It may be the funniest Supreme Court decision I've ever read, if unintentionally so.

What's more, you need a certain number of black students in law schools in order to form a "critical mass," whatever that is, but it doesn't take as many Hispanic students to do so, and it takes even fewer American Indians. I give up. Here is still another foreign language. Only this one doesn't make sense, as if it were written for some purely abstract world that exists out in space, or only in law books.

It's all so much hocus-pocus to me, like the idea of race itself so long ago on Texas Avenue. I sit here reading Sandra Day O'Connor's majority opinion, and I'm puzzled. I can't get my mind around it. I laugh out loud here and there, and think: Shoot, I knew better than that when I was 6 years old.

Here's what we'd like to know: do college admissions departments do geneaologies and blood tests? Why don't white kids just start saying they're African-American or Native-American or whatever ethnicity is stylish these days? Who's going to check up on them?

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STAR POWER

Schwarzenegger contemplates political run (Carol
Devine-Molin, June 30, 2003, Enter Stage Right)

Arnold Schwarzenegger jokes, "My kids are normal kids. They go to the mall and pass out recall petitions".

And, on a recent "Tonight" show, Schwarzenegger facetiously remarked to Jay Leno, "There is no money over there (in Iraq). There's no leadership – pretty much like California." Rapper Snoop Dogg was also on the program and promptly dubbed Schwarzenegger "The Notorious GOP" in good fun.

Watch out Governor Davis! Auh-nuld might indeed be gearing up to "terminate" your political career in the state of California. Clearly,
Schwarzenegger is testing the political waters at this juncture.

This is exactly what the CA GOP needs to get itself energized and could quickly re-establish the party's viability.

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STRONG RELIGION. WEAK SECULARISM (via Tom Morin)

The Great Revival: Understanding Religious "Fundamentalism": a review of Strong Religion: The Rise of Fundamentalisms Around the World by Gabriel A. Almond, R. Scott Appleby, and Emmanuel Sivan (David Aikman, July/August 2003, Foreign Affairs)

Almost anyone interested in the rise of Christian conservatism (to use a nonpejorative term) as a cultural and political concept in the United States will quickly discover that although Protestant fundamentalism is indeed an identifiable movement in American history, it was numerically superseded by the late 1950s by what is now called "evangelicalism." Evangelicals believe as ardently as Protestant fundamentalists in the need to propagate the gospel, but they were determined to break out of precisely the enclave mentality into which the fundamentalists had chosen to retreat from the 1920s onwards. Strong Religion refers a few times to Bob Jones University, certainly a bastion of American fundamentalist thinking, but overlooks the important point that Bob Jones, Sr., virtually excommunicated evangelist Billy Graham from fundamentalism in 1957 because Graham wanted evangelicals to work with any Christian church that would accept them.

This fact is important to understand because the evangelical, not the fundamentalist, brand of Christianity seems to be expanding faster than any other religious movement in the world today, including Islam. (It is worth noting that fundamentalist Protestant Christians generally oppose strongly the Pentecostalist or charismatic experience, which is at the heart of much of the Christian growth in the developing world.) The evangelical Christian phenomenon in the southern hemisphere has been thoughtfully examined by Philip Jenkins in The Next Christendom. Jenkins argues that the southward expansion of Christianity in Africa and Latin America will have more profound consequences globally than the ongoing phenomenon of Islamism.

Although perhaps uncomfortable with going into what particular Christian groups believe, the authors of Strong Religion are certainly aware that it is the evangelicals who are expanding their influence both in the United States and around the world, whereas those Christian groups that have sought to accommodate secularism are in decline. Interesting statistics cited in the book for the United States include the rise of Southern Baptists from 10 million in 1960 to 17 million in 2000, a fourfold increase in the adherents to American Pentecostal denominations, and a massive decline in the Episcopal Church from about 3.5 million in 1960 to 2 million in 2000. The Southern Baptists and the Pentecostals have been much more supportive of positions such as biblical inerrancy than the Episcopalians, many of whom appear to have abandoned much of the historical Protestant orthodoxy.

Strong Religion is undoubtedly correct in noting that it is their response to modernity that generally determines whether fundamentalist groups prosper or wither. But how helpful is the book's definition of fundamentalism as "an aggressive, enclave-based movement with absolutist, reactive, and inerrantist tendencies"? This strongly negative depiction does not capture the nuances of modern religious groups.

In Indonesia, for example, the Islamic revivalist movement Nudhat'ul-Ulama is both pro-democracy and pro-pluralism. But it is probably also in favor of "inerrancy" in the Islamic context, thus fitting at least one of the authors' criteria for a fundamentalist group.

Or take the role of religious revivalists elsewhere in the developing world. In Guatemala, many sociologists have observed that communities where Pentecostalism is strong usually manifest what German sociologist Max Weber a century ago defined as "the Protestant ethic": self-discipline, frugality, hard work, and saving. A similar pattern can be seen in China today, where there may be more than 60 million Protestant Christians (compared with 700,000 in 1949). Some Chinese sociologists have noted the "coincidence" that the most significantly Christianized city, Wenzhou, where some 14 percent of the population is now Christian, is also one of China's top performers in domestic commerce and foreign trade.

One of the central beliefs of the rational humanists is that over time secularism will displace superstitious religiosity. They view this as both
inevitable and salutary, but it appears to be neither. Europe, which is secularism's test case, is dying while America remains stubbornly religious and is thriving--this despite the efforts of our own elites to impose secularism. Meanwhile, Christianity is spreading like wildfire in Latin America, Africa, and China. Indeed, Christianity is being reimported to the United States via Latino immigrants.

It's truly staggering just how wrong "reason" has turned out to be both in theory and application. In fact, given that its adherents continue to believe in it despite its conspicuous lack of success, one might conclude that it is merely a successor superstition, and an inferior one at that.

MORE:
-ESSAY: China's Next Great Leap: China may be on its way to becoming a Christian nation. (Terry Eastland, September 30, 2002, Dallas Morning News)

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ROOPER-DOOPER

How to Build the Perfect Democratic Contender (ADAM
NAGOURNEY, June 29, 2003, NY Times)

"The self-deprecating charm of Joe Lieberman--you have got to start with that," said Anita Dunn, a Democratic strategist. "And Bob Graham's resume. Al Sharpton's one-liners! No one has better one-liners than Al Sharpton. Howard Dean's ability to excite activists and new people." [...]

[J]ohn Edwards, the North Carolina senator, may seem a little too young and slight to be Leader of the Free World; in White House circles, he is mockingly known as the "Breck Girl." But it is not hard to find Democrats who would like to bottle his charm and personable campaign style. John Kerry, the Massachusetts senator, may not seem as if he would be happy eating corndogs in the jostling crowd at the State Fair in Des Moines. But leave the congeniality to the resume-challenged Mr. Edwards: Mr. Kerry has a war record that any candidate would love--two tours in Vietnam that brought him a few medals, and a tour back home leading the opposition to the war.

Mr. Lieberman's campaign is introducing many Americans to the customs of the observant Jew, such as not working on Saturday. It also appears to have awarded him the franchise on the moral and ethical issues. The penchant of Senator Bob Graham to keep detailed notebooks chronicling the most mundane of chores--think: got up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head--may give Democrats pause. But Mr. Graham, as a former member of the Senate intelligence committee, has authority in his challenges to Mr. Bush's efforts to protect the nation from terrorism. Better than that, he is from Florida.

Is there any candidate who can boast more legislative experience and ties to traditional sources of Democratic support than Representative Richard A. Gephardt, the former House minority leader? (Of course, that could be his big weakness as well.) Dr. Dean, the former governor of Vermont, may seem ideologically out of step with a lot of voters, but he has already shown his ability to draw a lot of new people into the system.

Ummm...anybody happen to notice what's missing here? How about a candidate with some popular ideas?

The Democrats are brain dead and have been since Walter Mondale lost in 1984. Bill Clinton had sense enough to borrow the opposition's ideas and won by running as not just a moderate but a conservative Republican--tax cuts, executions, anti-China, etc.. But there's no room to George W. Bush's right and the Democratic Party faithful are tired of being the GOP Junior League. So, incredibly, this batch of candidates seems to have returned to that Mondalism--anti-anti-Saddam instead of anti-anti-communist; take back the Bush tax cuts, as Mondale wanted to take back the Reagan cuts; pro-abortion, pro-gay rights, anti-religious, anti-Vietnam (are they aware the war ended--disastrously for the Vietnamese people--thirty years ago?), etc.. They really have revivified dead flesh and made it walk (well, stumble) again.

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YEAH, THIS'LL WORK.

Statements of Fatah and Hamas and Islamic Jihad on the Cessation of Military Operations.

Fatah

Out of the desire of the Palestinian political factions on the higher national interests of the Palestinian people in this critical period of our national struggle and stressing the high importance of the national Palestinian unity in our ability to struggle, steadfast to our achieve our fair goals and not to give any chance to harm it on the basis of sticking to the national rights of our people, adopted by the national Palestinian councils of the P.L.O. and the Arab summits, U.N., nonallied and African summits and friends and honorable people in the world, and the full commitment for the continuous struggle to achieve it on top of it the right of our people to return and self-determination and establishing the independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as a capital on all lands occupied in the year 1967 and in response to all the Arab efforts and the Quartet, we declare for all the countries and lovers of peace and freedom in the world our following initiative:

Cessation of all military operations in accordance with the Egyptian initiative.

At the same time we call upon all the states and peoples and governments worldwide and especially those interested in achieving peace, security and stability in the area to (urge) the Israeli side to implement the following:

First, the immediate stop of all acts of Israeli violence against our people, including stopping assassinations, arrests, deportation, massacres against our communities, cities, villages, refugee camps and to stop the incursions and destruction of the buildings, the economic infrastructure, the official and public institutions, (destruction) of agricultural lands and lands confiscation, and to stop the Judeaizing measures.

Second, to lift the closure from the Palestinian people and its legitimate elected leadership.

Third, to release all the prisoners and detainees from the Israeli prisons.

Fourth, not to harm the Islamic and Christian holy places, especially the Haram al-Sharif, the Church of the Nativity and the al-Ibrahimi Mosque.

Fifth, immediate stop of confiscating of lands and building settlements and expansion in the existing settlements as an introduction to removing them and to remove the separation walls.

Sixth, begin the immediate withdrawal of the occupation forces to where they were before Sept. 28, 2000 and to implement the road map plan to quickly send the international monitors to supervise its implementation according to the international legitimate resolutions and to establish a just and lasting and comprehensive peace in the area."

Hamas and Islamic Jihad

Out of our desire for the unity of our Palestinian ranks at this dangerous phase which our people and our cause are going through, and in order to protect our national unity achieved by the intifada and the resistance and documented by the blood of the martyrs, and as the contribution from us to consolidating Palestinian national dialogue on the basis of adherence to the rights of our people, and in order to protect our internal front from the danger of schism and confrontation, and in order to block the enemy from having any excuse to wreck it, and in an assertion of the legitimate right to resist the occupation as a strategic choice until the end of the Zionist occupation of our land and until we achieve all our national rights, and in response to efforts by many in the Palestinian and Arab arena who care about the unity of the Palestinian national ranks, we declare the following initiative:

A. Suspension of the military operations against the Zionist enemy for three months, effective today, in return for the following conditions:

1. An immediate cessation of all forms of Zionist aggression against our Palestinian people including incursions, destruction, closures and sieges on cities, villages and refugee camps, including the siege imposed on President Yasir Arafat, house demolitions, leveling of agricultural land and assaults against land, property and Christian and Islamic holy sites, especially the holy Al Aksa Mosque. In addition, the immediate cessation of all individual assassination operations, massacres, collective measures, all arrests and deportations against our people, leaders, cadres and fighters.

2. The release of all prisoners and detainees, Palestinian and Arab, from occupation prisons without condition or restriction and the return to their homes first and foremost of those who have spent long periods and those with lengthy sentences, women, children, the sick and elderly.

B. In the event that the enemy does not act according to these conditions and commitments, or violates any of them, we see ourselves unencumbered by this initiative and we hold the enemy responsible for the consequences.

Above all, it's their sincerity I find impressive.

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FAREWELL TO THE QUEEN

Katherine Hepburn is reported to have died.

Four pictures that we'd particularly recommend: Bringing Up Baby; The Philadelphia Story; The African Queen, and The Lion in Winter.

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DUPE-OFF

The Gullible Mr. Kerry: The senator gets fooled again. (Christopher Hitchens, June 24, 2003, Slate)

So, the junior senator from Massachusetts has finally come up with a winning line. "Vote for me," says John Kerry. "I'm easily fooled." This appears to be the implication of his claim to have been "misled" by the Bush administration in the matter of WMD. And, considering the way in which Democratic Party activists generally portray the president as a fool and an ignoramus, one might as well go the whole distance and suggest a catchy line for the campaign: "Kerry. Duped by a Dope."

Given that Kerry once went all the way to Vietnam under some kind of misapprehension about a war for democracy and launched a political career on the basis of what he finally learned when it was much too late, one might be tempted to discern a pattern here. But that temptation should probably be
discarded. The Tonkin Gulf resolution was fabricated out of whole cloth (by a Democratic president, building on the legacy of another JFK from Massachusetts), and not even the most Stalinized of the Vietnamese leadership ever ran a regime, or proposed an ideology, as vile as that of Saddam Hussein. Indeed, Ho Chi Minh in 1945 modeled his declaration of independence on the words of Thomas Jefferson, appealed for American help against France, and might have got it if FDR had lived. Uncle Ho shared in the delusion that there could be an anti-colonial and anti-dictatorial empire. If that is indeed a delusion.?

Maybe someone who isn't over his own Ho Chi Minh infatuation should go easy on tossing accusations like "dupe" around?

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APOLOGIZE?

Knights Templar bury the hatchet with Rome.: Whatever next? An apology to Islam, perhaps (Hilary Clarke, 29 June 2003, Sunday Herald)

Multi Templi Scotia, the Scottish branch of the order, now includes people of all denominations. James Ritchie, Grand Herald of the order, said he would welcome both improved relations with the Catholic Church and an apology to the Islamic world for the Crusades. 'I would be in favour of anything that gives us greater understanding of different religions and people,' he said.

Any attempt to issue an official apology for the crusades will, however, be fraught with political difficulties, not least because of the different beliefs of members of the order in different countries.

The grand commander of the US order, James Carey, was a rear-admiral in the US Navy during the first Gulf war. He served in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, father of the present President Bush, and has been an outspoken supporter of the current administration in this year's war against Iraq.

How about we apologize for trying to retrieve the Holy Lands if they apologize for taking them?

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ARE WE ALL TAFTIANS NOW?

Old and in the Way: The American Street has sized up best the new paradoxes of foreign policy. (Victor Davis Hanson, June 27, 2003, National Review)

During this entire crisis tired voices of convention have misunderstood the nature of this war and the temporary presence of Americans in exotic places like the Asiatic provinces of the former Soviet Union, the Gulf, or Kurdistan. Instead of seeing such deployments in their proper context of ad hoc military efficacy and reaction to 9/11, they have instead shrilly alleged some sinister conspiracy to harness the world's oil through the use of permanent military deployment abroad and perpetual war.

Fools! The real danger is not that we are interventionists, but rather are on the verge of a weird insularity not seen since the 1920s - a paradox of still being engaged abroad but not in the usual manner of the past. The American Street is in a strangely revolutionary - read "fed-up" - mood. It is growing distant from Europe. It is angry with the Arab world especially, and it is tired with South Korea - and most whiny nations that either take billions of dollars in direct American aid or ankle-bite under the aegis of American arms.

The result is while hothouse analysts in Paris and spoiled teenagers in Seoul with Reeboks and football jerseys damn America the imperialist, the United States they knew is changing right before their eyes in ways that they might not like in the next decade - but that will in fact relieve most Americans. [...]

The real global story is not "anti-Americanism," but perhaps a growing American weariness with strident allies and the braggadocio of pathetic Middle Eastern despotisms. If I were a functionary of the European Union, I would either have an emergency meeting right now to explore ways of stemming a rising, grassroots tide of Middle America's anger against Europe or alternatively allot 400 or 500 billion Euros per annum for its own unilateral and collective defense. We in America are waiting for sober Europeans to question their current frightening leadership that came of age in 1968, but now shrug that the Schroeders, Fischers, and Villepins may not be so aberrant after all. The EU, remember, is now being asked by Mr. Abbas on the West Bank to stop subsidizing Hamas.

So in response, what should we do?

Keep quieter and carry a far bigger stick.

There's an amusing definition of insanity, that it consists of making the same mistake over and over again but expecting the outcome to change. One wonders if observers of America are insane, given that they seem incapable of accepting the fact that America only rouses itself from isolationism long enough to swat down annoyances, then withdraws back into itself. The tragedy of the Cold War was that we failed to swat and so stayed abroad far too long at far too high a cost. But there seems little inclination on the part of the Administration or the people to stay engaged in the world this time, a few more pummelings and we'll come back home. All this Empire nonsense will soon be forgotten...until next time.

MORE:
-Principles Without Program: Senator Robert A. Taft and American Foreign Policy (John Moser, September 2001, Dialogues)

What conclusions, then, may we reach regarding Taft's overall importance for the history of U.S. foreign relations? As the revisionists have pointed out, he was remarkably prescient on many of the problems inherent in a highly interventionist foreign policy: unprecedented accretion of power in the hands of the executive branch of government, curtailment of civil liberties at home, the charge of "imperialism" arising from American influence abroad, and most importantly the danger of what Paul Kennedy referred to as "imperial overstretch"-the extension of overseas commitments beyond the ability of a nation to meet them. Even his contemporary critics, such as John P. Armstrong, admitted that the senator played an important role as a check on the internationalism of the Truman administration, raising difficult questions about particular policies even if only to be voted down. Indeed, in the wake of the Vietnam War many liberals, including (most ironically) Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., proved willing to embrace many of Taft's positions on foreign affairs.

But while it certainly would not do to reject Taft's importance out of hand, it is equally erroneous to claim that he offered a coherent alternative paradigm for the conduct of foreign affairs. Republican party platforms in the late 1940s and early 1950s to a large extent echoed the interventionism of their Democratic counterparts. The reason for this was twofold: first of all, Taft never felt comfortable enough with the subject to put the sort of effort into foreign policy as he did into, say, domestic economic matters; and secondly his intense partisanship led him to view foreign affairs as little more than a stick with which to beat the Democrats. Thus to some he appeared as merely a mindless "isolationist," while others failed to recognize any consistent viewpoint whatsoever.

It is probably a mistake, however, to place all the blame for this on Taft. The late 1940s and early 1950s were, after all, a period of America Triumphant, a time when almost all Americans believed in the role of the United States as leader of the free world, and very few questioned the wisdom of extensive overseas commitments. Taft himself seemed to accept these premises in his book, A Foreign Policy for Americans (though in it he often hedged about how to best follow through on them). Therefore even if he had mapped out a clear and coherent plan for foreign affairs derived from his core principles, it is unlikely that he would have found much support for it. It was when he was being most consistent and true to his principles, such as when he opposed the North Atlantic Treaty, that he appeared to be the most out of step with the times. It was not, therefore, until the 1960s and the doubts raised by the Vietnam War that a serious reevaluation of Taft's foreign policy was possible. And indeed, as policymakers of the post-Cold War era struggle with the issue of foreign affairs, perhaps it is time for another such reconsideration.

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HARK, HEROLD

The new Joan of Arc on a crusade to stop French unions causing misery to millions (Philip Delves Broughton, 04/06/2003, Daily Telegraph)

France's exhaustion with its unions has found its voice in a 21-year-old student, Sabine Herold, who is challenging the silent majority to revolt against the strikes crippling her country and causing havoc for British travellers.

With schools and government offices closed yesterday, Channel ferries halted, and airlines cancelling most of their flights to and from France, Mlle Herold called the union members 'reactionary egotists'

They "claim to defend public services but are just defending their own interests", she said.

With her pale blue mascara and long eyelashes, she makes an unlikely Joan of Arc. But her words have found an echo in large protests by students and parents against repeated strikes by teachers and threats to disrupt this summer's exam schedule.

She has also become an emblem for the many in French society who believe that economic reforms are long overdue. She blames President Jacques Chirac for caving in repeatedly during his career to union pressure. The many British travellers who have been affected by the strikes in France can only hope her campaign succeeds.

One recalls how the Maid of Orleans ended up...

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GREAT SLIGHT NORTH

Our cultural icons: the flag, beer 'Two-fours,' Shania Twain, brewskies with Trudeau top list of Canadiana (Chris Nuttall-Smith, June 29, 2003, CanWest News Service)

If we had our way this Tuesday, most beer-drinking Canadians would spend Canada Day ogling Shania Twain while sharing a brewski with Pierre Trudeau in Quebec -- home to Canada's sexiest people -- before closing out the festivities with sex on a beach in the Maritimes, a new poll shows.

Wow...and we worry about the state of American culture...

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THE ANSWER

"CRY":What would Captain Cook say? (Roger Kimball, 6.28.2003, Armavirumque)

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POST-DEMOCRATIC AMERICA

Ralph Nader: The US Needs Regime Change: He's the most radical US politician alive, blamed for losing Gore the 2000 election and allowing America's most conservative president ever to gain power. Now, he has a message for the world (Chris Lee, 29 June 2003, Sunday Herald)

'Not enough Americans are rolling up their sleeves as active citizens and as a result, they are watching their country be hijacked by giant corporations and their political allies in Washington,' he says. 'With 9/11, the politicians have seen a political advantage. We are moving away from democracy and into a plutocracy. This is an extremely serious condition.'

Call it a leadership disorder. In Nader's mind, Bush's wartime presidency and his quixotic war on terror are responsible for an era of eroded civil liberties and the reckless build-up of the munitions and defence industries. Government corruption and distortion of the truth, Nader feels, are taking place on the most serious level possible. 'The president has lied to the American people,' he exclaims. 'We were misled, or worse, about Saddam Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction, his ties to al-Qaeda, his threat to the rest of the world. This is an impeachable offence. Now the president is emphasising the 'liberation of the Iraqi people' because that's the only reason left. Everything else has been shown to have been phoney. More people are getting killed and injured every day while his propaganda enriches corporations and the president's friends, not to mention his re-election campaign. But as long as he beats the drum of war and struts as a wartime president, he's able to camouflage what is essentially a losing presidency and inoculate himself from impeachment.'

To hear Nader tell it, the White House is in the grip of big-money contributors and conservative ideologues. And Bush's prime motivation for launching an invasion of Iraq is the same one that many observers suspect prompted the first Gulf War: oil. [...]

Furthermore, Nader believes that the US -- and, perhaps, the UK -- teeters on the brink of its own regime change. 'There has to come a time when people say 'Are you exaggerating the war on terrorism? Are you exaggerating the terrorist threat?' Iraq? It's in Bush's interests to keep saying that there are terrorist cells here and there. But no Democrat has asked if there are al-Qaeda cells all over the United States and if they are suicidal and they are funded and they hate us, why hasn't anything happened?' he says. 'If whistle-blowers start leaving the Pentagon or the CIA, he is going to be in serious trouble. If Tony Blair gets in more serious trouble, then the trouble is going to spill over here. They are one step away from serious political disaster. That step is if the parents of the troops killed over in Iraq convene for a news conference and accuse them [Blair and Bush] of costing their sons' lives, they'll be in serious trouble.'

Supposing for a moment that we accept the Left's hysteria as a legitimate response to the turning of America into some kind of repressive police state and international agressor, doesn't this argument answer Mr. Nader's last objection? "Why hasn't anything happened?" Because crypto-fascism is working?


MORE:
-Rage. Mistrust. Hatred. Fear. Uncle Sam's enemies within: While the US fights a war on terror, it is also systematically crushing its citizens' rights. Neil Mackay on the alarming rise of a new tyranny (Sunday Herald, 29 June 2003)

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IDLING

Economy is set on idle: Nation's use of capacity is nearing a modern low (JOHN SCHMID, June 28, 2003, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel)

Airlines these days fill little more than half the seats on their planes, leaving hundreds of the world's aircraft sitting idle.

America's automakers have the capacity to build 2 million more cars each year than people buy.

And in 2001 and 2002, the nation's paper-making heartland - concentrated in Wisconsin - decommissioned 104 paper-milling machines, each the length of a football field.

From greasy tool-making machinery to high-speed fiber-optic data lines, the United States has mothballed more industrial equipment this year than it has since 1982.

The shuttered offices and factories - some mutely awaiting an upturn and others closed for good - are a legacy of the longest economic expansion in post-World War II America. The giddy years of the late '90s,before the boom abruptly turned to a bust, left the economy saddled with more capacity than the marketplace can absorb.

And in the view of economists, the years of over-investment are now impeding a broad-based economic revival.

"If you have 26 percent of the capacity of the economy sitting idle, it is hard to sell to your board or your bank that you need to invest in new capacity," said Charles W. McMillion, chief economist of MBG Information Service, a forecasting firm in Washington, D.C.

The reference to "1982" is cause for hope, as we've enjoyed 20 years of uninterrupted economic expansion since that year.

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GOOD SAMARITANS

Graham's works defy anti-Muslim image (VAN KORNEGAY, Jun. 26, 2003, The State, SC)

Many will brand [evangelist Franklin] Graham as intolerant and divisive for his words, but they should also consider his work before trying to banish him from the Muslim world. It is work that has not only alleviated human suffering but also has given Christians and Muslims the chance to rub elbows rather than cross swords.

In the summer of 1999 in a boggy field on the Albanian coast, I saw a dozen Samaritan's Purse staffers build and run a small tent town for 2,000 mostly Muslim refugees who had fled ethnic violence in Kosovo. In less than two months' time they worked like characters in a fast-forward video erecting tents, digging latrines, installing a water system and starting a bakery.

For many of these refugees, the Serbs were the only people calling themselves Christians they had ever known, and it was these same Christians who had terrorized them and driven them from their homes. It's no wonder they were a little perplexed that a Christian organization was now coming to their aid.

Samaritan's Purse relief workers came from all walks of American life -- college students and professors, nurses, doctors, retired military, even a short-order cook. They lived in tents alongside the refugees, ate the same food, used the same pit latrines and provided a humane haven from the oppression the Albanians had known for more than 10 years.

The refugees had the freedom to worship any way they wanted, and Samaritan's Purse training materials even proscribed how staffers should dress and act in order to avoid offending Muslim sensibilities.

One wonders what charitable works groups like People for the American Way and other critics of Mr. Graham undertake in the Muslim world.

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BACKWARD LONGING

What a kick: Kickball enjoys comeback -- by adults (Robyn Dochterman, June 28, 2003, Minneapolis Star Tribune)

In a world where everything old is new again, the kickball craze probably shouldn't surprise anyone. The rubbery smell of the red ball has the power to take adults back to simpler times on grade school playgrounds. But unlike freeze tag or Big Wheels, kickball seems to translate to adulthood with surprising ease.

More than 1,100 people participate in organized leagues in the Twin Cities area. The Midwest Unconventional Sports Association (MUSA) and the Cities
Sports Connection (CSC) have nearly 400 players each. Edina, Plymouth, Apple Valley, St. Louis Park and other city leagues make up the balance. The World Adult Kickball Association (WAKA), which has 6,000 players nationwide, is starting a Twin Cities league. [...]

The sun is sinking. The swimming pool near the kickball field closes and three kids weave their bikes along the sidewalk, trying to ride without hands. When they spot the game, they wheel into the grass to watch. A player kicks a high foul ball, and it spins into the street. A city bus nearly flattens it as it bounces crazily down the slope.

The pleasure of diving for pennies, telling knock-knock jokes or catching lightning bugs might fade as kids grow up and go to work. But the urge to reach back to those days, and the desire to have simple, sheer fun, is still alive -- and kicking.

Kickball translating to adulthood is hardly surprising, it is after all a game even spazzes can play. Kill the Guy With the Football would be surprising.

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THE LOOSENING

Homosexuality and Child Sexual Abuse (Timothy J. Dailey, Ph.D., Family Research Council)

Scandals involving the sexual abuse of under-age boys by homosexual priests have rocked the Roman Catholic Church. At the same time, defenders of homosexuality argue that youth organizations such as the Boy Scouts should be forced to include homosexuals among their adult leaders. Similarly, the Gay Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), a homosexual activist organization that targets schools, has spearheaded the formation of "Gay-Straight Alliances" among students. GLSEN encourages homosexual teachers-even in the youngest grades-to be open about their sexuality, as a way of providing role models to "gay" students. In addition, laws or policies banning employment discrimination based on "sexual orientation" usually make no exception for those who work with children or youth.

Many parents have become concerned that children may be molested, encouraged to become sexually active, or even "recruited" into adopting a homosexual identity and lifestyle. Gay activists dismiss such concerns-in part, by strenuously insisting that there is no connection between homosexuality and the sexual abuse of children.

However, despite efforts by homosexual activists to distance the gay lifestyle from pedophilia, there remains a disturbing connection between the two. This is because, by definition, male homosexuals are sexually attracted to other males. While many homosexuals may not seek young sexual partners, the evidence indicates that disproportionate numbers of gay men seek adolescent males or boys as sexual partners. In this paper we will consider the following evidence linking homosexuality to pedophilia:

Pedophiles are invariably males: Almost all sex crimes against children are committed by men.

Significant numbers of victims are males: Up to one-third of all sex crimes against children are committed against boys (as opposed to girls).

The 10 percent fallacy: Studies indicate that, contrary to the inaccurate but widely accepted claims of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, homosexuals comprise between 1 to 3 percent of the population.

Homosexuals are overrepresented in child sex offenses: Individuals from the 1 to 3 percent of the population that is sexually attracted to the same sex are committing up to one-third of the sex crimes against children.

Some homosexual activists defend the historic connection between homosexuality and pedophilia: Such activists consider the defense of "boy-lovers" to be a legitimate gay rights issue.

Pedophile themes abound in homosexual literary culture: Gay fiction as well as serious academic treatises promote "intergenerational intimacy."

Here for instance is that "martyr" of libertarianism, Pim Fortuyn:

In chapter 1 about the 1950s, I wrote about my early sexual experiences, experiences that I see as an enrichment. Today, an experience like that in the park could easily lead to a complaint by parents to the police because of paedophilia, and the relevant young man would be in trouble. But why?

He didn't do me any harm. On the contrary, he showed me something that was incomprehensibly exciting and I could feel and touch it, but today we are ready to interfere with complete teams of professionals. By interfering in such an irritating and grown-up way in the world of children, we make an enormous problem of something that for a child is no problem at all and is only exciting.

It would be absurd to argue that we can as a society embrace homosexuality as normal and an integral part of human liberty but then turn around and reject the core elements of this sexuality. If we are to love not just the sinner but the sin, then these behaviors can't be considered sinning any more. As surely as night follows day anti-paedaphilia laws must follow anti-sodomy laws into oblivion. As Maureen Dowd admonishes Antonin Scalia today, it's time for conservatives to "Loosen up...baby."

MORE:
-ESSAY: Pedophilia Chic: If you thought sex with children was taboo--think again.
(Mary Eberstadt, 06/17/1996, Weekly Standard)
-ESSAY: "Pedophilia Chic" Reconsidered: The taboo against sex with children continues to erode. ( Mary Eberstadt, 01/01/2001, Weekly Standard)
-ESSAY: The Elephant in the Sacristy : Beneath the scandals now consuming the Catholic church is a cluster of facts too enormous to ignore. (Mary Eberstadt, 06/17/2002, Weekly Standard)

In the end, one must believe one of two things about the offenders: Either they were born with a sexual "orientation" toward molesting children; or somehow, just maybe, the experience of being molested themselves affected their future sexual feelings. If one holds to the "orientation" view, one faces the serious problem of explaining away as "coincidence" a broadly shared experience of childhood or adolescent molestation--one out of proportion to the general population. But if, on the other hand, sexual predators are made, not born, a currently forbidden hypothesis suggests itself: that other "sexualities," too, may be affected by experience.

Today, the few researchers and clinicians who dare touch this subject are treated as professional lepers. Think only of the calumny that has come the way of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), which provides counseling to homosexual men and women who believe that sexual "orientation" is susceptible to change. Public opprobrium has also been the fate incurred by groups like Courage, a ministry to homosexuals from the perspective of traditional Catholic teaching. There is no doubt that the experience of groups like these--similar to those of the few writers who have dared dissent from the contemporary secular articles of faith about homosexuality--has had a chilling effect on public discussion, including discussion that could help identify, diagnose, and treat offenders in the future.

And here is where a contemporary secular taboo--that of questioning the ideology of "orientation"--crashes head-on into the greater public good. What the priest scandals demonstrate beyond argument is that what we need, right now, is in-depth study of the victim-to-perpetrator causal chain. We need answers to questions that, properly understood, will help prevent other boys from being preyed upon in the future--for example, why some children who are abused do not go on to become abusers themselves; why others become compulsive offenders whose victims number as high as the hundreds; and how institutions of all sorts might better screen and thwart and help the adults tempted by this profound evil. Today, however, because the ideology of "orientation" has effectively foreclosed discussion of just these issues, there is a tragically short supply of such theoretical and clinical exploration--and likely an even shorter supply of personal will and fortitude among potential researchers. As the JAMA article cited earlier noted suggestively--in a review, recall, of the clinical literature on the sexual abuse of boys--"No longitudinal studies examined the causal relationship between abuse and gender role or sexual orientation." There should be such studies. Interestingly, among the proposed reforms the bishops will discuss in Dallas, one promises that "we offer to cooperate with other churches, institutions of learning, and other interested organizations in conducting a major research study in this area"--namely, "the problem of the sexual abuse of children and young people in our society."

Such information would not only be useful to the bishops and the rest of the public in contemplating the matter of deterrence. It might also shed light on human sexuality more generally. In particular, it might help explain the prominence of the theme of man-boy seduction--which I have documented in two essays in these pages--in gay literature, journalism, and culture. It is now over 20 years since gay eminence grise Edmund White observed that "sex with minors" was one of two features of gay life "likely to outrage the straight community" (the other, he believed, was "sex in public places"). In the wake of the priest scandals, a few other gay voices have acknowledged just such a homosexual/heterosexual divide on the question of minors. As a writer for the Washington Blade put it with surprising candor, "These cases--where the 'victim' lies somewhere in between childhood and adulthood, and the 'abuser' may or may not also have a gay adult sexual life--prove far murkier than either the Catholic Church or many gay rights advocates seem willing to admit." But no gay writer has sounded a more poignant note than the unnamed man who wrote in a letter posted on Andrew Sullivan's website--which contribution Sullivan deserves credit for publishing: "I must disagree with your disavowal of any homosexual complicity in the Church scandal. . . . Until all queers are able to face the fact that we have created for ourselves a culture that values youth and beauty above all else, and to realize that this obsession creates, in at least some gay men, a deviant and abusive tendency toward sex with minors, we are doomed to continue to create victims as surely as the atrophied Church."

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MAJORITY DREAMS

Bush Plays It Fast, With Hard Money (DAVID E. ROSENBAUM, 6/29/2003,. NY Times)

By early next March, Democrats will probably have settled on a nominee for president.

At that point, with no opposition in the primaries, President Bush's re-election campaign is expected to begin spending the massive amount of money it is raising to paint an unfavorable picture of the Democratic candidate in voters' minds and to establish the terms of the fall contest in a way that benefits the president.

It is almost certain that the Democrats will not have the money to respond. "They will be flat on their backs," said Scott Reed, an experienced Republican consultant who is not involved in the 2004 presidential race, "tired from an exhausting primary campaign, still at each other's throats and completely broke." [...]

But Mr. Bush is forgoing matching money, so there will be no limit to what he can spend. His campaign says it plans to raise $170 million, almost twice what Mr. Bush had in 2000 when he also refused matching money and faced stiff primary opposition, and many times more than any other candidate has ever spent. [...]

Because Mr. Bush plans to accept public financing for the general election campaign, he can use the money he is raising only between now and the Republican National Convention in New York in September 2004.

"It's a bonanza for them," said Tony Coelho, who for a time was Al Gore's campaign manager in the last presidential race. "There's no way they can spend this amount of money just for themselves."

Mr. Coelho said he expected the Bush campaign to contribute millions of excess dollars to Congressional campaign committees and state and local Republican parties to be used to improve the party's position in Congress. "What they want to do is not just target Bush's re-election but also make the Republican Party the majority party for the rest of the decade if not longer," he said.

The big thing at this point is for the Party to avoid the Reagan/Clinton mistake of not running on any agenda. You need to make your landslide look like an endorsement of the things you want to get done--in Mr. Bush's case, counter-revolutionary entitlement and tax reform--whether it is or not.

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TOO LONG AT THE FAIR

Who says Al's our pal? (Neil Cavuto, June 29, 2003, Town Hall)

So Alan Greenspan and his buddies on the Federal Reserve Board lowered interest rates again this week. Another quarter-point bone to the masses, for which we're to be eternally grateful. Pardon me, but I don't think so.

First off, it should have been a half-point cut. That would have sent an unequivocal message to the markets and the rest of us that this Fed gets it. Things are still dicey, so there's no time for fooling around.

By moving as conservatively as they did, Al and his pals sent quite the opposite message: that things are fine, just you wait. Well, for better than three years' worth of rate cuts, we've been waiting, and the Fed has been dithering. This latest cut only continued the trend, and was one of the big reasons why the Dow fell 98 points the day the Fed moved. Too little, too late.

What amazes me is despite the disappointment, few criticize Al himself. He's held in remarkably high regard almost everywhere. Wall Street loves him. Congressmen trip over themselves praising him. And even the Bush administration is afraid to say boo to him. Why? What has this guy done to warrant such unanimous love?

I'll tell you, in one word: nothing.

Mr. Greenspan hasn't understood the economy since Paul Volcker and Ronald Reagan destroyed inflation--time to enjoy a well deserved retirement.

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WHAT EVER BECAME OF EUROPE?

Aging Europe Finds Its Pension Is Running Out (RICHARD BERNSTEIN, June 29, 2003, NY Times)

[W]hile pension reform is the urgent political issue of the moment in Germany, Austria, France and other countries, many experts see it as a harbinger of things to come, a sign of a demographic shift with important implications not only for the welfare of retirees but also for European societies as a whole. The crucial factor is age.

One study by William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington, predicts that the median age in the United States in 2050 will be 35.4, only a very slight increase from what it is now. In Europe, by contrast, it is expected to rise to 52.3 from 37.7.

The likely meaning of this "stunning difference," as the British weekly The Economist called the growing demographic disparity between Europe and the United States, is that American power--economic and military--will continue to grow relative to Europe's, which will also decline in comparison with other parts of the world like China, India and Latin America.

With its population not only aging but shrinking as well, Europe seems to face two broad possibilities: either it will have to make up the population shortfall by substantial increases in immigration, which would almost surely create new political tensions in countries where anti-immigrant parties have gained strength in recent years, or it will have to accept being older and smaller and therefore, as some have been warning, less influential in world affairs.

"The European countries are aging in a world that is becoming younger," Mr. Frey said in a telephone interview. "And in a global economy, they're not going to share in the energy and vitality that comes with a younger population." [...]

"In reality, a legal retirement age of 80 is what we should aim at," Erich Streissler, an Austrian economist, wrote in a newspaper article.

It's hard to know whether media like the Times are finally waking up to the most important story of the late 20th Century/early 21st--the death of Europe--or whether this is just a case of their best writer, Richard Bernstein, doing a story he's noticed because he's pretty conservative. Folks have a tendency, perhaps because the implications are so dire, to pooh-pooh these stories and say the decline so far isn't too bad and can be easily reversed. But one of the studies cited in the story and linked below does a nice job of explaining what happens when "negative momentum" takes hold, as it has already in Europe, with ever smaller generations duplicating the infertility of the previous generation.

Can't you just imagine what the streets of Paris will look like when a government tells the French they have to work until they're 80 to get their pensions? Like a nursing home production of Les Miserables...


MORE:
-Europe's Population at a Turning Point (Wolfgang Lutz, Brian C. O'Neill, Sergei Scherbov, Science)

Europe has just entered a critical phase of its demographic evolution. Around the year 2000, the population began to generate "negative momentum": a tendency to decline owing to shrinking cohorts of young people that was brought on by low fertility (birthrate) over the past three decades. Currently, the effect of negative momentum on future population is small. However, each additional decade that fertility remains at its present low level will imply a further decline in the European Union (EU) of 25 to 40 million people, in the absence of offsetting effects from immigration or rising life expectancy. Governments in Europe are beginning to consider a range of policy options to address the negative implications of population decline and rapid aging. Social policies and labor laws aimed at halting the further increase in the mean age of childbearing--which contributes to low fertility--have substantial scope for affecting future demographic trends. They also have an additional health rationale because of the increasing health risks associated with childbearing in older women.

-ALL 10 MILLION EUROPEANS: The last two generations grew up with the idea of the "population explosion". For a century the world has lived with constant upward revision of population forecasts: the only question was if the growth would be fast, or very fast. And the last generation faced the question: how many billions can this planet support? So it is a culture shock, when new projections of global population include scenarios of dramatic population decline - without any meteorite impacts, new epidemics, or famines. Or when a UN report suggests that Europe needs 700 million immigrants to maintain its age structure... Is the future population nightmare not rural Bangladesh, but rural Estonia? (Paul Treanor, March 2003)

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YOU'VE GOTTA BE FARUQUIN KIDDING

-REVIEW: of Islam Under Siege by Akbar S Ahmed (Ahmad Faruqui, Asia Times)

One would be hard pressed to disagree with the core argument of the book, which is directed at Muslims. It consists of two parts. First, don't blame the "Great Satan" for all your ills. Second, be inclusive and compassionate toward other human beings regardless of their faith, because that is what God has willed the believers to do. Many (but not all) of the problems facing the Muslim world are indeed self-inflicted, and blaming the West for all of them has set the Muslims back on the path to progress. Conspiracy theories dominate Muslim views of the West, which is believed to be plotting for the extermination of Islam while indulging in an orgy of sex and violence. It is too often the case that the lives of Muslims are cloaked with a fatalism based on a misunderstanding of God's will. [...]

He also mentions that the freedom of speech and religion in the US prior to September 11 had created an atmosphere that could be compared to that of Muslim Spain (Andalus) when Christians, Jews and Muslims lived side by side in peace. However, everything changed after the terror attacks, as the US came in the grip of hyper-group solidarity. Muslims could be arrested anywhere and held without charges indefinitely, merely for being Muslims. Many who were arrested had their beards shaven forcefully.

Hopefully Mr. Faruqui understands Islam better than America, but that bit in the second paragraph doesn't instill much confidence in his analytical abilities.

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ONE MORE FOR THE ASH HEAP

U.S. Policy Change Toward Beijing (J. Michael Waller, June 26, 2003, Insight)

The People's Republic of China (PRC) is losing its hard-won image as a force for stability in Asia as key thinkers in and around the Bush administration are beginning to view it as a dangerous and often reckless power that is fomenting fear and instability. If this change sweeps through the government leadership like other recent paradigm shifts - for instance, the quickly spreading view that Saudi Arabia no longer is a stable force in the Middle East but a corrupt and unpopular financier of terrorism - Sino-American relations will be headed for the rocks. That's bad news for the Chinese Communist Party leadership and the U.S. and other companies that have built their fortunes on it. [...]

The Chinese leadership has used its "partner" status in the world war on terrorism to crack down even further on religious, political and social movements. According to Al Santoli, editor of the American Foreign Policy Council's China Reform Monitor, "Beijing is using the war on terror as an excuse to imprison and execute political opponents and religious leaders," including underground Roman Catholic clergy, democracy activists and the outlawed Falun Gong spiritual movement.

Even the State Department responded to this, at least expressing "deep concern" over the life sentence imposed on Wang Bingzhang last February, stressing that "the war on terrorism must not be misused to repress legitimate political grievances or dissent."

The sheer volume of evidence presents a damning indictment of the PRC as a fomenter of instability and fear, a purveyor of weapons of mass destruction to the world's most dangerous state-sponsors of terrorism, a supplier of nuclear-missile technology to the planet's most tense hot spots and a unilateral force committed to changing the world's political map. Analysts see Beijing pursuing a two-track strategy of sustained, low-level military pressure with positive inducements of trade, loans, development assistance and even security cooperation - which combined create a sense of fear and dependency on the part of China's neighbors. [...]

Beijing's "long-term strategic objective is to drive American bases and influence out of the Pacific region and to exercise hegemony over it," according to Australia-based sinologist Peter Zhang. "I wrote those words nearly four years ago," he said in a recent essay for the New Australian. "Since then events in the region have only strengthened my assessment."

They're not a threat to us in the short or long term, but they aren't a partner in any way either. We should bring America's full rhetorical pressure to bear on them--"the PRC is one of the most murderous regimes in human history, remains repressive, and is incapable of satisfying the demands for freedom and prosperity of its people"--and base our military-space program on destroying their satellite and missile capability. This latter will be useful even as and after China disintegrates, because it will give us the capability to destroy missiles in other lesser nations. Prepare for China and the Saddams and Kim Jong-Ils are a snap.

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THANK GOODNESS FOR SHARIA

Iran Reportedly Nabs Bin Laden's No. 2 Man (Fox News, June 28, 2003)

Ayman al-Zawahiri, Usama bin Laden's right-hand man, was reported last night to be in custody in Iran along with several other top Al Qaeda leaders.

The Arabic news channel Al-Arabiyah said the fanatic Egyptian-born doctor is under arrest in Iran along with bin Laden's son Saad and Al Qaeda's infamous spokesman Abu Ghaith.

The report said they may be sent back to their home countries.

Al-Zawahiri has been sentenced to death in Egypt for his role in the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat.

Well, he definitely won't be a head man in al-Qaeda for much longer.

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THERE'S ALWAYS A STATE RELIGION

Our state religion is secularism (Ted Byfield, June 27, 2003, National Post)

Canada's state religion is secularism, which proclaims that if there is a God, man could know nothing about It. Therefore, any viewpoint that contends otherwise should be dismissed as an absurdity, and above all permitted no role in the determination of public policy, because religion must be regarded as a purely "private" affair.

Claims of individuals to know anything as actually true, or morally good, should be disparaged, and school curricula must be designed to discourage such assumptions. Influence over children should be gradually taken away from parents and vested in the state. In particular, the ability of parents to imbue their children with any religious viewpoint should be thwarted through public education.

The purpose of human life is pleasure, the centre of all human endeavour is properly the self, and the chief vehicle for all human fulfillment and advance is the state. Finally, the source of all moral authority must be vested in what Plato called "the Guardians," which in our day would mean the professoriate, the luminaries of the liberal media, the educators, and the bureaucracy. Judges, the intelligentsia, commentators and assorted "experts," these are the priests and the prophets.

Such is the state religion of Canada. Its chief adversary is Christianity, and Christianity has no media voice. When The Report magazine folded, this was the real loss.

It's strange that people believe you can try to erradicate religion from public affairs without replacing it with some other set of ideas, as if the
opposite of Truth weren't No Truth.

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CON COM

Miller Emerges as New Voice for Bush Re-Election (Reuters, 6/28/03)

A new voice has emerged in the re-election campaign of President Bush, that of Dennis Miller, who is gaining a reputation as a conservative comic by attacking Democrats with biting humor.

Miller flew on Air Force One from San Francisco to Los Angeles with the president on Friday, and later gave a stand-up routine at a Bush fund-raiser in Los Angeles. [...]

Bush remained offstage until after Miller's often caustic comic performance during the fund-raiser that drew in $3.5 million, most of it in $2,000 checks from 1,600 people. [...]

"[Howard Dean can roll up his sleeves all he wants at public events, but as long as we see that heart tattoo with Neville Chamberlain's name on his right forearms, he's never going anywhere," Miller said.

New?

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WHO ON EARTH IS LEO STRAUSS?

Philosophers and kings (Lexington, 19/06/2003, The Economist)

FROM the moment George Bush moved into the White House, the search has been on for the man (or woman) who is pulling his strings. But now all are forgotten in the fuss about the most surprising suspect of all: Leo Strauss, a political philosopher who died in 1973 and produced a series of learned studies of political theorists (such as Xenophon's Socratic Discourse) that are variously described as seminal and utterly opaque. But his real talent was for teaching.

One reason why Strauss is so controversial is that a little selective quotation can be used to give his thinking a decidedly sinister tinge. Strauss emphasised both the fragility of democracy and the importance of intellectual elites. He was also a devotee of Plato, who famously argued that “philosopher kings” sometimes had to be willing to tell “noble lies” in order to keep the ignorant masses in line. The implication: Mr Wolfowitz and his fellow Straussians deliberately lied about Saddam Hussein's nukes to advance their political cause. This is stretching it. Strauss was critical of democracy in much the same way that Winston Churchill was: he believed (unlike Plato) that it was the worst political system apart from all the others. He focused on the weaknesses of liberal democracy—particularly its habit of underestimating the dangers of tyranny—precisely because he had seen the Weimar Republic destroyed at close hand.

The rise of the Straussians suggests that American conservatism has shifted its focus from liberty to virtue. Ronald Reagan was surrounded with free-marketers in Adam Smith ties. But Mr Bush is an intensely religious man who has no qualms about using big government to improve people's behaviour. Strauss was an agnostic, but he also stressed the cultivation of personal virtue, and his followers (perhaps traducing him, and certainly outraging Plato) have argued that organised religion is a necessary buttress of civilisation. Strauss's paternalist side would have warmed to the way that Mr Bush has expanded the Department of Education, has started promoting marriage through the Department of Health and Human Services and has toughened America's drug policies. Straussians such as Mr Walters (the current drug tsar) and Mr Kass (head of the council of bioethics) have helped to clothe Mr Bush's Christian instincts in the non-religious language of moral philosophy and practical policy.

The rise of the Straussians also illustrates an odd point about modern American conservatism. Despite all their bile about Old Europe, the American right has repeatedly found its inspiration in European thinkers. A few years ago, it was an Austrian libertarian called Friedrich