ALLAWI'S BAD LUCK:

A Big Man To Watch In Baghdad (David Ignatius, February 1, 2004, Washington Post)

As Ayad Allawi recounts the story of how he was nearly hacked to death by Saddam Hussein's agents 26 years ago, he slips out of his earnest role as a member of the Iraqi Governing Council and into a narrative of flickering images and half-heard noises. Listen to his account and you begin to understand why the struggle to create a new Iraq is so brutal and frustrating. [...]

Allawi was part of the Shiite merchant class. With their links to the bazaars of Persia, the prominent Shiite families were often far wealthier and more cultivated than the Sunnis. Like his relative Ahmed Chalabi, another prominent Shiite opposition leader, Allawi was a secular man who wanted to build a modern country.

Allawi's apostasy began after he left Baghdad in 1971 and made his way to London to continue his medical studies. He resigned from the Baath Party in 1975, but Saddam initially tried to coax him back with a combination of threats and bribes. When these blandishments failed, friends told Allawi in January 1978 that his name had been placed on a "liquidation list."

Saddam's henchmen were right to be worried. "At that time," Allawi says, "I was in contact with high-ranking Baath officials and military officers who shared my view that Saddam had hijacked the party."

Before he left the hospital in Wales in 1979, Allawi had already begun organizing a network that he hoped would someday destroy Saddam, who had seized power from other Baathists in a coup that year. He continued his efforts through the 1980s, traveling as a businessman in the Middle East and meeting with Iraqis who might join his opposition network. [...]

Allawi arrived in Baghdad soon after the U.S. Army. He joined the interim Governing Council that was appointed by the U.S. occupation chief, L. Paul Bremer, and was named to its nine-member "presidential committee." For two decades, Allawi had argued that a stable post-Saddam Iraq could only be built on the foundations of the modern state the Baathists had created, including the army, police, and secular courts. And Allawi says he warned U.S. officials in May that they would make a terrible mistake if they disbanded the Iraqi army instead of using it to maintain order and begin a process of national reconciliation.

But Bremer rejected that advice, probably his biggest mistake. The army, like other institutions, was swept away over Allawi's protests in a surge of de-Baathification. [...]

The council's regular Wednesday meetings with Bremer also went badly. The Iraqis felt they were being treated as a rubber stamp for whatever the Americans decided to do. Bremer listened, but in the end he did what he wanted. Through all the bickering, Allawi focused on running the council's security committee, which was responsible for building up a new Iraqi army, a civil defense force, police and an intelligence service. These security issues are probably the most crucial task of the occupation, and it's too soon to judge whether Allawi will succeed.

It has been Allawi's bad luck to be disparaged by almost everyone: by opposition leaders as an ex-Baathist; by ordinary Iraqis as a CIA man or an exile; by the Americans as a critic of Bremer's tactics; by religious leaders as too secular. And yet, there's a power to his arguments about how to keep the country from falling apart.

Of all the mistakes we may have made, the belief that we had to thoroughly de-Ba'athify is the hardest to fault. Indeed, if anything, we should probably have been prepared to handle past beneficiaries of Ba'athist rule (mostly the Sunni) more harshly.

---

WHERE WAS THE MORALITY TO BE ANAESTHITIZED?:

Washing their Hands: a review of HITLER'S SCIENTISTS: Science, War, and the Devil's Pact By John Cornwell (Gregg Herken, January 28, 2004, Washington Post)

The question that Cornwell poses early in the book, and that becomes a leitmotif, is whether those technical experts who participated in Nazi depravities were Germans behaving as Germans, or Germans behaving as scientists. Those who think they know Cornwell's answer may be in for a shock. The author argues persuasively that the elements of pseudoscience that we have come to associate with the Nazis -- eugenics, phrenology, notions of "racial hygiene" -- had their roots in post-World War I Europe and were often promoted, or even invented, by German scientists with the aid of sympathetic industrialists. But Cornwell does not find the fault to be in the mystical German Seele (soul). As he points out, social Darwinism and euthanasia of the "unfit" were ideas likewise in vogue among intellectuals in the United States and Britain during this time. Nor were bizarre and inhumane experiments unique to the Nazis. A famous British scientist once recalled how, as a boy, he was lowered into a freezing lake in a leaking diving suit by his father, who wished to test a new breathing apparatus. American physicians injected charity patients with plutonium during the Second World War, just to discover where the substance went in the body.

Although the atrocities of Hitler's Germany are by now perhaps too familiar to shock, that does not make Cornwell's meticulous cataloguing of them any less disturbing or depressing. Even so, the author feels compelled to give the devil his due. Drawing on previous work by historian Robert Proctor, Cornwell points out that the Nazis, who already had drawn the connection between tobacco and cancer, actively campaigned against smoking, banning it in public buildings. In 1943 -- when they surely had more pressing concerns -- the Nazis decreed that German workers suffering from asbestos exposure had the right to receive compensation. For decades to come, Anglo-American companies would claim that the mineral was harmless, even suppressing evidence to the contrary.

This is not to say that Cornwell sees Allied and German science as morally equivalent. Yet it is not the well-known monsters such as Josef Mengele whom he finds most distressing, but rather the nearly wholesale "acquiescence of the German great and good in science": those scientists who became "morally anaesthetized" to the evil they served.

Diabolical science was not a function of Nazism--rather Nazism was a function of science.

---

YOU WOULDN'T THINK IT NEEDED SAYING, BUT...:

Top Saudi Cleric Assails Terrorists (RAWYA RAGEH, 1/31/04, Associated Press)

Saudi Arabia's top cleric called on Muslims around the world Saturday to forsake terrorism, saying those who claim to be holy warriors were an affront to the faith.

In a sermon that was remarkable not only for its strong language but also its timing - at the peak of the annual hajj - Sheik Abdul Aziz al-Sheik told 2 million pilgrims that terrorists were giving their enemies an excuse to criticize Muslim nations.

"Is it holy war to shed Muslim blood? Is it holy war to shed the blood of non-Muslims given sanctuary in Muslim lands? Is it holy war to destroy the possession of Muslims,'' he said.

A large number of the victims of suicide attacks in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iraq and elsewhere have been been Muslims.

Al-Sheik, who is widely respected in the Arab world as the foremost cleric in the country considered the birthplace of Islam, spoke at Namira Mosque, a televised sermon watched by millions of Muslims in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states.

The Osamists have done the seemingly impossible--bombed Saudi Arabia and Pakistan into getting serious about terrorism.

---

LAW>ORDER>SURRENDER:

France-Minister Chased (AP, Jan 31, 2004)

A public appearance by France's law-and-order interior minister turned ugly on Saturday, as dozens of angry youths besieged his entourage following a visit to the Paris subway.

Nearly 50 youths chased Nicolas Sarkozy, surrounded by his security guards, as they emerged from a visit to Les Halles station in central Paris to tout new transportation security measures.

The tough-talking Sarkozy, one of France's best-known politicians, was whisked into a nearby police station and on to his car as the youths shouted insults at him.

Our grandchildren, when they think of France, will associate it with the crescent flag rather than the croissant.

---

CEO-STYLE:

Donors Advocated Change: Dean Supporters OK With Losing Trippi (Jodie Tillman, 1/31/04, Valley News)

Hours had passed since the votes came in, since the group of well-connected fund-raisers learned their man had finished second in the New Hampshire presidential primary. Returning to their Concord motel after a late-night rally, some of the 100 men and women who had traveled from near and far to work for Howard Dean headed straight to bed.

But a group of about 20 on the so-called “Dean's List” -- people who have raised at least $50,000 for the campaign -- stayed up in the hotel's breakfast area. Worried by Dean’s showing in New Hampshire and in Iowa the previous week, they wanted to figure out where the campaign was going.

“It turned into a very intense discussion,” said Norwich resident Bill Stetson, who is on the Dean's List. “There was a feeling that we were off track. We just felt there was something wrong in Burlington.”

From one session lasting into the wee hours of Wednesday morning emerged a consensus among these influential supporters: The campaign's management style had to change.

And several hours after Stetson and another supporter reported their recommendation to the Dean national campaign co-chairman, news broke that national campaign manager Joe Trippi had been replaced with a Washington insider.

Steve Grossman, Dean's national co-chairman, said the group's recommendations coincided with what Dean himself had been thinking since his third-place finish in Iowa: that the team-management style favored by Trippi needed to be replaced with a more hierarchical, “CEO-style.”

The truly staggering thing here is not just that they spent $41 million dollars blowing leads in IA and NH, but that they thought there was more where that came from. It was a campaign with no adult supervision and seemingly not the slightest acquaintance with reality.

---

RATHER SWITCH THAN FIGHT:

Arab-Americans switch: Bush to Kucinich: Prominent group that backed president in 2000 says they were 'stung' (WorldNetDaily.com, January 31, 2004)

Complaining it was betrayed, a key Arab-American group that endorsed George W. Bush in the 2000 election says it will back Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich for the Democratic nomination and stand behind that party's eventual nominee.

The endorsement of Kucinich was not based on who has the best chance to win, but on "principle," said Osama Siblani, head of the Arab-American Political Action Committee.

"The argument we had yesterday was should we stand by our principles or cast a vote based on electability," he said, according to the Associated Press. "But this was a group that voted for [President] Bush in 2000 and were stung by the Bush administration."

The very reasons that Arab-Americans are changing parties are those which should preclude a Democratic presidency.

---

NO, YOU'RE THE FRONTRUNNER...:

Electing the Electable: Let us review the Democratic presidential primaries so far. (DAVID BROOKS, 1/31/04, NY Times)

In the beginning, John Kerry surged to a big lead in the New Hampshire polls because he seemed so electable. He had plenty of experience, lots of money and big hair, and, as somebody said, he looks like an animatronic version of Abraham Lincoln. But then Howard Dean raised a lot of money, and New Hampshire voters figured that he was bringing so many new people into the process that he must be electable — and if he was electable, then they should probably support him because they wanted somebody who could beat George Bush.

So Dean's poll numbers rose, and the news media noticed his momentum, and other voters noticed how much great press he was getting. And that led to a self-reinforcing upward spiral of electability as more people concluded that he was electable because so many other people were concluding he was electable. People around the country saw that Dean was doing so well in New Hampshire they, too, concluded that he must be electable, a perception that led to an impressive rise in the national polls, which only enhanced his electability.

All this time, Kerry had not changed his views particularly, and he had not changed his campaign style, though he might have changed the bags under his eyes, depending on whom you ask. But savvy Democratic voters wanted to vote for somebody who could win the most votes in November, and they decided that since Dean was ahead of Kerry, therefore Kerry must be less electable, so voters moved away from Kerry. So Kerry's support plummeted, and the more his support plummeted the more he looked pathetically unelectable.

So Kerry fired his campaign manager and moved to Iowa, where fewer people had formed a conclusion about his electability

If it weren't so enjoyable it would be sad to see a once great party reduced to the point where the contest for its presidential nomination consists of staying one step ahead of the public scrutiny that will destroy your candidacy.

---

ONLT THE FOURTH "R" MATTERS:

Our Foreign Legions: Lessons and cautions from Europe on assimilating immigrants. (FRANCIS FUKUYAMA, January 31, 2004, Wall Street Journal)

Americans, looking at Europe, should be glad that they have made their country an assimilation powerhouse. But as the authors of a new volume on assimilation edited by Tamar Jacoby indicate, this is not something that we can take for granted. During the big immigration wave of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the largely Protestant native-born elites deliberately sought to use the public school system to assimilate the newcomers from southern and eastern Europe to their cultural values. The 1960s and '70s gave rise to multiculturalism, affirmative action and bilingualism, which sought to reverse course on assimilation. The '90s saw a backlash against this kind of divisive identity politics with the passage of Proposition 227 in California, which wiped out public school bilingual programs at a stroke. This was our version of the headscarf ban, one that worked well because it was supported by a great many Hispanic parents themselves who felt their children were being held back in a Spanish language ghetto.

It is in this context that we should evaluate President Bush's recent proposal to grant illegal aliens work permits. Many Americans dislike the policy because it rewards breaking the law. This is all true; we should indeed use our newly invigorated controls over foreign nationals to channel future immigrants into strictly legal channels. But since we are not about to expel the nearly seven million people potentially eligible for this program, we need to consider what policies would lead to their most rapid integration into mainstream American society. For the vast majority of illegal aliens, the law they broke on entering the country is likely to be the only important one they will ever violate, and the sooner they can normalize their status, the faster their children are likely to participate fully in American life.

It is no exaggeration to say that the assimilation of culturally distinct immigrants will be the greatest social challenge faced by developed democracies over the coming decades. Given the subreplacement fertility rates of native-born populations, high levels of immigration have become necessary to fund not just current standards of living but future social security benefits. Divergent immigration patterns will unfortunately deepen the wedge that has emerged between America and Europe in foreign policy. We cannot do much to affect European policy, but we can take steps to see that their problems do not become our own.

Turning our schools back into training grounds for fit citizens of the Republic would seem a cause around which nativist and immigrantophile could unite.

---

FOLLOW THE LONER?:

A Kerry Top 10 (National Journal, Jan. 30, 2004)

In making his own way in the Senate, Kerry has often stepped on the toes of fellow Democrats. He has campaigned against federal spending projects championed by both Republicans and Democrats. When he pursued his fraud probe of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, he didn't shy away from detailing the roles that former President Carter and former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young played in the controversy.

Two former Senate staffers who worked for Kerry's colleagues describe another paradoxical side to Kerry -- his apparent aloofness and lack of focus on some important matters passing through the Senate, and his occasional fascination with causes, to the point of what one described as "obsession." The BCCI scandal was one example of his doggedness, but Kerry also spent years trying to terminate an obscure nuclear reactor research program. The program was based in Illinois and championed by that state's two Democratic senators, and Kerry's unrelenting effort to end the project did not please his colleagues. Kerry also crossed swords with the then-chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, J. Bennett Johnston, D-La., on the reactor issue and on Johnston's support for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but today Johnston is a Kerry supporter.

Another Kerry cause was eliminating federal subsidies for mohair production. The senator gave speech after speech against the subsidies, which cost taxpayers $60 million a year while creating very few jobs. Kerry got approving editorial coverage in The Boston Globe and The New York Times when the subsidies were phased out in the mid-1990s, but the senator didn't have much to say when the program was revived a few years later. He expressed chagrin, but showed little interest in tackling the issue again. Likewise, he campaigns now against Bush's tax cuts, but he skipped the 2001 vote on those cuts to deliver a commencement address.

This profile makes him sound kind of like Nixon, except pro-Communist.

---

YOU KNOW IT'S THE TIMES EDITORIAL BOARD WHEN...:

The Gift Horse (NY Times, 1/31/04)

n Thursday, Laura Bush announced that President Bush would ask for an $18 million increase in funds for the National Endowment for the Arts. If approved, this request will bring the N.E.A.'s annual spending to nearly $140 million. All but $3 million of the increase will go to create a new program called "American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius," which will include a mix of touring performances, local presentations and arts education in partnership with public and private organizations across the country.

It's impossible to argue with increased financing for such a valuable enterprise, although this announcement falls under the category of You Know It's an Election Year When. . . .

You'd think the paper of record could at least get its facts straight, seeing as how Mr. Bush secured more money for the NEA last year also and his appointment of Dana Gioia to head the Agency demonstrated that he was serious about transforming it.

---

THE DEMOCRATS' FRIENDS--THE KLEPTOCRATS:

Crisis for Chirac as Juppé is found guilty on funding (Philip Delves, 31/01/2004, Daily Telegraph)

A political crisis engulfed President Jacques Chirac last night after his closest ally and heir apparent, the former prime minister Alain Juppé, was found guilty of illegal party funding.

Juppé, who was once described by M Chirac as "the best among us", was barred from public office for 10 years and given an 18-month suspended prison sentence. [...]

While head of M Chirac's previous party, Rally for the Republic (RPR) and financial director at the town hall, Juppé arranged for the illegal payment of RPR employees with city money.

His conviction is extremely embarrassing for M Chirac, who has avoided similar charges of illegal party funding through bribes, expense fiddling and creating imaginary jobs at the Paris town hall only by changing the law on presidential immunity to protect him while in office. Juppé is seen by many to be taking the fall for his mentor.

Remind us again why the Democrats want to set up the French and Germans as our moral arbiters?

---

LET'S OBLIGE HIM:

Castro claims plot by Bush (Carlos Diaz, 1/31/04, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE)

Cuban leader Fidel Castro yesterday accused President Bush of ordering his assassination and vowed to "go down fighting" if there was a U.S. invasion.

In a five-hour speech, the 77-year-old communist president shot down rumors about his health and heightened his attacks on the "belligerent behavior" of the United States and its leader.

"We knew that Mr. Bush had made a commitment with the mafia of the Cuban-American Foundation to kill me. I accuse him of this," Mr. Castro told about 1,000 representatives from 32 nations attending a conference in Havana against the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas.

"This dead man can still talk. This dead man can make plans. This dead man ... is not dead yet." [...]

Mr. Castro said that Cuba does not want "a war [against] Yankee imperialism" but he insisted that the communist nation "will not budge at all from our principles."

The Cuban leader received thunderous applause when he said: "I am not asking to survive a war. I've already done my part and I still have to do what I have to do. With weapons in hand, I don't care how I die, but I'm confident that if they invade us, I will go down fighting."

How hard can it be to bomb a guy who gives five hour speeches?

MORE:
State Department: Chavez, Castro won't derail FTAA plans (The Associated Press, , Jan. 30, 2004)

The U.S. State Department's top official for Latin America said Friday the negotiations for the 34-nation Free Trade Area of the Americas would not be derailed by governments that don't fully support the trade bloc.

Roger Noriega, assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, was asked at a business conference whether Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Cuban President Fidel Castro can influence other Latin American nations to lessen their support for the President Bush-backed free trade area.

''I don't think any one country constitutes a roadblock on the FTAA,'' Noriega said. ``We'll just go around them.''

Chavez, a friend of Castro, has expressed his opposition to many aspects of the FTAA and has been accused by U.S. officials of stoking anti-American sentiment in Latin America. Communist Cuba is not included in the FTAA talks, but Castro has been singled out by Noriega for promoting policies to destabilize democratic governments.

''None of us is ignoring the negative aspects and the penchant for some to fish in troubled waters and cause trouble for other countries,'' Noriega said.

---

CANADA’S CONTRIBUTION TO THE WAR ON KIDDIE-TERROR:

Top court sets limits on spanking (Kirk Makin, The Globe and Mail, 31/01/04)

Parents can spank or use force on their children provided it is minimal and not the product of frustration or rage, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled yesterday.

While the majority of judges were unwilling to prohibit the use of force altogether, they declared corporal punishment off-limits for children under the age of 2 and for teenagers. And they outlawed the use of objects such as rulers or belts, as well as slaps or blows to the head.

Teachers can no longer use any form of corporal punishment, the court added, although they may restrain pupils to gain compliance with their instructions.

The judgment went a long way toward meeting the concerns of critics of spanking, while at the same time leaving intact a Criminal Code defence that can be used by parents or teachers charged with assault who establish they used "reasonable force" on a child.

Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin said the defence will apply only in cases of "sober, reasoned uses of force that address the actual behaviour of the child and are designed to restrain, control or express some symbolic disapproval of his or her behaviour. Degrading, inhuman or harmful conduct is not protected."

This is being widely played as a defeat for activists and the caring professions and a triumph for family and common sense. It undoubtedly is, as no one was betting on the outcome and much of Europe has now criminalized all corporal punishment. Who is going to lament the fact it is no longer legal to punch your kid in the head in a blind rage?

This is the latest skirmish in the long campaign to extirpate all physical violence from society, whether with strangers, spouses, animals or children. That is surely a mark of civilized progress, but does there come a point where the self-control this requires can only be attained through maintaining an emotional distance from our loved ones? Does permanently sublimating human anger require the building of emotional walls within? And, if so, does it matter?

Anyway, should this issue come before the U.S. Supreme Court with its new-found fealty to international precedent, American traditionalists will be able to cite their northern neighbour’s common sense for once. You are most welcome.

---

EVANGELIZE EUROPE:

Research Around the World Links Religion to Economic Development (FELICIA R. LEE, 1/31/04, NY Times)

Forget investment and savings rates, worker productivity and wage scales to determine which countries will become richer or poorer. What really stimulates economic growth is whether you believe in an afterlife — especially hell.

At least that's what two Harvard scholars have found after analyzing data collected in 59 countries between 1981 and 1999.

"Our central perspective is that religion affects economic outcomes mainly by fostering religious beliefs that influence individual traits such as honesty, work ethic, thrift and openness to strangers," the researchers, Robert J. Barro and Rachel M. McCleary, wrote in a recent issue of American Sociological Review. (They also happen to be married.) "For example, beliefs in heaven and hell might affect those traits by creating perceived rewards and punishments that relate to `good' and `bad' lifetime behavior." [...]

[O]ver the last 30 years, many East Asian countries, including Malaysia, Singapore and South Korea, have experienced both rapid economic growth and the spread of Christianity, Mr. Barro said.

"South Korea is a good example of that rapid growth and more religion," he said. There the number of converts from Confucianism and other Eastern religions to Christianity is growing rapidly, he explained. [...]

"I find that belief factors play a major role in economic growth, but here is one of the world's leading economists saying so," Mr. Inglehart said, referring to Mr. Barro. "When Weber argued that big breakthroughs in economic growth were in Protestant countries, it was at a time when many cultures were shaped by Protestant institutions. His notion in the broadest sense is that belief factors play a role in economic factors."

"This is a revised view of the Protestant ethic," he continued. He noted that many mostly Protestant, wealthy countries were now more interested in quality of life, and that many Eastern countries were now more focused on economic growth — with some populations even converting, as Mr. Barro noted, to Christianity and specifically to Protestantism.

"Confucian countries are now the most Protestant countries on earth, in terms of a moral imperative to work hard, save money, to do well," Mr. Inglehart said.

The future lies not in the West--where, excluding the U.S., Christianity is dying-- but where Christianity is growing.

Note that this fact is the dog not barking in another story from today's Times, On the Dark Side of Democracy
By EMILY EAKIN, 1/31/04, NY Times)

To most Americans, the notion that free markets and democracy are essential to curing the world's ills is an article of faith. If only Iraq and Afghanistan, Cuba and North Korea, Syria and Rwanda would adopt both, their people, not to mention the world, would be safer and richer.

Yet to Amy Chua, a professor at Yale Law School, such accepted wisdom is mostly evidence of a persistent and disturbing national naïveté. All too often, she says, bringing free markets and elections to developing nations leads not to stability or prosperity but to hate-mongering, discrimination and even genocidal violence.

The idea that political and economic liberty could trigger such atrocities is heretical to many Western liberals. That, Ms. Chua says, is because people here are blind to ethnicity. [...]

[C]ritics complain, America's approach is both precipitous and simplistic, encouraging political liberalization in nations that may not have the social and economic conditions necessary to sustain it. "We're not prepared to understand, assess and respond to the complexities of other societies," said the economist Jeffrey D. Sachs, who has served as an adviser to governments in Russia, Poland and Bolivia.

Mr. Stiglitz agreed, saying that democracy experts tend to ignore social variables like ethnicity and gender. In Malaysia, for example, he said, the local government created a successful affirmative action program to benefit the indigenous Malay majority — and ward off ethnic conflict with the prosperous Chinese minority — over the objections of Western advisers. And in Rwanda, he said, the transition from customary to formal law put land formerly controlled by women under male ownership, an outcome Western experts failed to anticipate.

Most critics are quick to stress that they are not against democracy, free markets or globalization per se; they merely object to the way these ideals have typically been pursued. "I'm an optimist," Ms. Chua said, summing up her position. "In the last 20 years, we have done things in many ways so badly, so foolishly, often with the best of intentions — like dropping a stock exchange in Mozambique or xeroxing copies of the U.S. Constitution. I think we can do better."

In her book, she argues that one way to reduce inequality and ethnic tension in democratizing nations is for market-dominant minorities to share some of their wealth by making "significant, visible contributions to the local economies in which they are thriving," by which she means building universities, hospitals or recreational facilities, supporting local schools and employing members of the indigenous majority in their companies.

They don't need money--they need missionaries.

MORE:
-World Values Survey (Prof. Ronald Inglehart, University of Michigan)
-ESSAY: American values: Living with a superpower: Some values are held in common by America and its allies. As three studies show, many others are not (The Economist, Jan 2nd 2003)
-Professor Robert J. Barro's Working Papers On The Web

---

TOO MUCH TALK?:

Physics and Politics: or Thoughts on the Application of the Principles of "Natural Selection" and "Inheritance" to Political Society (1863) (Walter Bagehot, 1826-77)

CHAPTER V. - THE AGE OF DISCUSSION.

The greatest living contrast is between the old Eastern and customary civilisations and the new Western and changeable civilisations. A year or two ago an inquiry was made of our most intelligent officers in the East, not as to whether the English Government were really doing good in the East, but as to whether the natives of India themselves thought we were doing good; to which, in a majority of cases, the officers who wore the best authority, answered thus: 'No doubt you are giving the Indians many great benefits: you give them continued peace, free trade, the right to live as they like, subject to the laws; in these points and others they are far better off than, they ever were; but still they cannot make you out. What puzzles them is your constant disposition to change, or as you call it, improvement. Their own life in every detail being regulated by ancient usage, they cannot comprehend a policy which is always bringing something new; they do not a bit believe that the desire to make them comfortable and happy is the root of it; they believe, on the contrary, that you are aiming at something which they do not understand--that you mean to "take away their religion;" in a word, that the end and object of all these continual changes is to make Indians not what they are and what they like to be, but something new and different from what they are, and what they would not like to be.' In the East, in a word, we are attempting to put new wine into old bottles-to pour what we can of a civilisation whose spirit is progress into the form of a civilisation whose spirit is fixity, and whether we shall succeed or not is perhaps the most interesting question in an age abounding almost beyond example in questions of political interest.

Historical inquiries show that the feeling of the Hindoos is the old feeling, and that the feeling of the Englishman is a modern feeling. ' Old law rests,' as Sir Henry Maine puts it, 'not on contract but on status.' The life of ancient civilisation, so far as legal records go, runs back to a time when every important particular of life was settled by a usage which was social, political, and religious, as we should now say, all in one--which those who obeyed it could not have been able to analyse, for those distinctions had no place in their mind and language, but which they felt to be a usage of imperishable import, and above all things to be kept unchanged. In former papers I have shown, or at least tried to show, why these customary civilisations were the only ones which suited an early society; why, so to say, they alone could have been first; in what manner they had in their very structure a decisive advantage over all competitors. But now comes the farther question: If fixity is an invariable ingredient in early civilisations, how then did any civilisation become unfixed? No doubt most civilisations stuck where they first were; no doubt we see now why stagnation is the rule of the world, and why progress is the very rare exception; but we do not learn what it is which has caused progress in these few cases, or the absence of what it is which has denied it in all others.

To this question history gives a very clear and very remarkable answer. It is that the change from the age of status to the age of choice was first made in states where the government was to a great and a growing extent a government by discussion, and where the subjects of that discussion were in some degree abstract, or, as we should say, matters of principle. It was in the small republics of Greece and Italy that the chain of custom was first broken. 'Liberty said, Let there be light, and, like a sunrise on the sea, Athens arose,' says Shelley, and his historical philosophy is in this case far more correct than is usual with him. A free state--a state with liberty--means a state, call it republic or call it monarchy, in which the sovereign power is divided between many persons, and in which there is a discussion among those persons. Of these the Greek republics were the first in history, if not in time, and Athens was the greatest of those republics.

After the event it is easy to see why the teaching of history should be this and nothing else. It is easy to see why the common discussion of common actions or common interests should become the root of change and progress. In early society, originality in life was forbidden and repressed by the fixed rule of life. It may not have been quite so much so in Ancient Greece as in some other parts of the world. But it was very much so even there. As a recent writer has well said, 'Law then presented itself to men's minds as something venerable and unchangeable, as old as the city; it had been delivered by the founder himself, when he laid the walls of the city, and kindled its sacred fire.' An ordinary man who wished to strike out a new path, to begin a new and important practice by himself, would have been peremptorily required to abandon his novelties on pain of death; he was deviating, he would be told, from the ordinances imposed by the gods on his nation, and he must not do so to please himself. On the contrary, others were deeply interested in his actions. If he disobeyed, the gods might inflict grievous harm on all the people as well as him. Each partner in the most ancient kind of partnerships was supposed to have the power of attracting the wrath of the divinities on the entire firm, upon the other partners quite as much as upon himself. The quaking bystanders in a superstitious age would soon have slain an isolated bold man in the beginning of his innovations, What Macaulay so relied on as the incessant source of progress--the desire of man to better his condition--was not then permitted to work; man was required to live as his ancestors had lived.

Still further away from those times were the 'free thought' and the 'advancing sciences' of which we now hear so much. The first and most natural subject upon which human thought concerns itself is religion; the first wish of the half-emancipated thinker is to use his reason on the great problems of human destiny--to find out whence he came and whither he goes, to form for himself the most reasonable idea of God which he can form. But, as Mr. Grote happily said--'This is usually what ancient times would not let a man do. His GENS or his fratria required him to believe as they believed.' Toleration is of all ideas the most modern, because the notion that the bad religion of A cannot impair, here or hereafter, the welfare of B, is, strange to say, a modern idea. And the help of 'science,' at that stage of thought, is still more nugatory. Physical science, as we conceive it--that is, the systematic investigation of external nature in detail--did not then exist. A few isolated observations on surface things--a half-correct calendar, secrets mainly of priestly invention, and in priestly custody--were all that was then imagined; the idea of using a settled study of nature as a basis for the discovery of new instruments and new things, did not then exist. It is indeed a modern idea, and is peculiar to a few European countries even yet. In the most intellectual city of the ancient world, in its most intellectual age, Socrates, its most intellectual inhabitant, discouraged the study of physics because they engendered uncertainty, and did not augment human happiness. The kind of knowledge which is most connected with human progress now was that least connected with it then.

But a government by discussion, if it can be borne, at once breaks down the yoke of fixed custom. The idea of the two is inconsistent. As far as it goes, the mere putting up of a subject to discussion, with the object of being guided by that discussion, is a clear admission that that subject is in no degree settled by established rule, and that men are free to choose in it. It is an admission too that there is no sacred authority--no one transcendent and divinely appointed man whom in that matter the community is bound to obey. And if a single subject or group of subjects be once admitted to discussion, ere long the habit of discussion comes to be established, the sacred charm of use and wont to be dissolved. 'Democracy,' it has been said in modern times, 'is like the grave; it takes, but it does not give.' The same is true of 'discussion.' Once effectually submit a subject to that ordeal, and you can never withdraw it again; you can never again clothe it with mystery, or fence it by consecration; it remains for ever open to free choice, and exposed to profane deliberation.

The only subjects which can be first submitted, or which till a very late age of civilisation can be submitted to discussion in the community, are the questions involving the visible and pressing interests of the community; they are political questions of high and urgent import. If a nation has in any considerable degree gained the habit, and exhibited the capacity, to discuss these questions with freedom, and to decide them with discretion, to argue much on politics and not to argue ruinously, an enormous advance in other kinds of civilisation may confidently be predicted for it. And the reason is a plain deduction from the principles which we have found to guide early civilisation. The first pre-historic men were passionate savages, with the greatest difficulty coerced into order and compressed into a state. For ages were spent in beginning that order and founding that state; the only sufficient and effectual agent in so doing was consecrated custom; but then that custom gathered over everything, arrested all onward progress, and stayed the originality of mankind. If, therefore, a nation is able to gain the benefit of custom without the evil--if after ages of waiting it can have order and choice together--at once the fatal clog is removed, and the ordinary springs of progress, as in a modern community we conceive them, begin their elastic action.

The problem being--as Europe amply demonstrates and as we're in danger of following--that the tendency is to completely discard custom and order, leaving only choice, and the spring expands until the community is no longer bound by common interests.

If discussion is corrosive of custom and all topics are subject to discussion in a free society than how do you maintain at least the degree of custom that order requires?

MORE:
-INTRODUCTION: to Physics and Politics by Walter Baghot (Roger Kimball)
-BIO: Bagehot , Walter (Britannica Concise)
-BIO: Walter Bagehot (Ronald Hilton, WAIS Forum on Wais News)
-CARICATURE: Walter Bagehot by David Levine (NY Review of Books)
-Walter Bagehot Online
-Walter Bagehot, 1826-1877 (New School)
-The San Antonio College LitWeb Walter Bagehot Page
-Bagehot, W (1826.2.3-77.3.24) (Akamac)
-ETEXTS: Walter Bagehot (February 3, 1826 – March 24, 1877)
-ETEXTS: Walter Bagehot (Blue Pete)
-ETEXTS: Project Gutenberg Titles by Walter Bagehot
-ESSAY: John Milton (1859) (Walter Bagehot)
-ETEXT: Physics and Politics (Walter Bagehot )
-ETEXT: Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market Walter Bagehot (1826-1877) (Library of Economics and Liberty)
-REVIEW: of Principles of Political Economy, with some of their applications to Social Philosophy. By J. S. Mill (Walter Bagehot, 1848, The Prospective Review)
-ARCHIVES: "walter bagehot" (Look Smart)

---

DUNN DONE:

Dunn says she won't seek return to Congress (The Associated Press, 1/30/04)

U.S. Rep. Jennifer Dunn, Washington state's senior Republican in Congress and a favorite of the Bush White House, told The Associated Press tonight that she's retiring from politics.

Dunn, 61, who had been courted by President Bush to run for the U.S. Senate this fall, said she has decided to serve out her sixth House term and then retire from public life.

She cited family considerations — she's newly remarried — and a desire for one more career after politics. She endorsed no successor in her Republican-leaning 8th District in Seattle's eastern suburbs.

Too bad--she was always a class act.

---

GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT:

No Evidence CIA Slanted Iraq Data: Probers Say Analysts Remained Consistent (Dana Priest, January 31, 2004, Washington Post)

Congressional and CIA investigations into the prewar intelligence on Iraq's weapons and links to terrorism have found no evidence that CIA analysts colored their judgment because of perceived or actual political pressure from White House officials, according to intelligence officials and congressional officials from both parties.

Richard J. Kerr, a former deputy CIA director who is leading the CIA's review of its prewar Iraq assessment, said an examination of the secret analytical work done by CIA analysts showed that it remained consistent over many years.

"There was pressure and a lot of debate, and people should have a lot of debate, that's quite legitimate," Kerr said. "But the bottom line is, over a period of several years," the analysts' assessments "were very consistent. They didn't change their views."

Kerr's findings mirror those of two probes being conducted separately by the House and Senate intelligence committees, which have interviewed, under oath, every analyst involved in assessing Iraq's weapons programs and terrorist ties.

The panel chairmen, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) and Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), and other congressional officials said in recent interviews that they found no evidence that analysts shaded their findings to more closely fit the White House's known desire to create the strongest, most urgent case for war with Iraq.

The conclusion that analysts did not buckle under political pressure does not answer the question of why the intelligence reports were so flawed. Nor does it address allegations -- made by Democrats in Congress and Democratic presidential candidates -- that top Bush administration officials misused intelligence and exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq.

The problem isn't that the intelligence services were politicized but that they're incompetent.

---

WHAT WITCHES?:

Artefact recalls witches' shadow (Greig Watson, 1/28/04, BBC)

A chilling reminder of our superstitious past has been unearthed from a rural farmhouse.

The "witch bottle" was discovered buried in old foundations in the Lincolnshire village of Navenby.

Containing bent pins, human hair and perhaps urine, the bottles were supposed to protect a household against evil spells.

Dated to about 1830, it is evidence the fear of dark forces persisted far longer than previously thought.

---

CAN'T FIGHT DESTINY:

Lewis & Clark helped rob American Indians (Robert J. Miller, January 28, 2004, Seattle Post-Intelligencer)

Meriwether Lewis and William Clark sit high in the pantheon of American folk heroes. Even today, Lewis and Clark are viewed as brave adventurers who went where no one had gone before, exploring and conquering the wilderness for the betterment of America.

There is another way to view Lewis and Clark, however, which is nearer to the truth. Lewis and Clark were military officers serving American empire and manifest destiny and they were the vanguard of American policies that ultimately robbed the indigenous peoples of nearly everything they possessed. [...]

The ultimate goal, then, of the Lewis and Clark Expedition was the subjugation of Indian property and commercial rights. The expedition helped the United States claim its discovery sovereignty over the Louisiana Territory, institute concrete plans to begin exercising that authority and extended America's claim to the Northwest. The expedition was a major part of Jefferson's plan to assimilate Indians and their assets into American society, to remove the tribes from the path of American continental expansion and, if necessary, to exterminate the tribes to advance the American empire.

Lewis and Clark opened the road to the domination of Indian tribes in the Northwest and the Louisiana Territory and to bringing Indian lands into the American empire. As a consequence, Indians lost valuable property and governmental rights and were ultimately subjected to official federal policies of forced removals, assimilation, armed conflicts, the reservation system and the termination of tribal governments.

The cultural, religious, family and governmental oppression that Indian people have suffered since the expedition is well documented. American Indians have obviously suffered the detrimental effects of "American empire."

The property wasn't valuable and there were no rights until we got there though.

---

OBLIGATORY HITLER COMPARISON OF THE WEEK:

Are Parallels To Nazi Germany Crazy? (Harley Sorensen, January 26, 2004, SF Gate)

The customers always write. I get about 400 e-mails in response to my columns every week, which might explain why I didn't answer yours. Here, slightly edited, is one of the more interesting ones from last week. It's from Herr Moellers in Germany:

"Dear Mr. Sorensen,

"I have many American friends and used to go on business travel to the U.S. a lot (I stopped doing that after even our European governments have given in to Uncle Sam's appetite for information about individuals traveling to God's Own Country), and I am shocked by the deterioration of democracy in a country that I used to love. This administration is a shame and the destabilization they have brought to the world is scaring the s** out of me.

"My father was a Nazi soldier and he realized during the war what he and most of his generation was led into. I have learned from him that a nation can be guilty and that we must stop the arrogance of the powers at the very beginning. To me, America is becoming truly scary and the parallels to the development in Germany of the thirties (although the reason behind it are totally different) are sickening.

"Thank you for writing about this development. The world is waiting for signs of opposition in the Unilateral States of America!"

Herr Moellers' e-mail is typical of a half dozen or so I've received over the past year from people with intimate knowledge of Nazi Germany.

I respect experience, so I'm inclined to believe what these people are telling me.

In a related story, I got an e-mail from someone today with intimate knowledge of how to make my breasts bigger. It worked for them and I respect experience.

Of course, if Mr. Sorensen were really interested in parallels to the rise of Nazism, he'd not have to look too far, Poll: Europeans 'tired of Holocaust victim games' (JENNY HAZAN, Jan. 27, 2004, Jerusalem Post):

Every third European feels Jews should stop playing "Holocaust victim" games, an Italian newspaper reported Monday. The poll came out on the eve of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, a day Israel this year dedicated to combating anti-Semitism.

The Corriere della Sera survey of nine European countries also found that 46 percent of those interviewed feel Jews are "different," and 71% of them urged Israel to withdraw from the territories. Nine percent of respondents do not "like or trust Jews," and 15% would prefer that Israel not exist.

Just over 68% said they believed Israel has a right to exist but that the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is "making the wrong choices."

Forty-eight percent of Europeans polled in Italy, France, Belgium, Austria, Spain, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany, and Britain said that Jews have "a particular relationship with money."

---

SHRUB DRUBBING:

Bush got nearly everything he wanted with 2004 budget (ALAN FRAM, January 29, 2004, Chicago Sun-Times)

President Bush is ready to roll out his 2005 budget just days after Congress finished this year's and demonstrated anew that the adage ''dead on arrival'' did not apply to most of his fiscal plans.

In what analysts and lawmakers agree was an impressive string of successes, Bush won most of the broad priorities he proposed in his $2.2 trillion budget for 2004.

He scored a major tax cut, new Medicare prescription drug benefits and money for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the same time, the president held the spending that Congress controls to 3 percent growth. [...]

Lawmakers have not been rubber stamps for the current president, trimming his defense request while spending more than he asked for highways, public works and veterans. They ignored Bush's plan to make tax cuts permanent, scaled back his proposal to stop taxing corporate dividends, blocked his energy bill and pockmarked spending measures with thousands of home-district projects.

Even so, aided by a friendly Republican-run Congress and a political climate that has diverted attention from record federal deficits, the budget that Bush proposed last February fared as well on Capitol Hill as any president's in recent memory, said legislators and other observers.

Imagine what he'd accomplish if he weren't a moron?

---

TOLERANCE, THEY ORDERED:

Scarves and Symbols (GUY COQ, 1/30/04, NY Times)

With France on the verge of passing a law that would prevent Muslim girls from wearing their head scarves in class, Americans are asking why the French are so attached to secularism. I always want to respond to this question by asking another, a version of one asked by Montesquieu nearly three centuries ago: how can one be French? Our uneasiness about head scarves and other religious symbols in schools is a result of our long, often painful, history. If we bow to demands to allow the practice of religion in state institutions, we will put France's identity in peril.

The French word that is closest to secularism, laïcité, was invented in the late 19th century to express several ideas. Laïcité includes, foremost, tolerance. Tolerance had actually been around for a while. It was first instituted in 1598 under the Edict of Nantes — which allowed Protestants to practice their faith and ended our Wars of Religion. But the state and the Roman Catholic Church were so intertwined that tolerance wasn't enough. We had to take away the church's power to oppress minorities and make law.

In order that the State could oppress majorities and make law. France nicely illustrates the point that official tolerance is ultimately intolerant.

---

NOW THAT'S THE WAY TO BUY VOTES:

Givers and Takers (DANIEL H. PINK, 1/30/04, NY Times)

Each year, the Tax Foundation, a nonprofit research group, crunches numbers from the Census Bureau to produce an intriguing figure: how much each state receives in federal spending for every dollar it pays in federal taxes.

For example, according to the most recent data, for every dollar the average North Dakotan paid in federal taxes, he received $2.07 in federal benefits. But while someone in Fargo was doubling his money, his counterpart in neighboring Minnesota was being shortchanged. For every dollar Minnesotans sent to Washington, only 77 cents in federal spending flowed back to the state.

Using the Tax Foundation's analysis, it's possible to group the 50 states into two categories: Givers and Takers. Giver states get back less than a dollar in spending for every dollar they contribute to federal coffers. Taker states pocket more than a dollar for every tax dollar they send to Washington. Thirty-three states are Takers; 16 are Givers. (One state, Indiana, has a perfect one-to-one ratio of taxes paid and spending received. As seat of the federal government, the District of Columbia has no choice but to be a Taker, and is therefore not comparable to the 50 states in this regard.)

The Democrats' electability predicament comes into focus when you compare the map of Giver and Taker states with the well-worn electoral map of red (Republican) and blue (Democrat) states. You might expect that in the 2000 presidential election, Republicans, the party of low taxes and limited government, would have carried the Giver states — while Democrats, the party of wild spending and wooly bureaucracy, would have appealed to the Taker states. But it was the reverse. George W. Bush was the candidate of the Taker states. Al Gore was the candidate of the Giver states.

Easy enough to correct the imbalance: elect Republicans to Congress from the Blue states.

---

WHERE THE WAR ENDS:

Pakistan loses ground in Afghanistan (Syed Saleem Shahzad, 1/31/04, Asia Times)

Asia Times Online has learned from insiders within the security administration of President General Pervez Musharraf in Islamabad that strategists have bowed to pressure from Washington, and will end all covert support for the resistance in Afghanistan.

Up to now, Pakistan has aided some commanders in Afghanistan belonging to the Hizb-i-Islami Afghanistan (HIA) of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the veteran mujahideen leader now largely responsible for orchestrating the Afghan resistance.

Pakistan's purpose was not so much to damage US interests, but to establish a counter-force to the growing pro-India presence along the Afghani border areas with Pakistan. Pakistan's support, though limited, did, nevertheless, work against the interests of the US. As a result, US intelligence tracked HIA recruiting offices in Pakistani cities such as Karachi and Peshawar, and pointed to various locations in Pakistan where HIA volunteers were being given training, money and arms. And for example, legendary Afghan commander Jalaluddin Haqqani ( who joined the Taliban and became a minister and who is now the main force behind the resistance in Khost and Paktia) visited Miran Shah in Pakistan several times, but authorities turned a blind eye.

Confronted with this, and coming at a time of revelations of some Pakistani scientists being accused of nuclear proliferation to Iran, among other countries, Islamabad had little option but to pledge to pull out all of its operators and their proxy networks from Afghanistan.

War with Saddam handed us Qaddafi. Qaddafi handed us Pakistani nuclear dealings. Musharraf is handing us Western Pakistan...

MORE:
Pakistan Adopting a Tough Old Tactic to Flush Out Qaeda (DAVID ROHDEand ISMAIL KHAN, 1/31/04, NY Times)

At the start of the month, Pakistan massed several thousand troops in and around the town of Wana, near the country's mountainous border with Afghanistan. Using a harsh century-old British method, officials handed local tribal elders a list and issued an ultimatum.

If 72 men wanted for sheltering Al Qaeda were not produced, they said, the Pakistani Army would punish the tribe as a group, demolishing houses, withdrawing funds and even detaining tribe members.

Several days later, several thousand tribal elders held a jirga, or council, and agreed to raise a force of their own to find the wanted men. In the last two weeks, the tribes have handed over 42 of them. Tribal members, meanwhile, have bulldozed and dynamited the homes of eight men who refused to surrender.

The most wanted fugitives, including foreign Qaeda members, remain at large, although as an added incentive, Pakistani officials have promised not to hand over any fugitive Pakistanis to the United States.

American officials declined to comment on the policy, but Pakistani officials hope the British method, combined with the American-financed building of roads and schools, will show results.

"There is this age-old system of collective responsibility," said Lt. Gen. Syed Iftikhar Hussain Shah, the governor of Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province and a key supporter of the new approach. "Tribes are supposed to help the government."

Live by the tribe...

---

PATIENCE, BUT NOT LIMITLESS:

Back in Baghdad (Steven Vincent, January 30, 2004, FrontPageMagazine.com)

Another element shoring up Iraqi goodwill and patience is Grand Ayatollah Ali Husani Sistani. Spiritual leader of Iraq’s 15 million Shia Muslims, Sistani has instructed his followers not to oppose the U.S. They continue to obey: last week, I attended a Shia political rally, and was probably the only Westerner at large religious festival—in neither did I detect anti-American sentiments. As we sat in Friday services at the al-Gailani mosque in central Baghdad, an Iraqi friend informed me that the sheikh was cautioning his listeners against violence. As he paraphrased the cleric’s words, “Anyone who shoots an American will be cut off from the people.”

Shia tribal leaders I’ve met seem willing to cooperate with the U.S., too. “America came and finished Saddam—that has changed our minds about them,” said Abdul Wahab Abdula al-Robeiey, chief of a council of 3,400 southern tribes. This support, they stress, depends on Uncle Sam’s trustworthiness. “If Americans are truly interested in the Iraqi people, then we are together in one body with them,” declared Mohammad al-Razzie al-Abdudi, sheikh of a 2,200-member tribe situated around Najaf.

The peace is eminently winnable.

---

ALWAYS AT YOUR THROAT OR AT YOUR FEET...WITH A FORK:

German Cannibal Gets Nearly Nine Years in Prison (AP, January 30, 2004)

A German who confessed to killing, dismembering and eating another man who allegedly agreed to the arrangement over the Internet was convicted Friday of manslaughter and sentenced to 8 1/2 years in prison.

The "Nearly" in the headline is a nice touch, eh?

---

ELECTABILITY ISN'T SUBSTANCE:

The new target: How would the White House attack John Forbes Kerry? (Lexington, Jan 29th 2004, The Economist)

Mr Rove has an embarrassment of riches when it comes to tagging the senator as a tax-and-spend paleoliberal who believes in coddling drug addicts, abolishing the death penalty and protecting partial-birth abortion. Mr Kerry has offended against Americans' God-given right to cheap petrol by advocating a 50-cent increase on the tax on it; he has also called for steep cuts in funding for the FBI and restrictions on the CIA.

The fact that this is Rovan demagogy doesn't make it any less damaging. Besides, the second avenue of attack is that Mr Kerry has been a little too political himself, seldom showing the same mettle in internal Democratic politics that he did in the jungles of Vietnam. Whenever he has summoned up the courage to challenge the party's leftish interest groups—by questioning affirmative action, for example, or taking on the teachers' unions—he has always retreated in the end. His current stump speech panders to his party's worst instincts on everything from drug prices to American business moving jobs abroad. For all his faults, Bill Clinton shifted the Democratic Party's centre of gravity on free trade, and law and order. So far Mr Kerry has left no footprints in the Democratic snow.

The third avenue of attack is that Mr Kerry is a blue-blooded elitist who doesn't understand ordinary people. He is the richest man in a Senate full of rich people: a Boston Brahmin (his middle name is Forbes) who married an heiress and went to a Swiss boarding school. Of course, his fellow Skull and Bones man, Mr Bush, can hardly claim that he was born on the wrong side of the tracks. But many Americans get much more riled about elitist liberals than they do about elitist Republicans—particularly if those liberals embrace the teachers' unions while sending their own children to private schools, or go soft on crime while making sure that they live in the safest bits of town. Add to this Mr Kerry's haughty style, and you can see the makings of a populist caricature.

What precisely is the substance? Off the top of your head can you name one thing that Mr. Kerry wants to change--other than the regime?

---

WE ARE BECOME SHIVA:

While I Was Sleeping: Why my husband finally refused to end my life during my two-month coma. (Lindsey O'Connor, February 2004, Christianity Today)

My blood ran cold as I watched the video of Terri Schiavo. I shivered at the news that this brain-injured woman was comatose or in a persistent vegetative state while the video seemed to show otherwise. The chill was more than just my journalistic intrigue. People everywhere were debating the right to "die with dignity" and wondering what it would be like to be in Schiavo's place, but I didn't exactly have to imagine.

One year before the day Schiavo's feeding tube was pulled, I awoke briefly from a 47-day coma, only to go back under for several more weeks. Severe childbirth complications resulted in two emergency surgeries and the transfusion of 20 units of blood and blood products—about twice the blood volume of my body. I remained comatose and on life support in the ICU for two months.

My family expected my death repeatedly during my coma. I developed acute respiratory distress syndrome, which is often fatal, and it critically impaired my lungs. I had pneumonia, a toxic blood infection, blood clots, kidney failure, and life threateningly low blood pressure and oxygenation. My family was told I had anoxia—brain damage from oxygen deprivation. I lay hooked up to a ventilator and a feeding tube, receiving maximum doses of drugs to keep me alive. Heroic measures and life-and-death decisions were daily realities for my family.

My husband slept and ate little. Tim juggled his job with being constantly available to me, to doctors' consultations, and to our family. He described our surreal journey in e-mail updates that were forwarded by many people around the world. He also undertook "Caroline therapy": laying our mother-deprived newborn on my chest while I slept, so she would sleep too.

Tim learned to be an effective advocate for a critically ill patient by researching my diagnosis thoroughly and making the doctors make him understand. And on days when his faith was in shock and he was too numb to pray, the prayers of others and a Holy Spirit–inspired mind propelled him beyond his capacity. Yet the possibility of a brain-damaged wife, or the thought that he was about to be a single father of five, including our newborn baby, always hovered. [...]

Gradually I've begun to remember bits of my comatose state: [...]

These memories seeded a need for clarity in answers and—just as important—a passion to ask the right questions in life-and-death issues. William Temple, who was Archbishop of Canterbury in the 1940s, wrote that the "church must announce Christian principles and point out where the existing social order is in conflict with them."

What then are the Christian principles at the heart of this argument? Two come to mind: "Thou shalt not murder" is a protective boundary whose removal would incite societal moral free-fall. And life is sacred and reflects God's image, with innate value regardless of its quality or productivity.

But if God values us, whole or brain-damaged, and there's value in being a loving caregiver to an incapacitated person, what about the seeming purposelessness of that patient's existence? A second biblically derived principle sheds light here: if our chief end is to glorify God, then we can find purpose and meaning in a life that society deems a mere existence. God can be glorified even through our suffering.

But how do we apply this truth in the modern hospital, especially when science can seem to be extending suffering while extending life? When is it morally right for a Christian to remove or refuse medical treatment? How do we determine when or if we can remove life support from our loved ones? When is it okay to issue a Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) order? Can we request that we not be kept alive artificially without violating the Sixth Commandment?

My family lived these agonizing questions.

Here's the question that confronts each and every one of us: if that were your spouse or parent or child, would they be dead now?

---

THE NORTH WILL RISE AGAIN:

A Northern Strategy (Stephen Schwartz, 01/20/2004, Tech Central Station)

[A] report in The Washington Post of January 15 included the following comment by Amir Mohebian, editor of the conservative Iranian newspaper Resalat: "In an Islamic society, selling wines is forbidden, but if somebody is drinking wine in his house, the question is, do we enter the house to arrest him or not? I think the system should apply only to the public sphere, not to the house. If somebody goes from the way of God in his house, that is a problem between him and God."

Can one extrapolate further from these latter remarks to the possibility of a personal Islam, without aggressive public expression? In an earlier Weekly Standard reportage, I quoted Arben Xhaferi, an Albanian political leader in western Macedonia, who told me, "We have our own history, our own culture, and our own Albanian model of Islam, based on interfaith respect and the understanding that religion is private." [...]

Taking off from the quote by Arben Xhaferi above, I would argue that a personal or private Islam is the dominant form of the faith, in a wide belt extending from the Balkans through Turkey to the countries of Central Asia. I have come to think of these as the "northern tier Muslim countries," and their form of religion as "northern Islam." As indicated by The Washington Post quote, Iran, notwithstanding its recent extremist history, also embodies comprehension, at least, of Islam as, potentially, a personal matter.

"Northern Islam" may even be somewhat inaccurate, in that a similar style of Islam was historically found in Pakistan -- before that country was assaulted by Saudi-funded extremists -- in India, and in Malaysia and Indonesia. Muslims from these countries refer to a "Turko-Persian-Indian" Islamic tradition.

The end of history and the inexorable force of globalization means that Islam is going to be Reformed--best if it can be done from within the tradition.

---

SADDAM'S WHORES:

Iraqi govt. papers: Saddam bribed Chirac (UPI, 1/28/04)

Documents from Saddam Hussein's oil ministry reveal he used oil to bribe top French officials into opposing the imminent U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

The oil ministry papers, described by the independent Baghdad newspaper al-Mada, are apparently authentic and will become the basis of an official investigation by the new Iraqi Governing Council, the Independent reported Wednesday.

"I think the list is true," Naseer Chaderji, a governing council member, said. "I will demand an investigation. These people must be prosecuted."

Such evidence would undermine the French position before the war when President Jacques Chirac sought to couch his opposition to the invasion on a moral high ground.

"We've established what you are; now we're just determining your price."

---

THE CHOICE:

Leading His Flock: Has the new archbishop of St. Louis crossed a line? (Robert P. George & Gerard V. Bradley, 1/29/04, National Review)

The Catholic Church proclaims the principle that every human being — without regard to age, size, stage of development, or condition of dependency — is entitled to the protection of the laws. In line with the indisputable facts of human embryogenesis and intrauterine human development, the Church teaches that children "hidden in the womb" are human beings. It is the obligation of legislators and other public officials to honor and protect their inalienable right to life. Yet many Catholic politicians, including the Democratic leaders of both houses of Congress, are staunch supporters of a "right to abortion." What should the leaders of the Church do about such people?

Raymond Burke, who was installed this past Monday as archbishop of St. Louis, has an answer. He has declared that public officials who act to expose the unborn to the violence of abortion may not receive Holy Communion, the sacramental symbolic of Church unity.

Pro-life citizens of every religious persuasion have applauded the bishop's action. Many commented that it is long past time for religious leaders to show that they are serious about their commitment to the sanctity of human life. Believers in "abortion rights," by contrast, were quick to condemn Bishop Burke. They denounced him for "crossing the line" separating church and state. In one of the wire stories we read, the partisans of abortion branded the rather mild-mannered Burke a "fanatic."

The "crossing the line" charge is silly. In acting on his authority as a bishop to discipline members of his flock, Bishop Burke is exercising his own constitutional right to the free exercise of religion; he is not depriving others of their rights. No one is compelled by law to accept his authority. But Bishop Burke has every right to exercise his spiritual authority over anyone who chooses to accept it. There is a name for such people: They are called "Catholics."

Obviously no one need be a Christian, but if you're going to be one the minimal requirement would seem to be that you take Christ rather seriously and his commandment as gospel: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you..." That mandatum novum can in no way be reconciled with abortion, or the killing of any other innocent.

---

RIPE? HE'S WINDFALL:

Already, GOP framing a Kerry fight: The long-serving Massachusetts senator could be an especially ripe target for Bush. (Linda Feldmann, 1/30/04, CS Monitor)

So far, Sen. John Kerry has won only a fraction of the 2,162 delegates he needs to take the Democratic presidential nomination, but Republicans have already placed him in their sights as the party's most likely opponent in November. The label is already set: He is a Kennedy-Dukakis liberal from Massachusetts.

And unlike the seven Democratic candidates, who have burned through millions of dollars battling each other, the Bush reelection team is sitting on a growing mountain of campaign cash, ready to be deployed against President Bush's opponent in the form of ads, direct mail, and other methods. [...]

One veteran political operative, who has amassed a 700-page file on Kerry, cites the senator's votes against major weapons systems in the 1980s and '90s as a point of vulnerability. Kerry also voted against larger intelligence budgets, he says, "which doesn't look good post-9/11." He says Kerry could also face problems over his ties to the telecommunications industry and to various Washington-based lobbying groups. Kerry, with his populist campaign message, bills himself as a champion in the fight against special interests.

Part of the challenge Kerry would face, analysts say, is how to put his entire record in perspective. It would be easy for the Republicans to take Kerry statements and votes out of context, and paint a picture of him that Democrats would find unfair. The Democrats' challenge would be to counter that effectively. By some measures - such as the ranking system of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) - Kerry is among the most liberal members of the Senate. Over the course of his Senate career, Kerry gets a 92 percent rating from the ADA, while Edward Kennedy (D), the senior senator from Massachusetts, has a 90 percent career rating.

How is the fact that he's more liberal than Ted Kennedy over such a long timeframe dependent on context?

---

REPRESS 'EM, DON'T DEPRESS 'EM

Kausfiles (Mickey Kaus, Kausfiles, 1/29/04)

Psst: President Bush got 86% of the vote in the Republican primary. Isn't that not so good? Update: USA Today (print edition) has an explanation--Democrats who voted in the Republican primary last year [sic], drawn by John McCain, only to find themselves automatically registered as Republicans this year. Various emailers note that Reagan also got only 86% in 1984. ...4:45 A.M.

Here we have, in microcosm, the entire Democratic dynamic, in which President Bush looks vulnerable until you take into consideration the rest of American history. But the real reason I'm commenting on this is my amusement, having followed the links to the official election results, that the Republican results are in the file "rpressum.htm" while the Democratic results are in the file "dpressum.htm". Makes sense to me. [Isn't copying Kaus' whole comment a copyright violation? -- Ed. No, but this "Ed." bit might be unfair competition, if the idea wasn't so grandiose on my part.]

---

FREDDIE'S DEAD:

Beyond Superfly: Ron O’Neal, actor and filmmaker (Emory Holmes II, 1/30/04, LA Weekly)

O’Neal and his friend Phil Fenty wrote Superfly and raised the $58,000 to finance the film themselves. For a time, it was the top box office draw in the nation, besting even The Godfather. But O’Neal’s silken portrayal of the Harlem coke dealer Priest also brought a bitter rebuke from both the mainstream and African-American press. In an interview with the Weekly in 1988, O’Neal protested, “I am not the character known as Priest in Superfly; I am the actor who made him come alive through my craft. But the press thought I was some n****r off the street who made a movie about his own dissolute life. I never used drugs in those days. And my film was about a dealer who quit selling drugs and got out of that system. Still, the negative press soured my career and, eventually, it soured me.”

Over the following three decades, O’Neal won only sporadic roles in movies and television. He survived drug addiction, a stabbing, poverty and occasional homelessness. Rediscovered by the hip-hop generation in the 1990s, he remarried and had reclaimed his optimism when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2000. On January 13, the day before he died at Cedars-Sinai, a special edition DVD of Superfly was released. He was 66.

If you grew up in the ghetto in the '70s there were really only two people on Earth you wanted to grow up to be the blaxploitation heroes Superfly and Shaft. Which you chose depended largely on which side of the law you preferred (though Isaac Hayes's theme song was superior to Curtis Mayfield's too).

Mr. O'Neal snagged a role in one iconic movie of the 80's also: Red Dawn.

---

TRIANGULATION IS BACK!:

Why the White House is pushing Cyprus solution: US sees reunification there as a model for Iraq and a way to mend ties with Europe. (Howard LaFranchi, 1/30/04, CS Monitor)

A US-promoted deal to reunify Cyprus would allow a united island to enter the European Union on May 1, and would open the door to an Islamic Turkey eventually joining the EU. But beyond that, experts say, sudden US interest in Cyprus exemplifies the administration's desire to show its "we're-all-in-this-together" side in the post-Iraq-war period. It also suggests the weight the White House places on ties with Turkey as a key to stability and reform in the Middle East.

"Turkey, Cyprus, and Iraq are related in a triangulated way that absolutely makes Cyprus a priority for the US because you're hitting the same nationalist and divided-community issues that are factors in Iraq," says Carole O'Leary, a Middle East expert at American University in Washington. "People are well aware that a reunification of Cyprus as a federal state would quickly be seen as a precedent for Iraq."

Apparently, Northern Ireland is the only decades long conflict that the Administration isn't on the verge of settling.

---

MOVING TO THE SIDE OF THE ROOM:

As US exits, can Iraqis deliver?: An occasional series following two local councils in Baghdad. (Dan Murphy, 1/30/04, CS Monitor)

Capt. Roger Maynulet didn't know that liberating Iraq would involve so many photo ops. Yet here he is in a baroque Arab wedding hall in Baghdad for the Hay Somer neighborhood council Christmas party, and he's just upstaged "Papa Noel." Sitting in the bower where newlyweds usually receive their guests, the burly Maynulet is besieged by excited kids clambering over him while laughing parents snap pictures. In between shots, council members and residents whisper in his ear, pressing ideas for neighborhood improvements but also eager to be seen with the American soldier.

This is the occupation the US war-planners had promised, tangible evidence of Iraqis and Americans working towards a better future. But the good feeling in Hay Somer conceals a looming danger for America's most ambitious nation-building project since the end of the cold war.

Across Iraq, the US military has set up hundreds of local councils to serve as the building blocks for Iraq's new political culture. But the Councils have been reliant on their military patrons for what little progress they've made.

A close look at two Baghdad councils - Hay Somer, a middle class neighborhood that is almost half Christian, and Sheikh Maruf, a scruffier and mostly Shiite area - shows that Iraq is filled with courageous people committed to the idea of democracy, but that their efforts are opposed by powerful institutions and habits that can't be changed overnight. [...]

In the months ahead, the Monitor will track these two councils as a window into this process. The slow withdrawal of the US presence in Iraq will change the way the councils work; Maynulet and his counterparts across the country are slowly pulling back from their councils, weaning them from their reliance on US military support.

But with some apprehension. In Hay Somer, Maynulet says he's been gratified by the steps taken so far. "When this started, it consisted of me sitting at the head of the table and basically telling people how things were going to be,'' he says. "As we've gone forward, they've taken more of the initiative and now I'm sitting at the side of the room."

But he's also worried about whether the council is ready to take the last step, and stand up to central government institutions designed to dictate to citizens, rather than to cooperate and listen. "The big question is how much authority the [councils] will be able to carve out for themselves," he says. "The refusal of the municipal government to work with them has been a recurring problem."

Not to suggest that the stages of democratic development are similar, but one does wonder how the Founders were able to hold the whole American experiment together when they were basically making it up as they went along.

---

NOW HE'S JUST TAUNTING THE RIGHT:

Farewell Mapplethorpe, Hello Shakespeare: The NEA, the W. way. (Roger Kimball, January 29, 2004, National Review)

[T]hings have changed, and changed for the better at the NEA. The reason can be summed up in two trochees: Dana Gioia, the distinguished poet and critic who is the Endowment's new chairman.

Within a matter of months, Mr. Gioia has transformed that moribund institution into a vibrant force for the preservation and transmission of artistic culture. He has cut out the cutting edge and put back the art. Instead of supporting repellent "transgressive" freaks, he has instituted an important new program to bring Shakespeare to communities across America. And by Shakespeare I mean Shakespeare, not some PoMo rendition that portrays Hamlet in drag or sets A Midsummer Night's Dream in a concentration camp. (Check the website www.shakespeareinamericancommunities.org for more information.)

Mr. Gioia is moving on other fronts as well. He has hired a number of able deputies who care about art and understand that what the public wants is more access to good art — opera, poetry, theater, literature — not greater exposure to social pathology dressed up as art. After a couple of decades of cultural schizophrenia, the NEA has become a clear-sighted, robust institution intent on bringing important art to the American people.

It's quite odd, really. People keep telling us — that is, professors and CNN commentators and Hollywood actors keep telling us — how very stupid President Bush is. Yet everywhere one looks he is supporting some of the most intelligent and dynamic people ever to occupy their cultural posts. Dana Gioia at the NEA, his counterpart Bruce Cole at the National Endowment for the Humanities, Leon Kass and his panel of distinguished scientists and philosophers at the President's Council on Bioethics (see their website www.bioethics.gov to get a sense of the good work they are doing on clarifying the enormous moral issues surrounding the debate over biotechnology). The Left keeps screaming about how dim George Bush is, but in the meantime, he has illuminated one area of public life after another with immensely talented and articulate people.

You can hear the bolts popping out of conservative necks already, but when Mr. Bush nominated someone as competent as Dana Gioia to the post, you knew it wasn't to fold up the agency. Since you can't get rid of the thing, it may as well at least do worthwhile work.

---

ORIGINAL SIN:

The Case that Made the Court (Michael J. Glennon, Summer 2003, Wilson Quarterly)

Today, political activists of all stripes call themselves “Jeffersonians.” In Jefferson’s day, however, his political philosophy was distinctive. Jefferson was the original advocate of “small is beautiful.” He favored the states over the federal government and preferred a limited federal government and (until he became president) a weak presidency. He believed that an enlightened electorate was the path to good government, and that civic virtue lay more surely in small farms than in big business or citified commerce. Decen-tralized authority was essential, he thought, to keep government close to the people and responsive to their wishes. Many opponents of the new U.S. Constitution shared Jefferson’s views, though Jefferson himself, as American emissary to France during the 1787 Philadelphia convention, avoided formally having to resolve his own ambivalence toward the nation’s new charter.

Jefferson’s philosophical antagonist is less known to Americans, at least to those outside the legal profession. John Marshall was the longest-serving chief justice in the Court’s history, and easily the most influential. The rumpled, outgoing, athletic Virginian was the first grand master of the Court’s internal politics and oversaw the disposition of more than a thousand cases. He wrote the opinions for 508 of them.

Marshall’s power flowed from three sources: political canniness, disarming charm, and a riveted focus on his unvarying long-term strategic objective: establishing the supremacy of the federal judiciary. Before his appointment by President Adams in 1801, the Court’s six members wrote separate opinions, limiting the Court’s potential institutional strength. Mar-shall changed that. He encouraged his colleagues to speak with one voice. He even cajoled them into joining him in taking rooms at Conrad’s, a Capitol Hill boarding house, where they dined together, drank together, and argued together. (Justices in those days had no offices, and the unnoticed Court met in a small room on the first floor of the Capitol.) In his first three years on the Court, Marshall participated in 42 cases. The opinion of the Court was unanimous in every one of them, and John Marshall wrote every opinion. [...]

Part of Jefferson’s animus toward Marshall grew out of their diametrically different political philosophies, which traced in turn to very different life experiences. While Jefferson punctuated periods of service to state and country during the Revolution with interludes spent entertaining captured English and Prussian officers at Monticello, Marshall passed the winter of 1777 at Valley Forge. The stench, cold, and hunger were unbearable, and 3,000 men-one-fourth of the Contin-ental Army-died. The misery left an indelible impression on the 22-year-old Marshall. The troops knew, as did he, that the colonies were not poor and that there was no shortage of foodstuffs. But the Continental Congress had no power to requisition supplies. It’s hardly surprising that Mar-shall’s every effort throughout his 34 years as chief justice would be directed at solidifying the authority of the federal government over the states, and the authority of the judiciary over Congress and the executive branch. [...]

While they waited for the Court’s decision, the Jeffersonians must have believed that Marshall was boxed in, and that neither of his apparent options would be attractive to him. Marshall could order Madison to deliver the commissions, but Jefferson might then direct Madison simply to ignore the Court’s order, thus leaving Marshall with no means of enforcement-and creating a precedent that the executive branch is not subject to judicial direction. Such a course, moreover, might well play into the Repub-licans’ impeachment plans and make it possible to replace the entire Court-thereby establishing, perhaps, the even broader precedent that a change in administration carries with it the right to appoint new, sympathetic Supreme Court justices. Marshall’s second option-to decide in favor of Madison and hold that, for one reason or another, he was not required to deliver the commissions-was no better. It, too, would have been a devastating victory for the Jeffersonians, not merely a triumph on the law but a highly visible political capitulation of the Supreme Court in the face of apparent political threats.

On February 24, 1803, two weeks after the Marbury trial ended, Marshall delivered the opinion of the Court. It was, as usual, unanimous, and was, as usual, signed only by him. The text lacks the sweep and flow of Marshall’s more majestic opinions, such as McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), or the timeless logic of Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), but it is a masterwork of calculated restraint, feint, and cunning, an opinion that laid claim for the courts to the greatest of governmental powers-the final say as to what the law is-even as it left Marshall’s opponents no effective response.

The opinion is pure Marshall in its gradual, almost imperceptible movement from the obvious to the arguable, and in the understated, inexorable, syllogistic force of its reasoning. The chief justice began with the undisputed facts that the plaintiffs’ commissions were signed by the president and sealed by the secretary of state (himself); therefore, he concluded, because the appointments were made and the commissions were complete, the plaintiffs had a right to them.

For every abridgement of a right, he continued, there is a remedy. This is “the very essence of civil liberty.” If the government of the United States should provide no remedy for the deprivation of a vested legal right, it should cease to be a “government of laws and not of men.”

Whether the plaintiffs were entitled to the remedy they sought-a writ of mandamus-depended upon the nature of the writ and the power of the Court. Marshall moved into more dangerous territory. “It is not by the office of the person to whom the writ is directed,” he wrote, “but the nature of the thing to be done, that the propriety or impropriety of issuing a mandamus is to be determined.” In other words, there was nothing in the Constitution that precluded the Supreme Court from telling the secretary of state-or the president of the United States-to do what the law required. At issue was what the Court would order to be done. Here, Marshall said, the test was whether the administration’s action had been discretionary or non-discretionary: If the action was purely discretionary, the question presented would be political and not within the Court’s power. But if the action had not been discretionary, then there would be no ground on which a court could refuse to order it to be carried out. Delivering a completed commission incident to a valid appointment, Marshall noted, was something that Madison was directed by law to do; it was therefore a non-discretionary act, which the Court could properly order Madison to carry out.

By this point in the opinion, then, Marshall had thoroughly excoriated the Jefferson administration for violating the law and suggested in plain terms that Madison’s failure to deliver the commissions was nothing less than a breach of duty. Would he take the final step and order that the commissions be delivered? That depended, Marshall continued, in a neat tactical twist, upon whether the Court had power to decide the case.

Jurisdiction was granted, remember, by section 13 of the 1789 statute that conferred original jurisdiction upon the Court in cases such as this. The Constitution, however, also conferred original jurisdiction upon the Court in specified cases. It provided that the Court could sit as a trial court in “all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, and those in which a state shall be a party.” Was it within Con-gress’s constitutional power to expand that list by law, as it had done in 1789, and did the Court therefore have jurisdiction to hear this case?

Marshall’s stunning answer was no-stunning because the issue of Con-gress’s power to expand the list in the Con-stitution had not been raised in the briefs presented, or even in passing in the oral argument; stunning because Marshall himself, in an earlier case, had relied upon section 13 in finding valid jurisdiction; stunning because section 13 was written by Oliver Ellsworth, one of the framers of the Constitution-who, as chief justice before Marshall, had also relied upon the statute to find valid jurisdiction; stunning because nearly half the members of the Congress that approved section 13 had been members of the Philadelphia convention. But there it was: Congress had acted beyond the scope of its constitutional power in enacting this statute. Any contrary interpretation, Mar-shall wrote, would render the Consti-tution’s list of specified cases mere surplusage. The consequence, Marshall went on to conclude, was that the 1789 law was of no force and effect: An “act of the legislature, repugnant to the Constitution, is void.” Then came the monumental point: “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.” In other words, the Supreme Court has the power to determine whether a law is repugnant to the Constitution.

Marshall thus succeeded in publicly labeling the Jefferson administration as a lawbreaker, lecturing Jefferson on his obligation to obey the Constitution, and establishing a precedent for judicial supremacy. He accomplished all this, moreover, in a manner that immunized him and his fellow justices from retribution, because the Court itself, after all, was the “victim” of its own abnegation.

The opinion is not a paragon of logic; much of it is circular, in particular the question-begging final argument that the Court has the power to invalidate a statute at odds with the Constitution. Nothing in the constitutional text directly supported that conclusion. None-theless, as many commentators have pointed out, the opinion was a small step backward (Mar-bury and his fellow Federalists never got their jobs as justices of the peace) and a huge step forward in Marshall’s lifelong quest to establish the United States Supreme Court as the final arbiter of the meaning of the Constitution.

Obviously there has to be some final determination of whether Congressional action may have transgressed the Constitution, but the very worst place to have that determination occur is in the most dangerous branch. Far better to allow another bite at the apple after the Court issues an opinion, perhaps by submitting said opinion to the Congress (requiring a supermajority?), Executive, and maybe even the state legislatures, which could then overturn the Court.

MORE (via Paul Cella):
-The True Story of Marbury v. Madison (David Forte, Winter 2003, Claremont Review of Books)

Of all the excuses for the abuse of judicial power offered by leftist judges and their defenders, none is more disingenuous than, "John Marshall made me do it."

Though normally not friends of original intent or legal tradition, today's judicial "activists" like to trace their lineage back to the (purported) original judicial activist, to the great Chief Justice who was the first to persuade the Supreme Court to strike down a law of Congress.

According to this conceit, which is now the standard interpretation enshrined in countless histories and hornbooks, Marbury v. Madison was the breakthrough that demonstrated how truly powerful the judiciary could be. In this famous case, decided 200 years ago, Marshall supposedly showed that the Constitution is an elastic document or at least could be turned into one. Therefore, the "living Constitution" is nothing new: John Marshall's own example and authority prove that judicial activisim is as American as apple pie.

Strangely, many conservatives accept this strained interpretation, though for different reasons. They agree that judicial activism is an exaggerated form of judicial review and that the problem is endemic to the Constitution. Reluctantly, they conclude that judicial review is an undemocratic flaw in the constitutional order that needs to be excised or constrained, perhaps by a constitutional amendment that would empower Congress to overrule the Court.

Yet both liberals and conservatives are mistaken, because the prevailing account of Marbury on which they rely is itself wrong.

This is what happened.

---

"THE" LORD:

Friend Jim Siegel delivered the following Torah commentary at a meeting this Monday at Central Synagogue in Manhattan, where he's a member:

Exodus 10-13:16 -- "Bo" (note: Torah portions are named after the first Hebrew word of the portion.) (Jim Siegel, 1/26/04, Central Synagogue in Manhattan

This week’s Torah portion – Bo from the book of Exodus -- is a very familiar one. In it he Lord punishes Pharoah and the Egyptians with the final three plagues -- swarms of locusts strip the land of all vegetation, three days of darkness blanket the land so that no Egyptian can see another, and God slays all the Egyptian first-born – that of “Pharaoh who sits on his throne to the first-born of the slave girl who is behind the millstones; and all the first-born of the cattle.”

With the last plague, of course, Pharoah finally relents; he lets the Israelites go.

This Torah portion and the previous one Va’era cite a number of times language that intrigues me – it says that the Lord stiffened or hardened the heart of Pharaoh.

Now, we know that Pharaoh was an evil and stubborn man. What bemuses me is the repeated statement that God causes him to act this way. Because this contradicts what I believe to be a fundamental human trait -- that we have free will.

Rabbi Joseph Telushkin and Dennis Prager write in their book The Nine Questions People Ask About Judaism that “Judaism posits that people have freedom of choice.” And, “(each person) makes his or her moral choice to sin or not to sin.”

Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who survived the Nazi death camps, says in his classic book Man’s Search for Meaning: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of his human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

So with this in mind, you may ask – did Pharaoh exert free will and free choice and harden his own heart? Or was he a puppet and a pawn to serve God’s will?

I think the answer is both. Pharaoh chose to say no to God’s command to free the Jews, because Pharaoh thought that he Pharaoh was a god. And who was this unseen Lord of these slaves to defy him!

But God does tell Moses why He has used Pharaoh in this way: “I have hardened his heart and the hearts of his courtiers, in order that I may display My signs among them, and that you may recount in the hearing of your sons and your sons’ sons how I made a mockery of the Egyptians and how I displayed My signs among them – in order that you may know that I am the LORD.”

So God did all this to convince the people of Israel, a beaten down people who understandably were skeptical after being enslaved for hundreds of years. He gave them yet another sign when they stood terrified before the Red Sea as Pharaoh had changed his mind once more, and had sent his horsemen, warriors and chariots rushing after the Jews. The Israelites cried out to Moses, “What have you done to us, taking us out of Egypt?…It is better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness.”

The Torah says, “Thus the LORD delivered Israel that day from the Egyptians. Israel saw the Egyptian dead on the shore of the sea. And when Israel saw the wondrous power which the LORD has wielded against the Egyptians, the people feared the LORD; they had faith in the LORD and in His servant Moses.”

God’s revelations to our ancestors have meaning for us today.

Every time Jews worship we recite in Hebrew the words of the Sh'ma prayer – “Hear, O Israel: the Eternal One is our God, the Eternal God alone!” We say the words, but do we truly feel them as faith? We’re human. We forget easily. We have a lot to do and a lot on our minds. Maybe one thing we take for granted is our faith in God. Maybe we need to refresh that faith. Because today we are not reminded of the wondrous and unfathomable power of God with plagues that persuade us, nor in crashes of thunder that convince us, nor with balls of fire that singe us. God’s power lies in the quiet miracles and quiet blessings of everyday life. We know it’s so easy to take these for granted.

I suggest that we remind ourselves that God has given us a purpose in life. Rabbi David Wolpe summarizes it so well :

“The Jewish people came out of Egypt bearing a message and a mission. The message was the highest truth – of one God, a God who cares for human beings and is passionately concerned about what we do. The mission was to bring the world to recognize that highest truth. Judaism is a system for realizing that truth in the world. God is not something we can know. But a relationship with God is something we can develop, and godly action, something we can achieve. We reach God in spiritual search and in moral behavior. Judaism teaches both. That is its mission and its message.”

No matter what religion we have chosen or beliefs we hold -- may each of us in all that we do choose to act, to learn, and to grow as God wants us to.

Amen.

MORE:
Bo knows God: Do you?: God is in complete control. Did you know that? (Dr. Elliot I. Berlin, January 27, 2004, Jewsweek)

---

ABSTINENCE NATION:

What Do Parents Want Taught in Sex Education Programs? (Robert E. Rector, Melissa G. Pardue, and Shannan Martin, January 28, 2004, Heritage.org)

This paper presents the results of a recent poll on basic issues concerning sex education. The poll questions seek to measure parental support for the themes and values contained in abstinence curricula as well as support for the values embodied in comprehensive sex education.

The data presented are drawn from a survey of parents conducted by Zogby International in December 2003. Zogby conducted telephone interviews with a nationally representative sample of 1,004 parents with children under age 18. Parents were asked 14 questions concerning messages and priorities in sex education; the questions used were designed by Focus on the Family. The margin of error on each question is plus or minus 3.2 percent points. The responses to the questions showed only modest variation based on region, gender of the parent, or race.1 The poll questions were designed to reflect the major themes of abstinence education. The descriptions of the messages contained in abstinence and comprehensive sex-ed curricula in the following text are based on a forthcoming content analysis of major sex-ed curricula conducted by The Heritage Foundation.

The exact wording of and responses to each of the 14 poll questions are presented in Charts 1 through 14. Overall, the poll shows that parents are extremely supportive of the values and messages contained in abstinence programs. By contrast, very few parents support the basic themes of comprehensive sex-ed courses. Responses to the individual questions are discussed below. [...]

Some 47 percent of parents want teens to be taught that "young people should not engage in sexual activity until they are married." Another 32 percent of parents want teens to be taught that "young people should not engage in sexual intercourse until they have, at least, finished high school and are in a relationship with someone they feel they would like to marry."

When these two categories are combined, we see that 79 percent of parents want young people taught that sex should be reserved for marriage or for an adult relationship leading to marriage. Another 12 percent of parents believe that teens should be taught to delay sexual activity until "they have, at least, finished high school." Only 7 percent of parents want teens to be taught that sexual activity in high school is okay as long as teens use contraception.

These parental values are strongly reinforced by abstinence education programs, which teach that sex should be linked to marriage and that it is best to delay sexual activity until marriage. By contrast, comprehensive sex-ed programs send the message that teen sex is okay as long as contraception is used; the underlying permissive values of these programs have virtually no support among parents.

Parents want teens to be taught that sex should be linked to love, intimacy, and commitment and that these qualities are most likely to occur in marriage.

Boy, real-life America is just nothing like libertarians and the Left want it to be, huh?

---

I DID WHAT? WITH WHO?:

How ‘None of the Above’ won: Mark Steyn says that New Hampshire picked the uninspiring John Kerry because he was the least unelectable of the contenders (Mark Steyn, 1/31/04, The Spectator)

According to the exit polls, the Ketchup Kid won because Democrats were looking for someone with ‘electability’. What this means is they settled on Kerry because he has less obvious unelectability than Dean (too angry), Lieberman (too Joe-ish), Clark (too freaky) and Edwards (too unknown). As I said here months ago, this was a race to find ‘None of the Above’, and the trick was always to position everybody else as ‘The Above’ and you as the ‘None’. On Tuesday, Kerry pulled that off. [...]

Traditionally, the role of the New Hampshire electorate is to rattle the front-runner and thereby make him a better candidate, as they did with Bush in 2000. But this time round the candidates seem to have rattled the electorate. Kerry is this year’s Bob Dole — the guy you make do with. It’s summed up by one of the Senator’s campaign buttons: ‘Dated Dean, Married Kerry’ — i.e., sure, Dean’s great for a few drinks and a couple of wild parties, but when you want to settle down for keeps you go with a solid citizen like Kerry.

Well, maybe. But I’ll bet on Wednesday morning more than a few of those voters who ‘married Kerry’ woke up feeling like Britney Spears. If Kerry clobbers Edwards in South Carolina next week, there’s no way to annul.

Here's where you see the danger of front-loading the primaries--as Mr. Steyn says, if John Kerry has a big night on February 3rd, it's over and they're stuck with the guy.

---

"SHOULDN'T WE ALL BE CRYING?":

From: JWR_Editor-in-Chief (Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2004 14:20:52 -0500

To: jwr-today@jewishworldreview.com
Subject: IMPT. PLEASE READ!

Dearest readers:

A few moments ago, my heart sank.

Going through my e-mail, I learned that one of this publication's periodic contributors, Chezi Goldberg, who dedicated his life to working with "at risk" teens and who was originally from Toronto and living in Jerusalem, was killed in today's bus bombing.

But what is so eerie was not his death --- that stung and I'm still feeling sick over it. And I mean SICK! What stung were the near prophetic words in one of his essays.

It's the middle of the day. I understand many subscribers are busy. But PLEASE take a moment and read these essays.

And then forward them to somebody you know --- and ask them to do the same.

It's important that his words move over the web no less that the jokes we always forward!

I'm CERTAIN that after reading the two articles you will agree with me.

PLEASE do it for Chezi. Do it for all of us. PLEASE

Binyamin L. Jolkovsky,
Editor in Chief
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/

-261 dead (Chezi Goldberg, Dec. 8, 2002, Jewish World Review)

I was riding a Jerusalem bus Thursday when news of the intended missile attack against the Arkia flight from Kenya came across the airwaves. For a moment the passengers were in shock. Then we all breathed a sigh of relief.

That was our mistake.

Minutes later, news of the attack on the Paradise Hotel came across the radio waves. There were casualties. There was no sigh of relief.

When we here look at a miraculous escape from a deadly attack and breathe a sigh of relief, we lose the war on terrorism. Our attitude should be: The terrorists intended to down a plane with 261 innocent commercial air travelers aboard. They did not succeed, thank G-d. However, their intentions were clear. We must consider their intentions and take action with a state of mind, as if they had succeeded.

-Because, if you don't cry, who will? (Yechezkel Chezi Goldberg, Dec. 3, 2001, Jewish World Review)

He walked into shul, synagogue. I nodded my acknowledgement, as I always do. He made some strange gesture, which I didn't comprehend. I continued praying.

A few minutes later, he walked over to me and said: "Didn't you hear?"

"Hear about what?" I replied.

He grew impatient, almost frustrated. "Didn't you HEAR?"

I understood that he was talking about last night's terror attack on Ben Yehuda Mall, a trendy night spot frequented not only by Israelis, but also Western tourists.

I assumed that he obviously was intimating that someone we knew was hurt or killed.

I replied: "About who?"

He looked at me as if I had landed from another planet. "About who? About everyone who was attacked last night."

I nodded. "Yes, of course I heard."

"Then why aren't YOU crying?"

His words shot through me like a spear piercing my heart. Our sages teach that "Words that come from the heart, enter the heart." He was right, of course. Why wasn't I crying?

I could not answer. I had nothing to say.

He pointed around the shul. "Why aren't all of my friends crying?"

I could not answer. I had nothing to say.

"Shouldn't we all be crying?"

I could not answer. I had nothing to say.

What has happened to all of us, myself included? We have turned to stone. Some would call it "numbness." Some would call it "collective national shock." Some would say that we all have suffered never-ending trauma and it has affected our senses.

Frankly, the excuses are worthless. All the reasons in the world don't justify our distance from the real pain that is burning in our midst.

Let us, this once, look into the dark places and shed tears today for the victims of terrorism in Israel, Iraq, and Afghanistan before we do turn to stone.

---

MODERNITY IS CENTRIFUGAL, NOT CENTRIPITAL:

The Anti-Federalist Society: Why Turkey, Iran, and Syria all have worries about Iraq's new federalist outlook. (Gerald Robbins, 01/28/2004, Weekly Standard)

Generally speaking, Turks are wary about federalism. It is a concept at variance with the nation's administrative infrastructure. History explains why: The Ottoman Empire's decentralized character was a major factor in its eventual downfall. Loose management of a multiethnic population resulted in constant rebellions and general instability.

Kemal Ataturk, modern Turkey's founding father, saw autonomy's detrimental effects and sought to rectify it. His solution was to create a strong, centralized system, largely derived from the French model of governance. This structure has remained intact throughout the past 80 years, warding off all attempts at reform.

THE ISSUE of the Kurds substantiates Turkey's centralist nature. Fears that a centralized Iraq can augment separatist notions among Turkey's estimated 13 to 16 million Kurds (approximately 20 to 25 percent of the nation's 67 million inhabitants) are based on precedent. From the early 1980s to mid 1990s, the Turkish government fought a Kurdish insurrection which claimed 37,000 lives. Turkey's national psyche is still scarred.

Yet comparing Turkey's Kurds with their Iraqi brethren is mixing apples and oranges. The Kurdish populace is a collection of different tribes and dialects that are often at cross-purposes with one another. This even extends to the political sphere--Turkey's Kurdish separatists adhere to Marxist-Leninist precepts while Iraq's Kurdish leadership reflects a meshing of clan affiliation with social democratic thought.

It can be further argued that a de facto federalism already exists in Kurdish Iraq. A U.N.-sponsored Kurdish enclave was established after the 1991 Gulf War ended. Cognizant of Turkey's cross-border concerns, it hasn't turned into a staging area for Kurdish separatism. Trading thrives between this landlocked entity and the Turkish interior.

FEARS ABOUT FEDERALISM aren't a uniquely Turkish phenomenon. The very idea of decentralization also worries Iraq and Syria. In Teheran's case, the prospect of a federalist structure succeeding within the region is particularly vexing. It not only possesses a sizeable minority of 6.5 to 8 million Kurds, but nearly one quarter of Iran--66.5 million people--are Azeri Turks. When Arab, Baluchi, and other groups are further added to Iran's ethnic picture, it turns out that only 51 percent of the country's total population is of Persian descent.

The alternative to federalism is not continued centralization but eventual separation, which you'd think they'd care for even less.

---

THE HAWKS ARE RIGHT AGAIN:

Iraqi self-rule splits White House (JONATHAN S. LANDAY, 1/27/04, Knight Ridder Newspapers)

[P]rivately, President Bush's national security aides are debating a number of U.S. and British fallback options, including acceding to a demand by Iraq's most revered Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, that the assembly be directly elected.

Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld favor a proposal to turn over power early - by April 1 - to the Governing Council, a body of U.S.-installed Iraqi leaders, said senior U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The council would be expanded from its current 25 seats to include more Shiites. The aim would be to persuade Sistani to agree to delaying elections, they said.

"This proposal came up in September and Bremer shot it down," said one senior U.S. official. "It has come back to life."

Adnan Pachachi, who holds the council's rotating presidency, heavily promoted the idea during a visit to Washington earlier this month.

But the State Department, the National Security Council staff and the CIA oppose the idea, the officials said.

State and CIA are always wrong and Condi happens to be wrong in this instance.

---

NOW COACHING THE WASHINGTON GENERALS... (via mc):

DEMOCRATS OFFER PLAN ON ALIENS (Amy Fagan, 1/29/04, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

House Democrats yesterday proposed granting legal residency and the eventual option of U.S. citizenship to millions of illegal immigrants now working in the United States.

Laying out their own principles for revamping the nation's immigration laws in response to what House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called President Bush's "political ploy," Democrats went beyond Mr. Bush's plan for a temporary-worker program and called for a system of "earned legalization" for illegal aliens.

At a Capitol Hill press conference, Democrats proposed allowing illegal immigrants who have worked in the United States for a yet-to-be-determined minimum period of time to stay here and be granted permanent legal residency, creating a "pathway" to eventual citizenship.

"The president's proposal is a political ploy, and not the solid foundation on which we can build an improved immigration policy," said Mrs. Pelosi of California. "Democrats have a better way." [...]

"The president wants to give [illegal aliens] a lot, but the Democrats want to give them the jackpot," said Steve Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies.

Sen. John Cornyn, the Texas Republican sponsor of legislation that essentially mirrors Mr. Bush's proposal, said requiring workers to eventually return to their home country will reduce future illegal immigration by strengthening struggling foreign economies.

"In my recent visit with government leaders in Mexico City, I was repeatedly told that they want their workers to come back, to return home with capital and skills," he said. "They need those small-business owners, those entrepreneurs to strengthen a weakened middle class."

There's no greater blessing in politics than to be given incompetent enemies. In that regard, at least, God has been generous to President Bush. The immigration plan that Mr. Bush recently announced is good policy but terrible politics, as pro-immigrant programs always are. This was a moment for Democrats to either hold their tongues or push the President's proposal in order to embarrass him when his own party killed it.

Instead they've come to his rescue, providing him the middle ground and a chance to oppose the Democrats' "too liberal" immigration scheme. When next he sees her, Karl Rove should kiss Ms Pelosi right on her Botox, if not her buttocks.

---

I'VE LOOKED AT LIFE FROM BOTH SIDES NOW:

Waffling on War: John Kerry’s split personality. (Ramesh Ponnuru, October 25, 2002, National Review)

John Kerry, the junior senator from Massachusetts and a candidate for president in 2004, is renowned for his foreign-policy expertise — at least in certain circles. "[N]o Democrat has offered a more coherent criticism of the Bush national security policies," wrote Al Hunt in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. So much the worse for the Democrats, one might conclude. Kerry spent the run-up to the Iraq vote taking shots at President Bush from right and left before finally voting with him. Hunt quotes Kerry remarking of Bush's national-security team: "These guys are fakers."

On the subject of fakers, Kerry surely knows whereof he speaks. Consider his record on the first Gulf War, which he voted against. In early January 1991, constituent Walter Carter sent Kerry a letter urging him to back the war. He received two responses. A January 22 letter from the senator, addressed to Carter as though he were an opponent of the war, indicated that Kerry favored sanctions and opposed war. A January 31 letter said, "From the outset of the invasion [of Kuwait by Iraq], I have strongly and unequivocally supported President Bush's response to the crisis and the policy goals he has established with our military deployment in the Persian Gulf."

It's not helpful that he was just as two-faced about Vietnam and the second Iraq War--at least he was consistent in his support for the Sandinistas even when they made a fool of him.

MORE:
Taking one prize, then a bigger one (Brian C. Mooney, 6/19/2003 , Boston Globe)

Before making the leap to the Senate, Kerry had to deftly navigate the treacherous terrain of Democratic Party politics in Massachusetts, surviving two primaries -- for lieutenant governor in 1982 and for the Senate two years later -- that could have buried his Washington ambitions.

In 1982, the party had split along conservative-liberal lines for the grudge rematch between Governor Edward J. King and Dukakis, the man King had ousted from the corner office four years earlier. But at the endorsement convention in Springfield that May, the Kerry forces were ready for any outcome. In a crowd of Democrats straining for attention in the race for lieutenant governor, the Kerry camp offered delegates a choice of lapel buttons -- "King/Kerry" or "Dukakis/Kerry."

-War Hero -- and Waffling Windbag (Max Boot, January 29, 2004, LA Times)

Kerry gave his biggest foreign policy address to date at the Council on Foreign Relations on Dec. 3. He made some excellent points about the need to improve homeland security, combat money laundering, do more in Afghanistan and hold the Saudis accountable for their support of terrorism. And he was right on the money in criticizing the current administration for not sending its senior officials overseas to sell Washington's case.

But a lot of Kerry's speech was pure partisan windbaggery. "The Bush administration," he claimed, "has pursued the most arrogant, inept, reckless and ideological foreign policy in modern history." Really? More inept than Jimmy Carter's, Lyndon Johnson's or Woodrow Wilson's? Kerry also rapped Bush for failing to achieve peace between Israel and its neighbors. He pledged to appoint as "presidential ambassador to the peace process" someone like Bill Clinton.

Why Clinton would have more success brokering a settlement as an ex-president than when he was president remains a mystery.

Those minor problems paled, however, next to Kerry's positions on Iraq. To his credit, he was one of the Democrats who voted Oct. 11, 2002, for the resolution giving President Bush the authority "to use the armed forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate" in Iraq. This has caused Kerry a lot of grief among Deaniac Democrats, and he's twisted himself into a pretzel to explain away this vote.

He claims that "I voted for the resolution to get the inspectors in there, period," and that he had no idea that Bush would use the authority granted to him to actually go to war. If you believe this, Kerry is too naive to be president. A likelier explanation is that he's trying to be pro-war and antiwar at the same time.

That impression was reinforced in his speech to the Council on Foreign Relations. He said that "we had to hold Saddam Hussein accountable," but only if we had united "the international community." He was asked: "Do you think you really could have brought the Germans, the French along in a commitment to use force?" Kerry brazenly answered "yes" but offered no credible explanation of how, beyond saying that he would have shown a lot of "patience and maturity." As if Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair hadn't spent six months dickering at the United Nations. Does Kerry also think that he could have gotten U.N. approval for military action in Kosovo — something that Clinton failed to achieve in 1999?

Then Kerry had the nerve to criticize the Bush administration for a "cut and run strategy" in Iraq.

That's pretty rich coming from someone who voted against the $87-billion aid package that's essential to our nation-building efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Kerry's inconsistency is stunning: He (like Sen. John Edwards) supported the war — kind of — but then refused to give our troops the resources necessary to finish the job.

-Judgement Call: John Kerry's patriotism isn't the issue--it's his judgement on the big decisions. (Hugh Hewitt, 01/29/2004, Weekly Standard)

A vote for the Democrats isn't a vote for the Baathists, but it surely is a vote for the United Nations. A solid majority of Americans aren't going to support a side which believes that legitimacy resides only in recurring consents from the Security Council and recoils from the use of force even when the Security Council is onboard.

John Kerry voted against the Gulf War in 1991. Had Kerry had his way, Saddam would now be a member of the nuclear club, and the WMDs he had in '91 would have doubled and tripled in scope and lethality. Kerry was absolutely, positively, and enormously wrong about the most important vote of his public life. His judgement was flawed then and remains flawed now. A vote for Kerry is a vote for the Security Council, except in 1991 when that Council wanted war.

A vote for Kerry is thus a vote for American paralysis.

---

CAN'T RULE IT OUT:

Firing the Manager (Howard Kurtz, January 29, 2004, Washington Post)

A few weeks ago, I was in Howard Dean's Burlington headquarters when campaign chief Joe Trippi gave the staff a pep talk.

They had just presented Trippi with a celebratory cake in the shape of Tennessee, in honor of the Al Gore endorsement, and he warned everyone--including his wife, who worked on the staff--that the nomination was far from sewn up. The other campaigns had made the mistake of underestimating Team Dean, he said, and they shouldn't make the same mistake.

He was right. And now, to my surprise, he's been forced out, the first victim of Dean's losses in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Suddenly, Trippi went from the strategic genius profiled on the front page of the New York Times and the cover of the New Republic to chief scapegoat? The man who pioneered Dean's Internet strategy is tossed out like the manager of a losing baseball team? Was it Trippi who suggested that Dean start yelling during his Iowa concession speech?

Mr. Dean's IA speech was so deranged seeming that its content didn't get much analysis, but William Saletan noticed a fascinating passage that suggests a level of calculation to what he said, Howard Dean's Remarks to His Supporters (January 19, 2004):

...we're going to win in Massachusetts. And North Carolina. And Missouri. And Arkansas. And Connecticut.

It's possible, of course, that even in the middle of his Miltown moment he just happened to string together the home states of John Kerry, John Edwards, Wes Clark, Dick Gephardt, and Joe Lieberman off the top of his head, but one must wonder....

---

WE GAVE THEM THE VOTE, GET OVER IT:

The end of feminized politics? (George Will, January 28, 2004, Townhall)

Kerry's ``patrician aloofness'' may be manly reticence. But he has embraced today's confessional ethos by making autobiography serve as political philosophy, and reducing his narrative to a war story. Riding his Harley, gunning for Iowa pheasants and playing hockey in New Hampshire have expressed his campaign's subtext: manliness.

Feminized politics, according to Carnes Lord of the Naval War College, justifies all policies with reference to their impact on children. In his book "The Modern Prince: What Leaders Need to Know Now,'' Lord says leadership is a problematic concept in today's democracies. Modern technology has produced prosperity, which has produced a middle class growing in size, competence (education), security (homeownership, 401(k)s, etc.) and self-confidence (assertion of rights). All this, plus the egalitarian, anti-hierarchical spirit of the age, plus the rarity of great wars, threatens to make politics seem unimportant and leaders seem dispensable.

Leadership, Lord says, presupposes some element of ``such traditionally manly qualities as competitiveness, aggression or, for that matter, the ability to command.'' Because ``leadership that is not prepared to disadvantage anyone is hardly leadership at all.''

Conservatives like Mr. Will seem to have a hard time wrapping their minds around the fact that women's suffrage and nature's imbalanced gender ratio means we have and will have a feminized politics (at least until gender selection abortion takes hold). In times of war it is possible to sell manliness, because physical security becomes more of a concern to women than economic security, but as a general principle our politics reflects feminine concerns.

---

100% PROCESS:

The Dead Center (ROBERT B. REICH, 1/29/04, NY Times)

Democrats have seen what the Republican Party has been able to accomplish over the years. The conservative movement has developed dedicated sources of money and legions of ground troops who not only get out the vote, but also spend the time between elections persuading others to join their ranks. It has devised frames of reference that are used repeatedly in policy debates (among them: it's your money, tax and spend, political correctness, class warfare).

It has a system for recruiting and electing officials nationwide who share the same world view and who will vote accordingly. And it has a coherent ideology uniting evangelical Christians, blue-collar whites in the South and West, and big business — an ideology in which foreign enemies, domestic poverty and crime, and homosexuality all must be met with strict punishment and religious orthodoxy.

In contrast, the Democratic Party has had no analogous movement to animate it. Instead, every four years party loyalists throw themselves behind a presidential candidate who they believe will deliver them from the rising conservative tide. After the election, they go back to whatever they were doing before. Other Democrats have involved themselves in single-issue politics — the environment, campaign finance, the war in Iraq and so on — but these battles have failed to build a political movement. Issues rise and fall, depending on which interests are threatened and when. They can even divide Democrats, as each advocacy group scrambles after the same set of liberal donors and competes for the limited attention of the news media.

Folks like Mr. Reich and the various Democratic candidates--Howard Dean, John Kerry, John Edwards--seem to believe that you build a political movement by building a political movement. They are focused exclusively on process, to the exclusion of ideas. It's instructional that Mr. Reich offers no vision whatsoever of what ideas a new movement of the Left would be built around. Of course, the dirty secret behind this silence is that those ideas would be profoundly unpopular with the American people--at least until the next Depression.

---

WHY CAN'T WE MOVE AS FAST AS KHATAMI?::

SISTANI'S WAY: Part 2: The marja and the proconsul (Pepe Escobar, 1/29/04, Asia Times)

Last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Iranian President Mohammed Khatami expressed what hundreds of millions of Muslims are feeling all over the world: "The American administration invaded Afghanistan to find [Osama] bin Laden, where is bin Laden? The Americans occupied Iraq under the pretext of installing democracy and finding weapons of mass destruction. Where are these weapons and where is democracy?" Khatami also revealed how Iran is closely monitoring the confrontation between the proconsul and the marja: "Ayatollah Sistani demanded direct democracy, and the Americans refuse it. That's what we have always proposed, one man, one vote." Also in Davos, John Ruggie, professor of international affairs at Harvard and an adviser to Annan, has been far from enthusiastic: "The Bush administration has not changed. The Americans' attitude does not incite anybody to cooperate with them." [...]

Even with all its military might, the US has never looked so fragile and discredited in Iraq. An occupying power which refuses democratic elections using all manners of excuses is being judged by the Islamic world - and the international community - for what it is: a neo-colonial power. It has now been proved there were never any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq - much less the means to deliver them. It is now being proved the invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with introducing democracy to the Middle East.

The UN mission - "driving under the [Washington] influence" - may estimate that direct elections are impossible before the American-imposed deadline of July 1. US President George W Bush will then be left with two extremely unsavory options. The caucuses will proceed in Iraq's 18 provinces, and 15 million Shi'ites will smash - by any means necessary - the legitimacy of any government that might emerge. Or the Americans may hold direct elections - and in this case Sunnis, not only in the Sunni triangle - will upgrade their already ferocious guerrilla war to code red, because they will never accept losing power to Shi'ites. Jihad or civil war: these are the options ahead.

Mr. Escobar is one of those guys who hates America so much he's started to believe his own rhetoric about us. There are going to be elections and Iraq is going to be a Shi'ite state. The pace at which that happens is the only question here, and the desire of the U.S. and UN to ensure that the process functions as smoothly as possible hardly represents a new colonialism. The difference between an election on July 1st and one on November 1st, or whenever, is not the difference between democracy and dictatorship, and to hold it so is an emotion, not a thought.

---

SUNSET THE CIA:

'We were almost all wrong' (John Diamond, 1/28/04, USA TODAY)

Pre-war U.S. intelligence warnings about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were wrong, former chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay told a Senate committee Wednesday. Kay said the lapse constitutes a massive intelligence failure, but one with many accomplices.

"We were almost all wrong — and I certainly include myself here," said Kay, a veteran weapons inspector who along with many other experts said before the March 2003 invasion that Iraq possessed banned weapons.

Although Kay's testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday echoed statements he has made in interviews during the past several days, his detailed, four-hour account under questioning was the most comprehensive declaration by the former administration official that a central tenet of the war on Iraq was based on faulty information.

Kay defended President Bush and laid blame on the intelligence community, but he also suggested that an outside, nonpartisan commission will be needed to sort out the intelligence failure. His testimony fueled new criticism of the White House.

Mr. Bush is wasting a golden opportunity to blow up the intelligence services--which have been wrong more often than right, and massively wrong on every big issue, since their formation in and after WWII--and start over with a clean slate and someone like Porter Goss or Bob Graham or both in charge.

---

NET LOSS:

In Shake-Up, Dean Names Gore Ally to Run Campaign (JODI WILGOREN and GLEN JUSTICE, 1/29/04, NY Times)

After spending nearly $40 million only to face devastating defeats in Iowa and New Hampshire, Howard Dean named a longtime friend of former Vice President Al Gore as his campaign chief on Wednesday, prompting the abrupt resignation of his campaign manager, Joe Trippi.

Dr. Dean said he had tapped Roy Neel, who was given the title of chief executive officer, to streamline day-to-day decision making as the Democratic presidential contest enters a lightning round of multistate contests. He said he had hoped to keep Mr. Trippi on as senior strategist.

But after a year of building the Dean juggernaut, from a staff of seven to what he has often called "the greatest grass-roots movement in the history of American politics," Mr. Trippi refused to be sidelined, and walked out after what aides described as an emotional staff meeting here.

"You're going to see a leaner, meaner organization," Dr. Dean, who has asked his 500 staff members to skip their paychecks for two weeks, told reporters on an 8 p.m. conference call. "We had really geared up for what we thought was going to be a front runner's campaign. It's not going to be a front-runner's campaign. It's going to be a long war of attrition. What we need is decision making that's centralized."

Seems like just yesterday that everyone in the media was telling us how Mr. Trippi had revolutionized politics by tapping into the Internet. What they never seemed able to grasp is that it was such a limited base as to badly distort the campaign. First, the Internet isn't America--it's wealthy white youngish America (which just happens to include most of the media). Second,
because of this the initial $40 million they raised was not a sign of things to come because more contributors weren't coming. Third, maybe worst of all, the online world in which the campaign dwelt was concerned about only their own issues and their take on those issues which aren't shared by many outside this limited social milieu.

---

YOU CAN'T BLAME THEM FOR EVERYTHING:

France's Neocon Assimilation Policy (Steve Sailer, January 25, 2004, V-Dare)

As I noted in last week's review of Tamar Jacoby's essay collection "Reinventing The Melting Pot," neoconservatives proclaim faith in assimilation as an excuse for not thinking hard about the quantity and quality of immigrants.

That assumption has allowed many neocons to endorse enthusiastically the Bush-Rove Illegal Alien Amnesty and Unlimited Guest Worker plan, which has otherwise proven about as popular as a case of salmonella.

But look at Europe. Its experience shows that the different assimilation approaches of the host countries matter less than what the immigrants bring with them. In particular, one European country has already tried out just about the entire neocon bag of assimilative tricks -- with deeply mixed results.

Mr. Sailer is simply wrong that pro-immigrationists aren't considering the quality of the immigrants. For instance, does anyone believe neo-conservatives would sound any different than the most wild-eyed nativists if Mexicans were Muslims?

---

A WORTHWHILE WEBLOG:

'Why I turned Pepys' diary into a weblog': If the diarist Samuel Pepys were alive today, he may well have used the web to record his thoughts. So Phil Gyford has turned his daily musings into a weblog. (BBC, 2 January, 2003)

When the idea of making a website out of Samuel Pepys' diary first occurred to me it seemed so obvious that I was worried someone would beat me to it.

For nearly 10 years from 1660 Pepys wrote about his experiences day by day: his own intriguing private life, his professional rise through the ranks and important events of the day such as The Great Fire and the Plague.

This journal of both large and small scale events often happens in public view today, on weblogs. Known as blogs, a few years ago these sites were the sole domain of web geeks but now an ever-increasing number cover thousands of topics.

Copyright isn't a problem; the remarkable Project Gutenberg, a community effort to make electronic texts of copyright-free books available to everyone, has produced a version of the diary dating from 1893. This Victorian edition misses out a few of the juiciest phrases but it is free to use and comes with explanatory footnotes.

One of the reasons for the recent boom in weblogs is that the tools to create and manage them are generally free and increasingly easy to use. I chose Movable Type because it allows readers to post comments next to each entry.

It all seemed too perfect: this could be a fascinating site and would be simple and cheap to create. I couldn't believe I was alone in thinking this, so I didn't tell even my closest friends about it.

After a few months thinking about how best to tackle it, I spent a few weekends and evenings creating the site, which was ready a week before Pepys' first entry on 1 January.

Although the diary text came with footnotes, these assume a level of knowledge about British history, geography and language that few have in the 21st Century.

This is where the ability to post comments on the site has proved crucial. Entries and footnotes are already being annotated by readers who provide explanations and additional information, creating a more communal experience than conventional publishing allows. So rather than simply publishing a dead - albeit fascinating - text, I now find myself in charge of a far more exciting living read.

This is a brilliant idea.

---

THE NATURE OF THE PLACE:

Charity begins at home (Justin Webb, 17 January, 2004, BBC Correspondent, Washington)

Even the fire and ambulance service in the Washington suburb where we live is provided on a voluntary basis by local people.

The Bethesda and Chevy Chase Rescue Squad has an annual fund-raising drive and in return for your donation, you get a sticker with their number. If fire breaks out, or if you need an ambulance, you have bought yourself cover. And if you haven't paid your dues and ring them, well they'll probably come anyway, out of charity.

Charity is the obverse of the self-reliance coin. I am not talking of the odd cake donated to a Women's Institute fete or a tenner to Children In Need.

Charity here is woven into the fabric of American life. In 2002, individual Americans gave $180bn away.

At my children's school, the three-year-olds were introduced to the American way just before Christmas. They spent a rather enjoyable day painting shoeboxes.

The parents then went to a bargain warehouse and bought a hundred pairs of children's socks and assorted cheap glittery items to put in the boxes. This was for the Washington poor.

At the same time the school had its own wish list to which parents were invited to contribute. The total was many thousands of dollars.

As a family we were somewhat discomforted by this contrast, between what we gave to ourselves and what we gave to those who were genuinely needy.

But Americans are not worried in the slightest. They are not into changing society, only keeping it going; giving what is surplus and keeping what is necessary for wealth to be maintained. [...]

In the progressive state of Washington, a car tax was introduced whereby you paid more if your car was more expensive.

This socialistic experiment was highly controversial and was put to a state-wide vote. It was struck down.

Apparently a victory for the rich. But when the exit poll data was examined, it was discovered that this was in fact a victory for the poor.

Wealthier people had voted in large numbers to keep the tax. Unusually for Americans, they thought it was fair that they should pay more. But poorer people had voted to get rid of it.

Why? Because in the heart of every American beats the belief that wealth lies around the corner, with a new job or a change of luck.

They too would be able to own a more expensive car and they didn't want to pay the extra taxes when they got it.

Americans do not approve of safety nets. They fly high and fall hard. That is the nature of the place.

The played this on the BBC last night and it was the most pro-American thing not read by Alistair Cooke they've had on in months.

---

SIMPLE SCIENCE (via Glenn Dryfoos):

Decoding Columbia: A detective story: In an inquest fraught with questions of guilt and shame, scientists unravel the mystery of a shuttle's demise. (Robert Lee Hotz, December 21, 2003, LA Times)

James Hallock discovered just how little it takes to bring down a space shuttle.

He did it by playing with pencils.

As a member of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, the pear-shaped, bewhiskered expert on flight safety had a New Englander's flinty skepticism and a physicist's distaste for untested accident theories.

On this day, Hallock, 62, scowled at specifications for the reinforced carbon panels that shielded the leading edge of Columbia's wings from the heat of reentry.

If one of the $800,000 panels had cracked, it might have been the flaw that on Feb. 1 caused the $1.8-billion spacecraft and its crew of seven astronauts to plummet in a shower of molten debris across six states.

Hallock brooded over a simple question: What would it take to break one?

Engineers gave him the original 25-year-old NASA specifications, which said the panels must withstand an impact equal to the kinetic energy of 0.006 foot-pounds.

What did that mean? Hallock twiddled a yellow No. 2 pencil between his fingers. How far, for instance, would he have to drop the pencil to generate that kind of impact?

In the mailroom at the board's makeshift headquarters in Shirlington, Va., he found a box of pencils and a postal scale.

He weighed the pencils, then calculated the mass of the average pencil. With that number, he worked out how much punch each pencil would pack.

"The answer," he would say later, "is that a No. 2 pencil dropped from about 6 inches equals the kinetic energy number they had."

The panels, in actual manufacture, were much stronger. But that remarkably low standard, Hallock believed, was a tangible measure of how confident NASA engineers were that nothing would hit the leading edge of the wing.

"The number didn't matter to them," Hallock said, "because they assumed nothing would ever hit the shuttle."

Eeerily reminiscent of the famous incident when Richard Feynman demonstrated the effect of cold on the O-rings in Challenger:

After one too many tutorials in doctoral-level dissembling from Lawrence B. Mulloy, then head of NASA's solid-fuel booster rocket project at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., Feynman famously clamped a piece of O-ring material and dipped it into a glass of ice water. There was, as national television audiences saw repeatedly, no resilience. Talk about smoking guns.

"I believe that has some significance for our problem," Feynman observed dryly.

---

BARGAIN WITH TERRORIST, JUST DON'T KEEP YOUR END OF THE DEAL:

Germany's `bargaining chips' for Arad - Hezbollah operatives and Iranian agents (Aluf Benn, January 27, 2004, Ha'aretz)

The "bargaining chips" who are slated for release from European prisons, in exchange for disclosure about the fate of missing Israel Air Force navigator Ron Arad, are Hezbollah operatives and Iranian agents who were involved in international terror attacks. One of them was convicted of murdering an American naval officer; he took orders from Imad Mughniyeh, who coordinates international terror strikes for Hezbollah. In exchange for the return of Arad or his remains to Israel, the German government is prepared to release two "bargaining chips," terrorists who murdered Kurdish opponents of Iran's regime in Berlin in autumn 1992. These assassinations, which are known as the "Mykonos Affair (after the Berlin restaurant where the attack took place)," seriously damaged relations between Germany and Iran. The German court which convicted the assassins ruled that the murders were authorized by top spiritual and political figures in Tehran. [...]

Germany has promised to release another "bargaining chip," Lebanese national Muhammad Ali Hamadi, a Hezbollah operative who is serving a life sentence for the murder of American navy diver Robbie Stethem, from Waldorf, Maryland, in Beirut in June 1985. Stethem was a passenger aboard a TWA plane that was hijacked in Athens; he was tortured and murdered in Beirut's airport. Hamadi was arrested two years later in Germany, while trying to smuggle explosives. An indictment was issued against Mughniyeh as well for the Stethem murder; and the U.S. government offered a $25 million reward to anyone responsible for the capture of the Hezbollah terror mastermind.

When Mr. Hamadi is released there should be a Predator waiting for him.

---

MEMORY UNBIDDEN:

BETTY ANN ONG, AMERICAN HERO (Edward Driscoll, 1/28/04)

I ran out to pick up the mail at my office a little while ago, and one the way back, while flipping stations on the car radio, came across the Sean Hannity Show. Hannity played the audio tape of Betty Ann Ong, the stewardess on American Airlines Flight #11, who called in to request help--any help--after terrorists maced the passengers in first class, stabbed the crew in the galley, and barricaded themselves in the cockpit of the plane, which they eventually crashed into the World Trade Center. [...]

Listening to that tape left me feeling like I punched in the gut. But Jonah's right: This stuff needs to be played over and over again. We shouldn't forget the horror--and the evil men that caused it.

It's the damndest thing, we're far enough removed from the events of that day that we can refer to 9-11 without tapping every time into the memories that are stored away somewhere in our viscera. But then you hear something or see something or read something--as happened to Brother Driscoll--and it does indeed hit you like a physical assault. What may be most interesting about the whole phenomena is that it seems to demonstrate that we may be almost too decent a people. Rare, maybe even unique, is the culture that would consciously choose to put away the most inflammatory images, sounds, and stories of that day, even as it pursues the perpetrators and wars with their comrades in terror.

Imagine the effect, even the cheap effect, to which such remembrance could be put. Recent criticism of the President--particularly in the wake of the Paul O'Neill book--has dwelt on the notion that 9-11 merely provided a convenient excuse for him to act out some kind of psychodrama whereby he got to settle his father's score with Saddam and introduce fascist rule under cover of the Patriot Act. How about an address to the nation where he just plays the tape of the two planes crashing into the WTC and then says: "History may one day show that Saddam Hussein was less of a threat than we thought he was, but what we did we did because this must never happen again." Whether something like that would work or might instead backfire doesn't even matter, because the fact is it is somehow not in the American grain to use the tragedy in that way. It's almost as if we share some kind of collective intuition about just how terrible--though not necessarily unjustified--are the things we might do if we were to exploit the darker demons of our nature.

But does that make sense? Can an entire people know (and fear) themselves at such a level? Or is there some other explanation for the way in which the central event in our recent history has been carefully stored away, only to be encountered in almost accidental fashion?

---

NUANCE? (via Jeff Guinn):

Do as I Say: Dr. Laura's counsel is caustic and oftentimes hypocritical, but it is also persuasive: a review of The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands by Dr. Laura Schlessinger (Caitlin Flanagan, January/February 2004, The Atlantic Monthly)

In a nutshell, Dr. Laura believes that many of the aspects of adult life that I had always considered complicated and messy and finely nuanced are in fact simple and clear-cut; that life ought to be neatly fitted around duty and responsibility rather than around the pursuit of that elusive old dog, happiness. This is what makes her the most compelling advocate for children I have thus far encountered, because the well-being of children often depends upon the commitment and obligation of the adults who created them. If you want to know whether the divorce culture has been a disaster for children, tune in to the Dr. Laura show one day. The mainstream media have a cheery name for families rent asunder and then patched together by divorce and remarriage: they are "blended families." But the day-to-day reality of what such blending wreaks upon children is often harsh. The number of children who are being shuttled back and forth between households, and the heartrending problems that this engenders in their lives, is a sin. Every June, Dr. Laura fields multiple calls having to do with transporting reluctant children across vast distances so that court-ordered visitation agreements can be honored. Whereas an article in Parents magazine or the relentlessly upbeat family-life columns in Time might list some mild and generally useless tips for dealing with such a situation (have the child bring along a "transitional object," plan regular phone calls home, and so forth), Laura throws out the whole premise. What in the world are the parents doing living so far away from each other? One of them needs to pick up stakes and move. "I can't do that," the caller always says. "Yes, you can," Laura always replies, and when you think about it, she's right.

The first time I heard her tell a divorced father that he should give up on his first chance at real love—he had met his soul mate during a trip out of state and wanted to move and marry her—so that he could stay close by his children, I almost couldn't believe what I was hearing. She actually wanted the man to drop by his ex-wife's house every afternoon to help with homework and the yard work and play some ball with his sons, which struck me as a radical notion—as indeed it is. A conventional psychotherapist would proceed from the assumption that the man's happiness is the primary consideration in this scenario. Dr. Laura doesn't give a whit about his happiness; she cares only that he fulfill his obligation to his children. Happiness, she might argue, may be a by-product of doing the right thing; but even if it's not, all that matters is that you behave yourself. Her insistence (often shrill, sometimes hopelessly hypocritical) that certain of life's obligations must be honored at almost any cost is refreshing. For the first few years that I listened to her show, I never failed to be impressed by the notion that old-fashioned morality—inflexible and unforgiving—is sufficient unto any FUBAR situation human beings can dream up. I didn't always agree with her: she opposes legal abortion, which I support; she's against premarital sex, of which I dimly recall being distinctly and unapologetically fond. She once harangued a mother who was clearly at sheer wits' end that she shouldn't hire an afternoon babysitter—advice I could hardly bear to listen to, I felt so keenly the mother's desperation and exhaustion. But more than once I wondered if she might have been right about one or another of the points on which we differed. [...]

To a person, just about, my friends are liberals, and when I try to talk to them about Dr. Laura, they think I've gone completely cuckoo. I took her first book on a family vacation a few years back, and my father read it one night and then sat me down for a very serious and disappointed discussion about my declining literary and political tastes. But none of my loved ones, if they could tease Laura's central argument about children and marriage from the tissue of arrogance and crackpot harangue in which it is embedded, would disagree with it in the least. Part of Laura's problem is that she has been a victim of her own poor advance. If she had admitted up front that as a young woman she lived a life of sexual liberty and experimentation (rather than waiting for the press to discover and reveal this past, one humiliating episode at a time), and if she had explained that motherhood had produced profound changes in her, she would have earned herself a lot less derision and ire. There are many of us who understand that once you have children, certain doors ought to be closed to you forever. That to do right by a child means more than buying him the latest bicycle helmet and getting him on the best soccer team. It means investing oneself completely in the marriage that wrought him, for there isn't a person in the world who won't date his moments of greatest happiness to the time his family was the most intact, whole, unshakable. I wish there was someone a bit more hip and glamorous than Laura standing up for this simple truth, but in our time and place there isn't.

One of the comforting lies we modern men tell ourselves is that morality is terribly complex and that it's hard to know what is the right thing to do. In fact, as Ms Flanagan notes, and as Dr. Laura constantly reminds people, we know full well what we should do, but it requires putting the interests of others above our own, so we don't much care to do it. We've built (?) a culture where plenty of people are willing to tell you that you shouldn't have to do any such thing, that you need to take care of you first. Dr. Laura is a whack-job, but a very useful one, just because she won't tolerate such nonsense.

---

DOING NOTHING:

Japan's graduates losing faith in corporate icons: Even electronics giant Sony has stumbled. (Bennett Richardson, 1/29/04, CS Monitor)

A closely watched survey by D&L Co., a Tokyo research firm, found late last week that the carmaker Toyota was the new champion, while Sony, which is undergoing a series of radical reforms, had fallen to an ignominious third place.

The survey results speak to the changing aspirations - and heightened sense of anxiety - that many young job seekers in Japan who grew up during a protracted economic slump hold about the workplace. If Sony can stumble, they ask, where can I find job security?

Some graduates are opting for smaller, forward looking firms and are keenly aware of the implications of entering a firm with a shaky business plan. "It'll be tough to get ahead in the world unless you enter a company where the earnings are going to improve in the future, rather than a company which has good earnings now," says one Japanese university student.

Others have shed long-term career aspirations altogether, according to labor analysts. Flying in the face of the traditionally strong Japanese work ethic, young people now tend "to not enthusiastically look for work and [instead] become itinerant part-time workers or do nothing after graduation," says Reiko Kosugi, assistant research director at the Japan Institute for Labor Policy and Training.

Maybe it's just because none have done so yet that so few can comprehend that several developed nations are headed for collapse. But these dying nations have lessons to teach us, if only we pay attention.

---

BILD BILE:

RAF bombers 'ignored Auschwitz' (Kate Connolly, 20/01/2004, Daily Telegraph)

Germany's best-selling newspaper has accused the Royal Air Force of insufficient zeal in its campaign against Nazi targets after reconnaissance pictures of Auschwitz were made public for the first time.

"Why were the concentration camp thugs not bombed?" a headline in yesterday's Bild asked, above an aerial photograph of Auschwitz in southern Poland, where about one million people - mainly Jews - were murdered.

The numerous wartime photos of Auschwitz taken by RAF reconnaissance pilots have been published on the internet by The Aerial Reconnaissance Archive based at Keele University.

The Allies deserve to be criticized for ignoring German and Russian atrocities in WWII, but not by those who committed them. And, given that it's a German paper, one gets the creepy feeling that they wish the RAF had bombed and killed the Jews for them.

---

WHERE THE WAR ENDS (continued) [via mc]:

U.S. plans Al Qaeda offensive: Sources say military is mapping operation to strike inside Pakistan (Christine Spolar, January 28, 2004, Chicago Tribune)

The Bush administration, deeply concerned about recent assassination attempts against Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf and a resurgence of Taliban forces in neighboring Afghanistan, is preparing a U.S. military offensive that would reach inside Pakistan with the goal of destroying Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network, military sources said.

U.S. Central Command is assembling a team of military intelligence officers that would be posted in Pakistan ahead of the operation, according to sources familiar with details of the plan and internal military communications. The sources spoke on the condition they not be identified.

As now envisioned, the offensive would involve Special Operations forces, Army Rangers and Army ground troops, sources said. A Navy aircraft carrier would be deployed in the Arabian Sea.

Referred to in internal Pentagon messages as the "spring offensive," the operation would be driven by certain undisclosed events in Pakistan and across the region, sources said. A source familiar with details of the plan said this is "not like a contingency plan for North Korea, something that sits on a shelf. This planning is like planning for Iraq. They want this plan to be executable, now." [...]

An offensive into Pakistan to pursue Al Qaeda would be in keeping with President Bush's vow to strike wherever and whenever the United States feels threatened and to pursue terrorist elements to the end.

"The best way to defend America . . . is to stay on the offensive and find these killers, one by one," Bush said last week. "We're going to stay on the hunt, which requires good intelligence, good cooperation, good participation with friends and allies around the world." [...]

Sources said the plan against Al Qaeda would be driven by events in the region rather than set deadlines and that delays could occur. But military sources said the push for this spring appeared to be triggered by the assassination attempts on Musharraf, both of which came in December, and, to some extent, the capture of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

Hussein was captured after eight months of an intense military and intelligence effort on the ground in Iraq. Pentagon and administration officials, buoyed by that success, believe a similar determined effort could work in Pakistan and lead to the capture or killing of bin Laden, said sources familiar with the planning.

Thousands of U.S. forces would be involved, as well as Pakistani troops, planners said. Some of the 10,600 U.S. troops now in Afghanistan would be shifted to the border region as part of regular troop movements; some would be deployed within Pakistan.

"Before we were constrained by the border. Musharraf did not want that. Now we are told we're going into Pakistan with Musharraf's help," a well-placed military source said.

Many story lines converge here:

(1) President Bush understands that the war ends in Western Pakistan.

(2) Al Qaeda is its own worst enemy: President Musharraf feared his own extremists enough to restrain us instead of them, but theu bombed him into changing his mind.

(3) The Democrats have been harping on how they support going after al Qaeda but not war in Iraq--now what do they say when the war shifts back to a full scale assault on al Qaeda?

(4) Anyone who thought the Administration had been chastened by the difficulties of the post-war situations in Afghanistan and Iraq was just kidding themself.

---

CONVERGENCE:

America Tugs at French-Accented Lands: It's Not Peanuts (SOMINI SENGUPTA, 1/28/04, NY Times)

With the advent of the campaign against terrorism [...] things began to change. Africa once again figured in Washington's strategic thinking, and there was something to be gained for an overwhelmingly Muslim country by cozying up to the Americans and, not coincidentally, threatening the French with a loss of influence.

These days, because of a swirl of additional circumstances ranging from a drop in French foreign aid to bitterness over French immigration policy to the power of American hip-hop to a variety of slights and perceived slights, Senegal is marching headlong into the arms of a new empire run out of Washington.

This is by no means a line in the sand, ending French influence here. It's more as if the dunes are shifting, slowly but perceptibly. France remains the biggest donor and trade partner, but Senegal's relations with the United States have already created some Paris-Dakar frisson.

Publicly, both sides say all is well. Africa-watchers are fond of likening it to a difficult moment in the life of an old couple, a love-hate dialectic born of an intimate familiarity.

"It's a period of friction," said Mamadou Diouf, a historian at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and Senegalese by origin, "where two partners are trying to adjust to a new moment."

The "moment" that Mr. Diouf refers to has as much to do with the global primacy of American power as the diminution of French power in the shadow of a united Europe. Complicating matters, just as the former colonies on the continent still need France, France still needs its former colonies: French influence in Africa allows it to punch above its weight in the world.

Influence, of course, comes at a price. And the price of supporting a swath of destitute countries in Africa has lately proved to be too much. French aid to its former colonies has plummeted.

The simple truth is that Africa matters more than France now and, unlike France, has a future

---

C-SPAN 2 VS. CABANA BOY:

The End of the Road: As the 1996 election waits to repeat itself, New Hampshire marked the end of the road for most of the field. (Fred Barnes, 01/28/2004, Weekly Standard)

If history prevails (and it often does), Kerry will be the Democratic nominee. Every candidate, Republican or Democrat, who has won both the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary has gone on to capture the nomination. Sure, Kerry is capable of screwing up so badly that he defies history, but it's not likely.

So the stage has been set for a Kerry versus President Bush race this fall. That match-up is reminiscent of the Bob Dole versus President Clinton election in 1996. Hold your applause. It would be a conventional presidential contest between two party regulars.

Kerry is Dole without the wit. Like Dole, he's an establishment figure, an old political horse with little pizzazz. He's not identified with any particular issue or cause. His ideology is basically liberal but flexible, just as Dole's was conservative but pragmatic. Kerry is acceptable across the center-left breadth of the Democratic party, a mirror image of Dole's standing among moderate and conservative Republicans.

The most interesting question in such a case would be whether Mr. Kerry, like Bob Dole, would demonstrate his commitment to the race by giving up his Senate seat. The problem for Mr. Kerry is that his party is in the minority and the Senate split evenly enough that they badly need his vote. One assumes that MA law would allow Republican Mitt Romney to name his successor (?)--former governor Paul Cellucci seems most likely--which makes stepping down problematic. However, staying and casting more controversial votes can't possibly help him, not to mention having to be there to cast them instead of out campaigning. He'd also have to speak in the Senate chamber about every position he's taking, which leaves a large margin for error and allows Republican firebrands to follow him to the floor and pummel him. Not to be indelicate or anything, but he's well and truly screwed.

---

WE WANT WHATSHISFACE (via Kevin Whited):

Shooting the Wounded (John Ellis, 01/27/2004, Tech Central Station)

Let's be blunt about John Forbes Kerry; he's a cold fish and coldly calculating as well. Former Massachusetts State Senate President William Bulger (D) once said that the initials "JFK" stood for "Just for Kerry." Bulger's view is widely shared at the national level. In Massachusetts, Kerry fans are hard to find. To know him is not to love him. And the more you know him, the more you understand why.

More important, Kerry is not a constituency politician. He's self-created and actualized. There is no safety net beneath him, as there was for Reagan when he faltered in Iowa, as there was for Mondale when he lost New Hampshire, as there was for George W. Bush when he lost New Hampshire four years ago. Kerry has a base, but it's psychographic, not demographic. If he begins to slide, aging yuppies will not be the only ones to cut him loose.

So he needs to be the winner, because everybody loves a winner. And in order to be the winner, he has to make sure that no one else wins. And that is why the decisions he makes today will largely determine whether or not he leverages his success in Iowa and New Hampshire into becoming the Democratic presidential nominee, or whether he lets his remaining rival, Senator Edwards, back up off the floor.

Strategically, Kerry has to throw every dollar, every organizer, every surrogate and all of his paid media at South Carolina, Oklahoma, Missouri and (to a lesser extent) the others. He has to shoot the wounded everywhere they twitch. If he does, then it will be over next Tuesday night. If he doesn't, then the game goes on. The longer it goes, the better it is for Sen. Edwards.

All right, I finally figured out the ideal presidential candidate for the Democrats: whoever that guy was who just got elected of San Francisco. In a race where the better you know a candidate and the longer his record the less chance he has of being elected, what the party needs is a total cypher. I've even got a campaign slogan for him: "I'm not Bush!"

---

SPEAKING OF LACKING...:

What the Democrats Lack on Iraq (Fred Hiatt, January 26, 2004, Washington Post)

To appreciate the Democrats' evolving case against the war in Iraq, there is no better place to look than Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's impassioned denunciation. The senator's case, laid out in a recent speech and an article on this page Jan. 18, is comprehensive and angry. It says the war may prove to be "one of the worst blunders in more than two centuries of American foreign policy." It accuses the Bush administration of being dishonest as well as wrong.

And, in what it does not contain, it points to a gap in the Democratic message that whoever emerges as presidential nominee eventually will have to fill.

Kennedy's most inflammatory accusations have to do with alleged political motivations for the war or its timing. "Soon Karl Rove joined the public debate, and war with Iraq became all but certain," the senator says. And: "Election-year politics prevail, but they should not have prevailed over foreign policy and national security." And: "There was no imminent threat, no immediate national security imperative and no compelling reason to go to war. . . . But the election timetable was clearly driving the marketing of the product." If Karl Rove -- that is, politics -- drove Iraq policy, then President Bush would merit not only defeat, as Kennedy says, but impeachment. But much of the rest of Kennedy's indictment undercuts the idea of a politically motivated war. For, in his effort to show that the attacks of Sept. 11 were an excuse for war, the senator argues that much of the Bush administration had believed for years that Saddam Hussein had to go.

Say what? If we went to war because that's what the country wanted then the President should be impeached? Is democracy now a High Crime?

---

CONGRATULATIONS, RAYMOND:

THE BROTHERS JUDD NH DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY PROGNOSTATHON

97% Precincts Reporting:
At the suggestion of a reader smarter than ourselves, we've decided to use a "least squares analysis" to rank the entrants prognostications. Essentially, we took the difference between the entrants guess and the results as reported by the NH ABC affiliate WMUR and squared it. We then summed these values for the total least squares difference.

Raymond appears to have won the contest with a truly prescient set of picks. We'll be sending him Lee Harris's terrific book, Civilization and Its Enemies, but thank you to everyone who participated. If we can figure out how to structure a contest for the next set of primaries, and folks are interested, we'll rustle up another fabulous prize (or two...).

---

WASN'T EMERSON THE BOOZER?:

How to campaign on a faraway planet (DAVE BARRY, Jan. 27, 2004, The Miami Herald)

[V]oters were hard to find on Sunday when Sen. Joe ''Joe'' Lieberman, accompanied by the media, went campaigning door to door with his wife, Hadassah. Lieberman is trailing in the polls, but surging, at least according to his campaign headquarters, which sent out a press release that begins, quote: ``The energy on the ground in New Hampshire is incredible.''

With all due respect, somebody at Lieberman headquarters is smoking crack. There is no energy on the ground in New Hampshire. New Hampshire is currently the same temperature as Pluto.

Nevertheless, Lieberman was upbeat as he prepared to canvass a residential neighborhood.

"We're feeling . . . JOE-mentum!'' he said. Really.

Apparently, that Joementum is the same affliction Joe Namath has.

---

UNPOPULARITY CONTEST:

In Next Round, No Certainties (TODD S. PURDUM, 1/28/04, NY Times)

[M]r. Kerry has only begun to be tested on the national stage. He has yet to compete among black and other minority voters, or in the South and the big swing states that tend to decide general elections. The quirks of personality, pedigree and policy that left him struggling to connect with audiences for much of last year still leave him vulnerable to assaults from Democrats and President Bush.

Mr. Kerry spent five austere and not always popular years of his adolescence boarding at St. Paul's School, just up the road in Concord, and it was there that he first displayed the hot political ambition as well as the cool personal reserve that have marked his career and this race. He has spent much of the past five months in a grinding effort to reintroduce himself to voters here, many of whom have known him for nearly two decades as the junior senator from neighboring Massachusetts but seemed drawn instead to Dr. Dean's fresh face.

"I'm all that's left standing of the Old Man in the Mountains!" Mr. Kerry declared Monday in Portsmouth, comparing his craggy Yankee profile to the famous granite rock formation at Franconia Notch that crumbled last year. Mr. Kerry hopes that he will soon loom alone on the political landscape, but, as Robert Frost memorably wrote, "Something there is that doesn't love a wall."

There's something profoundly odd about a political party that thinks its most electable candidate is someone who is described--either openly or implicitly--in every profile as unlikable.

---

SAVING FRANCE FROM THE FRENCH?:

Is France on the way to becoming an Islamic state? (Barbara Amiel, 26/01/2004, Daily Telegraph)

France is facing the problem that dare not speak its name. Though French law prohibits the census from any reference to ethnic background or religion, many demographers estimate that as much as 20-30 per cent of the population under 25 is now Muslim. The streets, the traditional haunt of younger people, now belong to Muslim youths. In France, the phrase "les jeunes" is a politically correct way of referring to young Muslims.

Given current birth rates, it is not impossible that in 25 years France will have a Muslim majority. The consequences are dynamic: is it possible that secular France might become an Islamic state?

The situation is not dissimilar elsewhere in the EU. Europeans may at some young point in the 21st century have to decide whether they wish to retain the diluted but traditional Judaeo-Christian culture of their minority or have it replaced by the Islamic culture of the majority. [...]

Tribal friction has only two solutions: groups will either unite in the manner of Normans and Saxons, melding into a society that may have different religious practices but subscribes to the same laws and values - in which case headscarves, beards and demographics don't matter a fig. Or they will follow the pattern of warring tribes throughout history.

The question is not whether French and Muslims can co-exist with each other so long as Muslim schoolgirls are bareheaded. Rather, it is the fundamental question of whether Muslim groups will become part of the French nation. This is not one of those old "querelles gauloises" that Barzini so loved. It is the fundamental dilemma of the new century.

Actually, the question is a bit different: it is whether an Islamic France is not preferable to a secular one.

MORE:
Europe Resisting Islam's Dark Ages (Alexis Amory, January 28, 2004, FrontPageMagazine.com)

The first international figure to vocalize the threat of fundamentalism to his own country was Holland’s Pym Fortuyn, a flamboyant millionaire businessman turned politician.   Holland had long been the ne plus ultra of a tolerant, libertarian society preaching a multicultural message that was not necessarily endorsed by its citizenry.  

Despite the “tolerance” required of the Dutch themselves, the Muslim immigrants were granted special rights and favors that did nothing to encourage assimilation.  The government encouraged immigrant children to speak Turkish, Arabic or Berber in primary schools rather than insisting they learn in Dutch.  Funding was provided for “ethnic diversity projects”, including 700 Islamic clubs that were sometimes grabbed as showcases by radical clerics.

Assimilation?  Forget it!  Even now, 30 years later, between 70 and 80 per cent of Dutch-born members of immigrant families import their spouse from their “home” country, mostly Turkey or Morocco, perpetuating a fast-growing Muslim subculture in large cities, according to London’s Daily Telegraph.  This means Dutch Muslim men are rejecting Muslim women born in Holland and trawling for someone more ignorant and more obedient from their “home” country.   The ones marrying female Dutch-born Muslims are foreign males who pay the girl’s family to use marriage as a ticket into the West .

Fortuyn played a strong hand.  A homosexual with a multi-hued history of amours, and with a deputy party leader who was not just black, but an immigrant,  the left couldn’t credibly accuse him of racism.  He was the first to understand that the rigid and conservative immigrants, who kept themselves apart, wished to demolish the freedoms and tolerance of which Holland was so proud and were thus a threat to Dutch liberal society.   He spoke to the fears of a large number of the Dutch who had kept quiet for fear of being branded “racist”.  Within a scant three months of forming his conservative party, which called for a moratorium on all immigration until those already in situ were assimilated, the party had already laid claim to 26 of Holland’s 150 seats.

Had he lived, it is likely that he would have won the upcoming election and been Holland’s prime minister today.  But he was murdered almost two years ago – ironically, by a leftie animal rights activist, although what animal rights had to do with anything was never explained.  So great was the sense of loss, that Fortuyn’s funeral in Rotterdam drew vast crowds and outpourings of grief in an eerie echo of Princess Diana’s funeral in Britain three years previously.

The election of Mr. Fortuyn, an advocate of pedophilia, illustrates the question nicely. In what sense would his morally debased Holland have been preferable to one dominated by Islam?

---

HUTTONMANIA:

Weblog special: the Hutton inquiry (The Guardian)

Those of you who read the entire Pentagon Papers will love this resource the Guardian has put together on the Hutton inquiry. One interesting aspect of the Guardian's effort is that they link to their rival's coverage of the story. The Guardian's politics is typically terrible, but they do get the Web.

---

THE 52ND STATE:

An American president of the Philippines? (Marco Garrido, 1/29/04, Asia Times)

Much is unclear; much is ironic. It is unclear whether Fernando Poe Jr (FPJ), the front-runner in the Philippine presidential race, is even qualified to run. His citizenship at birth, one lawyer contends, was actually American. If this is found to be the case, Poe could be disqualified for not meeting the constitutional requirement of the president being "a natural-born Filipino".

This would be ironic indeed. A revelation of US citizenship would probably bolster FPJ's appeal among an electorate that, by and large, considers tangible ties to the United States an unqualified positive. The perennial presidential candidate Ely Pamatong banks on this allure, campaigning, as he does, on a platform of US statehood for the Philippines.

Isn't the whole world supposed to hate us?

---

WHERE THE WAR ENDS:

US draws a line on Pakistan's nuclear program (Syed Saleem Shahzad, 1/29/04, Asia Times)

Parallel to this Pakistani investigation, though, the US has launched its own independent probe into Pakistan's links to the nuclear programs of Iran, Libya and North Korea, and, depending on the results, according to insiders in the Pakistani administration, Washington could lean on Islamabad to completely abandon its program. Such action would conform with the US's broader agenda to defuse tension on the sub-continent. Already the US has forced India and Pakistan, not quite kicking and screaming, to the peace negotiating table, and for this peace process to last, Pakistan, a perennial meddler in Afghanistan and Kashmir in particular, would need to be tamed.

The US hand has been strengthened by the weekend announcement by President General Pervez Musharraf, who for the first time admitted that "some individual or individuals" may have been involved in proliferating Pakistan's nuclear technology.

America is notoriously awful at seeing wars through to their logical conclusions--turning the Civil War, WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq I from military victories into geo-strategic losses--and if the war on terror concludes without our depriving Pakistan and North Korea of their nuclear weapons, and/or without our rooting al Qaeda out of Western Pakistan, it too will be a defeat.

---

I'M BAD, I'M NATIONWIDE:

A shift to national stage will change the dynamic (Yvonne Abraham, 1/28/2004, Boston Globe)

Today, the race for the Democratic presidential nomination goes national. And national changes everything.

Iowa and New Hampshire, those temples of retail politics, are history. The candidates have logged thousands of hours in those states, flipping pancakes and placing gentle hands on elderly shoulders in hopes of attracting every voter personally. For months they belonged to the voters of those two states, who have now delivered their 67 delegates, out of 2,162 needed to secure the nomination.

Retail is over. From now on, it's wholesale all the way.

And it's going to cost all the candidates now as they race back and forth from South Carolina to Arizona, seeking votes and buying television time. All of the campaigns are strapped for cash after the battles in Iowa and New Hampshire.

John Kerry, now the clear front-runner after his two victories, has had some fund-raising success over the past week, but some of his rivals are nearly broke at a time when they have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to air television commercials to be competitive in the next stage of the primary.

Just six days from today, primaries will be conducted in Arizona, Delaware, Missouri, Oklahoma, and South Carolina. New Mexico and North Dakota will hold caucuses. A total of 336 delegates will be up for grabs.

That's a pretty good test to see if Democrats across the entire country buy the Kerry campaign's "electability" theory.

---

THERE IS A SHI'ASTAN, GET OVER IT:

SISTANI'S WAY: Part 1: Democracy, colonial-style (Pepe Escobar, 1/28/04, Asia Times)

Bush and his neo-conservative entourage did everything in their power to bypass the UN to get inside Iraq. Now they need the UN to get out. But it's not the UN that holds the magic key. It is Grand Ayatollah Sistani. If he issues a fatwa (religious edict) condemning the caucuses and the future, indirectly-appointed national assembly, 15 million Shi'ites will follow - and whatever government chosen indirectly will be considered a fake. Sistani has also made it very clear that only a government chosen by free, direct elections will have the legitimacy to negotiate the crucial issue with the Americans: when the occupying troops will actually leave.

But what do Sistani and the Shi'ites ultimately want? It is not a theocratic state modelled on Iran, where the principle of Velayat-e-Faqih - politics subordinated to religion - is paramount. They want a democracy, with Shi'ite politicians holding most of the levels of power - something consistent with the fact that Shi'ites make up 62 percent of the national population. And crucially, they want no political involvement by Islamic clerics. But no one in Washington seems to be listening.

The Administration is obviously reluctant to see its plans hijacked by Sistani, but in the end he's doing what we want and helping us get out, so we'll yield.

---

HOW HAS THE WAR MADE US MORE SECURE?

Libya hands over WMD equipment: US (AFP, Jan 27, 2004)

The White House announced Tuesday that Libya had shipped parts crucial to its quest for nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles to a secure US location, calling it "real progress" towards disarmament.

A transport plane carrying some 55,000 pounds of documents and equipment, including centrifuge parts used to enrich uranium and missile guidance sets, landed in Tennessee at 8:37 a.m. Monday, said spokesman Scott McClellan.

"The shipment is now at a secure facility in Tennessee," said the spokesman, who added that "the most sensitive" documents ties to Libya's nuclear weapons program had been aboard a similar flight last week.

---

THERE IS A KURDISTAN, GET OVER IT:

Kurds, divided, face new future: Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan will meet with President Bush Wednesday; Iraq's Kurds will be on the agenda. (Nicholas Birch, 1/28/04, The Christian Science Monitor)

Turkish leader Tayyip Erdogan is visiting the White House Wednesday, in part to dissuade President Bush from giving too much autonomy to the Kurdish parties running northern Iraq. Ankara claims that if other states give their Kurds an inch, Turkey's own much larger minority will try to take a mile. But the antipathy between Turkish and Iraqi Kurds calls into question the basis of Ankara's continued opposition to Iraqi Kurdish calls for a federal Iraq.

The reasons for the lack of solidarity between Turkish and Iraqi Kurds are numerous. They have been divided by borders for over 80 years. Most Iraqi Kurds speak a dialect incomprehensible to the Kirmanci-speakers in Turkey's southeast.

Above all, though, Turkish Kurdish perceptions of Iraqi Kurds have been clouded by memories of their own nationalist struggle. As Mahmud, sitting next to Abdulaziz in the cafe, puts it: "We have no faith in [Iraqi Kurdish leaders] Talabani and Barzani - the Kurds' only real hope is in prison in Imrali."

He's referring to PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, in solitary confinement since 1999 on an island off Istanbul, and largely remembered as a violent advocate of Kurdish separatism. An ex-Marxist, he targeted not just the Turkish authorities, but also local tribal leaders he considered responsible for southeastern Turkey's poverty.

In the eyes of many Turkish Kurds still sympathetic to Mr. Ocalan, Massoud Barzani, son of a charismatic tribal leader, symbolizes the feudal, tribal structures they would like to see eradicated from Kurdish society.

The distaste is mutual.

Turkish worries are perfectly understandable, but the Kurds have had a de facto state for over a decade and they aren't coming out of the war with less autonomy.

---

ENLIGHTENING THE DARK CONTINENT:

Signs of tolerance amid religious strife in Sudan: Muslim-Christian tensions are softening in Sudan - which could set the tone for Africa. (Abraham McLaughlin, 1/28/04, The Christian Science Monitor)

[A]n end to Sudan's 20-year civil war - between mostly Muslim northerners and Christian and traditional southerners - is in sight. Conciliation is in the air. Officials appear to be moderating their religious policies.

Now the test is whether Sudan can morph from an ethno-religious killing ground into a modern melting pot with robust religious tolerance. The outcome will deeply affect the future of Africa's vastest country. And it could set a tone of religious civility for the nearby Middle East, and for Africa, where Muslim-Christian tensions are rising.

"The government is beginning to support all faiths," the Bishop of Khartoum, Ezekiel Kondo, tells the congregation. "But we will not succeed unless we continue knocking on the door," he says, meaning they must raise money, scout land, and lobby for permission to build.

Whether they succeed - and whether Sudan succeeds - matters for Africa. Growing numbers of Africans are converting to Islam and Christianity. There's an inflow of Islamic fundamentalism. Both trends are adding to - and sometimes causing - strife.

In neighboring Chad, low-level fighting continues between Arab northerners and black African southerners. In Nigeria, the government is fending off political and armed attacks from disaffected Muslims. In Kenya, some Islamic leaders want strict sharia, Islamic law, imposed. They threaten to secede if it's not. "If a pluralist, democratic Sudan can be created," says a senior Western diplomat here, "it can be a model for the rest of Africa."

From Eritrea to Djibouti to Morroco to Libya to Sudan to Kenya to Uganda...improvements in Africa, however tenuous, continue to be a great untrumpeted story.

---

WHERE'S THE BEEF?:

Weeknight Kitchen: Lynne's Super Stuffed Turkey Burger (Lynne Rossetto Kasper, January 27, 2004, The Splendid Table)

Makes 2 generous burgers; multiplies easily

1 medium onion, thinly sliced
Small handful tasty grape tomatoes, halved
1 large clove garlic, thinly sliced
4 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, divided
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1/2 pound raw ground turkey
2 tablespoons dry wine (white or red)
1 to 2 ounces extra-sharp Cheddar cheese, cut into 1/4- to 1/2-inch cubes
2 large hamburger buns
Condiments such as catsup, mustard, etc.

1. Put 2 tablespoons of the olive oil in a 10-inch nonstick skillet and heat over high. Add onions and tomatoes with generous sprinkles of salt and pepper. Sauté over high, stirring frequently, until onions begin to brown. Add garlic and cook until onions are wilted and soft. Remove from heat. Set aside half of the onion mixture for topping burgers.

2. Blend ground turkey with remaining onion mixture, 1/4 teaspoon salt and 1/8 teaspoon pepper. Shape into 2 balls. Make a deep hole with your thumb and insert half of the cheese into each ball. Pinch hole closed and flatten ball into 3/4- to 1-inch thick patties with no sign of cheese on the outside. Patties will be very soft and sticky.

3. Heat remaining 2 tablespoons olive oil in a 10-inch nonstick skillet over medium high. Sear burgers about 30 seconds on each side until browned. Turn carefully with a pancake spatula as patties are soft and can break easily. Lower heat to medium-low and cook about 5 minutes per side, or until there is no pink at center of burger and an instant-read thermometer measures at least 150°F. Serve hot on buns, topping with reserved onions and your favorite condiments.

---

WHERE'S THE PART WHERE HE DESERTS?:

Operation Desert Guard: Bush's War Record: Missing, Inaction (James Ridgeway, January 28 - February 3, 2004, Village Voice)

What are the facts? The single best rundown on this issue was contained in an article by Walter V. Robinson of The Boston Globe on May 23, 2000. On May 28, 1968, Bush enlisted in the Texas Air National Guard's 147th Fighter-Interceptor Group at Ellington Air Force Base in Houston and was selected for pilot training. In July of that year a board of officers said he should be commissioned as a second lieutenant; he left for six weeks of basic training and was commissioned that September 4. Then he took off for eight weeks to work on a Florida Senate campaign. Next he attended and graduated from flight school (November 25, 1968, to November 28, 1969). He trained full-time to be an F-102 pilot at Ellington, where from July 7, 1970, to April 16, 1972, he attended frequent drills and alerts.

From this point on, his record is murky. Bush's records reveal no sign he showed up for duty during his fifth year as a guardsman, according to the Globe. On May 24, 1972, Bush had moved to Alabama to work on a Senate race and received permission to serve with a reserve unit there. Headquarters ordered that he serve with a more active unit, and on September 5, 1972, he got permission to perform his Guard duty at the 187th Tactical Recon Group in Montgomery. But there is no record of his turning up, and the unit commander says he never did. From November 1972 to April 30, 1973, Bush was in Houston but didn't go to his Guard duties. In May 1973, two lieutenant colonels in charge of Bush's Houston unit were unable to rate him for the prior 12 months, claiming he had not been at the unit during that time. From May to July 1973, Bush logged 36 days on duty after special orders for active duty were issued to him. His last day in uniform was July 30, 1973, and that October 1, after beginning Harvard Business School, this weekend warrior was discharged from the Texas Air National Guard. That was eight months before his Guard tour was scheduled to expire.

If the president wasn't a deserter, what was he?

A well-connected Guardsman, who appears to have done his duty, but not one smidge more?

---

EUROPE’S ADDICTION:

Europeans are not cowards. It's that we know war (Fletcher Crossman/International Herald Tribune/Jan 28, 2004)

Listening to Richard Perle on the radio recently was a little hard for a European like me. Perle, a former chairman of the Defense Policy Board, stated that European nations "do not have the most courageous of instincts," with the implication that America has to intervene in international affairs because Europeans are afraid to. Perle's comments take place against a chorus of similar sentiments to be heard on America's airwaves in recent months. An average listener would be forgiven for believing that Europeans are a cowardly bunch of ungrateful wimps, whose anti-American bombast is a merely a cover for their complicity with evil regimes. It may be true. But as a European myself - I'm from Britain - it doesn't feel true. And I wonder if our cultural disconnect comes from two very different experiences of war. Let's be clear: Europeans don't run away from war. Even the most fleeting look at our history will tell you that we love war, we want war, we will find almost any excuse for a war. In 1914...

Our cities were flattened, a genocide was committed, a whole civilization was brought to its knees. But World War II was mercifully different for America. Despite its debilitating losses - and its astonishing selflessness in prioritizing the European theater ahead of its own mission in the Pacific - America emerged from the devastation in a pre-eminent position, its infrastructure intact. Culturally, politically and economically, America stood like a gleaming Colossus above an impoverished world. If America had believed that by use of force, Good could prevail over Evil, then it had been proved right. War had saved Freedom and defeated Tyranny.

And this is now burned into the American psyche in much the same way that cynicism is for the European. America is the brave young soldier, with shining eyes and a firm jaw, marching towards a battle that will make the world a better place. Europe is the bitter old veteran sitting on the sidewalk, his medals collecting dust somewhere, shaking his head knowingly as the young soldier marches by.

It is heartening to hear a European put their case without rancour or disdain. He even openly acknowledges America's historical selflessness and the nobility of her goals. We are all guided by our history to an extent and it is needlessly insulting to link modern European pacifism to individual European cowardice. Yet this image of the tired, battle-scarred European looking sadly and knowingly at the naive and idealistic American is itself becoming pretty tired.

Four times in a dozen years the U.S. has traveled half way around the world to defeat three genocidal, sabre-rattling tyrannies. Each time it was done with precision planning, astonishing speed, few casualties and far fewer victims than even supporters feared. Mission accomplished, the Americans went home or, in the case of Iraq, are trying to. This is very strange behaviour for a naive and cocksure imperialist power. More to the point, it calls into question the idea that war is unthinkable or the ultimate evil.

Europe’s post-war wisdom has evolved into a psychic addiction. Like many recovering addicts, it becomes confused and hostile when life does not evolve in accordance with the world view it constructed to give meaning to its destructive folly. It is like the alcoholic who finally conquers his demons but who deeply resents those who drink without encountering them. It is one thing to be cautious and hard-headed about war, quite another to hide from it desperately while raging at those who don’t but who both escape and avoid inflicting its full destructive potential.

---

SECOND CRISIS DODGED:

Hutton: The verdict: IT WAS the call every journalist in Westminster was waiting for — and Britain’s top political editor TREVOR KAVANAGH got it. (Trevor Kavanagh, 1/28/04, The Sun)

For days the big question at the Commons has been the verdict of Lord Hutton’s report on the death of Dr David Kelly.

And before MPs and the Cabinet got to hear the conclusions of Lord Hutton, Trevor noted them all down from a trusted source — then set about writing the Scoop of the Year.

TONY Blair is today sensationally cleared of any “dishonourable or underhand” conduct leading to the suicide of tragic scientist David Kelly.

Lord Hutton’s long-awaited report into Dr Kelly’s death also exonerates ex-Downing Street media boss Alastair Campbell.

And it makes only passing criticism of the Defence ministry headed by embattled Geoff Hoon.

But the document — top secret until it is published officially at noon today — is a devastating indictment of the BBC and its defence correspondent Andrew Gilligan.

Not a bad 48 hours for Mr. Blair, eh?

---

MORE EARNEST THAN REALISTIC? (via mc):

GOP deficit angst rises: $4.2 trillion outlook emboldens party's fiscal conservatives (Alexander Bolton, 1/27/04, The Hill'

Republicans expect the battle over spending to begin in earnest this week at the retreat, just days before President Bush is due to submit his 2005 budget next Monday. They hope to resolve all intraparty disputes on spending before the spending bills reach the House and Senate floors this summer and avoid the rebellions that in the past have ground the appropriations process to a halt.

Conservatives say that their list of reforms includes across-the-board non-defense budget cuts, spending caps with real teeth and requirements that efforts to waive House budgetary rules be voted on by the GOP caucus behind closed doors in order to reach the floor.

Some conservatives have threatened to vote against a GOP-written budget that does not cut the deficit to below current projections.

However, the fractious lawmakers agree with their leadership on one thing: The deficits are not to be trimmed by raising taxes or failing to make permanent the 2001 tax cuts. This is in line with the position Bush took in his State of the Union address last week.

"The real battle will be in the coming weeks," said Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.), who led conservative opposition last year to the $400 billion Medicare bill that budget hawks criticized as the type of bloated federal entitlement they came to Congress to curtail.

Pence said that if priorities the House adopts in its federal budget plan reflect fiscal discipline, then "I don't expect that we'll have a contentious year on the floor. If not, I think you'll have a large number of the members ready to be heard if need be on fiscal discipline on the floor."

More power to them if they can do it, but the prospect of getting any kind of fiscally responsible bills through a Senate where a few Democrats can kill any spending cut they don't like seems highly dubious, and there's no point having an intraparty bloodletting only to fail in the end.

---

ALL THE WAY WITH JFK:

CBS News estimates that Sen. John Kerry is the winner of the New Hampshire primary.

UPDATE:

Did Senator Kerry just refer to businessmen who outsource jobs as traitors to their country ("Benedict Arnolds")?

UPDATE II:

Did Howard Dean, in what is apparently part of his stump speech, just say that the biggest loss America has suffered since George W. Bush was elected is our unity? How about losing our fellow citizens on 9-11?

---

WHAT'S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT?:

Death of a Salesman:
Can John Kerry sell John Kerry? (William Saletan, Jan. 27, 2004, Slate)

If the polls are right, John Kerry will win the New Hampshire primary today and head South and West as the Democratic Party's presumptive presidential nominee. "Dated Dean, Married Kerry," goes the slogan of the hour. But before this rebound relationship drifts to the altar, maybe Democrats should ask what they're getting in Kerry. After watching him for a year and seeing him work New Hampshire, here's my warning: You're getting a guy who has plenty of selling points but can't make the sale himself.

Like my colleague Chris Suellentrop, I've watched the Kerry surge with amazement. I've asked myself how Kerry is persuading previously skeptical voters to change their minds about him. The answer is, he isn't. Other people are doing the persuasion. Other people are doing the testimonial ads, as first lady Christie Vilsack did for Kerry in Iowa. Other people are firing up his crowds. Other people are telling his story. Other people are touting his virtues at rallies because he doesn't reliably display those virtues himself. The man who stood up to serve his country as a soldier is being propped up as a candidate.

One of the things you hear alot these days is that the Left's hatred of George W. Bush is no different than was the Right's hatred of Bill Clinton. You also hear that the main consideration of the primary voters this time around is therefore to find someone who can beat President Bush. So they appear to be willing to vote for guys they don't particularly like or agree with much or even know much about, just so long as they are perceived as "electable".

Now, what's interesting about this is that GOP voters, who presumably would have wanted to beat Bill Clinton and Al Gore just as badly, handed the '96 nomination to Bob Dole, whose turn it was in the much more hierarchical and orderly Republican Party, and to George W. Bush in 2000, even though John McCain polled far better in head-to-head matchups against Gore. Electability seemed a rather secondary issue. In the case of Bush vs. McCain in particular, the nomination went to the guy who seemed more comfortable being a conservative Republican. This did pretty nearly backfire--so maybe it proves once and for all that the GOP is the Stupid Party--but it meant that when Mr. Bush did pull out the election the party had the guy it wanted most, instead of a guy who'd have won easier but about whom they weren't terribly enthusiastic.

That the Democrats are doing the opposite is obvious even in the unofficial slogan of the Kerry campaign--"Dated Dean, Married Kerry". Not just Senator Kerry but General Clark and Senator Edwards have all made a conscious decision to market themselves as candidates you settle for, instead of ones you love. Strange.

---

NORTH AFRICA:

France fails immigrants, says official study (Jon Henley, January 27, 2004, The Guardian)

France is failing miserably to assimilate immigrants, a government commission said yesterday, painting what it called a "morbid picture" of ghettos, soaring unemployment, inadequate education, sexual inequality and rising fundamentalism in a "socially and professionally disadvantaged" community.

The High Council on Integration said in a damning report that an "enormous effort" was needed to assimilate adolescents of immigrant origin, who have been "abandoned" and constitute a "significant challenge for the republic".

The report comes as tensions mount over government plans to ban Islamic headscarves from schools, a move meant to protect France's strictly secular state, but which many fear will spark more resentment in its large Muslim community and hinder, rather than help, integration.

France no longer has a coherent culture of its own to assimilate immigrants into and is taking in the least assimilable of the lot anyway. But its rapid demographic decline and insistence on maintaining the welfare state means it has no choice but to keep bringing them in. It's a recipe for disaster.

MORE:
More people attend mosques than Church of England: Census (Nabanita Sircar, January 26, 2004, Hinustan Times)

More people in Britain attend mosques than the Church of England. It is for the first time that Muslims have overtaken Anglicans. According to figures 930,000 Muslims attend a place of worship at least once a week, whereas only 916,000 Anglicans do the same. Muslim leaders are now claiming that, given such a rise of Islam in Britain, Muslims should receive a share of the privileged status of the Church of England. [...]

Immigration from Eastern Europe and conversions are believed to be adding to the number of Muslims. Lord Ahmad Patel, a Labour peer said 10 extra seats should be allocated to other religions. The Church of England has 26 seats in the House of Lords. However, the recent figures do not include Catholics. The Catholic church has 1.5 million British worshippers.

---

ONE CRISIS DOWN, ONE TO GO:

Government wins top-up fees vote (Matthew Tempest, January 27, 2004, The Guardian)

The government tonight narrowly won its vote on top-up fees - giving Tony Blair a brief window of respite before he defends himself against the conclusions of the Hutton report tomorrow.

After a six-hour debate, the government won the vote by minuscule margin of just five, with 316 voting for the bill and 311 against.

That still means the government has turned around a seemingly unstoppable rebellion by Labour backbenchers - for which many will give the credit to Nick Brown and his namesake, the chancellor.

---

LOOKING FOR ELECTABLE, FINDING DESPICABLE:

Vetting the Vet Record: Is Kerry a proud war hero or angry antiwar protester? (Mackubin Thomas Owens, 1/27/04, National Review)

Kerry hooked up with an organization called Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). Two events cooked up by this group went a long way toward cementing in the public mind the image of Vietnam as one big atrocity. The first of these was the January 31, 1971, "Winter Soldier Investigation," organized by "the usual suspects" among antiwar celebrities such as Jane Fonda, Dick Gregory, and Kennedy-assassination conspiracy theorist, Mark Lane. Here, individuals purporting to be Vietnam veterans told horrible stories of atrocities in Vietnam: using prisoners for target practice, throwing them out of helicopters, cutting off the ears of dead Viet Cong soldiers, burning villages, and gang-raping women as a matter of course.

The second event was "Dewey Canyon III," or what VVAW called a "limited incursion into the country of Congress" in April of 1971. It was during this VVAW "operation" that John Kerry first came to public attention. The group marched on Congress to deliver petitions to Congress and then to the White House. The highlight of this event occurred when veterans threw their medals and ribbons over a fence in front of the Capitol, symbolizing a rebuke to the government that they claimed had betrayed them. One of the veterans flinging medals back in the face of his government was John Kerry, although it turns out they were not his medals, but someone else's.

Several days later Kerry testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His speech, touted as a spontaneous rhetorical endeavor, was a tour de force, convincing many Americans that their country had indeed waged a merciless and immoral war in Vietnam. It was particularly powerful because Kerry did not fit the antiwar-protester mold — he was no scruffy, wide-eyed hippie. He was instead the best that America had to offer. He was, according to Burkett and Whitley, the "All-American boy, mentally twisted by being asked to do terrible things, then abandoned by his government."

Kerry began by referring to the Winter Soldiers Investigation in Detroit. Here, he claimed, "over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command."

"It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit, the emotions in the room, the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam, but they did, they relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.

They told their stories. At times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country."

This is quite a bill of particulars to lay at the feet of the U.S. military. He said in essence that his fellow veterans had committed unparalleled war crimes in Vietnam as a matter of course, indeed, that it was American policy to commit such atrocities.

In fact, the entire Winter Soldiers Investigation was a lie. It was inspired by Mark Lane's 1970 book entitled Conversations with Americans, which claimed to recount atrocity stories by Vietnam veterans. This book was panned by James Reston Jr. and Neil Sheehan, not exactly known as supporters of the Vietnam War. Sheehan in particular demonstrated that many of Lane's "eye witnesses" either had never served in Vietnam or had not done so in the capacity they claimed.

And he thinks he's fit to command that same military?

---

YOU MEAN WE DON'T LIVE IN A POLICE STATE?:

Justice investigators find no abuses of anti-terrorism Patriot Act (CURT ANDERSON, January 27, 2004, Associated Press)

A Justice Department investigation into possible civil rights and civil liberties abuses under the anti-terrorism USA Patriot Act found no abuses but a few instances of mistreatment of Muslim and Arab people, mainly at U.S. prisons, according to a report released Tuesday.

Among the 1,266 recent civil rights and civil liberties complaints received between June 14 and Dec. 15, 2003, only 17 involved Justice employees and merited a full investigation, according to the report by Glenn A. Fine, the department's inspector general.

Of those, most involved excessive force, verbal abuse and other alleged mistreatment at Bureau of Prisons facilities. [...]

Most of the complaints -- 720 -- were found to be "unrelated" to civil liberties or civil rights. These included people who claim the government is broadcasting harmful signals to people or that its agents are intercepting their dreams, according to the report.

81% of those latter complaints come from Dennis Kucinich and his supporters.

---

GOOD NEWS FOR TYRANTS:

Report: Humanitarian reasons didn't justify Iraq war: Human Rights Watch dismisses one of the Bush administration's main arguments for the invasion. (Matthew Clark, January 27, 2004, csmonitor.com)

As the months roll by without any discovery of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the Bush administration has increasingly emphasized Saddam Hussein's brutality and human rights violations as an important justification for the preemptive war it launched to overthrow his regime. After former chief US weapons inspector David Kay announced over the weekend that Iraq did not possess any WMD stockpiles before the war, the White House has backed off the claim that had been its main justification for the war.

But a leading advocacy group, Human Rights Watch (HRW), released a report Monday challenging the administration's other main justification. The report said that the war in Iraq should not be justified as a defense of human rights. In its annual report, the independent, nongovernmental organization argues that, because there was no ongoing or imminent mass killing when the conflict began, the war was not necessary to stop such atrocities.

"The Bush administration cannot justify the war in Iraq as a humanitarian intervention, and neither can Tony Blair," said Kenneth Roth, the group's executive director. The mass killing of Kurds in 1988 (often cited by US President George W. Bush) would have justified humanitarian intervention, Mr. Roth said.

"But such interventions should be reserved for stopping an imminent or ongoing slaughter," he said. "They shouldn't be used belatedly to address atrocities that were ignored in the past."

Reflexive opposition to America and to war has made a lot of folks on the Left say a lot off stupid things, but a purported human rights organization suggesting that a genocidal dictatorship need only pause in its killing in order to make its sovereignty inviolable has to take the cake.

---

HEAVY TURNOUT IN HANOVER ANYWAY:

Just went and voted--George W. Bush for president, Condi Rice for vice president--they've already run out of Democratic ballots once and had to send for more.

MORE:
If early projections hold up--with Dean closing to within 5 points of Kerry and Edwards and Clark far back--Dean can emerge as the big winner here. Not only did he battle back but he's got the money and organization to run everywhere. Most importantly, John Kerry doesn't look like he can take a punch and the Doctor looks ready to throw a few again, Candidates trade jabs as New Hampshire votes (CNN, January 27, 2004):

"I was the front-runner in this race for a long time. Everybody threw everything they could at me," Dean told CNN's "American Morning."

"One of the things John will have to learn as a front-runner is (to) stop whining when people say something different about him."

---

FAB FIVE FIX-UP?:

Kerry hit on cosmetic issue (Lloyd Grove, 1/27/04, NY Post)

The down and dirty New Hampshire primary ends tonight - not a moment too soon for front-runner John Kerry.

Since the Massachusetts senator's Iowa victory last week, operatives for rival Democratic campaigns have been insinuating that Kerry is getting Botox injections, paralyzing the muscles that produce worry lines.

Yesterday - the same day I received such a call from a hardened spin doctor versed in the black arts of negative campaigning - Kerry spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter told me she has been busy denying the rumor for the past week.

"Have you looked at him?" Cutter demanded, referring to her creased, droopy-eyed candidate. "He looks like a 60-year-old man who has been working too hard running for President, with little time for sleep and no time to worry about what he looks like."

The Botox attack apparently wasn't dismissed from the get-go because Kerry's 65-year-old wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, openly touts her regular use of the wrinkle-fighting treatments. The Chicago Tribune put the rumor into public circulation with a story last week, and the Boston Herald followed up with a Sunday editorial noting that "Kerry does look a darn bit shinier than usual."

It definitely looks like he had something done around his eyes.

---

FRANKINCENSED:

AL FRANKEN KNOCKS DOWN DEAN HECKLER (VINCENT MORRIS, January 27, 2004, NY Post)

Wise-cracking funnyman Al Franken yesterday body-slammed a demonstrator to the ground after the man tried to shout down Gov. Howard Dean. [...]

Franken said he's not backing Dean but merely wanted to protect the right of people to speak freely. "I would have done it if he was a Dean supporter at a Kerry rally," he said.

"I'm neutral in this race but I'm for freedom of speech, which means people should be able to assemble and speak without being shouted down."

The trouble started when several supporters of fringe presidential candidate Lyndon Larouche began shouting accusations at Dean.

That's a shockingly sensible view of free speech from Mr. Franken--such freedoms have consequences, one of which should be that people can beat the tar out of you.

---

KEEP THE PEDAL TO THE METAL:

Iran to end vote dispute: Many barred candidates will be reinstated (The International Herald Tribune, January 27, 2004)
 

TEHRAN A bitter political dispute over the mass disqualification of reformist candidates for Iran's parliamentary elections next month is close to being resolved, the Parliament speaker, Mehdi Karroubi, said on Tuesday.

"In the next couple of days we will witness a very good understanding between the government and the Guardian Council," Karroubi told reporters.

He said the Guardian Council would announce by Friday the reinstatement of many of the candidates it had barred from running in the Feb. 20 race.

The candidate bans imposed by the hard-line Guardian Council - an unelected 12-member body of clerics and jurists with sweeping powers - plunged Iran into its worst political crisis in years and prompted international concern over the legitimacy of the coming vote.

The vast majority of those barred were President Mohammad Khatami's reformist allies, whom hard-liners accuse of undermining the values of the Islamic Republic and trying to shift Iran from clerical to secular rule.

Reformist Parliament members, dozens of whom have been holding a 16-day sit-in, said they would resign on Sunday if the Guardian Council did not reinstate the candidates. Reformist parties also said they might boycott the vote, and government officials have threatened not to organize the vote.

But Karroubi said around 500 disqualified candidates, including many current Parliament members, would be reinstated on Tuesday and more would be reinstated by the end of Thursday.

It's remarkable the degree to which the adoption of the rhetoric and the forms of democracy can force even the unwilling to behave in democratic ways, but those who genuinely want reform in Iran should keep pressing their advantage.

---

IRON LADY VS. WOBBLY MAN:

Tea with Mrs. Thatcher (YEHUDA AVNER, Jan. 26, 2004, Jerusalem Post)

THE FIRST Gulf War had just about ended, and between sips of tea and cucumber sandwiches Thatcher resorted to salvos of reminiscences about how she had first heard of Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait the August before.

"I was still prime minister last summer, of course," she recalled wistfully, "and was attending a conference in Aspen, Colorado, with president Bush. When I heard about the invasion of Kuwait I went to see him in his suite. He asked me, 'Now, Margaret, what's your view?' I told him I had experienced aggression in the Falklands, so I had no doubt how to deal with an aggressor.

"Aggressors had to be stopped, thrown out, destroyed. And when he began to chew this over, I said, 'Look George, this is no time to be wobbly. No half-measures. Liberate Kuwait. Go into Iraq. Destroy Saddam Hussein and his National Guard utterly. Britain will be by your side.'"

Her voice suddenly acquired a serrated edge: "George Bush promised me two things," she said grimly. "He promised to destroy the Iraqi forces, and he promised to capture Saddam Hussein and have him tried as a war criminal. Well, as far as I am concerned, what happened in fact "

She was interrupted in mid-sentence by the little servant's cough of her maid, who had obsequiously entered the room to hand her a note. Thatcher shot her a sharp glance, read the note with ferocious concentration and, rising, said, "You'll have to excuse me a moment. I have to take a call in the study."

She strode to the door, opened it, paused, turned, and glowered back, "So yes, what happened in fact is that George Bush failed on both counts. He neither destroyed the National Guard, nor did he capture Saddam Hussein."

She said this with an emphatic lifting of the head and a lowering of the eyelids for added veracity. Then, with a cold, hard stare, she walked back into the room, laid a confiding finger on my arm, and said, "I've telephoned Number 10 only once since leaving, and that's when I saw what savagery Saddam Hussein was inflicting on the Kurds and the Shi'ites.

"I simply could not hold my tongue. They were doing exactly what George Bush had asked them to do – rise up against Saddam Hussein – and then he left them hanging in the lurch."

It's hard to think of a stronger indictment of multilateralism than that it required that Saddam be left in power in 1991.

---

CONTEST CLOSING AT 10AM:

Be sure to get your entries in for the BROTHERS JUDD NH DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY PROGNOSTATHON. The prize this time is especially appealing--the good people of FSB Associates are once again kicking in a book and this time it's the great Lee Harris's Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History. If you're unfamiliar, his essay, Our World Historical Gamble, may have been the best thing written last year about the role of America in the present danger.

---

NO ONE EVER TAKES THE PONY AWAY:

Perpetual Debt: From the British Empire to the American Hegemon (H.A. Scott Trask, January 27, 2004, Mises.org)

Bush officials have suggested that their "war on terror" will last many decades. Less than a month after 9-11, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld compared it to the "50-years, plus or minus" of Cold War with the Soviet Union. In March 2002, Secretary of State Powell warned that the war "may never be finished, not in our lifetime." A month later, Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge warned that the threat of terrorism "is a permanent condition to which this country must permanently adapt."

Thus, if the ruling elite has its way, and it shall, as the American people have no opinion on the matter, or can even be bothered to think about it, we are faced with at least half a century of intermittent war and a further augmentation of the national security state that has been draining our
wealth like a voracious vampire since 1950. There is no secret as to how they will finance it--by borrowing and inflating. If the Democrats are the party of "tax and spend," the Republicans are the party of "borrow and spend."

Since Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole's introduction of the funding system in England during the 1720s, the secret was out that government debt need never be repaid. Just create a regular and dependable source of revenue and use it to pay the annual interest and the principal of maturing bonds. Then for every retired bond, sell a new one. In this way, a national debt could be made perpetual. Walpole's system proved its worth in financing British overseas expansion and imperial wars in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The government could now maintain a huge peacetime naval and military establishment, readily fund new wars, and need not
retrench afterward. The British Empire was built on more than the blood of its soldiers and sailors; it was built on debt. The ever-growing debt had the ancillary benefit of attaching the interests of wealthy creditors to the government. This example was not lost on some leaders of the infant
American Republic, Alexander Hamilton for one.

The triumph of the funding system and its corollary of perpetual debt is undeniable. It rules the world. While there is some expressed concern about the size of the Bush deficits, almost no member of either the intelligentsia or the ruling elite has suggested, or even considered, paying
the debt down. Just consider the likelihood of congressmen agreeing to set aside $400 billion a year in a sinking fund instead of spending it on programs, projects, and overseas adventures designed to get him, or her, reelected. The possibility of it happening is as remote as that of an
American mountaineer summitting the highest peak on Mars.

This reminds us again of the passage from Macaulay's History of England:

At every stage of the growth of the debt the nation has set up the same cry of anguish and despair....[After the Napoleonic Wars] the funded debt of England...was in truth a fabulous debt; and we can hardly wonder that the cry of despair should have been louder than ever. Yet like Addison's valetudinarian, who continued to whimper that he was dying of consumption till he became so fat that he was shamed into silence, [England] went on complaining that she was sunk in poverty till her wealth showed itself by tokens which made her complaints ridiculous....The beggared, the bankrupt society not only proved able to meet all its obligations, but while meeting these obligations, grew richer and richer so fast that the growth could almost be discerned by the eye.

Apparently even Austrian economicsists can eventually be shamed into accepting reality.

---

IF REGIME CHANGE IS INEVITABLE...:

POWER RANGERS: Did the Bush Administration create a new American empire—or weaken the old one? (JOSHUA MICAH MARSHALL, 2004-01-19, The New Yorker)

Last March, after Jacques Chirac, the French President, announced that he would veto any new United Nations resolution sanctioning war against Iraq, the White House saw a chance for a different sort of victory. If a majority of the fifteen Security Council members voted for a new resolution and France vetoed it, the United States could claim that the problem was not American unilateralism but French obstructionism. And that hope set the United States scrambling to line up the votes of Chile, Mexico, Pakistan, and a trio of impoverished states from the west coast of Africa. “No matter what the whip count is, we’re calling for the vote,” President Bush said at a news conference broadcast worldwide on March 6th. “It’s time for people to show their cards, let the world know where they stand when it comes to Saddam.”

But, apart from Britain, Spain, and Bulgaria, the countries on the Security Council declined to side with the United States. Emissaries threatened and cajoled, to no avail. Pakistan, admittedly, had a restive Muslim population to contend with. But Mexico and Chile said no, too, and so did Cameroon and Guinea and Angola, a country that is heavily dependent on American trade and good will. In the end, Bush didn’t call for a vote.

At the time, this moment of mortification received scant attention; the outbreak of war was imminent. It was a curious spectacle, though. No country in the world could stand in the way of America’s determination to remove Saddam. But the United States seemed powerless to persuade even the smallest nations to legitimatize its power with a symbolic vote.

As hard-liners in the Bush Administration saw it, the real humiliation was that we had sought the approval of a quarrelsome international body in the first place. During the previous year, a growing number of them had become fascinated with the notion of empire. It was time for America, unabashedly and unilaterally, to assert its supremacy and to maintain global order. The U.N. debacle—the mismatch between our diplomatic sway and our military might—could be taken as confirmation of this view. And yet, if our overtures carried so little weight, just what was the nature of our imperial power? [...]

The Bush doctrine, with its tenets of preëmptive war, regime change, and permanent American military primacy, promised a new global order. The best way to think of that order is by analogy with the internal organization of a nation-state. What makes a state a state is its monopoly over the legitimate use of force, which means that citizens don’t have to worry about arming to defend themselves against each other. Instead, they can focus on productive pursuits like raising families, making money, and enjoying their leisure time. In the world of the Bush doctrine, states take the place of citizens. As the President told graduating cadets at West Point in 2002, America intends to keep its “military strengths beyond challenge, thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless, and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace.” In other words, if America has an effective monopoly on the exercise of military force, other countries should be able to set aside the distractions of arming and plotting against each other and put their energies into producing consumer electronics, textiles, tea. What the Bush doctrine calls for—paradoxically, given its proponents—is a form of world government.

The new order envisaged by the Bush doctrine hasn’t quite worked out as it was meant to. That’s because, from the beginning, the White House has acted on the assumption that bold action would make our allies rally behind us and our enemies cower. Building a consensus with our friends before we acted only encouraged quarrelsomeness. The point wasn’t that dictation was superior to consensus; the point was that it created consensus. [...]

Conservative ideologues, in calling for an international order in which America would have a statelike monopoly on coercive force, somehow forgot what makes for a successful state. Stable governments rule not by direct coercion but by establishing a shared sense of allegiance. In an old formula, “domination” gives way to “hegemony”—brute force gives way to the deeper power of consent. This is why the classic definition of the state speaks of legitimate force. In a constitutional order, government accepts certain checks on its authority, but the result is to deepen that authority, rather than to diminish it. Legitimacy is the ultimate “force multiplier,” in military argot. And if your aim is to maintain a global order, as opposed to rousting this or that pariah regime, you need all the force multipliers you can get.

Perhaps we've been living in an alternate reality from Mr. Marshall, but from what we saw no one opposed the American use of force in Iraq except for Saddam himself. Sure, some nations refused to sign on for the task of regime change, but none of them did anything about it. After all, Frenchmen don't show much interest in dying to protect France--they certainly aren't going to fight to preserve the concept of a foreign dictator's sovereignty.

What's more, the regime no sooner was changed than the war became de facto legitimate. No one refuses to recognize the new Iraq and those who were owed money by the old Iraq have been forced to abandon hope of collecting, while the rush is on to enter into new business deals in the new nation. Cheap rhetoric yielded rather quickly to geopolitical reality.

Obviously if America were to start toppling governments just because they're annoying--France, Germany...--it could lose legitimacy. But so long as we bring our power to bear exclusively on regimes that are genuine threats to the lives and liberties of their own people and of their neighbors, there'll be some grumbling from the usual quarters but our neo-imperialism will be essentially consensual.

---

ECO-IMPERIALISM:

Green movement is morally bankrupt (Roger Bate, Jan 27 2004, Business Day)

THE view most people have of colonialism and imperialism is largely negative. So any charge that a group, individual or government is guilty of them is bound to be resisted strongly by the recipient.

Recently, in New York City, a broad charge of eco-imperialism was laid at the feet of the environmental movement. The Congress of Racial Equality (Core ) blames government officials, aid agency bureaucrats as well as sandal-wearing greens for mass disease and death in the poorest countries of the world because they export their most vile regulatory policies.

According to Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore: "The environmental movement has lost its objectivity, morality and humanity". Last week he said: "The pain and suffering it inflicts on families in developing countries can no longer be tolerated." So far the green movement has ignored the criticism, but it will soon have to respond, since "eco-imperialism" is becoming a more widely heard, if not yet fully appreciated, term. [...]

Paul Driessen, author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power Black Death, hopes, like Innes, that eco-imperialism becomes a household word. Driessen says: "It's time to hold these groups accountable and compel organisations, foundations, courts and policymakers to understand the consequences of the policies they are imposing on our Earth's poorest citizens."

Mr. Driessen's book is terrific.

---

BROWN BRINGS BLAIR BACK FROM BRINK?:

Fee rebel leader switches sides (Tom Happold, January 27, 2004, The Guardian)

Leading rebel Nick Brown is to back the government's controversial plans to let universities charge students variable fees in tonight's Commons vote, Guardian Unlimited can reveal.

The former chief whip told the site: "The concessions that the government have made are good enough for me. I'll be supporting the government tonight."

Mr Brown's change of heart will provide a major boost to the government's chances of winning tonight's knife-edge vote.

He was the main organiser of the rebellion, along with his former deputy, George Mudie, and other rebels are likely to follow his lead.

---

NO SALLY RAND THEY:

Europe's Wishful Thinking: The European Union wants to have a bigger economy than America and their welfare state, too. (Irwin M. Stelzer, 01/27/2004, Weekly Standard)

IT IS FOUR YEARS since E.U. leaders met in Lisbon and set out a strategy for economic reform that they claimed would enable Europe to outstrip the United States as the world's leading economic power. Britain's Tony Blair liked the idea of reform, and France's Jacques Chirac liked the idea of besting the United States. So reform it was to be.

One need only dip into the new report to understand that the seeds of American entrepreneurialism cannot successfully be planted in the hostile soil that is today's Europe. The tools that the European Commission would use to catch up with America, and move European GDP up from its present 72 percent of the U.S. level, include such winners as passing a "Framework Directive on eco-design of energy-using products;" devising "social inclusion strategies" and establishing "National Action Plans (NAPs) . . . to set national targets" to improve social cohesion; and developing a "new industrial policy approach." There's more, lots more, including new regulations and taxes.

Meanwhile, back in America, President Bush is trying to reduce both the level of taxation and the burden of regulation. In short, the European Union aspires to American performance, and sees increased involvement of both Brussels' and member states' bureaucracies as the path to that goal, while U.S. policy is to reduce the role of government in business affairs.

The one concrete step they've taken, boosting their real interest rate to such an absurd level as to make the euro appear artificially competititive with the dollar, is killing them and was the result not of any economic policy but the need to seem a plausible world power even as they sat out the Iraq War. The Europeans just aren't a serious people anymore.

---

THE DUKE OF DIXVILLE:

Clark ëcarriesí Dixville Notch (LORNA COLQUHOUN, 1/27/04, Manchester Union Leader)

Democratic presidential hopeful Wesley Clark and his wife Gert celebrate in front of the tally board at the Dixville Notch polling station shortly after midnight Tuesday. Clark won the town of Dixville Notch with eight out of 15 Democratic votes cast. (AP) DIXVILLE ó Itís Wes Clark, by a handful.

As tradition would have it, New Hampshireís tiny hamlet of Dixville Notch had their say last night, casting the first 26 votes in the stateís Democratic Primary election around midnight.

George W. Bush swept up for the Republicans with 11 votes, not bad since there are only 10 registered Republicans in the Notch.

But this was a night for Democrats, and Clark ó the only candidate in history to actually show up for the annual occasion -- got plenty of loud cheers when his 8 votes were announced.

---

HEY, WAFFING BOY, NO MOWE BUWWETS:

Employees union pours $1.3 million into pro-Dean campaign (SHARON THEIMER, January 26, 2004, Associated Press)

Rather than hoarding its money to spend against President Bush, a public employees union has spent at least $1.6 million on get-out-the-vote efforts for Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean.

The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees political action committee is spending the money independently of Dean's campaign, which allows it to devote as much as it wants to the efforts.

It has spent at least $1.3 million over the last two weeks on mailings, polling, phone banks, ads and other primary spending in several early-voting states. Those include Iowa, which held its presidential caucuses last week; South Carolina, New Mexico and Arizona, which vote Feb. 3; Michigan, which has its primary Feb. 7; and Wisconsin, which votes Feb. 17. [...]

The AFSCME PAC raised at least $4.5 million last year and spent at least $3.9 million. Its latest campaign finance report, covering November, showed it started December with about $1.4 million on hand to spend.

This is the kind of massive strategic error that the more experienced industrial labor movement would never have made.

---

ISLAM'S EVANGEL:

How Arabs are reacting to Bush's State of the Union (Walid Phares, PhD, January 26, 2004, Townhall)

[T]he most significant reaction was the less seen in the West. That is the voice of the underdogs, the dissidents and the had-enough-of-it people. Kuwait applauded the speech. So did the Governing Council in Iraq. But beyond these two liberated countries, other civil societies expressed their support to the State of the Union. In a sense, it was their state of misery acknowledged in Washington. Students and reformist in Iran sheered. Opposition in Syria and Lebanon breathed better. Southern Sudanese and Nubians reinforced their will. Berbers and liberal seculars in Algeria clapped hands. And from the deepest underground of activism, dissident web sites, with writers around the Arab world, including women in Saudi Arabia, started to count the days. In short: the lowest layers in the region's make-up received their state-of-affairs with the voice of the most powerful man on Earth, the President of the United States.

How ironic. Inside Byzantium (read Washington's beltway), the debate had no respite. It is still about "where are the WMDs?" and "what are we doing in Iraq?" But down-under, in what will become the future generations of the entire Middle East, Shiites, Kurds, liberal Sunni, democratic Arabs and oppressed minorities, women and students are reading President Bush's speech in disbelief. "Who among our own Presidents-for-life and Fundamentalist Monarchs have ever mentioned the mass graves and our vanished human rights?" Let it come from the American President. And if he is not serious, it doesn't matter. What matters is that the Truth was said." This is from the underground chat rooms. The people have hope.

Anyone who still isn't convinced that Howard Dean isn't fit to lead the Free World need only read these words:

"You can say that it's great that Saddam [Hussein] is gone, and I'm sure that a lot of Iraqis feel it is great that Saddam is gone, but a lot of them gave their lives, and their living standard is a whole lot worse now than it was before."

---

RUN THE EXPERIMENT:

One Iraqi, One Vote? (DILIP HIRO, 1/27/04, NY Times)

Mr. Bremer and the American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council give many reasons for ruling out quick elections: the electoral rolls are not up to date; the political parties are not functioning properly; and the security situation is not conducive to election campaigns. All of these arguments fall apart on closer scrutiny.

For one, the voter rolls may be outdated, but since 1991 all Iraqis have been issued food ration cards that could be used as identification at polling stations. Mr. Bremer and some governing council members object that using ration cards would disenfranchise exiles who have returned since Saddam Hussein's fall. Yet there are only about 250,000 Iraqi returnees and all should have documents from the countries of their exile that would suffice as identification.

Some Iraqi families had their cards taken away by the Baathist regime because a family member deserted the army. But another identification document exists, a "census card" provided to all Iraqis when they reached school age, giving the student's name, address and age. It is worth noting that within two months of the overthrow of the shah of Iran in February 1979, the revolutionary government used the fallen regime's identification cards to hold a referendum on whether Iran should be an Islamic republic.

As for the argument that political parties are needed, Iran offers another precedent. In August 1979, the Islamic authorities held elections to the constitutional Assembly of Experts. Almost all of the candidates ran as individuals rather than as party affiliates, yet they were able to campaign and get their messages out to voters.

Critics also say that Iraqis have no recent tradition of elections. Actually, Iraq had five elections for its 250-member Parliament from 1980 to 2000. Though all the candidates were pre-approved by the regime, voters did get a choice between Baathists and non-Baathists (the Baathists' share of seats ranged from 142 to 183). The point is, some people felt free to express a personal preference.

Perhaps the central criticism is that Iraq is simply not secure enough to have a fair vote. But this is not sufficient grounds to deprive Iraqis of their say in their own political future. In May 1992 the Kurdish parties operating in Iraq's no-flight zone held elections for their new regional Parliament under conditions that were pretty grim. Only by holding that poll did the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan achieve the legitimacy they hold to this day.

Conditions are never ideal for a first democratic election.

---

LESS MONEY, BETTER CHOICES:

Seattle Schools Learn Money Doesn't Buy Grades (Fox News, January 27, 2004)

Seattle school officials (search) are learning a valuable but surprising lesson — throwing money at schools doesn't always help kids achieve. And spending more money on some students rather than others does little more than cause trouble.

Under Seattle's weighted student formula, schools with kids who are poor, not fluent in English or have special needs get more money to help them compete. Only it doesn't seem to work.

"If money is the only thing we need to make better schools — to increase academic achievement for students — then we would have seen that by now," said Lynn Harsh of the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, an Olympia-based group that focuses on state budgets and tax policy, welfare reform, health-care reform, education and governance issues. "Instead we're seeing the opposite results."

In a related story: the sun rose in the East today.

---

SUPERWEDGIE:

American Public Opinion About Gay and Lesbian Marriages (Gallup News Service, January 27, 2004)

A Jan. 9-11 CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll asked Americans if they would favor or oppose a law that would allow homosexual couples to legally get married, or if they have no opinion on the issue at all. The results show that a majority of Americans, 53%, oppose such a law, and 44% of respondents oppose it strongly. Twenty-four percent of Americans say they would favor such a law, and 23% do not have an opinion about gay marriage.

Results to a similar question asked in a mid-December poll (but without an explicit "no opinion" response) show that 65% of Americans said marriages between homosexual couples should not be recognized as legally valid, while 31% said they should.

In other words, because of party dynamics Democrats are pushing an issue on which they have a 3-1 disadvantage.

---

FOLLOW THE MONEY:

More and More Autism Cases, Yet Causes Are Much Debated (ERICA GOODE, 1/26/04, NY Times)

No one disputes it. Cases of autism, the baffling and often devastating neurological disorder that strikes in early childhood, are rising sharply.

In California alone, the number of children receiving special services for autism tripled from 1987 to 1998 and doubled in the four years after that.

One needn't be as cynical as we to believe that the last sentence above explains the increase in and of itself.

---

THEY'RE THEIR OWN GOEBBELS:

Palestinians shocked at use of suicide mother (Chris McGreal, January 27, 2004, The Guardian)

Hamas has defied widespread criticism among Palestinians for using a young mother as a suicide bomber by publishing photographs of Reem Riyashi and her two small children posing with weapons.

Mrs Riyashi, 22, blew herself up and killed four Israelis at a Gaza border crossing a fortnight ago after faking a disability to bypass a security check.

She was the first female suicide bomber for Hamas, leading to considerable speculation as to her motives, and criticism of the organisation even among some supporters.

Mrs Riyashi left behind two young children: a three-year-old son, Obedia, and her daughter, Doha, who is 18 months. In the photographs, the boy is clutching what appears to be a mortar shell and, like his mother, is wearing a Hamas headband. Another picture shows her gazing at both children.

It's rather unusual for an oppressed people to seek to dehumanize themselves and destroy any symnpathy to which that might theoretically be entitled.

---

I REACHED OUT ONE NIGHT AND YOU WERE GONE:

Democrats switching to GOP: Kentucky trend accelerates after Fletcher's victory (TOM LOFTUS and AL CROSS, The Courier-Journal)

After Republican Gov. Ernie Fletcher's election on Nov. 4, Kentucky's long-term trend of Democrats becoming Republicans accelerated, especially among those closest to the state capital.

In Frankfort and surrounding Franklin County between Election Day and the end of December, 147 Democrats went Republican while 29 Republicans went the other way, records show.

The new Republicans in the county include about 50 state employees, and some high-level political appointees of former Gov. Paul Patton's administration who live elsewhere and want to stay on under Fletcher.

Even former state Democratic chairman Bill Patrick, who works for the state but lives in Lexington, became a Republican.

---

BURY HIM WITH HIS BOOTS ON:

Own missteps, Iowa results hurting Clark (Jill Lawrence, 1/25/04, USA TODAY)

Retired general Wesley Clark skipped last week's Iowa caucuses to focus on Tuesday's New Hampshire primary. He hoped for a blast of momentum going into the Southern states that vote next week.

Instead, Clark's Democratic presidential bid could be in serious trouble. [...]

Clark's struggle is due in part to his own missteps on issues as basic as abortion and the Iraq war. He also has fumbled routine tasks such as making sure introductions of him aren't embarrassing.

But the unexpected Iowa results also have thwarted Clark's progress. Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry was galvanized by his upset victory in Iowa and now leads here. Former Vermont governor Howard Dean is on a damage-control mission after his Iowa debacle and may be staging a comeback. North Carolina Sen. John Edwards' strong second place in Iowa has translated into new credibility and huge crowds here.

Skipping IA was understandable, given how organization reliant it was thought to be, but the General might very well have won had he contested it. Now he's toast.

---

THE RACE TO BEAT LYNDON:

Candidates Talk to Women: Dean, Lieberman and Kucinich in Dartmouth Forum (Sonia Scherr, 1/26/04, Valley News)

Kucinich also said he would bring a “feminine perspective” to the Oval Office... [...]

Lieberman said he thinks it's important to consider women for nontraditional posts, such as secretary of defense and secretary of treasury. He also said he would put more than one woman on his short list of running mates. “My administration will reflect America,” he said.

Hard to be certain which of these guys is less in touch with reality.

---

SO WHEN DO WE GIVE UP ENGLISH?:

You are what you speak (Janadas Devan, Straits Times, 1/25/2004)

Western philosophers long assumed the alphabet represented a distinct advance in civilisation....

But they ... would be wrong....

As 20th century philosophers, linguists and logicians have established, a great number of the errors and confusions of Western thought are due to the structure of Indo-European languages, including their adoption of phonetic writing.

The world view inscribed in Chinese characters - as well as the peculiar features of their grammar - turns out to be far closer to the reality that modern science has disclosed. An ancient language - using a combination of pictograms, ideograms and phonograms, like Egyptian hieroglyphs - appears to be the most modern.

I suspect those 20th century philosophers, linguists and logicians were Chinese; and that philosophers employed by the Clay Workers Union will soon prove that clay tablets are more modern writing implements than computers.

---

THE MIDDLE KINGDOM:

Chinese middle class? It's just a myth, study finds: Although nearly half of mainlanders consider themselves middle class, only 4% meet the criteria, research shows (Chua Chin Hon, 1/27/04, Straits Times)

Nearly one in two mainland Chinese considers himself 'middle-class', according to a new study, although the researcher found that only 4.1 per cent of 5,860 people interviewed made the cut.

The study by Dr Li Chun- ling of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences appeared to debunk the widespread hype in the Chinese and international media about China's burgeoning middle class, which is expected to change everything from travel trends to consumer habits in the country and beyond.

'The so-called Chinese middle class is nothing but a myth and a bubble conjured up by some media organisations and researchers,' Dr Li was quoted as saying in a recent issue of the China Newsweek magazine. She could not be contacted for this report.

She also raised concerns that this false sense of optimism and 'achievement', fuelled in part by the hype and the country's sterling economic performance, may overshadow some of the very real and pressing problems in China, such as the rising income gap, unemployment and environmental degradation.

Between the end of 2001 and 2002, when the hype about the Chinese middle class was probably at its zenith, she and her team conducted a study of 5,860 people aged 16 to 70 in 12 regions, including Beijing, Shanghai, Zhejiang, Heilongjiang, Sichuan and Inner Mongolia.

Despite the lack of a recognised or widely accepted yardstick for being middle class, the study set out four criteria: profession, monthly income, consumption and lifestyle, and subjective identity.

China's structural problems are plentiful, but the false belief of the majority that they are middle class is hard to see as one of them. Such belief seems likely to alleviate an awful lot of political pressure on any government.

---

THE WHITEST MAN IN NEW HAMPSHIRE

Landslide Kerry The mystifying appeal of the Massachusetts senator. (Chris Suellentrop, Slate, 1/26/04)

At a firehouse in Hampton yesterday, a man told Kerry that he thinks it's unfair that people say a New Englander can't connect with people from varying backgrounds. And to prove that you can do it, he says, explain the importance of the icon on my hat. Kerry is mystified. "The Latin? The Ten?" he asks. Malcolm X, the man explains.

It would be nice to be hipper than the President again.

---

TWO-FER:

EU snubs Paris over arms for China (Ambrose Evans-Pritchard and Philip Delves Broughton, 27/01/2004, Daily Telegraph)

A French attempt to lift the European Union arms embargo against China was rejected by ministers yesterday amid concern over Beijing's human rights record and belligerent attitude to Taiwan.

President Jacques Chirac has led the drive to ease sanctions imposed after the Tiananmen Square massacre of students in 1989, hoping to benefit from China's economic growth and draw Asia's rising power into strategic "multipolar" alliance with the EU to counter American hegemony.

But EU foreign ministers meeting in Brussels agreed by 14 to 1 that China's deployment of up to 650 missiles in a war of nerves against Taiwan made it a hazardous moment to lift the arms boycott.

The decision is a blow to Beijing, which has been seeking a strategic partnership with the EU to obtain high-technology weaponry.

Anytime you can smack down France and China at the same time is a particularly good deal.

---

HOW ABOUT "NONE OF THE ABOVE"?:

Knowns, unknowns and the Ketchup Kid (Mark Steyn, 27/01/2004, Daily Telegraph)

Here's my sense of how things will go today, based on nothing more scientific than a weekend winter-sports break over on the eastern side of the state and a chat with the waitress in the Littleton Diner on the way back to my pad in western New Hampshire. She'd had pretty much every candidate host events at the diner except Dean and Lyndon Larouche, whose campaign wanted to hold a shindig there but got turned down. Larouche is the guy who thinks the Queen is an international drugs kingpin (or, in this case, queenpin) secretly running the world on her cocaine profits. Compared with some of the wackier utterances of Dean and Clark, the House of Windsor drug cartel is one of the less fanciful notions this primary season. At the rate the white knights are tripping over their feet of clay, Larouche could well be the frontrunner by March, with his face on the cover of Newsweek and a poll showing he'd beat Bush 49 per cent to 46 per cent, if Prince Philip doesn't have him taken out by a hit team first.

But, barring a Larouche surge, my bet for today's vote is as follows:

1) Senator John Kerry 29 per cent
2) Governor Howard Dean 28 per cent
3) Senator John Edwards 19 per cent
4) Senator Joe Lieberman 12 per cent
5) General Wesley Clark 10 per cent
6) Everybody else 2 per cent

You can have a good laugh about these predictions tomorrow morning.

Especially after the debate the other night, it looked like the electability mantle had descended on Mr. Kerry so completely that he could walk with this thing, and he still may. But if Howard Dean really is reclosing the gap on him it would be a stunning demonstratio of just how weak a candidate the Senator is--unable to stand just four days of press scrutiny and frontrunner attention. General Clark having shown himself to be unelectable too, John Edwards may be the next big thing as we head to his birth state of South Carolina.

---

TRAPPED IN SOMEONE ELSE'S FANTASY:

(via Jeff Guinn):
What Makes a Terrorist? (James Q. Wilson, Winter 2004, City Journal)

Ideological terrorists offer up no clear view of the world they are trying to create. They speak vaguely about bringing people into some new relationship with one another but never tell us what that relationship might be. Their goal is destruction, not creation. To the extent they are Marxists, this vagueness is hardly surprising, since Marx himself never described the world he hoped to create, except with a few glittering but empty generalities.

A further distinction: in Germany, left-wing terrorists, such as the Red Army Faction, were much better educated, had a larger fraction of women as members, and were better organized than were right-wing terrorists. Similar differences have existed in the United States between, say, the Weather Underground and the Aryan Nation. Left-wing terrorists often have a well-rehearsed ideology; right-wing ones are more likely to be pathological.

I am not entirely certain why this difference should exist. One possibility is that right-wing terrorist organizations are looking backward at a world they think has been lost, whereas left-wing ones are looking ahead at a world they hope will arrive. Higher education is useful to those who wish to imagine a future but of little value to those who think they know the past. Leftists get from books and professors a glimpse of the future, and they struggle to create it. Right-wingers base their discontent on a sense of the past, and they work to restore it. To join the Ku Klux Klan or the Aryan Nation, it is only necessary that members suppose that it is good to oppress blacks or Catholics or Jews; to join the Weather Underground, somebody had to teach recruits that bourgeois society is decadent and oppressive.

By contrast, nationalistic and religious terrorists are a very different matter. The fragmentary research that has been done on them makes clear that they are rarely in conflict with their parents; on the contrary, they seek to carry out in extreme ways ideas learned at home. Moreover, they usually have a very good idea of the kind of world they wish to create: it is the world given to them by their religious or nationalistic leaders. These leaders, of course, may completely misrepresent the doctrines they espouse, but the misrepresentation acquires a commanding power.

Marc Sageman at the University of Pennsylvania has analyzed what we know so far about members of al-Qaida. Unlike ideological terrorists, they felt close to their families and described them as intact and caring. They rarely had criminal records; indeed, most were devout Muslims. The great majority were married; many had children. None had any obvious signs of mental disorder. The appeal of al-Qaida was that the group provided a social community that helped them define and resist the decadent values of the West. The appeal of that community seems to have been especially strong to the men who had been sent abroad to study and found themselves alone and underemployed.

A preeminent nationalistic terrorist, Sabri al-Bana (otherwise known as Abu Nidal), was born to a wealthy father in Jaffa, and through his organization, the Fatah Revolutionary Council, also known as the Abu Nidal Organization, sought to destroy Israel and to attack Palestinian leaders who showed any inclination to engage in diplomacy. He was hardly a member of the wretched poor.

Alan B. Krueger and Jitka Maleckova have come to similar conclusions from their analysis of what we know about deceased soldiers in Hezbollah, the Iran-sponsored Shiite fighting group in Lebanon. Compared with the Lebanese population generally, the Hezbollah soldiers were relatively well-to-do and well-educated young males. Neither poor nor uneducated, they were much like Israeli Jews who were members of the “bloc of the faithful” group that tried to blow up the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem: well paid, well educated, and of course deeply religious.

In Singapore a major terrorist organization is Jemaah Islamiyah. Singaporean psychologists studied 31 of its members and found them normal in most respects. All were male, had average to above-average intelligence, and held jobs ranging from taxi driver to engineer. As with al-Qaida and Hezbollah members, they did not come from unstable families, nor did they display any peculiar desire toward suicidal behavior. Though graduates of secular schools, they attached great importance to religion.

Of late, women have been recruited for terrorist acts—a remarkable development in the Islamic world, where custom keeps women in subordinate roles. Precisely because of their traditional attire, female suicide bombers can easily hide their identities and disguise themselves as Israelis by wearing tight, Western clothing. Security sources in Israel have suggested that some of these women became suicide bombers to expunge some personal dishonor. Death in a holy cause could wash away the shame of divorce, infertility, or promiscuity. According to some accounts, a few women have deliberately been seduced and then emotionally blackmailed into becoming bombers.

That terrorists themselves are reasonably well-off does not by itself disprove the argument that terrorism springs from poverty and ignorance. Terrorists might simply be a self-selected elite, who hope to serve the needs of an impoverished and despondent populace—in which case, providing money and education to the masses would be the best way to prevent terrorism.

From what we know now, this theory appears to be false. Krueger and Maleckova compared terrorist incidents in the Middle East with changes in the gross domestic product of the region and found that the number of such incidents per year increased as economic conditions improved. On the eve of the intifada that began in 2000, the unemployment rate among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip was falling, and the Palestinians thought that economic conditions were improving. The same economic conditions existed at the time of the 1988 intifada. Terror did not spread as the economy got worse but as it got better.

This study agrees with the view of Franklin L. Ford, whose book Political Murder covers terrorist acts from ancient times down to the 1980s. Assassinations, he finds, were least common in fifth-century Athens, during the Roman republic, and in eighteenth-century Europe—periods in which “a certain quality of balance, as between authority and forbearance” was reinforced by a commitment to “customary rights.” Terrorism has not corresponded to high levels of repression or social injustice or high rates of ordinary crime. It seems to occur, Ford suggests, in periods of partial reform, popular excitement, high expectations, and impatient demands for still more rapid change.

But if terrorists—suicide bombers and other murderers of innocent people—are not desperate, perhaps they are psychologically disturbed. But I cannot think of a single major scholar who has studied this matter who has found any psychosis. Terrorists are likely to be different from non-terrorists, but not because of any obvious disease.

In short, recruiting religiously inspired or nationalistically oriented terrorists seems to have little to do with personal psychosis, material deprivation, or family rejection. It may not even have much to do with well-known, high-status leaders. Among West Bank and Gaza Palestinians, for example, there is broad support for suicide bombings and a widespread belief that violence has helped the Palestinian cause, even though as late as June 2003 only about one-third of all Palestinians thought Yasser Arafat was doing a good job. Indeed, his popularity has declined since the intifada began.

The key to terrorist recruitment, obviously, is the group that does the recruitment.

This view jibes with that of Lee HarrisAl Qaeda’s Fantasy Ideology (Lee Harris, August 2002, Policy Review)

On September 11, 2001, Americans were confronted by an enigma similar to that presented to the Aztecs — an enigma so baffling that even elementary questions of nomenclature posed a problem: What words or phrase should we use merely to refer to the events of that day? Was it a disaster? Or perhaps a tragedy? Was it a criminal act, or was it an act of war? Indeed, one awkward tv anchorman, in groping for the proper handle, fecklessly called it an accident. But eventually the collective and unconscious wisdom that governs such matters prevailed. Words failed, then fell away completely, and all that was left behind was the bleak but monumentally poignant set of numbers, 9-11.

But this did not answer the great question: What did it all mean? In the early days, there were many who were convinced that they knew the answer to this question. A few held that we had got what we had coming: It was just desserts for Bush’s refusal to sign the Kyoto treaty or the predictable product of the U.S. decision to snub the Durban conference on racism. Others held, with perhaps a greater semblance of plausibility, that the explanation of 9-11 was to be sought in what was called, through an invariable horticultural metaphor, the “root cause” of terrorism. Eliminate poverty, or economic imperialism, or global warming, and such acts of terrorism would cease.

Opposed to this kind of analysis were those who saw 9-11 as an unprovoked act of war, and the standard comparison here was with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. To this school of thought — ably represented by, among others, the distinguished classicist Victor Davis Hanson — it is irrelevant what grievances our enemy may believe it has against us; what matters is that we have been viciously attacked and that, for the sake of our survival, we must fight back.

Those who hold this view are in the overwhelming majority among Americans. And yet there is one point on which this position does not differ from the position adopted by those, such as Noam Chomsky, who place the blame for the attack on American policy: Both points of view agree in interpreting 9-11 as an act of war, disagreeing only on the question of whether or not it was justifiable.

This common identification of 9-11 as an act of war arises from a deeper unquestioned assumption — an assumption made both by Chomsky and his followers on one hand and Hanson and National Review on the other — and, indeed, by almost everyone in between. The assumption is this: An act of violence on the magnitude of 9-11 can only have been intended to further some kind of political objective. What this political objective might be, or whether it is worthwhile — these are all secondary considerations; but surely people do not commit such acts unless they are trying to achieve some kind of recognizably political purpose.

Behind this shared assumption stands the figure of Clausewitz and his famous definition of war as politics carried out by other means. The whole point of war, on this reading, is to get other people to do what we want them to do: It is an effort to make others adopt our policies and/or to further our interests. Clausewitzian war, in short, is rational and instrumental. It is the attempt to bring about a new state of affairs through the artful combination of violence and the promise to cease violence if certain political objectives are met.

Of course, this does not mean that wars may not backfire on those who undertake them, or that a particular application of military force may not prove to be counterproductive to one’s particular political purpose. But this does not change the fact that the final criterion of military success is always pragmatic: Does it work? Does it in fact bring us closer to realizing our political objectives?

But is this the right model for understanding 9-11? Or have we, like Montezuma, imposed our own inadequate categories on an event that simply does not fit them? Yet, if 9-11 was not an act of war, then what was it? In what follows, I would like to pursue a line suggested by a remark by the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen in reference to 9-11: his much-quoted comment that it was “the greatest work of art of all time.”

Despite the repellent nihilism that is at the base of Stockhausen’s ghoulish aesthetic judgment, it contains an important insight and comes closer to a genuine assessment of 9-11 than the competing interpretation of it in terms of Clausewitzian war. For Stockhausen did grasp one big truth: 9-11 was the enactment of a fantasy — not an artistic fantasy, to be sure, but a fantasy nonetheless.

And what's important about it is the implication that, because al Qaeda's actions flow from their own self-contained fantasy, there is no ameliorative action that we can take that will satisfy them. Those then--mostly isolationists of Left or Right--who say we need to withdraw from here or there or pressure this or that nation or not pressure this or that one or whatever else are simply not addressing themselves to reality. The violence and hatred directed towards us are not a function of us but of them. Changes we make to us will simply not deter them.

---

PLAYING STABLE:

Dean Loses Ground as Primary Voters Shift Toward Stability (Ronald Brownstein, January 26, 2004, LA Times)

In 2003, Howard Dean's rise set the tone for the Democratic presidential race. Now his decline is reshaping the race in 2004.

Dean's meteoric ascent encouraged all of his rivals to try to match the anger and passion he brought to the campaign. For months, the other Democratic contenders jostled to see who could express the most contempt for President Bush.

At times, the race seemed above all a competition to see which candidate could stuff the most adjectives into a single sentence vilifying Bush. Dean led the field in part because almost all of the other candidates were trying to be like him, and none of the imitations matched the fervor of the original.

But a funny thing happened as the actual voting approached: The anger that exhilarated so many of the hard-core activists who dominated the process in 2003 is proving much less attractive to the broader universe of Democratic voters now checking into the contest.

Suddenly, the dominant voice in the race belongs to voters like Jeannine Tucker, a retired life insurance company employee from Goffstown, N.H., who initially intended to support Dean but is now considering Sens. John F. Kerry and John Edwards and retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark.

"One time I went to see Dean, and he was right on in what he said," Tucker said last week, while waiting for Kerry to speak at a rally in Manchester. "Now, after the couple of little missteps in what he's saying, and losing his temper, I'm not too sure…. As president, you've got to have somebody who's stable. This is a very precarious job."

Tucker's comment, echoed by other voters here, may offer the key to the upheaval that has transformed Dean from frontrunner into beleaguered underdog.

So, for the Democrats stability isn't having ideas and sticking to them but aping what works for other people?

---

WITH 11,000 YOU GET 50:

Stocks Hit 2-1/2 Year High (Reuters, 1/26/04)

U.S. stocks rose on Monday, with the Dow Jones industrial average and Nasdaq Composite Index hitting highs not seen for more than 2-1/2 years, as investors cheered earnings reports, strong housing data and a bullish report on Merck & Co. Inc. (MRK).

The Dow Jones industrial average (DJI) closed up 132.75 points, or 1.26 percent, at 10,701.04. its highest close since June 2001.

---

FOOT FUN (via The Mother Judd):

"This is one of the strangest things I have ever encountered.

Left brain, right brain

While sitting at your desk, lift your right foot off the floor and make clockwise circles.

Now, while doing this, draw the number "6" in the air with your right hand.

Your foot will change direction and there's nothing you can do about it."

---

LIKE A BUTTERFLY, A WILD BUTTERFLY:

By Deficit Obsessed (James K. Glassman, January 22, 2004, Washington Times )

Rubinomics, the prevailing theory in the Clinton years, held that the economy boomed because 1993 tax increases turned the deficit into a surplus, driving down interest rates. In fact, long-term bond rates were 7.3 percent the in 1992 and 8 percent in 1994 after which something quite different may have lowered rates and lifted the stock market: the election of a Republican House. [...]

History also refutes Rubinomics. During the Reagan years, debt rose, but interest rates fell. During the Clinton years, debt fell, but interest rates stayed the same. During the Bush years, debt rose, but interest rates fell.

It's not that deficits don't matter just not at these levels, or at any level that's truly feasible. Our government debt, at about 50 percent of GDP, is far lower than that of Europe and Japan. Unless deficits truly get out of hand (and we're far from that), other things, like taxes, matter much more. President Bush said that tax cuts would leave more money in the pockets of Americans, who would spend and invest to lift the economy. That's happened. As the economy gets better, revenues will rise, and the deficit will shrink.

Certainly, all is not rosy. We need to reform Social Security and Medicare to prepare for the retirement of baby boomers. Now, there's an issue for the campaign. But Democrats who want to win in November would do well to ignore Rubin's obsession with the deficit. This time, he's all wet.

Indeed, during the period when we had a budget surplus the Fed raised interest rates repeatedly, suggesting at least a psychic, if not a material, disconnect of debt from interest rates.

---

BE GLORIOUS, DAMN YOU!

Kill Yuppie Scum The backlash against neoliberalism (John Derbyshire, NRO, 1/26/04)

The story of the past quarter-century — a convenient starting marker would be the election of Margaret Thatcher on May 3, 1979 [footnote omitted] — has been the triumph of what is loosely called neoliberalism, a belief in open markets with minimal restraints on trade between nations, free movements of peoples, and the dismantling of huge state-owned enterprises and regulatory bodies. This has been a very wonderful thing, and I shouldn't like to leave you with any misunderstanding as to how I feel about it. I am old enough to remember the previous regime, at least in England, and believe me, neoliberalism is way better than what went before.

As is the nature of all human things, though, the new synthesis has generated a new antithesis. Neoliberalism has its dark side. When neoliberalism was first promoted in China by Deng Xiaoping, it was launched with the slogan: "To get rich is glorious!" So, indeed, it must have seemed to the cowed, brutalized survivors of Mao Tse-tung's 30-year experiment in egalitarian communism. And so it is: Personal wealth produces a great deal of vulgar display and vapid hedonism, but it also patronizes great art, gives the leisure for public service, and supplies the wherewithal for works of charity.

The dark side of neoliberalism is inequality. Every country that has embraced the new order has seen the gap between rich and poor grow wider. Not all of us have entrepreneurial talents; not all of us — very few of us, in fact — have the ability to get rich. Now of course, a rising tide lifts all boats, and the neoliberal order has blessed not only those who enriched themselves, but hundreds of millions of others, too. Not only has it lifted us up, it has supplied us with a plethora of goods and services that did not exist 30 years ago, and that would never have been brought into existence by any state-managed bureaucracy, or any Dictatorship of the Proletariat, or any of those labor-industry-government partnerships so fondly imagined by leftist economists of the 1970s.

I very much like John Derbyshire. His occassional essays for National Review and NRO are pithy and even elegant. His Calvin Coolidge novel is excellent. I very much want to read his mathematics book, though I have no interest in the subject matter. When it comes to the beauty of of prime numbers, I am as a blind man in a convention of the deaf.

But what the heck is he talking about. He doesn't want us to mistake his love of neoliberalism, one of the crowning achievements of which is the free movement of people. Well, gee, John, how could we have come to make that mistake? (Tangentially, hasn't it been fun these last few weeks to watch NRO lambast the President for his immigration plan, on the one hand, and argue that conservatives must support him, on the other?)

Like many conservatives, Mr. Derbyshire is uncomfortable with democratic capitalism. In this, his name is nicely poetic. Like Tolkien, he harks back wistfully to the way things (never) were when happy little Englanders lived their preindustrial lives like the hobbits in their Shire. It's too bad, we can hear him grumble, that freedom leads inexorably to Donald Trump. And, of course, it is unfortunate, but would he be any happier if he as carefully watched how any of us spend our money. For that matter, do conservatives really like to see more money being frittered away on modern art, or the hallways of power being stocked with the leisured rich, or the creation of more mega-foundations, spending the wealth of the Fords, Rockefellers and Carnegies? Have we all become such socialists that we take for granted our right to an opinion on what other people do with their property?

If so, we should be sobered by Mr. Derbyshire's timely demonstration of where this notion leads as he attacks neoliberalism's downside: income inequality. First, says who? In the United States at the moment, income inequality is largely, though apparently not solely, caused by immigration. [The preceding sentence was changed. See the comments. DGC] We're importing poor people, because we're just not making any of our own, any more. The rich certainly are richer than they've ever been, but so are the poor. I doubt that he would argue that actual economic inequality is greater in the West than it was under Communism. Second, so what? Income equality isn't a good thing. Depending upon how ruthless the government is, it is either a pipe dream or the excuse for great evil. If political rights belong to everyone equally, why does "justice" have anything to say about the distribution of income (not wealth, by the way) at some particular point in time. I've never been poorer than when I was in college, but any compassion spent on me then would have been wasted.

Freedom is freedom; the idea that it should be curtailed if we don't like where people choose to go led to the worst of the last century. This is where Mr. Derbyshire goes wrong. He implicitly accepts the centrality of the state in modern life. Our safeguard from excess and depravity is not the state, but can only be a culture that rejects excess and depravity. Political freedom can only survive if the greater nation, expressing itself not through the police or regulation, but through censure and shame, limits our choices by limiting what we choose, not what we are free to choose. The alternative is the freedom of license, which, damaging in itself, will be followed by repression.

Thus, the importance of religion in the United States. Religion says that the rich man and the poor man are equal in the sight of G-d. From this flows our idea of the importance of political equality. Religion says that man has been given free will and can use it even to disobey his Creator. From this flows our idea of freedom. Religion says that man has an inherent dignity. From this flows our idea of inalienable rights. Religion says that man is imperfect and not perfectable. From this flows our idea of limited government and our skepticism of efficient government.

Liberals often ask what is it that conservatives wish to conserve? It is this culture, which teaches that the measure of a man is how he acts, not what he earns or buys.

---

WELCOME TO THE UNIPOLAR WORLD:

U.S. Enters New, Expansive "Proof of Primacy" (Thomas Donnelly, January 26, 2004, Navy News Week)

What used to be called the "post-Cold War world" has gone through three distinct periods.

First, the "Long 1990s", beginning with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and ending with the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, marked a time of drift and, at least in international politics, American confusion and indecision.

The second, from 9/11 until the March 19, 2003, invasion of Iraq, was a period of transition, during which the Bush administration struggled to fashion a response to events that destroyed its illusions that the world's problems could be "managed" by a small knot of confident and competent pragmatists, acting in the spirit of humble realpolitik.

The invasion of Iraq marked the start of the third period, a new era of Pax Americana, distinguished by the energetic exercise of U.S. power not simply to protect the status quo of American global preeminence but to extend the current liberal international order, beginning in the Middle East.

We might refer to this period as hastening the "end of history".

---

SATAN'S CHATAUQUA (via John Resnick):

Liberals turn to entertainment to batter the 'House of Bush' : Stage shows, music, books being used to reach voters (Joe Garofoli, January 25, 2004, San Francisco Chronicle)

Loathing President Bush is an art form in Berkeley, a disgust so pointed that 3,500 people recently gave a standing ovation to a trio of best- selling Bush-bashing authors -- comedian Al Franken, economist Paul Krugman and ex-Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips -- before they uttered a word onstage.

Unbeknownst to most in the sold-out Berkeley Community Theater audience, they were beta-testing a show that East Coast promoters are developing into a national barnstorming tour. The promoters were impressed; dates in New York and New Haven, Conn., are expected to be announced in the next week on what's being billed as the "Rolling Thunder" tour.

Bookers in Los Angeles and Chicago are gauging the reception of the unorthodox concept -- three disparate authors, fronted by three different publishers, united only by their common pounding of the leader of the free world -- before scheduling local versions.

Wasn't this show called "Bring Da Funk"?

---

LEFT LINGUISTIFICATION:

The anti-liberal (Joshua Glenn, 1/4/2004, Boston Globe)

IDEAS: You disagree with the proposition that all human beings have an equal moral status, and so possess the same fundamental rights. But what about the practical argument that a world with equal human rights is a less dangerous one?

[John] KEKES [outspoken conservative professor of philosophy at the State University of New York, Albany]: People may have equal moral status at birth, but what they do when they come to maturity clearly affects that status. War, torture, oppression, discrimination, poverty, terrorism, and the drug trade are widespread in the world, and the only way to stop evil activities is to curtail the rights of evildoers. No one can reasonably believe that murderers and their victims, or terrorists and their hostages, have the same rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

IDEAS: Many liberal theorists would argue that evil activities are a result, not a cause, of social injustice -- so social justice ought to be a top priority.

KEKES: The belief that social justice is the most important political value is dangerous because its single-minded pursuit often makes it incompatible with the pursuit of other values -- freedom, prosperity, order, security, criminal justice, and so forth -- that are just as important. It is a dangerous mistake to privilege equality at the expense of everything else.

The Absurdity of Egalitarianism: an excerpt from The Illusions of Egalitarianism (John Kekes, 1/26/04, Front Page)

Suppose that egalitarianism is seen for what it is: an absurd attempt to deny in the name of justice that people should be held responsible for their actions and treated as they deserve based on their merits or demerits. A nagging doubt remains. It is undeniable that there are in our society innocent victims of misfortune and injustice. Their inequality is not their fault, they are not responsible for it, and they do not deserve to be in a position of inequality. The emotional appeal of egalitarianism is that it recognizes the plight of these people and proposes ways of helping them. Counting on the compassion of decent people, egalitarians then charge their society with injustice for ignoring the suffering of innocent victims.

There are several things that need to be said in response to this frequently heard charge. First, anyone committed to justice will want people to have what they deserve and not to have what they do not deserve. Innocent victims do not deserve to suffer, yet they do. A decent society should do what it can to alleviate their suffering. But this has nothing to do with equality or egalitarianism. What is objectionable is not that some people have less than others. It is not unjust that millionaires have less than billionaires. What is objectionable is that some people, through no fault of their own, lack the basic necessities of nutrition, health care, education, housing, and so forth. They are our fellow citizens, and because of that we feel compassion for their plight.   

Second, the plight of innocent victims who lack the basic necessities is not ignored. On the contrary, they are being helped by their fellow citizens who are taxpayers. Take a family of four with an annual income of $70,000. They are likely to pay about $25,000 in federal, state, property, and school taxes. Approximately 60 percent of the federal and state budget is spent on social programs. Thus roughly 60 percent of the family’s annual taxes, that is, $15,000, is spent on social programs. The family, therefore, contributes over 20 percent of their income, more than one dollar out every five, to helping others, including the innocent victims. This is more than enough to acquit them of the charge of shamefully ignoring the plight of their fellow citizens that egalitarians baselessly level against them.

Third, the relentless egalitarian propaganda eagerly parroted by the media would have us believe that our society is guilty of dooming people to a life of poverty. What this ignores is the unprecedented success of our society in having less than 13 percent of the population live below a very generously defined poverty level and 87 percent above it. The typical ratio in past societies is closer to the reverse. It is a cause for celebration, not condemnation, that for the first time in history a very large segment of the population has escaped poverty. If egalitarians had a historical perspective, they would be in favor of the political and economic system that has made this possible, rather than advocating absurd policies that undermine it.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Left ideology is that they've redefined the word "justice" so that it no longer means that you get what you deserve based on your own merits but instead that everyone is entitled to the same regardless of merit.

---

OR EXPECTEDLY:

Democracy 101: Travel with `Mr. Mike' as he sets about winning hearts and minds in southern Iraq (Kevin Whitelaw, 2/2/04, US News)

Amid a grove of palm trees surrounded by farmlands, lunch is being served in the tribal guesthouse. Men clad mostly in traditional robes sit barefoot on carpets around a feast of lamb, rice, and grilled fish. The center of attention on this day isn't one of the gathered Shiite tribal chiefs or the tall, bearded cleric; it is a mustachioed American they politely call Mr. Mike.

With some amusement, the Iraqis watch their guest pick at the food with his fingers, as is the local custom, but they pay close attention as he talks about democracy. In turn, he listens to their complaints about the American plan for a transitional government and about the Iraqi politicians in Baghdad. "We didn't know much about Iraqi culture and people, and so that's why we have made some mistakes," he replies in fluent, Egyptian-accented Arabic. "We only knew about the army."

In some ways, Mr. Mike calls to mind a soft-spoken, Midwestern version of Indiana Jones, with an olive fedora, a rumpled safari jacket, and a Buck knife (his "insurance policy") strapped to his waist. Here in the Shiite heartland, home to the ruins of the ancient city of Babylon, Mike Gfoeller (GE-fel-ler), a 46-year-old veteran diplomat, administers a swath of southern and central Iraq. He is the civilian face of the U.S. military occupation, one of the relatively few Americans Iraqis encounter who isn't sporting body armor, wraparound sunglasses, and an M-16. Instead, he is armed with a diplomat's skills. Intimately familiar with Arab culture from past postings in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, he speaks the language, which he learned in college and on a Fulbright fellowship in Egypt.

Nine months after American tanks first rolled into Baghdad, the historic attempt to transform Iraq into something akin to a democracy remains troubled. American misjudgments, a persistent insurgency, and a deeply divided Iraqi population scarred by years of repression threaten to plunge Iraq into deeper violence. But Gfoeller's cross-cultural encounters here are, at least for now, something quite different. The tribal chiefs talk of American "liberation" rather than "occupation," and they enthuse about their democratic future--even if they are a little fuzzy about the details. "We want an Iraqi democracy from Iraqi traditions, not from American ones," says Farkad al-Hussainy al-Quizwiny, a towering, thickly bearded sheik who heads a Shiite religious school in Hilla and works closely with Gfoeller. "But if an unwanted man reaches power, we should force him out." This provokes a sharp debate. "Even if a man reach power with 50 percent, we should back him," insists Abdul Aziz al-Yasiri, a politician who has come from Baghdad seeking the tribe's support. The local Iraqis agree, then shift to discussing, of all things, the upcoming U.S. election and how their actions might help support President Bush.

The vibrant Shiite tribal network--built upon the strong loyalities felt by perhaps 60 percent of the region's Shiite population--offers a reason to be hopeful. "Unexpectedly, it turns out the conservative Shiite tribes are the most fertile ground for democracy," Gfoeller observes after the lunch, as his armored Chevy Suburban careens along dirt roads, dodging children and livestock. "They don't know the first thing about democracy, but they want to try it." [...]

The tribal leaders' apparent openness to American ideas seems to spring in part from their gratitude to the nation that ousted Saddam. Mass graves testify to Saddam's brutal repression of Iraq's Shiites; as a reminder, one host at the luncheon carries a photo in his pocket of his brother's severed head. Democracy, many of them also realize, could help the Shiites--who make up about 60 percent of Iraq's population--claim greater power in the traditionally Sunni-dominated nation. So far, the five impoverished Shiite provinces that Gfoeller effectively governs--which include the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala--have been relatively quiet, with few coalition casualties. "We are providing them security," says Ahmad Khabut, a tribal leader and the mayor of Al Kifl, near Hilla. "We believe the coalition will make Iraq a prosperous country." Gfoeller's headquarters compound in Hilla has been hit by mortar several times, as recently as two weeks ago. After one attack, he politely turned down an offer by a tribal chief to track down, and presumably kill, the attackers.

Of course, even here, the obstacles threaten to snuff out the glimmers of hope. Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq's most important Shiite cleric, is demanding early elections, jeopardizing the U.S. plan to turn over power to a transitional government by July 1 (with full elections once there is a new constitution and census). In Baghdad, tens of thousands of Shiites turned out in support of Sistani, who refuses to meet with any Americans, including Gfoeller. And there are worrisome upstart Shiite clerics like Moqtada al-Sadr, who draw support from desperate, unemployed urban Shiites. Meanwhile, Gfoeller's sixth province is Al Anbar, in the restive Sunni triangle. Violence there has ebbed slightly in the wake of Saddam's capture, but the attacks continue. Last week, in two separate incidents on the same day in Al Anbar, insurgents killed two Iraqi policemen and four Iraqi women working at a U.S. base.

As for the Shiite tribes near Babylon and democracy, it's still the early days. But whether drawn by curiosity or conviction, hundreds of tribal leaders, religious clerics, community leaders, and even women from the region pack into the marble-walled meeting rooms of the old Saddam Mosque in Hilla for a lecture on democracy. "Everyone is here to be acquainted with democracy," says Sheik Thahar Abdul Khadum Mokeef al-Jabouri, a local tribal chief who heads a union of farmers in Hilla. A local farmer, Ali Madlum al-Fatlawi, agrees: "Democracy is the only solution for the Shia."

As bad as the WMD intelligence was, our misunderstanding of how well suited Shi'ism is to democracy appears to have been an equally dismal failure.

MORE:
The Mullah and Democracy (BERNHARD ZAND, 1/26/04, Der Speigel)

The two most powerful religious leaders in the modern history of the Shiites studied in Najaf with the legendary Grand Ayatollah Abd al-Kassim al-Chui. Neither of the two turned out entirely as his teacher might have wished. According to Chui, one of the two men, Iran's revolutionary leader Ruhollah Khomeini, was always more interested in politics than theology. A great tribune of the people, but only moderately successful as a religious scholar.

In the 1980s, Chui referred to the other of his two pupils and his later successor, Sajid Ali al-Sistani, as a great mind, adding that his problem was that he was too much of a homebody. According to Chui, Sistani spent too much time studying religious texts instead of venturing outside and encouraging his fellow believers to resist Saddam's dictatorship. The old Chui disapproved of Sistani's behavior. Perhaps it is precisely this criticism from the man who was his teacher in the days of the Iran-Iraq war, and who died in 1992, that today shapes the actions of Grand Ayatollah Sistani.

A little more than a year ago, the name of this religious scholar from the Shiite city of Najaf, except to his followers, was little more than a concept to a few Western scholars of Islam. However, the longer the American occupation in Iraq lasts, the more significant is the 73-year-old religious leader's influence on world politics.

---

WHEN YOU KNOW FOR SURE, IT'S TOO LATE:

From Iraq to Libya, US knew little on weapons: Doubts that Hussein had WMD raise questions about war's rationale and intelligence reliability. (Peter Grier, 1/27/04, The Christian Science Monitor)

When it comes to unconventional weapons, Iraq may have been far from the most dangerous country in the world after all. In recent days a string of surprising revelations has scrambled the world's proliferation threat assessments.

Iraq's weapons programs were apparently in shambles, for instance, while Libya's were surprisingly advanced. Pakistan's nuclear scientists might have been rogue agents, proffering secrets for cash. And it appears that North Korea may be the most advanced rogue nuclear nation of all, with an advanced capacity to produce fissile material.

The bottom line: In the shadowy world of intelligence, judging capacities to produce biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons is among the most difficult estimating jobs of all.

"These intelligence estimates are not good enough to support a policy of preemptive war," says Joseph Cirincione, of the nonproliferation project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington D.C.

To the contrary, these intelligence failures suggest that it will have to suffice that a regime is hostile to us in order to justify our pre-emption, because we can never know how close they are to having WMD. Mr. Cirincione can't really be suggesting that we wait and see if these regimes use the weapons and then react can he?

---

THE SHRINKING DEBT?:

Hill Budget Office Sees 10-Year Deficits (ALAN FRAM, 1/26/04, Associated Press)

Federal deficits will total nearly $2.4 trillion over the next decade, the Congressional Budget Office projected Monday, a worsening of nearly $1 trillion since its last forecast in August.

Which would make the total debt smaller as a % of GDP than it is now, no?

---

FLYPAPER THEORY:

 AL QAEDA SUSPECT CAUGHT (Sky News, 1/26/04)

An al Qaeda operative with close ties to the suspected mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks has been captured in Iraq.

US president George W Bush said Hassan Ghul was helping al Qaeda step up attacks by insurgents against soldiers in Iraq.

He was captured last week.

Al Qaeda members are believed to have entered Iraq after the war last year that toppled President Saddam Hussein.

Mr Bush said Ghul "reported directly" to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is suspected of coordinating the September 11 attacks on the United States that killed about 3,000 people and who was captured in Pakistan in March.

---

ONE FREE TRADE AGREEMENT AFTER ANOTHER:

U.S., Costa Rica Reach Free Trade Deal (MARTIN CRUTSINGER, 1/26/04,
AP)

The Bush administration reached an agreement with Costa Rica on Sunday that will allow that nation to join four of its neighbors in creating a Central American Free Trade Area with the United States, officials of the two countries announced.

Mr. Bush has the best record on Free Trade of any president in American history.

---

LUUUUUCCCCCCYYYYYYYYYY!:

The Great Explainer: John Kerry has a lot of explaining to do. (Fred Barnes, 01/26/2004, Weekly Standard)

His emergence as the Great Explainer is a problem for Kerry. Politicians prefer to be on offense, not defense. And while the need to explain isn't a major problem for Kerry now while Democratic presidential candidates are being nice to each other, it could get far worse. As the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, Kerry is sure to be closely scrutinized by the media, as Dean was when he was the frontrunner. And if Kerry wins the nomination, the Bush campaign will try to put him on the defensive by playing up inconsistencies in his record.

On "Fox News Sunday," Kerry also was forced to explain his conflicting positions on gay marriage and the CIA. He voted against enactment of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which says a state is not obligated to recognize a gay marriage legalized by another state. But Kerry said he's actually opposed to gay marriage.

So why not vote for DOMA, which passed overwhelmingly? Kerry said he thought the Senate was gay bashing and "being used to drive wedge issues." In fact, gay marriage "was no issue" at the time, he said. "That was politics."

On the CIA, Kerry sponsored a bill to cut $1.5 billion from the budget for intelligence gathering. Then after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001, he asked why America's intelligence wasn't better. His explanation: He wanted the CIA to devote more money to human intelligence and less to technical means. He sought, he explained, "to change the culture of our intelligence gathering." He didn't explain, however, how slashing the CIA budget would achieve that. [...]

He criticized President Bush for withdrawing from the Kyoto global warming treaty in 2001. "You don't just walk away from a treaty [negotiated by] 160 countries over 10 years," he said. But in 1997, Kerry voted for a resolution, which passed 95-0, saying the United States "should not be a signatory" to the treaty. So on Kyoto, he'll have some explaining to do.

It speaks volumes about why congressmen don't get elected president that John Edwards is considered to have an advantage over John Kerry precisely because he has so little experience and thus fewer votes to explain away.

---

CONSTRICT THE FRANCHISE:

Survey: Freshmen more political — and more conservative (Greg Toppo, 1/25/04, USA TODAY)

After 35 years of decline, political interest among young people is on the rise, a wide-ranging survey of U.S. college freshmen finds. [...]

In the newest edition, released today, 34% of freshmen surveyed last fall say it's important to keep up with politics, continuing a three-year uptick that began just months after the Florida recount and weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Still, modern kids' political engagement pales next to that of the freshmen class of 1966, the survey's first subjects, 60% of whom said it was "essential or very important" to keep up with politics.

Since then, the survey shows, students' political views also have shifted to the right. Liberals still outnumber conservatives, but just barely: 24% say they hold liberal political views; 21% call themselves conservatives.

The percentage of liberals has nose-dived from its high of 38% in 1971. The percentage of conservative students, as low as 14% after Richard Nixon's second presidential inauguration in 1973, has hovered near the 20% mark since 1981 and Ronald Reagan's first term. Then, as now, the largest group by far remained students who call their their political views "middle-of-the-road."

The unnaturalness of being a conservative at such an age is reason enough to repeal the vote for 18 year olds.

---

YOU CATCH MORE FLIES WITH A MOAB THAN WITH HONEY:

TEHRAN TERRORFEST (AMIR TAHERI, January 26, 2004, NY Post)

THE other day at the World Economic Forum's inaugural session at Davos, Switzerland, Iran's President Muhammad Khatami repeatedly nodded his head in approval as forum founder Klaus Schwab called for the eradication of international terrorism. In his own speech, Khatami called for a "dialogue of civilizations" as an alternative to war and terror.

Meanwhile, militants from some 40 countries spread across the globe were trekking to Tehran for a 10-day "revolutionary jamboree" in which "a new strategy to confront the American Great Satan" will be hammered out.

The event starts Feb. 1, to mark the 25th anniversary of the return to Iran from exile of the late Ayatollah Ruhallah Khomeini, the founder of the "Islamic Revolution." It is not clear how many militants will attend, but Iran's official media promise a massive turnout to underline the Islamic Republic's position as the "throbbing heart of world resistance to American arrogance."

The guest list reads like a who's who of global terror.

In fact, most of the groups attending the event, labeled "Ten Days of Dawn," are branded by the United States and some European Union members as terrorist outfits. These include 17 branches of the Hezbollah, a worldwide militant Shi'ite movement created by Tehran in 1983.

Kill them.

---

LET THE BIG DOGS EAT:

Climate model predicts even hotter summers (Belle Dumé, 23 January 2004, PhysicsWeb)

The record-breaking heat wave that affected much of Europe in the summer of 2003 "took place 50 years too early" according to a Swiss climate scientist. Martin Beniston of the University of Fribourg says that last year's heat wave was not like those that occurred in 1947 and 1976, and more like the conditions that might be expected towards the end of this century. He hopes that governments will use the heat wave as an indication of "a shape of things to come" to devise new strategies for coping with future climate change and global warming

One further reason to use nuclear weapons on North Korea is that we could trigger just enough of a nuclear winter to counteract global warming.

---

BUYING BACK TRADITIONAL VALUES:

The Nanny in Chief: Bush thinks he knows what's good for you, and he'll spend money to prove it (ANDREW SULLIVAN, Feb. 02, 2004, TIME)

There's barely a speech by President Bush that doesn't cite the glories of human freedom. It's God's gift to mankind, he believes. And in some ways this President has clearly expanded it: the people of Afghanistan and Iraq enjoy liberties unimaginable only a few years ago. But there's a strange exception to this Bush doctrine. It ends when you reach America's shores. Within the U.S., the Bush Administration has shown an unusually hostile attitude toward the exercise of personal freedom. When your individual choices conflict with what the Bush people think is good for you, they have been only too happy to intervene. The government, Bush clearly believes, has a right to be involved in many personal decisions you make — punishing some, encouraging others, nudging and prodding the public to live the good life as the President understands it. The nanny state, much loved by Democrats, is thriving under Republicans. [...]

Once upon a time, Republicans believed in leaving it to the private and voluntary sectors to do the important work of building citizenship and values. Remember the "thousand points of light"? These days those lightbulbs need government subsidies. One of the key beliefs of this President is that federal money should be funneled to religious groups that blend proselytizing with important social work. His faith-based initiative largely withered on the vine, but he has done what he can. In last year's State of the Union message, he proposed almost half a billion dollars to pay for mentors for disadvantaged high school students or the children of prisoners. This year he proposed an extensive government program to coach newly released ex-cons into better lives. Ever wonder who these government-backed mentors are? And what exactly they're preaching? Maybe you should, because you're paying for them. [...]

There has always been a tension in conservatism between those who favor more liberty and those who want more morality. But what's indisputable is that Bush's "compassionate conservatism" is a move toward the latter — the use of the government to impose and subsidize certain morals over others. He is fusing Big Government liberalism with religious-right moralism. It's the nanny state with more cash. Your cash, that is. And their morals.

Mr. Sullivan doesn't like this trend because he's only interested in the GOP to the extent that its former libertarian impulse might sanction his sexuality, but it is the logical, and only realistic, direction for the party to take. Seventy years of rule by New Deal Democrats has left us a post-moral culture and an irreversibly popular welfare state, so if conservatives are to restore traditional morals and values to the society the best way to do so is--somewhat paradoxically--to use the levers of government. Thus, rather than do away with welfare altogether, as the libertarian Right would demand, welfare reform imposed responsibilities and work requirements on recipients. Likewise, the privatization of other services--like Social Security, education, health care, unemployment, etc.--won't be private at all. Although it will maximize choice and try to minimize day-to-day government interference, it will in fact be a massive government mandate that Americans take responsibility for their own social safety net. Meanwhile, the use of faith-based organizations to provide remaining social services both provides religious groups with money and restores the role of their teachings in the lives of societies least responsible members. Finally, on "privacy" issues like abortion, homosexuality, etc., where permissive jurists have engaged in a sustained anti-Constitutional assault on traditional morality, conservatism must seek to reverse the damage both by court-packing and, when possible, by amending the Constitution.

Mr. Sullivan is right that this is all a departure from the conservative ideal of society that already has a universal morality and therefore needs less government, but the return to such a society is impossible and was never going to be sustainable in a democracy at any rate. Indeed, no aspect of the conservative critique of democracy was more prophetic than that once the majority recognized that they could transfer other peoples' money to themselves they would and that their growing dependence on government would be destructive of society and the virtues upon which society depends.

It is here that we arrive at the genius of Bushism, for what the President's proposed Opportunity Society actually does is to turn these flaws of democracy against themselves: first, it subverts entitlement programns so that you are in effect transfering money to yourself; second, it exploits the democratic impulse towards greater government as a means of imparting values. So, the money upon which you will retire tomorrow you are required to sock away today and the treatment you wish to receive for an addiction requires you to participate in the community of a religious organization, rather than simply make a claim upon a government bureaucrat.

It is hardly surprising that what Mr. Bush is attempting is provoking so much controversy, especially on the remnants of the far Right and the orthodox Left, because it represents a radical reconciliation of the two. If the Puritanical small government ideology that prevailed well into the early 20th Century might be said to be the American thesis and the secularized big government ideology of the past seven decades its antithesis, then the remoralized big government conservatism of Mr. Bush can be seen as the synthesis of the two. In this regard, the President is the first Republican to have accepted the reality that most people in modern America demand some level of economic security from the State and to try and channel that demand so that it ultimately serves conservative purposes. Should he succeed in accomplishing any considerable portion of this synthesis he will be a transforming figure in American history, of no less import than FDR.

MORE:
Independent accounts (William G. Shipman, January 26, 2004, Washington Times)

In his State of the Union address, President Bush briefly discussed one of the most important issues facing Americans: Social Security reform. Now that campaigning for the 2004 elections is under way, we'll probably hear a lot about why the Social Security system should be revamped to include individual accounts invested in stocks and bonds. Opponents of reform have already played their cards; they argue it's impossible to manage 140 million personal accounts, let alone cost-effectively. They're wrong and here's why.

I recently led a group of professionals, representing many disciplines, to determine whether such a system were feasible. After careful study, we concluded it is. The administrative architecture of our reformed Social Security structure, which I outlined in testimony before the House Budget Committee Task Force on Social Security, was reviewed by the General Accounting Office and was adopted by the President's Commission to Strengthen Social Security.

My group started with a list of eight principles we considered necessary for success. The system would have individual accounts with assets owned by the account holder; reasonable costs; a low employer-administrative burden; opportunities for workers of all income levels to participate; a structure so inexperienced investors would not suffer poor returns relative to experienced investors; investment choice and a solution for participants who make no investment choice; and lastly, automatic adjustments to match technological innovations offered by the financial services industry.

---

POST-POST-ZIONISM:

Politically Incorrect Historian: Benny Morris' transformation highlights chilling truths about the conflict (Jonathan Tobin, Jan. 26, 2004, Jewish World Review)

[E]ver since the Palestinian Authority rejected Israel's peace offer at the July 2000 Camp David summit and answered it with a terrorist war of attriti on, [Benny] Morris has begun to make statements that have lost him his fans on the left.

The culmination of this process came when the Israeli daily Ha'aretz published a lengthy interview with the writer on Jan. 9. In it, Morris told journalist Ari Shavit — himself a highly partisan star of the Israeli left — that while his work uncovering Israeli wrongdoing would continue, he was no longer a supporter of peace efforts with the Palestinians.

Indeed, Morris shocked Shavit by asserting that Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion — whom Morris has roundly criticized as responsible for some of the suffering of Palestinian Arabs — probably made a mistake by not completely expelling all of them from the West Bank during the fighting in 1948 and 1949.

"A society that aims to kill you forces you to destroy it," Morris said. Even more significantly, Morris pointed that all of the bad deeds which he is prepared to blame on Israelis do not amount to much when compared to the atrocities carried out elsewhere, as well as to the attempts of the Arabs to destroy Israel.

"When you take into account that there was a bloody civil war here and that we lost 1 percent of the population, you find that we [Israel] behaved very well," Morris told a dumfounded Shavit.

We've more by and about Mr. Morris here.

Meanwhile, though it's slightly dated, here's a great essay on the post-Zionist movement from which Mr. Morris came and the threat that progressive transnationalism poses to Western nations, The End of Zionism?: The ideology that built the State of Israel has given way to a Post-Zionism that sanctifies Jewish disempowerment. (Yoram Hazony, Summer 1996, Azure)

Zionism is Jewish nationalism--the belief that there should be a Jewish nation-state in the land of Israel. Few people today recognize what an abomination this idea was to Jewish intellectuals when it was formally constituted as a political organization in 1897. Of the great Jewish thinkers of all denominations, virtually none could stomach the idea: Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Haim Soloveitchik, the Hasidic rebbes of both Lubavitch and Satmar, all rejected the Jewish state for much the same reason: They believed the Jewish people was essentially a thing of the spirit, and that the creation of the state--which perforce meant a Judaism of tanks and explosives, of politics and intrigue, of bureaucracy and capital, in short the empowerment of Judaism--would mean the end of Judaism as a philosophy, an ideal, a faith.

What took the teeth out of the anti-Zionism of the Jewish left and right was the Holocaust. In the wake of the most fearsome possible demonstration of the evil of Jewish powerlessness, the anti-Zionism of all camps became an embarrassment. The pugnacious little fighters of Palestine lashing out at the British enemy and Arab marauders became the heroes of the Jewish people. By the time Jewish toughs such as David Ben-Gurion and Menachem Begin had managed to bomb the British off their backs, their state, Israel, had really become the state of virtually the entire Jewish people. After the gas chambers, almost every Jew everywhere had become a Zionist, a believer in the necessity and obligation of Jewish power.

Yet Jewish and even Israeli intellectuals never became reconciled to the empowerment entailed in the creation of a Jewish nation-state. The very desirability of the Israeli War of Independence in 1948 was caustically challenged in the writings of S. Yizhar, perhaps the most prominent writer of the postwar years. And by the 1960s, Israeli academia, itself founded by anti-nationalists such as Buber and Yehuda Magnes, had begun to spawn an entire generation of literary figures whose point of departure was the rejection of Jewish nationalism. Thus Amos Ozís most famous novel, My Michael, portrays Jerusalem, the very symbol of the Jewish national revival as a city of brooding insanity and illness. Similarly, A.B. Yehoshua's story, "Before the Forest," has the young Jew joining forces with an Arab to burn down the "Zionist" forest planted on the ruins of an Arab village. In Yehoshua's best-known novel, The Lover, the hero deserts his unit in mid-battle, and a high-school girl from a well-to-do family finds comfort in the arms of an Arab.

Other common themes of Israeli literature are much the same: the escape from Israel; the destruction of Israel; death (by decay, rather than struggle); the Israel Defense Forces as concentration camp, pigsty, whorehouse; and the ideal of disempowerment represented by the Holocaust--which, as novelist Moshe Shamir has observed, "is becoming the common homeland of the Jews, their promised land."

While literary figures have long led the effort to create a post-Zionist consciousness in Israel, recent years have seen an even more pronounced effort on the part of academics. The 1967 Six Day War immediately inspired attacks by opponents of nationalism such as Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who claimed that Israel was undergoing nazification, that Israelís soldiers had become "Judeo-Nazis," and that Israel would soon be setting up concentration camps4óa leitmotif soon mimicked and elaborated upon by other prominent intellectuals such as Amos Funkenstein (winner of the Israel prize) and the historian Moshe Zimmermann. In the last two decades, these seemingly far-out expressions of hatred for Zionist power have paved the way for a more "scientific" delegitimization of the Jewish state by historians, sociologists and journalists offering more acceptable versions of the same themes: Zionism was a colonialist movement, said Ilan Papo. It forcibly expelled the Arab refugees from their homes in 1948, said Benny Morris. It fabricated a false connection between the Jews and the land, said Boas Evron. It used the Holocaust to advance its political ends, said Tom Segev. And so on.

There are certainly elements of truth in some of the allegations raised. The reality of power--and especially power wielded in desperation, as Zionist power was--is that it inevitably has its seamier side. But instead of contributing to a new balance in Israeli historiography, the new academics have waged what amounts to a scorched earth campaign against the past, joining authors and artists in a wholesale effort to wreck the basic faith of the Israeli public in its own history. As the novelist Aharon Meged, a veteran member of the Labor movement, described the rise of post-Zionism among Israeli intellectuals: "For two or three decades now, several hundred of our society's 'best,' men of the pen and of the spirit have been working single-mindedly and without respite to preach and prove that our cause is not just: Not only that it has been unjust since the Six Day War and the 'occupation' and not only since the founding of the state in 1948 but since the beginnings of Zionist settlement at the end of the last century."

In light of this assault, every value invoked in building the Jewish state--the ingathering of the exiles, the redemption of a neglected land, the purity of arms used in self-defenseóis repainted as the product of ignorance, hypocrisy and cynicism, as is the Jewish state itself. "Post-Zionism" becomes the only belief acceptable to an "enlightened" individual.

By now post-Zionist truths have become so self-evident as to constitute an Israeli "political correctness"...

The important point to take away from this is that folk on the Left less sensible than Mr. Morris will court even the destruction of their own nations in societies in pursuit of their ideology.

MORE:
and here Benny Morris clarifies a few points for his old friends, now critics:
Right of Reply / I do not support expulsion (Benny Morris, 1/23/04, Ha'aretz)

The war being waged against us since September 2000 is three-dimensional: On one level, which is the one highlighted by Palestinian spokespersons, a struggle is being waged for liberation from Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip; on the second level, the Palestinians - according to spokesmen for Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah militants - are waging a war to eradicate the Zionist state and to restore their "rights" over all of Palestine; on the third level, the Palestinians' struggle is part of the global struggle being waged by jihadist Islam against the "Western Satan," with Israel being a vulnerable extension of Western culture in our region.

For jihadist Islam, Israel represents the embodiment of all the values it abhors - democracy and freedom, openness, tolerance and pluralism, individualism and secularism, criticality (including the value of expressing self-criticism, which is absent from their culture), women's rights, liberalism and progress, sexual freedom - while the proponents of jihad aspire to return to the days in which the sword of Islam ruled from India to the Atlantic Ocean and minorities quaked under its shadow. These jihadists - and the societies that support them and dispatch them - who rejoice in the streets whenever a building is brought crashing down upon hundreds or thousands of occupants or a bus is reduced to a smoldering hulk, deserve the name "barbarians." It's unfortunate that many in the West and in the extreme Israeli left prefer to ignore the second and third dimensions and to view the Palestinian struggle solely through the prism of the first dimension, resistance to occupation.

A central accusation in the letters to Haaretz Magazine ("The judgment of history," January 16) concerned the issue of "ethnic cleansing." I will repeat my words, which apparently did not register (perhaps because of the misleading title on the cover): I do not support the expulsion of Arabs from the territories or from the State of Israel! Such an expulsion would be immoral, and is also unrealistic. What I said was, that if in the future, these communities were to launch massive violence against the State of Israel in combination with a broad assault on Israel by its neighbors, and endanger its survival, expulsions would certainly be in the cards. As for Israeli Arabs, my comments may be seen to represent a minatory road sign pointing in two possible directions: They could, as a whole, choose the path of loyalty to the Jewish state and integration within it as equal citizens, and thus enjoy quiet, prosperous lives; or they could choose the path of disloyalty to the state and of active and violent support for those who seek its demise. The latter path - with which many Israeli Arabs identified in October 2000 and with which many in its leadership seem to identify today, in one convoluted way or another - will help lead to either the destruction of the Jewish state or to their being uprooted.

---

THE VAGUEST WAY:

Red harvest in Iraq (Spengler, 1/26/04, Asia Times)

Hollywood embraced all of Hammett's heroes except for the Op [Red Harvest], whose casual destructiveness offends American sensibilities. Yet Hammett's grubby detective might be American literature's most original invention, and, more to the point, he is just the man America needs right now in Iraq.

We encounter the Op in a 1920s Western town, where the mine boss imported gangsters to break a strike, and the gangsters stayed to run the rackets. A brittle truce prevails among the various gangs, the corrupt police and the mine owner. The Op willfully incites a gang war, deceiving colleagues and superiors. He dislikes authority, not least the one that pays him. Damsels in distress and downtrodden workers matter to him not at all. He is a loner without friends, short, fat and alcoholic. His transient love interest is a demimondaine whose murder he neglects to prevent. He incites the war simply because he can, at great risk to his own life, which in any case he holds cheap. He manipulates rather than confronts. The story ends when everyone else is dead.

Numerous films borrowed Red Harvest's plot outline, including Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo, Sergio Leone's For a Fistful of Dollars, Walter Hill's Last Man Standing, and the Coen brothers' Miller's Crossing, without, however, portraying Hammett's protagonist. That anomaly reveals much about American culture. The detectives and cowboys who infest American cinema descend from the silly chivalric literature that Miguel de Cervantes lampooned in Don Quixote.

Americans want their tough guys to have a heart of gold. In the Kurosawa-Leone-Hill adaptations, the Toshiro Mifune-Clint Eastwood-Bruce Willis characters take great risk to aid a lady in distress. Hammett's Op cares neither about lady nor risk. His object is the mutual destruction of the contending parties, which he arranges with humor and enjoyment.

Spengler is one of those as yet unreconciled to the truth that our interests are best served by destruction of only one of the contending parties.

---

WE'LL HAVE A BETTER VIEW OF THE ICEBERG IF WE MOVE THESE DECK CHAIRS:

What the Change in Germany Means (Frank X. Vogelgesang, January 26, 2004, Mises.org)

Now it seems clear that 2003 ended with a negative compound growth rate, while unemployment has risen to over 10%. As for the BA, after calls for its abolition following the 2002 scandal subsided, the various stakeholders rolled up their sleeves and started to "reform" the bureaucracy. So far, the only clearly visible result is a new name (from "institute" to "agency"), a spanking new website and, as surreal as it may seem, a few thousand new public employees, hired to take on the new tasks arising from the "reform." Unemployment is rising? Hey, spend more public money on the labor office!

So, nothing has changed, has it? Well, yes and no. After getting re-elected, the German Chancellor announced his reform "Agenda 2010." In short an assortment of piecemeal changes in tax, labor, social, and regulatory policies. Since after the 2002 election majorities are such that the CDU (Christian Democrats) and FDP (Free Democrats) opposition control the upper
chamber (Bundesrat), much political haggling ensued. Laws proposed by the government did not get ratified and under the German system were being sent to a "reconciliation committee" (Vermittlungsausschuss), where representatives of both Chambers submerge themselves in what has become known as the "dark chamber" and try to hammer out a compromise.

The compromise which after two weeks was announced in early December amid much fanfare, for practical matters does not amount to much: move forward half of a tax reform that has already been written into law by one year; finance the 8 to 9 billion Euros in forgone taxes with 30% of new debt, the sale of several entities still in state hands (like airports), and a timid reduction in subsidies. Also part of the deal is to make it easier for companies of up to 10 people (current threshold stands at five) to lay off people, and a reform of the crafts and trade regulations.

In other words, this package cannot be considered a profound structural change of German society, much less a clear departure away from the all encompassing state and toward more individual liberty and responsibility. The biggies, for instance, in labor market reform, like doing away with industry wide wage standards, were not touched.

However, the December compromise in my opinion is remarkable for two reasons: first, it made clear to a lot of people that the current constraints on freedom brought about by a suffocating state and ubiquitous regulation does not, to use a popular image, lie over the country like a wet
blanket. Rather the system that has been built up over the past decades compares to a cancer whose metastases have spread everywhere.

Second, though, it shows that something has started moving. Take the proposed reform of the crafts and trade regulation. Let us remember that in Germany you must be trained and certified (Meisterzwang) according to a certain system to be allowed to carry out some 90 odd different crafts. Without the title you cannot operate a barber shop or run a painting
business.

Does the meagerness of such "reforms" really suggest a nation coming to grips with its problems, especially when the main ones are demographic and religious?

---

STILL TED'S PARTY:

The Kennedy Comeback (WILLIAM SAFIRE, 1/26/04, NY Times)

assumptions, to be tested soon enough, have Democratic soothsayers predicting a Kerry-Edwards ticket at the Boston convention. What delicious diversity: North and South, with Kerry's fatal Massachusettsism ameliorated by Edwards's Carolina charm; the experience of craggy Kerry enlivened by the passionate optimism of the boyish Edwards.

But the political philosophy these two men have embraced is lopsidedly leftist: In this campaign, they have clawed their way up the greasy pole of politics with a pitch that is pure populism. Both men have risen high in Democratic polls with a brand of class resentment and soak-the-rich rhetoric rooted in the old-fashioned liberalism of Ted Kennedy.

I used to think that the battle within the Democratic Party would pit the centrist Clinton Restoration, using Clark as its sacrificial lamb this time around, against the maverick antiwar, antiestablishment legion that Dean had excited. Though Dean also railed against the rich, his signature attraction was his antiwar anger.

As Dean machine-gunned himself in the foot — in gaffes that dismayed Iowans weeks before his primal pep talk — his support did not switch to Clark, the inept amateur handled and financed by the Clintonites. Instead, many disillusioned Deaniacs went to a third faction that has long been lying in the Democratic weeds: the proponents of class warfare propounded for a generation by Ted Kennedy.

Not by John F. Kennedy, the president who cut taxes and would "bear any burden" in the defense of liberty. But by the Old Left led by his brother Teddy, scourge of conservative judges and free-market medicine, whose aging acolytes have tried to keep the not-so-hot liberal flame burning under the rich and powerful.

The resuscitation of this long-dormant faction among Democrats surprised me. But with his campaign in the doldrums as Dean's restorative rage invigorated both the new Netties and the Old Left, John Kerry turned to his Senate senior and Massachusetts mentor for succor.

The class warfare theme, a specialty of Mr. Kerry's campaign guru, Bob Shrum, is useful for winning Democratic primaries and even statewide elections in some places, but, as Mr. Safire notes, routinely loses presidential elections.

---

TONY THE TORY:

Blair falling on sword of education reform?: Under the new system, students would shoulder debt instead of taxpayers. (Margalit Edelman, 1/26/04, CS Monitor)

His support of raising fees for college tuition is, once again, an act of political courage that has earned him the scorn of opposition politicians, his own party, and a wide swath of the British public.

Mr. Blair is seeking parliamentary approval for university funding reforms in a vote tuesday. He seeks higher tuition fees in British public universities, and wants to allow the schools themselves to determine how much to charge, up to a maximum of £3,000 annually. Students would be able to delay payment until they're earning £15,000 annually. The new fees would also finance compulsory bursaries for poor students, and those who never break the salary barrier would have debts written off after 25 years. The "top up" charges would replace the £1,125 annual fee that students now pay up front. Even with students contributing more, general taxation would still pay more than 80 percent of the cost.

To most Americans, Blair's proposal wouldn't seem shocking in an era where parents expect thousands in debt for public and private university education. But transatlantic sensibilities on education, health, and nearly any issue pitting government obligations against taxpayers can be oceans apart.

Many here expect universities to be funded largely by the government through taxation. Three recent polls conducted by British polling firms Populus, YouGov, and ICM all found about a third of respondents supporting tax-based college funding.

Nonetheless, there seems to be growing recognition that students should foot more of the bill. The same polls found that between 40 and 65 percent believe students ought to contribute to their education but agree with Blair's postponed repayment. A majority of respondents on lower rungs of the economic ladder who did not attend university also considered the plan fair.

You have to suppose that those here who continue to think of Tony Blair as a garden variety Leftist just don't understand how radically conservative is what he's trying to do.

---

AXIS OF GOOD FILES:

India rises as strategic US ally: Monday India celebrates Republic Day - and worries neighbors, especially Pakistan. (Scott Baldauf, 1/26/04, The Christian Science Monitor)

Just five years after US-imposed sanctions turned India and Pakistan into virtual pariah states for their nuclear-weapons tests in 1998, India has emerged as America's "strategic partner" in South Asia. Far more than its alliance with Pakistan to hunt down Al Qaeda and Taliban remnants, America's new relationship with India is a broad security, political, technological, and economic arrangement on par with America's relationship with Europe or NATO. The US is even talking about sharing roles in joint space missions.

In speeches over the last week, President Bush, Colin Powell, and other US officials have lauded India's new position in the world and growing economic importance on the global stage. Separately, US officials have talked of India's common interests in protecting sea lanes from the Persian Gulf to the Straits of Malacca, an area that India already patrols with its blue-water navy.

Call it the outsourcing of global security, with India once again getting the job.

"If you're looking at the security of the oil lanes or the sea lanes of Southeast Asia or the relationship with China, there's a natural convergence of interests from the US and India on all this," says K. Santhanam, director of the Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses, a government think tank in New Delhi.

It's a situation that has many of India's neighbors, primarily its nuclear rival Pakistan, wringing their hands.

Wringing is good.

---

THE DOMINOES JUST KEEP FALLING...INTO OUR LAPS:

Sudan shifts from pariah to partner (Abraham McLaughlin, 1/26/04, The Christian Science Monitor)

Standing amid the ruins of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant here, an avuncular man named Idris Babiker Eltayeb has every reason to detest America. After all, the US sent 13 cruise missiles to demolish his factory in 1988, saying there was evidence it was making chemical weapons for Osama bin Laden.

Yet as he steps carefully between piles of twisted concrete, pointing out pieces of American missiles still lying in the dust, he's got a smile on his face - and architectural plans under his arm. He aims to rebuild the factory - and make American drugs in it. He's also negotiating with a US firm to distribute its drugs here.

His long journey from US target to budding partner mirrors Sudan's. In five years, this North African nation has gone from international pariah to tentative US antiterror ally. America is now deluging Sudan with promises of aid and invitations to the White House to sign a peace deal ending its 20-year civil war. Many here think it could be a model for Syria, Iran, and even North Korea to come in from the terror-supporting cold.

"Sudan is a success story," says Bruce Hoffman, a terror expert at the RAND Corporation in Washington.

With the exception of Western Pakistan, is there anywhere in the Middle East that's moved closer to Osamaism than to Americanism since 9-11?

---

IS THERE ANY PART OF HIMSELF THAT CABANA BOY HASN'T SOLD?:

The Many Faces Of Sen. John Kerry: John Kerry decided three decades ago that the path to political stardom was to be all things to all people - which included tailoring his stance on issues depending on his audience. Now that he wants to be president, can we trust him to tell us where he really stands? (John Pike, Sept 16, 2003, Insight on the News)

Kerry's first national media attention and the first in which the epithet "phony" was directed against him came on April 22, 1971, when he testified before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations as part of a carefully orchestrated buildup to an antiwar protest in Washington. The object was publicity, and a nationwide storm developed around this tall young man still in his 20s. He spoke as a member of an antiwar group called the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), some of whom felt kinship with Communist China's Chairman Mao. Testifying eloquently against the war and U.S. bombings using a speech prepared with the help of a Bobby Kennedy speechwriter, Kerry slipped away from the manuscript to add rhetorical bombs of his own design, saying he had heard U.S. soldiers relate how they had "personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war." Kerry also was quoted during this period as saying, "War crimes in Vietnam are the rule, not the exception." He spoke on television of "crimes committed on a day-to-day basis, with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command."

Many veterans were outraged at these charges of American war crimes, which he later acknowledged he personally never saw, and which it developed had been spun out of the mouths of young Maoists. Michael Bernique, who served with Kerry as a swift-boat skipper, reportedly said, "I think there was a point in time when John was making it up fast and quick. I think he was saying whatever he needed to say."

War veteran John O'Neill, who publicly debated Kerry at this time, has been reported as saying Kerry's statements about war crimes were irresponsible, wrong, immoral and a "disservice to all the people that were there. ... The war didn't change [Kerry]. I think he was a guy driven tremendously by ambition. I think he was that way before he went and is that way today." [...]

John Forbes Kerry no longer trumpets the fact that his initials are JFK, and he has expunged his middle initial from his bumper stickers. Political operatives in the Bay State say this is because it is believed his close association with the Kennedys and Massachusetts liberalism might hurt his presidential candidacy, especially in the South. When it is remembered that he was Democratic presidential-nominee Michael Dukakis' lieutenant governor, Kerry campaigners note that the two were elected on separate ballots.

There are other image problems that still have not been handled. The week that included Kerry's appearance before Congress included another incident that produced an embarrassment that took years to be exposed. In a protest on April 23, 1971, Kerry led his shocked countrymen to believe that, weeping, he and his VVAW comrades had tossed their war medals onto the steps of the Capitol where a large sign nearby proclaimed: "Trash." It stirred the emotions for those on both sides of the conflict and again spurred media attention for Kerry. But then in 1984 a reporter noticed that Kerry's medals were displayed on the wall of his office and the Wall Street Journal reported that, when confronted, Kerry claimed he actually tossed away his combat ribbons, not his medals. Kerry says he threw someone else's medals. Whatever the truth, he had let the fabrication continue for years. [...]

Columnist Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe also wonders whether Kerry tries to be all things to all people. Jacoby reports that, when in the early 1990s a constituent wrote Kerry expressing support for an invasion of Iraq, Kerry's office responded by sending two letters one saying he opposed the war and another supporting President George H.W. Bush's response. Kerry blamed it on computer problems and the failure to dispatch a third letter one opposing the war but supporting the troops.

With antiwar candidate Dean moving ahead in New Hampshire and Iowa, Kerry continued to try to present himself as both for the war and against it, say Democratic political consultants in the Bay State. Now, they say, he may be writing off those states in favor of a last-ditch stand in the South as a national-security veteran.

An experienced Kerry watcher reminds that in 1984, when he first was trying to win election to the Senate, his chief rival in the tough Democratic primary was U.S. Rep. James M. Shannon. Kerry had been outscored by Shannon, 100-94, on the endorsement questionnaire of a group opposed to America's then-growing military. In Massachusetts, the antiwar vote was and is significant, and the two liberals were vying for their vote. A member of the group favoring a reduction in funds earmarked to build key weapons systems contacted a Kerry lieutenant and advised that Kerry change his answers on the questionnaire so that both candidates would have an equal score. Kerry changed his answers, both got a perfect score and the maneuver kept Shannon from receiving the important endorsement of the group.

In seeking approval of this disarmament group, Kerry formally expressed approval of canceling a host of the very weapons systems that helped defeat Iraq so quickly, including the B-1 and B-2 stealth bombers, the AH-64 Apache helicopter, the Patriot missile system, the F-15, F-14A and F-14D jets, the AV-8B Harrier jet, the Aegis air-defense cruiser and the Trident missile system. Kerry says of this 1984 campaign posture, "I'm sure that some of it was driven at the time by the nature of the beast I was fighting politically." [...]

Heard of Watergate? Get ready for Lowellgate.

On Sept. 18, 1972, the evening before the primary election during his second attempt for Congress, Kerry's brother Cameron and one Thomas Vallely, both part of his current campaign team, were arrested by Lowell police at 1:40 a.m. and charged with breaking and entering with the intent to commit larceny. The two were apprehended in the basement of a building whose door had been forced open, police said. It housed the headquarters of candidate DiFruscia. The Watergate scandal was making headlines at this time, and it was called the Lowell Watergate.

"They wanted to sever my telephone lines," DiFruscia said recently. Had those lines been cut, Kerry's opponent would not have been able to telephone supporters on Election Day to get out the vote and coordinate poll watchers, vital roles in a close election. "I do not know if they wanted to break into my office," says DiFruscia today. At the time he said, "All my IBM cards and the list of my voter identification in the greater Lowell area are in my headquarters."

Cameron and Vallely, along with David Thorne, who was Kerry's campaign manager at the time and has been close to him since they attended Yale together, did not deny the two entered the building in which they were captured. They said at the time they were in the cellar of the building to check their own telephone lines because they had received an anonymous call warning they would be cut.

This reporter heard an allegation that another congressional candidate placed the alleged anonymous call, which was denied. But if the Kerry campaign was concerned about someone breaking and entering to cut off its telephone service, why didn't they just call the police? Why break the law? And what does any of this say about Kerry's mind-set? Kerry campaign officials did not answer important Lowellgate questions.

The case was transferred to superior court and continued without a finding, where it was dismissed about a year later. But since it happened at the last minute, and Kerry won the primary but went on to lose the general election, this ugly business did not receive intense media scrutiny. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were busy investigating another break-in.

The lesson that FDR, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, and Clinton all teach is that if you spend your whole life plotting to become president you sell off too much of your soul along the way to be trustworthy--by the time you get there your moral capital has long since been spent. Senator Kerry fits their mold to a disquieting degree.

MORE:
Lifetime Liberal Rating (Americans for Democratic Action)

Description of the Lifetime Voting Record:

ADA releases an annual voting record based on 20 issues we consider to be the most important each year. Each Member of Congress receives 5 points for each vote on which he/she voted with us, and does not receive 5 points if he/she voted against us or was absent for the vote. The total possible score is 100%, a perfect Liberal Quotient.

Massachusetts:

Kennedy (D) 88
Kerry (D) 93

-What Becomes a President Most?: As Kerry's fortunes rise, primary voters say they are searching for electability. But their quest is not that simple (NANCY GIBBS, Feb. 02, 2004, TIME)

Kerry may be the one using the Real Deal as his slogan, but there's a sense that he's protesting too much. Herbert Hoover once said of Franklin Roosevelt that "he was a chameleon on plaid," and there has been something of that quality throughout Kerry's campaign. He has written poetry and wind-surfed and ridden a Harley. He has played both hockey and his guitar. It was meant to make him seem more human, change the scale, since he looms over the field like a tall dark cloud. For months nothing seemed to work. He still came across as a classic Massachusetts Yankee, easy to admire but hard to like. The consolation out of Iowa was that maybe it didn't matter if he wasn't all that likable if he's what voters think they need.

-Does Teresa Heinz Trust John Kerry?
If not, why should we? (Timothy Noah, Dec. 2, 2003, Slate)

If Teresa Heinz won't trust presidential candidate John Kerry with her money, why should American voters trust Kerry with their country?

Teresa Heinz and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., were married in 1995. Kerry's assets at the time were a few million dollars. Heinz's assets at the time were reportedly around half a billion dollars, which she'd inherited from her late husband, Sen. John Heinz, R-Pa., heir to the ketchup fortune. Unlike many other married couples, Heinz and Kerry kept their premarital assets separate. Much of Teresa Heinz's inheritance was no doubt tied up in trusts, but a substantial sum must have been unencumbered, because she had Sen. Kerry sign a prenuptial agreement. "Everybody has a prenup," Heinz explained to Lisa DiPaulo, who profiled her sympathetically in Elle.

-Ahead in N.H., Kerry Defends Record Against G.O.P. Attacks (CHRISTINE HAUSER, 1/25/04, NY Times)

---

LET SHI'ASTAN BE:

Democracy Anxiety: Iraq's Shiites are nervous they won't get to vote; Americans are nervous about letting them. (Reuel Marc Gerecht, 02/02/2004, Weekly Standard)

Simply put, Shiites everywhere have been cheated. By the Ottomans, British, Sunni Arab Hashemites, pan-Arab nationalists, Baathists, and the first Bush administration, which let them die by the tens of thousands when Saddam put down the rebellion following the first Gulf War. To make matters worse for the Shiites of Iraq, their country is the birthplace of Shiism, where annually the faithful commemorate (except when the Sunnis wouldn't let them) the mother of all shortchanges, the defeat and martyrdom of the Imam Hussein, the son of the Caliph Ali and the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. Muslims loyal to an Umayyad caliph in Damascus--the folks who would later be called Sunnis--won the day, and kept on winning for 1,300 years (minus a few, usually short-lived, Shiite triumphs).

The Ashura celebrations of Hussein's martyrdom that occurred not long after the fall of Saddam Hussein produced a palpable political quickening throughout Iraq's Shiite community. As one cleric later remarked to me, in the spring of 2003 when the Shiites beat their chests in mourning for the betrayal of their imam, they were really saying the centuries of cheating had come to an end. For him, a democratic system in Iraq would ensure that no conspiracy of forces would ever again hurt Shiites. The age of taqiyya--the historic Shiite disposition toward dissimulation in self-defense--could finally end, and Shiites could live as normal men, that is, as Sunnis. Though the understanding of democracy among Iraq's Shiites, especially among the clergy, is more sophisticated than that, at heart this is the wellspring of their democratic sentiment and goodwill toward the United States. Sistani's commitment to the Bush administration's effort to midwife democracy in his country rides on this simple conviction. The more complicated America's blueprint for democracy in Iraq--and the caucus system envisaged by Washington isn't easily grasped by American officials, let alone Iraqis--the greater the risk Sistani will abandon the project. Keeping it simple greatly helps to check the historical sense that betrayal is near. [...]

Anyone who has had any contact with the Provisional Authority knows how far removed it is from the real Baghdad, let alone Iraqi society. It is a good bet that Ayatollah Sistani understands the pitfalls of democracy in Iraq as well as Ambassador Bremer. A very good sign that many in the U.S. government (and in the press) are losing their balance and judgment concerning Sistani and the traditional clergy of Najaf is when they allude ominously to Sistani's Persianness, implying he contains within him the serious potential for theocratic authoritarianism and nasty anti-American behavior. Ironically, this nefarious Iranian DNA critique is the one that radical "pure-Arab Iraqi" clerics, like Moqtada al-Sadr, and others within the Dawa movement, have used against traditional clerics in Najaf and Karbala who have been insufficiently militant. Before them, the Hashemites regularly threw this gravamen at Shiite clerics, of Iranian lineage or not, who attempted to counter the Hashemite quest to centralize Iraq in Arab Sunni hands. Ditto the Baath and Saddam Hussein.

The point is, you judge a Shiite cleric first and foremost by his writings, his lectures to his students, the younger clerics he has trained, and his mentors. By all of these criteria, Grand Ayatollah Sistani is a "good" mullah. There are two big intellectual currents in modern Shiite clerical thought. One leads to Khomeini and the other leads to clerics like Sistani. There are certainly overlapping areas between the two schools of thought--the place of women in post-Saddam Iraq will likely be a fascinating subject--but on the role of the people as the final arbiter of politics, there is very little reason to doubt Sistani's commitment to democracy. Clerics like Sistani may use high-volume moral suasion, they may suggest that a certain view is sinful, but they understand that clerics cannot become politicians without compromising their religious mission.

Having Iranian blood and family in the Islamic Republic surely has made Sistani more sensitive to the pitfalls of clerical dictatorship. Sistani is a true marja'-e taqlid--"a source of emulation"--the highest stature that any Shiite cleric can have. The Iranian revolution has done a superb job of deconstructing and diminishing the clerical educational system in Iran. The Islamic Republic now produces only national clerics, whose traditional juridical eminence barely extends beyond the confines of Iran's religious schools. Sistani is the last great transnational Shiite divine. His eminence easily reaches into his motherland. The relationship between Grand Ayatollah Sistani and the other senior clerics of Najaf with Iran's mullahs is a complicated work in progress. American officials would be wise not to sell Sistani short in his inevitable competition with Iran's hard-core clergy. The Iranians have not yet let loose hell against the Americans in Iraq even though logistically they probably could. One reason for this is surely Sistani, of whom Iran's ruling clerics must be careful and respectful. As in the matter of democracy in Iraq, Sistani may again become one of America's most effective allies.

This is a fight we can't win and shouldn't want to--Shi'ism is on our side.

MORE:
-US threshold for Iraq 'success' is modest (Howard LaFranchi, 1/26/04, The Christian Science Monitor)

[M]ost Middle East experts say the idealistic vision of Iraq as a kind of democratic and free-market lighthouse matters less than a picture of progress toward a stable and peaceful democracy.

"We have these two extremes of the political spectrum, the neoconservative idealists and the war critics, with very demanding expectations," says Patrick Clawson, deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "Both basically argue that if we leave without having transformed Iraq, it wasn't worth it."

But Mr. Clawson adds that for the vast majority of Americans, if Iraqis seem better off, even if conditions are far from perfect, "that will be OK." He explains, "People understand that building a democracy takes a long time."

That view is echoed by some Iraqi leaders who see a danger either in Iraqis pressing all-or-nothing positions now, or in others expecting too much too soon. "You have to remember that under Saddam Hussein, Iraq evolved to be a failed state," says Barham Salih, prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq. "People have to understand that context in order to assess the progress so far."

Particularly for American voters, it matters little exactly how progress towards self-rule is made. But it does matter whether the sense of security is improving, both for American soldiers - who will number about 100,000 by the time of the planned handover this summer - and for Iraqis themselves.

---

DEAN WORMER STRIKES BACK:

Iran's Guardian Council vetoes election bill: Move is likely to provoke election boycott (AP, Jan. 25, 2004)

Iran's hard-line Guardian Council has vetoed a bill that sought to reverse the disqualification of thousands of reformist electoral candidates, a leading legislator said tonight.

The move is part of an escalating battle between reform-minded lawmakers and religious conservatives who dominate the most powerful branches of the government. [...]

The legislators had passed the bill earlier today in a session broadcast live on state radio. They categorized it as "triple-urgent," meaning highest priority. It was the first time since Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution that parliament had approved a triple-urgency bill.

---

NOT BUSH, NOT CLINTON, BUT GREENSPAN:

Panel: Bush may have inherited recession (Associated Press, January 22, 2004)

It turns out that President Bush may have inherited a recession after all.

The president often makes that claim when talking about the economy, prompting Democrats to charge he is fudging history since the recession began in March 2001, two months after he took office, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.

But NBER officials said Thursday they are debating whether they made a mistake and the downturn actually began as early as November 2000, when Bill Clinton was still in the White House.

The seven-member cycle dating committee, composed of academic economists who specialize in studying business cycles, may well end up leaving the starting date of the recession alone, officials said.

When they finally sift through the numbers--which will be decades from now--it won't have been a recession, just a period of flat or slow growth, however, it did begin in 2000, as a result of Alan Greenspan's badly miscalculated Fed rate hikes.

---

THE NIHILISTS (CONTINUED):

Lee Harris--whose book you can win by guessing correctly in the contest above--also speaks to the point below in his essay, Al Qaeda’s Fantasy Ideology (Lee Harris, August 2002, Policy Review)

In what follows, I would like to pursue a line suggested by a remark by the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen in reference to 9-11: his much-quoted comment that it was “the greatest work of art of all time.”

Despite the repellent nihilism that is at the base of Stockhausen’s ghoulish aesthetic judgment, it contains an important insight and comes closer to a genuine assessment of 9-11 than the competing interpretation of it in terms of Clausewitzian war. For Stockhausen did grasp one big truth: 9-11 was the enactment of a fantasy — not an artistic fantasy, to be sure, but a fantasy nonetheless.

My first encounter with this particular kind of fantasy occurred when I was in college in the late sixties. A friend of mine and I got into a heated argument. Although we were both opposed to the Vietnam War, we discovered that we differed considerably on what counted as permissible forms of anti-war protest. To me the point of such protest was simple — to turn people against the war. Hence anything that was counterproductive to this purpose was politically irresponsible and should be severely censured. My friend thought otherwise; in fact, he was planning to join what by all accounts was to be a massively disruptive demonstration in Washington, and which in fact became one.

My friend did not disagree with me as to the likely counterproductive effects of such a demonstration. Instead, he argued that this simply did not matter. His answer was that even if it was counterproductive, even if it turned people against war protesters, indeed even if it made them more likely to support the continuation of the war, he would still participate in the demonstration and he would do so for one simple reason — because it was, in his words, good for his soul.

What I saw as a political act was not, for my friend, any such thing. It was not aimed at altering the minds of other people or persuading them to act differently. Its whole point was what it did for him.

And what it did for him was to provide him with a fantasy — a fantasy, namely, of taking part in the revolutionary struggle of the oppressed against their oppressors. By participating in a violent anti-war demonstration, he was in no sense aiming at coercing conformity with his view — for that would still have been a political objective. Instead, he took his part in order to confirm his ideological fantasy of marching on the right side of history, of feeling himself among the elect few who stood with the angels of historical inevitability. Thus, when he lay down in front of hapless commuters on the bridges over the Potomac, he had no interest in changing the minds of these commuters, no concern over whether they became angry at the protesters or not. They were there merely as props, as so many supernumeraries in his private psychodrama. The protest for him was not politics, but theater; and the significance of his role lay not in the political ends his actions might achieve, but rather in their symbolic value as ritual. In short, he was acting out a fantasy.

It was not your garden-variety fantasy of life as a sexual athlete or a racecar driver, but in it, he nonetheless made himself out as a hero — a hero of the revolutionary struggle. The components of his fantasy — and that of many young intellectuals at that time — were compounded purely of ideological ingredients, smatterings of Marx and Mao, a little Fanon and perhaps a dash of Herbert Marcuse.

For want of a better term, call the phenomenon in question a fantasy ideology — by which I mean, political and ideological symbols and tropes used not for political purposes, but entirely for the benefit of furthering a specific personal or collective fantasy. It is, to be frank, something like “Dungeons and Dragons” carried out not with the trappings of medieval romances — old castles and maidens in distress — but entirely in terms of ideological symbols and emblems. The difference between them is that one is an innocent pastime while the other has proven to be one of the most terrible scourges to afflict the human race.

The visions of eliminating the social safety net that dance through the heads of the disgruntled "conservatives" and the dreams of dismantling our rather minimal legal apparatus for fighting terror which addle the minds of libertarians are likewise the product of fantasy ideologies which take no account of the desires of the vast bulk of their fellow citizens.

---

THE LAROUCHE/JUDD AXIS

Queen to give knighthood to Bill Gates - but you can blame it on Gordon Brown (Robert Peston, Telegraph, 1/25/04)

Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder and the world's wealthiest man, is to receive an honorary knighthood for "services to global enterprise". . . .

The controversial software company creator - whose commercial success has led to hatred of him among his competitors - is worth an estimated $40 billion (£22 billion). Microsoft is described as the "Evil Empire" by those who resent its grip on the computer industry.

No self-respecting American should accept even this honorary honor.

---

THE NIHILISTS:

A Concerned Bloc of Republicans Wonders Whether Bush Is Conservative Enough (DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK, 1/25/04, NY Times)

To many people, President Bush — tax-cutter, born-again Christian, invader of Iraq — is the face of American conservatism. But here at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, many of the assembled are questioning whether he is conservative enough.

Conservatives complain about the administration's spending on Medicare and education and its proposed spending on space exploration, its expansion of law enforcement powers to fight terrorism and its proposed guest-worker program for immigrants.

To underscore the discontent, the American Conservative Union, which organizes the conference, held a dinner in honor of Republicans in the House of Representatives who voted against the president's Medicare bill. The conference called them fiscal heroes. The topic of one panel discussion was "G.O.P. Success: Is It Destroying the Conservative Movement?" and another debated whether the administration's antiterrorism efforts were endangering people's rights to privacy and freedom. [...]

"There are troubling signs that the ship of conservative governance is off-course," Representative Mike Pence, Republican of Indiana, said in the opening address.

Too many "big-government Republicans" have come to see government as a solution instead of the problem itself, Mr. Pence said.

"One more compromise of who we are as limited-government conservatives and our majority could be gone as well," he said, adding, "It is time for conservatives to right the ship." [...]

Many conservatives attribute the 1992 electoral defeat of the first President Bush to disillusionment at the conservative grass roots over his failure to understand the movement and his willingness to raise taxes.

"Bush Sr. jumped over the line and we had to whack him," said Grover G. Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform and a strategist of the conservative movement.

As Eric Hoffer described this mindset:

Free men are aware of the imperfection inherent in human affairs, and they are willing to fight and die for that which is not perfect. They know that basic human problems can have no final solutions, that our freedom, justice, equality, etc. are far from absolute, and that the good life is compounded of half measures, compromises, lesser evils, and gropings toward the perfect.  The rejection of approximations and the insistence on absolutes are the manifestation of a nihilism that loathes freedom, tolerance, and equity.

Mr. Norquist captures the fanaticism of such folks perfectly--he's proud to have helped give the country 8 years of Bill Clinton, and nearly 8 of Al Gore, because it proved he's ideologically pure. Thus is the self ultimately elevated above country and even over ostensible cause.

---

PUTTING THE COMPASSION IN CONSERVATISM:

New loan program with no down payments (Kenneth Harney, January 25, 2004, San Francisco Chronicle)

What do you say to zero down on your first home purchase? And how about rolling your closing fees into the mortgage itself, giving you a home loan that costs you nothing out of pocket up front?

That intriguing offer could become a standard, government-backed option for an estimated 150,000 or more first-time home buyers if Congress approves a new zero-down program to be proposed in President Bush's federal budget. No- down-payment mortgages could go as high as $290,000 in high-cost markets on the East and West coasts.

If sanctioned by Congress, the program will be run by the Federal Housing Administration, the nation's largest single source of mortgage money for first- time buyers.

FHA loans typically carry minimum down payments of 3 percent. The new program would essentially allow home buyers to come to the table with no cash whatsoever.

That is expected to open the door to a first home for thousands of families and singles who have sufficient incomes to pay monthly rents as high as mortgage payments, but who find it difficult to accumulate enough savings to handle a down payment and closing fees. If approved by Congress, the program would become a permanent addition to the FHA menu of mortgage options.

You not only help low income families, but in making them homeowners make them more conservative too, because more deeply invested in society.

---

SYMPHONIC SUPERPOWER:

The One-Note Superpower: A funny thing has happened. While the war on terrorism has dominated headlines, the great engine of globalization has kept moving (Fareed Zakaria, 2/02/04, Newsweek)

Covered in blankets of snow, Davos was looking stunning last weekend. The sight even moved the normally unflappable vice president of the United States. Dick Cheney began his speech to the World Economic Forum noting reflectively that settings like these force one to step back from day-to-day pressures and take "the long view." Unfortunately, his own address, well-crafted and thoughtful on its own terms, did not really take up that challenge.

Cheney spoke intelligently about the dangers of terrorism. He noted that today's technology makes possible the killing not just of 3,000 people, but 300,000. His solutions were persuasive: help end the ideologies of violence by promoting reform in the greater Middle East; increase cooperation among countries to battle terrorism, and if and when diplomacy fails, take decisive (meaning military) action.

But the speech fell flat. It's not that people at the conference disagreed with it. But it seemed quite disconnected from what they—politicians, businessmen, religious figures, social activists and writers from around the world—had been talking about and grappling with over the previous few days. You see, a funny thing has happened around the world over the past two years. While the war on terrorism has dominated headlines, the great engine of globalization has kept moving, rewarding some, punishing others, but always keeping up the pressure by increasing human contact, communication and competition. For almost every country today, its primary struggle centers on globalization issues—growth, poverty eradication, disease prevention, education, urbanization, the preservation of identity.

On all these, America is now largely silent.

Is this not just a question of where our responsibility appropriately lies? We're not much use to them in the realm of poverty eradication and the like--except by force of example and the thoroughgoing penetration of our ideas into their cultures, which will eventually destroy their identities--but we're the only ones who can co-ordinate a global crackdown on terror. Isn't the point here that we can force globalization quite passively while fighting the war rather actively?

---

BOOKNOTES:

Sea of Glory: America's Voyage of Discovery, the U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842 by Nathaniel Philbrick (C-SPAN, January 25, 2004, 8 & 11pm)

In 1838, the U.S. government launched the largest discovery voyage the Western world had ever seen-6 sailing vessels and 346 men bound for the waters of the Pacific Ocean. Four years later, the U.S. Exploring Expedition, or Ex. Ex. as it was known, returned with an astounding array of accomplishments and discoveries: 87,000 miles logged, 280 Pacific islands surveyed, 4,000 zoological specimens collected, including 2,000 new species, and the discovery of the continent of Antarctica. And yet at a human level, the project was a disaster-not only had 28 men died and 2 ships been lost, but a series of sensational courts-martial had also ensued that pitted the expedition's controversial leader, Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, against almost every officer under his command.

Though comparable in importance and breadth of success to the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the Ex. Ex. has been largely forgotten. Now, the celebrated Nathaniel Philbrick re-creates this chapter of American maritime history in all its triumph and scandal.

Like the award-winning In the Heart of the Sea, Sea of Glory combines meticulous history with spellbinding human drama as it circles the globe from the palm-fringed beaches of the South Pacific to the treacherous waters off Antarctica and to the stunning beauty of the Pacific Northwest, and, finally, to a court-martial aboard a ship of the line anchored off New York City.

MORE:
-AUTHOR PAGE: Nathaniel Philbrick (Book Browse)
-INTERVIEW: Q & A: Nathaniel Philbrick '78 ( Deborah Toth, Jan/Feb 2001, Brown Alumni Magazine)
-REVIEW: of Sea of Glory: America's Voyage of Discovery, the U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842 by Nathaniel Philbrick (ALCESTIS COOKY OBERG, Houston Chronicle)

---

THE EMERGING DEMOCRATIC MINORITY:

: As Democrats abandon traditional values and religion, their core voters are slipping away (Tony Quinn, January 25, 2004, LA Times)

Could 2004 be 1928 all over again?

Not since the 1928 elections have the Republicans retained control of both Congress and the White House. Now that 76-year-old record may be about to fall: President Bush is looking stronger with the economy picking up, and Republicans seem likely not only to hold on to control of both houses of Congress but also to increase their numbers.

A GOP gerrymander of Democratic districts in Texas will probably add six to eight Republicans to the House. Every other big state is so heavily gerrymandered that no other major changes are likely. This means the GOP majority in the House is expected to grow by at least half a dozen seats.

The Rothenberg Political Report says that six Democratic Senate seats are in danger of falling to Republicans — five in the South — while only three GOP-held seats are similarly vulnerable. The Democratic minority will almost certainly have fewer seats in the next Congress than it has today.

How did we ever get to this: The nation's historic-majority Democratic Party reduced to a declining minority, and the second-banana Republicans suddenly running everything?

A good place to start is 1928, because U.S. politics seems to run in roughly 60-year cycles.

The most remarkable aspect of this realignment is that the Democrats seem intent on nominating a candidate who represents precisely the prior epoch. Are they just in denial?

MORE:
Labor's Iowa Implosion (Harold Meyerson, January 21, 2004, Washington Post)

---

BLISSED UNION (via Tom Morin):

America's war of ideas is exactly what we need (Elizabeth Nickson, January 23, 2004, National Post)

It is simply not fair that the Americans can have a Civil War and we can't. Like every other political junkie in the known world, I have been living with my satellite feed since the Iowa caucuses on Monday, and the next few months, well, I have a plan, which is to absorb as much
American politics as I can. Canadian politics? Bore me later. I mean Belinda Stronach is, upon consideration, a fine and interesting thing. At least she doesn't look like she'd been buried and dug up again, like everyone else. But shouldn't she have started with senator? Oh right, she can't, because the Senate is filled with Jean Chretien's stooges and besides, no one out of there has said anything, in any even tiny way, useful or interesting ever. They just cost money.

Not fair, not fair, not fair. The Americans can have a war of ideas and we can't discuss anything. Because anything not out of the Bigger Government playbook is called right-wing extremism, and worse Christian, and thus demonized. Meanwhile, the sleepiest country in the world, which
lives next door to the most vibrant country in the world, continues to tumble into the wormhole of complete irrelevance. Unluckily for us, the extraordinary American growth and innovation can float even our dozy economy, and we never have to grow up and behave like adults.

And on Tuesday, the State of the Union. You'd have to go back to the Greeks to find theatre like that. There was the scarlet-faced Ted Kennedy stuffed into his $2,500 suit, and the harridan Hillary, her selfish little ferret face looking punched and puffy, like the schoolyard bully she is. As every policy initiative slipped from their grasp, the Democratic side of the aisle, visibly shrank. It was bliss, bliss, bliss. [...]

Does anyone else wish they were living in a real country?

On the flipside--they do have curling.

---

FOURTH WAY?:

Judgment Day: The end for Blair?: He took on his party and tamed it, he took on the Tories and trounced them twice, but then he ‘liberated’ Iraq and now the Prime Minister, so wrapped up in his image as a winner, could lose it all over tuition fees and the Hutton report. (James Cusick, 25 January 2004, Sunday Herald)

In July 1994, just after winning the leadership of the Labour Party following the death of John Smith, Blair uttered seven words in his acceptance speech that MPs should have written down, underlined, memorised or even had tattooed as a warning for what was to come. “I will tell you how it works …” he said. He was speaking about his definition of socialism, but in the nine years since – perhaps culminating in the vote on Tuesday and the verdict of Lord Hutton the following day – telling his party “how it works” has become Blair’s confrontational trademark.

Tony Blair is the nemesis of old Labour and the creational saviour of New Labour. The result? According to one disgruntled backbencher, who will be happily voting against the government on Tuesday, “Blair has simply ripped up the very idea, not just of Labour, but of what a party can be. He’s rewritten the notion that a party is an organised group of people who share the same policies, the same general ideology, share a common purpose. Blair’s idea of party – from the start – was a party to back his ideas. And that, maybe, is about to end”.

Blair – also from the start – called his leadership of the Labour Party “a mission of national renewal, hope, change and opportunity”. For the ill-prepared in Labour ranks, his leadership has been a roller coaster of change that has seen the party reinvent itself, redefine itself, and now midway through a second term, re-examine its commitment to Blair’s vision. What some rebels remain unsure of is that if they derail this latest element of Blair’s vision does that mean Blair will simply refuse to take on further challenges and walk away?

For the Blair Party to revert to Labour would be disastrous for Britain, but offers the Tories a golden opportunity to assume the mantle of Blairism.

---

DID BLUTO BECOME AN IRANIAN SENATOR?:

Iranian parliament approves urgent bill seeking to restrict hard-liner council (ALI AKBAR DAREINI, January 25, 2004, Associated Press)

Pro-reform legislators fired a new volley in their latest political crisis with Iran's hard-liners Sunday, passing a law aimed at restricting the power of a council that conservatives used to bar liberal candidates from running in elections.

The law poses a challenge to the Guardian Council, the unelected body controlled by hard-liners that has broad powers to overrule decisions of the elected government. The council could nullify the new law, but that would likely stoke the crisis.

The reformist-dominated parliament approved the bill, categorized as "triple-urgent" -- the highest designation of importance for legislation, used when the parliament feels that the country is in great political or military danger.

It was the first time since Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution that the parliament has approved a triple-urgency bill.

Wasn't Delta House put on triple urgent probation?

---

TRUMAN CAPOTE MAYBE:

Once Were Warriors: On foreign policy, are the Democrats again the party of Truman? (WALTER RUSSELL MEAD, January 25, 2004, Wall Streeet Journal)

Are the Democrats coming back to their roots? It is still very early in the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, but with more than 80% of Iowa caucus-goers endorsing candidates who voted at least to authorize the U.S. strike against Iraq, it is beginning to look as if the Democrats are ready to put the antiwar temptation behind them in order to challenge George W. Bush for the White House.

That would be good news for the Democrats. No antiwar candidate can win a national contest in 2004. It would also be good news for the country and for the world. The illusion that a Democratic administration would abandon the vigorous prosecution of the war on terror is one of the few hopes to which America's enemies can still cling.

That's nicely put, but Harry Truman, if memory serves, didn't ask for French permission to nuke Hiroshima and recognized the state of Israel so unilaterally that General Marshall almost resigned.

MORE:
Wannabes vs. a true leader (Ruben Navarrette Jr., 1/25/04, Dallas Morning News)

As they mull over their presidential choices, Americans were provided last week with a dramatic contrast in leadership styles - between those who practice leadership and those who concentrate on style.

President Bush gave up no ground in his State of the Union address. He was downright defiant as he spelled out what his administration had accomplished to fight terrorism, lower taxes and make schools accountable. He was iron-willed when he laid down what he wanted Congress to do. From gay marriage to immigration to the Patriot Act, no subject seemed too hot to handle.

Throughout the speech, Bush seemed to be drawing a rhetorical line in the sand and saying unequivocally and without apology: "This is where I'll make my stand, whether you stand with me or not."

How terribly refreshing. And, frankly, how unlike anything you've heard from the Democratic presidential candidates. Part of the problem may be that the Democratic contest is full of people who aren't sure what they stand for.

---

KING OF THE BLIND (ER, SORRY, MAKE THAT "DIFFERENTLY-SIGHTED"):

Kerry wins debate by being mediocre (Bernadette Malone, 1/25/04, Manchester Union Leader)

BY VIRTUE of some humorously bad competition, John Kerry is once again the Democratic Presidential frontrunner. At Thursday nightís debate at Saint Anselm College, the droopy Boston Brahmin we once thought was washed up looked the most Presidential of any of the contenders -- thanks to the recent blunders of Howard "Meltdown" Dean and Wesley "Who Am I?" Clark.

What a difference a campaign season makes. Coming off his big win in Iowa, John Kerry is the new place for Democrats to rest their hopes for defeating George W. Bush in November. How sad for them.

Mr. Kerry is like the girl a drunk snags in a bar at closing time only to wake up the next morning and discover she's "coyote ugly". But by then the deed is done.

MORE:
Mad Dr. Dean jolts Kerry campaign to life (MARK STEYN, January 25, 2004, Chicago Sun-Times)

Not even Al Gore, in his bewildering array of alternative identities, managed to be both crazy and comatose in the same week. The governor seems to have come up with his own variation on the fiscally conservative/socially liberal shtick: Vote for Dean -- fiscally balanced, emotionally unbalanced.

None of the Vermonster's many enemies in the Democratic Party could have devised as exquisite a torture for Howard Dean as this last week. But, whether they've solved their party's problem is another matter. What seems to be happening on the ground in New Hampshire is this: Now that John Kerry is the sane alternative to Howard Dean, much of Wesley Clark's support has leached away to Kerry. But at the same time Dean has been so subdued and demoralized that some of his wackier support has leached away to Clark. If Kerry is the sane alternative to Dean, Clark is the crazy alternative to Kerry.

Don't take my word for it -- ask Michael Moore, the corpulent conspirazoid. He has endorsed Clark, not Dean. Message: Vote for the real crazy, not the karaoke crazy. In Thursday's debate, Peter Jennings twice gave Gen. Clark the opportunity to repudiate retrospectively Moore's characterization of the president as a ''deserter,'' as Clark had failed to do when Moore made the charge standing alongside him. Instead, Clark claimed to have no views on the matter, not to have looked into it, and said that Moore is ''not the only person who's said that.'' Clark doesn't scream: He has that weirdly intense stare. But, for as long as he's in the race, he'll do more damage to Democratic credibility than any amount of howling from Howard. He's very touchy about status: As he pointed out on CNN, he's a four-star general while Kerry was a mere lieutenant. In the ranks of the deranged, he's Field Marshal Flakey while Dean would be lucky to make corporal.

That brings us to the ''Comeback Kerry,'' as he styled himself last Monday, though even his missus, Theresa Heinz, could only force a grin at that line. In Iowa, the Ketchup Kid left Dean lying in a big pool of red sticky stuff, and establishment Dems breathed a sigh of relief. But it's hard to see why. Consciously or otherwise, Democrats seemed to be trying to neutralize the war as an issue -- the overwhelming majority is still opposed to it but in Iowa they just wanted it to go away, so they could get back to talking about their issues: health, education, mandatory bicycling helmets, etc.

That sounds fine in theory. But let's suppose it works, and the Dems nominate Kerry, whose argument is that, because he's a veteran, his plan to give Jacques Chirac a veto over American foreign policy sounds butcher than it would coming from Dennis Kucinich. Fine. But take away the war from Kerry and what's left? An old-school Massachusetts liberal. Not a mere lieutenant, but a mere lieutenant-governor. To Michael Dukakis. Kerry's record on domestic issues is well to the left of Dean's, and a much fatter target for Republicans. He's soft on drug pushers and murderers, big on tax hikes and partial-birth abortion. If I were Bush and I had to choose between running against Howard Dean's Vermont or John Kerry's Massachusetts, I know which guy I'd be rooting for.

-Abortion Vulnerabilities: The country is changing. The Dems are not. (Joel C. Rosenberg, 1/23/04, National Review)

A CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll conducted last January found that 70 percent of Americans support a ban on partial-birth abortion. Younger Americans feel even more strongly that killing a baby in the process of being born is downright barbaric. A whopping 77 percent of Americans age 18 to 29 favor the ban on partial-birth abortion signed by President Bush last year. Perhaps even more interesting, 57 percent of obstetricians and gynecologists favor the ban.

Yet not a single leading Democrat running for president does.

Sen. John Kerry is rapidly emerging as the front-runner in New Hampshire. Should he win the Granite State primary next week, it's now conceivable that he could become an unstoppable force and run away with the Democratic nomination. But how would he fare in a general election against President Bush, particularly in the South?

Kerry is already perceived as a northeastern Massachusetts liberal who will have trouble selling his Ted Kennedy-endorsed "values" in the Bible Belt. The fact that Kerry has voted against the ban on partial-birth abortion five separate times certainly won't help.

On abortion, the Democrats have become the party of radical extremism.

---

SHE'S LUCKY THERE WERE NO MOES ON BOARD:

A little less freedom of speech (Jeff Jacoby, 1/25/2004, Boston Globe)

IT DOESN'T take much to get slammed as a racist these days. Just ask Jennifer Cundiff.

Back in February 2001, the Southwest Airlines flight attendant was trying to coax passengers boarding a flight from Las Vegas to Kansas City to find their seats quickly so the plane could take off. "Eenie meenie minie moe," she said over the intercom, "pick a seat, we gotta go."

Cute and harmless, right? Not to two black passengers, it wasn't. Louise Sawyer and Grace Fuller, who are sisters, interpreted Cundiff's couplet as a racist insult and said they were sure it was meant to humiliate them. It was so upsetting, Fuller claimed, that it triggered a seizure and left her bedridden for days. Eventually the women sued, charging Southwest with violating their civil rights and inflicting physical and emotional distress.

If you're scratching your head in bewilderment, you aren't alone. Unless you're old enough to remember flappers and speakeasies, you probably don't know that the words that originally followed "eenie, meenie, minie moe" were "catch a nigger by the toe." Cundiff, who was 22, certainly didn't know. Like most of us, she grew up saying "catch a tiger by the toe" -- she says she had never heard the older, uglier version.

Ah, but innocence offers scant protection against contemporary racial victimology. Neither does common sense nor the right to free speech. Any of those should have been reason enough for US District Judge Kathryn Vratil to summarily bounce the lawsuit as frivolous. Instead, she ruled that Cundiff's little rhyme "could be reasonably viewed as objectively racist and offensive" and said a jury would have to decide "whether Cundiff's remark was racist, or simply a benign and innocent attempt at humor."

Remember when the law was an honorable profession?

---

GOTCHA:

The General: Did Clark Fail to Salute?: Wes Clark won a war, but ran afoul of his Pentagon masters and lost his job. Here's how. (Evan Thomas and T. Trent Gegax, 2/02/04, Newsweek)

The doubts raised by Clark's own bosses have cast an uneasy pall over his presidential candidacy. What really happened? According to a knowledgeable source, Clark ran afoul of Cohen and Shelton by being less than totally forthcoming in morning conference calls during the Kosovo war in the spring of 1999. From his NATO headquarters in Brussels, Clark wanted to wage the war more aggressively, but back in the Pentagon, Cohen and Shelton were more cautious. They would give Clark instructions on, for instance, the scale of the bombing campaign. "Clark would say, 'Uh-huh, gotcha'," says NEWSWEEK's source. But then he would pick up the phone and call [British Prime Minister] Tony Blair and [Secretary of State] Madeleine [Albright]." As Clark knew full well, Blair and Albright were more hawkish than Shelton and Cohen. After talking to the State Department and NATO allies, Clark would have a different set of marching orders, says the source, who has spoken about the matter with both Cohen and Clark. "Then, about 1 o'clock, the Defense Department would hear what Clark was up to, and Cohen and Shelton would be furious."

---

WHO WILL STOP THIS SENSELESS SLAUGHTER:

War of Ideas, Part 6 (THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, 1/25/04, NY Times)

Part 6? Didn't he only threaten 5?

---

GOOD NEWS FOR PARENTS OF TROUBLESOME TODDLERS

Infanticide is justifiable in some cases, says ethics professor (Elizabeth Day/The Telegraph/25/01/04)

One of British medicine's most senior advisers on medical ethics has provoked outrage by claiming that infanticide is "justifiable".

Professor John Harris, a member of the British Medical Association's ethics committee, said that it was not "plausible to think that there is any moral change that occurs during the journey down the birth canal" - suggesting that there was no moral difference between aborting a foetus and killing a baby.

The professor's comments were made during an unreported debate last week on sex selection, which was held as part of the Commons Science and Technology Committee's consultation on human reproductive technologies.

Prof Harris, who is also a professor of bioethics at the University of Manchester, was asked what moral status he accorded an embryo and he endorsed infanticide in cases of a child carrying a genetic disorder that remained undetected during pregnancy.

He replied: "I don't think infanticide is always unjustifiable. I don't think it is plausible to think that there is any moral change that occurs during the journey down the birth canal."

He declined to say up to what age he believed infanticide should be permissable. [...]

Prof Harris said that he stood by his remarks, which he claimed had been elicited "in response to goading" from pro-life campaigners.

Distasteful, perhaps, but perfectly logical, rational and scientific. Results count and if it works, go for it. After all, we modern sophisticates know how morality evolves.

---

THE AURA OF VICTORY:

Newsweek Poll: And They're Off (Brian Braiker, Jan. 24, 2004, Newsweek)

Riding high on his victory in the Iowa caucus—and benefiting from former Vermont governor Howard Dean’s embarrassing “I have a scream” speech—Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry has surged to the head of the pack of democratic presidential hopefuls, according to the latest NEWSWEEK poll, commanding 30 percent of support from registered Democrats, up from 11 percent two weeks ago. And for the first time in the poll's history a Democrat is enjoying a marginal advantage over President George W. Bush. In a hypothetical face-off, Kerry commanded a three-point lead over the president. Dean’s support among registered and likely Democrats, meanwhile, has been cut in half, to 12 percent. That puts him in three-way tie for second place in the Jan. 27 New Hampshire primary with retired Gen. Wesley Clark (12 percent) and North Carolina Sen. John Edwards (13 percent).

That puts Senator Kerry's election number vs. President Bush higher than his name recognition was on Monday morning. This is the danger for Democrats in believing that winning Democratic primaries equals electability. The Senator is a blank slate right now, upon which people can impose any qualities and policies they like. Then they find out what he's done and wants to do and he tanks. Similar polls in January/February had Ronald Reagan in the mid-40s and in a dead heat with Walter Mondale--then the election started...

---

ELIZABETH SUPERFLY THE SECOND:

LaRouche sets frightening example in campaign (Boris Volodarsky, January 15, 2004, Yale Daily News)

As Jeff Pearlman writing for Newsday put it Lyndon LaRouche is to presidential elections "what fungus is to the damp side of a rock." LaRouche ran in every single presidential election since 1976. He even ran from jail in 1992 where he was held on fraud charges. Those charges were, incidentally, the reason for Dean's comment during the Black Caucus Debate. After initially running as a third party candidate he became a Democrat and contested Democratic primaries since 1980. Although always unsuccessful, LaRouche was never entirely irrelevant and maintained his pockets of support. In 2000 for example he garnered 22 percent in the Democratic primary in Arkansas. Still, despite this sizable support, the Democratic Party and the establishment in general treats his candidacy as that of a ghost. He is never invited to debates, the media generally ignores him, the polling agencies refuse to include his name, and the Democratic Party fights to the tooth to keep him off the ballot.

Once you learn about LaRouche's views it becomes obvious why the Democratic Party has isolated LaRouche. Political Research Associates compiled a collection of LaRouche's past quotes and here is the picture that emerges: According to this self-described leading economist of the twentieth century, British monarchy secretly runs the world. Even the Nazi Germany was designed and shaped from London. London not only runs drug cartels but also imposes various methods of psychological control like Jazz and the Beatles. It also successfully uses such agents as Jews and the Episcopal Church to run its operations. Once he comes to power LaRouche promises to eliminate the principal London's agency in the United States: "the Nazi Jewish lobby." Jews in general and Zionism in particular have a special place in LaRouche's ideology. He refers to the latter as "the state of collective psychosis." [...]

According to the Center for Responsible Politics in his current bid for the White House alone LaRouche raised over $5.5 million in small donations. According to the Federal Election Commission as late as last April his fundraising figures surpassed those of Lieberman, Dean and Graham. According to the last report from three months ago he still has more money than Kucinich, Mosley-Braun and Sharpton combined, all three of them politicians with nationwide standing.

He's run a very effective campaign here, far better than most of his rivals. But these people are truly nuts. In the NJ Democratic gubernatorial primaries in 1985 there was a LaRouche candidate. The candidate I was working for and the president of the State Senate kept laughing at his answers and it looked ungovernorlike, so they were under strict orders from their respective campaigns to knock it off. They took to just passing notes to each other and smirking.

Finally, in the last debate before the primary, closing statements, last chance to reach the voters, the guy takes out a poem by Schiller and reads it aloud for two minutes. The moderator, dumbfounded, had to interrupt and apologetically tell him he'd run out of time. He folded up the poem and said: "That's okay....I think everyone got the message."

Well, they did if the message was that LaRouchies are lunatics.

---

DO THE RIGHT THING, MOOKIE:

Howard urged to back education bill (Donald MacLeod, January 23, 2004, The Guardian)

An influential conservative thinktank today urged Michael Howard and Tory MPs to back the government's top-up fees bill for the good of universities.

John Marenbon, a Cambridge don who was a member of the examinations watchdog under the Conservative government, says the bill is "fundamentally right" because is sets universities free, within limits, to set their own fees. He calls on Mr Howard to change his policy of total opposition, although there are aspects, like the Office for Fair Access, which should be opposed.

"The Conservatives have a chance to act with wisdom and statesmanship by supporting a government bill which is fundamentally right," writes Dr Marenbon in a pamphlet published by the thinktank Politeia today. "It is an act of courage for a Labour government to have proposed such a measure which introduces, though to a limited degree, a market into higher education."

Critics have described the proposals to allow universities to charge fees of up to £3,000 a year as "Thatcherite" - that's compliment as far as Dr Marenbon is concerned. Institutions should have the freedom to shape their own destiny and individuals should take responsibility for the decisions that shape their lives.

One of the heavy responsibilities of the opposition party in a democracy is to behave as if it might one day be in power again and to vote in favor of good policies, even if their opponents approve of them. Republicans did so on the Free Trade treaties of the Clinton era--which were literally Reaganite--the Tories should do so on this issue.

---

HERE COMES CHRIS LEHANE, WITH A HATCHET:

Rivals Mine Kerry Senate Years For Material to Slow Him Down (TODD S. PURDUM, January 25, 2004, NY Times)

Now that his opponents are moving even more aggressively to slow Mr. Kerry's rise, his 19-year voting record as the junior senator from Massachusetts could loom as his greatest political vulnerability, among Democrats and Republicans alike. The sheer length of Mr. Kerry's service means that he has built a paper trail of positions on education, the military, intelligence and other issues — stands that might have looked one way when he took them but that resonate differently now.

For example, at the end of the cold war, Mr. Kerry advocated scaling back the Central Intelligence Agency, but after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, he complained about a lack of intelligence capability. In the 1980's, he opposed the death penalty for terrorists who killed Americans abroad, but he now supports the death penalty for terrorist acts. In the 1990's, he joined with Republican colleagues to sponsor proposals to end tenure for public school teachers and allow direct grants to religion-based charities, measures that many Democratic groups opposed. In 1997, he voted to require elderly people with higher incomes to pay a larger share of Medicare premiums.

The record is susceptible to two broad strands of attack. Mr. Kerry's rival Democrats point to a series of shifting stands on issues, like his qualified praise for the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress and his vote authorizing President Bush to use force in Iraq. They say these are are at odds with his campaign claim to be the "real deal" Democratic alternative to Mr. Bush, capable of "standing up for people and taking on powerful interests," as he says in his stump speech.

"When it was popular to be a Massachusetts liberal, his voting record was that," said Jay Carson, a Dean campaign spokesman. "When it was popular to be for the Iraq war, he was for it. Now it's popular to be against it, and he's against it. This is a voting record that is a big vulnerability against Republicans in the general election. He's all over the place on this stuff."

By contrast, the Republicans seek to paint Mr. Kerry as voting in lock step with, or even to the left of, his fellow Massachusetts Democrat Edward M. Kennedy, long a Republican target and a perennial party fund-raising bugbear.

There's a reason congressmen don't become presidents.

---

THERE'S HOPE FOR THE JACKSONS:

3-year-old makes news at State of the Union (Phil Kadner, January 22, 2004, Daily Southtown)

Five days before the president spoke to the nation, a decision was made that would significantly alter TV coverage of the State of the Union address.

Three-year-old Jessica Jackson decided she wanted to meet "President Boosh."

"Every time her mother drives by the Capitol building with Jessica in the car she points to it and says, 'That's where Daddy and President Bush work,' " said U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-2nd) of Chicago, also known as Jessica's father.

Jackson said his daughter told him five days before Tuesday's speech that she wanted to meet the president.

He agreed to take her. [...]

Was it possible that Jessica had been exposed to some exaggerated descriptions and ó out of curiosity ó had asked to see the president's horns and tail for herself?

"Not at all," Jackson said. "In fact, she has never heard me express my opinions of the president at home.

"Unlike some people in politics, I keep my professional and private lives very separate.

"I never take political disagreements personally."

So at 9 p.m. EST, the president was announced to the joint session of Congress, the members stood as one, and as Bush made his way up the aisle shaking hands left and right, he came upon the Jacksons.

He put out his hands, hugged Jessica and gave her a big fat smooch on the cheek.

The TV cameras caught the action and, throughout the one-hour speech, returned repeatedly to Jackson and his daughter.

"She applauded every time the president talked about his tax cuts," Jackson laughed.

"I think she may be a Republican."

---

NEW PHASE:

Referendum Should Decide Political Future of Iran, Says MP (DPA - World News, Jan 24, 2004)

A referendum should decide the political future in Iran, a reformist MP told the news service Kar on Saturday.

“If the current trend continues, we should enter a new phase and let the people decide about the performance of the Guardian Council in a referendum,” Fatemeh Rakei said.

A referendum has been the key word in recent months among reformists and especially students in which the people would decide whether democratically elected or state appointed bodies should have the final say on state affairs.

Iran will soon be more democratic than the EU.

---

GOT MINE, GET YOURS:

The Bush Immigration Plan: A step in the right direction (Anthony B. Bradley, 1/21/04, Acton Institute)

The United States is the most prosperous nation in the world with a long history of both legal and illegal immigration. For centuries, immigrants have risked their lives to find ways to use their gifts and provide for their families, often taking jobs that others do not want. In fact, massive group immigration is an ongoing fact of human history. Thomas Sowell’s grand study, Migration and Cultures: A World View, reminds us of the scope of that movement. In the past three centuries, 70 million people emigrated from Europe, with nearly 50 million coming to the United States (35 million between 1830 and 1930). With migrants often come resentment and suspicion, another phenomenon of long standing.

Nearly 4 million people emigrated from Ireland to the U.S. during the nineteenth century. The Irish were stereotyped as a lazy band of drunken brawlers and they worked primarily in the low-skilled labor market. During the massive Irish immigration of the 1840s and 1850s immigrants were greeted with signs that read “Irish Need Not Apply.”

In the same century, five million Germans migrated to the United States. Large numbers became farmers and day laborers. These Germans were often criticized for isolating themselves from the American mainstream with church services conducted, business transacted, and newspapers printed exclusively in their native tongue.

Almost 26 million people emigrated from Italy between 1876 and 1976. The early Italian immigrants took jobs that others despised at the bottom of the occupational ladder, such as sewer and sanitation workers. Italians also cordoned themselves into enclaves, their neighborhoods of 1880 to 1910 often more segregated than those of blacks.

The story is much the same for the Jewish, African, Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, and Puerto Rican immigrants over the past century. In every case, immigrants fill economic needs in their new society.

Some Americans have an artificially inflated expectation of wages for jobs requiring few skills. So-called menial jobs like landscaping, food service, unskilled construction jobs, sanitation, housekeeping, retail, and farming rejected by many in our unskilled labor force. Many immigrants, on the other hand, are willing to work these jobs in an attempt to begin to build capital for a better life.

The anti-immigrationist creed can be summed up in one simple phrase: people were wrong to try and keep my grandparents out but I'm right to try and block you.

MORE:
-The Great Mexico Brain Drain: The other face of Mexican immigration (Hector Carreon, January 23, 2004, ACN)

The images that most Americans have of Mexican immigrants are principally those created by the media and certain immigration reform groups. These images are of Mexicans swimming across the Rio Grande, jumping the iron fence at San Ysidro, dying in enclosed railroad box cars or of those meeting death in the hot and arid Arizona desert. For many years, however, there has been a constant flood of other types of Mexican immigrants. These are wealthy and well educated Mexican immigrants that fly here in Mexicana and Areomexico airlines as students and tourists and decide to stay here.

Americans, especially those in the border states of California, Texas, Arizona and New Mexico have suddenly become conscious of the vast number of Mexican immigrants that now reside here. To the typical Anglo mind, spotting Mexican immigrants is easy, or so they think. Their criteria for identifying a Mexican immigrant, legal or undocumented, is that they must first have brown skin, be wearing a sombrero and be standing at a bus stop. It is a rare "gringo" that can spot a Mexican immigrant at a trendy store in La Jolla, Rodeo Drive, Fashion Island, Santa Barbara or other exclusive shopping areas in California.

The immigration of middle and upper class Mexicans to the USA is increasing exponentially. Most of these well to do Mexicans have bachelor, master and doctorate degrees. The disturbing phenomena of the best-and-the brightest Mexicans emigrating to the USA is caused by the present and worsening economic crisis in Mexico. Yesterday, the Instituto Nacional de Estadistica, Geografia e Informatica (INEGI) released a study that found that 684, 000 Mexicans with university degrees are presently unemployed. The IMEGI study found that Mexico is not producing enough employment opportunities for the highly skilled and educated sectors of Mexico.

---

BUY A "U":

British MP 'fired' for pro-terror statement (DOUGLAS DAVIS, 1/24/04, Jerusalem Post)

British legislator Jenny Tonge has been fired by Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy as party spokesperson on children's affairs after she expressed sympathy for suicide bombers and suggested she would consider becoming one herself if she were a Palestinian.

Kennedy described Tonge's remarks as "completely unacceptable; they are not compatible with Liberal Democrat party policies and principles," he said. "There can be no justification, under any circumstances for taking innocent lives through terrorism," Kennedy added.

British legislator Tonge, who visited the Palestinian areas last June and compared life for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip with the Nazis' treatment of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, made the remarks about suicide bombers during an address to a meeting of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign.

Will no one put Europe out of our misery?

---

AN INVALUABLE ALLY:

Turkey to mediate between Israel, Syria (Jerusalem Post, 1/24/04)

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan made the announcement at the World Economic Forum at Davos. Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul is expected to begin shuttle diplomacy in the coming few days.

During Syrian President Bashar Assad's recent visit to Damascus, Turkey passed on Israel's position that to demonstrate his seriousness he needs to close the terrorist organizations' offices in Damascus and end his country's support of Hizbullah.

But officials also said that although Israel favors direct contact with the Syrians, and also uses the good offices of the US to pass on messages to Damascus, Turkish involvement would also be helpful.

At this time last year many who live only in the moment wanted America to impetuously turn its back on the Turks, who were only defending their own interests in regard to the coming Kurdistan.

---

EMPIRE ON THE CHEAP:

Bush to Ask for $401.7 Billion Defense Budget (Associated Press, January 23, 2004)

President Bush will ask Congress to approve $401.7 billion in defense spending for the budget year that begins in October, a 7 percent increase over this year, the Pentagon announced Friday.

The money does not include the cost of fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Currently, the Pentagon is spending about $1 billion a week in Iraq and about $1 billion a month in Afghanistan.

If, as expected, operations are still under way in those countries when the 2005 budget year begins Oct. 1, the administration presumably will have to ask Congress to appropriate extra billions of dollars.

Folks who anticipate the imminent collapse of the American Empoire under this burden might do well to consider this chart:

---

WHICH WAY TO BATAAN?:

Forget the Debate: Democrats' Debate Fizzles; Dean Goes for an Image Make-Over (Kareem Fahim,
January 23rd, 2oo4, Village Voice)

There was plenty of expectation but little drama during last night's Democratic presidential debate, the first since the frenzied reshuffling of the Democratic field in Iowa last week, and the last before the all-important New Hampshire primary.

Since the last debate several weeks ago, there have been putative adjustments in strategy, bandied about by the pundits. John Kerry has transformed himself into a folksy populist, and Joe Lieberman has scrapped his reputation as a scrapper. John Edwards added character to his charm (or was it just success?), and his message suddenly commanded attention. Al Sharpton and Dennis Kucinich are hanging on to keep the others honest. And Howard Dean, of course, has been stuck morosely in the hole he dug for himself when he let out that monstrous rebel yell.

After the debate, the Fox analysts concluded that the whole thing was a tepid affair, despite attempts by Peter Jennings to draw candidates into battle. "I'd say, 'Nice try'," Lieberman joked at one point, in deference to the new arbiter of successful campaigning, John Edwards. "I'm going to talk about myself." No news had been made, the analysts hurriedly agreed, and I'm guessing they then joined millions of other Americans and flipped to ABC for the real dish of the day: Howard Dean's attempt at rehabilitation on Primetime.

The Democrats seem to be making a rather significant mistake by adopting their nice guy poses far too early in the campaign season. The chief distinguishing feature of their 2003-4 campaign season has been the inability of the frontrunners and temporarily hot candidates to withstand even mild scrutiny or a challenge from rival campaigns. They started out with John Kerry the presumptive favorite, but he got drubbed by Howard Dean from the day the Iraq War ended until Dr. Dean in turn blew himself up. Along the way, Dick Gephardt's assumed advantage in Iowa disappeared, as did he, and General Clark went from the flavor of the month of December to New Coke in January. What is driving this turbulence seems pretty obvious in opinion polling: none of the candidates is terribly well known--with the exception of Joe Lieberman whose name recognition made him a frontrunner briefly too; though on Tuesday he may well finish behind Lyndon LaRouche--and what folks know of them they don't particularly like. This makes it extremely dangerous to call off the dogs now and send a relatively untested nominee up against George W. Bush.

If John Kerry has already buckled once, in the face of Howard Dean and Joe Trippi, how's he going to fare this coming summer when Karl Rove spends $200 million dollars telling us all about the fella who was Michael Dukakis's lieutenant governor and Ted Kennedy's junior partner in the Senate?

---

I THINK, THEREFORE BUGGERY IS A RIGHT:

Compassionate Conservatism: The Philosophic State of the Union (S.M. Oliva, January 24, 2004, Capitalism)

The president built his address around the consistent theme of his presidency: "compassionate conservatism." The exact meaning of his philosophy has always been elusive, but Tuesday's speech provided a good roadmap for the novice traveler. In short, compassionate describes the president's metaphysics and epistemology, and conservatism summarizes his ethics and politics. On all four counts, compassionate conservatism is a philosophy repugnant to the values embodied in the American constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Metaphysics establishes the nature of existence. It is rooted in the law of identity—A is A, as Aristotelians would say. Metaphysics establishes what is, while epistemology determines how a consciousness can acquire and use knowledge of its existence. This sounds like weighty stuff, but it's important to understand the foundation of any philosophical system. In George Bush's philosophy, he views existence as ultimately unknowable; he accepts, without evidence, the existence of God and a realm beyond the comprehension of man's consciousness. This metaphysical view determines Bush's epistemology, since he rejects reason as the sole means of acquiring knowledge. Instead, Bush considers reason and faith to be equally valid methods of cognition.

Compassion is Bush's shorthand for acquiring knowledge via faith and emotion. The president believes that man's understanding of the universe comes from compassion, which is his emotional acceptance of other peoples'—and God's—perceptions of reality. By this standard, Bush finds truth in the compassionate (i.e. charitable) acts of man towards man. Ultimately, he believes, God reveals himself through such acts, and this makes true knowledge of existence knowable to man on some level.

This theory of knowledge allows Bush to accept contradictory premises. The best example from his address came when he talked about the prospects for democracy in the Middle East:

"We also hear doubts that democracy is a realistic goal for the greater Middle East, where freedom is rare. Yet it is mistaken, and condescending, to assume that whole cultures and great religions are incompatible with liberty and self-government. I believe that God has planted in every heart the desire to live in freedom. And even when that desire is crushed by tyranny for decades, it will rise again."

Bush assumes, on faith, that man instinctively possesses the knowledge to "live in freedom". But history tells us otherwise. Freedom, liberty, and individual rights are social concepts that took centuries to develop. The United States first brought these concepts into a unified republic. But there was nothing automatic or religious about this accomplishment. And contrary to the president's statement, these concepts are incompatible with many cultures and religions. If they were compatible, why then haven't individual rights republics sprung up throughout the Middle East? Indeed, why haven't they sprung up in Asia or Africa? But since Bush believes they are compatible, all evidence to the contrary, then it must be true, for faith makes it so.

On matters of ethics and politics, Bush's compassion melds with conservatism. This means the president views rights as derived not from man's existence, but rather from institutions invested with compassionate or mystical authority. Bush referred to rights just once in his speech, saying America's foreign policy sought a "peace founded upon the dignity and rights of every man and woman". But the rights he spoke of were not those derived from man's nature, but from man's creator, or God. All rights, in the president's view, exist only by permission of established authorities. Or to use a more conventional conservative premise, order takes precedence over liberty.

If it's fun watching the Left have conniptions over the Bush presidency, it's positively sublime watching secular libertarians be driven insane. This guy apparently hasn't ever even read the Declaration if he thinks rights come from anywhere but the Creator.

---

U SHO'NUF DO BE COOKIN' IN MY BOOK:

The Man from Seneca: John Edwards, not just another pretty face. (Andrew Ferguson, 02/02/2004,Weekly Standard)

LIKE A FEW OTHER excessively nice-looking human beings, John Edwards is a victim of reverse lookism. Common experience, lately reinforced by the most rigorous scientific research, demonstrates lookism's effects: Ugly people never catch a break, while the well-configured among us always receive favored treatment. In the past, Edwards has undoubtedly been lookism's beneficiary. Having no political connections or experience to speak of, he would never have been elected senator from North Carolina, nor been fingered early on as a presidential prospect by the national press corps, if he had had the face, for example, of Dennis Kucinich, who, as a presidential prospect, has been fingered only by himself.

But now it is John Edwards who can't catch a break. His looks have become a curse. People who would never dream of using a racial epithet or adverting to a stranger's unwieldy nose or sloping chin think nothing of cruelly comparing Edwards to the Breck Shampoo girl or the cuter half of the Olsen twins. No one has yet compared him to a polo player from a Ralph Lauren ad or to a young John Derek, husband of Bo, or to Timmy in "Lassie," or to the TV personality Lyle Waggoner, Playgirl magazine's first centerfold in the 1970s, but I'm waiting.

It would help if he'd ever done anything other than chase ambulance faster and shakedown insurance companies harder than any other shyster in America.

---

THE PIG IN THE POKE:

Two-Face: John Edwards is a Clinton-style golden boy. What does it look like when he has a bad day? (Jonathan V. Last, 01/23/2004, Weekly Standard)

JOHN EDWARDS is currently the trendy pick to win the Democratic nomination. According to the conventional wisdom, John Kerry is now the solid frontrunner, Dean is a has-been (albeit a has-been with money), and Clark is increasingly out of his league--making Edwards a nice dark-horse bet.

The primary reason for liking Edwards is his collection of natural gifts. He's smart and confident, but more than that, he's a tremendous politician. When he's firing on all cylinders, he's polished but not slick, seamless but not prepackaged. He does not always fire on all cylinders.

Exhibit A would be last night's debate, where Edwards treaded water until he ran up against the Defense of Marriage Act and didn't appear to understand the law. Exhibit B would be today's event at the Page Belting manufacturing plant.

You'd think they'd have learned their lesson about neophytes after the Dean and Clark implosions.

---

JUST CAUSE FOLKS OPPOSE YOU DOESN'T MEAN IT'S NOT A DEMOCRACY:

America as a One-Party State: Today's hard right seeks total dominion. It's packing the courts and rigging the rules. The target is not the Democrats but democracy itself. (Robert Kuttner, February 1, 2004, American Prospect)

America has had periods of single-party dominance before. It happened under FDR's New Deal, in the Republican 1920s and in the early 19th-century "Era of Good Feeling." But if President Bush is re-elected, we will be close to a tipping point of fundamental change in the political system itself. The United States could become a nation in which the dominant party rules for a prolonged period, marginalizes a token opposition and is extremely difficult to dislodge because democracy itself is rigged. This would be unprecedented in U.S. history.

In past single-party eras, the majority party earned its preeminence with broad popular support. Today the electorate remains closely divided, and actually prefers more Democratic policy positions than Republican ones. Yet the drift toward an engineered one-party Republican state has aroused little press scrutiny or widespread popular protest.

We are at risk of becoming an autocracy in three key respects. First, Republic