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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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

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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)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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."

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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...

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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.

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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?

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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?

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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?

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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.

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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."

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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.

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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?

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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.]

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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"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 ca