BETRAYALS BEHIND HIM:

What's That in Your Shirt Pocket?: The Rev. Al Green talks about his spirit and what happened when God found his stash (Peter S. Scholtes, 3/24/04, City Pages)

City Pages: A question from the old days: What was "Take Me to the River" about, anyway?

Al Green: I wrote the song, "Take me to the river/Wash me down/Cleanse my soul/Put my feet on the ground." That's what I wrote down. Now, [guitarist] Teenie Hodges and Willie Mitchell wrote, "I don't know why you treat me so bad," and "took all my cigarettes," and da-da-da. I didn't write none of that. I wrote, "Put my feet on the ground." That's what I wanted. And at that time my feet definitely wasn't on the ground. Far from it. I was zinging away, I'm telling you.

CP: Do you still feel like your feet aren't on the ground sometimes?

Green: No, no. I asked to be delivered from that. And I was delivered from it. God said to me, "You have to pray about this. Now what I want you to do is...uh, what's that in your shirt pocket?"

I'm going like, "Huh? Oh, well, there's some junk up in it. But I just bought this." [laughs]

The man says, "Well, when you need my help, you call me."

I say, "Hold it, hold it. I need your help."

So he says, "Okay, speed up a little bit. Take the bottle out of the bag, roll down the window, start shaking. Ah ah ah, don't look back. Keep going."

Honestly, I never talk about that. But that really did happen. And since that time, I haven't done that. It's a waste of time, a waste of your money, a waste of your life. You betray your children, you betray yourself. I don't need that. I need to be... [breaks into song] "I don't know why/I love you like I do."

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HOW COME THE GOP IS IN THE MAJORITY ON EVERY WEDGE ISSUE?:

Karl Rove's Moment: How "Bush's Brain" hijacked Washington, D.C. and politics-as-usual (Steve Perry, 3/24/04, City Pages)

To speak of Karl Rove's successes is to speak of the failures and corruptions of American politics and public life. They are two expressions of the same thing. Since January and the start of the Democratic presidential campaign, there has been some hint of life in the loyal opposition and the press; American newspapers, led by the big three (New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times), have turned notably more critical in their Bush coverage. Any one of numerous potential scandals still might return to haunt the administration. (One of the figures reportedly implicated in the criminal investigation of the Plame leak is Rove underling I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.) There are also signs that Democrats aren't the only ones in the Washington political establishment feeling anxious about Bush's brazenness and his reckless, sloppy management of economy and empire. This circle is not a great power in electoral politics, but it could lend fuel to a media feeding frenzy, if one arose.

The president could lose this election, as I'm guessing Rove surmised early on. In crafting a campaign that is half poison-pen note, half Hallmark card, he and George W. are wagering against a lot of things: real, and serious, competition from John Kerry and the Democrats; and sustained criticism of Bush in the media. These aren't bad bets. The news media has proven that it does consist mainly of deadline-driven trained seals, most of whom don't know much about the issues in question themselves. But they do know the rules of political theater, and that is what they write about. Rove and the Republicans understand this so much better than the Democrats that in terms of hand-to-hand political combat, it's a little like the Democratic National Committee beer-ball team against the New York Yankees.

John Kerry has been slowly dematerializing in the public imagination since his wrap-up of the nomination came into view. He has made some trenchant criticisms of Bush, but he hasn't made any of them stick. He doesn't know how. It's still possible that Kerry and the Dems could put the White House back on the defensive, force them off their game, but they've been losing that battle for a month now and can't afford to keep losing it much longer.

It doesn't mean Bush is home-free. No matter how well you do political campaigns, there is always the faint chance that too many people will already have seen through you. The amazing thing about 2004 is not that a radical, reckless president has the chance to be reelected; the amazing thing is that, in the face of a political establishment and a news media that rarely said boo to George W. Bush, millions and millions of people have his number anyway. Where the people are concerned, therefore, Karl and W are forced to make a dicier bet--against public memory, decency, and self-interest. It isn't clear yet whether terror fears and "wedge" issues like gay marriage, guns, and religion will once again divert sufficient numbers of people from more pressing matters, such as their own livelihoods. Maybe not.

On the other hand, Karl Rove has yet to lose a race by underestimating the integrity and rationality of American electoral politics.

It's always interesting to see someone totally Blue flail around trying to comprehend Red America. For instance, the idea that you are betraying your own self-interest if you oppose the party of gay marriage, gun control, anti-religion and appeasement of terror reflects a rather profound alienation from the basic values of most Americans.

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TROUBLE IN THE COLONIES:

Editorial: Appalling treatment (Toronto Star, 3/23/04)

Is it fair to boo a U.S.-born Grade 9 girl for carrying an American flag across a stage during a school multiculturalism parade?

Is it fair to insult and use obscene gestures against 11-year-old peewee hockey players from the Boston area because you don't like the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq?

Is there no limit to some Canadians' anti-American anger?

Those questions are being asked again on the one-year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq after a teenager was in tears after being loudly booed as she carried the American flag in a parade of 39 flags representing every nationality in the school.

Not to worry, they'll salute it when they're the 51st star.

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IN BED OR INCOMPETENT?:

L.A. Times Overlooks Details of Kerry's FBI Record (Scott Stanley Jr., 3/30/04, Insight on the News)

News management may have reached an embarrassing low in the Los Angeles Times for March 23 where an article by staff writer John M. Glionna purports to offer selections from the FBI file on soon-to-be Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry, who was under surveillance by the G-Men as a member of the executive board of the pro-Viet Cong Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW).

Presenting items from 50 documents carefully selected from what it reported were 14 boxes of related government papers 12 feet high, the Times confirmed from the FBI and other witnesses that Kerry had resigned from the VVAW leadership in November 1971 at a Kansas City board meeting to run for Congress. For years Kerry claimed that he had resigned after a July 1971 meeting in St. Louis and had not been present for the Kansas City meeting that was moved from venue to venue to try to avoid FBI surveillance of the group's most secret plans.

The reason official confirmation that he did not leave the group until after the Kansas City meeting is important, say specialists on radical activities during the Vietnam era, is that the FBI documents confirm earlier reports by those present that Kerry participated in a closed-door discussion of a proposal to assassinate seven U.S. senators who were special targets of Hanoi, with whose agents selected leaders of VVAW had been meeting. The Los Angeles Times made no mention of this part of the story, broken 10 days earlier in the New York Sun by founding New York Times books editor Tom Lipscomb and since spiked by editors coast to coast.

Any editors from the LA Times attend that Kerry Fan Cub meeting at Al Franken's?

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WE DENIED THEM ASPIRIN ANYWAY:

Ex-White House aide defends 9/11 allegations (CNN, 3/23/04)

During the Clinton administration, [former White House counter-terrorism expert Richard Clarke] said, al Qaeda was responsible for the deaths of "fewer than 50 Americans," and Clinton responded with military action, covert CIA action and by supporting United Nations sanctions.

"They stopped al Qaeda in Bosnia," Clarke said, "They stopped al Qaeda from blowing up embassies around the world."

"Contrast that with Ronald Reagan, where 300 [U.S. soldiers] were killed in [a bombing attack in Beirut,] Lebanon, and there was no retaliation," Clarke said. "Contrast that with the first Bush administration where 260 Americans were killed [in the bombing of] Pan Am [Flight] 103, and there was no retaliation."

"I would argue that for what had actually happened prior to 9/11, the Clinton administration was doing a great deal," Clarke said.

Just in case there was any doubt that this is merely partisan bitching.

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TARGET ACQUISITION:

Hardliner Rantissi named new Hamas chief for Gaza Strip (Amos Harel, Arnon Regular and Uri Ash, 3/23/04, Haaretz)

Abdel Aziz Rantisi on Tuesday became the new "general commander" of Hamas replacing slain Ahmed Yassin, who was assassinated by Israel on Monday.

Immediately after claiming the mantle at the packed Yarmouk Stadium in Gaza, where thousands - including Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia - gathered to pay condolences to the Hamas leadership, the 57-year-old Rantisi went underground, fearing an Israeli attempt on his life.

He should be hiding, because he's a dead man. Before Israel unilaterally creates a state of Palestine it has to kill as many of these guys as it can, because once there is a state such attacks would be acts of war.

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THE ENEMY WITHIN:

The Enemies of Religious Liberty (James Hitchcock, February 2004, First Things)

It is common for religious believers to lament the Supreme Court's barely concealed hostility to the free exercise of religion, at least since the middle decades of the twentieth century. But in the long term, even more damage is likely to be done by the influence of ideas advocated by a cluster of political and legal theorists in the academy. For these writers, religious liberty itself is a pernicious idea.

The term "liberalism" in recent political theory has been defined, by John Rawls and others, as both an agreement to abide by constitutional principles that provide access to all citizens ("political" liberalism) and as a particular ideological concept of a free and open society ("comprehensive" liberalism). According to Rawls, the "political" notion of liberalism takes no position on ultimate questions of meaning — and it is the ideal to which contemporary liberals should aspire.

Oddly enough, this formulation seems to harmonize with the argument of the Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray, according to which belief in religious absolutes can be reconciled with the First Amendment of the Constitution by considering it to be an "article of peace" rather than an "article of faith." In this view, one is not obliged to accept any particular philosophical assumptions but must merely agree to respect the Constitution for the sake of civil harmony. As we shall see, despite Rawls endorsement of this Murrayan ideal, many of the most prominent liberals writing today adopt, whether or not they expicitly say so, a radically comprehensive and even imperial version of liberal ideology. [...]

It is religion's claim to articulate the meaning of existence that runs up against Rawlsian "comprehensive" liberalism. As Carter observes, deep faith is both incomprehensible and threatening to the liberal order, which therefore defines religion as irrational, private, and divisive. As J. Judd Owen has pointed out in Religion and the Demise of Liberal Rationalism (2001), the liberal concept of individual freedom tends to create an atmosphere in which religion is tolerated only to the degree that it is deemed harmless: tolerance ends at the point where religion makes strong demands on its adherents.

The strict separationist argument has therefore been extended to what is "private" as well as public. Thus Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson acknowledge in Democracy and Disagreement (1996) that the liberal order threatens religious belief — and they believe it should. Similarly, in Toleration and the Constitution (1986) David A. J. Richards asserts the necessity of fostering "a religion and an ethics that validate the highest-order moral powers of rationality and reasonableness of a free people," which he declares to be "the only kind of religion suitable for a democracy." Richard Rorty likewise proclaims in Truth and Progress (1991) that the "highest achievements of humanity" are incompatible with traditional religion.

Ostensibly the primary political argument against strong religious beliefs is that they threaten civic peace; for this reason, Cass Sunstein argues in The Partial Constitution (1999) that America's founding document decrees "a secular liberal democracy in a way that is intended to minimize religious tension." He thus urges the liberal state to force the intolerant to be tolerant, with government serving as "a divine instrument" for depriving groups of "weapons to use against one another."

But if no deep conflicts are permissible in the liberal state, coercive methods may be necessary to restrain them. As Stanley Fish, no friend of religion, admits, the liberal state is tolerant in inverse proportion to the seriousness of what is at stake and does not achieve its promised neutrality. At the same time, in There's No Such Thing As Free Speech (1994) he ridicules believers for invoking liberal principles on their own behalf, arguing that they should not expect to benefit from liberalism's promises but ought actually to reject them. Wojciech Sadurski similarly argues in Moral Pluralism (1990) that government cannot be neutral towards those who allegedly deny the principle of neutrality itself.

According to Kathleen M. Sullivan of the Stanford University Law School, the "establishment clause" actually establishes a culture from which there can be no legitimate dissent — in which religion is tolerated only "insofar as it is consistent with the establishment of the secular moral order." She candidly admits that "the religion clauses enable the government to endorse a culture of liberal democracy that will predictably clash over many issues with religious subcultures." But believers "must pay for the secular army which engineers the truce among them" for the sake of civil peace. Critics of the theory of evolution, for example, are accused by Sullivan of being in violation of the spirit of the Constitution, which, she claims, has been "shaped by an argument honoring Galileo's defense of empirical rationality against the abuses of Bible interpretation." Hence the state is obligated to encourage "scientific rationality."

It follows logically that churches should be denied the right to be fully self-governing. Thus in A Wall of Separation (1998) Ted Jelen accuses a Catholic bishop who threatens religious sanctions against dissident church members of being guilty of "a religiously based threat to the prerogatives of democratic citizenship." The same charge would be brought against religious officials who express or enforce opposition to homosexual marriages or abortion. Sullivan thinks that churches can be allowed to exclude women from the ranks of the clergy only so long as this does not "impede the functioning of the civil public order." In Please Don't Wish Me a Merry Christmas (1997), Steven Feldman goes so far as to argue against allowing the major Christian denominations to proselytize among non-Christians.

The liberal state, Sadurski argues, should discriminate among religious groups on the basis of how "progressive" each is thought to be, and Rogers Smith insists in Liberalism and American Constitutional Law (1990) that religion can only enjoy constitutional liberties if it undergoes a basic transformation to make itself more "rational" or "self-critical." Going further, Steven Macedo, who explicitly identifies his view as "comprehensive," defines liberalism in The New Right Versus the Constitution (1987) as "a permanently educative order" for the preservation of liberal values and argues that the power of government can be legitimately used against illiberal churches because doing so promotes greater overall freedom. He urges "the right sort of liberal partisanship in all spheres of life," and, despite the Constitution's explicit prohibition of any religious test for public office, he argues that certain religious believers (notably Catholics) can justly be excluded from certain public functions, such as serving as judges. [...]

In identifying the interests of the state, in formulating some concept of the public good, comprehensive liberals exclude religious believers as such from citizenship, even though a very high proportion of citizens define themselves as religious. A large majority of the nation is thus required to acquiesce in the use of governmental authority precisely for the purpose of undermining their own beliefs, even of impairing their ability to inculcate those beliefs in their children. By redefining "free exercise" and exalting the "establishment clause," separationists have in effect "established" their own hostility to religion.

Extreme separationists justify restraints on religious liberty on the grounds that religion tends to foment divisiveness. But they impose no such restraints on divisiveness of a secular kind. Ironically, liberals who are quick to detect signs of political repression even in democratic societies now justify the restriction of religious liberty on precisely the grounds traditionally used to justify political repression — that full freedom cannot be granted to those who allegedly would use it to undermine the regime of freedom. It is, to say the least, paradoxical to restrict religion undemocratically because it is deemed to be insufficiently supportive of democracy.

One Nation, Enriched by Biblical Wisdom (DAVID BROOKS, March 23, 2004, NY Times)

[T]onight's reading assignment is A Stone of Hope by David L. Chappell.

A Stone of Hope is actually a history of the civil rights movement, but it's impossible to read the book without doing some fundamental rethinking about the role religion can play in schools and public life. [...]

Chappell argues that the civil rights movement was not a political movement with a religious element. It was a religious movement with a political element. [...]

[The Reverend Martin Luther] King had a more accurate view of political realities than his more secular liberal allies because he could draw on biblical wisdom about human nature. Religion didn't just make civil rights leaders stronger — it made them smarter.

Whether you believe in God or not, the Bible and commentaries on the Bible can be read as instructions about what human beings are like and how they are likely to behave. Moreover, this biblical wisdom is deeper and more accurate than the wisdom offered by the secular social sciences, which often treat human beings as soulless utility-maximizers, or as members of this or that demographic group or class.

Whether the topic is welfare, education, the regulation of biotechnology or even the war on terrorism, biblical wisdom may offer something that secular thinking does not — not pat answers, but a way to think about things.

For example, it's been painful to watch thoroughly secularized Europeans try to grapple with Al Qaeda. The bombers declare, "You want life, and we want death"— a (fanatical) religious statement par excellence. But thoroughly secularized listeners lack the mental equipment to even begin to understand that statement. They struggle desperately to convert Al Qaeda into a political phenomenon: the bombers must be expressing some grievance. This is the path to permanent bewilderment.

We need not speculate too deeply on whether it is their specific intent or not, but it must be obvious that the effect of the Left's demand that religion be driven from the public sphere is to destroy the very foundations of the rather minimalist Republic that the Founders established. Do away with right understanding of human nature; abolish the internal morality that is required to restrain men; and you not only make the evil that men do incomprehensible, you've no choice but to revert to a thoroughgoing statism in order to control these suddenly inexplicable creatures.

Thus does the call for tolerance, which cloaks itself in the language of liberalism, work instead to subvert liberal democracy.

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THE PETER PRINCIPLE:

Catholic + American = ?: How a communal body made its peace with liberal democracy.: a review of Catholicism and American Freedom: A History by John T. McGreevy (Allen Guelzo, March/April 2004, Books & Culture)

[M]cGreevy is...a great noticer of irony, and the principal irony of Catholicism and American Freedom is that the 1940s were precisely the moment when long-dormant Catholic voices calling for assimilation and accommodation to liberal democracy began to clear their throats and be heard. The twin horrors of fascism and communism persuaded many Catholics—and McGreevy focuses strongly on Jacques Maritain—that visions of paradisiacal communities, including those based on class or race, were delusions, and that liberal democracy, whatever its problems, was an infinitely safer bet for Catholics than the fascism of Franco, Petain, Salazar, and the Anschluss. In the United States, legal disputes over schools and local tax revenues found Catholics deploying church-state-separation arguments to demand equal treatment; the American Jesuit John Courtney Murray argued for a reconciliation of Catholicism and American democracy, even if the price was a cautious endorsement of individualism. And the proof was in the presidential pudding. John F. Kennedy was narrowly elected president in 1960, despite the less-than-discreet questions about whether his loyalty to the Catholic Church was at war with his loyalty to the Constitution, and to the mortification of truculent Protestants, the republic did not end.

All too soon, however, it became apparent that conflict over Catholicism and American freedom, far from disappearing, had only shifted its location, from Catholics v. American culture to Catholics v. Catholics. Every hope of liberal Catholics that the way was now clear for a rapprochement with American life crashed onto the twin rocks of Catholic moral theology: contraception and abortion. The indifference with which the American Catholic laity greeted Paul VI's 1968 encyclical on contraception, Humanae Vitae, suggested that the cultural rapprochement had been a little too successful. "Most Catholic couples rejected the teaching or ignored it," McGreevy admits, and as early as 1964, Catholic physicians were already suggesting that the Church needed to "redefine what is meant by abortion." Intellectually, Catholic theologians heaved overboard the ballast of Thomistic theology as "legalism" and shifted their attention to "the historical, the particular, the individual, the changing and the relational" —the words coming, not from a Protestant situational ethicist, but from Fr. Charles Curran.

But the one unarguable virtue of an ecclesiastical hierarchy which is pledged to the principle of semper eadem is the conviction that there are some rocks on which it would be better if the ship actually broke rather than transforming itself into a sponge, and abortion proved to be one of them. Also, even the most forward liberal Catholics sat uneasily beside the onward rush of American political and legal thought beyond Isaiah Berlin's "two ideas" of liberal democracy and into the embrace of John Rawls and the "third idea" of liberalism as absolute individualistic self-definition (now enshrined in Justice Anthony Kennedy's opinion, striking down the Texas sodomy law).

What is surprising in this regard is how near to success Catholics were in turning back state legislation liberalizing abortion in the early 1970s; it was the overriding intervention of the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton which upset the expectation that the tide of individualism could be resisted by Catholic political strength alone. Still more surprising, and more ironic, was how abortion signaled the end of the alliance between Catholics and Democrats. "A Democratic Party adamant that all abortions remain legal" drove observant Catholics (and the more observant, the more driven) into the unlikely arms of both the Republican Party and Protestant evangelicals. As liberal Protestantism dissolved into mere blue-America secularism, Protestant evangelicalism found itself, for the first time, as deeply alienated from the dominant culture as Catholics had been a century before. It discovered the limits on raging individualism, and then discovered that conservative Catholics also had a controversy with individualism, based on natural law theory.

It is certainly one of the great ironies of American life that Catholicism, once thought incompatible with liberal democracy, is now one of its last remaining bulwarks. Indeed, the alliance of evangelicals and Catholics may be what saves us from the kind of precipitous decline that secular Europe is in the midst of today.

FROM THE ARCHIVES:
THE REPUBPLICAN:
Orestes Brownson and the Truth About America (Peter Augustine Lawler, December 2002, First Things)

With Brownson and Murray, we can say that there is an American tradition of Thomistic realism that opposes itself to the dominant American tradition of contractualism and pragmatism, while also resolutely affirming the achievement of American constitutionalism. We might add to the American Thomist tradition the great literary artists Walker Percy and Flannery O'Connor. Percy, for example, realistically affirmed the truth and goodness of science while also rejecting scientific claims that do not acknowledge the reality of the distinctive excellence, and destiny, of human beings.

Brownson and Murray teach us the important lesson that the beliefs we hold in common as Americans must really be true if our liberty is to be defensible. Where Brownson goes beyond Murray is in his robust defense of the necessarily national or territorial character of democracy. This was arguably his keenest insight--and one that contemporary Catholics, in America and elsewhere, inclined as they are toward skepticism of national sovereignty and admiration of transpolitical institutions, would do well to ponder.

For Brownson, national solidarity is a natural human potential rooted in necessary human dependence. It also accords with the real but limited human powers of knowing and loving one another. The universality of reason and even religion, given our natural possibilities and limitations, cannot be the model for political order. The proper political form is thus the nation, the modern equivalent of the polis. Brownson thought national solidarity perfectly compatible with the solidarity of the human race through reason and faith, as long as the state was properly oriented toward the truth.

Given our need to flourish as social but limited beings, government deserves our love, loyalty, and obedience. "Loyalty," Brownson writes, "is the highest, noblest, and most generous of human virtues, and is the human element of that sublime love or charity which the inspired Apostle tells us is the fulfillment of the law." Loyalty is more specifically human or particular than the supernatural virtue of charity. And charity cannot replace loyalty as a political or national passion. So Christianity elevates "civic virtues to the rank of religious virtues [by] making loyalty a matter of conscience." Brownson even asserts that "he who dies on the battlefield fighting for his country ranks with him who dies at the stake for his faith." More precisely, "Civic virtues are themselves religious virtues, or at least virtues without which there are no religious virtues, since no man who does not love his brother does or can love God." Human beings approach the universal through the particular, and love of the personal Creator cannot be separated from other particular human beings. Human love is never for human beings in general. All men are brothers, but men come to know brotherly love only when they experience political solidarity with their fellow citizens.

Through the blessing of the Internet: The American Republic: Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny (1865) (Orestes A. Brownson)

The ancients summed up the whole of human wisdom in the maxim, Know Thyself, and certainly there is for an individual no more important as there is no more difficult knowledge, than knowledge of himself, whence he comes, whither he goes, what he is, what he is for, what he can do, what he ought to do, and what are his means of doing it.

Nations are only individuals on a larger scale. They have a life, an individuality, a reason, a conscience, and instincts of their own, and have the same general laws of development and growth, and, perhaps, of decay, as the individual man. Equally important, and no less difficult than for the individual, is it for a nation to know itself, understand its own existence, its own powers and faculties, rights and duties, constitution, instincts, tendencies, and destiny. A nation has a spiritual as well as a material, a moral as well as a physical existence, and is subjected to internal as well as external conditions of health and virtue, greatness and grandeur, which it must in some measure understand and observe, or become weak and infirm, stunted in its growth, and end in premature decay and death.

Among nations, no one has more need of full knowledge of itself than the United States, and no one has hitherto had less. It has hardly had a distinct consciousness of its own national existence, and has lived the irreflective life of the child, with no severe trial, till the recent rebellion, to throw it back on itself and compel it to reflect on its own constitution, its own separate existence, individuality, tendencies, and end. The defection of the slaveholding States, and the fearful struggle that has followed for national unity and integrity, have brought it at once to a distinct recognition of itself, and forced it to pass from thoughtless, careless, heedless, reckless adolescence to grave and reflecting manhood. The nation has been suddenly compelled to study itself, and henceforth must act from reflection, understanding, science, statesmanship, not from instinct, impulse, passion, or caprice, knowing well what it does, and wherefore it does it. The change which four years of civil war have wrought in the nation is great, and is sure to give it the seriousness, the gravity, the dignity, the manliness it has heretofore lacked.

Though the nation has been brought to a consciousness of its own existence, it has not, even yet, attained to a full and clear understanding of its own national constitution. Its vision is still obscured by the floating mists of its earlier morning, and its judgment rendered indistinct and indecisive by the wild theories and fancies of its childhood. The national mind has been quickened, the national heart has been opened, the national disposition prepared, but there remains the important work of dissipating the mists that still linger, of brushing away these wild theories and fancies, and of enabling it to form a clear and intelligent judgment of itself, and a true and just appreciation of its own constitution tendencies,--and destiny; or, in other words, of enabling the nation to understand its own idea, and the means of its actualization in space and time.

Every living nation has an idea given it by Providence to realize, and whose realization is its special work, mission, or destiny. Every nation is, in some sense, a chosen people of God. The Jews were the chosen people of God, through whom the primitive traditions were to be preserved in their purity and integrity, and the Messiah was to come. The Greeks were the chosen people of God, for the development and realization of the beautiful or the divine splendor in art, and of the true in science and philosophy; and the Romans, for the development of the state, law, and jurisprudence. The great despotic nations of Asia were never properly nations; or if they were nations with a mission, they proved false to it--, and count for nothing in the progressive development of the human race. History has not recorded their mission, and as far as they are known they have contributed only to the abnormal development or corruption of religion and civilization. Despotism is barbaric and abnormal.

The United States, or the American Republic, has a mission, and is chosen of God for the realization of a great idea. It has been chosen not only to continue the work assigned to Greece and Rome, but to accomplish a greater work than was assigned to either. In art, it will prove false to its mission if it do not rival Greece; and in science and philosophy, if it do not surpass it. In the state, in law, in jurisprudence, it must continue and surpass Rome. Its idea is liberty, indeed, but liberty with law, and law with liberty. Yet its mission is not so much the realization of liberty as the realization of the true idea of the state, which secures at once the authority of the public and the freedom of the individual--the sovereignty of the people without social despotism, and individual freedom without anarchy. In other words, its mission is to bring out in its life the dialectic union of authority and liberty, of the natural rights of man and those of society. The Greek and Roman republics asserted the state to the detriment of individual freedom; modern republics either do the same, or assert individual freedom to the detriment of the state. The American republic has been instituted by Providence to realize the freedom of each with advantage to the other.

The real mission of the United States is to introduce and establish a political constitution, which, while it retains all the advantages of the constitutions of states thus far known, is unlike any of them, and secures advantages which none of them did or could possess. The American constitution has no prototype in any prior constitution. The American form of government can be classed throughout with none of the forms of government described by Aristotle, or even by later authorities. Aristotle knew only four forms of government: Monarchy, Aristocracy, Democracy, and Mixed Governments. The American form is none of these, nor any combination of them. It is original, a new contribution to political science, and seeks to attain the end of all wise and just government by means unknown or forbidden to the ancients, and which have been but imperfectly comprehended even by American political writers themselves. The originality of the American constitution has been overlooked by the great majority even of our own statesmen, who seek to explain it by analogies borrowed from the constitutions of other states rather than by a profound study of its own principles. They have taken too low a view of it, and have rarely, if ever, appreciated its distinctive and peculiar merits.

As the United States have vindicated their national unity and integrity, and are preparing to take a new start in history, nothing is more important than that they should take that new start with a clear and definite view of their national constitution, and with a distinct understanding of their political mission in the future of the world.

The idea that the United States has a mission, that we are in the process of becoming (or of not becoming, as the case may be), is foreign to most people, precisely because we so little understand the the nature of the Constitution and of the Republic that the Founders bequeathed to us. If you get a couple minutes today and want to reflect on America, try reading especially the last two chapters of Brownson's book. Even if you reject them utterly, it would seem useful to ponder what purpose the nation does then serve and whether the ideas that animated the Founding are things we no longer believe in as a people. Because if we don't understand those ideas and/or don't believe in them, then the American Republic will join many other noble experiments in the dustbin of history.

MORE:
-The Orestes Brownson Society
-ETEXT: New Views of Christianity, Society, and the Church (Orestes A. Brownson)
-ESSAY: Catholicity Necessary To Sustain Popular Liberty (Orestes Brownson,
OCTOBER 1845)
-ESSAY: Democracy and Liberty (Orestes Brownson)
-Orestes Augustus Brownson Papers (Notre Dame Archives)
-BACKGROUND: Orestes Brownson (Notre Dame Archives)
-Orestes A. Brownson (1803-1876) (My Virtual Study: Terrence Berres)
Orestes Augustus Brownson (Catholic Encyclopedia)
-Orestes Brownson (American Transcendentalism Web)
-Orestes Augustus Brownson (Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty)
-Chapter 4: Early Nineteenth Century: Orestes Augustus Brownson (1803-1876) (PAL: Perspectives in American Literature - A Research and Reference Guide, Paul P. Reuben)
-ESSAY: Brownson's Quest for Social Justice (Edward Day, C.SS.R., August 1954, The American Ecclesiastical Review)
-ARCHIVES: "Orestes
Brownson" (Find Articles)
-ARCHIVES: "Orestes Brownson" (Mag Portal)
-ESSAY: Limits and Hope: Christopher Lasch and Political Theory (Jean Bethke Elshtain, Summer 1999, Social Research)
-REVIEW: of Aliens in America: The Strange Truth about Our Souls. By Peter Augustine Lawler (Damon Linker, First Things)
-ESSAY: Christianity and Liberty (George H. Smith, Nov/Dec 1992, Religion & Liberty)
America "last best hope of mankind" (Jay Ambrose, 7/04/03, Manchester Union-Leader)

Today, July 4, we celebrate a declaration, and that in itself is something special among nations. It is wars that nations often celebrate as their most patriotic of days, but our focus is on words about the "unalienable rights" of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"; our focus is on a statement that the American colonies are now independent, not that they will be after armed conflict, but that they are as of the declaration's adoption.

July 4 is a celebration of a people deciding to choose a destiny free from the dictates of others. The decision--an act of mind --is what counts most. And what have we done with that independence? We have become incredibly powerful, of course, but not because we sought power. We are where we are because we afforded common men and women opportunities nowhere else equally available.

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IF THEY'RE GOING TO WORSHIP THE MOTH, SHOULDN'T THEY HAVE THE HOLIDAY ON ASH WEDNESDAY?:

Darwin Day and the Peppered Moths (Marek Kohn, 29 February 2004, Independent on Sunday)

Richard Dawkins was looking magisterial, his demeanour and his dark suit apt for an occasion devoted to an eminent Victorian. This was Darwin Day, February 12, the anniversary of the great scientist's birth in 1809. The international Darwin Day Program urges its celebration around the world; the British Humanist Association, for whose event Dawkins was acting as chair, wants it to be a public holiday. It feels that if believers have saints' days, non-believers should have a ceremonial day off too.

How should we spend such a day, though? There are no obvious traditions, like maypole-dancing and marches for May Day. Over in Shrewsbury, Darwin's birthplace, they were having "a night of fine food and revelry" on the grounds that as a Cambridge student, Darwin had belonged to a 'Glutton Club' devoted to dining on "strange flesh". At the London School of Economics, by contrast, the atmosphere was more chapel than feast. Darwin Day was an occasion for sober dress and righteous ire. [...]

These are the two main forms of the peppered moth, emblems and textbook examples of evolution in action. The dark form appeared in Victorian Manchester, described at the time as "the chimney of the world", and had almost taken over from the speckled by the century's end. An entomologist named J.W. Tutt suggested that the dark ones were better concealed from birds in industrial districts, where pollution had stripped the lichen from the trees and covered them in soot. Half a century later, experiments by Bernard Kettlewell, of Oxford University, supported Tutt's hypothesis and made the peppered moths famous as a demonstration of evolution at a pace humans could observe. Then the dark forms duly went into decline along with smokestack industries and coal fires, making the textbook story complete. Yet in the past few years, Creationists and other anti-evolutionists have taken up the peppered moth as a stick with which to beat Darwinians. The LSE event was a rally in defence of the peppered moths' tarnished reputation.

And it was personal - relentlessly, vehemently, entirely personal. The speaker was Dr Michael Majerus, who leads the Evolutionary Genetics group at Cambridge University. Some years ago, he published a book in which he reviewed the studies done on the peppered moths. There were some anomalies, such as the appearance of dark moths in unpolluted areas, and it remained infernally difficult to do experiments which did not distort the untidy reality of life in the wild. These difficulties did not, however, shake his confidence in the story that Tutt had started a century before. But reviewing the book in the journal Nature, Jerry Coyne, an American evolutionist, compared his reaction to Majerus's discussion with the dismay he had felt when he discovered the truth about Santa Claus. He considered that the moth should be discarded as "a well-understood example of natural selection in action". [...]

Given a platform, Majerus took his revenge. For an hour he refuted, denounced and mocked. He closed with an impassioned invocation of over forty years' experience, man and boy: "I have caught literally millions of moths in moth traps. And I have found in the wild more peppered moths than any other person alive or dead. I know I'm right, I know Kettlewell was right, I know Tutt was right."

But, he acknowledged, anyone else needs scientific proof.

There's something almost sublime about a Darwinist religious event where the faithful acknowledge that it is the dubious who are more scientific in their skepticism.

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GOTTA DO SOMETHING 'TIL OPENING DAY:

The Brothers Judd have put together a group on ESPN.com's Tournament Challenge and would like you to join.

Group name: BrothersJudd
Password: ericjulia

Helpful links:

Create a new account:

Already have an entry? Go to your entry page and then click on the following link:

Tournament Challenge

We'll figure out some prizes, beyond bragging rights, for the winners.

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THE BROTHERS JUDD 2004 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION PROGNOSTATHON

THE BROTHERS JUDD 2004 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION PROGNOSTATHON

In an attempt, probably feeble, to create our own version of a tracking poll, we've (well, the Other Brother has) set up a page where you can pick the electoral vote results for each state for the 2004 election. The unique feature here is that you can go in up to once a week and change your picks. We'll display a running tabulation of the current results. This should let us see how one (with all apologies to our readers) incredibly odd corner of the Internet sees the political climate at any given moment.

Eventually we'll freeze the picks (late October), turn it into a contest,and award prizes to the winners.

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HOWARD WHO?:

Click The Vote: In the age of Internet politics, the Web can make or break a candidate (Stephen Baker, 3/29/04, Business Week)

As the eight-month Kerry-Bush marathon takes off, the President looks to extend his lead on the Net. The Republican Party, with its long history of direct-mail activism, has far more experience breaking its list into target groups, from tax hawks to pro-life activists. The plan is to solidify this base through the long campaign, adding e-mail names and tapping volunteers to call conservative radio stations, write letters to the editor, and knock on doors for the Bush ticket. The Republicans are even experimenting with instant messaging to create up-to-the-second links between small groups, says Max Fose, partner at consultancy Integrated Web Strategy.

The Democrats, by contrast, are struggling to catch up. The party, say insiders, relied heavily on its control of the White House to mobilize supporters during the '90s. When Terry McAuliffe took the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee in 2001, he found the tech system "nothing short of shocking," says one DNC tech leader. Kerry, who used the Web far less than Dean, faces a steep learning curve. Kerry has signed up only 33,000 volunteers online, according to his campaign spokeswoman Morra Aarons.

The most innovative Web approaches are likely to come from the networked activists. With campaign-finance reform stemming the flow of so-called soft money to the parties, much of the moolah goes straight to online advocacy groups. They can focus on a single message, a strategy that plays to the Web's strengths. And they innovate constantly. After country singer Willie Nelson released an antiwar song, Aaron Sain, a member of RightMarch.com, recorded Hey Hollywood, a conservative response in praise of President Bush. RightMarch sent a link to the song to its members, and some 20,000 downloaded it.

Even as the Web rises, TV remains the key to reaching undecided voters. According to TNS Media Intelligence/CMR, television spending this political season is expected to reach $1.1 billion, dwarfing the millions spent on the Web. Unlike the Net, TV reaches nearly every home in America. It has the power to grab the viewer's attention, and it offers far more compelling video than a broadband Net connection. "TV is still the most efficient. It interrupts you," says Robert M. Stern, president of the Center for Governmental Studies, a research organization in Los Angeles. "But the Internet is far more cost-effective."

AND THE WEB IS GAINING GROUND. WHILE the growth of ad-zapping technology, such as TiVo (TIVO ), erodes the value of a TV ad, the Web's reach is growing. With the spread of broadband connections, candidates -- including the vast majority who can't afford to buy time on TV -- can speak directly to voters. "It's a godsend for candidates who literally wouldn't have a voice," says David M. Stone, a film producer in Philadelphia who created Web videos for long shot Garrett Gruener in the California recall election.

The Web also has a legal edge. It's not bound to the same election regulations as TV. A candidate who runs a hard-hitting ad against an opponent on television must take responsibility for it, in his own voice, sometime during the ad. No such requirement yet exists for Net ads. In February, the Bush team circulated its first attack ad against Kerry to its millions of online supporters -- minus the President's voice authorizing the message. The pace of Web ads is sure to pick up, especially in the last two months of the campaign, when political ads by advocacy groups on TV are prohibited. "It's going to be a wild last two months on the Web," says James F. Moore, senior fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Interesting that it took the Dean implosion for the press to recognize that it is actually the Bush campaign that is leading the way on the web.

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AXIS OF GOOD FILES:

Voting Bloc: In Geneva, the U.N.'s successor may be testing its wings (Jonathan Rauch, March 22, 2004, Reason)

Since 1996, a handful of foreign-policy wonks have been kicking around the idea of a "democracy caucus" at the U.N. Two administrations, first Bill Clinton's and then George W. Bush's, took quiet but significant steps in that direction. Now, according to Bush administration officials, the concept will be test-flown at the six-week meeting of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights that began on Monday in Geneva.

Reached at his Chicago law office shortly before his departure for Geneva, Richard S. Williamson, the U.S. ambassador to the Human Rights Commission, said, "It's our hope, going to Geneva, to have two or three working sessions of the Community of Democracies—the democracy caucus, if you will." Asked if the meetings would be simply organizational or social, as earlier ones have been, he said: "We want to move beyond that. We are hopeful there will be meetings to discuss particular agenda items at the commission meeting and seek to find a common approach to them." Losing no time, the democracy caucus convened over breakfast in Geneva on Wednesday. [...]

In 1996, a private group called the United Nations Association of the United States of America floated the idea of a caucus solely for democracies. With 120 or so nations (out of 191 U.N. members), such a caucus could serve as a powerful counterweight to the traditional caucuses.

Late in the second Clinton administration, with a push from the State Department, the democracies began to organize. In 2000, 106 democracies gathered for the first meeting of an informal group they called the Community of Democracies. It had no permanent staff or formal powers, but it did produce an endorsement, in principle, of a democracy caucus at the U.N., a stance that the community reaffirmed in a second meeting in 2002 and, most recently, at a U.N. meeting last fall.

The Bush State Department then began lobbying Community of Democracy nations in a series of diplomatic lunches. "And these lunches with ambassadors from all different geographical regions—but all democracies—talked about all kinds of ideas, including this one," Paula J. Dobriansky, the undersecretary of State for global affairs, said in an interview. "Overall, it was very clear that other democratic countries from various regions embrace this idea and feel it could be of great value at the U.N., that it can bring together and highlight issues relevant to democracy."

All of that was groundwork. What had yet to happen was for the caucus to meet at the U.N. to do actual business: devise common positions, advance resolutions, eventually vote as a bloc on nominations and policies. It is this operational coordination that the administration hopes will now begin in Geneva, under the leadership of Chile, which currently heads the Community of Democracies' steering group. [...]

[C]onsider the long-term potential. By the time the Community of Democracies becomes strong enough to act coherently inside the U.N., it will also be strong enough to act coherently outside the U.N. It will contain most of the world's countries, including most of the strong ones. It will be unencumbered by the vetoes of tin-pot tyrannies. As it gains confidence and skill, it will attract money and authority. It may sprout an aid budget, a relief program, a peacekeeping arm, perhaps treaty powers.

In other words, the Community of Democracies may begin as a voice within the U.N. but go on to become a competitor to the U.N. Perhaps—one can dream—it may someday be the U.N.'s successor.

This is a vital step in the transition from a world where power over a people lends a regime sovereignty to one in which the regime must prove its legitimacy, by gaining the consent of the governed, before it will be recognized as sovereign. The implications are massive. Consider only one: under this standard, the burden of proof would be on regimes like Saddam's, Kim Jong-il's, Castro's, etc, to show why they should not be toppled and replaced by legitimate governments, rather than the liberal democracies having to put on dog and pony shows featuring WMD.

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THE VEEPSTAKES:

Saddam, women's rights (Nat Hentoff, March 22, 2004, The Washington Times)

At the Brookings Institution in Washington on Feb. 25, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton charged that, with Saddam Hussein gone, there have been "pullbacks" in the rights Iraqi women enjoyed under his rule. Not even such bellicose critics of the war as Sen. Ted Kennedy have claimed that the regime change has cost women in Iraq the leading defender of their rights.

Mrs. Clinton did try to qualify her softening of the dictator's horrific image by noting that these women's rights were "on paper." However, she went on to give substance to the rights on paper: "They went to school; they participated in the professions. They participated in government and in business; as long as they stayed out of his way, they had considerable freedom of movement."

John Burns -- who reported for the New York Times from Iraq before, during the war and since -- wrote of a paramilitary group once led by Saddam's oldest (since forcibly deceased) son, Uday: "Masked and clad in black, (the men) make the women kneel in busy city squares, along crowded sidewalks, or in neighborhood plots, then behead them with swords." The women's crime, said their families, was having criticized Uday's benevolent father.

When the dictator's prisons were briefly opened before the war, Mr. Burns reported on the "raping of women in front of their husbands, from whom the torturers wanted to extract information."

Certainly looks like she wants on the Kerry ticket.

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YET ANOTHER ENDORSEMENT HE CAN'T AFFORD:

Kerry rebuffs Venezuela's Chavez (Reuters, 3/22/04)

U.S. Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry has attacked Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez as a dubious democrat hostile to U.S. interests, delivering a slap in the face to the leftist leader who had portrayed Kerry as a potential friend.

The Kerry statement on his Web site made front-page news in Venezuela on Monday, nearly two weeks after Chavez had publicly praised the Democrat contender, hailing his health care plans and likening him to assassinated U.S. President John Kennedy.

No word yet on whether Daniel Ortega is going to support Mr. Kerry as the Senator supported him in the 80s.

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AND THEY WONDER WHY WE DON'T TRUST THE MEDIA?

The Trial of John Kerry (William Rivers Pitt, 10 December 2003, t r u t h o u t)

There are but a few weeks to go before the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. Time has grown short. In an effort to galvanize the message Kerry wants to deliver in the time remaining, he convened a powerful roster of journalists and columnists in the New York City apartment of Al Franken last Thursday. The gathering could not properly be called a meeting or a luncheon. It was a trial. The journalists served as prosecuting attorneys, jury and judge. The crowd I joined in Franken's living room was comprised of:

     Al Franken and his wife Franni;
     Rick Hertzberg, senior editor for the New Yorker;
     David Remnick, editor for the New Yorker;
     Jim Kelly, managing editor for Time Magazine;
     Howard Fineman, chief political correspondent for Newsweek;
     Jeff Greenfield, senior correspondent and analyst for CNN;
     Frank Rich, columnist for the New York Times;
     Eric Alterman, author and columnist for MSNBC and the Nation;
     Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist/author of "Maus";
     Richard Cohen, columnist for the Washington Post;
     Fred Kaplan, columnist for Slate;
     Jacob Weisberg, editor of Slate and author;
     Jonathan Alter, senior editor and columnist for Newsweek;
     Philip Gourevitch, columnist for the New Yorker;
     Calvin Trillin, freelance writer and author;
     Edward Jay Epstein, investigative reporter and author;
     Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who needs no introduction.

We sat in a circle around Kerry and grilled him for two long hours. In an age of retail politicians who avoid substance the way vampires avoid sunlight, in an age when the sitting President flounders like a gaffed fish whenever he must speak to reporters without a script, Kerryís decision to open himself to the slings and arrows of this group was bold and impressive. He was fresh from two remarkable speeches -- one lambasting the PATRIOT Act, another outlining his foreign policy ideals while eviscerating the Bush record ñ and had his game face on. He needed it, because Eric Alterman lit into him immediately on the all-important issue of his vote for the Iraq War Resolution. The prosecution had begun.

Remember the outrage twenty years ago when George Will, a mere columnist, helped Ronald Reagan prepare for a debate with Jimmy Carter? Look at all the freakin' editors on this list.

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TEACHERS PET:

Sexual Abuse by Educators Is Scrutinized (Caroline Hendrie, 3/10/04, Education Week)

A draft report commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education concludes that far too little is known about the prevalence of sexual misconduct by teachers or other school employees, but estimates that millions of children are being affected by it during their school-age years.

Written in response to a requirement in the federal No Child Left Behind Act, the report by a university-based expert on schoolhouse sexual misconduct concludes that the issue "is woefully understudied" and that solid national data on its prevalence are sorely needed.

Yet despite the limitations of the existing research base, the scope of the problem appears to far exceed the priest abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church, said Charol Shakeshaft, the Hofstra University scholar who prepared the report.

The best data available suggest that nearly 10 percent of American students are targets of unwanted sexual attention by public school employees—ranging from sexual comments to rape—at some point during their school-age years, Ms. Shakeshaft said.

"So we think the Catholic Church has a problem?" she said.

To support her contention that many more youngsters have been sexually mistreated by school employees than by priests, Ms. Shakeshaft pointed to research conducted for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and released late last month. That study found that from 1950 to 2002, 10,667 people made allegations that priests or deacons had sexually abused them as minors. ("Report Tallies Alleged Sexual Abuse by Priests," this issue.)

Extrapolating from data collected in a national survey for the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation in 2000, Ms. Shakeshaft estimated that roughly 290,000 students experienced some sort of physical sexual abuse by a public school employee from 1991 to 2000—a single decade, compared with the roughly five-decade period examined in the study of Catholic priests.

Those figures suggest that "the physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests,"contended Ms. Shakeshaft, who is a professor of educational administration at Hofstra, in Hempstead, N.Y.

Much as folks wished it to be, the priest abuse scandals were not a function of Catholicism but of deviant men seeking access to boys. Gotta figure the other professions that offer access to children (girls as well as boys), but make far fewer demands upon practitioners, will have even bigger problems.

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PLEASE, HAMMER, HURT 'IM:

For Kurds, a day of bonfires, legends, and independence: During Newroz, a spring festival, Kurds commemorate the defeat of a tyrannical king. (Dan Murphy, 3/23/04, CS Monitor)

At first blush, the holiday looks similar to dozens of coming-of-spring festivals around the world. But for the Kurds, the day means far more - especially this year, the first after the fall of Saddam Hussein, with the Kurds having won a major political victory in the transitional constitution, which appears to guarantee the de facto autonomous status they've enjoyed since the US created the no-fly zone after the 1991 Gulf War.

In the 20th century, Newroz became an integral part of the Kurdish national myth. On the Kurdish calendar, the first day of spring is the first day of the year.

In the 1930s, the Kurdish poet Taufik Abdullah decided it was time for a Kurdish cultural revival, and struck on this ancient holiday as the key.

"It was a dying holiday but he revived it and remade it as a symbol of Kurdish national struggle,'' says Stran Abdullah, a Kurdish journalist. "It was to remind everyone and ourselves that we're different, a special people. The lighting of the fires became a symbol of freedom." [...]

Part of the reason that Kurdish national aspirations remain so strong is that Newroz came with a set of myths befitting a people who felt oppressed and robbed by history. Kurdish children are brought up on the legend of Kawa, a courageous blacksmith who lived 2,500 years ago under the tyranny of King Zuhak, a monster with two serpents growing from his shoulder who fed on the brains of small children. He was so evil that spring no longer came to Kurdistan.

One popular version of the myth has it that Kawa, asked to send his seventh and last child to Zuhak, hid his son in the mountains with other fleeing children. Over time, Kawa turned the children into an army and, on March 20, marched on the castle and smote the king dead with his hammer. Fires were lit on the hillsides to celebrate the victory, so the story goes, and spring at last returned the next day.

Over the past 30 years the Kurds came to see Hussein, particularly since the atrocities of the campaigns of the 1980s, which included the murder of 5,000 Kurds at Halabja, as a latter-day Zuhak.

"We're so happy Saddam is gone, we live in hope that our rights will be protected now,'' says Chi Bahaddin, a young wife decked out in a red-sequined dress. Still, she's not satisfied. "It would have been best for everybody if he had been killed with a hammer."

Regardless of what happens in the rest of Iraq, the creation of a free Kurdistan is a worthy accomplishment.

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PUTIN AS THATCHER:

A Russian reform hits home: mortgages: For his second term, President Putin has made home ownership a priority. (Scott Peterson, 3/23/04, CS Monitor)

Part of Mr. Putin's campaign focused on mortgages, and the need for a "legislative package that could 'launch' an affordable housing market." The problems must be "addressed without delay" in the spring parliamentary session, Putin said, because "only a free man can ensure the state's prosperity."

The budding market has now loaned $400 million to $500 million by some counts, with an average mortgage of $18,000, paid back over seven to 15 years. The Association of Russian Banks, says Georgy Gangus, expects the market to quadruple during the next three years, toward a potential volume of $30 billion.

But bringing mortgages to Russia has not been easy. Though seeds of a mortgage system were sown in the late 1990s, legal and psychological hurdles persist. The law enabling lenders to foreclose on the property of defaulters remains untested, for example, so lending banks have been cautious.

And while most Soviet-era apartments were simply given to those who were resident in them when the communist regime fell apart, laws defining land ownership were only passed in 2001.

In a demand-driven real estate market - where prices in some better Moscow areas soared 40 percent last year - many families can't afford to move without a loan. Until recently, tax and finance laws were also in flux; often borrowers have little collateral other than their jobs.

"[Lending] is impeded by the fact that there are no credit histories in Russia, no credit rating agencies, and no credit bureaus," says Gerald Gaige, the head of Real Estate and Valuation Advisory at Ernst & Young, who has worked in Russia for 10 years.

Among the laws expected to be passed this spring is one that smooths the process now prohibiting banks and financial institutions from sharing credit information, Mr. Gaige says. Only now are assets such as buildings and property in Russia beginning to be valued and "monetized," he adds; new rules in the works will also create mortgage-backed securities, to make more cash available to lenders.

So far there are only "thousands, not millions" of mortgages in Russia, a figure that Gaige expects to "accelerate" since some 100 banks and institutions are already geared up to make such loans.

This is the most hopeful sign yet that Mr. Putin gets it.

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WHERE THE WAR ENDS:

Terror suspects may have escaped through secret tunnel, officials say (Ahsanullah Wazir, 03/22/2004, Associated Press)

Top al-Qaida terrorists may have escaped a siege by thousands of Pakistani soldiers through several secret tunnels leading from mud fortresses to a dry mountain stream near the border with Afghanistan, a security chief said today.

The longest tunnel found so far was more than 1 mile long and led from the homes of two local men - Nek Mohammed and Sharif Khan - to a stream near the frontier, said Brig. Mahmood Shah, head of security for Pakistan's tribal regions. [...]

The militants may have used the tunnel to escape during the disastrous first day of the operation on Mar. 16, when at least 15 soldiers were killed in fierce fighting. Still, Lt. Gen. Safdar Hussain, the commander of the operation, said over the weekend that authorities believe an important terrorist remains inside, based on the level of resistance of the holdouts.

The important thing here is the Pakistani willingness to take casualties and keep fighting.

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THE EUROS, HATING LIFE:

'You love life, we love death' (Spengler, 3/23/04, Asia Times)

Washington continues to underestimate its enemies. Who precisely loves life and who loves death? Al-Qaeda's taunt comes from a people with one of the highest birth rates in the world, namely the Arabs. It is directed at a people with one of the lowest birth rates in the world, namely the Spanish. One does not love "life" if one does not bother to have children. One loves rather one's own life, with its vacations, jamon serrano (cured ham), wines and siestas. Al-Qaeda is saying that the Spaniards are too soft to fight for their own future. Two generations ago, it was the arch-Catholic Spanish legionnaire General Millan Astray who raised the cry "Viva la muerte!" at the outset of the Civil War, by which he meant that death was preferable to defeat. [...]

Sacrifice is the universal means by which religions enable the faithful to come to grips with death. Christians take part vicariously in the self-sacrifice of their God; Muslims sacrifice themselves. Jewish sacrifice in pre-Christian times contained both a material side, that is, the elaborate animal and other food sacrifices performed at the temple, as well as a purely spiritual side ("a broken and contrite heart", Psalm 51:10). In post-temple times that peculiarly Jewish institution, the Sabbath, became a sacrifice of sorts; by doing no work of any kind on the Sabbath, "a foretaste of the world to come", the Jew sacrifices his ego, namely his impulse to act on and control the world. Only in a very specific sense was Ismail Hayina correct to say that the Jews love life more than anyone else. The Jewish concept of election, the notion that Israel is a divinely chosen and thus an eternal people, gives the Jews a special surety of eternal life. That is why, alone among the major religions, the Jews have no ascetic tradition.

All religion submerges the ego, in anticipation of the day when death will destroy the ego for all time. Sacrifice, namely giving up something of one's self, is the universal vehicle for reducing the ego. Sacrifice becomes terribly dangerous when the ego cannot re-emerge under the sun and sky of the real world. [...]

The longstanding Judeo-Christian objection to Islam lies in the notion that Allah's absolute power is not constrained by love. "The God of Mohammed is a creator who well might not have bothered to create. He displays his power like an Oriental potentate who rules by violence, not by acting according to necessity, not by authorizing the enactment of the law, but rather in his freedom to act arbitrarily," wrote the Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig. (See Asia Times Online, Oil on the flames of civilizational war, Dec 2, 2003). Whether the human ego can stand up to this absolute power is a different question; whether Islam has a propensity to produce a necrophiliac brand of radicalism is a question that the West will continue to ask. That issue is only tangential to the matter of al-Qaeda's challenge, which simply means, "Unlike us, you are unwilling to give your lives for your cause." Evidently that is true of the Spanish; if it becomes true of the West in general, radical Islam will win.

Al Qaeda is certainly right about Europe, but for these same reasons wrong about at least 60% of America.

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TOO EASILY SLAKED:

Are the Jacksonians Sated? (Michael J. Totten, 03/22/2004, Tech Central Station)

A curious thing seems to have happened since Saddam Hussein's regime was overthrown in Iraq. America no longer feels like a country at war. [...]
 
America's Jacksonians have been sated.
 
Who are the Jacksonians?
 
In 1999 Walter Russell Mead wrote a celebrated essay for The National Interest called The Jacksonian Tradition where he described what he calls the four foreign policy traditions in the United States; Jacksonian, Wilsonian, Hamiltonian, and Jeffersonian.
 
Jeffersonians are principled pacifists. Hamiltonians seek a stable and orderly world made secure for the global economy. Wilsonians build international institutions that promote freedom and human rights. They also fight for a world that's safe for democracy. And finally there are Jacksonians, who are isolationist in peace time and ruthless in war time.
 
Jacksonians, when roused, fight unflinchingly to the finish. The very idea of a limited war is anathema. They demanded the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan in World War II, and they hardly blinked an eye at the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Their complaint about the Vietnam War is that we didn't fight to win, not that we stayed on too long. When the first President Bush left Saddam Hussein in power after routing him in Kuwait, Americans of the Jacksonian persuasion were deeply unsatisfied.
 
After September 11, 2001, pin-point air strikes against terrorist camps in Afghanistan would have been woefully inadequate. Nothing short of the overthrow of the Taliban was acceptable. Though regime-change in Iraq was the brainchild of hawkish Wilsonian intellectuals, Jacksonians lent their support instinctively and overwhelmingly. They would no longer tolerate violations of the 1991 cease-fire they never thought Saddam deserved in the first place. [...]
 
President Bush's Middle East strategy is Wilsonian idealism in Jacksonian costume. Rhetorical flourishes like "good riddance" and "dead or alive" play well among Jacksonians, even as it drives more genteel Wilsonians and Jeffersonians to distraction.

Jacksonians are not "principled pacifists" but principled isolationists and theirs is the default position of America generally. Though they are ferocious once we're dragged into war, their attention span is rather brief and they tend to make us return to our splendid isolation before the underlying problems that caused war in the first place are dealt with.

Indeed, we can see in retrospect that those within the Administration who argued for doing Iraq in the immediate wake of 9-11 were probably right. By waiting until after Afghanistan they nearly didn't have enough backing to take out Saddam and folks just want it all to end now. (That's why leaving the al Qaeda elements in Pakistan was wise--no one will dispute going after them whenever.)

The great task before President Bush, the one that stands to make him a historic figure if he succeeds, is to convince the Jacksonians that his style of hawkish Wilsonianism is in America's (and their) best interest. The basic idea is that by hastening the End of History and pushing the world's most dysfunctional regions and states towards liberal democracy we can avoid getting pulled into their problems in the future. That is: it is always America that ends up dealing with the most pathological -isms; stopping genocides; intervening in civil wars; reversing invasions; etc.--why not act preemptively for once and settle these problems on our terms?

In trying to effect this revolution, Mr. Bush is squarely within the American rhetorical and intellectual tradition but running counter to the political tradition. If he pulls it off it will be an unparalleled achievement.

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NOBODY KNOWS THE TROUBLES... YASSIN?:

Sheik Was a Symbolic Figure Revered by Hamas Followers (CHRISTINE HAUSER, 3/22/04, NY Times)

[A]s the spiritual leader and man who helped found Hamas, Sheik Yassin is the most significant Palestinian militant killed by Israel so far. Sheik Yassin, a quadraplegic, was a symbolic figure for Palestinians to resistance against Israel.

He was revered by followers of Hamas, which is officially committed to Israel's destruction and has launched suicide attacks against Israelis in retaliation for what it calls Israel's crimes in the occupied territories and attacks on Palestinians.

His death came as Israeli forces have increased the pressure on militants in the Gaza Strip after two Palestinian suicide bombers from a refugee camp there blew themselves up eight days ago at the Israeli port of Ashdod, killing 10 Israelis. Hamas and Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades jointly claimed the attack.

Sheik Yassin has denied involvement in planning specific attacks against Israel, but Israeli officials say he is personally responsible.

In a statement that underscored the prospect of even more violence after his killing, Hamas's military wing said it was planning a "string of responses to this crime of assassination."

Yoram Schweitzer, an Israeli researcher in international terrorism at the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies in Tel Aviv, said that Sheik Yassin was of such symbolic importance to Palestinians there would likely be a new urgency for "spectacular attacks" to satiate Palestinian calls for revenge.

"We are already in a war with Hamas, Islamic Jihad and contingents of Fatah," Mr. Schweitzer said in a telephone interview, referring to other Palestinian groups that have carried out attacks.

"I don't think it is going to change anything for the time being."

MORE:
Israel preparing for wave of terror (Herb Keinon, Mar. 21, 2004, Jerusalem Post)

Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said Monday that Israel will press ahead with a systematic campaign against Hamas, hours after an IAF air strike killed the founder of the Islamic terrorist group, Ahmed Yassin.

Yassin's "hands were soaked in the blood of Israeli children," Mofaz told reporters after appearing before parliament's Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee.

Yassin was directly responsible for attacks that killed hundreds of Israelis, Mofaz said.

"As part of our systematic operations against all the terror organizations, we are working on a large number of tracks, including striking against the terrorist leaders, activists, sources of money, (making) arrests and targeted killings," Mofaz said. "We shall continue this systematic policy against the terrorist organizations."

Mofaz said he was confident Hamas could be weakened ahead of a possible Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

The defense minister said Israel had taken possible Hamas reprisals into account. "We are prepared for a possible wave of terror in the coming weeks," he said.

The Defense Ministry is preparing a systematic war against Hamas, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz told the cabinet Sunday, saying this is especially important as Israel moves toward disengagement from Gaza.

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IT'S MORNING IN ARABIA:

In Afghanistan, once a hotbed of Qaeda training and Taliban tyranny, nobody can deny we helped bring forth the beginnings of democratic government. Afghans, including newly liberated women, are helping track down fugitive killers. [...]

Nobody can be certain that Iraq will remain whole and free after we turn over sovereignty on June 30. But prospects look far better than predicted by defeatists who claimed a year ago that political freedom had no chance of taking root in hostile Arab soil. [...]

We are training a civilian defense corps, twice the size of a joint Shiite-Sunni-Kurdish army, to take over free Iraq's battle against the Ansar-Qaeda terrorists and Baathist diehards. With the transfer of political power to a transitional Iraqi government, public fury at the mortar and rocket attacks on "soft target" civilians will be a nationalizing, not a destabilizing, force — directed not at occupiers but against the terrorist invaders. [...]

From Kuwait to Qatar, the coalition's overthrow of Saddam has been a political tonic. Libya's dictator is making weaponry concessions lest his economy be wrecked and he be ousted. Repressive Iran is ripening for revolution. Egypt's boss and Saudi Arabia's princes are nervous because an arc of democracy bids fair to extend from Turkey through Iraq to Israel, with literate, enterprising populations blazing a path to liberating prosperity in the greater Middle East.

Syria's sullen Bashar al-Assad is feeling the heat. He benefited most from Saddam's corruption, probably provided a hiding place for Iraqi weapons and a route of entry into Iraq for Qaeda killers. His troops illegally occupy Lebanon; he supports Hezbollah and Hamas terrorists in rocket attacks and suicide bombings. His so-called intelligence sharing has been singularly unproductive.

Creeping? When else in history has democratization moved so fast?

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JOHN WHO? (via mc):

Kerry unveils message ad, touts 'a new direction' (AP, 3/22/04)

John Kerry introduces himself to voters in a television ad unveiled Monday, promising "a new direction for America" from a war-tested Democrat.

Titled "Fought for America," the 30-second ad airing in 17 states beginning Tuesday says Kerry has "the military experience to defend America" and the policies to improve health care and the economy.

"We need to get some things done in this country: affordable health care, rolling back tax cuts for the wealthy, really investing in our kids. That's why I'm running for president," Kerry says in the commercial, which includes footage of him emerging from the jungles of Vietnam more than 30 years ago.

The four-term Massachusetts senator and decorated Vietnam veteran is trying to define himself before President Bush and his GOP allies do. The president is spending more than $6 million on broadcast TV alone to label Kerry a soft-on-terrorism, tax-raising, flip-flopping liberal. Kerry spent less than a third of that amount on his first commercial, accusing Bush of "misleading America" with negative ads. [...]

Kerry's latest commercial, his second, contains no direct criticism of Bush. His advisers, confined to a budget of more than $2 million for the new ad, are hoping that voters will reject the White House's negative spots and learn more about the Democratic challenger who came out of the primaries ill-defined and underfunded.

That doesn't mean Kerry or his staff have sworn off negative campaigning.

"This is our chance to say Americans have a real choice, and we don't have to define the president because the people have been living through his real and meaningful failures every day," campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill told The Associated Press.

Right general idea but way too half-measure. The entire ad needs to be just an introduction to a guy who most voters don't know. They seem to be assuming that folks are aware of his military background and just need a reminder. Likewise, they aren't spending enough on this ad buy to make a dent in the public perception. If this is all they do biography-wise and then go on the attack they're toast.

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HOW OLD IS J-LO?

Kerry recruits former Mondale aide to lead search for running mate (Rob Hotakainen, 03/22/2004, Minneapolis Star Tribune)

When Jimmy Carter called Walter Mondale on July 15, 1976, asking him to join the Democratic ticket, Jim Johnson was in Mondale's room at the Carlyle Hotel in New York City.

In 1984, as Mondale's presidential campaign manager, Johnson oversaw the search that made history when Mondale chose the first woman, then-Rep. Geraldine Ferraro of New York, as his running mate.

As Johnson now takes charge of the vice presidential candidate search for Democratic Sen. John Kerry, his friends say the Minnesota native is well-suited for the job for one big reason: He can keep his mouth shut.

Makes sense because Mr. Kerry's candidacy is so deeply flawed that he has to try and find a VP who might help, rather than choosing someone competent to take over, as George W. Bush did. And there are only two options that could generate any excitement: Bill Richardson (first Hispanic) or a woman.

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DISPOSABLE, BUT NOT REUSABLE (via Christopher Badeaux):

What’s morality got to do with it?: Some 55 million foetuses are aborted each year. Why, then, all the fuss about destroying embryos in the course of stem-cell research? (Mary Wakefield, 3/20/04, The Spectator)

Although ‘reproductive cloning’ is illegal in Britain, many people oppose cloning embryos on the grounds that scientists, once confronted with a blastocyst, will be unable to resist implanting it in a human womb. The resulting clone baby will then, they imagine, suffer hideous genetic defects and accelerated ageing in the manner of Dolly the sheep. ‘There is every reason to expect an expansion of the context of therapeutic cloning to include foetuses,’ says Dr Fleming, director of Southern Cross, an Australian bioethics think-tank. ‘Particularly given the fact that it would be much easier to allow organs to develop “naturally” in the cloned foetus before harvesting. There have, in fact, already been calls for the harvesting of organs from embryos and foetuses. If cloned foetuses were allowed to develop, the next “natural” consequence would be to allow cloned embryos to be implanted and develop until birth.’

It’s a horrible thought but I’m sure Dr Fleming is right. If it can happen, it will, and probably already has somewhere in an underground lab in Belgium. But here’s another horrible thought: isn’t the whole attempt to draw a wavy line between the sorts of embryocide we like and don’t like basically nonsense? Can we really persist in thinking that a tiny blastocyst has some sort of right to respect if we are in favour of aborting 24-week-old babies?

The government attempts to make sense of the issue by giving an embryo this ‘symbolic moral status’ — a term cooked up by the Warnock committee in 1990. ‘The special status of an embryo as a potential human being is accepted,’ says the Department of Health, ‘but the significance of the respect owed to developing human life is regarded as increasing in proportion to the degree of development of the embryo. At the very early stages of development, according to this view, it is morally justified to use embryos for research purposes in order to benefit others.’ It’s a comfort to think that the little blastocysts have some standing in the world even as the syringe approaches, but what exactly is a ‘symbolic moral status’? To what is an early embryo morally equivalent? A dog? You’d have the RSPCA in fits. An iguana? Perhaps something in-between a mouse and a skin cell? And what does its ‘special moral status’ entitle an embryo to, apart from the right to be scrutinised by the Human Embryology and Fertilisation Authority before it’s whacked?

Those who object to therapeutic cloning, but not to IVF or abortion, claim that there is a difference between creating an embryo just in order to nix it and killing it after an accidental pregnancy. But treating an embryo as a means to an end is only ethically problematic if it has human status. And if the intention of scientists doing the therapeutic cloning is to alleviate a considerable amount of suffering, then what’s the problem? Why is it better to abort a foetus for the sake of convenience than to kill a blastocyst in the interest of finding a cure for heart attacks, strokes, cancer, diabetes, liver failure, blindness, senile dementia, Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s, Alzheimer’s and arthritis?

Ms Wakefield is right, but begs the question. There is something deeply foolish about people who support abortion for the purpose of killing the child but oppose abortion to harvest tissue for "therapeutic" purposes. But the point is that both should be banned.

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CALL ME FISHMEAL:

Ahab and Nemesis (A. J. Liebling, 1955-10-08, The New Yorker)

Back in 1922, the late Heywood Broun, who is not remembered primarily as a boxing writer, wrote a durable account of a combat between the late Benny Leonard and the late Rocky Kansas for the lightweight championship of the world. Leonard was the greatest practitioner of the era, Kansas just a rough, optimistic fellow. In the early rounds, Kansas messed Leonard about, and Broun was profoundly disturbed. A radical in politics, he was a conservative in the arts, and Kansas made him think of Gertrude Stein, les Six, and nonrepresentational painting, all of them novelties that irritated him.

“With the opening gong, Rocky Kansas tore into Leonard,” he wrote. “He was gauche and inaccurate, but terribly persistent.” The classic verities prevailed, however. After a few rounds, during which Broun continued to yearn for a return to a culture with fixed values, he was enabled to record: “The young child of nature who was challenging for the championship dropped his guard, and Leonard hooked a powerful and entirely orthodox blow to the conventional point of the jaw. Down went Rocky Kansas. His past life flashed before him during the nine seconds in which he remained on the floor, and he wished that he had been more faithful as a child in heeding the advice of his boxing teacher. After all, the old masters did know something. There is still a kick in style, and tradition carries a nasty wallop.”

I have often thought of Broun’s words in the three years since Rocky Marciano, the reigning heavyweight champion, scaled the fistic summits, as they say in Journal-Americanese, by beating a sly, powerful quadragenarian colored man named Jersey Joe Walcott. The current Rocky is gauche and inaccurate, but besides being persistent he is a dreadfully severe hitter with either hand. The predominative nature of this asset has been well stated by Pierce Egan, the Edward Gibbon and Sir Thomas Malory of the old London prize ring, who was less preoccupied than Broun with ultimate implications. Writing in 1821 of a “milling cove” named Bill Neat, the Bristol Butcher, Egan said, “He possesses a requisite above all the art that teaching can achieve for any boxer; namely, one hit from his right hand, given in proper distance, can gain a victory; but three of them are positively enough to dispose of a giant.” This is true not only of Marciano’s right hand but of his left hand, too—provided he doesn’t miss the giant entirely. Egan doubted the advisability of changing Neat’s style, and he would have approved of Marciano’s. The champion has an apparently unlimited absorptive capacity for percussion (Egan would have called him an “insatiable glutton”) and inexhaustible energy (“a prime bottom fighter”). “Shifting,” or moving to the side, and “milling in retreat,” or moving back, are innovations of the late eighteenth century that Rocky’s advisers have carefully kept from his knowledge, lest they spoil his natural prehistoric style. Egan excused these tactics only in boxers of feeble constitution. I imagine Broun would have had a hard time fitting Marciano anywhere into his frame of reference.

Archie Moore, the light-heavyweight champion of the world, who hibernates in San Diego, California, and estivates in Toledo, Ohio, is a Brounian rather than an Eganite in his thinking about style, but he naturally has to do more than think about it. Since the rise of Marciano, Moore, a cerebral and hyperexperienced light-colored pugilist who has been active since 1936, has suffered the pangs of a supreme exponent of bel canto who sees himself crowded out of the opera house by a guy who can only shout. As a sequel to a favorable review I wrote of one of his infrequent New York appearances a year ago, when his fee was restricted to a measly five figures, I received a sad little note signed “The most unappreciated fighter in the world, Archie Moore.” A fellow who has as much style as Moore tends to overestimate the intellect—he develops the kind of Faustian mind that will throw itself against the problem of perpetual motion, or of how to pick horses first, second, third, and fourth in every race. Archie’s note made it plain to me that he was honing his harpoon for the White Whale.

MORE:
Archie Moore’s Remarkable Run at the Heavyweight Championship (B. R. Bearden, East Side Boxing)

It’s 1954 and Archie is making some noises towards a possible Marciano fight but nobody is listening. Not yet. [...]

In a campaign of harassment that would make a celebrity stalker proud, Moore goes after the heavyweight champion where it hurts the most; his pride. He takes out adds in papers calling for Rocky to fight him, he gives interviews where he outlines his strategy to defeat the Rock, he has wanted posters printed and placed where Marciano will see them, he sends him notes on the golf course, “Are you afraid to fight an old man?”. Even the Ring is suggesting Moore has a chance to dethrone the Rock “if Marciano gives him a shot”. Called out in such a sustained, public manner, Rocky shelves his retirement plans (which are unknown to the public or Moore) and agrees to answer the challenge of the Old Mongoose.

The resulting fight starts off as if Moore’s master plan were flawless. In the second round he drops Marciano with a perfect right for only the second time in the Rock’s career. For a brief moment, a twinkling in the eye of fate, it appears Archie will hold both the light heavyweight and the heavyweight belts. But the moment is a mere two seconds and Marciano is back on his feet, taking no count, and coming after Moore with a savagery he might not have unleashed on the amiable Moore otherwise. Archie later admits the mistake he made was to drop Marciano early, noting that the heavyweight champ was a slow starter and he meant to get the early rounds in the bank as Walcott had done. By dropping him in the second round, he’s roused the smoldering fire that always burned in Marciano and the result is a relentless, merciless assault. All Archie’s great boxing skill, his cross-arm defense, his feints and moves, can’t keep off him a man he would refer to later as “a bull with boxing gloves”. For eight rounds Moore takes a terrible beating, knocked down three times, saved by the bell in the eighth, and when he returns to his corner with the assist of a compassionate referee it’s obvious the end is near. Between rounds the referee comes to Moore’s corner and offers to stop the fight, the outcome of which is no longer in doubt, and Archie replies, “I too am a champion, and I want to go out like a champion.”

The courageous words of a great fighter, the final defiant gesture from a man who worked so hard for his shot at the heavyweight title. The ninth round starts, Marciano is a whirlwind of fury, and Archie is down for the fourth and last time. In defeat he is as endearing as in triumph; he says he hopes the fans felt they got their money’s worth and he thanks Marciano for giving him the shot.

Archie Moore would have one more shot at the title, fighting Floyd Patterson for Rocky’s vacated title. It is Marciano himself who names Patterson and Moore as the men most deserving to fight for the belt. Moore fights a torrid schedule leading up to the Patterson fight, eleven bouts in eight months, seven of them against heavyweights. It’s too much, and Archie isn’t in the shape for Patterson that he was for Marciano. The result is a 5th round KO and the end of Archie’s heavyweight championship dreams.

The incredible Archie Moore finished with a record of 183-24-10 with at least 141 KOs (some historians state it at 145, but either way it’s the most of any fighter in the history of gloved boxing). He fought 61 times against Top Ten fighters and 15 times against future Hall of Famers. Archie may not have grasped the golden ring he wanted so badly, but it wasn’t for lack of courage or the will to reach for it.

-Moore packed a lethal punch (Ron Flatter, ESPN.com)

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BODYGUARD OF LIES:

AFTER MADRID (David Remnick, 2004-03-22, The New Yorker)

In recent years, Osama bin Laden has concealed his person from spies and Predator drones but has hidden his intentions and his sense of historical mission in plain sight. The recent bombings in Madrid are linked not only to the goals of undermining and unnerving states where secular pluralism reigns but also, by way of a kind of magical realism, to ancient resentments and fantasies, to bin Laden’s desire, expressed in videotaped speeches and declarations, that his followers reverse what Al Qaeda’s ideologist Ayman al-Zawahiri once called “the tragedy of Al-Andalus.” In the United States, “The Moor’s Last Sigh” is a novel by Salman Rushdie; for radical Islamists it is the memory of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella expelling Muslims from the Iberian peninsula and of King Boabdil fleeing Granada in tears while his mother says, “Do not weep like a woman for what you could not defend like a man.” That event, five centuries past, resonates in the fundamentalist imagination like the defeat of the Muslim armies in Vienna in 1683 and the end of the Ottoman caliphate in 1924. [...]

The problem of modern terror--terror that combines an apocalyptic ideology and a yearning for destruction--demands honesty with ourselves about the nature of the threat and honesty in politics. Capturing the top leaders of Al Qaeda is a necessity, but terror is not a threat that will end with decapitation. Nor will it end with the ordinary politics of negotiation and concession. The rebel cells of Madrid will not disperse with the pullout of Spanish troops from Iraq any more than the cells in this country dispersed with the American pullout of troops from Saudi Arabia. The old models do not apply. Groups like eta and the I.R.A. have committed acts of repugnant violence, but their aims have always been regional, limited in scope. The radical Islamists are at war with modernity itself. Their sense of difference is encapsulated in the declaration of an alleged Al Qaeda spokesman: “You love life, and we love death.” Transnational terror cannot be combatted in an atmosphere of international distrust. At the very least, the terrorists have proved themselves to be as good as their word. Governments that hope to resist them must be, too.

Why? If this is a war that has to be fought and in which nothing we can do, short of killing them, is going to affect the Islamicists, and if the Europeans will only participate if they are lied to, then why not lie to them? If the choice really was between the truth or Saddam's downfall, who would choose truth?

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THE ICEPICKMEN COMETH:

Neoconservatives and Trotskyism (Bill King, March 22, 2004, Enter Stage Right)

In one of the first in-depth studies written about neoconservatism in the 1970s, The Neoconservatives: The Men Who Are Changing America's Politics (1978), Peter Steinfels observed that it is impossible to understand the neoconservatives without understanding their history. Yet it is precisely the history of "the neocons" that is today being systematically distorted by paleoconservatives through the polemical campaign they are waging against leading neoconservative intellectuals and the foreign policy of the Bush administration.

As part of the two-decade old civil war within intellectual conservatism, paleoconservatives have forcefully asserted that neoconservatism is a descendant of American Trotskyism, and that neoconservatives continue to be influenced by the ideas of the exiled Soviet revolutionary in their view of foreign policy. In fact, in the period since the attacks of 9/11 the isolationist paleocons have made the "Trotskyist neocon" assertion one of their main weapons in the ongoing feud. Web sites such as The Center for Libertarian Studies' LewRockwell.com and Antiwar.com, and magazines such as Pat Buchanan's American Conservative and the Rockford Institute's Chronicles, have all featured articles focusing on the supposed link between the neocons and Leon Trotsky. The most extreme paleocons, who flirt dangerously with outright anti-Semitism, claim not only that neoconservatism is derivative of Trotskyism but that a "cabal of Jewish neocons" is manipulating US foreign policy and actually implementing Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution from the White House.

While paleoconservatives usually have little impact outside of intellectual circles, their "Trotskyist neocon" assertion has rapidly entered mainstream political discussion. To a large degree this is due to the efforts of anti-neocon liberal pundits, such as Michael Lind and William Pfaff, who popularized the neoconservative-as-Trotskyist theme both before and during the initial ground war in Iraq. The assertion is now so widely accepted that a writer as far removed from paleoconservatism (or anti-neocon liberalism) as Vanity Fair's Sam Tanenhaus can claim that, "…a belated species of Trotskyism has at last established itself in the White House." Ostensibly serious discussions of neoconservative "Trotskyism" have also appeared in mainstream newspapers throughout the world, from Canada's National Post to Hong Kong's Asia Times Online. And even as respected a foreign policy commentator as Dimitri K. Simes, co-publisher of The National Interest, has joined the "Trotskyist neocon" chorus, writing recently in Foreign Affairs that the neoconservatives' belief in "permanent worldwide revolution" owes more to the founder of the Bolshevik Red Army than to "America's forefathers".

[Irving] Kristol never did join the "official" Trotskyists of the SWP, but rather the heretical offshoot led by Max Shachtman, the Workers' Party (WP), in 1940. More importantly, Kristol belonged to a small intra-party faction inside the WP known as the "Shermanites" which was led by future Sociologist Philip Selznick, and also included Lipset, Himmelfarb, and Diamond, i.e. the only other neoconservatives to have been associated with Trotskyism. What is key here, and what for the most part has been overlooked, is that the Shermanites considered not only Stalinism but Bolshevism, which in their context meant Trotskyism, to be "… bureaucratic, totalitarian, and undemocratic". Decisive to Kristol and the others' rejection of Marxism and Trotskyism was Robert Michels' Political Parties, which was introduced to the group by Selznick. This "premature" anti-communism was so anathema to Shachtman that after Kristol and the tiny band of Shermanites resigned from the Workers' Party in 1941, a mere one year after they had joined, they were then retroactively expelled. The journal that Kristol and the Shermanites briefly published after their expulsion from the Workers Party, Enquiry, far from providing "conventional Marxist fare" as has been claimed by one scholar, in fact consisted mainly of substantive critiques of Marxism, Leninism, and Trotskyism, all the more noteworthy for the youthfulness of those making them. [...]

The final variation of the "Trotskyist neocon" assertion is the one that received much attention during the debates over the war in Iraq, and which contributed the most to the assertion's current widespread popularity. It is also perhaps the most confused. The contention here, as ludicrous as it may seem, is that neoconservatives in the US Defense Department, such as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle, are surreptitiously implementing Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution from the White House.

This charge is associated primarily with the liberal pundit Michael Lind, who in a much quoted article in the New Statesman from April of this year wrote that, "…neoconservative defence [sic] intellectuals…call their revolutionary ideology 'Wilsonianism' (after President Woodrow Wilson), but it is really Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution mingled with the far-right Likud strain of Zionism". Even before Lind, however, the charge had already been made by Paris-based columnist William Pfaff, who had written in the International Herald Tribune in December of 2002 that, "The Bush administration's determination to deal with its problems through military means [….] seems a rightist version of Trotsky's "permanent revolution," destroying existing institutions and structures in the millenarian expectation that all this violence will come to an end in a better and happier world." As recently as this past August, Pfaff was still insisting in the IHT that neoconservatives, "…are influenced by the Trotskyist version of Marxist millenarianism that was the intellectual seedbed of the neoconservative movement."

Yet if anti-neocon liberals such as Lind and Pfaff -- together with an assortment of conspiracy theorists -- have done the most to popularize the idea that neoconservatives adhere to the theory of permanent revolution, it is again the paleoconservatives that deserve the credit for coining the idea -- or at least some of the credit, for the actual origins are more varied than one would imagine. Paleoconservative criticism of the aggressive internationalism championed by some neoconservatives dates back to the origins of their dispute in the early 1980s. But at that time, neoconservatives were only being accused of "neo-Wilsonianism". Explicitly equating the belief in promoting a "global democratic revolution" with Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution is a much more recent invention that started during the debates over how to respond to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 -- and it has some rather surprising roots.

In September of 2001, just a few weeks after the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, the paleoconservative author Joseph Stromberg devoted an article on the LewRockwell.com web site to attacking a piece by neoconservative scholar Michael Ledeen entitled "Creative Destruction: How to wage a revolutionary war". Ledeen's main argument was that it was "…time once again to export the democratic revolution" as the best way to defeat the terrorists. Polemicizing against this view, Stromberg questioned whether Ledeen's approach stemmed from "Schumpeter or Bakunin" and decided it was neither. Stromberg then quoted a Yugoslav bureaucrat from the 1960s, Edvard Kardelj, who at the height of the Soviet-Chinese dispute sought to discredit the "Chinese line of exporting the revolution by force" by labeling it as "Trotskyite". Stromberg, who at least gives credit to Commissar Kardelj, then went on to -- incredibly -- choose that very same label to smear Ledeen and the neoconservatives. Given these methods, one should perhaps refer to the paleocons as the "inverted Titoists" of conservatism!

In reality, while Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution can be called many things, including irrelevant, it has nothing whatsoever to do with exporting revolution. Much less does it extol upheaval for its own sake or the inherent virtues of violence and destruction -- something more akin to a blend of Georges Sorel and Frantz Fanon than to Trotskyism. As defined in its final form by Trotsky in the late 1920s, the theory of permanent revolution held that in third world countries, attempts to carry out the tasks of the "bourgeois-democratic" revolution, such as land reform and "authentic" national independence, would fail unless those attempts led to the seizure of power by the working class through a socialist revolution. Rather than a theory of "exporting revolution", Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution is above all a theory of the possibility of socialist revolution in the third world through combining and passing over the "historical stage" of a "bourgeois-democratic" revolution.

The claim that neoconservatives derive their view of foreign policy from an inversion of the American Trotskyists' call for permanent revolution in the 1930s and 40s is thus deeply flawed right from the start: Permanent revolution was never about using the Red Army to spread socialism. The Trotskyist movement's actual conceptual framework and political activity in the 1930s and early 40s consisted of trying to bring about world-wide revolutions "from below" as the way to break the Soviet Union out of its isolation and achieve world socialism. Calling for the Stalinist bureaucracy to export socialism by bayonet would not only have had nothing to do with permanent revolution, it would have been suicidal to boot! It was, after all, that same Stalinist bureaucracy that the Trotskyists were seeking to overthrow through "political revolution" in the USSR, and which was itself actively strangling revolutions and annihilating Trotskyists wherever it could, from Siberia to Spain to Vietnam.
The whole essay is well worth reading, but two things stand out: (1) Whatever happened to them all being the tools of the fascist svengali Leo Strauss? Do paleocons think any more people will know who Trotsky is than knew who Strauss was?; and (2) As we said yesterday, the Republic is Founded on the idea of permanent revolution. People aren't therefore required to support democratizing the whole world; but when they oppose it they are being literally un-American.

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YOU ARE NOT ALONE:

Acoustics Experiment Shows Why It's So Hard to Make Out the Heroine's Words at the Opera (Bertram Schwarzschild, PhysicsToday)

Vocal-tract resonances enhance the output of the vocal cords. They also create the distinctions between different vowels sounds. For sopranos singing high notes, the two functions come into conflict.

A frustrated listener might well define grand opera as musical theater where you have a hard time making out the words even when they're being sung in your own language. Conceding the point, many opera houses nowadays always flash surtitles above the proscenium. Comprehension is particularly difficult in the higher reaches of the soprano register. Hector Berlioz long ago warned composers not to put crucial words in the soprano's mouth at high notes.

A recent study at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, lays most of the blame on an inescapable tradeoff dictated by the physical acoustics of vowel differentiation and singing very high notes. Acoustical physicists John Smith and Joe Wolfe, working with physics undergraduate Elodie Joliveau, have carried out an experiment that demonstrates why different vowel sounds are almost impossible to distinguish when sopranos are singing in the highest octave of their range.

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BATTEN DOWN THE HATCHES:

Helicopters fire missiles at car of Hamas spiritual leader in Gaza (The Associated Press, 3/22/04)

Israel Air Force helicopters fired missiles at Hamas leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin as he left a mosque near his house at daybreak Monday, residents said, and Hamas officials and witnesses said he was killed.

Witnesses said Israeli helicopters fired three missiles at Yassin and two bodyguards as they left the mosque, killing them instantly. Hamas officials confirmed that he had been killed. Four people were killed and 12 wounded in the attack, witnesses said.

Yussef Haddad, 35, a taxi driver, said he saw the missiles hit and kill Yassin and the bodyguards. "Their bodies were shattered," he said.

Why not just do Arafat too and then pull out completely?

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AND?:

Holy War in Europe: Is al Qaeda a Eurocentric organization? (Reuel Marc Gerecht, 03/29/2004, Weekly Standard)

A small cadre of European scholars, mirrored by a small group of European internal-security and intelligence officials, have followed the growth of Islamic radicalism in Europe for nearly 20 years. They know, even if European politicians do not, that Europe's most fearsome Muslim true believers are not products of the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation, or the First Gulf War, or the American troop presence in Saudi Arabia after 1990, or the Algerian civil war, or the Bosnian war, or the strife in Chechnya, or the Hindu pillaging of mosques, or the war in Afghanistan, or the second American war against Saddam Hussein, or the globalization of American culture. These events are banners that men who are already converted to jihad wave as they march to give battle. The holy warriors in Europe do not want to see peace in Palestine any more than Hamas's spiritual chief Ahmad Yassin or Osama bin Laden or Iran's clerical guide Ali Khamenei wants to see Israelis and Palestinians solve their problems in two separate, peacefully coexisting states. They do not care about Israeli settlements.

Europe's jihadists are born from their imperfect assimilation into Western European societies, from the particular alienation that young Muslim males experience in Europe's post-Christian, devoutly secular societies. The phenomenon is vastly more common among Arabs than among African or Asian Muslims. The reasons why these young, predominantly Arab males are drawn to the most militant expressions of Islam are complex and always personal. But their journey--which they usually begin as highly Westernized, modern-educated youths of little Islamic faith and end as practitioners of bin Ladenism--is a thoroughly European experience.

The jihadists of Europe have drunk deeply from the virulently anti-American left-wing currents of Continental thought and mixed it with the Islamic emotions of 1,400 years of competition with the Christian West. It's a Molotov cocktail of the third-world socialist Frantz Fanon and the Muslim Brother Sayyid Qutb. Muslims elsewhere have gone through similar conversions--the United States, too, has had its Muslim jihadists and will, no doubt, produce more. And the globalization of this virulent strain of fundamentalist, usually Saudi-financed, Islam is real and probably getting worse. But the modern European experience seems much more likely to produce violent young Muslims than the American. Europe may be competitive with the worst breeding grounds in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan.

For Americans, after 9/11, this is obviously not just of academic interest. For the future of al Qaeda--if al Qaeda is to have a future where killing Americans en masse remains its transcendent raison d'être--is in Western Europe. [...]

President Bush has said that we, the West, are all in this together. But this simply isn't true. The néo-umma guerrière doesn't really want to strike Spain, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Portugal, Italy, Austria, Germany, Poland, or even France as much as it wants to bomb the United States. It would be a delicious irony if small bands of Muslim holy warriors in the twenty-first century accomplished the opposite of what the Ottomans, the most powerful of Islam's empires, achieved in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The latter helped bring the West together; the former may help tear it apart.

This though fails to address the fundamental question: who cares? Why would we want to stay together with a post-Christian Europe? In the end, mightn't we find that we share more with an Islamic France than with the current wretched iteration?

---

CRANK UP OLE SPARKY:

What it means to be human: Roger Scruton tracks down the soul — the divine spark that distinguishes us from the rest of creation (Roger Scruton, 3/20/04, The Spectator)

Other animals are conscious, have thoughts, desires and emotions. But only we are self-conscious, able to address each other from ‘I’ to ‘I’ and to know ourselves in the first person, as subjects in a world of objects. As Kant plausibly argued, self-consciousness and freedom are two sides of a coin. It is I, not my body, who choose, and it is I who am praised or blamed, not my limbs, my feelings or my movements. There is a mystery here: how can I be both a free subject and a determined object, both the ‘I’ that decides and the body that carries the decision through? Kant argued that the understanding stops at the threshold of this mystery, and I suspect that he was right. It is precisely this mystery that religions try to normalise with the story of the soul.

The story varies from epoch to epoch and creed to creed. But it is never more simply put than in the language of the Koran, in which one word — nafs — means both ‘self’ and ‘soul’. This soul is raised in me: only by learning the ways of accountability do I rise to the condition of a free being, who realises his freedom in his deeds. Hence the soul can be corrupted. There is such a thing as the Devil’s work, which consists in undermining the self, tempting people to see themselves as objects, leading them to identify completely with their biological condition, to squander their selfhood in orgies of concupiscence and to refuse all accountability for what they are and do. The moral truth is conveyed with admirable simplicity in the great Sura of the Sun, Koran 91, which invokes the wonders of creation: sun and moon, day and night, heaven and earth, and finally ‘a soul, and what formed her, to which He revealed both right and wrong’. The Sura goes on to tell us that the one who safeguards the soul’s purity will prosper, while he who corrupts it is destroyed. It requires no metaphysics to understand the words ‘wa nafsin...’ — ‘and a soul...’. They are spoken in me and to me. The verse refers to the self that harbours knowledge of right and wrong, and it is just this that is the source of meaning in me.

Christians, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists have other ways of capturing this simple thought, but the fundamental observation is shared. Human beings stand out from the rest of creation. They are subjects in a world of objects, and as a result they judge and are judged. Hence they can be redeemed and corrupted. This work of redemption and corruption is neverending. We do not need a metaphysical doctrine of the soul to make sense of this; as we learn from the Koran, the reflexive pronoun is enough. Faith adds just one crucial detail: namely, that the reflexive pronoun is used also by God.

The fundamental amorality of materialism/sciencism/rationalism, whatever you care to call it, lies in its inability ever to render us more than objects.

---

A DEBT THEY CAN NEVER REPAY TO BUSH AND BLAIR:

The way forward: There is a long and hard road ahead if America and Britain are to begin to make amends with the Arab world (Yasir Suleiman, 3/21/04, Sunday Herald)

After decades of indifference and support for authoritarian rule in the Arab lands, US policy-makers have discovered democracy and embraced it as their ultimate goal for a future Middle East, which, it is hoped, will be more prosperous and more ready to interact peacefully with the West. The American administration has dubbed this vision its Greater Middle East policy, which it intends to present to the G8 summit of industrialised countries in the summer. Democratising the Arab world within a Middle East that has been geo-politically expanded to include Afghanistan and Pakistan is the topic of the hour for most Arabs.

There is no doubt that Arabs yearn for a genuine democracy in their countries, but they have responded to the American ideas on democracy, which have been met with traditional political acquiescence from Britain, with a massive dose of cynicism and an impressive array of conspiracy theories. Arabs ask how the Americans and British can be trusted with their future, considering their track record of false promises, brazen disregard for injustice and international legality in Palestine, lies over the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and support in the past for those countries whom they have now found wanting?

Mr. Suleiman seems to have entirely missed the point. We've only stepped in because it became blazingly obvious that the Arabs couldn't be trusted with their own future. Somewhat to our discredit, we preferred indifference...until the bombs started going off. Now we're there helping to democratize the region and asking nothing in return.

MORE:
Beginning to Bloom: The British learned in the 1920s that growing democracy in Iraq takes time. But the U.S. effort there is already showing signs of success. (Joel Rayburn, March 21, 2004, LA Times)

A year ago, troops of the U.S.-led coalition moved into Iraq on their way to swiftly defeating Saddam Hussein's armies. Since then, Iraq's journey toward stability and democracy under U.S. tutelage has been painfully slow and difficult. So says a chorus of observers who reflexively transform not-unexpected obstacles to the establishment of an Iraqi government into major roadblocks. Typical was the New York Times' judgment, after reports of a delay in the signing of the interim Iraqi constitution, that the U.S. occupation had failed both to deliver Iraq from "pervasive insecurity" and to devise a "satisfactory formula … for creating the interim government due to assume power July 1." But although the problems confronting the United States and its coalition partners in Iraq are complex, they are not new. The good news is that when measured against the only previous attempt at Iraqi democracy-building — in the 1920s under the British — the current effort compares favorably in virtually every way. [...]

The U.S.-led democratization effort in Iraq, then, has been quite successful despite problems, risks and poorly handled situations. Even the Islamist terrorists seem to agree. In a way, their horrific surge of violent attacks against civilian targets last week, from the drive-by shooting of aid workers to the powerful car bomb in Baghdad, is a sign of their desperation and fear that democracy is taking root in Iraq, and that their window for destabilizing the country is closing. The goal of a stable, pluralistic democracy seems reachable — and we've been in Iraq only a year. If the pessimists read some history, they would learn that expectations of a swift conclusion to the Iraqi project are unrealistic and historically naive.

---

REQUIEM FOR A FEATHERWEIGHT:

John Dean Kerry (David Hogberg, 3/17/2004, American Spectator)

Recently Juan Williams described Kerry as "someone who can take a punch and punch back on his way to a strong finish." Yet last week showed a Kerry who was punch drunk. The reason is that Kerry's campaign skills really haven't been tested. The only real challenge Kerry faced during the primary was revamping his campaign after he lost the lead in the polls to Howard Dean. Dean's implosion is what was primarily responsible for Kerry's wins in Iowa and New Hampshire. After the Granite State win had cemented his position as frontrunner, Kerry never really faced a serious attack. Gephardt and Lieberman were gone early, Clark was feckless, Dean was in disarray, and Edwards played too nice. Perhaps if Kerry had to defend his status as a frontrunner, it would have toughened him up, made him more careful in his remarks, and impressed upon him the difference between putting out fires and pouring gasoline on them.

Indeed, Kerry hasn't faced a tough challenge since his Senate race of 1996. (He ran unopposed in 2002.) And a closer look at that victory, over GOP Governor William Weld, suggests that Kerry's ability to best a tough opponent is suspect. Kerry beat Weld by only seven percentage points, despite outspending Weld by $4.6 million, and running in what was a good year for Democrats and during Bill Clinton's successful effort to make the unpopular Newt Gingrich the face of the Republican Party. As the Almanac of American Politics suggested, it "may simply have been a matter of Democrats coming home," as Clinton walloped Dole in Massachusetts 61-28%. Kerry didn't so much fight his way to the finish line as he was carried there on Clinton's coattails.

Last week Kerry demonstrated campaign skills that are very rusty, if they exist at all. Unless he makes big improvements quickly, he is headed for a meltdown. Since he is not given to impulsive primal screams à la Dean, it will not be sudden. Rather, it will draw out like a blade as he compounds one gaffe with another and another...

Math isn't a strong suit, so can someone correct me if those numbers don't indicate that the Senator ran 26% points behind Bill Clinton's margin?

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GIVE ME SECURITY, GIVE THEM DEATH (via Kevin L. Whited):

The Liberty of Others (Carroll Andrew Morse, 03/18/2004, Tech Central Station)

They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security.

-- Benjamin Franklin [...]

The willingness of Spain to abandon the Iraqi people after the Madrid bombings demonstrates the existence of an option for trading liberty for security not anticipated by Franklin. Franklin assumed the existence a dangerous human inclination to sacrifice one's own liberty in pursuit of security. Over the past several decades, however, a different source of liberty that can be traded away has been discovered. The liberty of others has been identified as a tradable commodity. [...]

Alas, the option of destroying the terrorists' ability to wage war is too unsophisticated for the internationalists of Old Europe. By cutting and running from Iraq, the Zapatero government rejects the strategy of destroying of terror networks at their source and joins Old Europe in the search for a solution based upon multilateral agreements and international law. Despite what may be good intentions, Zapatero's withdrawal does not advance the rule of law. No just law requires individuals or nations to stand idly by while hundreds of thousands of people are tortured and murdered. On the contrary, abandoning Iraq and decrying its liberation as a mistake makes mockery of the rule of law.

Spain's March 11-based disengagement from Iraq most closely resembles the option of acceding to the demands of a foreign despot. It is more a bilateral deal with the terror masters than it is a principled stand to defend multilateralism and the rule of law. Here are the terms of the deal: Spain agrees to withdraw material support for operations against state sponsors of terror. Since the state sponsors of terrorism are also brutal dictatorships, Spain also turns its back on extending liberty to places of the world where its presence is lacking. In return for these self-imposed restraints, the Spanish government expects the terror masters to refrain from using their death squads against the people of Spain.

This is the type of deal that Benjamin Franklin warned against -- a trade of liberty for security. The acceptance of the inevitability of terrorism and the refusal to take the battle to the terrorists may well succeed in buying a little short-term security for the people of Spain; they may be spared further attacks while the terror masters seek to establish control of the foreign policy of other nations. Ultimately, in the long term, such arrangements never benefit anyone except terrorists and their leaders. At some point, the despots who give orders to the death squads will make further demands of Spain. And if Spain refuses to comply, the death squads will again be unleashed. There is no promise of security for Spain; there is only a promise of future opportunities to surrender more and more liberty.

Can't be tough on the Euros--after all not every nation commits itself to fighting despotism globally in its founding documents:

WHEN in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.

WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness -- That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.

By its very terms the Declaration recognizes certain regimes to be illegitimate and makes it a duty to topple them.

---

JAMES WEPT:

The Florida Chamber's Big Fish Tale (Paul Jacob, March 21, 2004, Townhall)

Cozying up to Florida legislators, the Florida Chamber of Commerce is agitating to take initiative rights away from Florida voters.

Otherwise, the Chamber warns, disaster is at hand. Those wild and crazy Florida voters will amend their state's constitution with such reckless abandon that businesses will flee, leaving Florida bankrupt. (Ignore all the people and businesses flocking to Florida these days. It spoils the Chamber's story.)

According to the Chamber, Florida voters should be put in their place, voting only for their betters, paying their taxes, keeping quiet.

Never mind hanging chads; the Chamber lobbyists are trying to hang the voters. Their rallying cry might as well be: "Disempower the voters now, before it's too late."

The Chamber of Commerce bemoans that Florida's state constitution has been amended 95 times since 1970.

Is this really appearing in a conservative publication? The initiative is an abomination, an instrument of exactly the kind of direct democracy that the Founders rightly abhorred.

---

BLUE HAIR WOMEN IN RED STATES (via Mike Daley):

Minnesota women blazing a new kind of political trail (Dane Smith, 03/21/2004, Minneapolis Star Tribune)

Whenever Minnesota's top elected officials gather these days, women are well represented -- not a terrible surprise in a state historically known for its liberalism.

What's unexpected is that Minnesota's female political powerhouses are mostly conservative Republicans.

The state's pace-setting Republican women include Lt. Gov. Carol Molnau, Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer, State Auditor Patricia Anderson and Supreme Court Chief Justice Kathleen Blatz. [...]

In the Legislature last year, both of the key sponsors of legislation that allowed more people to get permits to carry guns were Republican women: Sen. Pat Pariseau and Rep. Lynda Boudreau. This year, the lead authors of the bill for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage are again Republican women: Sen. Michele Bachman and Rep. Mary Liz Holberg.

The advances of conservative women extend into the realm of local government, interest groups and public-policy advocacy. Strong players in those fields include: Hennepin County Commissioner Penny Steele, a conservative voice in Minnesota's largest local government; Kersten, of the Center of the American Experiment, who is a frequent contributor to opinion pages and policy journals; Linda Runbeck, a top leader of the Taxpayers League of Minnesota; and Annette Meeks, public affairs director for the Center of the American Experiment and a member of the Metropolitan Council. [...]

Unlike many DFL women who jumped into politics in their 20s or 30s, Republican women tend to have raised their children first and been drawn into community affairs gradually, Molnau said.

"For whatever reason, there are some women driven to do what they think is right; they put in the extra time, they get active, and they are rewarded," Molnau said.

Kiffmeyer is an example of a lifelong party activist who didn't run for public office until she was a grandmother. And she marvels that she and other women managed without much difficulty to achieve statewide office without the quotas imposed by DFLers at almost every level of party organization.

"It's not like we were owed it," Kiffmeyer said. "We felt we had to earn it."

The key to long term dominance of a state's politics is a deep bench like this one.

---

"MORE BANG FROM EXISTING BUCKS":

The Contentious 'No Child' Law II: Money Has Not Been Left Behind (Paul E. Peterson & Martin R. West, 3/17/04, Education Week

"An unfunded mandate," cry the critics of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. In the words of Sen. John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee: "By neglecting his promise to provide the funding necessary to help each student to reach high standards, George W. Bush has made a mockery of the phrase 'leave no child behind.'" Virginia's Republican-dominated legislature recently struck a similar chord, passing (on a vote of 98-1) a resolution complaining that the law will cost "literally millions of dollars that Virginia does not have."

A damning critique, if true. But consider the following:

The No Child Left Behind law is, intrinsically, an inexpensive school reform, a plan to get more bang from existing bucks, not a high-priced mandate. The costs of setting standards, testing students, and releasing results to the general public are trivial, compared to the cost of public schooling more generally.

Two Massachusetts officials, James Peyser and Robert Costrell, report in the current issue of our publication, Education Next, that accountability costs in their state run about $20 per student tested. Looking at 25 states, the Harvard University economist Caroline Hoxby found that the costs of accountability systems in place in the 2000-01 school year ranged from less than $2 per public school student in South Carolina to $34 per student in Delaware. Costs in the median state were just $15 per public school student. Meanwhile, average per-pupil costs in U.S. public schools now run approximately $10,000 a year.

In short, the true costs of the No Child Left Behind Act are no more than 0.2 percent of the total cost of public schooling. Would that all unfunded mandates were so cheap.

But if the mandate is cheap, the new federal bucks are plentiful. Historically, education has been a matter to be funded by state and local governments. But the federal role has been increasing rapidly under the Bush administration. Between 2000 and 2003, the U.S. Department of Education upped its contribution to elementary and secondary education by approximately $300 per pupil, from $23 billion to $36 billion dollars--15 times the cost of accountability.

NCLB is perhaps the worst understood piece of major legislation of recent years. Widely misunderstood to be a classic case of throwing money at a problem, it instead imposes accountability on public schools and provides for vouchers when they fail, which the bill makes nearly inevitable. It's a huge win for conservatives which they whine about endlessly.

---

SADDAM SIGHED, "IF ONLY...":

Meet The Press (NBC, 3/21/04)

NBC'S TIM RUSSERT: "Was John Kerry wrong to vote authorization for war?"

SEN. TED KENNEDY (D-MA): "Look, he has explained his position. If John Kerry had been president of the United States with that vote, we never, I don't believe, gone to war, certainly not at that time. He would have worked through the inspection system. He would have worked through the international kinds of system, and I don't personally believe that we would have gone to war."

---

HMMMMMMM, BUTTER...:

Mysteries of bog butter uncovered: Wax found in Celtic bogs is the remains of ancient meat and milk. (PHILIP BALL, 17 March 2004, Nature)

Those who live in the countryside of Ireland and Scotland and dig up chunks of peat for fuel have long been familiar with bog butter. While gathering the compressed plant matter, which can be burned in fires, diggers occasionally slice into a white substance with the appearance and texture of paraffin wax.

This is thought to be the remains of food once buried in the bog to preserve it. Waterlogged peat is cool and contains very little oxygen, so it can be used as a primitive kind of fridge.

The question is what type of food was buried in the peat. Local lore sometimes says that the waxy stuff is literally the remains of butter. For example, the seventeenth-century English writer Samuel Butler remarked in one of his famous poems that butter in Ireland "was seven years buried in a bog".

But there could be an alternative source for the waxy material: dead animals. In the eighteenth century, French chemists discovered that human corpses often contain adipocere, a substance also known as 'grave-wax'. So bog butter could be the remains of carcasses rather than dairy products.

---

LITTLE SYSTEMS HAVE THEIR DAY:

In Memoriam A. H. H. (Alfred, Lord Tennyson )

Preface

Strong Son of God, immortal Love,
    Whom we, that have not seen thy face,
    By faith, and faith alone, embrace,
Believing where we cannot prove;

Thine are these orbs of light and shade;
    Thou madest Life in man and brute;
    Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot
Is on the skull which thou hast made.

Thou wilt not leave us in the dust:
    Thou madest man, he knows not why,
    He thinks he was not made to die;
And thou hast made him: thou art just.

Thou seemest human and divine,
    The highest, holiest manhood, thou.
    Our wills are ours, we know not how;
Our wills are ours, to make them thine.

Our little systems have their day;
    They have their day and cease to be:
    They are but broken lights of thee,
And thou, O Lord, art more than they.

We have but faith: we cannot know;
    For knowledge is of things we see
    And yet we trust it comes from thee,
A beam in darkness: let it grow.

Let knowledge grow from more to more,
    But more of reverence in us dwell;
    That mind and soul, according well,
May make one music as before,

But vaster. We are fools and slight;
    We mock thee when we do not fear:
    But help thy foolish ones to bear;
Help thy vain worlds to bear thy light.

Forgive what seem'd my sin in me;
    What seem'd my worth since I began;
    For merit lives from man to man,
And not from man, O Lord, to thee.

Forgive my grief for one removed,
    Thy creature, whom I found so fair.
    I trust he lives in thee, and there
I find him worthier to be loved.

Forgive these wild and wandering cries,
    Confusions of a wasted youth;
    Forgive them where they fail in truth,
And in thy wisdom make me wise.

1849.

I

I held it truth, with him who sings
    To one clear harp in divers tones,
    That men may rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things.

But who shall so forecast the years
    And find in loss a gain to match?
    Or reach a hand thro' time to catch
The far-off interest of tears?

Let Love clasp Grief lest both be drown'd,
    Let darkness keep her raven gloss:
    Ah, sweeter to be drunk with loss,
To dance with death, to beat the ground,

Than that the victor Hours should scorn
    The long result of love, and boast,
    `Behold the man that loved and lost,
But all he was is overworn.'

II

Old Yew, which graspest at the stones
    That name the under-lying dead,
    Thy fibres net the dreamless head,
Thy roots are wrapt about the bones.

The seasons bring the flower again,
    And bring the firstling to the flock;
    And in the dusk of thee, the clock
Beats out the little lives of men.

O, not for thee the glow, the bloom,
    Who changest not in any gale,
    Nor branding summer suns avail
To touch thy thousand years of gloom:

And gazing on thee, sullen tree,
    Sick for thy stubborn hardihood,
    I seem to fail from out my blood
And grow incorporate into thee.

III

O Sorrow, cruel fellowship,
    O Priestess in the vaults of Death,
    O sweet and bitter in a breath,
What whispers from thy lying lip?

'The stars,' she whispers, `blindly run;
    A web is wov'n across the sky;
    From out waste places comes a cry,
And murmurs from the dying sun:

'And all the phantom, Nature, stands—
    With all the music in her tone,
    A hollow echo of my own,—
A hollow form with empty hands.'

And shall I take a thing so blind,
    Embrace her as my natural good;
    Or crush her, like a vice of blood,
Upon the threshold of the mind?

IV

To Sleep I give my powers away;
    My will is bondsman to the dark;
    I sit within a helmless bark,
And with my heart I muse and say:

O heart, how fares it with thee now,
    That thou should'st fail from thy desire,
    Who scarcely darest to inquire,
'What is it makes me beat so low?'

Something it is which thou hast lost,
    Some pleasure from thine early years.
    Break, thou deep vase of chilling tears,
That grief hath shaken into frost!

Such clouds of nameless trouble cross
    All night below the darken'd eyes;
    With morning wakes the will, and cries,
'Thou shalt not be the fool of loss.'

V

I sometimes hold it half a sin
    To put in words the grief I feel;
    For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.

But, for the unquiet heart and brain,
    A use in measured language lies;
    The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.

In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er,
    Like coarsest clothes against the cold:
    But that large grief which these enfold
Is given in outline and no more.

VI

One writes, that `Other friends remain,'
    That `Loss is common to the race'—
    And common is the commonplace,
And vacant chaff well meant for grain.

That loss is common would not make
    My own less bitter, rather more:
    Too common! Never morning wore
To evening, but some heart did break.

O father, wheresoe'er thou be,
    Who pledgest now thy gallant son;
    A shot, ere half thy draught be done,
Hath still'd the life that beat from thee.

O mother, praying God will save
    Thy sailor,—while thy head is bow'd,
    His heavy-shotted hammock-shroud
Drops in his vast and wandering grave.

Ye know no more than I who wrought
    At that last hour to please him well;
    Who mused on all I had to tell,
And something written, something thought;

Expecting still his advent home;
    And ever met him on his way
    With wishes, thinking, `here to-day,'
Or `here to-morrow will he come.'

O somewhere, meek, unconscious dove,
    That sittest ranging golden hair;
    And glad to find thyself so fair,
Poor child, that waitest for thy love!

For now her father's chimney glows
    In expectation of a guest;
    And thinking `this will please him best,'
She takes a riband or a rose;

For he will see them on to-night;
    And with the thought her colour burns;
    And, having left the glass, she turns
Once more to set a ringlet right;

And, even when she turn'd, the curse
    Had fallen, and her future Lord
    Was drown'd in passing thro' the ford,
Or kill'd in falling from his horse.

O what to her shall be the end?
    And what to me remains of good?
    To her, perpetual maidenhood,
And unto me no second friend.

VII

Dark house, by which once more I stand
    Here in the long unlovely street,
    Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,

A hand that can be clasp'd no more—
    Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
    And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.

He is not here; but far away
    The noise of life begins again,
    And ghastly thro' the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.

VIII

A happy lover who has come
    To look on her that loves him well,
    Who 'lights and rings the gateway bell,
And learns her gone and far from home;

He saddens, all the magic light
    Dies off at once from bower and hall,
    And all the place is dark, and all
The chambers emptied of delight:

So find I every pleasant spot
    In which we two were wont to meet,
    The field, the chamber, and the street,
For all is dark where thou art not.

Yet as that other, wandering there
    In those deserted walks, may find
    A flower beat with rain and wind,
Which once she foster'd up with care;

So seems it in my deep regret,
    O my forsaken heart, with thee
    And this poor flower of poesy
Which little cared for fades not yet.

But since it pleased a vanish'd eye,
    I go to plant it on his tomb,
    That if it can it there may bloom,
Or, dying, there at least may die.

IX

Fair ship, that from the Italian shore
    Sailest the placid ocean-plains
    With my lost Arthur's loved remains,
Spread thy full wings, and waft him o'er.

So draw him home to those that mourn
    In vain; a favourable speed
    Ruffle thy mirror'd mast, and lead
Thro' prosperous floods his holy urn.

All night no ruder air perplex
    Thy sliding keel, till Phosphor, bright
    As our pure love, thro' early light
Shall glimmer on the dewy decks.

Sphere all your lights around, above;
    Sleep, gentle heavens, before the prow;
    Sleep, gentle winds, as he sleeps now,
My friend, the brother of my love;

My Arthur, whom I shall not see
    Till all my widow'd race be run;
    Dear as the mother to the son,
More than my brothers are to me.

X

I hear the noise about thy keel;
    I hear the bell struck in the night:
    I see the cabin-window bright;
I see the sailor at the wheel.

Thou bring'st the sailor to his wife,
    And travell'd men from foreign lands;
    And letters unto trembling hands;
And, thy dark freight, a vanish'd life.

So bring him; we have idle dreams:
    This look of quiet flatters thus
    Our home-bred fancies. O to us,
The fools of habit, sweeter seems

To rest beneath the clover sod,
    That takes the sunshine and the rains,
    Or where the kneeling hamlet drains
The chalice of the grapes of God;

Than if with thee the roaring wells
    Should gulf him fathom-deep in brine;
    And hands so often clasp'd in mine,
Should toss with tangle and with shells.

---

EVEN A PEUGEOT NEEDS GAS TO RUN THE RACE

Kerry Faced Tight Campaign Finances (Sharon Theimer, AP, 3/21/04)

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry spent nearly as much as he raised last month and had little campaign cash left as March began, according to a report he filed Saturday.

The Massachusetts senator raised $8.4 million and spent nearly $8.3 million in February, beginning this month with $2.4 million in the bank, according to his monthly campaign finance report to the Federal Election Commission.

President Bush, facing no Republican opponent, started March with $160 million raised and $49 million spent. He had $110 million on hand to spend as Kerry emerged from this month's "Super Tuesday" primaries as the Democratic nominee-to-be.

There are about 23 weeks until the Republican Convention in New York City, at which point the President will have to have spent his $110 million, plus whatever additional funds he raises. So, week in and week out, the campaign must spend at least $5 million.

On the other hand, Kerry's campaign must raise every dollar it needs to spend between now and the Democratic convention in July, which might explain another reason for the president's campaign going right to ridicule. Are doners really going to reach deep into their pockets to fund a joke?

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THE ATHEIST BIGOTRY OF LOW EXPECTATIONS (via mc):

An Inspired Strategy: Is Religion a Tonic for Kids? You Better Believe It, Say Teens and Scholars (Laura Sessions Stepp, March 21, 2004, Washington Post)

Late last year, a commission convened by Dartmouth Medical School, among others, studied years of research on kids, including brain-imaging studies, and concluded that young people who are religious are better off in significant ways than their secular peers. They are less likely than nonbelievers to smoke and drink and more likely to eat well; less likely to commit crimes and more likely to wear seat belts; less likely to be depressed and more likely to be satisfied with their families and school.

"Religion has a unique net effect on adolescents above and beyond factors like race, parental education and family income," says Brad Wilcox, a University of Virginia sociologist and panel member. Poor children who are religious will do better than poor children who are not religious, he adds -- and in some cases better than nonreligious middle-class children.

Meanwhile, a social groundswell may be underway, as a larger proportion of teenagers than a decade ago say religion is important. In 2001, about three out of five teenagers said religion was "pretty important" or "very important" to them -- a significant increase, according to Child Trends, a research organization that analyzes federal data. The biggest jump occurred not among poor and unambitious teenagers -- the stereotyped believers -- but among young achievers who anticipated finishing four years of college. [...]

The commission members said that religious congregations benefit teenagers by affirming who they are, expecting a lot from them and giving them opportunities to show what they can do. These are not exactly earthshaking observations; as the panel noted, the same could be said of clubs, sports teams and other youth organizations (such as the YMCA, which helped fund the study). What sets religious groups apart, however -- and makes a surprisingly big difference to kids, according to the panel -- is that they promote a "direct personal relationship with the Divine." [...]

On Sundays you can find Kimbrey [Pierce, a Columbia high school senior,] and 100 or more young people hanging out at Glen Mar United Methodist Church, an Ellicott City congregation that doubled its membership in the 1980s and again in the 1990s and now counts 1,500 active members.

Senior pastor Anders Lunt realized long ago that the way to grow a church was to attract baby boomers and the way to attract boomers was through their kids. The church youth program took off six years ago when its first full-time youth director, D.C. Veale, was hired.

Veale, a bearded, Tolkienesque figure in his early thirties, recruited adults to help him with a struggling group of fewer than 20 regular members. Today he calls on about 30 adult volunteers to lead a youth choir, handbell choir and rock band, a video tech team, plays and scavenger hunts, Bible groups, community service projects and mission trips.

Youths also play major parts in more traditional worship, teaching Sunday school, reading scripture, and three times a year preaching sermons so popular that people squeeze in at the back of the sanctuary and spill out into the front hall.

Lunt has instructed his Howard County congregation that no place is off-limits to the young. When babies cry during a sermon, he has been known to stop mid-sentence to assure parents it's okay.

"I have been in churches where there are no children," the congenial, sandy-haired pastor will say, "and those are awful places."

The corollary, of course, is that in the secularized nations of Europe, people expect nothing of themselves, everything of government, and there are no children--those are increasingly awful places.

---

CAN INDIA BE GREAT WITHOUT A CCC?:

Software of Democracy (THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, 3/21/04, NY Times)

While India has the hardware of democracy — free elections — it still lacks a lot of the software — decent, responsive, transparent local government. While China has none of the hardware of democracy, in the form of free elections, its institutions have been better at building infrastructure and services for China's people and foreign investors.

When I was in Bangalore recently, my hotel room was across the hall from that of a visiting executive of a major U.S. multinational, which operates in India and China, and we used to chat. One day, in a whisper, he said to me that if he compared what China and India had done by way of building infrastructure in the last decade, India lost badly. Bangalore may be India's Silicon Valley, but its airport (finally being replaced) is like a seedy bus station with airplanes.

Few people in India with energy and smarts would think of going into politics. People don't expect or demand much from their representatives and therefore they are not interested in paying them much in taxes, so most local governments are starved of both revenues and talent.

Krishna Prasad, an editor for Outlook magazine and one of the brightest young journalists I met in India, said to me that criminalization and corruption, caste and communal differences have infected Indian politics to such a degree that it attracts all "the wrong kind of people." So India has a virtuous cycle working in economics and a vicious cycle working in politics. "Each time the government tries to put its foot in the door in IT [information technology]," he said, "the IT guys say: `Please stay away. We did this without you. We don't need you now to mess things up.' "

That attitude is not healthy, because you can't have a successful IT industry when every company has to build its own infrastructure. America's greatest competitive advantages are the flexibility of its economy and the quality of its infrastructure, rule of law and regulatory institutions. Knowledge workers are mobile and they like to live in nice, stable places. My hope is that the knowledge workers now spearheading India's economic revolution will feel compelled to spearhead a political revolution.

Ah, yes, infrastructure boondoggles as a sign of national health--one forgets that at the New York Times the New Deal worked. India's problems are significant, but falling behind China in the race to build highways to nowhere is not among them.

---

NEVER MIND:

The Kerry campaign would appear to have gone insane. Tim Russert is doing a number on the Senator's record and who do they have defending him?: Ted Kennedy.

---

BIOGRAPHY FIRST (via Flag of the World):

An Eight-Month Run: Starring John Kerry in "Airplane" and George W. Bush in "The Happy Warrior." (Peggy Noonan, March 11, 2004, Wall Street Journal)

Mr. Kerry has a structural weakness on the stump. It's John Kerry. There he was this week on stage in shirtsleeves, with a handheld mike, riffing along. "I have news for George W. Bush . . ." "George Bush said he would be a uniter, but instead he is a divider . . ." "I used to do Elvis . . ." Raspy, pacing back and forth. He reminded me of someone, but I couldn't place it. The blank intensity, the conviction that what's on his mind is important, though he can't quite remember why . . .

And then I had it. Captain Rex Kramer in "Airplane," played by Robert Stack. At the end of the movie he's alone in the tower at the microphone, talking to an empty plane. "Do you know what it's like to fall in the mud and get kicked in the head with an iron boot? Of course you don't, no one does. It never happens. It's a dumb question. Skip it."

There's the same faintly disturbing aspect to his free associations. Mr. Kerry's voice is like Robert Stack's, the same studied actor's baritone. [...]

Right now the key to Mr. Bush's success in defining both himself and Mr. Kerry is joy. The joy of the battle. And what joyous battlers bring to the proceedings: humor and wit and grace.

The one thing cable TV can't resist, and can't ignore even if it comes from a Republican, is wit. Wit brightens their copy. They love humor and joy. They will use a pithy putdown over and over. That's why Mr. Bush got so much mileage out of even a wan joke about Mr. Kerry having been in Washington long enough to take two sides on every issue.

Mr. President, keep it up but do it better.

Don't make the country mad at John Kerry, make them laugh at John Kerry. And use wit not only for wit's sake but to make political and philosophical points.

This year comedy's a cannon. It's the only thing right now that will break through the media wall.

The other day I was thinking of the White House Correspondents Association Dinner a couple of years ago at which Ozzy Osbourne was the big attraction. He stood up when the president entered the room and gestured to his own long hair. He yelled out something like, "You should grow your hair too." Mr. Bush looked and laughed and shouted, "Second term, Ozzy!" That's the spirit.

A particular danger is lurking in front of Mr. Kerry and whether he stumbles into it or not will tell us something significant about not just what kind of candidate he'll be this year but what kind of president he'd make. The danger is the temptation to respond to Mr. Bush's jibes by going negative. The problem with this is that so few people still know who the Senator is and their first impressions of him would then be of a nobody going after a rather popular president. Mr. Kerry is not a likable man anyway, but introducing himself to the American people in such a fashion would make people really dislike him.

So, the question for the Kerry campaign is: are they realistic enough and is the candidate patient enough to start out with biography? Those of us who have been paying far too much attention are sick by now of hearing about the Senator's service in Vietnam, but perhaps 60% of the citizenry is either unaware that this Kerry guy served or else think he's the Senator Kerrey who dated Debra Winger. They need to find some imaginative ways to generate free media for awhile during which the candidate talks about himself and not politics: the late night talk show rounds, C-SPAN, Regis, the Today Show, Saturday Night Live, etc. But maybe Baseball Opening Day and a couple innings in the TV booth? Maybe an unannounced and relatively low key trip to a NASCAR race? Maybe a trip to Good Friday and Easter services? Maybe even one of those goforsaken bus trips across America? And, in the meantime, they need to be disciplined enough to spend some of the too little cash they have on hand to run those warm and fuzzy ads that make politicians seem like new and improved bathroom tissues. Hardest of all, they need to do all this with George Bush and Karl Rove just carving him up all the while and with the almost psychotically angry Democratic regulars screaming for him to return fire.

It's a tall order, but a good test. (Of course, it's only the second test--the first is retiring from the Senate.)

---

TOO BAD HE'S FRENCH AND HAS NO SENSE OF HUMOR:

Bush brands Kerry a serial tax-raiser, mocks Democrat's claim of foreign support (NANCY BENAC, March 20, 2004, Associated Press)

President Bush used the first rally of his re-election campaign to cast Democrat John Kerry on Saturday as a serial tax-raiser who has voted for tax increases 350 times. He also mocked Kerry's claims of support from undisclosed foreign leaders.

Bush took note of Kerry's proposals to expand health care, education and other domestic programs while still cutting in half the deficit. Kerry, the president, said, has promised more than he can pay for.

"He's going to have to pay for it somehow," Bush told thousands of cheering supporters at the Orange County Convention Center. "It's pretty clear how he's going to fill the tax gap -- he's going to tax all of you. Fortunately, you're not going to give him that chance."

Aides to Kerry, who was vacationing in Idaho... [...]

Bush used his speech to jab at Kerry on two other counts: his vote against an $87 billion aid plan for Iraq and Afghanistan, and his claim that some foreign leaders would prefer to see Kerry win the election.

On the foreign aid, Bush mocked Kerry's awkward explanation that "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it."

Bush read aloud the quote, then declared: "That sure clears things up, doesn't it?"

"His answers aren't always clear but the voters will have a very clear choice in this campaign."

As for Kerry's claim that foreign leaders would prefer a Kerry White House, the president told the crowd, "That's OK, I'm not too worried, because I'm going to keep my campaign right here in America."

As Morton Kondracke noted on Fox News Special Report the other night, Mr. Bush is doing something unique in American politics here: he's making the Senator a target of open ridicule. The campaign's message leap-frogged over negative and went straight to dismissive. Even more daring, it's the President himself taking the lead. The key to this will be to stay relatively light-handed and to avoid outright contempt. If they can do that and treat Mr. Kerry as an object of fun, it will be just devastating.

---

ALL THE WAY FROM POINT A TO POINT A:

After 19 Years in Senate, Kerry of Today Is Far From Kerry of 1985 (KATHARINE Q. SEELYE, 3/20/04, NY Times)

When he first entered the Senate, in 1985, John Kerry was a proponent of a nuclear arms freeze and he joined other liberal Democrats in challenging numerous elements of President Ronald Reagan's military expansion. He called the build-up unnecessary and said some of the weapons systems were useless.

Mr. Reagan's military expansion was subsequently credited for helping hasten the collapse of the Soviet Union. And with the cold war ending, the world was suddenly a different place. The next president, George Bush, also a Republican, and his secretary of defense, Dick Cheney, began drawing down the armed forces and scaling back weapons systems, reaping the benefits of what was referred to as the peace dividend.

Mr. Kerry, like most of his colleagues, went along. But he also occasionally went further than the majority of his party.

In 1994 he proposed some cuts in military programs and intelligence services that even many Democrats rejected. Senator Dennis DeConcini, the Arizona Democrat who then headed the intelligence committee, had said, earlier cuts were "as deep as the intelligence community can withstand during its post-cold-war transition." [...]

More recently, Mr. Bush has ridiculed Mr. Kerry for initially supporting the use of force in Iraq, then campaigning against it.

In the heat of the Democratic primaries this year, after Howard Dean, the antiwar candidate, criticized his vote, Mr. Kerry said that he had merely voted for the president to "threaten" the use of force and that he had believed Mr. Bush would build an international coalition and go to war only as a last resort.

The Bush campaign is also emphasizing Mr. Kerry's subsequent vote against $87 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan and for more equipment for the troops.

Explaining his vote at the time, Mr. Kerry said: "The best way to support our troops and take the target off their backs is with a real strategy to win the peace in Iraq — not by throwing $87 billion at George Bush's failed policies."

He also said he wanted that $87 billion to come from rescinding part of Mr. Bush's tax cut and he voted for an amendment to do that. But it was rejected, so Mr. Kerry voted against the final measure.

In a scathing television commercial, the Bush campaign singles out items from that one vote to suggest that Mr. Kerry voted "no" several times against specific outlays like "funding our soldiers," "body armor for troops in combat" and "higher combat pay." The Bush campaign then remade the commercial and began running it on Thursday to further deride Mr. Kerry. It pointed to his recent explanation that "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it."

Wow, the transformation from opposing Vietnam to opposing the Cold War to opposing the war on terror is really startling, eh?

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WANNA BET HE'S BACK BY MONDAY?:

Some Democrats Say Kerry Must Get Back on the Trail (DAVID M. HALBFINGERand ADAM NAGOURNEY, 3/21/04, NY Times)

[A]s Mr. Kerry disappeared to regroup on the slopes of Sun Valley this weekend, he left Democrats recoiling at the disparity between his campaign in the works and that of the White House, which has devoted six months to preparing for this moment.

As the White House greeted Mr. Kerry's claim on the Democratic nomination with an avalanche of advertisements and attacks, the challenger seemed at least a little spent as he faced the challenges of raising money, building a staff, responding to all of what his aides called the "incoming," and retooling his campaign to appeal to a general election audience.

Après ski, of course.

If nothing else, this vacation indicates the Democrats have written off the South and NASCAR dads.

---

EVER FALLEN IN LOVE WITH SOMEONE YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE FALLEN IN LOVE WITH?:

A Bush Surprise: Fright-Wing Support (WARREN ST. JOHN, 3/21/04, NY Times)

With his mohawk, ratty fatigues, assorted chains and his menagerie of tattoos — swallows on each shoulder, a nautical star on his back and the logo of the Bouncing Souls, a New York City punk band, on his right leg — 22-year-old Nick Rizzuto is the very picture of counterculture alienation. But it's when he talks politics that Mr. Rizzuto sounds like a real radical, for a punk anyway. Mr. Rizzuto is adamantly in favor of lowering taxes and for school vouchers, and against campaign finance laws; his favorite Supreme Court justice is Clarence Thomas; he plans to vote for President Bush in November; and he's hard-core into capitalism.

"Punks will tell me, `Punk and capitalism don't go together,' " Mr. Rizzuto said. "I don't understand where they're coming from. The biggest punk scenes are in capitalist countries like the U.S., Canada and Japan. I haven't heard of any new North Korean punk bands coming out. There's no scene in Iran."

Mr. Rizzuto is the founder of Conservative Punk, one of a handful of Web sites and blogs that have sprung up recently as evidence of a heretofore latent political entity: Republican punks. With names like GOPunk, Anti-Anti-Flag and Punkvoter Lies, the sites are a curious blend of Karl Rove and Johnny Rotten, preaching personal responsibility and reflexive patriotism with the in-your-face zeal of a mosh pit. When he's not banging his head to the Misfits, the Vandals or the Bouncing Souls, for example, Mr. Rizzuto spends his time writing essays denouncing Michael Moore and "left-wing propaganda," and urging other conservative punks to join his cause.

"Punk has been hijacked by an extreme left-wing element," Mr. Rizzuto said. "It's blame America first. Everything is America's fault, and everything is Bush's fault." Mr. Rizzuto said his goal "is rallying conservative punks and getting people to vote."

Alone he keeps the wolves at bay...

---

SEE WHAT WATCHING SOCCER MAKES YOU DO (via Tom Morin):

Dogging Craze Has Brits in Heat (Leander Kahney, Mar. 19, 2004, Wired)

Giving new meaning to the term "flash mob," the British have invented a new sex craze called "dogging" that mixes sex, exhibitionism, mobs and the Internet.

Dogging combines technology with swinging, cruising and voyeurism. To wit: Crowds big and small watch exhibitionist couples who've met on the Net have sex in cars, and sometimes join in.

"Dogging is the broad term used to cover all the sexual outdoor activities that go on," says the dogging FAQ at Melanies UK Swingers, a popular dogging site. "This can be anything from putting on a show from your car, to a gangbang on a picnic table."

Dogging appears to be popular and widespread, attracting heterosexual couples and single men and women of all ages, income brackets and backgrounds. Not surprisingly, however, dogging meets tend to attract more men than women.

Dogging is most often practiced in cars at rural parks, lover's lanes and superstore parking lots. The term dogging has a number of suggested origins, but it probably refers to the "walking the dog" excuse proffered to spouses for an evening's absence.

Dogging sessions are usually organized through the dozens of dogging sites and message boards that have sprung up in the last couple of years. Photos are exchanged and meetings arranged by e-mail or mobile phone text message.

No wonder the Democrats think we still share values with the Europeans...

MEANWHILE, IN WHAT'S LEFT OF THE WEST:
Time, at Last: Stay-at-home moms — DISCOVERED! (Rich Lowry, 3/19/04, National Review)

In a cover story headlined "The Case for Staying Home," [TIME] magazine reports, without sneering or condescension, the trend toward more new mothers leaving the work force. This is an important cultural benchmark, because until now, the media, feminist leaders and other opinion-makers have tended to portray stay-at-home moms as a regrettable throwback to what should be a long-gone era of child-rearing. Now, perhaps, we are ready to honor the full range of choices made by women struggling with how to balance career and family.

The workplace participation of married mothers with a child less than 1 year old has dropped for the first time ever, reversing a 30-year trend. It fell from 59 percent in 1997 to 53 percent in 2000. Women have realized that "having it all" — i.e., leaving their young kids with someone else all day long — is not as wondrously fulfilling as they were led to expect. "Common sense is winning out over the ideologies of the 1960s and 1970s," says family expert Allan Carlson. [...]

The option to stay at home shouldn't be a privilege of the well-credentialed few. Public policy needs to make it easier for families to choose whether to have mom, or dad, stay home, rather than forcing both parents into the work force. High taxes do just that. About half of married couples with children in the mid-1950s paid no federal income tax, thanks to a generous $3,000 personal exemption. If this exemption had kept up with inflation, it would be $10,000 today.

Although the steadily increasing child tax credit (now $1,000 per child) has eased the burden on families, more tax relief will make it still easier for them. Meanwhile, the tax code's dependent-care tax credit, which is only available for parents who go to licensed day-care providers, could be broadened to include parents who provide their own child care. The tax code could make it easier for moms and dads to maintain home offices as they search for creative ways to spend more time with their children while still working.

---

AND COMMUNISM WAS AN ATTEMPT TO EMPOWER THE PROLETARIAT

Too Quiet on the Home Front (David Brooks, New York Times, 3/20/04)

Compassionate conservatism never really had much of a life, but its collapse has had a debilitating effect on the Bush presidency.

Compassionate conservatism started out, remember, as a way to salvage the Republican Party from the wreckage of the Gingrich revolution. Newt Gingrich vowed to slash government, an approach that struck voters as entirely too negative. So Bush rejected "the destructive mind-set that if government would only get out of our way, all our problems would be solved."

Instead, compassionate conservatism was designed as a positive governing philosophy. It would revive responsible citizenship with more community and national service, more parental involvement in schools. Self-governing citizens would have greater incentives to give to charity.

Moreover, compassionate conservatism would get Republicans engaged in normally Democratic issues. The idea was to build trust across party lines and change the tone in Washington.

I've misunderstood any number of political programs. Where's my Times column?

---

HURRY SLOWLY:

Clinton Aides Plan to Tell Panel of Warning Bush Team on Qaeda (PHILIP SHENON, March 20, 2004, NY Times)

Senior Clinton administration officials called to testify next week before the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks say they are prepared to detail how they repeatedly warned their Bush administration counterparts in late 2000 that Al Qaeda posed the worst security threat facing the nation — and how the new administration was slow to act.

They said the warnings were delivered in urgent post-election intelligence briefings in December 2000 and January 2001 for Condoleezza Rice, who became Mr. Bush's national security adviser; Stephen Hadley, now Ms. Rice's deputy; and Philip D. Zelikow, a member of the Bush transition team, among others.

One official scheduled to testify, Richard A. Clarke, who was President Bill Clinton's counterterrorism coordinator, said in an interview that the warning about the Qaeda threat could not have been made more bluntly to the incoming Bush officials in intelligence briefings that he led.

At the time of the briefings, there was extensive evidence tying Al Qaeda to the bombing in Yemen two months earlier of an American warship, the Cole, in which 17 sailors were killed.

Okay, we'll bite: why didn't they do anything about it, since it was still their watch? It can't have been both so urgent that something needed to be done immediately and something that could be put off while a new administration found its sea legs, can it?

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BRING IT ON...THE PLUNGER THAT IS:

Gaffes and Senate Speak: Kerry’s political mistakes have allowed the Bush administration to cast the senator in a negative light—and deflect attention from its deception about the cost of its Medicare plan (Eleanor Clift, March  19, 2004, Newsweek)

This is a critical stage in the campaign. The voters barely know Kerry, and the Bush campaign is racing to define him in a negative way before he can define himself. A 30-second ad calling Kerry “wrong on defense” began airing this week. An earlier ad claimed Kerry would raise taxes by $900 billion. The Associated Press reported that Karl Rove—Bush’s campaign Svengali—boasted to a group of conservative activists meeting in Washington, “This is just a taste of what we’re going to give him.” 

Kerry knew this was coming. “Bring it on,” he said so often it became his battle cry. Well, now they’ve brought it on, and what is Kerry doing? He’s going on vacation in Idaho, leaving behind the festering story of his unholy bond with foreign leaders. “Before long they’ll be calling him Jacques Kerry,” says a Republican strategist. “It’s only a matter of time.”

The cable networks also had a grand time airing over and over Kerry’s response to the Bush attack that he didn’t support the troops in Iraq because he voted against the $87 billion the administration requested to reconstruction. “I actually did vote for the $87 billion, before I voted against it,” Kerry said. That’s Senate-speak, and Kerry better shed it if he wants to win the election. Voters can’t grasp the contortions of casting a preliminary vote conditioned on an amendment that would have paid for the war with Bush’s tax cut, however high-minded that might have been.

If the election is fought on national security, Bush has the edge. Even if events on the ground in Iraq are not going well, Republicans enjoy a 20-point advantage over Democrats when it comes to keeping the country safe. Kerry thinks his strong suit is foreign policy. But the Bush campaign is ready to pounce on any misstep. “I just want to shake [Kerry,]” says a Democratic Senate aide. “[He’s] got to be disciplined.”

One can almost feel sorry for Democrats who succumbed to a February fever dream that they could beat George Bush with an unlikable, liberal, sitting Senator. But, if they want to shake him now, they're going to want to Abner Louima him by this Summer.

---

GET ON WITH YOUR LIVES ALREADY:

By any means necessary: It is not simply Israel's current hardline government that is to blame for the subjugation of Palestinians, but Zionism itself (Ghada Karmi, March 18, 2004, The Guardian)

For those who have forgotten or never understood what Zionism meant in practice, the Israeli historian, Benny Morris's latest revelations and comments - published first in the Israeli daily Haaretz and then in the Guardian - make salutary reading. They have raised a storm of controversy that is still raging two months later, perhaps because they were too honest about an ideology that some would rather keep hidden. Morris, who first exposed the dark circumstances of Israel's creation in his groundbreaking 1988 book on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem, explains the Israeli project with a brutal candour few Zionists have been prepared to display. [...]

"The right of [Palestinian] refugees to return ... seems natural and just," Morris says. "But this 'right of return' needs to be weighed against the right to life and wellbeing of the 5 million Jews who currently live in Israel." Apparently, Jewish self-determination is an imperative that supersedes the rights of the people at whose expense it was promulgated.

And in this he encapsulates the essence of Zionism. Though creating Israel entailed Palestinian suffering, Morris argues, it was for a noble aim. That is why Zionism is still a dangerous idea: at its root is a conviction of moral rightness that justifies almost any act deemed necessary to preserve the Jewish state. If that means massive military - including nuclear - force, unsavoury alliances, theft of others' resources, aggression and occupation, the brutal crushing of all resistance - then so be it. No one should be under any illusion that Zionism is a spent force, regardless of current discourse about "post-Zionism". That a benign Zionism, sympathetic to Palestinians, also exists means little while these basic tenets remain.

We must thank Morris for disabusing us of such notions. But a project that is morally one-sided and can only survive through force and xenophobia has no long-term future. As he himself says: "Destruction could be the end of this process."

How does Ms Karmi think the world works? The Indians have an equally just case for reclaiming America--think we're going to let them? Okay, what wouldn't we be prepared to do to them if they used Palestinian methods to try?

---

HERBERT WHO?:

The Fog Of History Strikes Again CBBS News, 3/19/04)

Unemployment and outsourcing are big issues in Campaign 2004, but Democrats hoping to make political hay out of them might want to be a bit more original than Democrats of yesteryear.

They've traditionally been fond of pointing to the Republican Party as the party of Herbert Hoover, on whose watch the nation sunk into the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Hoover has in fact been mentioned repeatedly by the John Kerry campaign as the last president until George W. Bush to oversee a loss of jobs. But a national poll finds that most people don't connect the Hoover name with the presidency, the Depression (whose camps of suddenly homeless individuals were known as "Hoovervilles") or the 1929 stock market crash.

Just 43 percent of the 634 adults questioned by the University of Pennsylvania's National Annenberg Election Survey correctly identified Herbert Hoover. Twelve percent thought he was the director of the FBI, a post held for 48 years by J. Edgar Hoover. Four percent linked the name to the Hoover Dam, the Nevada-Arizona structure honoring the former president. Three percent thought Hoover had something to do with the vacuum cleaner invented in 1907 (by Ohio janitor James Spangler, whose cousin William H. Hoover became president of his company). [...]

The nation's touch of amnesia when it comes to history cuts both ways - politically, that is. [...]

Pollsters discovered that only one out of five people connected [Jane] Fonda - a two-time Oscar winner who continues to be politically active, although less controversially in recent years - with opposition to the Vietnam War.

Only 20 percent of those surveyed knew Fonda as a Vietnam War protester. Twice that many identified Fonda as an actress, 9 percent tied her to exercise videos, and 2 percent linked her name to either her father, the late Oscar-winning actor Henry Fonda, or to her ex-husband, maverick media mogul Ted Turner. Another 11 percent gave a variety of answers while 17 percent had no answer at all.

Come to think of it, when was the last time Ms Fonda was in a movie?

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TEMPORAL PROVINCIALISM (via Matt Crawford):

Imagining the Future (Yuval Levin, Winter 2004, The New Atlantis)

Put simply, those who imagine the future in terms of innovation tend to think of the future as something that will happen to us, and so as something to be judged and understood in terms of the interests of the free, rational, individual adult now living. That person is the basic unit of measurement in all of the theories of social life that inform the anthropology of innovation: the freely choosing individual of classic liberal democratic theory; the rational actor of free market capitalism; the consenting adult of libertarian cultural theories. All of these models and theories serve us well because enough of us do more or less answer that description much of the time.

But the future is populated by other people—people not yet born, who must enter the world and be initiated into the ways of our society, so that they might someday become rational consenting adults themselves. Strangely, what is missing from the view of the future grounded in innovation is the element of time, or at least its human consequent: the passing of generations. What is missing is the child—the actual bearer of the future of humanity—and the peculiar demands, conditions, and possibilities that the presence of children introduces into the life of our society and its future.

In part, children are absent from this vision of the future because the vocabulary of classical liberal and libertarian thinking leaves little room for them. The thought-experiment that is liberalism’s creation myth—that famous state of nature from which free and equal men enter together into society and government for the protection of their rights—holds out a timeless ideal. Government is legitimate because free individuals created it by choice and live under its rules in accordance with a kind of contract. But only the founding generation of any society can claim to have done that. The generations that follow did not freely create their regime. They were born into it, literally kicking and screaming. They enter a world formed by laws, arrangements, and institutions that were established by others, but which they have no real choice but to accept. They are also incapable, for about the first two decades of their lives, of fully exercising the rights of citizens. And yet every decision made by their society will directly affect them and those who will follow them. So by the logic of the theory, how can we take into account the needs and rights of future citizens who are not there to consent? How can we keep from treating them unjustly?

Liberal theorists have not been blind to this difficulty of course; and more importantly, like many things that occupy political philosophers, these concerns are really far more of a problem in theory than in practice. The theorists come up with complicated notions of implicit consent and implied participation, while in actual societies liberalism is suspended in the family, and parents are trusted to look out for the interests of their children.

Nonetheless, it matters that the theory of liberal society and the anthropology of innovation have serious trouble with children and with future generations. Our theories do shape our ideals and our actions, and affect our sense of what is legitimate and what is desirable.

The most common answer to the liberal difficulty with the child is to treat children as the charge and almost as the property of parents, and so to apply the language of rights to them second hand. This often makes good sense, but it also has the effect of subsuming the interests of the child within those of the parents, so that in principle our picture of the world can still consist purely of rational adults and their needs and wants. That way, we can continue to imagine the future without considering the distinctive challenges (and the peculiar promise and hope) that result from the presence of children in society.

But the absence of children in this vision of the future results from more than a gap in a theory. Even more important is the very practical way in which children pose a hindrance to any vision of progress. Regardless of how much intellectual and material progress any society may make, every new child entering that society will still enter with essentially the same native intellectual and material equipment as any other child born in any other place at any other time in the history of the human race. Raising such children to the level of their society is, to put it mildly, a distraction from the forward path. And a failure to initiate the next generation of children into the ways of civilization would not only delay or derail innovation, it would put into question the very continuity of that civilization.

The constant intrusion of children into our world reminds us that even as we blaze a trail into the new and unknown we are always at risk of reverting very far back into humanity’s barbarous origins, because we are always confronted with new human beings who have just come from there. We are, in a limited sense, always starting from scratch, and this means that we need more than innovation to secure and to better our future.

The anthropology of innovation would like to avoid or avert this complicated reality. It does so mostly by ignoring it, but at the edges of the party of innovation, we see genuine efforts to ward off the challenge of the child. In the “transhumanist” desire for eternal life is a desire to think of the future as belonging to us, and not to future generations. It is a desire to start not from scratch, but from individual, rational, freely choosing adults, and to progress only from there.

Indeed, it may be that in its fullness, this innovation-driven vision of the future almost has to exclude children. William Godwin, the eighteenth-century futurist and prophet of innovations of the human intellect, offers a sense of why that should be. In his future, free of “disease, anguish, melancholy [and] resentment,” when people might live nearly forever, progress would almost depend on the absence of children. “The whole will be a people of men, and not of children,” Godwin writes of his utopian ideal, “generation will not succeed generation, nor truth have, in a certain degree, to recommence her career every thirty years.”

This may be the only way in which the anthropology of innovation could be sufficient in itself as a vision of the future. But the fact that truth has, “in a certain degree, to recommence her career every thirty years,” or in other words that children enter the world knowing nothing of it, is a defining feature of the life of every human society. Children do not start where their parents left off. They start where their parents started, and where every human being has started, and society must meet them there, and rear them forward. That we are all born this way has everything to do with how the future happens.

Hannah Arendt, borrowing a term from the demographers, labeled this inescapable fact of life human “natality,” the counterpart of human mortality. A vision of the future that takes note of our natality will go about imagining in a profoundly different way.

The Anthropology of Generations

To imagine the future in terms of generations means, most fundamentally, to be concerned for continuity. The means of human biological continuity do not offer guarantees of human cultural continuity, because (at least for the time being) the intellectual and cultural progress we might make leaves no real mark on the biology of our descendents. They enter the world as we did, and as all human beings have before us: small, wrinkled, wet, screaming, helpless, and ignorant of just about everything. At this very moment, dozens of people are entering the world in just that condition—about 15,000 worldwide make their entrance every hour—and the future of the human race depends upon them. Contending with this constant onslaught and initiating these newcomers into the ways of our world is the never-ending and momentous challenge that always confronts every society.

At stake are both the achievements of the past and—most especially—the possibilities of the future. If the task of initiation and continuation fails in just one generation, then the chain is broken, the accomplishments of our past are lost and forgotten, and the potential for meaningful progress is forsaken. The barbarism of savage human nature, more than the prospect of a final human victory over natural limitations, is in this sense always just around the corner.

Indeed, what stands out about the anthropology of generations is not so much a desire to protect children from the dangers of the world—a desire shared by nearly everyone—but rather the related determination to protect the world from the dangerous consequences of failing to instruct the up-and-coming generation.

It's interesting that the Hawthorne story that Leon Kass had the Bioethics Commission read was The Birthmark, but the problem that Mr. Levin raises is actually treated in another of his stories, Earth's Holocaust.

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THE SECOND BATTLE OF THE 2008 PRIMARY (WHO GETS RALPH?):

Second Coming: Ralph Reed, now born again as a political strategist, has moved on from doing God's work to doing George W. Bush's (Joshua Green, April 2004, Atlantic Monthly)

ew figures in American politics seem more fixed in time and place than Ralph Reed. As the brash, boyish director of the Christian Coalition a decade ago, Reed personified the ascendant religious right: he was an articulate, media-savvy spokesman who put to rest the predominant stereotype of religious conservatives as fiery televangelists, and led them into the modern political era. An organizational genius, Reed transformed the remnants of Pat Robertson's failed 1988 presidential campaign into a potent political force, more than a million strong at its peak. The Christian Coalition was instrumental in shaping the Republican Party of the 1990s, and helped Newt Gingrich bring off the Republican revolution of 1994. For a time Reed appeared likely to be the power behind the curtain for years to come. In 1995 Time seemed only mildly hyperbolic when it extolled him on the cover as "the right hand of God."

The following year, however, the Republican Party of Gingrich and Reed seemed to expire after Bob Dole's defeat by Bill Clinton. Reed's aggressive style of conservatism alienated moderate voters. He left the Christian Coalition in 1997, just as its influence began to wane, and largely disappeared from the public eye.

But he did not abandon politics. Reed returned to Georgia, where he had been raised, and began anew as a secular political consultant. The return home could not have provided much professional solace: the governor's mansion was in the hands of a popular Democrat, and by 2000 both the state's Senate seats, too, were held by Democrats. The consulting firm that Reed founded, Century Strategies, had an inauspicious start when most of its clients, including Alabama Governor Fob James, lost their 1998 races. Nevertheless, over the next four years Reed helped do for the Georgia Republican Party something much like what he'd done for the Coalition—organizing and rebuilding it from the ground up. He was elected state party chairman in 2001, and in 2002 the Georgia Republicans won a historic upset. Sonny Perdue became the first Republican in thirty-nine gubernatorial elections to win, and a Republican congressman, Saxby Chambliss, defeated the Democratic senator Max Cleland. Georgia's other senator, Zell Miller, is a Democrat in name only, who has already endorsed George W. Bush—so in practical terms Georgia was fully Republican. "What happened in Georgia in 2002 was a once-in-a-decade performance," says the political analyst Charlie Cook.

Even if it had many causes (not least the tremendous appeal of the President, whose visits in behalf of Republican candidates Reed leveraged to maximum effect), this startling success testified to Reed's enduring skill as a political strategist. The Georgia resurgence went a long way toward detoxifying his image, proving that he could succeed outside the context of a politics whose very nature was implicitly rejected by his party's embrace of "compassionate" conservatism. The Bush Administration has acknowledged Reed's achievement by putting him in charge of the Southeast for the upcoming re-election campaign—recognition that confers high standing in the current Republican hierarchy. Beneath that very practical tribute lies a greater honor, and a challenge. Because most southeastern states are reliably Republican, Reed's true responsibility is to reprise his Georgia performance in the state that analysts of both parties believe could once again determine the next President: Florida.

Of course, the GOP has held the House since 1994 and, except for the Jeffords blip, the Senate as well. So, Mr. Reed's moment in time has lasted a decade so far.

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THANK U FALLETME B MASELF AGIN:

Grateful Kurds in Iraq's north embrace Americans and their culture (Mariam Fam, 3/20/04, Associated Press)

At MaDonal, a restaurant with a familiar name, diners munch cheeseburgers and fries. U.S. troops open cans of Diet Coke. An American flag flies next to the sign that bears the internationally recognized trademark yellow M.

The scene reflects a fact of life in Iraq's north: Many Kurds are fascinated with the culture of the superpower that freed an oppressed people from brutal persecution by the ousted dictator.

''The people like the Americans,'' said Dana Mohammed, who works at MaDonal, named after McDonald's. ''They helped us get rid of the dictator, Saddam Hussein.''

In Saddam's Iraq, the United States was demonized and largely blamed for the country's woes. In the new Iraq, the U.S. presence gets mixed reviews at best. Many Arab Sunnis resent an occupation that has cost them their privileged status. Some majority Shiites, while grateful for the ouster of the dictator, think the Americans have overstayed their welcome.

In some moderate Middle Eastern countries where U.S. culture is popular, American restaurants and products are often threatened with boycotts. The U.S. flag is often burned by angry demonstrators.

But the situation in northern Iraq is different.

Many Kurds ethnically distinct from Arabs have no qualms about expressing their support for the United States.

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REVISIONISM?:

Civil War Still Haunts Spanish Politics (ANTONIO FEROS, 3/20/04, NY Times)

That the civil war should remain a searing political reference point more than 25 years after democracy was established is not as odd as may at first seem. Some of Spain's main political parties, including the Socialist, the Communist and some nationalist parties, played substantial roles before and during the civil war, and analysts believe that their ideologies, tactics and goals have not changed substantially since then.

The Popular Party did not exist during the civil war, but it was originally founded in the late 1970's by Manuel Fraga Iribarne, a minister of Francisco Franco during the 1960's; and on occasion it has been regarded as the offspring of Francoist ideology and tactics. Therefore, to understand the real intentions of each political party, the argument goes, one must look at what happened before and during the civil war.

Yet just what happened during that period — when 300,000 people died in action, 400,000 were forced into exile and another 400,000 were imprisoned by Francoists during and after the war — has become the subject of increasingly bitter dispute.

Pío Moa, a journalist and historian, is probably the best known of the recent crop of revisionists. His several books on the Republic (1931-1936) and the civil war have been enormously popular. "Los Mitos de la Guerra Civil" ("The Myths of the Civil War"), published last year, sold more than 100,000 copies in a few months. In it Mr. Moa systematically questions the main thesis accepted by a majority of Spanish historians: that Franco overthrew the democratically elected government. In the words of Stanley Payne, a historian at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Mr. Moa disputes "the notion that leftist politics under the Republic were inherently democratic and constitutionalist and the idea that the civil war was the product of a long-standing conspiracy by wealthy reactionaries rather than a desperate response to stop a revolutionary process that had largely destroyed constitutional government."

In addition, Mr. Moa maintains that Franco's victory saved Spain from the trauma of revolution and territorial fragmentation, and that his regime — supported by a majority of Spaniards — helped modernize Spain and provided the conditions on which to build today's democratic system.

Isn't that obvious?

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THE WHALE IS WAY BIGGER THAN CAPTAIN BUCHANAN DREAMS (via Paul Cella):

Buchanan's White Whale (Lawrence Auster, March 19, 2004, FrontPageMagazine.com)

In these intensely polarized and paranoid times, more than a few people are like the obsessed Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, of whom Melville wrote, in one of the supreme passages of American literature: "The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung.... All that most maddens and torments; ... all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it."

Today, of course, we don't have whale hunters from Nantucket circumnavigating the globe, but we do have politics—an increasingly ugly, ideological politics in a country that seems to be splitting apart before our eyes. Unsurprisingly, we also have among us, on the both the left and the right, Ahab-style monomaniacs who throw away their reason and blame everything that has gone wrong in the world on a single, all-controlling, evil cause. Such fanatics tend to wrap every issue around the object of their particular rage, coming back again and again to the same complaint, the same burning grievance, the same satisfying theory that explains all of society's problems as stemming from the group they oppose.

For Patrick Buchanan, that White Whale is, of course, Israel, along with Israel's purported agents in America, the neoconservatives. As a sign of his obsession, at the very moment when America and its Coalition partners were launching the war against Iraq last year, and most Americans were focused on how to win this tremendous battle, Buchanan published a long diatribe in The American Conservative called "Whose War?", in which he charged that President Bush was in thrall to "the neoconservatives' agenda of endless wars on the Islamic world that serve only [emphasis added] the interests of a country other than the one he was elected to preserve and protect."

"We charge that a cabal of polemicists and public officials seek to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America's interests. We charge them with colluding with Israel to ignite those wars and destroy the Oslo Accords. [Note how according to Buchanan, it is Israelis and American neoconservatives, not Palestinian terrorists, who destroyed the 'peace process.'] We charge them with deliberately damaging U.S. relations with every state in the Arab world that defies Israel or supports the Palestinian people's right to a homeland of their own. We charge that they have alienated friends and allies all over the Islamic and Western world through their arrogance, hubris, and bellicosity."

These charges of massive deception and at least quasi-treason are repeated in Buchanan's recent cover article in The American Conservative, in which he offers a critique of Richard Perle and David Frum's book, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror. To be fair, the piece doesn't immediately come across as simply an anti-neocon screed. Buchanan starts out with some reasonable-sounding criticisms of what appear to him as the excesses of the book, in which Frum and Perle seem to propose a global war by the United States against all terrorists, everywhere, on behalf of all possible targets of terrorism, everywhere. At the very least, Perle and Frum should be censured for the book's overwrought title; the notion of "an end to evil" is as dangerously divorced from reality as Woodrow Wilson's "war to end all wars." Buchanan is especially put off by Perle's statement that "a radical strain within Islam ... seeks to overthrow our civilization and remake the nations of the West into Islamic societies, imposing on the whole world its religion and laws." Buchanan counters that Islamism does not present any particular danger to America, or at least not anything we need to worry about, and he advances several arguments to support this idea.

The most important thing for us to realize--though the paleocons, like the libertarians and the Left, seem incapable of grasping it--is that it is George W. Bush who has captured the neocons, not vice versa. After all--assuming we accept the idea, for the sake of argument if nothing else, that neoconservatism is to some considerable degree driven by Zionism--what conceivable Israeli interest is served by establishing a strong and vibrant Shi'ite republic in Iraq; or liberalizing Libya; or brokering peace between India and Pakistan; or confronting North Korea; or bringing democracy to Haiti; etc.; etc.; etc... In fact, the deeply ironic dynamic between George W. Bush and the neocons is that where they may be perceived as merely Zionist, his vision is truly Jewish.

MORE:
The Evangelical Roots of American Unilateralism: The Christian Right's Influence and How to Counter It (Duane Oldfield, March 2004 , Foreign Policy In Focus)

That the administration of George W. Bush is pursuing a unilateralist foreign policy on issues ranging from the Iraq War to global warming to the International Criminal Court is obvious to observers at home and abroad. Also clear is the fact that the Bush policy, at least in its broad outlines, is very much in keeping with the preferences of the Christian right. As the second two quotes above indicate, the president, himself a born-again Christian, does not hesitate to use a moralistic, implicitly religious language in defense of his policies. [...]

Although the Christian right's unilateralism is not new, its proximity to power is. Three developments have helped make the Christian right a significant player in U.S. foreign policy: the election of a president with close ties to the movement, the growth of the Christian right's grassroots organizational strength, and the development of an alliance with neoconservatives, who have come to play a crucial role in the present administration.

The Christian right played a supporting role in the Reagan administration's war on Central America, particularly in funneling aid to the Nicaraguan contras (Diamond, 1989, chaps. 5 and 6). However, its activism in the 1980s was primarily on the domestic front. The administrations of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton provided few opportunities for Christian right influence, at least at the presidential level. A committed multilateralist, Bush Sr. set off alarm bells in the Christian right with his talk of a “new world order.” For many elements of the Christian right, that phrase tapped into a long history of right-wing demonology, symbolizing a world government--perhaps Satanically inspired--threatening American sovereignty. And antagonism toward Bill Clinton was even stronger. Demonized by a Christian right that vigorously fought to have him impeached, Clinton had little incentive to grant its leaders access to foreign policy decisionmaking.

The disputed election of George W. Bush provided the Christian right with a far more sympathetic president. Bush's personal history helps cement his ties to the movement. Although his father was clearly uncomfortable with the movement's style of mixing religion and politics, the current president, saved from the sin of alcoholism by his own born-again experience, has long understood the nuances of the Christian right's religious constituency and speaks its language. Recognizing this back in 1988, Bush Sr. gave his son the task of reaching out to that constituency for him in his presidential campaign. Campaign aide Doug Wead worked with George W. Bush as part of an effective effort to woo evangelical leaders. George W. Bush's White House reflects its occupant's comfort with evangelicalism. The first words heard by Bush speechwriter David Frum when he arrived at the White House were “missed you at Bible study” (see Frum).

The personal inclinations of the current president are reenforced by the development of the Christian right's grassroots electoral capabilities. Prior to Pat Robertson's 1988 presidential campaign, the Christian right had very limited experience with precinct organizing. Robertson's nomination campaign failed in its immediate objective, but it laid the groundwork for the emergence of the Christian Coalition. That coalition's grassroots network, in turn, played a significant role in the Republican congressional victories of 1994. In the run-ups to the 1996 and 2000 campaigns, the Christian Coalition's annual convention became a required stop for GOP presidential aspirants. Early on, George W. Bush hired former Christian Coalition Director Ralph Reed as a consultant for his nomination campaign. After Bush lost the New Hampshire primary, strong support from the Christian Right, especially in South Carolina, helped him beat back a serious challenge from Senator John McCain.

With the Christian right now a central part of the Republican electoral coalition, presidents of that party must take the constituency's concerns into account. And the change goes even deeper than that. When Christian right activists entered party politics during the Robertson campaign in the late 1980s, the distinction between these activists and established Republicans was clear. For many party regulars, the Robertson activists were alien interlopers who had somehow descended on the party. In the words of the president's brother Neil Bush, they were “cockroaches” issuing “from the baseboards of the Bible-belt.” Though tension between the Christian right and other party factions continues, the Christian Right is now an established component, and in some areas even a dominant feature, of the party coalition. John Green provides an insightful analysis of the evolution of the “collective identity” of the Christian right: from sectarian religious identities in the early 1980s to a pro-family identity that helped unite Christian right members across religious lines to the current era of “evangelical Republicans,” in which partisanship is central to movement identity. Ralph Reed, former executive director of the Christian Coalition and now chair of the Georgia Republican Party, exemplifies this trend. As Christian rightists become party activists, Christian right organizations may suffer, as the Christian Coalition has since Reed's departure, but their influence within the party grows. In a Republican Party dominated by conservative Southerners such as George W. Bush, Tom Delay, and Dick Armey, Christian right activists are no longer interlopers; they are insiders.

Finally, the Christian right's access to power has been greatly aided by the ties it has developed with neoconservatives influential within the present administration. Neoconservative intellectuals, many of them Jewish, may seem unlikely allies for the Christian right, but this partnership has developed across several issue areas. The most important basis for this partnership is a common support for Israel or, to put it more accurately, for the Likud Party's vision of Israel's interests. The Christian right's support for Israel harks back to the movement's beginnings in the late 1970s, but it has risen to a higher level in the last few years. The 2002 annual convention of the Christian Coalition culminated in a rally for Israel, and Ralph Reed and Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein recently founded a new group, Stand for Israel. Meanwhile, throughout Christian right media, criticism of the Palestinians and support for hard-line Israeli policies has grown more intense.

The Christian right's support for Israel is closely interrelated with prophetic concerns discussed earlier in this essay. In the words of Christian right author John Hagee: “Israel is the only nation created by a sovereign act of God, and He has sworn by His holiness to defend Jerusalem, His Holy City. If God created and defends Israel, those nations that fight against it fight against God.” At a recent Christian Coalition gathering, a speaker even suggested that the September 11th attacks were God's punishment for America's insufficient support of Israel (Arab News, 2003).

Links with neoconservatives have also been forged around the issue of religious persecution. Michael Horowitz, a neoconservative senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, and Nina Shea of the Puebla Institute, were instrumental in mobilizing evangelicals around the issue of religious persecution. Elliott Abrams, then head of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, wrote extensively supporting the cause and, along with Nina Shea, was later appointed to the commission created by the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, eventually serving as its chair. Abrams has moved on to human rights and Middle East policy positions at the National Security Council.

In 1997, when the Project for the New American Century was born, it united conservative leaders around a call for a much more aggressive U.S. foreign policy (including forceful action against Iraq's Saddam Hussein). The group's Statement of Principles declared: “Such a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today. But it is necessary if the United States is to build on the successes of this past century and to ensure our security and greatness in the next.” Among the 25 signatories were leading neoconservatives and future players in the Bush administration including Elliott Abrams, Dick Cheney, Frank Gaffney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz. Also on the list were Gary Bauer, long-time head of the Family Research Council, and author William Bennett.

A sympathetic president, grassroots electoral strength, and ties to influential neoconservatives have given the Christian right influence in American foreign policy, providing support for a militant unilateralism and unwavering backing for Israel . The Christian right has been rewarded with appointments on delegations to UN conferences and supportive administration action on its international social agenda (see Butler), and it has been heartened by the president's use of religious language to justify his policies. The religious right does not dominate foreign policymaking in the current administration; for example, it lacks key posts at the State and Defense departments. However, the Christian right has provided powerful grassroots support for the unilateralist forces that currently dominate American foreign policy.

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DO THE EDITORS AT THE TIMES READ ITS NEWS PAGES?:

Hussein's Fall Leads Syrians to Test Government Limits (NEIL MacFARQUHAR, 3/20/04, NY Times)

A year ago, it would have been inconceivable for a citizen of Syria, run by the Baath Party of President Bashar al-Assad, to make a documentary film with the working title, "Fifteen Reasons Why I Hate the Baath."

Yet watching the overthrow of Saddam Hussein across the border in Iraq prompted Omar Amiralay to do just that. "It gave me the courage to do it," he said.

"When you see one of the two Baath parties broken, collapsing, you can only hope that it will be the turn of the Syrian Baath next," he added, having just completed the film, eventually called "A Flood in Baath Country," for a European arts channel. "The myth of having to live under despots for eternity collapsed."

When the Bush administration toppled the Baghdad government, it announced that it wanted to establish a democratic, free-market Iraq that would prove a contagious model for the region. The bloodshed there makes that a distant prospect, yet the very act of humiliating the worst Arab tyrant spawned a sort of "what if" process in Syria and across the region.

The Syrian Baath Party remains firmly in control, ruling through emergency laws that basically suspend all civil rights. The government says the laws are necessary as long as Israel occupies the Golan Heights, 40 miles from Damascus, and the two nations remain at war.

Yet subtle changes have begun, even if they amount to tiny fissures in a repressive state. Some Syrians are testing the limits, openly questioning government doctrine and challenging state oppression.

Syrians who oppose the government do so with some trepidation because it used ferocious violence in the past to silence any challenge. Yet the fall of Mr. Hussein changed something inside people.

"I think the image, the sense of terror, has evaporated," said Mr. Amiralay, the filmmaker.

This was precisely the premise of the Iraq war, an Islamic domino theory, if you will. It's interesting to note that Mr. Amiralay understands that the transformation is internal to the people of the region, who now see how hollow was the regime. President Bush would seem to have been just about the only political leader who understood that this would be the case, an understanding he shared with only a few neocon academics (like, most importantly, Paul Wolfowitz). The establishment believed that the Islamic world was impervious to liberalization, maybe even unfit for evolution towards democracy.

The situation calls to mind what Robert Kaplan wrote about Ronald Reagan, tongue deeply in cheek:

In perceiving the Soviet Union as permanent, orderly, and legitimate, [Henry] Kissinger shared a failure of analysis with the rest of the foreign-policy elite--notably excepting the scholar and former head of the State Department's policy-planning staff George Kennan, the Harvard historian Richard Pipes, the British scholar and journalist Bernard Levin, and the Eureka College graduate Ronald Reagan.

Missing from that list is only Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose 1975 assessment of the USSR--at the time when all but these few viewed it as permanent--applies just as well to the totalitarian regimes of the Islamic world:

Yes, yes, of course, we all know you cannot poke a stick through the walls of a concrete tower, but here's something to think about: what if the walls are only a painted backdrop?

In the Middle East today, thanks to George W. Bush, people have perceived that the walls surrounding them are merely a painted backdrop.

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NECESSARY EVIL:

The evil that men do:
Theodore Dalrymple can find no better explanation for man’s wicked behaviour than the doctrine of Original Sin (Theodore Dalrymple, 3/20/04, The Spectator)

For personal reasons that it would be tedious to explain, my entire adult life, at least in its professional aspect, has been a search for the source of man’s evil. Besides this question, all other questions — at least those pertaining to mankind — seem to me almost trivial. But I cannot say that I have answered the question to my own satisfaction, let alone to anyone else’s. I am still mystified.

I do not mean that all men are evil; far from it. Most men are not, or at least not habitually. But all men are capable of evil. Evil is always lurking in the lair of man’s heart, including my own, awaiting its chance to pounce; and if man were a computer, which of course some believe that he is, I believe that his default setting, as it were, would be to evil rather than to good. [...]

The best way of understanding evil is by way of metaphor, the metaphor of Original Sin. I do not think that Adam actually existed as a historical figure, of course; yet the idea that death and sin came ineradicably into the world (ineradicable, that is, by man himself) with Adam’s first disobedience, the eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, is a metaphorically realistic account of the human condition — far more realistic, and hardly less conjectural, than any other that is supposedly more scientific. It explains why technical progress is not moral progress, and why utopian dreams are bound to fail. Imperfect beings cannot bring about perfection. [...]

Original Sin accounts for the manifest imperfectibility of man. No social arrangements, however civilised or compassionate, will ever result in the elimination of man’s desire to do evil: the best that can be hoped for is that they will limit the scope of its expression. There is, for example, so much domestic evil in this country for two reasons: because there is nothing to discourage it and because there is so little room for evil, at least of the cruder sort, in the public sphere. This is not to say that one day the opportunity to commit evil in a larger, public theatre and on a vastly larger scale will not arise; indeed I think it very likely that one day it will. Goodness is fragile because it requires self-restraint, but evil is strong because it requires self-expression.

You could say that modern Darwinism has a concept of Original Sin, that our genes endow us with certain ineradicable traits such as the drive for dominance, or (in the case of our weaker brethren) the resistance to dominance, that are akin to Original Sin. But Darwinist explanations of actual human conduct are as metaphorical as biblical ones, and no more illuminating: they explain some of the past all right, but never predict the future. They are always wise after the event.

It is, in large part, because of this metaphor of Original Sin--with its recognition of Man's imperfectability and the acknowledgement of Evil--that Judeo-Christianity is the foundation of a decent society. Remove the first element--our inherent imperfection--and you'll have a tendency towards too much government. Remove the second--the reality of Evil--and you'll tend toward too little restraint (internal and external) of personal impulse. Add to that the ideas that Man is endowed with dignity as a function of being Created and that he is bound by the morality handed down by that Creator and you've got the whole structure.

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DONE BY MEMORIAL DAY:

90-Day Media Strategy by Bush's Aides to Define Kerry (JIM RUTENBERG, 3/20/04, NY Times)

The goal, several campaign aides said, is to first strip Mr. Kerry of the positive image that he carried away from the Democratic primary contests and then to define him issue by issue in their own terms before the summer vacation season. The central thrusts will be national security and taxes, they said.

The aides said the strategy was planned weeks ago in coordination with Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's chief political aide, while Mr. Kerry was battling for his party's nomination.

The aides are following a tight timetable, they said, and they want to have defined Mr. Kerry on their terms between now and early June, when they expect voters to stop paying close attention to politics, at least for a time. In addition, Mr. Kerry will very likely have a much larger war chest with which to fight by then, reducing the effect of the Republican media blitz.

"We just see this as the greatest window of opportunity, not that there won't be others," said Mark McKinnon, Mr. Bush's head media strategist. "It's easiest to define somebody when they're ill-defined, and John Kerry's ill-defined."

The Bush aides pronounce their efforts a success so far, and point to polls showing that Mr. Kerry's ratings are dropping while Mr. Bush's are rising, a huge relief to a campaign that just a couple of weeks ago was criticized even by some Republicans as appearing flat-footed.

"If you look at the average balance of the public polls now, the president's either even, or up one or two points," said Matthew Dowd, the president's chief campaign strategist. "And two weeks ago he was down three or four."

This early drive by the Bush campaign is in marked contrast to the approach of the Kerry organization, whose strategists say they believe the period before June is important but not as crucial as Mr. Bush's team asserts. Calling the Bush campaign's depictions of their candidate "distortions," Mr. Kerry's strategists said the labels would not stick. Mr. Kerry is on vacation in Idaho this week.

It's awfully hard to believe that many Americans are paying attention now--as witness how low Mr. Kerry's Positives + Negatives remain in most polls--nevermind that they'll be paying attention for the next three months. But, what the hey, they've got all that money--gotta spend it somehow.

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ENDS AND MEANS:

Fukuyama in Tel Aviv: Benjamin Netanyahu, Shimon Peres, and Francis Fukuyama come together to discuss the end of history in Israel. (Peter Berkowitz, 03/19/2004, Weekly Standard)

Under the bright lights on the large auditorium stage, the diminutive professor held forth for 40 minutes. With his characteristic calm cogence, Fukuyama rehearsed the key elements of his argument: history displays a broad pattern of human progress; bourgeois civilization will not be transcended; history will terminate not in a socialist utopia but in liberal democracy and market capitalism; this conclusion is fortified by the empirical evidence of people around the world who have voted with their feet for freedom, democracy, and modernization; and it is further fortified by theoretical reflection on human nature which discloses the rationality of economic and political systems based on individual rights and the consent of the governed.

The key question thus far posed by the 21st century, Fukuyama observed, is whether there is a Muslim exception to the end of history. Fukuyama doubts it. He pointed out that the real democracy deficit is not in Muslim or predominantly Muslim countries but in Muslim Arab countries of the Middle East. And there the problem, he suggested, was not Islam, though he indicated it still awaits its Luther, but bad government and dismal economic prospects that produce an angry alienation on which purveyors of radical Islam prey. What is necessary on the part of the liberal democracies of the world, according to Fukuyama, is the right kind of politics, one that knows that individual freedom is the long term goal but which takes careful account of, and learns to work with, the distinctive culture of Arab and Muslim societies. [...]

Netanyahu began by explaining that he rejected the descriptive part of Fukuyama's thesis but embraced the prescriptive part. Never mind that the descriptive and prescriptive parts of Fukuyama's thesis--liberal democracy was in fact and appropriately triumphing around the world because it satisfied genuine and powerful human wants, needs, and desires--were inseparably connected. What Netanyahu really wanted to dwell upon was that terrorism is a monumental threat to liberal democracy, and while inflamed by poverty and oppression, it "is a product of the totalitarian mindset." In concluding that the issue in connection to Fukuyama is not whether he is right about the end of history but rather how we can insure that he is right, Netanyahu agreed with Fukuyama as well as Peres that the world's liberal democracies have a moral and strategic interest in the spread of liberal democracy.

Because Mr. Fukuyama's overarching thesis is correct, the war on terror truly doesn't matter much: the destiny of the Islamic world is liberal capitalist protestant democracy, regardless of anything we do. And, because of its resistance to that fact, the Middle East is so backwards that it doesn't offer any serious threat to our domestic security in the United States. Were we so inclined--were we French, German, Spanish, Canadian, Democrats, paleoconservatives, libertarians, etc.--we could sit back and wait for it to happen on its own.

The Bush revolution in foreign policy though--one echoed above by Mr. Netanyahu--consists in putting the full force of American military, economic, and moral power into an effort to hasten the End of History in those regions that are lagging. It is disingenuous to understate how radical is this transformation. It is obviously a reversal of America's traditional isolationism, but it is also a major departure from the containment policy that was used to fight the Cold War up until Ronald Reagan was elected and goes well beyond what even the Gipper did to win that war. (Mr. Bush can be bolder precisely because the dysfunctional culture in this case is so weak--there's no Mutual Assured Destruction in this confrontation.)

Indeed, while the President does sometimes dress up his policy in the garb of security, it is really much more a function of his (and our) religious faith:

Historians in the future will reflect on an extraordinary, undeniable fact: Over time, free nations grow stronger and dictatorships grow weaker. In the middle of the 20th century, some imagined that the central planning and social regimentation were a shortcut to national strength. In fact, the prosperity, and social vitality and technological progress of a people are directly determined by extent of their liberty. Freedom honors and unleashes human creativity -- and creativity determines the strength and wealth of nations. Liberty is both the plan of Heaven for humanity, and the best hope for progress here on Earth. [...]

Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe -- because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export. And with the spread of weapons that can bring catastrophic harm to our country and to our friends, it would be reckless to accept the status quo.

Therefore, the United States has adopted a new policy, a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East. This strategy requires the same persistence and energy and idealism we have shown before. And it will yield the same results. As in Europe, as in Asia, as in every region of the world, the advance of freedom leads to peace.

The advance of freedom is the calling of our time; it is the calling of our country. From the Fourteen Points to the Four Freedoms, to the Speech at Westminster, America has put our power at the service of principle. We believe that liberty is the design of nature; we believe that liberty is the direction of history. We believe that human fulfillment and excellence come in the responsible exercise of liberty. And we believe that freedom -- the freedom we prize -- is not for us alone, it is the right and the capacity of all mankind.

Working for the spread of freedom can be hard. Yet, America has accomplished hard tasks before. Our nation is strong; we're strong of heart. And we're not alone. Freedom is finding allies in every country; freedom finds allies in every culture. And as we meet the terror and violence of the world, we can be certain the author of freedom is not indifferent to the fate of freedom.

With all the tests and all the challenges of our age, this is, above all, the age of liberty.

The implications of this are twofold: first, we can not be too surprised that the nations of Europe--which no longer share that faith--show so little interest in this crusade; and, second, given that the two political parties in America divide to a significant degree along a faultline of faith, we should not be too surprised that the Democrats wish to call the whole thing off.

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NO WONDER THEY RESENT US SO (via ef brown):

Socialists: The zombies who won the Spanish election. (Chris Suellentrop, March 18, 2004, Slate)

Granted, the war in Iraq and the war against al-Qaida are the whole reason the world has been watching Spain so closely for the past week. But there's another reason for the conservative silence about Zapatero's economics: The socialist debate over what to do about capitalism—and the proletariat, and the theory of surplus value, and the ownership of the means of production—is largely over in Europe. If the old libel against American liberals is that they're socialists, the new European libel against socialists is that they're liberals—classical ones. Here are some of the economic promises on which Zapatero's Socialist Workers Party campaigned: lowering the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 30 percent, cutting income taxes, and reducing the value-added tax. Oh, and they're going to balance the budget and control inflation. The man expected to be the Socialist finance minister, Miguel Sebastian, is a U.S.-educated economist with a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. He's promising to put his faith in the Invisible Hand. "There will be a strict separation between politics and business," he told the Financial Times. "We will be a market-friendly government." These are socialists?

They're what's left of them. The 43-year-old Zapatero took the helm of the Socialist Workers Party in 2000, in the wake of a disastrous election for the party. That year, the Socialists allied themselves with the Communists, known as the United Left, but for the first time since Franco's death in 1975, the Socialists and the United Left together did not win a majority of Spanish votes. In the wake of that defeat, Zapatero pledged to follow a "Nueva Via," or New Way, rhetorically aligning himself with the "New Democrats" of Bill Clinton, the "Third Way" of Tony Blair, and the "New Middle" of Gerhard Schröder. He would navigate between market fundamentalism and state socialism. The clear message: The era of big socialism is over.

Gotta be tough for a European Leftist to acknowledge that you're a compassionate conservative and that when the End of History came it landed on the American square, not the Socialist one.

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WHAT DECENT SOUL WOULD NOT REACT?:

Reactionary Prophet: Edmund Burke understood before anyone else that revolutions devour their young—and turn into their opposites: a review of Reflections On The Revolution In France: Edmund Burke, edited by Frank M. Turner (Christopher Hitchens, April 2004, The Atlantic Monthly)

[E]dmund Burke was neither an Englishman nor a Tory. He was an Irishman, probably a Catholic Irishman at that (even if perhaps a secret sympathizer), and for the greater part of his life he upheld the more liberal principles of the Whig faction. He was an advanced opponent of the slave trade, whose "Sketch of a Negro Code" was written in the early 1780s, and who before that had opposed the seating of American slaveholders at Westminster. His epic parliamentary campaign for the impeachment of Warren Hastings and the arraignment of the East India Company was the finest example in its day of a battle against pelf and perks and privilege. His writings on revolution and counter-revolution, and on empire, are ripe for a "Straussian" or Machiavellian reading that seeks to discover the arcane or occluded message contained within an ostensibly straightforward text.

This is most particularly true of his Reflections on the Revolution in France, which has seldom if ever been better analyzed and, so to speak, "decoded" than in this excellent companion edition. One might begin by giving this imperishable book its full name. The original 1790 title page read "Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to That Event: In a Letter Intended to Have Been Sent to a Gentleman in Paris." The gentleman in question was Charles-Jean-François Depont, a young man of Burke's acquaintance who had become a member of the French National Assembly and had written to him in the fall of 1789. Burke owed him a reply, which turned into a very long letter indeed after its author had been further inspired to put pen to paper. The further inspiration was supplied by two meetings in London, of the Constitutional Society and of the Revolution Society, at which were passed warm resolutions welcoming the fall of the Bastille. It was, more than anything else, the alarm he felt at these latter developments that impelled Burke to his response. Please note, then, that Burke chose to stress not the French Revolution but "The Revolution in France." He seems to have intended, here, to speak of the phenomenon of revolution as it applied to French affairs, and as it might be made to apply to English ones. Hence the emphatic mention of "certain societies in London."

The Revolution Society was not as insurgent or incendiary as its name might suggest. It was a rather respectable sodality, dedicated to celebrating the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688, a relatively bloodless coup that installed William and Mary of the House of Orange on the English throne, and established Protestantism as the state religion. One of the society's leaders was the Reverend Richard Price, a great friend to the American Revolution and a staunch Unitarian clergyman. His resolution, carried by the same meeting that had forwarded a "Congratulatory Address" to the National Assembly in Paris, read in part, "This Society, sensible of the important advantages arising to this Country by its deliverance from Popery and Arbitrary Power ..."

It was made immediately plain to Burke that those who had enthused over revolution across the Channel were also interested in undermining and discrediting the same Church that he—an Irishman brought up under anti-Catholic penal laws—felt so obliged to defend. (This deep connection has been established by Conor Cruise O'Brien in a masterly series of studies that began with his own edition of the Reflections in 1968.) But the point is not a merely sectarian one. In 1780 London had been convulsed and shamed by the hysterical anti-Papist Gordon Riots, in which a crazed aristocratic demagogue had led a mob against supposedly subversive Catholics. (The best evocation of the fury and cruelty of that episode is to be found in Dickens's Barnaby Rudge.) This memory was very vivid in Burke's mind, and goes far to explain his visceral detestation of crowd violence. No less to the point, some emulators of Jacobinism—the United Irishmen, with many Protestants among their leaders—were at work in Ireland trying to bring off a rebellion that would compromise all parliamentary "moderates." And several of the pro-Jacobin activists and spokesmen in England, not excluding the rather humane Price himself, had had political connections with Lord George Gordon. As between the Jacobite and the Jacobin, Burke could not be neutral for an instant; he might give up the Jacobite cause out of loyalty to the British crown, but he was profoundly stirred when he saw old-fashioned anti-Catholicism renascent under potentially republican colors. So one does well to keep Barnaby Rudge in mind along with A Tale of Two Cities.

Three questions will occur to anybody reconsidering the Reflections today. Was it a grand and prophetic indictment of revolutionary excess? Was it the disdainful shudder of a man who despised or feared what at one stage he described as the "swinish multitude"? And did it contain what we would now term a "hidden agenda"? The answer to all three questions, it seems to me, is a firm yes. Let us take the two most celebrated excerpts of Burke's extraordinary prose. The first is the prescient one. [...]

If modern conservatism can be held to derive from Burke, it is not just because he appealed to property owners in behalf of stability but also because he appealed to an everyday interest in the preservation of the ancestral and the immemorial. And the abolition of memory, as we have come to know in our own time, is an aspect of the totalitarian that spares neither right nor left. In the cult of "now," just as in the making of Reason into an idol, the writhings of nihilism are to be detected.

It is vastly to the credit of Conor Cruise O'Brien that he still feels it necessary to defend Burke from the charge of being a "reactionary." It may not be feasible to make this extenuation a consistent one. Burke was strongly in favor of repressive measures at home, including the silencing of all dissent. In calling for an all-out war, he outdid William Pitt himself. He died before the worst of the Bonapartist project for Europe was revealed, and it cannot easily be said that his gravest fears in this respect did not materialize. But in his discussion of the French philosophes he declined even to cite any of their secular and rationalist critique, because, as he put it in a footnote to Reflections, "I do not choose to shock the feeling of the moral reader with any quotation of their vulgar, base, and profane language." That's Tory pomposity defined. Furthermore, and as Darrin McMahon points out in his chapter of this edition, Burke in the year of his death (1797) wrote to the exiled Abbé Barruel to thank him in the most profuse terms for a copy of his Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire du jacobinisme. This was a work, infamous in its time, of the most depraved and retrograde Jesuitism, which purported to find a grand conspiracy of Freemasons and other subversives in the overthrow of the Bourbons. Burke's letter was no mere courtesy; it lauded the abbé for his justice, regularity, and exactitude. This is the only charge against Burke that I cannot find mentioned or dealt with in Conor Cruise O'Brien's tremendous biography The Great Melody; but as O'Brien has observed in another context, those intellectuals who will not give up "civility" and "objectivity" for the cause of revolution have sometimes been observed to sacrifice these qualities for the sake of the counter-revolution. Clearly, Burke saw himself as willing to try all means and all alliances in order to "contain" revolutionary France, lest it pose a challenge similar to that presented by the Protestant Reformation, and then as far as possible to destroy it.

It's unclear why anyone would need to be defended against a charge of being a reactionary, especially one who was reacting against the French Revolution, but it's nice to see Mr. Hitchens continue his Rightward drift, which will end with his embracing Catholicism by decade's end.

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DEBAATHIFICATION:

H.D. Miller has a
great idea

---

WITH A CUPPA:

Pecan Scones (Domain Magazine, November/December 1989)

Buttery scones enriched with pecans and sour cream. Makes 24 to 28 Scones

4 cups all-purpose flour
3 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup brown sugar
1 cup coarsely ground pecans
1/2 pound butter, chilled and cut into cubes
1 cup sour cream
1 cup milk

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Sift together flour, baking powder, and salt.

Add sugar and pecans.

Cut in butter until mixture resembles bread crumbs.

Combine sour cream and milk, add to dry mixture, and stir just until mixed.

On well-floured board, divide dough into 6 balls, flatten each to 5/8-inch thickness, and cut into wedges or circles.

Bake at 375 degrees on ungreased sheet until golden brown, 15 to 20 minutes.

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GET THE MAN A TOE TAG:

‘Reckless’ And ‘Irresponsible?’: 2003 Tape Shows Kerry Seemingly Backing $87 Billion In Iraq Funding He Voted Against (Jake Tapper, March 19, 2004, ABCNEWS.com)

In an interview several weeks before he voted against $87 billion in funding for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., seemed to argue that such a vote would be reckless, irresponsible, and tantamount to abandoning U.S. troops.

On the Sept. 14, 2003, edition of CBS's Face the Nation, Kerry spoke at length about an amendment he and Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., were offering which would have paid for the $87 billion by delaying some of the recent tax cuts.

Asked if he would vote against the $87 billion if his amendment did not pass, Kerry said, "I don't think any United States senator is going to abandon our troops and recklessly leave Iraq to whatever follows as a result of simply cutting and running. That's irresponsible."

Kerry argued that his amendment offered a way to do it properly, "but I don't think anyone in the Congress is going to not give our troops ammunition, not give our troops the ability to be able to defend themselves. We're not going to cut and run and not do the job."

Kerry spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter said her boss' vote against the funding was a "protest vote." …

Bad enough to say it, but to say it on tape--which will certainly be appearing in the next GOP ad--is disastrous. Anyone taking bets on when he cuts this vacation short?

MORE:
Kerry's 1994 effort to cut defense eyed (JOHN SOLOMON, 3/19/2004, The Associated Press)

When John Kerry offered a surprise plan to trim $43 billion in spending a decade ago, he encountered some harsh resistance: The cuts would threaten national security. U.S. fighter pilots would be endangered. And the battle against terrorism would be hampered, opponents charged.

And that's just what Kerry's fellow Democrats had to say.

"We are putting blindfolds over our pilots' eyes," Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, a decorated World War II veteran, said of the impact of Kerry's proposed intelligence cuts. Senators rejected Kerry's plan on a vote of 75-20. [...]

[S]everal of the Democrats' longest serving senators zeroed in immediately on the cuts Kerry proposed for military and intelligence.

"The amendment offered by the senator from Massachusetts would reduce the fiscal year 1994 budget for national defense by nearly $4 billion," said Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., then the powerful Appropriations Committee chairman. "We have already cut defense spending drastically. ... Cutting another $4 billion is simply unwise and insupportable."

Sen. Dennis DeConcini, D-Ariz., then the Intelligence Committee chairman, took Kerry to task at the time for reducing intelligence spending by $6 billion over six years, saying it would leave Americans vulnerable while facing problems such as the war in Bosnia, nuclear proliferation and terrorism.

"It makes no sense for us to close our eyes and ears to developments around the world," he said, wondering aloud why Kerry didn't raise the idea of his cuts with the committee first.

Inouye, who has supported Kerry's presidential campaign, rebuked Kerry for proposing military cuts without consulting Pentagon leaders. "This is clearly micromanaging the Defense Department without any input from our military commanders," the Hawaii Democrat said.

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TALK TO MY LAWYER (via John Resnick):

Teen's right to wear sweatshirt is restored: Denbigh High responds to letter threatening lawsuit (Angela Forest, March 19 2004, Hampton Roads Daily Press)

A Denbigh High School student prevented from wearing an anti-abortion sweatshirt in school last month by a school administrator now can wear it after a Michigan law center raised the possibility of a lawsuit.

An assistant principal told Daniel Goergen on Feb. 18 to remove the sweatshirt or turn it inside-out. Printed in white letters on the front of the black, hooded sweatshirt are the words "Abortion is homicide." The back reads "You will not silence my message / You will not mock my God / You will stop killing my generation."

"It was kind of irritating, it was bringing me down a little," Goergen said of the assistant principal's decision. "I respected (the assistant principal's) opinion and did what she said because she's an administrator. Then I got a lawyer to explain to her the right for me to wear it."

Many students at the school have shown support for his actions, he said.

In response to a letter from the Thomas More Law Center in Ann Arbor, Chief Deputy City Attorney Leonard Wallin sent a letter March 12 informing Goergen's lawyers that he could wear the sweatshirt at school.

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WE KNOW HE'S GUILTY, WHY DID HIS DUPES BELIEVE HIM?

Unmasking Alger Hiss: a Review of Alger Hiss's Looking-Glass Wars: The Covert Life of a Soviet Spy (Ronald Radosh, 3/17/04, Hudson Institute)

What White accomplishes in this innovative and brilliant new book is not yet another attempt to show Hiss's guilt, but rather an examination of how Hiss managed to be both a gifted Soviet agent and "a successful publicizer of his innocence," able to convince so many people. Why, White asks, was Hiss seen as a sympathetic figure by so many who should have known better—and why did they ignore irrefutable evidence in order to go on believing him?

White starts from the premise that Hiss was both a dedicated Communist party member and an agent of Soviet military intelligence from 1934 to 1946, and then asks why Hiss lied about this so blatantly, for so long, and even enlisted friends and family in the lie. He had other options. He could—as his wife desired—have faded into the woodwork and led a private life. He could have admitted his guilt and sought to excuse his actions with the "idealistic" reasons that he thought at the time justified the betrayal of his own country—the rationale used today by left-wing historians to exonerate the Rosenbergs.

Instead, Hiss pursued a consistent path of categorically dissociating himself from the slightest connection with Communism, developing what White calls a false narrative that he would relate for the rest of his life. He was, he claimed, simply a loyal New Dealer and devotee of international peace, a man who was therefore accused by the New Deal's right-wing enemies for their own partisan purposes. He characterized those who accused him as liars and himself as their innocent and unwilling victim. Hiss's chosen narrative was nothing but a spy's cover story, repeated ad infinitum until many opinion makers chose to believe him. [...]

Hiss had a fanatical dedication to vindicating his reputation. One of the major themes of White's psychological portrait is of how Hiss brought his son Tony, who had been estranged from him since childhood, into active participation in his fraudulent effort. He mended his fences with Tony in adulthood, and gained the loyalty of a family member who would carry on the effort to vindicate him even after his death. In effect, he betrayed the trust of loyal friends and family members, including his own son, to pursue the goal of helping the Soviet Union.

What helped Hiss most was the changing moral and political climate. When he was imprisoned, most Americans undoubtedly believed in his guilt. But he maintained his charade long enough for the 1960s and Vietnam to come along and produce a new national climate, one in which many Americans came to believe the worst about their government—that, for example, the Justice Department and FBI would fabricate evidence to convict an innocent person. This skeptical climate enabled Hiss to gain near-vindication, as White puts it, "without his producing a shred of credible new evidence." His tale of partisan right-wingers and government officials orchestrating a frame-up won him fresh supporters among the emerging New Left.

Didn't help that one of the men who brought him down, Richard Nixon, self-destructed in the 70s.

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POLL DRIVEN POLS:

Divide and Bicker: The Dean Campaign's Hip, High-Tech Image Hid a Nasty Civil War (Howard Kurtz, February 29, 2004, Washington Post)

In different conversations and in different ways, according to several people who worked with him, Dean said at the peak of his popularity late last year that he never expected to rise so high, that he didn't like the intense scrutiny, that he had just wanted to make a difference. "I don't care about being president," he said. Months earlier, as his candidacy was taking off, he told a colleague: "The problem is, I'm now afraid I might win."

As Dean was swallowed by the bubble that envelops every major candidate, he allowed his campaign to sink into a nasty civil war that crippled decision-making and devastated morale. In the end, say some of those who uprooted their lives for him, these tensions hastened the implosion that brought Dean down.

The polarization revolved around two people: Joe Trippi, the rumpled, passionate, sometimes headstrong campaign manager who drew rock-star coverage in the press, and Kate O'Connor, the quiet, shrewd, low-profile Vermont confidante who never left Dean's side. [...]

Every presidential campaign has an ambitious strategist, a James Carville or Karl Rove, pulling the strings back at headquarters, and an unassuming body man (or woman) traveling with the candidate, a loyalist who can read his moods, cater to his needs and watch his back. And there are often tensions between "the office" and "the road." For Trippi and O'Connor, the sparring began early and never let up.

When Dean, once dismissed as a gadfly candidate, was surging to the front of a crowded Democratic field in September, things came to a head.

O'Connor, according to a staffer who saw the e-mail, wrote a friend that she wanted to get rid of Trippi and that she felt like quitting herself except that she needed to protect Dean. This followed a clash in which Trippi and other top political advisers helped craft a major Boston speech in which Dean was to denounce special interests -- only to have him toss out most of the speech after O'Connor expressed her opposition.

O'Connor, who said she had "possibly" sent the e-mail but did not recall it, said Dean felt the speech wasn't suitable for a large rally. But she confirmed that she was "uncomfortable" with the campaign's move toward "harping on the special interests. . . . I thought it was not a message that was true to who Howard Dean was." While she offered her opinions, "the thought that I could manipulate him is just absurd."

In October, as much of the media and political establishment began to view the former governor as unstoppable, Trippi was so frustrated by the mounting strife that he threatened to resign, he and other officials confirmed. Trippi asked his campaign allies to join an "intervention" with Dean to get things changed, but they told him he was being unrealistic. Trippi's partner in a consulting firm, Steve McMahon, and Trippi's wife, Kathy Lash, a campaign aide, talked him out of quitting. But he made a pact with his wife that, win or lose, he would quit the day after the New Hampshire primary.

For all the low-level warfare between what was termed the "Washington faction" and the "Vermont faction," O'Connor does not believe the disagreements damaged Dean's effort. "Maybe I'm just naive," she said. "Maybe it did and I'm oblivious to the fact that it hurt the campaign." [...]

Even the highest-ranking advisers found Dean resistant to changing his approach. Dean strategists say campaign chairman Steve Grossman repeatedly urged the candidate to talk about treating patients as a physician and expressed frustration that Dean never took the advice.

"Unfortunately Howard never took advantage of that unique quality and experience he had, that of being a doctor," Grossman said. Had Dean used more "personal examples" involving patients, it "would have humanized him and created more of an emotional link between him and the voters."

Trippi dispatched various aides to accompany Dean and O'Connor on the road, but problems developed each time. One said he was viewed as "Trippi's spy." Another said O'Connor would "kill" people she viewed as insufficiently loyal. A third said staffers were frightened of "the wrath of Kate." As fundraising surged and the campaign was rapidly expanding, Trippi tried to hire several seasoned pros but told colleagues that O'Connor had blocked his efforts.

"Completely false," said O'Connor. "I didn't meddle in hiring." She said Trippi refused to hire some people suggested by Dean, which Trippi confirmed.

But O'Connor saw herself as standing up for Dean. "If Washington people wanted to change a position, Kate would be the first one to say no, because she knows how long and how adamantly the governor held a particular position," said Sue Allen, Dean's longtime Vermont spokeswoman.

"She had the thankless job of keeping him on message. He's the kind of guy who will chat with somebody and change his opinion. She would control access, and that angers people. . . . She's a handy scapegoat."

David Bender, the New York senior deputy campaign director, said that when O'Connor complained about exhaustion and he suggested some time off, "she looked at me with a ferocity in her manner and voice and said: 'I know they want to get rid of me. . . . I will do this job if I have to do it from a hospital bed hooked up to an IV because I'm the only one who protects Howard. Everyone else wants something from him.' " [...]

Kate O'Connor knew about the Al Gore endorsement. Joe Trippi didn't. He blamed O'Connor. He also blamed Howard Dean.

It was early December, and Dean and Gore had agreed to keep quiet about the former vice president's plan to announce his support within days, fearing a premature leak. Trippi grew suspicious when staffers were asked to charter a large plane to Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He asked Dean, who said someone would be endorsing him but he couldn't tell Trippi who it was. Trippi reminded him that he was the campaign manager. But Dean wouldn't budge.

The larger message was that O'Connor had known and the Washington faction had not. O'Connor said she was simply doing what Dean and Gore wanted. What no one knew was that this would be the high point and that the corrosive sense of mistrust would eat away at the campaign at the worst possible time.

Over the next six weeks, Dean's rivals escalated their attacks on his fitness for the White House, and he was hit by an avalanche of negative headlines. "Every media organization and reporter went after us because, you know, take down the front-runner," he told CNN.

But Dean also started making high-profile mistakes. After the seizure of Saddam Hussein, Dean's top political aides scripted a San Francisco speech in which the candidate would say that although his opposition to the Iraq war was unchanged, the capture was a victory for the American military. At the last minute, Dean added a line that the country was no safer, sparking a new controversy.

It was during this period that some senior officials became convinced that Dean wasn't serious about doing what it takes to win the White House, especially when he refused repeated requests to ask his wife, Judith Steinberg Dean, to make even an occasional campaign appearance. Dean did not respond to an interview request, but O'Connor believes he never wavered in his desire to be president.

Still, she said, "he didn't expect to be there" as the front-runner, and they were surprised at the intensity of the media barrage. "We never anticipated the constant getting beaten up over something every single day," O'Connor said.

But others felt the campaign should have been better prepared to play defense and that this contributed to the daily drip of damaging stories.

Senior officials, for instance, said they had never been able to gain access to the boxes of Dean records in O'Connor's garage or the files kept in her car trunk. Enright had reviewed tapes of Dean's appearances on a Canadian talk show from 1996 to 2002, but there was one tape she never got -- and NBC triggered a flap by reporting that Dean on that tape had disparaged the Iowa caucuses as "dominated by the special interests." The staff blamed O'Connor, who said she had never seen that tape and that the material in her Ford Focus was just news clips from Dean's gubernatorial days.

Campaign officials said they also tried to get O'Connor to dig out old National Rifle Association questionnaires completed by Dean. Enright was blindsided when the New York Times obtained one from a rival campaign, showing that Dean had opposed restrictions on owning assault weapons -- a contradiction of his current position.

When Dean, despite raising $40 million, finished third in Iowa on Jan. 19, he ripped up his prepared remarks and started yelling on his campaign bus, officials said, proclaiming that the message of taking on Washington's entrenched interests hadn't worked, that the grass roots were a mirage and had let him down. [...]

The warfare continued over Dean's message, the outsider-against-Washington-special-interests pitch that Trippi had developed in a PowerPoint presentation, tested in polls and, despite O'Connor's concerns, used to sell the candidate to major labor unions.

Dean's policy director, Jeremy Ben-Ami, declared in an e-mail: "The message of the campaign is simply no longer our campaign vs. the special interests. This is not what the governor wants to be saying -- or frankly what he ever really wanted to be saying."

Joe Drymala, the chief speechwriter who received the e-mail, resigned in protest. "I refused to believe it because I didn't want to," he said. "To believe that was to believe that Howard Dean was a fraud."

This kind of infighting is indeed a staple of every campaign, but what exacerbated it in Mr. Dean's case was that he ran as something he isn't, just because it happened to be working. The Vermonters closest to him knew him to be a moderate, even conservative, Democrat, one who could run on his record as a governor. The Washingtonians wanted him to be the anti-Iraq war/pro-class warfare candidate who they trot out every four years. For the Vermonters he was Bill Clinton. To the Washingtonians he was Al Gore (2000 version). Unfortunately, Mr. Dean bought into the Washingtonian shtick when it moved him in the polls, but since that isn't who he is it appears to have brought on some kind of psychotic episode.

Now John Kerry has inherited the mantle and, though the anti-war half fits him to a tee, the rhetoric about special interests and fighting for the little guy rolls off his tongue like cinder blocks. It's always a bad idea to go before the American people and try to present yourself as something you manifestly aren't. How long before Mr. Kerry starts his own schizophrenic meltdown?

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WRONG, EXCEPT ON THE FACTS:

Bush Insults Kerry's Intelligence: The president's latest attack is even more dishonest than the last. (Fred Kaplan, March 9, 2004, Slate)

Yesterday, President Bush told a crowd of supporters in Houston that, back in 1995, two years after the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, Sen. John Kerry introduced legislation to cut the intelligence budget by $1.5 billion. "Once again, Sen. Kerry is trying to have it both ways," the president said. "He's for good intelligence; yet he was willing to gut the intelligence services. And that is no way to lead a nation in a time of war." Bush further charged that Kerry's bill was "so deeply irresponsible that he didn't have a single-co-sponsor in the United States Senate." [...]

One thing is true: Kerry did introduce a bill on Sept. 29, 1995—S. 1290—that, among many other things, would have cut the intelligence budget by $300 million per year over a five-year

So the only thing that's true is the fact, but Mr. Kaplan disagrees with the wisdom of the cuts? Shocking.

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SILENT MISERY:

Remember the Misery Index?: Here's why the press doesn’t play this oldie anymore. (Jerry Bowyer, 3/18/04, National Review)

For those who only began following economic statistics within the past 10 years, a definition is in order. The misery index, as the name suggests, is designed to measure the amount of misery felt by ordinary people in the economy. Since fear of unemployment and loss of purchasing power through inflation have pervasive effects in the lives of ordinary Americans, the misery index is simply the unemployment rate added to the inflation rate. Unemployment is based on the (recently neglected) household survey of employment, compiled by the Labor Department. And the inflation rate is based on the annual change in the Consumer Price Index.

How does the current misery index stack up with earlier periods? You be the judge:

The ranking for the average misery index for given periods in descending order are as follows:

* George Herbert Walker's average misery index is a massively large 10.7 percent.

*The Post WWII period's average is a rather large 9.5 percent.

*The average for Clinton's first term weighs in at a moderate 8.8 percent.

*George W.'s current misery index is 7.6 percent.

*The average for Clinton's second term is 6.8 percent.

This means that George W.'s current misery index is roughly only two-thirds of his father's average. In other words, with the exception of the hyper-growth of Clinton's second term, the current misery index compares very favorably with every other time-period analyzed here.

Not to mention that the jobs number will just keep improving this year.

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LIVING ON BORROWED TIME:

Poll Numbers Devastating for Chávez (Hispanic American Center for Economic Research)

Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez would be defeated by a wide margin in any election or any referendum on his mandate, according to two private polling firms that released their survey results here Wednesday.

Polls conducted in 64 cities and in rural areas show ''consistently since late 2001 that, at a ratio of around 70-30, the electorate would vote against Chávez,'' Luis León, director of the Datanálisis firm, told the foreign press.

In a potential referendum to revoke Chávez's mandate -- a vote that the opposition is seeking and which the Constitution allows as of August -- ''64 percent of the electorate would vote against Chávez and 34 percent in favor,'' said León. Saúl Cabrera, of Consultores 21 polling firm, told the press that ''in any election Chávez would lose.''

''It's what you could say about someone gravely ill with cancer: he is going to die in a month, six months or a year. But he is going to die,'' said the public opinion expert.

Not soon enough.

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KERRY'S FIRST 100 DAYS:

FCC to broadcasters: F-word is out of bounds (JONATHAN D. SALANT, 3/19/2003, AP)

The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday overruled its staff and declared that an expletive uttered by rock star Bono on NBC last year was both indecent and profane. The agency made it clear that virtually any use of the F-word was inappropriate for over-the-air radio and television.

"The 'F-word' is one of the most vulgar, graphic and explicit descriptions of sexual activity in the English language," the commission said Thursday. "The fact that the use of this word may have been unintentional is irrelevant; it still has the same effect of exposing children to indecent language."

Senator Kerry's list of Executive Orders to issue in the first 100 in office just got longer.

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THE COMING ARAFAT ENDORSEMENT OF KERRY WON'T HELP:

Reading the minds of Jewish voters: President Bush's policies toward Israel have been pretty favorable; Kerry has never been a leader on Israel-related issues. How will the Jews vote? (Mitchell G. Bard, March 19, 2004, Jewsweek)

In 1916, Republican presidential candidate Charles Evans Hughes won 45% of the Jewish vote, but lost the election. Four years later, Warren Harding won 43% of the Jewish vote and the presidency. Since then, Eisenhower (in 1956) is the only Republican who won as much as 40% of the Jewish vote. On average, Republicans have received less than 25% of Jewish votes since 1916. That could all change this year.

In 2000, George W. Bush received only 19% of the Jewish vote in large measure because Al Gore was viewed as a good friend of Israel and most Jews suspected Bush would inherit the policies of his father, which were widely regarded as the most hostile toward Israel since Eisenhower. Four years later, few Jews would question that President Bush's policies toward Israel have been, if not the most favorable in history, pretty darn close.

No one believes Bush will win a majority of the Jewish vote, but he has a good chance of reaching the levels achieved by Eisenhower, Harding, and Hughes. Jewish Republicans suggest there is a realignment taking place as Jews become more conservative, but Jews remain the most liberal group of voters other than African-Americans, and the constituency that is most likely to vote against its economic interests. Some of the data from the last midterm election supports the idea of a realignment, but it is too early to tell. If Bush does as well as many expect, it is less likely to be a result of a Jewish shift to the Republican Party, which still has social policies that do not sit well with most Jews, than because of their support for his approach to foreign policy and the lackluster Democratic alternatives. [...]

The truth is the Jewish vote does matter. Though the Jewish population in the United States is roughly six million (about 2.3% of the total U.S. population), roughly 89% live in 12 key electoral college states. These states alone are worth enough electoral votes to elect the president. Therefore, it can make a difference in the outcome if the Jewish vote shifts.

If only they were Zionists.

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60-40 NATION:

The age of reverence: Once upon a time in nostalgia land, everybody was good and God-fearing. More recently, the fad has been all things irreverent. But is that changing, and what impact is religion having on our popular discourse?
(Benyamin Cohen, March 19, 2004, Jewsweek)

Media observers are sensing a change in the mood of America. People are fed up with the negative and want something uplifting instead. Even before the Super Bowl stunt, it seems, Americans were tired of indecency and looking for inspiration. It would seem that reverence is the new irreverence.

"People have been fed up for a long time," says film critic and observant Jew Michael Medved. "Four times the number of people go to church or synagogue every week as go to the movie theaters. It's taken a huge mega blockbuster like the Passion of the Christ before people have begun to understand that there is a religious audience out there and they are looking for more traditionalist, more uplifting fare."

And the proof is on the boob tube. Shows with positive religious overtones like Joan of Arcadia, 7th Heaven, and Wonderfalls are ratings hits and critical darlings. Jay Leno, late night's nice guy routinely beats his more acerbic competitor, David Letterman.

And throughout pop culture, a "kinder, gentler" image is taking shape. [...]

The source of this upturn in religious reverence is anybody's guess, but one good bet might be a response to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The truth is 9/11 changed more than just our airport security procedures. Rather, much has been said about how we as a people changed, how our predominant outlook on the world was shattered that day. But what about our pop culture? After all, if Janet Jackson's nipple can send TV censors scrambling, one would assume that 9/11 sent shockwaves through our collective unconscious.

Hard to believe that the persona of George W. Bush isn't pushing the trend too. A President who talks so openly about his faith and makes it so central to our public policy has opened the way for others to talk more openly about what they believe and to make demands upon the purveyors of pop culture.

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OTHER THAN HIS ENTIRE VOTING RECORD (via Mike Daley):

Kerry not weak on defense, McCain says (Nancy Benac, 3/19/2004, Associated Press)

Asked on two morning television shows yesterday whether he thought Kerry was weak on defense, the Arizona senator was quick to bat down the suggestion. Furthermore, he chided both parties for waging such a "bitter and partisan" campaign.

"This kind of rhetoric, I think, is not helpful in educating and helping the American people make a choice," he said on "The Early Show" on CBS.

McCain said Kerry would have to explain his voting record, but also told NBC's "Today" show: "No, I do not believe that he is necessarily weak on defense. I don't agree with him on some issues clearly. But I decry this negativism that's going on on both sides."

There's your next ad--a vote by vote comparison of Kerry vs. McCain on issues from the Contras to the Iraq Supplemental, about which Mr. McCain had the following to say:

Mr. President, we have begun a debate that may ultimately be more consequential than the war debate we had in this chamber last October, which culminated in the votes of 77 Senators authorizing the President of the United States to go to war against Saddam Hussein s Iraq. A negative Senate vote last fall, before our country was committed to liberating and reconstructing Iraq, would have weakened the President s leadership and made America less secure. But a vote against reconstructing Iraq now, with 130,000 American forces on the ground, American credibility before friends and enemies at stake, and the enormous responsibility of helping the Iraqi people rebuild their country now on our shoulders, would doom Iraq's transformation to failure, with grave consequences for the entire Middle East, and devastate American leadership in a dangerous world.

In other words, Mr. McCain believes that John Kerry voted to doom Iraq's democratic transformation to failure and devastate U.S. leadership in the world.

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NO SANCTUARY:

Afghan offensive: Grand plans hit rugged reality (Syed Saleem Shahzad, 3/20/04, Asia Times)

The plan to eradicate the Afghan resistance was straightforward: US-led coalition forces would drive from inside Afghanistan into the last real sanctuary of the insurgents, and meet the Pakistani military driving from the opposite direction. There would then be no safe place left to hide for the Taliban and al-Qaeda remnants, or, presumably, for Osama bin Laden himself. The plan's implementation began with the launch of operation "Mountain Storm" around March 15.

But the insurgents have a plan of their own, which they have revealed to Asia Times Online. Conceived by foreign resistance fighters of Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Arab origin, it is a classic guerrilla stratagem that involves enmeshing the mighty military forces of the United States and its allies in numerous local conflicts, diverting them from their real goal and dissipating their strength.

The insurgents' plan, too, has been put into effect, and the fierce fighting in Pakistan's tribal agency of South Waziristan last Tuesday, when resistance fighters and their tribal sympathizers took on the Pakistani military and routed it, was an early manifestation. Now Pakistan must quell its own rebel tribespeople before it continues to help the US with Mountain Storm. Indeed, Pakistan is attempting just that, on Thursday launching a "full force" operation in South Waziristan, using artillery and helicopter gunships. At the same time, tribal opposition to the Pakistani military has spread to North Waziristan - all according to plan, it seems.

Boy, these guys just don't get it. The whole reason that this action had to come after Iraq and that we continue to support General Musharraf is because this is the necessary quagmire. It is not sufficient to round-up a few al Qaeda types in a police action--the region has to be dealt with semi-permanently. This is where the war ends.

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TIRED OF ROAMING THE AISLES? (via The Mother Judd):

Just Browsing: Living Room Film Club, a Click Away (WILLIAM GRIMES, March 19, 2004, NY Times)

Netflix, founded in 1998, is an online movie-rental company that could be described as the anti-Blockbuster. It deals only in DVD's, and customers pay a flat monthly fee of $19.95 to rent an unlimited number of films with no late fees. The sole restriction is that subscribers may keep only three movies out at a time. (The company also offers more expensive five-film and eight-film plans.)

As each movie is returned in its self-addressed, prepaid envelope, Netflix sends out the next film on a list that the subscriber maintains online. Since the company has 23 regional distribution centers, most movies arrive the day after they are sent out. In theory a fanatic customer watching three films a day could go through several hundred DVD's each year, whittling down the per-film rental cost to a dollar or less. In practice the average user watches about six movies a month. [...]

There are two other weaknesses in the Netflix system, one unavoidable, the other understandable. First, the company does not rent videocassettes, so its library does not include thousands of films, some of them obscure, but many of them recognized classics. Anyone hoping to binge on Barbara Stanwyck will have to do without "Ball of Fire." Preston Sturges fans will look in vain for "Easy Living."

It's a godsend, especially if you don't have a wide range of rental places in your area.

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OUR FIGHT:

Remarks by the President on Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom (The East Room, 3/19/04)

The murders in Madrid are a reminder that the civilized world is at war. And in this new kind of war, civilians find themselves suddenly on the front lines. In recent years, terrorists have struck from Spain, to Russia, to Israel, to East Africa, to Morocco, to the Philippines, and to America. They've targeted Arab states such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Yemen. They have attacked Muslims in Indonesia, Turkey, Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan. No nation or region is exempt from the terrorists' campaign of violence.

Each of these attacks on the innocent is a shock, and a tragedy, and a test of our will. Each attack is designed to demoralize our people and divide us from one another. And each attack must be answered, not only with sorrow, but with greater determination, deeper resolve, and bolder action against the killers. It is the interest of every country, and the duty of every government, to fight and destroy this threat to our people.

There is [a] dividing line -- there is a dividing line in our world, not between nations, and not between religions or cultures, but a dividing line separating two visions of justice and the value of life. On a tape claiming responsibility for the atrocities in Madrid, a man is heard to say, "We choose death, while you choose life." We don't know if this is the voice of the actual killers, but we do know it expresses the creed of the enemy. It is a mind set that rejoices in suicide, incites murder, and celebrates every death we mourn. And we who stand on the other side of the line must be equally clear and certain of our convictions. We do love live, the life given to us and to all. We believe in the values that uphold the dignity of life, tolerance, and freedom, and the right of conscience. And we know that this way of life is worth defending. There is no neutral ground -- no neutral ground -- in the fight between civilization and terror, because there is no neutral ground between good and evil, freedom and slavery, and life and death.

The war on terror is not a figure of speech. It is an inescapable calling of our generation. The terrorists are offended not merely by our policies -- they are offended by our existence as free nations. No concession will appease their hatred. No accommodation will satisfy their endless demands. Their ultimate ambitions are to control the peoples of the Middle East, and to blackmail the rest of the world with weapons of mass terror. There can be no separate peace with the terrorist enemy. Any sign of weakness or retreat simply validates terrorist violence, and invites more violence for all nations. The only certain way to protect our people is by early, united, and decisive action.

In this contest of will and purpose, not every nation joins every mission, or participates in the same way. Yet, every nation makes a vital contribution, and America is proud to stand with all of you as we pursue a broad strategy in the war against terror.

We are using every tool of finance, intelligence, law enforcement and military power to break terror networks, to deny them refuge, and to find their leaders. Over the past 30 months, we have frozen or seized nearly $200 million in assets of terror networks. We have captured or killed some two-thirds of al Qaeda's known leaders, as well as many of al Qaeda's associates countries like the United States, or Germany, or Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia, or Thailand. We are taking the fight to al Qaeda allies, such as Ansar-al-Islam in Iraq, Jemaah Islamiya in Indonesia, and Southeast Asia. Our coalition is sending an unmistakable message to the terrorists, including those who struck in Madrid: These killers will be tracked down and found, they will face their day of justice.

Our coalition is taking urgent action to stop the transfer of deadly weapon and materials. America and the nations of Australia, and France, and Germany, and Italy, and Japan, and the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom, Canada, Singapore, and Norway have joined in the Proliferation Security Initiative all aimed to bind together, to interdict lethal materials transported by air or sea or land. Many governments have cooperated to expose and dismantle the network of A.Q. Khan, which sold nuclear secrets to Libya, Iran and North Korea. By all these efforts, we are determined to prevent catastrophic technologies from falling into the hands of an embittered few.

Our coalition is also confronting the dangerous combination of outlaw states, terrorist groups, and weapons of mass destruction. For years, the Taliban made Afghanistan the home base of al Qaeda. And so we gave the Taliban a choice: to abandon forever their support for terror, or face the destruction of their regime. Because the Taliban chose defiance, our coalition acted to remove this threat. And now the terror camps are closed, and the government of a free Afghanistan is represented here today as an active partner in the war on terror.

The people of Afghanistan are a world away from the nightmare of the Taliban. Citizens of Afghanistan have adopted a new constitution, guaranteeing free elections and full participation by women. The new Afghan army is becoming a vital force of stability in that country. Businesses are opening, health care centers are being established, and the children of Afghanistan are back in school, boys and girls.

This progress is a tribute to the brave Afghan people, and to the efforts of many nations. NATO -- including forces from Canada, France, Germany, and other nations -- is leading the effort to provide security. Japan and Saudi Arabia have helped to complete the highway from Kabul to Kandahar, which is furthering commerce and unifying the country. Italy is working with Afghans to reform their legal system, and strengthening an independent judiciary. Three years ago, the people of Afghanistan were oppressed and isolated from the world by a terrorist regime. Today, that nation has a democratic government and many allies -- and all of us are proud to be friends of the Afghan people.

Many countries represented here today also acted to liberate the people of Iraq. One year ago, military forces of a strong coalition entered Iraq to enforce United Nations demands, to defend our security, and to liberate that country from the rule of a tyrant. For Iraq, it was a day of deliverance. For the nations of our coalition, it was the moment when years of demands and pledges turned to decisive action. Today, as Iraqis join the free peoples of the world, we mark a turning point for the Middle East, and a crucial advance for human liberty.

There have been disagreements in this matter, among old and valued friends. Those differences belong to the past. All of us can now agree that the fall of the Iraqi dictator has removed a source of violence, aggression, and instability in the Middle East. It's a good thing that the demands of the United Nations were enforced, not ignored with impunity. It is a good thing that years of illicit weapons development by the dictator have come to the end. It is a good thing that the Iraqi people are now receiving aid, instead of suffering under sanctions. And it is a good thing that the men and women across the Middle East, looking to Iraq, are getting a glimpse of what life in a free country can be like.

There are still violent thugs and murderers in Iraq, and we're dealing with them. But no one can argue that the Iraqi people would be better off with the thugs and murderers back in the palaces. Who would prefer that Saddam's torture chambers still be open? Who would wish that more mass graves were still being filled? Who would begrudge the Iraqi people their long-awaited liberation? On year after the armies of liberation arrived, every soldier who has fought, every aid worker who has served, every Iraqi who has joined in their country's defense can look with pride on a brave and historic achievement. They've served freedom's cause, and that is a privilege.

Today in Iraq, a British-led division is securing the southern city of Basra. Poland continues to lead a multinational division in south-central Iraq. Japan and the Republic of Korea -- of South Korea have made historic commitments of troops to help bring peace to Iraq. Special forces from El Salvador, Macedonia, and other nations are helping to find and defeat Baathist and terrorist killers. Military engineers from Kazakhstan have cleared more than a half a million explosive devices from Iraq. Turkey is helping to resupply coalition forces. All of these nations, and many others, are meeting their responsibilities to the people of Iraq.

Whatever their past views, every nation now has an interest in a free, successful, stable Iraq. And the terrorists understand their own interest in the fate of that country. For them, the connection between Iraq's future and the course of the war on terror is very clear. They understand that a free Iraq will be a devastating setback to their ambitions of tyranny over the Middle East. And they have made the failure of democracy in Iraq one of their primary objectives.

By attacking coalition forces -- by targeting innocent Iraqis and foreign civilians for murder -- the terrorists are trying to weaken our will. Instead of weakness, they're finding resolve. Not long ago, we intercepted a planning document being sent to leaders of al Qaeda by one of their associates, a man named Zarqawi. Along with the usual threats, he had a complaint: "Our enemy," said Zarqawi, "is growing stronger and his intelligence data are increasing day by day -- this is suffocation." Zarqawi is getting the idea. We will never turn over Iraq to terrorists who intend our own destruction. We will not fail the Iraqi people, who have placed their trust in us. Whatever it takes, we will fight and work to assure the success of freedom in Iraq.

Many coalition countries have sacrificed in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Among the fallen soldiers and civilians are sons and daughters of Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, the Republic of Korea, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Spain, Switzerland, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We honor their courage, we pray for the comfort of their families. We will uphold the cause they served.

The rise of democratic institutions in Afghanistan and Iraq is a great step toward a goal of lasting importance to the world. We have set out to encourage reform and democracy in the greater Middle East as the alternatives to fanaticism, resentment, and terror. We've set out to break the cycle of bitterness and radicalism that has brought stagnation to a vital region, and destruction to cities in America and Europe and around the world. This task is historic, and difficult; this task is necessary and worthy of our efforts.

In the 1970s, the advance of democracy in Lisbon and Madrid inspired democratic change in Latin America. In the 1980s, the example of Poland ignited a fire of freedom in all of Eastern Europe. With Afghanistan and Iraq showing the way, we are confident that freedom will lift the sights and hopes of millions in the greater Middle East.

One man who believed in our cause was a Japanese diplomat named Katsuhiko Oku. He worked for the Coalition Provision Authority in Iraq. Mr. Oku was killed when his car was ambushed. In his diary he described his pride in the cause he had joined. "The free people of Iraq," he wrote, "are now making steady progress in reconstructing their country -- while also fighting against the threat of terrorism. We must join hands with the Iraqi people in their effort to prevent Iraq from falling into the hands of terrorists." This good, decent man concluded, "This is also our fight to defend freedom."

Ladies and gentlemen, this good man from Japan was right. The establishment of a free Iraq is our fight. The success of a free Afghanistan is our fight. The war on terror is our fight. All of us are called to share the blessings of liberty, and to be strong and steady in freedom's defense. It will surely be said of our times that we lived with great challenges. Let it also be said of our times that we understood our great duties, and met them in full.

May God bless our efforts.

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MUDD, NOT BOOTH:

KERRY RETREATS FROM HIS DENIAL ON VIETNAM MEET: Evidence Puts Him At Kansas Parley (JOSH GERSTEIN, 3/19/04, NY Sun)

Senator Kerry of Massachusetts yesterday retreated from his earlier steadfast denials that he attended a meeting of Vietnam Veterans Against the War at which a plan to assassinate U.S. Senators was debated.

The reversal came as new evidence, including reports from FBI informants, emerged that contradicted Mr. Kerry’s previous statements about the gathering, which was held in Kansas City, Mo. in November 1971.

“John Kerry had no personal recollection of this meeting 33 years ago,” a Kerry campaign spokesman, David Wade, said in a statement e-mailed last night from Idaho, where Mr. Kerry is on vacation.

Mr. Wade said Mr. Kerry does remember “disagreements with elements of VVAW leadership” that led to his resignation, but the statement did not specify what the disagreements were.

“If there are valid FBI surveillance reports from credible sources that place some of those disagreements in Kansas City, we accept that historical footnote in the account of his work to end the difficult and divisive war,” the statement said.

It did not address the murder plot, though as recently as Wednesday a top aide to Mr. Kerry said that the Massachusetts senator and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee was “absolutely certain” he was not present when the assassination plan, known as the “Phoenix Project,” was discussed.

The New York Sun first reported last week that other anti-war activists placed Mr. Kerry at the Kansas City meeting. A total of six people have now said publicly that they remember seeing Mr. Kerry there.

His failure to report the plot to authorities would seem tough to explain away.

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M. KERRY ET LA BALLON ROUGE

Reggie and the red balloons (John Mercurio, CNN Political Unit, 3/19/04)

Reggie the Republican registration rig will be in Orlando tomorrow. So will the Blue Dog Democrats and their budget-busting red balloons. . . .

The Republican National Committee is parking its 56-foot 18-wheeler inside the convention center, allowing hundreds of volunteers to fan out after the rally for a massive voter-registration blitz. This grass-roots effort to help mobilize the GOP vote is part of the RNC's "unprecedented" commitment to register 3 million new voters by November.

Also on hand, we hear, will be a large number of red balloons, which conservative Blue Dog Democrats plan to use to remind voters of the "ballooning" federal budget deficit that the president has created since 2001. Even though the aforementioned "dogs" are "blue," the balloons are red, presumably to represent the budget's "red ink."

I can't figure out any way to work Eric and Julia Roberts into this post. Oh. Hey! Trifecta.

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ALL THOSE FLIP-FLOPS TAKE A LOT OUT OF A GUY:

Amid Natural Splendor in Idaho, a Weary Kerry Gets Away From It All (DAVID M. HALBFINGER, March 19, 2004, NY Times)

His getaway came at a particularly rough time for the senator, the expected Democratic presidential nominee. For more than a week, he has had to defend himself from an onslaught of attacks by President Bush and millions of dollars in negative advertising, while taking criticism for calling Republicans "crooked" and "lying" and claiming to have the support of leaders whom he has not named. Moreover, a New York Times/CBS News poll indicated that many Americans were beginning to see him as the kind of politician who says what he thinks people want to hear.

Several Democrats and Kerry aides said some of his missteps were a result of exhaustion. They and some of the senator's friends said the vacation could not have come too soon. "He needed it about as badly as anybody could need it," said Sam Grossman, a real estate developer who has skied with Ms. Heinz Kerry here for decades, and with Mr. Kerry for years. "The best thing that can happen is he'll sleep, relax, eat some good food, and then, in a couple of days, he'll be back firing again."

Another reminder of how badly Mr. Kerry needed a break was provided by the Bush campaign, which released a commercial skewering him for saying Tuesday that he had voted both for and against the $87 billion appropriation for military operations and reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan. "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it," he said, referring to an amendment he favored that would have rescinded some tax cuts to help finance the Iraq war.

Mr. Kerry's staff back in Washington was working in overdrive, meanwhile, marshaling surrogates to defend him and punch back at Mr. Bush. They were also compelled, however, to reject an endorsement from one foreign leader: Mahathir Mohamad, former Malaysian prime minister — "an avowed anti-Semite whose views are totally deplorable," Rand Beers, a foreign policy adviser, said in a statement.

But Mr. Beers added that Mr. Kerry would shun as inappropriate the endorsement of any foreign leader at all.

You have to be deeply delusional in order to believe that the Senator makes better decisions about what foreign leaders he beds down with when he's well rested.

He's been wrong on every foreign policy question for thirty years and they think a couple naps will help?

MORE (via Tom Corcoran):
The Treason Temptation: In their growing disdain for their own country Democrats increasingly rely on foreign opinion -- and think this won't cost them politically. (George Neumayr, 3/18/04, American Spectator)

Democrats bristle at the suggestion that they are out of touch with mainstream America. But their rhetorical reliance on opinion from outside the country -- whether it is John Kerry citing support from foreign leaders or Democratic activists citing Scandinavian jurisprudence as they try to topple marriage -- proves it. The more they alienate themselves from mainstream America, the more they rely on foreign cultural currents to push their agenda.

Modern Democrats are peculiar in American political history in that they actually brag about non-American support. This is a political boast the Founding Fathers and early Federalists would find puzzling if not shocking. Independence from foreign opinion and influence is one of the founding marks of America. The Federalist Papers contain chapters entitled "Concerning Dangers From Foreign Force and Influence." John Kerry's foreign-leaders-are-pulling-for-me talk would sound to the American founders like the beginnings of treason.

Democrats loudly emphasize their foreign support, then wonder why they are caricatured as the party that tends toward anti-Americanism. After it turns out that an accused traitor, Susan Lindauer, was a serial employee for Democrats -- hopping from the office of Rep. Peter Defazio to Rep. Ron Wyden's to Senator Carol Moseley Braun's to Rep. Zoe Lofgren's -- one would think the Democrats might show some reluctance to hawk foreign endorsements. But they don't. They consider them useful political props.

They rush to defend the veracity of Kerry's declaration of foreign support, as if the political problem is that it might be false when the real political problem is that it is true. Dem diplomat Richard Holbrooke's defense of Kerry -- "In the last six or seven months, I've been in Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Europe. I've met with leaders in all of those regions, and they have overwhelmingly -- not unanimously but overwhelmingly -- said that they hope that there's a change in leadership" -- supplies Americans with an urgent reason not to vote for Kerry. He is more in tune with the views of foreign leaders than with mainstream America.

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ALL ONE WAR:

 Iraq-al Qaeda link (Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough, March 19, 2004, Washington Times)

We have obtained a document discovered in Iraq from the files of the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS). The report provides new evidence of links between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

The 1993 document, in Arabic, bears the logo of the Iraqi intelligence agency and is labeled "top secret" on each of its 20 pages.

The report is a list of IIS agents who are described as "collaborators."

On page 14, the report states that among the collaborators is "the Saudi Osama bin Laden."

The document states that bin Laden is a "Saudi businessman and is in charge of the Saudi opposition in Afghanistan."

"And he is in good relationship with our section in Syria," the document states, under the signature "Jabar."

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WORKED IN SPAIN:

Taiwanese president, vice president shot but survive (AP, 3/19/04)

President Chen Shui-bian and his vice president were wounded Friday when shots were fired into their motorcade on the final day of campaigning for a landmark election and referendum that could be a turning point in Taiwan's tense relationship with China.

Presumably, though, the Taiwanese aren't as pusillanimous as Europeans.

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OOPS, NEVER MIND THAT ENDORSEMENT BIT:

Statement from Kerry Foreign Policy Advisor Rand Beers on the former Malaysian Prime Minister

“John Kerry rejects any association with former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, an avowed anti-Semite whose views are totally deplorable. The world needs leaders who seek to bring people together, not drive them apart with hateful and divisive rhetoric.

“This election will be decided by the American people, and the American people alone. It is simply not appropriate for any foreign leader to endorse a candidate in America’s presidential election. John Kerry does not seek, and will not accept, any such endorsements.”

Former Malaysian Leader Endorses Kerry (AP, March 18, 2004)

Former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad endorsed Democratic contender John Kerry in the U.S. presidential race Thursday, saying he would keep the world safer than President Bush.

"I think Kerry would be much more willing to listen to the voices of people and of the rest of the world,'' Mahathir, who retired in October after 22 years in power, told The Associated Press in an interview.

"But in the U.S., the Jewish lobby is very strong, and any American who wants to become president cannot change the policy toward Palestine radically,'' he said.

Surely the Senator isn't such a dupe that he thinks the other leaders who are endorsing him have the best interests of the United States and the cause of freedom at heart?

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EPISCOPAL CHURCH GOES TO THE DOGS:

Look what the church dragged in (Miami Herald, 8/9/2003; via Curt Jester)

Rover, of course, needs his run in the park. But what about his spiritual needs?

All Saints Episcopal Church in Fort Lauderdale wants to meet those needs ...

The church just started monthly services for pets and their loved ones, even providing doggie treats for Rover at communion time.

Houses of Worship Are Reaching Out To a Flock of Pets (WSJ, 3/10/2004)

For the first time in 10 years, Mary Wilkinson went to church one Sunday in January. She sat in a back pew at St. Francis Episcopal Church in Stamford, Conn., flipping through a prayer book and listening intently to the priest's sermon.

What drew Ms. Wilkinson back into the fold was a new monthly program the church introduced -- Holy Communion for pets. As part of the service, the 59-year-old retired portfolio manager carried her 17-year-old tiger cat to the altar, waited in line behind three panting dogs to receive the host ...

As a Catholic, I'm more pleased than ever that we're not in communion with the Episcopal Church.

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ONLY 30+ ROTTEN WEEKS TO GO:

Kerry's Uncommon Touch: Besides the flip-flops, John Kerry has another big problem: how his life in the Senate has prepared him for connecting with ordinary Americans. (Hugh Hewitt, 03/18/2004, Weekly Standard)

JOHN KERRY presented President Bush with a St. Patrick's Day gift via the Wednesday morning New York Times. Responding to a new Bush ad reminding voters that Kerry had voted against last year's $87 billion dollar appropriation to support the troops deployed in Iraq, Kerry responded: "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it."

This beautiful bit of nonsense from the nominee followed Sunday's Miami Herald piece on Kerry's many positions on Cuba and Cuba-related issues. The choice paragraphs from among many:

"Asked in the Herald interview last year about sending Elián back to Cuba, Kerry was blunt: 'I didn't agree with that.'"

"But when he was asked to elaborate, Kerry acknowledged that he agreed the boy should have been with his father."

"So what didn't he agree with?"

"'I didn't like the way they did it. I thought the process was butchered,' he said." [...]

KERRY had his first rotten week last week, with his venomous outburst about the "crooked" and lying GOP, his declaration that he wanted to be the nation's second black president, and his assertion that he's spoken with foreign leaders who want him to win in November. Pressed to name these Harvey-the-Rabbit leaders, Kerry dodged and darted, and found himself snarling at Cedric Brown, a signmaker from Pennsylvania. Kerry told Brown that it wasn't any of his business who these pro-Kerry leaders are, and followed that up by bullying Brown into admitting that he had voted for Bush, which led to boos from the pro-Kerry crowd.

As a caller to my show put it: Doesn't Kerry want to win any of the votes that went to Bush in 2000?

We're big fans of Mr. Hewitt, but the comparison of John Kerry to Elwood P. Dowd is a slander upon Jimmy Stewart.

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ANOTHER ENDORSEMENT HE CAN'T AFFORD:

Spain's Next Prime Minister Says U.S. Should Dump Bush (Keith B. Richburg, March 18, 2004, Washington Post)

Prime Minister-elect Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero on Wednesday described the U.S. occupation of Iraq as "a fiasco" and suggested American voters should follow the example set by Spain and change their leadership by supporting Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts for president in November.

"I said during the campaign I hoped Spain and the Spaniards would be ahead of the Americans for once," Zapatero said in an interview on Onda Cero radio. "First we win here, we change this government, and then the Americans will do it, if things continue as they are in Kerry's favor."

Spain, making the world safe for Socialist appeasers...

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MAD MACS (via Tom Morin):

Mel's New Testament Profits: Gibson Could Earn $500 Million From His Leap of Faith (Anne Thompson, March 18, 2004, The Washington Post)

Only one man has ever taken hundreds of millions out of the Hollywood studio system: George Lucas. He socked his "Star Wars" millions into his Bay Area empire Lucasfilm Ltd. and now funds his own movies and reaps the rewards.

Gibson now has the same kind of freedom. Speculation abounds on what he will do with his half-billion.

Asked whether Gibson will donate some of the money from the film to charity, his spokesman Alan Nierob said: "It would be out of character for Mel to publicize his private donations."

He's most likely, sources close to him say, to put money into more religious-themed films. He's scheduled to do another "Mad Max" movie, though those close to Gibson find it hard to imagine him now wanting to do that or make another "Lethal Weapon" sequel.

This much we do know. On Tuesday, Gibson told ABC Radio that there were several "R-rated" Old Testament stories that "fired his imagination," most notably the tale of the Maccabees, who overthrew an idol-worshiping Syrian king in 164 B.C. "They stood up for their beliefs and made war and came out winning," Gibson said. "It's like a western, you know."

Now that would truly be anti-Semitic--Rabbi Foxman's head will explode just at the thought of a supposed Jew-hater turning them into pop heroes.

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WELL, ABORTION IS PROFANE:

School Strips Teen's Pro-Life Tee-Shirt; Attorney Demands Redress (Jim Brown, March 17, 2004, AgapePress)

A Virginia public high school is being threatened with a lawsuit for telling a student that his pro-life T-shirt is equivalent to profanity.

For the past two and a half years at Denbigh High School in Newport News the student has been wearing a sweatshirt that says "Abortion is Homicide. You will not silence my message. You will not mock my God. You will stop killing my generation. Rock For Life."

But the school's assistant principal told the pro-life teen the message on his shirt violated a school rule that prohibits students from using obscene or profane language. He was told not to wear it to school again, even though he had been doing so without incident going on three years.

Nice pun though.

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SWING OR SHTETL?:

A new swing vote: Alliance of Jews & Evangelicals could tip the election (Zev Chafets, March 17, 2004, NY Daily News)

[Yechiel] Eckstein is an unorthodox Orthodox rabbi from Chicago who recently moved to Israel. He wears a baseball hat for a skull cap, and he looks more like an ex-jock than a practicing clergyman. His congregation isn't what you'd expect, either. He is the founder and leader of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, a group linked to 20,000 Evangelical and Pentecostal churches.

Eckstein raises money from Christians and gives it to Jews. Last year alone, he took in around $40 million. Most of it was disbursed in the Holy Land. That's enough to make the Fellowship of Christians and Jews Israel's biggest philanthropic foundation - and Eckstein a very influential figure in his new country.

The rabbi's real power base, though, is still the United States. A close associate of Ralph Reed, Pat Robertson, Gary Bauer and Tom DeLay, Eckstein is at the epicenter of the rapidly developing Jewish-Evangelical political connection.

The fellowship is officially nonpartisan, but there is no question that the partnership Eckstein is building will help the Republicans this year and beyond. For that reason, it is highly controversial in the Jewish establishment. Historically, American Jews have distrusted and disliked Evangelical Christians. Since FDR, they have voted overwhelmingly Democratic in every national election except 1980, when upward of a third cast ballots for Ronald Reagan over the born-again Jimmy Carter.

George W. Bush is born-again, too, but he also is the most pro-Israel President in history. Eckstein believes President Bush will get a significant Jewish vote, perhaps enough to make a difference in electoral battleground states like Illinois, Pennsylvania and, especially, Florida.

The tough part is prying the folks in Florida away from Pat Buchanan.

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THE TERRORISTS WIN AGAIN:

Spain Will Legalise Gay 'Marriages' - Zapatero (Reuters, 3/18/04)

Spain will legalize gay unions, although it may not call them marriages, incoming prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said on Thursday, but he did not set a time-frame for the move.

Where have you gone, Generalissimo...

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MORE BUYER'S REMORSE:

Flip Side (Noam Scheiber, 3/18/2004, TNR Online)

Kerry sympathizers will respond that this kind of analysis reads way too much into what was, after all, only one week. Would that they were right. But a simple look at some recent polling data suggests that's unlikely. Several weeks of favorable coverage during the Democratic primaries and a couple of months of White House missteps had conspired to give Kerry a statistically significant lead over Bush in most polls by late February. This week, a New York Times/CBS poll showed Kerry suffering a 10-point net reversal in his favorable/unfavorable ratings since that time. Maybe that's the kind of thing that happens even to fundamentally strong candidates when they suffer a couple of bad days. But, given the speed and size of the turnaround, the numbers seem far more likely to suggest that Kerry is settling into his natural equilibrium. Unfortunately for Democrats, that's not the one that has him winning in November.

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WAFFLER-IN-CHIEF:

Bush Uses Kerry's Words in Campaign Ad (RON FOURNIER, 3/18/04, AP)

John Kerry's words are being used against him in President Bush's new television ad, which accuses the presumptive Democratic nominee of waffling on military issues.

Airing nationally on cable TV, the commercial borrows heavily from an ad Bush is airing in West Virginia this week criticizing Kerry for voting against an $87 billion aid package for Iraq and Afghanistan last year.

Campaigning in West Virginia Tuesday, Kerry responded to the ad, saying he voted against the $87 billion bill because he did not support the president's military and reconstruction plans. The Democrat explained that he supported a failed amendment that would have paid for the Iraq and Afghanistan programs by repealing Bush's tax cuts.

"I actually did vote for his $87 billion, before I voted against it," Kerry said.

Bush's campaign tacked that quote to the end of the West Virginia ad, which was edited slightly to make room for Kerry's have-it-both-ways response. The new ad was released Thursday.

By the time Karl Rove is done with him, the Senator won't be able to get elected president of IHOP.

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THE ENEMY WITHIN:

House Iraq Resolution Turns Into Debate (JIM ABRAMS, 3/17/04, Associated Press)

The House on Wednesday approved a simple four-point resolution praising U.S. troops and the Iraqi people on the first anniversary of the war in Iraq, but only after a raucous debate over whether the war was warranted and had made the world a safer place.

Democrats said the Republican-written measure was aimed at endorsing President Bush's flawed policies, while Republicans said the removal of Saddam Hussein was an unequivocal victory in the war against terrorism.

The measure passed 327-93...

Next they'll be a filibuster over National Turnip Day.

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GEORGE SOROS HAS COMPANY:

Terror 'Threat' Names Targets (CBS News, March 18, 2004)

The Islamic militant group that claimed responsibility for last week's Madrid train bombings has warned that its next targets could be the United States, Japan, Italy, Britain or Australia, an Arabic newspaper reported Thursday.

The London-based Al-Quds al-Arabi said on its Web site that it had received a statement from "The Brigade of Abu Hafs al-Masri (al Qaeda)" in which the group reiterated its claim of responsibility for the March 11 attacks that killed more than 200 people and wounded 1,600.

"Our brigades are getting ready now for the coming strike," said the statement dated March 15. "Whose turn will it be next? Is it Japan, America, Italy, Britain, Saudi Arabia or Australia?"

The statement warned these countries that "the brigades of death are at your doors," adding that they would strike "with an iron hand at the right time and place."

Are these the foreigners John Kerry says support his election?

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WHERE THE WAR ENDS:

Pakistan: Qaeda No. 2 Surrounded (CBS News, March 18, 2004)

Pakistani officials said Thursday they believe al Qaeda No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahri is surrounded near the Afghan border.

No other details were available.

Pakistani troops and paramilitary forces using artillery and helicopter gunships had launched a new assault Thursday against al Qaeda and Taliban suspects in a tribal region near Afghanistan, two days after a fierce assault that left dozens dead.

The new push began in Azam Warsak, Shin Warsak and Kaloosha villages in South Waziristan, the tribal region that borders Afghanistan, said Brig. Mahmood Shah, the chief of security for the area. Army spokesman Gen. Shaukat Sultan said there have been casualties in the new offensive, but he had no details of how many or on which side.

The operation follows a clash between security forces and suspected Taliban and al Qaeda holdouts in a fortress-like compound in the village of Kaloosha, just miles from the border. Some 41 people — including 15 troops and 26 militants, died in the raid on Tuesday, the military said Thursday. Eighteen other suspects were captured.

A military statement said most of those killed Tuesday were foreigners, but it gave no details of nationalities and acknowledged that only two of the bodies had been recovered. No senior al Qaeda figures are believed to have been among those killed or captured.

One of the two dead militants whose bodies were recovered was a Chechen and the other was believed to be of Middle Eastern origin, a military official said on condition of anonymity.

Given the likelihood that Osama is, and has been, dead, this'd be huge.

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I, TAWANA:

Cops: 'Hate Crime' A Hoax (CBS/AP, 3/18/04)

A professor who claimed she was targeted in a hate crime that stirred student protests at the Claremont Colleges is suspected of staging the vandalism herself, police said Wednesday.

Kerri F. Dunn's car was vandalized and covered with racist, anti-Semitic and sexist epithets on March 9, while she spoke at a forum on racism.

The incident prompted faculty to cancel classes and students to stage rallies the following day.

Two witnesses interviewed by police investigators allegedly saw Dunn, a visiting professor of psychology at Claremont McKenna College, commit the vandalism, police said in a statement.

Is there such thing as a psychologist/psychiatrist who isn't a nutbag?

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LET THE WOLFMAN CAST THE DECIDING VOTE:

Costello plays safe in abortion debate: The Health Minister, Tony Abbott, has put himself at odds with the Treasurer, Peter Costello, in leaving open the possibility of future moves to discourage abortions (Mark Metherell and Alexandra Smith, March 18, 2004, The Sydney Morning Herald)

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DOES CLINTON HAVE ANY FOREIGN POLICY ACHIEVEMENTS?:

Churches Burn as NATO Boosts Kosovo Peace Force (Shaban Buza, Mar 18, 2004, Reuters)

Albanians set fire to Serb Orthodox churches in Kosovo on Thursday as NATO scrambled to deploy up to 1,000 more troops to stifle an explosion of ethnic violence.

A church was torched in the flashpoint town of Mitrovica despite the efforts of French NATO peacekeepers, who fired teargas and rubber bullets to drive off the mob.

Gunshots were heard, but it was not clear where from.

A Serb church and Serb homes were also set ablaze in the central town of Obilic, near the provincial capital Pristina.

Reports from Obilic said NATO peacekeepers had evacuated about 100 Serbs because it could not guarantee their safety -- as happened on Wednesday night in the capital, Pristina.

NATO summoned reinforcements after 22 people were killed in the worst ethnic clashes in Kosovo since the allies and the United Nations took control of the province from Serbia in 1999. Some 500 have been injured, of whom 20 were in intensive care.

Remind us again why we went to war against instead of with the Serbs?

Meanwhile, pompous ass Richard Holbrooke was on Chris Matthews last night criticizing the Bush administrations nation building record--anyone want to compare Afghanistan and Iraq to Haiti, Yugoslavia and Somalia?

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MR. RILEY:

St. Patrick's Day at Riley's (Paul Greenberg, March 17, 2004, Townhall)

With sincere apologies to, and selective quotations from, Finley Peter Dunne, creator of the immortal Mister Dooley, the Irish barkeep and political sage who first noted that politics ain't beanbag.

J. Aloysius Hennessey looked even more confused than usual as he came through the swinging doors of Riley's Royal I.R.A. Vegetable Bar Grill at the corner of Broadway and Apocrypha. He headed straight for the bar at the back - as if he were late for an appointment.

Hennessey would have taken off his coat if he'd had one, and plunked down a dollar if he had one. Instead, he raised a forefinger straight up to indicate his order: One Cold One.

Mr. Riley calmly took the dishrag he usually wore casually draped over his left shoulder, leisurely dusted off the free lunch, nodded sagely (he couldn't nod any other way, being a sage), and raised his own forefinger to point out the Past Due list taped to barroom mirror. Hennessey's name led all the rest.

"I'm confused," Hennessey confessed.

"As if I'd ever seen you whin ye weren't," said Mr. Riley.

"It's this prezydential iliction, donnybrook, lollypaloooza and general foofaraw and brouhaha," explained Hennessey. "Here 'tis only Saint Paddy's Day and th' two distinguished candydates is already debatin' the issues iv th' day by throwin' chairs at one anwather. 'Tis worse thin me last family reunion. Just when did this campaign start, anyway?"

"It started, Hennessey, th' day th' the last prezydential iliction ended. And it'll be over shortly befure th' ides iv November, which is whin th' next one starts. The Missus Clinton is already gearin' op fir that wan. Aught-eight is her year. She's joost waitin' fir a clear field, like a filly in th' Irish Sweepstakes. And it'll shure be a race t'see!"

"I'll dhrink to that," said Hennessey.

One doubts you could get away with doing minstrel show dialect today.

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PIECEWORK:

Your Place or Mine?: Telecommuting can produce real savings, but employees are now reluctant to cut the cord. Should companies do it for them? (Doug Bartholomew, March 15, 2004, CFO)

As a CFO in these still uncertain economic times, imagine saving $3,000 per employee per year. And lopping $71 million off your real estate bill. Oh, and how about a 4 to 12 percent boost in employee productivity?

Sound good? Those are some figures thrown around by advocates of telecommuting, or, as some prefer to call it, teleworking. While the numbers may be optimistic, they do suggest that working from home isn't just good for commute-weary employees but for employers as well. But properly equipping a remote employee is more complicated than you might think, as is deciding whether the investment truly pays off. More vexing still may be the issue of who should take the lead in pushing for—or pushing back on—work-from-home arrangements. [...]

However these workers are defined, their numbers are increasing, at least by some measures (as with the total population, growth rates vary depending on how teleworker is defined). To be effective from home, they typically rely on a computer, often a laptop that travels back and forth from home to office; an Internet connection, preferably broadband and not dial-up; a telephone; maybe a fax machine; and, increasingly, a growing range of corporate-based software applications that can be accessed from home.

Also close at hand, of course, are family members, pets, and maybe the plumber, coming sometime between 10 and noon. With distractions, obligations, and temptations in abundance, productivity is bound to suffer. Isn't it?

Not necessarily. Most corporations with large numbers of teleworkers report productivity increases, not declines. "A number of companies fear their workers will be at home with their feet up in front of the TV, and that's just not the case," says IDC analyst Merle Sandler. "You can put measures in place to see if employees are actually producing what they are expected to produce."

Realistically, folks don't do more than a few of hours of truly productive work even if they're in the office, so why not make it so they can put in those hours at their convenience.

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NOT FAIR TO MODO:

Both of them are fairly unreadable nowadays, but here are consecurtive entries in the NY Times newsletter today:

Axis of Appeasement
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
The notion that Spain can separate itself from Al Qaeda's
onslaught on Western civilization by pulling its troops
from Iraq is a fantasy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/18/opinion/18FRIE.html

Pride and Prejudice
By MAUREEN DOWD
The Republicans prefer to paint our old ally as craven
rather than accept the Spanish people's judgment ˜ that the
Iraq takeover had nothing to do with the war on terror.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/18/opinion/18DOWD.html
Kind of cruel of the editors to juxtapose Ms Dowd, their resident expert on Sex and the City and such pop trivialities, with their foreign policy guru.

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SHOW US THE VOTES:

Blacks Shift to the Center: Why the Democrats are losing their hammerlock on this constituency. (John H. McWhorter, 3/18/04, FrontPage)

There are no indications that voting Republican will become the norm among blacks any time soon — and a good thing, too, because being a slam-dunk voting bloc for a single party means that neither party has any reason to court your vote with meaningful proposals. But more and more, black politics are moving to a constructive center, wary of sad realities but open to the fact that change does happen.

In a poll conducted by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in 2000, for example, 74% of blacks were registered as Democrats. By 2002, that number had fallen to 63%, with about one in four blacks — many of them younger voters — registered as independents.

In a 1995 Gallup poll, almost all blacks favored affirmative action in the form of outreach to minorities, but 78% were opposed to hiring minority applicants when they were less qualified than white ones. [...]

Of course, most of us still know a black person or two who bring to mind Homey the Clown from the television variety classic "In Living Color," painting life as a black person in the U.S. as an endless battle against racist abuse. This ideology, increasingly difficult to square with reality, is a legacy of a stain that the past left on the African American self-image.

In his 1951 classic, "The True Believer," Eric Hoffer noted that fanatic movements attracted people who found a balm for their insecurity by folding themselves into movements that stressed unquestioning allegiance. Forging true progress means engaging with the complexities of the real world, but this requires individual initiative. Therefore, fanatic movements sidestep logical engagement in favor of mythologies and recreational fury. Post-civil rights blacks have been ripe for such ideologies: Left with a sense that one is inferior, nothing could be more soothing than a new identity based on resenting a morally inferior enemy.

For the true believer, a paradisiacal future is the focus, which requires that the present be remorselessly condemned regardless of actual conditions. Hence the black "victicrat's" insistence year after year that "most" black Americans remain mired in misery.

Homey the Clown and Eric Hoffer--now there's a parlay. Meanwhile, we'll withhold judgment on whether black America is moderating until we see if George W. Bush gets back up to at least Reaganesque levels of support in 2004.

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NUMBERS OTHERS CAN ONLY DREAM OF:

Census projects more diversity (Haya El Nasser, 3/18/04, USA TODAY)

The oldest baby boomers will turn 65 in 2011. By 2030, 20% of Americans will be 65 or older, up from 12% in 2000.

The profound demographic shifts promise to redefine American society at every level — from the ethnic make-up of suburban neighborhoods to public education, elderly care and national voting patterns.

Economists say that as the U.S. population ages, the increase in the working-age population will help pay for Social Security, Medicare and other government benefits for seniors.

The population increase also will fuel the housing market. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has cited the increase in the population for helping to keep the housing industry humming.

While far lower than the 86% population increase from 1950 to 2000, the projected 49% growth by 2050 contrasts sharply with forecasts for most European countries. Germany and Italy, for example, are on the brink of population declines because of low fertility rates.

The projections suggest that whites who are not Hispanic — the dominant population group since the nation was founded in 1776 — will see their share of the population drop from 69% in 2000 to 50% in 2050.

Immigration is all well and good, but the task now is to get those of us who are already here to boost fertility rates.

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WESTERN KURDISTAN:

12 Kurds Killed in More Clashes with Syrian Police (Kerry Sheridan, 17 Mar 2004, Voice of America)

At least 12 Kurds have been killed in northern Syria, in the latest in a series of clashes with police that began last Friday.

Several people were shot to death in northeastern Syria on Tuesday, when security forces fired at Kurdish demonstrators. Hundreds had gathered to mark the anniversary of the devastating chemical attacks that Saddam Hussein launched against Kurds in northern Iraq 16 years ago.

The deaths followed several days of violence between Kurds and Syrian police, which began when fighting broke out between Arabs and Kurds at a football game last week. [...]

Ms. Harris said the unrest is the most serious in recent history, and is escalating. She said Kurds from Turkey have tried to cross the border into Syria to show their solidarity, but have been blocked by Turkish army forces. Kurdish groups in Iran and Belgium have held demonstrations to protest the treatment of Kurds in Syria.

You'd think Baby Assad would prefer the Qaddafi model to Saddam's fate.

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DO POLICE EVER ADDRESS ROOT CAUSES?:

US vs. Europe: two views of terror: White House sees a war; European allies focus on police work. (Howard LaFranchi, 3/18/04, CS Monitor)

With President Bush set to emphasize in a speech Friday that the war in Iraq is a cornerstone of his war on terrorism, the White House is leaving no doubt about its view that the battle against terror, as practiced in this century, is indeed a war. But that view has not caught on with America's European allies - and has only met with more vehement rejection as the Bush administration has equated the terror war with the Iraq war.

After decades of battling terrorism on their own soil, Europeans continue to believe that the best counterterrorism work is done through police intelligence and cooperation. And they believe that characterizing the fight as a "war" only antagonizes the populations that have produced terrorist groups and makes it harder to address the root causes of terrorism.

What may have changed now is the arrival of the same kind of terrorism in the heart of Europe that prompted America's sense of urgency, some experts say. But they add that transatlantic cooperation will be enhanced only if the US dictates less what Europe's response should be, and instead sits down to more fully understand Europe's sense of facing a new threat.

If the root cause of Islamicist terror is the complete failure of the states in the Islamic world to provide decent living standards for their people and remain competitive with the West, then how can you mount an effective counterterrorism effort without destabilizing the region and replacing regimes and the governing ideology?

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NOT CHARITY, BUT SURVIVAL:

In fast-growing Texas, businesses aid schools (Kris Axtman, 3/18/04, CS Monitor)

The classrooms are filled with new learning tools, walls are freshly painted, inside and out, and new playground equipment gleams in the late winter sun.

These recent improvements to His Place Day Care Center on the city's heavily Hispanic east side have come despite statewide education cutbacks. Where public funding is failing to support struggling preschools and kindergartens, local branches of companies such as Baker Hughes, ExxonMobil, and IBM are making a much needed entrance in this land of sandboxes and pint-size desks.

It's part of a growing realization by businesses that investment and involvement in early childhood development is crucial to their own success. The flurry of public-private cooperation is especially welcome in states with fast-growing young populations - of which Texas is the leader.

"It's just wonderful," says Hattie Robinson White, the day care's executive director. His Place Day Care Center has received more than $60,000 through an ExxonMobile program and volunteers from Baker Hughes pitched in to help paint the school. "More and more, we need corporate America to step up and say, 'We want to make an investment in the lives of children,' because they are going to be paying on one end or the other. This is their future workforce."

Democrats can keep arguing that the GOP only supports private remedies for education because of ideology, but businesses--which have to hire the products of public schools-- recognize that the system is failing.

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JEWS ALIENATED BY JUDEO-CHRISTIAN VALUES?:

Jewish Americans wary of Bush evangelical base (Ralph Z. Hallow, March 17, 2004, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

[J]ewish leaders say President Bush's gains among heavily Democratic Jewish voters for his support of Israel and the Iraq war could be offset by policy initiatives influenced by evangelical Christians, who many Jews think are anti-Semitic despite their support of Israel.

"Jews are generally turned off by the views that his administration has taken on a host of issues -- including stem cell research, the faith-based initiative, a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, abortion rights -- that are very popular with the president's evangelical base," said Ira Forman, executive director of the National Jewish Democratic Council, which raises money and support for Democratic candidates.

Christian conservatives have been especially supportive of Israel, but many Jewish Americans think the majority of Israel's supporters on the religious right are anti-Semitic, said David Twersky, international affairs director of the American Jewish Congress.

A January poll sponsored by the American Jewish Committee shows that 20 percent of Jewish Americans think most Christian conservatives are anti-Semitic and another 21 percent say many are. Even though those numbers have dipped, nearly 50 percent predict bias against Jews will grow in America.

It is a strange world we live in when you can be that bigoted but still think yourself the victim of bias.

MORE:
-Kerry Camp Moving To Calm Jewish Fears: One-on-one confabs for big givers, secret conference calls may be paying off. (James D. Besser, 3/19/04, The Jewish Week)

Faced with reports that some big Jewish contributors are still wary of the John Kerry presidential campaign, and with even stronger concerns that Republican charges of Kerry's Mideast flip-flops were starting to stick, the campaign is moving aggressively to firm up Jewish financial support.

In numerous one-on-one conversations with Kerry backers and in secret conference calls, potential contributors are being reassured that the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee will be a strong candidate against President George W. Bush, and that he will be a strong supporter of Israel.

Those efforts seem to be paying off.

Top Kerry supporters report that many Jewish givers, the financial backbone of the Democratic Party, are plunging in even as some have expressed concerns about Kerryís statements on Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and Israelís security fence.

-Jews Choose: Will George W. Bush get their vote come November? (Carl Schrag, Feb. 10, 2004, Slate)

Matthew Brooks, the executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, has been riding high lately. Who can blame him? After toiling away as the leading spokesman of Jewish Republicans for more than a dozen years, he's finally starting to see signs that the tiny interest group might be growing.

When the American Jewish Committee released a poll last month showing that as many as 31 percent of American Jews would vote for President Bush if presidential elections were held today, Brooks could hardly contain his glee. In fact, he didn't seem to try at all.

"It [is] now undeniable that there is a major shift taking place among Jewish voters," Brooks trumpeted in a press release commenting on the poll.

Considering that Bush drew just 19 percent of the Jewish vote in 2000, it wouldn't take much of a shift for the numbers to rise. But the RJC shouldn't pop the champagne corks prematurely; Jews may have some very good reasons to shift their allegiances, but they also have strong motivation to stay within the Democratic fold. November is a long way off, and there's plenty of time for people to think and rethink the question of which candidate to choose.

A few days ago, I spoke with a woman in Chicago who could have been speaking for many Jews I know. "What am I supposed to do in November?" she asked. "Bush has been so good for Israel, and that's so important to me."

"So, what's the problem?" I asked, even though I knew exactly what her problem was. I hear it every day.

"I'm a lifelong Democrat," she said. "How can I vote for Bush?" She is gratified by Bush's support for Israel in the post-9/11 era, and she believes he's right to pursue the war on terror. But she disagrees with just about every plank of his domestic agenda, and she can't conceive of casting a vote that might mean further weakening the separation of church and state or an end to Roe v. Wade.

Good on Israel, bad on baby-killing.

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GETTIN' BUTT-WHIPPED BY A FAT OLD BALD GUY WITH A BUM TICKER:

Remarks by the Vice President at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum (3/17/04)

The President's conduct in leading America through a time of unprecedented danger - his ability to make decisions and stand by them - is a measure that must be applied to the candidate who now opposes him in the election of 2004.

In one of Senator Kerry's recent observations about foreign policy, he informed his listeners that his ideas have gained strong support, at least among unnamed foreigners he's been spending time with. (Laughter.) Senator Kerry said that he has met with foreign leaders, and I quote, " who can't go out and say this publicly, but boy they look at you and say, 'You've got to win this, you've got to beat this guy, we need a new policy,' things like that." End quote.

A few days ago in Pennsylvania, a voter asked Senator Kerry directly who these foreign leaders are. Senator Kerry said, "That's none of your business." (Laughter.) But it is our business when a candidate for President claims the political endorsement of foreign leaders. At the very least, we have a right to know what he is saying to foreign leaders that makes them so supportive of his candidacy. American voters are the ones charged with determining the outcome of this election - not unnamed foreign leaders. (Applause.)

Senator Kerry's voting record on national security raises some important questions all by itself. Let's begin with the matter of how Iraq and Saddam Hussein should have been dealt with. Senator Kerry was in the minority of senators who voted against the Persian Gulf War in 1991. At the time, he expressed the view that our international coalition consisted of " shadow battlefield allies who barely carry a burden." Last year, as we prepared to liberate Iraq, he recalled the Persian Gulf coalition a little differently. He said it was a "strong coalition," and a model to be followed.

Six years after the Gulf War, in 1997, Saddam Hussein was still defying the terms of the cease-fire. And as President Bill Clinton considered military action against Iraq, he found a true believer in John Kerry. The Senator from Massachusetts said, quote, "Should the resolve of our allies wane, the United States must not lose its resolve to take action." He further warned that if Saddam Hussein were not held to account for violation of U.N. resolutions, some future conflict would have " greater consequence." In 1998, Senator Kerry indicated his support for regime change, with ground troops if necessary. And, of course, when Congress voted in October of 2002, Senator Kerry voted to authorize military action if Saddam refused to comply with U.N. demands.

A neutral observer, looking at these elements of Senator Kerry's record, would assume that Senator Kerry supported military action against Saddam Hussein. The Senator himself now tells us otherwise. In January he was asked on TV if he was, quote, "one of the anti-war candidates." He replied, "I am." He now says he was voting only to, quote, "threaten the use of force," not actually to use force.

Even if we set aside these inconsistencies and changing rationales, at least this much is clear: Had the decision belonged to Senator Kerry, Saddam Hussein would still be in power, today, in Iraq. In fact, Saddam Hussein would almost certainly still be in control of Kuwait. (Laughter.)

Senator Kerry speaks often about the need for international cooperation, and has vowed to usher in a "golden age of American diplomacy." He is fond of mentioning that some countries did not support America's actions in Iraq. Yet of the many nations that have joined our coalition - allies and friends of the United States - Senator Kerry speaks with open contempt. Great Britain, Australia, Italy, Spain, Poland, and more than 20 other nations have contributed and sacrificed for the freedom of the Iraqi people. Senator Kerry calls these countries, quote, "window dressing." They are, in his words, "a coalition of the coerced and the bribed."

Many questions come to mind, but the first is this: How would Senator Kerry describe Great Britain - coerced, or bribed? Or Italy - which recently lost 19 citizens, killed by terrorists in Najaf - was Italy's contribution just window dressing? If such dismissive terms are the vernacular of the golden age of diplomacy Senator Kerry promises, we are left to wonder which nations would care to join any future coalition. He speaks as if only those who openly oppose America's objectives have a chance of earning his respect. Senator Kerry's characterization of our good allies is ungrateful to nations that have withstood danger, hardship, and insult for standing with America in the cause of freedom.

Senator Kerry has also had a few things to say about support for our troops now on the ground in Iraq. Among other criticisms, he has asserted that those troops are not receiving the materiel support they need. Just this morning, he again gave the example of body armor, which he said our administration failed to supply. May I remind the Senator that last November, at the President's request, Congress passed an $87 billion supplemental appropriation. This legislation was essential to our ongoing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan - providing funding for body armor and other vital equipment; hazard pay; health benefits; ammunition; fuel, and spare parts for our military. The legislation passed overwhelmingly, with a vote in the Senate of 87 to 12. Senator Kerry voted no. I note that yesterday, attempting to clarify the matter, Senator Kerry said, quote, "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it." (Laughter.) It's a true fact. (Laughter.)

On national security, the Senator has shown at least one measure of consistency. Over the years, he has repeatedly voted against weapons systems for the military. He voted against the Apache helicopter, against the Tomahawk cruise missile, against even the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. He has also been a reliable vote against military pay increases - opposing them no fewer than 12 times.

Many of these very weapons systems have been used by our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and are proving to be valuable assets in the war on terror. In his defense, of course, Senator Kerry has questioned whether the war on terror is really a war at all. Recently he said, and I quote, "I don't want to use that terminology." In his view, opposing terrorism is far less of a military operation and far more of an intelligence-gathering, law enforcement operation. As we have seen, however, that approach was tried before, and proved entirely inadequate to protecting the American people from the terrorists who are quite certain they are at war with us - and are comfortable using that terminology.

I leave it for Senator Kerry to explain, or explain away his votes and his statements about the war on terror, our cause in Iraq, the allies who serve with us, and the needs of our military. Whatever the explanation, whatever nuances he might fault us for neglecting, it is not an impressive record for someone who aspires to become Commander-in-Chief in this time of testing for our country. In his years in Washington, Senator Kerry has been one vote of a hundred in the United States Senate - and fortunately on matters of national security, he was very often in the minority. But the presidency is an entirely different proposition. The President always casts the deciding vote. And the Senator from Massachusetts has given us ample doubts about his judgment and the attitude he brings to bear on vital issues of national security.

The American people will have a clear choice in the election of 2004, at least as clear as any since the election of 1984. In more than three years as President, George W. Bush has built a national security record of his own. America has come to know the President after one of the worst days in our history. He saw America through tragedy. He has kept the nation's enemies in desperate flight, and under his leadership, our country has once again led the armies of liberation, freeing 50 million souls from tyranny, and making our nation and the world more secure.

All Americans, regardless of political party, can be proud of what our nation has achieved in this historic time, when so many depended on us, and all the world was watching. And I have been very proud to work with a President who - like other Presidents we have known - has shown, in his own conduct, the optimism, and strength, and decency of the great nation he serves.

Thank you very much.

John Kerry's such an easy target he made Dick Cheney sound like James Carville.

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CAN'T BUY THEIR LOVE (via ef brown):

Poll Finds Hostility Hardening Toward U.S. Policies (SUSAN SACHS, 3/17/04, NY Times)

In some predominantly Muslim countries, where negative attitudes toward American policy have prevailed for years, disapproval of the United States persisted over the past year, although at a less intense level that Mr. Kohut described as anger rather than hatred.

Still, the survey found, people in Jordan, Pakistan and Morocco tended to view other outsiders with almost the same degree of ill will and distrust as they did the United States. Opinions about the European Union and the United Nations were generally unfavorable or ambivalent at best, a sharp contrast to opinion in Europe and Russia where attitudes toward those institutions were positive. [...]

Turkish attitudes toward the United States improved during the past year, possibly a reflection of satisfaction that post-war Iraq has not descended into a civil war that might threaten or destabilize Turkey. This year, 30 percent of Turks rated the United States favorably, compared with 12 percent last year.

Europe's not going to get on their good side by getting on our bad.

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WHY GO BACKWARDS?:

US stalls on Iranian offer of reform deal (Guy Dinmore, March 16 2004, Financial Times)

The US has for 10 months been stalling over an Iranian offer of landmark talks that would see the Islamic republic address Washington's concerns on nuclear weapons, terrorism and Israel - because of divisions within the Bush administration. [...]

What has become known in diplomatic circles as Iran's "grand bargain" was first communicated to the US State Department through the "Swiss channel" on May 4 last year. Switzerland represents US interests in Iran. The communication quoted a senior Iranian official as laying out a "road map" to normalise relations, which have been hostile since the Iranian revolution of 1979.

Under the plan, Iran would address US concerns over nuclear weapons and terrorism, co-ordinate policy on Iraq and consider a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In return, Iran expected a lifting of sanctions, recognition of its security interests, dropping of "regime change" from the official US lexicon and eventual re-establishment of relations. "There was a lot of detail to be worked out," said one American familiar with the proposal. "They proposed concrete steps on how to work on this. The substance of the agenda was pretty reasonable."

However, Washington has given no formal response to the offer. Instead, the Swiss foreign ministry received a rebuke from the US for "overstepping" its mandate.

Why would we cut a deal with the totalitarians in a place where a significant internal reform movement already exists and the regime is so embattled?

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IS THE LEFT MORE PRO-DEMOCRACY OR ANTI-CHRISTIAN?:

Killing Iraq With Kindness: Imposing "universal values" by force just doesn't work. (IAN BURUMA, 3/17/04, NY Times)

Once again a nation with a universalist mission to liberate the world is creating dangerous enemies (and once again Jews are being blamed). This is not necessarily because the Islamic world hates democracy, but because the use of armed force — combined with the hypocrisy of going after one dictator while coddling others, the arrogant zealotry of some American ideologues and the failures of a ham-handed occupation — are giving America's democratic mission a bad name.

One problem with American troops' liberating the Middle East is that it confirms the opinions of both Muslims and Westerners who see the Iraq war as part of a religious war, a "clash of civilizations" in the phrase of the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington. On the face of it, this would seem an unlikely proposition. Saddam Hussein did not rule over an Islamic state. Far from it; he killed large numbers of Muslims. Whatever his values are, it would be an insult to claim they represent Arab civilization. And although Tony Blair (also a fan of the phrase "universal values") and George W. Bush are Christians, religion does not appear to have played a major part in their war aims.

Yet to many Arab Muslims inside and outside Iraq, this does indeed look like a war unleashed by "Zionists and Crusaders" to keep the Muslims down, or worse, impose a foreign civilization on an Arab nation. This is certainly the way Islamist extemists see it. But then, they always were believers in Mr. Huntington's thesis.

Islamists, however, do not represent Muslim or Arab civilization — any more than the Christian Coalition, let alone "Zionists," represents the West. Iraq is a perfect example of how ethnic, religious and cultural fault lines run inside national borders. The future of Iraq is not being forged out of a battle between West and East, or between Muslims and Christians, but between Shiites and Sunnis, Kurds and Arabs, Baathists and democrats. The main fault line crossing most Muslim societies isn't even between secularists and religionists, but between Muslims with different ideas about the proper role of religion.

Islamists of the kind represented by Al Qaeda are religious revolutionaries. But it is perfectly possible for a practicing Muslim to be against United States intervention, free-market capitalism, sexual freedom and the importing of Hollywood movies without being a theocratic revolutionary. Such a person may be a moderate reformer who believes, as did many Europeans until just a few decades ago, that democratic politics is best organized along religious lines.

The real question for the Western universalists, then, is whether the cause of moderate Muslims is helped by the revolutionary war that has been set off by the American and British armies. For that is what the war in Iraq is: not a clash of civilizations, but a revolution unleashed through outside force.

That does state the case well. This is in fact a religious crusade on the part of the United States because the universalist values it is promoting, unlike the rationalist ones of Napoleon and the French, derive from Judeo-Christianity. That seems to be why the secularists of the American Left and Europe so passionately oppose Iraq's liberation.

Unfortunately for folks like Mr. Buruma, the answer to his question is the precise opposite of what he thinks it is. Obviously Iraqis (especially Kurds and Shi'ites) are better off today than they were a year ago, and state this themselves. But, in addition, the Sau'dis are starting to tamp down Wahabbism themselves; Syrians have begun protesting their Ba'athist regime for the first time; Colonel Qaddaffi has radically realigned his nation towards the West; Sudan is taking tentative steps towards peace; Hizbullah is moving towards politics rather than terror; King Mohammed VI is democratizing Morocco rather rapidly; Irans clerics were forced to so damage their own republic, in order to stop true liberal reform, that they've lost all legitimacy; smaller Gulf States like the UAE are really trailblazing; etc.; etc.; etc.

Indeed, any honest assessment of the President's revolutionary project in the Islamic world would have to conclude that it could hardly be going better. The issue for folks like Mr. Buruma then--what we might call, as Michael Walzer has, the Decent Left--is whether they are forced to oppose a successful policy of democratic liberalization just because they oppose its religious sources and leader.

MORE:
Our Union’s Jewish State (David Klinghoffer, 3/17/04, The Forward)

If anyone else has pointed out what a Jewish piece of oratory the recent State of the Union address was, I’m not aware of it. The ethos, the whole moral outlook, was Jewish, and this observation raises a question: How did America come to be the most Judaic country on earth, a country where one could plausibly say such a thing about the principal yearly address given by an American president? [...]

An amazingly observant and prescient writer, [the sainted Reform rabbi Leo Baeck (1873-1956)] understood Judaism’s daughter religion as being in a constant state of war with her own Jewish soul. In certain periods of Christian history, he explained, the Judaic heritage — what he called "classical” religion — was dominant: an emphasis on ethics, on commandments. In other periods, this Jewish side of Christianity was submerged under a "romantic” tendency that revered not ethical action but emotional experience, that gauzy, swooning sensation of feeling and glorying in being personally "saved.”

This essentially aesthetic, passive version of religion loves sacred music and wafting incense, but can look with indifference on injustice and tyranny. By contrast, the Jewish "classical” counter-tendency thinks less about the self and more about the wrongs done by human beings and directs a focused passion to setting things right on earth. This leads to a messianic longing for a final redemption of all people, as well as to a certain missionary instinct to share your ethical vision with others. [...]

Back to the State of the Union. One is struck by the heartfelt piety, entirely compatible with the Hebrew Bible, accompanied by the moral impulse and the will to defeat systematized injustice: in Baeck’s terms, by the ethical and the messianic.

The president advocates "confidence and faith” because "The momentum of freedom in our world is unmistakable — and it is not carried forward by our power alone. We can trust in that greater power who guides the unfolding of the years. And in all that is to come, we can know that His purposes are just and true.” [...]

Nothing like this is to be found in Europe — where sexual decadence is smiled upon, where it was thought that leaving Iraqis to suffer under their horrendous dictator was the most reasonable course of action. Lofty or comical, it’s something for which we Jews should not forget to thank our Maker. Which reminds me: Thank you, God, for making me an American.

Amen, brother.

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AXIS OF EVIL FILES:

Chinese, French warships stage joint 'non-conventional security' drill (AFP, Mar 16, 2004)

Chinese and French warships carried out a joint exercise Tuesday, marking the largest naval drill China has ever conducted with a foreign country, state media and officials said.

The exercise, coming at the end of a five-day visit by French naval vessels to China, was aimed at improving capabilities in the field of "non-conventional security," according to the Chinese foreign ministry.

"In recent years, the development of the relations between the two countries and the two militaries has been growing smoothly," ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao told a regular briefing.

The exercise came just four days ahead of crucial presidential elections on Taiwan, watched carefully by China which is in constant fear of separatist sentiments on the island.

One advantage of extending a nuclear guarantee to Taiwan is that if Chine made a move we could nuke its ally France.

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HE'S NO BOB DOLE:

John Kerry's attention deficit disorder (Orrin Judd. March 15, 2004, Enter Stage Right)

As a threshold matter, the image of Mr. Kerry that is already beginning to gel, and which will solidify quickly as Karl Rove begins to spend his millions, is of a hyper-cautious flip-flopper, slow to make a decision and then prone to second-guess himself, even to switch to the opposite position. Nor is it just the GOP driving this meme. Even the New York Times's February 26th endorsement of him, for the New York State primary, was as tentative as a kiss for a sister:

"Mr. Kerry, one of the Senate's experts in foreign affairs, exudes maturity and depth. He can discuss virtually any issue of security or international affairs with authority. What his critics see as an inability to take strong, clear positions seems to us to reflect his appreciation that life is not simple. He understands the nuances and shades of gray in both foreign and domestic policy. While he still has trouble turning out snappy sound bites, we don't detect any difficulty in laying down a clear bottom line. His campaigning skills are perhaps not as strong as his intellectual ones, but they are pretty good and getting better. Early in the race he alienated some audiences with brittle, patronizing lectures. But he has improved tremendously over the last few months. His answers are focused and to the point, and his speeches far more compelling. [...]

A sense of balance comes through when he is talking. Unfortunately, so far in this campaign Mr. Kerry has shown little interest in being daring, expressing a thought that is unexpected or quirky on even minor issues."

If that's the most passion his amen corner can muster, he's in trouble already.

Thus, THE BROTHERS JUDD 2004 KERRY RESIGNATION PROGNOSTATHON.

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11:

Courier, 11, seen as pawn in Mideast terror: Boy was unaware he carried bomb (Charles A. Radin, 3/17/2004, Boston Globe)

Israeli military and intelligence analysts were reexamining unsolved terror bombing cases yesterday, after an 11-year-old boy was stopped at a checkpoint with a 20-pound, nail-reinforced bomb in a backpack. Israeli and Palestinian officials said the boy did not know what he was carrying.

Investigators said they were looking into whether this method could have been used in previous cases in which the route of bombs from their makers to their users was never discovered. The incident, the first time a child was found carrying a bomb unknowingly, seems likely to revive long-standing concerns on both sides about the willingness of Palestinian terrorists to involve children in their operations.

Eleven.

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JOHN WHO?:

Some Dems to run away from Kerry (Hans Nichols, 3/17/04, The Hill)

A handful of House Democrats who look vulnerable in November’s election, plan to run away from their party’s presumptive presidential nominee, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), and will not endorse him.

The holdouts are a minority of the 17 “frontliners” selected by the party leadership for member-to-member cash infusions, but their attitude reflects varying levels of comfort with how the New England senator will play in their districts.

A majority of frontliners, including those who are from conservative districts carried by President Bush in 2000, and have slim majorities, plan to campaign with and for Kerry.

But, regardless of their formal position on Kerry, most vow to run “independent campaigns.”

Several lawmakers, including Reps. Rodney Alexander (D-La.), Allen Boyd (D-Fla.), Jim Marshall (D-Ga.), Jim Matheson (D-Utah) and Dennis Moore (D-Kan.) have told The Hill they do not currently plan to endorse Kerry.

Alexander, who late last week denied he was considering switching parties, wrote to union supporters, stating: “I’d like to clarify. I will not be endorsing any candidate, including President Bush.”

Moore said he is leaning against endorsing Kerry, although he does not expect the presidential circus to run through Kansas, which Bush won overwhelmingly.

“I don’t suspect that I am going to run my campaign in accordance with the Democratic nominee,” Moore said. “I am going to run my campaign without regard to what the nominee does. They don’t have long coattails in Kansas.”

Boyd’s Florida district, which Bush carried with 53 percent, is expected to see some of the heaviest presidential traffic in the country. But the fourth-term lawmaker told The Hill that he remains undecided about endorsing Kerry. “At some point, we’ll meet individually,” said Boyd.

“You would want to get an assurance personally on how he’s going to run,” he added.

Through spokesmen, Marshall and Matheson said they have no plans to endorse Kerry. Both Georgia and Utah are expected to vote heavily for Bush.

Keeping in mind that this is John Kerry's high-water mark, it still seems possible that at least one of the Senate Democrats will endorse President Bush, maybe even one of those being mentioned as a possible vice presidential running mate (their being mentioned indicating just how far to the Right they are within the Party).

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ILLINOIS WILL BE ASSIMILATED:

State Sen. Obama wins Democratic Senate primary in Ill.; millionaire Ryan wins on GOP side (MIKE ROBINSON, March 16, 2004, Associated Press)

State Sen. Barack Obama, a former civil rights lawyer seeking to become just the third black U.S. senator in a century, easily won the Democratic primary Tuesday, setting up a November contest that is key to the party's bid to regain control of the closely divided Senate.

Millionaire Jack Ryan defeated a crowded field to capture the Republican nomination. With 70 percent of the votes counted, Ryan had 130,713 votes, or 36 percent. Dairy owner Jim Oberweis had 87,007 votes, or 24 percent, and state Sen. Steve Rauchenberger had 76,187 votes, or 21 percent.

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TIME TO UPDATE YOUR ENTRY:

Nation's Direction Prompts Voters' Concern, Poll Finds (ADAM NAGOURNEY and JANET ELDER, March 16, 2004, NY Times)

The Times/CBS News poll offered the latest evidence that the race for president was as tight as has long been predicted. Even after two weeks in which Mr. Bush has run televised advertisements promoting himself and attacking Mr. Kerry, and in which Mr. Kerry has enjoyed the glow of favorable coverage that greeted his near-sweep of Democratic primaries, the two men are effectively tied, with 46 percent of voters saying they supported Mr. Bush and 43 percent backing Mr. Kerry.

The candidacy of Ralph Nader looms as a potentially lethal threat to Democratic hopes of regaining the White House: With Mr. Nader in the race, Mr. Bush leads Mr. Kerry by 46 percent to 38 percent, with Mr. Nader drawing 7 percent of the votes. In a sign of the polarized electorate Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry are facing, three-quarters of supporters of each candidate asserted they would not change their mind before the election.

Even by the rapidly descending standards of the Times this is a disturbing instance of partisan reporting as they do not mention the President's 8 point lead and John Kerry being under 40% until the 9th freakin' paragraph.

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DOES ANYONE THINK AUTHENTIC WHEN THEY THINK KERRY?:

Bush's openness about religion connects with American youth (DAVID TARRANT, Mar. 16, 2004, The Dallas Morning News)

Today, as he campaigns for a second term, the president's unabashed candor about his faith is hitting the mark among an emerging group of voters: young conservative Christians. [...]

When it comes to their faith, "a lot of people are uncomfortable talking about it. President Bush has broken that barrier by not being afraid in a public setting to talk about how a higher being has affected his life," said Shelby Ricketts, also a member of the local Young Republicans. "That makes him attractive to a lot of young people."

Indeed, studies and polls show that a substantial number of college students are expressing strong interest in religion, along with a more socially conservative outlook.

Enrollment at conservative Christian colleges and universities is growing rapidly. Even on secular campuses, membership in religious clubs has skyrocketed.

At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, "On Thursday nights, you can't find a large lecture hall that doesn't have a religious group using it," said Dr. Christian Smith, a sociologist and director of the National Study of Youth and Religion.

Campus Crusade for Christ has chapters on more than 1,000 campuses - up from about 300 in the early 1990s, said Nathan Dunn, the group's communications director. There are 200 chapters in Texas. InterVarsity Christian Fellowship has chapters on 560 college campuses, including about two dozen schools in Texas.

What this generation of students wants, Dunn said, is "authenticity in every area of their lives. They're looking for what's real and what's true."

They look for genuine qualities in their leaders, he said.

"They want to be able to trust who they're putting their faith in," he said, "and they are drawn to leaders who are not hesitant to talk about what they believe."

John Kerry's not hesitant to talk about what he believes, once he's seen the polling data that tells what that is...today.

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JOHNNY CAN YOU HEAR ME? (via John Resnick):

John Kerry, Bush's Advisor On Iraq (David Freddoso, Mar 16, 2004, Human Events)

Sen. John Kerry (D.-Mass.) has been all over the map on the topic of the Iraq War. In October 2002, he voted for the Iraq war resolution. Later, assaulted from his left on the campaign trail, he changed his mind, declaring that the U.S. should not have invaded Iraq, even stating that Bush "rushed to war against our warnings."

When confronted with his vote in favor of the war, Kerry has flip-flopped back, retreating to this position, which he gave this month to a reporter from Time: "I might have gone to war but not the way the President did."

Is that so? It sounds reasonable enough. But in fact we don’t have to rely on any such guesswork: we have a way of knowing exactly what Kerry would have done, had he been president.

On September 6, 2002, Kerry laid out a very specific plan for dealing with Iraq in an op-ed in the New York Times. And looking back now at that op-ed, it almost appears that Bush took his advice, step by step, through the entire process.

It is not unfair to hold Kerry to what he said, especially considering his comments to Time Magazine this month: “I refuse ever to accept the notion that anything I've suggested with respect to Iraq was nuanced. It was clear. It was precise. It was, in fact, prescient. It was ahead of the curve about what the difficulties were. And that is precisely what a President is supposed to be. I think I was right, 100% correct, about how you should have done Iraq.”

So what did Kerry suggest?

We Still Have a Choice on Iraq (JOHN F. KERRY, September 6, 2002, NY Times)

The question is not whether we should care if Saddam Hussein remains openly scornful of international standards of behavior that he agreed to live up to. The question is how we secure our rights with respect to that agreement and the legitimacy it establishes for the actions we may have to take. We are at a strange moment in history when an American administration has to be persuaded of the virtue of utilizing the procedures of international law and community - institutions American presidents from across the ideological spectrum have insisted on as essential to global security.

For the sake of our country, the legitimacy of our cause and our ultimate success in Iraq, the administration must seek advice and approval from Congress, laying out the evidence and making the case. Then, in concert with our allies, it must seek full enforcement of the existing cease-fire agreement from the United Nations Security Council. We should at the same time offer a clear ultimatum to Iraq before the world: Accept rigorous inspections without negotiation or compromise. Some in the administration actually seem to fear that such an ultimatum might frighten Saddam Hussein into cooperating. If Saddam Hussein is unwilling to bend to the international community's already existing order, then he will have invited enforcement, even if that enforcement is mostly at the hands of the United States, a right we retain even if the Security Council fails to act. But until we have properly laid the groundwork and proved to our fellow citizens and our allies that we really have no other choice, we are not yet at the moment of unilateral decision-making in going to war against Iraq.

Less than one week later, President Bush addressed the UN General Assembly and in a speech notably devoid of emphasis on the mere existence of WMD, but heavy on Saddam's continuing refusal to abide by UN resolutions, not least among them the resolution requiring him to liberalize the regime, laid out the case for enforcing the stated will of the international community, Remarks by the President in Address to the United Nations General Assembly (9/12/02, New York, New York):

Twelve years ago, Iraq invaded Kuwait without provocation. And the regime's forces were poised to continue their march to seize other countries and their resources. Had Saddam Hussein been appeased instead of stopped, he would have endangered the peace and stability of the world. Yet this aggression was stopped -- by the might of coalition forces and the will of the United Nations.

To suspend hostilities, to spare himself, Iraq's dictator accepted a series of commitments. The terms were clear, to him and to all. And he agreed to prove he is complying with every one of those obligations.

He has proven instead only his contempt for the United Nations, and for all his pledges. By breaking every pledge -- by his deceptions, and by his cruelties -- Saddam Hussein has made the case against himself.

In 1991, Security Council Resolution 688 demanded that the Iraqi regime cease at once the repression of its own people, including the systematic repression of minorities -- which the Council said, threatened international peace and security in the region. This demand goes ignored.

Last year, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights found that Iraq continues to commit extremely grave violations of human rights, and that the regime's repression is all pervasive. Tens of thousands of political opponents and ordinary citizens have been subjected to arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, summary execution, and torture by beating and burning, electric shock, starvation, mutilation, and rape. Wives are tortured in front of their husbands, children in the presence of their parents -- and all of these horrors concealed from the world by the apparatus of a totalitarian state.

In 1991, the U.N. Security Council, through Resolutions 686 and 687, demanded that Iraq return all prisoners from Kuwait and other lands. Iraq's regime agreed. It broke its promise. Last year the Secretary General's high-level coordinator for this issue reported that Kuwait, Saudi, Indian, Syrian, Lebanese, Iranian, Egyptian, Bahraini, and Omani nationals remain unaccounted for -- more than 600 people. One American pilot is among them.

In 1991, the U.N. Security Council, through Resolution 687, demanded that Iraq renounce all involvement with terrorism, and permit no terrorist organizations to operate in Iraq. Iraq's regime agreed. It broke this promise. In violation of Security Council Resolution 1373, Iraq continues to shelter and support terrorist organizations that direct violence against Iran, Israel, and Western governments. Iraqi dissidents abroad are targeted for murder. In 1993, Iraq attempted to assassinate the Emir of Kuwait and a former American President. Iraq's government openly praised the attacks of September the 11th. And al Qaeda terrorists escaped from Afghanistan and are known to be in Iraq.

In 1991, the Iraqi regime agreed to destroy and stop developing all weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles, and to prove to the world it has done so by complying with rigorous inspections. Iraq has broken every aspect of this fundamental pledge.

From 1991 to 1995, the Iraqi regime said it had no biological weapons. After a senior official in its weapons program defected and exposed this lie, the regime admitted to producing tens of thousands of liters of anthrax and other deadly biological agents for use with Scud warheads, aerial bombs, and aircraft spray tanks. U.N. inspectors believe Iraq has produced two to four times the amount of biological agents it declared, and has failed to account for more than three metric tons of material that could be used to produce biological weapons. Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons.

United Nations' inspections also revealed that Iraq likely maintains stockpiles of VX, mustard and other chemical agents, and that the regime is rebuilding and expanding facilities capable of producing chemical weapons.

And in 1995, after four years of deception, Iraq finally admitted it had a crash nuclear weapons program prior to the Gulf War. We know now, were it not for that war, the regime in Iraq would likely have possessed a nuclear weapon no later than 1993.

Today, Iraq continues to withhold important information about its nuclear program -- weapons design, procurement logs, experiment data, an accounting of nuclear materials and documentation of foreign assistance. Iraq employs capable nuclear scientists and technicians. It retains physical infrastructure needed to build a nuclear weapon. Iraq has made several attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon. Should Iraq acquire fissile material, it would be able to build a nuclear weapon within a year. And Iraq's state-controlled media has reported numerous meetings between Saddam Hussein and his nuclear scientists, leaving little doubt about his continued appetite for these weapons.

Iraq also possesses a force of Scud-type missiles with ranges beyond the 150 kilometers permitted by the U.N. Work at testing and production facilities shows that Iraq is building more long-range missiles that it can inflict mass death throughout the region.

In 1990, after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the world imposed economic sanctions on Iraq. Those sanctions were maintained after the war to compel the regime's compliance with Security Council resolutions. In time, Iraq was allowed to use oil revenues to buy food. Saddam Hussein has subverted this program, working around the sanctions to buy missile technology and military materials. He blames the suffering of Iraq's people on the United Nations, even as he uses his oil wealth to build lavish palaces for himself, and to buy arms for his country. By refusing to comply with his own agreements, he bears full guilt for the hunger and misery of innocent Iraqi citizens.

In 1991, Iraq promised U.N. inspectors immediate and unrestricted access to verify Iraq's commitment to rid itself of weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles. Iraq broke this promise, spending seven years deceiving, evading, and harassing U.N. inspectors before ceasing cooperation entirely. Just months after the 1991 cease-fire, the Security Council twice renewed its demand that the Iraqi regime cooperate fully with inspectors, condemning Iraq's serious violations of its obligations. The Security Council again renewed that demand in 1994, and twice more in 1996, deploring Iraq's clear violations of its obligations. The Security Council renewed its demand three more times in 1997, citing flagrant violations; and three more times in 1998, calling Iraq's behavior totally unacceptable. And in 1999, the demand was renewed yet again.

As we meet today, it's been almost four years since the last U.N. inspectors set foot in Iraq, four years for the Iraqi regime to plan, and to build, and to test behind the cloak of secrecy.

We know that Saddam Hussein pursued weapons of mass murder even when inspectors were in his country. Are we to assume that he stopped when they left? The history, the logic, and the facts lead to one conclusion: Saddam Hussein's regime is a grave and gathering danger. To suggest otherwise is to hope against the evidence. To assume this regime's good faith is to bet the lives of millions and the peace of the world in a reckless gamble. And this is a risk we must not take.

Delegates to the General Assembly, we have been more than patient. We've tried sanctions. We've tried the carrot of oil for food, and the stick of coalition military strikes. But Saddam Hussein has defied all these efforts and continues to develop weapons of mass destruction. The first time we may be completely certain he has a -- nuclear weapons is when, God forbids, he uses one. We owe it to all our citizens to do everything in our power to prevent that day from coming.

The conduct of the Iraqi regime is a threat to the authority of the United Nations, and a threat to peace. Iraq has answered a decade of U.N. demands with a decade of defiance. All the world now faces a test, and the United Nations a difficult and defining moment. Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?

The United States helped found the United Nations. We want the United Nations to be effective, and respectful, and successful. We want the resolutions of the world's most important multilateral body to be enforced. And right now those resolutions are being unilaterally subverted by the Iraqi regime. Our partnership of nations can meet the test before us, by making clear what we now expect of the Iraqi regime.

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will immediately and unconditionally forswear, disclose, and remove or destroy all weapons of mass destruction, long-range missiles, and all related material.

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will immediately end all support for terrorism and act to suppress it, as all states are required to do by U.N. Security Council resolutions.

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will cease persecution of its civilian population, including Shi'a, Sunnis, Kurds, Turkomans, and others, again as required by Security Council resolutions.

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will release or account for all Gulf War personnel whose fate is still unknown. It will return the remains of any who are deceased, return stolen property, accept liability for losses resulting from the invasion of Kuwait, and fully cooperate with international efforts to resolve these issues, as required by Security Council resolutions.

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will immediately end all illicit trade outside the oil-for-food program. It will accept U.N. administration of funds from that program, to ensure that the money is used fairly and promptly for the benefit of the Iraqi people.

If all these steps are taken, it will signal a new openness and accountability in Iraq. And it could open the prospect of the United Nations helping to build a government that represents all Iraqis -- a government based on respect for human rights, economic liberty, and internationally supervised elections.

The United States has no quarrel with the Iraqi people; they've suffered too long in silent captivity. Liberty for the Iraqi people is a great moral cause, and a great strategic goal. The people of Iraq deserve it; the security of all nations requires it. Free societies do not intimidate through cruelty and conquest, and open societies do not threaten the world with mass murder. The United States supports political and economic liberty in a unified Iraq.

It's interesting to note that President Bush and his critics were already at cross purposes, as we see Mr. Kerry focussed solely on weapons and seemingly willing to countenance the continuation of Saddam's regime and all the other violations of UN resolutions, while President Bush already considers Ba'athism a dead letter, the only question being whether they remove themselves from power or we do.

This seems to be yet another--and perhaps the most important--example of Mr. Bush creating confusion by stating precisely what he thinks and what he means to do about it. WMD never mattered to him--democracy and the rule of law did.

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OR LIE CRAVEN COWARDS IN OUR GRAVES:

Manifesto for a Capitalist Revolution (Stephen Schwartz, 03/16/2004, Tech Central Station)

How can anyone believe that Islamic countries will forever elude the global impetus that has swept through such formerly impoverished nations as South Korea, Taiwan, and Malaysia (the latter, by the away, about as Muslim as a country can get)? The information revolution and such items as satellite communications have contributed enormously to the advance of financial and political accountability. A little more than a century ago Friedrich Engels, the confrere of Karl Marx, wrote of the "invading socialist society," referring to an inevitable and observable transformation of capitalism from within, by which the goals of the old socialism -- greater prosperity and equality of access to it, and a general sense of common purpose throughout society, would be realized. [...]

A Marxist colleague of mine has observed, somewhat sourly, that rather than a decline in the rate of capitalist development, we are now in a period of accelerated capitalist development. Let me state the case rather more directly: the past century and a half have seen a speedup in the rate at which countries become stable, prosperous, democracies. It took 150 years for Spain, once the richest country in Europe thanks to the gold and silver of the New World, to become what it is today, and the true "new Spain" did not emerge, bright and beautiful, until the death of Franco in 1975. Germany required 75 years, from 1880 to 1955, and the presence of American troops; Japan needed 60, from 1900 to 1960, also with direct American help. But for South Korea the process took only 30 years, from 1953 to 1983, and suddenly the country was ripe for transformation into the democratic state we see today. In 15 years from Pinochet's seizure of power to his resignation, in 1998, Chile was equally transformed. And in Zizek's Slovenia, the years from the end of Titoite dependency to economic success were so short they are difficult to measure. The country came out of Yugoslavia in 1991, ready to bloom.

I will not deny that bloodshed accompanied all these processes: Spain suffered two civil wars and countless rebellions, over two centuries, and Germany and Japan fought in both world wars; South Korea was devastated by aggression from its northern neighbor; Pinochet was hardly an admirable figure, and, yes, 70 people died when Slovenia decided to go its own way. Yet the worldwide capitalist revolution continues, and produces positive results, with America in its vanguard. And it will end up victorious in Iraq and elsewhere a Muslim majority resides, from Morocco to Indonesia, from Albania to Tanzania. The terrorism of al-Qaida and other Islamist reactionaries cannot stop it; nor can window-breaking by anarchist teenagers at Starbucks or McDonalds; nor the reactionary leftism of a Chavez in Venezuela; nor the irritable wit of intellectuals like Slavoj Zizek. As for the enthusiasts of sociological film criticism, I recommend putting The Searchers aside, and watching My Darling Clementine (1946) and High Noon (1952). Sometimes, even in the real world, the good guys win.

It's an interesting thing though, in those movies there's always a single man or a small group who end up having to act unilaterally against evil for the good of folks who generally won't lift a finger to help.

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A HISTORIC OPPORTUNITY:

Stability under a strongman (The Japan Times, March 17, 2004)

As expected, Russian President Vladimir Putin was re-elected by a landslide in Sunday's presidential election. His leadership now seems almost unchallenged. Opposition parties are weak. Parliament is obedient. Key government posts are held by Putin loyalists. Mr. Putin's tightened grip on power may bolster political stability, but his authoritarian instinct is raising concerns about the future of Russia's fledgling democracy.

President Putin need not worry much about the legislature, in which the pro-Putin ruling bloc commands an absolute majority. Nor does he face any significant criticism from within the government. Immediately before Sunday's election, he dismissed Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, a one-time loyalist to former President Boris Yeltsin. Mr. Putin's victory is a prelude to a more assertive second term. The key word here is stability, though perhaps a better word would be domination. Indeed, the political situation in Russia appears to be revolving around a sole strongman. On his watch the Russian administration is likely to enjoy a spell of "superstability."

Mr. Putin deserves his victory. The election showed most Russians to be more or less satisfied with his performance in his first term. His vigorous economic and foreign policy has received a solid vote of confidence. In his second term he is likely to even more actively pursue his "strong Russia" agenda for doubling the country's economic output and for playing a larger role on the world stage.

For Japan, a strong Russian presidency will be welcome if it can jump-start stalled diplomatic negotiations on pending issues left over from World War II, notably the dispute over the Northern Territories, a group of islands northeast of Hokkaido. Commenting on Mr. Putin's re-election, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda said it is "desirable in terms of the consistency of negotiations for a peace treaty," which is tied to a territorial settlement.

A period of authoritarian stability is precisely what the country needed, but now it's up to Mr. Putin to use it wisely, something all too few men ever have--Franco, Pinochet, & Trujillo come to mind. If he works to establish property rights, the rule of law, an independent judiciary, military, church, and civil society, he could be Russia's salvation. If he's in it just for the power and futile dreams of empire, then it's hard to see any future at all for Russia.

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SENATOR YEA/NAY:

Kerry takes on GOP head-on in swing through pivotal Va. (Ken Fireman, March 17, 2004, Newsday)

John Kerry took his presidential campaign to the small but potentially pivotal state of West Virginia yesterday -- and the Republicans were waiting.

Before Kerry even arrived in Charleston, W.Va., for an event showcasing his support for veterans, President George W. Bush had unveiled a new ad on local TV accusing him of undercutting U.S. troops in Iraq by voting against war funding.

"John Kerry: Wrong on defense," said the ad, which focused on the presumptive Democratic nominee's 2003 vote against an $87 billion appropriations bill to fund military operations in Iraq.

Kerry reacted with asperity. "The Republican attack machine has welcomed me to West Virginia today with another distortion," the Massachusetts senator told the veterans, adding that he voted against the bill because Bush refused to pay for it by rescinding some of his tax cuts.

Can't find it in a print story yet, but Carl Cameron played the tape on Fox News Special Report and Senator Kerry, in defending himself, said: "I voted for this bill...before voting against it."

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IT'S 1929 IN BRODERVILLE:

One Bold Thinker Among the Democrats (David S. Broder, March 14, 2004, Washington Post)

Why is this boom leaving so many worse off? Frank's catalogue of causes is a familiar one: globalization and its handmaiden, the outsourcing of jobs to low-wage countries; the weakening of unions; the tilt of the tax system in favor of the wealthy investor. And Frank endorses the regular catalogue of remedies urged by Kerry and other mainstream Democrats. They include tougher trade rules, restoration of union organizing and bargaining rights and steps to make the tax system more progressive. Like everyone else, including Bush, he says education, innovation and skills training are the keys to a healthy long-term economic future.

But unlike others, Frank does not stop at that point. Just as he is bold in diagnosing the cause of the problem -- a private economy geared to producing wealth, not jobs -- he is equally daring in his remedies.

Toward the end of his speech, Frank uttered a sentence one can hardly imagine coming from the mouth of a 21st-century American politician. "Our problem today," he said, "is too little government."

When I asked him in an interview Thursday if he was sending a message to Kerry, Frank said, "It's a message for all Democrats. What I'm saying is we're in a situation now where we need the government, and where is it? We've cut taxes, we've criticized bureaucracy, we've almost condemned the public sector. I'm saying it's time to talk positively about government and use it to do what the private economy is no longer doing."

His proposal is to tax some of the wealth the private sector is now producing so abundantly -- "a fairly small percentage," he said, without being specific -- "and use it to employ people on socially useful purposes."

Frank urges that we "take some of the wealth that is being created by this wonderful thing, this increased productivity, this new technology and the ways of using it, and all this innovation, and let us use it for our own undisputed public purposes. Let us give cities and states more money so they can have more people policing, fighting fires, cleaning up the environment, repairing facilities that need to be repaired, enhancing train transportation, building highways, helping construct affordable housing in places where that is a crisis, helping pay for higher education for students."

As Frank acknowledged, this whole approach smacks "to some extent [of] the New Deal philosophy." And that is why no one, including the Democratic presidential candidate, is likely to endorse it wholesale.

What could better summarize the utter vacuity of the Left than to advocate a New Deal "solution" to an economy with stable prices, low unemployment and strong growth? Mr. Frank's prescription is bold in much the way that giving a healthy person preventive chemotherapy would be.

MORE:
Smile, these are good times. Truly: Anxiety is turning to paranoia about jobs. Take a deep breath: most Americans have rarely had it better (The Economist, Mar 11th 2004)

Waiting for the job recovery might be a good time to take a broader measure of the material well-being of Americans. Their condition is widely held to be perilous. The economy, it is said, is being “hollowed out” by international competition and the connivance of business and political elites, creating “two Americas”, one rich, one poor. Median income of American households, commentators often say, has been stagnant, though census figures give a rise of one-fifth since 1980. Lou Dobbs, on CNN's “Lou Dobbs Tonight”, is just one media fabulist who makes his living by claiming that, as America is being “exported”, so the well-being of middle Americans is in a parlous state.

It is a good story, but false on many levels. For a start, this slow growth in median income overlaps with a scale of immigration into America outpacing all immigration in the rest of the world put together. Many immigrants have come precisely to take up the lowest-paid jobs. As a result, in the 20 years to 1999 some 5m immigrant households were added to those defined as below the poverty level. Yet among native-born Americans, poverty rates have declined steadily since the 1960s. In the case of black families, median incomes have recently been rising at twice the pace for the country as a whole.

Strip out immigrants, and the picture of stagnant median incomes vanishes. Indeed, for the nine-tenths of the population that is native-born, middle-income trends continue their improvement of the 1950s and 1960s. For these people, inequality is not rising, but falling. Gregg Easterbrook cheekily points out in his excellent recent book, “The Progress Paradox” (Random House), that if left-leaning Americans seriously want better statistics about middle-income gains, then they should simply close their borders.

Mr Easterbrook points to something else about the figures for median household income. A quarter-century ago a typical household had three members. Today, it has just 2.6 members. Simply by this effect, median households have seen their real incomes rise by a half.

Another measure of improved well-being is increased access to jobs. Between 1980 and 2002 Americans in work rose by over 40%, a far brisker pace than the 26% growth in the population. Some three-quarters of the adult population are now in work, close to a record and some ten percentage points higher than in Europe. [...]

Of course, many American households struggle to survive on minimum-wage jobs with employers who do them few favours. We will look at low-paid work in a future week. What this piece attempts to argue is that the middle is far from being hollowed out. As Mr Easterbrook emphasises, most Americans have at least two cars and their own house, and they send their children to college. Certainly a bigger share of household income is being spent on things that did not feature 50 years ago, such as high-tech health care. But it has brought the benefit of a longer and better life, and not just for the old: since 1980, infant mortality has fallen by 45%.

At the end of last year, America's household wealth, at $44 trillion, passed the previous peak set in early 2000. With Americans wealthier than ever, why are many so anxious?

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BELOVED QUEBEC?:

One nation under God: The US is powerful and religious; the EU is weak and secular. Mark Steyn wonders whether it is any coincidence (Mark Steyn, 3/15/04, The Spectator)

Last year, I had a long talk with a ‘senior EU official’ and I was amazed at the way, quite unprompted, he used the phrase ‘Europe’s post-Christian future’, presuming that I would agree with him that this was a condition to aspire to. Europe’s quite post-Christian enough, and most of the horrors of our time came about through the most prominent expressions of its post-Christian state, Nazism and Communism. And yet faith in secularism is indestructible. The other day a correspondent emailed a swipe at me by the Independent’s Johann Hari in a vain effort to goad me into swiping back. Mr Hari was discussing the term ‘Islamofascism’: ‘It has been picked up by some people, like the vile Mark Steyn, who seem to think that all Islam is evil. I dislike all religions and would happily see the whittling away of every last church and mosque, but to imply that all Islam is on a par with al-Qa’eda is grotesque.’

I certainly don’t think ‘all Islam is evil’, though much of it is problematic for a liberal, Western, pluralist society. But I love the way that, even as he’s slurring me as anti-Islam, Johann Hari casually reveals that he’d like to see the end of ‘every last church and mosque’. Surely Islamophobia isn’t any more politically correct for being subsumed within theophobia, is it? The assumption of virtue by radical secularists comes so easily you wonder whether they ever stop to think it through.

For example, it is a fact that the most religious nation in the West is also the most powerful militarily, economically and culturally. Is that a coincidence? It could be. To suggest otherwise would be to claim the ‘special relationship with God’ that so distresses Max Hastings. So let’s look at it the other way: what happens when you opt for the ‘post-Christian future’?

Take my beloved Quebec. As recently as 1960, the birth rate in the province was an average of four children per couple. (Jean Chrétien, the recently retired Canadian prime minister, was the 18th of 19 children of a Quebec mill worker.) But then came the so-called ‘Quiet Revolution’, determined to free the people not just from the House of Windsor but from the Church of Rome, too. There’s a fine scene in Denys Arcand’s Barbarian Invasions in which a sad Catholic priest in Montreal explains to an art appraiser from London that one month in the Sixties the churches simply emptied out and the people never came back.

Fast forward to 1995, and Quebec’s referendum on ‘sovereignty’. Lucien Bouchard, the separatist leader of Her Majesty’s loyal opposition, wanders off-message in one speech and urges the women of the province to have more children because they have one of the lowest fertility rates of any ‘white race’ on the planet. Immediately, all the bien pensant types berate him for his faux pas. But the thing is, he wasn’t wrong. A couple of weeks later, his side narrowly lost the referendum, by a few thousand votes. Given that young Francophones tend to be separatist, had Quebec Catholics of the mid-Seventies had children at the same rate as their parents, M. Bouchard would now have his glorious république. Now he never will. Quebec couples have an average of 1.4 children, and their shrivelled fertility rate has cost them their country.

In the space of a generation, a Catholic backwater became the most militantly secularist jurisdiction in North America. [...]

Maybe the collapse of the church and the looming demographic disaster facing Quebec and most of Catholic Europe is just another coincidence. But, for whatever reason, Europeans have less and less interest in God’s first injunction, to ‘go forth and multiply’. And, as a consequence, they’ll enjoy their post-Christian EUtopia, but only for the two or three generations it lasts. Russia is headed for the same fate. China, where Christianity is booming, seems unlikely to make the same mistake.

Though, predictably, they don't seem to be enjoying it much.

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IF ONLY AMERICANS WERE THIS HAPPY:

Survey finds hope in occupied Iraq (BBC, 3/16/04)

The survey, carried out for the BBC and other broadcasters, also suggests many are optimistic about the next 12 months and opposed to violence.

But of the 2,500 people questioned, 85% said the restoration of public security must be a major priority.

Opinion was split about who should be responsible, with an Iraqi government scoring highest. [...]

Seventy per cent of people said that things were going well or quite well in their lives, while only 29% felt things were bad.

And 56% said that things were better now than they were before the war.

John Kerry thinks Saddam should still be governing them.

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THE FAMILY FRIENDLY ABORTIONIST?:

Boxer says Jones out of touch with voters (AP, March 16, 2004)
Sen. Barbara Boxer kicked off her re-election campaign Tuesday by casting the race as a choice between positive, family friendly values she said she represents and extremist positions she said her opponent holds on such issues as the environment, abortion rights and gun control.
And Pol Pot was intellectual-friendly...

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OH YE OF LITTLE FAITH

Manpower 2Q04 Employment Outlook Survey (Manpower, Inc., .PDF format via manpower.com)

The results of the Manpower Employment Outlook Survey in the United States include Puerto Rico. Nearly 16,000 interviews have been conducted with employers across the United States to measure anticipated employment trends between April and June 2004. All participants were asked, "How do you anticipate total employment at your location to change in the three months to the end of June 2004 as compared to the current quarter?" Of the US employers that were surveyed, 28% expect an increase in hiring in the second quarter, while 6% plan to decrease staff levels.

This creates a Net Employment Outlook of 22%. Sixty-two percent of the
employers polled anticipate no change in hiring activity, and 4% are uncertain of the job outlook at their companies. The employment outlook has not been this promising since the first quarter of 2001, according to the seasonally adjusted survey results. The job forecast for the second quarter is a steady improvement from the first quarter of 2004 and is nearly twice as strong as it was last year at this time.

Of course, this data is still subject to the half empty/half full pundits on either side. On CNBC this morning, Manpower's CEO (Jeff Joerres) went on to discuss something I've thought for months now: there's concurrently a significant boom in self employment, Subchapter S Corp. formation and LLC's. He said they expect some of that Labor to be eventually pulled back into the corporate realm as demand warrants, thereby bolstering the more traditional metrics of "job growth." Granted, many of those little businesses will simply fail as they're statistically prone to do. But the Fed and the Government's role should be to get out of the way and let capital formation and labor association work itself out in a trying economy. The private sector will inevitably create jobs at a rate the Governement could only dream of if they'd quit meddling.

As to the historical comparison with 2001, which most will agree in hindsight was a waining period, bear in mind that 1Q01 was the END of a string (some 6-8 quarters?) worth of similar levels. Mr. Joerres also reiterated how Manpower has backtested their survey vs. subsequent government payroll reports and it proves to be a highly-correlated leading indicator.

Hiring managers' propensity to hire now seems tempered by two remaining hurdles: 1) FIRING is always easier and actually substantially less risky than hiring - particularly for smaller companies where the bulk of new jobs are created. 2) Given the events of the last 3 years and the implied instability in the future status of tax laws, longer range planning is still murky enough to prompt extra cautiousness.

In any event, comparing the current job growth rate to historical rates which were neither sustainable nor ultimately prudent is like wishing the NASDAQ would hit a 5,100 high next week. Today one wonders how many of the "jobs" along with the other 3,100 index points never really existed in the first place.

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MEANWHILE, HERE'S WHAT THE NEW YORKER DOES WELL:

A BAD THING: Why did Martha Stewart lose? (JEFFREY TOOBIN, 2004-03-15, The New Yorker)

Peter Bacanovic, Stewart’s broker at Merrill Lynch, was, like almost everyone else, just trying to keep Martha Stewart happy. On December 27, 2001, while he was on vacation in Florida, he heard from his assistant, Douglas Faneuil, that another of his clients, Sam Waksal, the chairman of ImClone, was trying to get rid of virtually all his own and his family’s stock in the company. Bacanovic knew that Stewart owned ImClone stock—Stewart and Waksal were close friends—and he told Faneuil to call her and let her know. [...]

Stewart’s trades that day were small compared with Sam Waksal’s. After learning that the Food and Drug Administration was going to reject ImClone’s most important product, a cancer drug called Erbitux, Waksal tried to move 79,797 shares to his daughter Aliza’s account through Bacanovic; Aliza herself sold 39,472 shares; his other daughter, Elana, sold 3,014. Waksal’s father sold 135,000 shares, and his sister sold 1,336. Not surprisingly, in light of the F.D.A.’s decision, which was announced the following day, the Waksals’ sales drew the attention of an internal auditor at Merrill Lynch, who asked to see Bacanovic as soon as he got back from Florida.The auditor, Brian Schimpfhauser, also noticed Stewart’s sale of ImClone, and, he later testified, “that made me kind of suspicious.”

A small problem now started to get bigger. Bacanovic had to come up with an explanation for why Stewart had sold at the same time as the Waksals. When Faneuil saw him after the New Year, Bacanovic first said that Stewart had sold ImClone as part of an end-of-year practice called “tax loss selling.” But that made no sense, because she had sold at a profit. So Bacanovic decided to tell the investigators that he and Stewart had a preëxisting agreement to sell her ImClone stock when the price reached sixty dollars a share, which it did on December 27th.

For a while, it looked as though this story might hold. Merrill Lynch had referred the Waksal case to the S.E.C., and the government’s investigators were putting together an easy insider-trading case against him. Because of the focus on the Waksal case, investigators were most concerned with whether he had tipped Stewart or anyone else about the imminent F.D.A. decision on Erbitux. Since Waksal himself hadn’t told Stewart, she had every reason to think she had no problem. On January 16, 2002, Bacanovic and Stewart met for breakfast, and it’s probable that they discussed the burgeoning investigation of the ImClone sales—and their possible culpability. Within a week, Stewart had decided to hire a criminal-defense attorney.

When Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia went public, in 1999, the company used the law firm of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz for corporate work. Wachtell, Lipton is smaller than many of the better-known firms in the city, but it has the highest profits per partner of any law firm in the nation—on average, more than three million dollars a year. Lawyers there tend to be brilliant and arrogant; typical among them is John Savarese, the lawyer whom Stewart hired in January, 2002. Like Bacanovic, Savarese is good-looking and socially prominent. He had earlier been a prosecutor in Manhattan, and in 1986 he helped convict the reigning bosses of the city’s five Mafia families. (Just before that trial, I worked for him as a summer intern.)

On January 25th, Michael Schachter, the Assistant U.S. Attorney in charge of the Waksal investigation, spoke to Savarese and asked to interview Stewart about the ImClone sale. Savarese had to evaluate this request in a transformed legal landscape of white-collar criminal law. Even before the Enron scandal, which was just then unfolding, the Justice Department and the S.E.C. had been placing tremendous pressure on corporate executives to coöperate with their investigations. The S.E.C., and even private auditors, might hesitate to certify the financial statements of a company headed by someone who wouldn’t coöperate. A directive to prosecutors from Deputy Attorney General Larry D. Thompson suggested that companies should pressure senior employees to testify rather than refuse to answer on Fifth Amendment grounds.

Stewart was travelling a lot in late January, so there wasn’t much time for her to talk to Savarese, but she seemed nonchalant about the prospect of sitting down with Schachter and his colleagues. She and Savarese tentatively agreed to meet with the prosecutors on February 4th. “There was a lot of pressure, including from Martha, that she go in there and show she had nothing to hide,” one person close to the Stewart camp says. “All she thought they wanted to talk about was whether Waksal himself had tipped her about the F.D.A. decision. She knew she was in the clear on that one.”

On January 31st, something happened that should have signalled the magnitude of the risk of letting the government question Stewart. Around five in the afternoon, Stewart and Savarese spoke for half an hour on the telephone. When Stewart hung up, she asked her secretary, Ann Armstrong, to call up her computer’s phone log for December 26th through January 7th. As Armstrong later testified at Stewart’s trial, Stewart examined the messages and noted the one from Bacanovic on December 27th, which read, “Peter Bacanovic thinks ImClone is going to start trading downward.” Armstrong described what happened next: “Martha saw the message from Peter, and she instantly took the mouse and she put the cursor at the end of the sentence, and she highlighted it back up to the end of Peter’s name, and then she started typing over it.” She changed the message to “Peter Bacanovic re imclone.”

Stewart then had second thoughts, Armstrong continued. “She instantly stood up, and still standing at my desk, she told me to put it back. ‘Put it back the way it was.’ She walked back to her office door, and by the time she got to her office door she asked me to get her son-in-law on the phone.” Alexis’s husband, John Cuti, was a litigator who sometimes worked for Stewart and her company. He said to Armstrong, who became increasingly upset, “Stop in your tracks,” and told her not to change anything else. When Armstrong got home that evening, Stewart called and asked if she had been able to restore the message. Ultimately, with the help of a friend, Armstrong was able to find the original message and fax a copy to Savarese. The next morning, Stewart left for a quick trip to Germany, which would get her back just before her interview at the U.S. Attorney’s office.

Cuti told Savarese about the altering of the document, which suggested that Stewart was worried about the appearance, at least, of the ImClone transaction, if not the legality of her actions. But she was out of the country, and there was no way to get her ready for the interview. To make matters worse, Savarese had not gone over her phone logs with her.

Savarese could have delayed Stewart’s appearance. He could have gathered all the relevant documents and forced her to test her recollections against the physical evidence. “It’s not easy telling someone like Martha Stewart to take the Fifth,” a lawyer inside the Stewart camp says. “She would have gone ballistic.” Instead, Savarese sent into the hands of prosecutors an underprepared witness, who may not have told him the whole story, and who had already tried to doctor evidence in the case. “What Savarese did was an unbelievable disaster,” another person in the defense camp told me.

It just doesn't seem like that hard a principle to grasp that you aren't allowed to tamper with evidence and lie to authorities.

MORE:
-Everywoman.com (Joan Didion, 2000-02-21, The New Yorker)

According to “The Web Guide to Martha Stewart—The unofficial Site!,” which was created by a former graduate student named Kerry Ogata as “a thesis procrastination technique” and then passed on to those who now maintain it, the fifty-eight-year-old chairman and C.E.O. of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia L.L.C. (“MSO” on the New York Stock Exchange) needs only four hours of sleep a night, utilizes the saved hours by grooming her six cats and gardening by flashlight, prefers Macs in the office and a PowerBook for herself, commutes between her house in Westport and her two houses in East Hampton and her Manhattan apartment in a G.M.C. Suburban (“with chauffeur”) or a Jaguar XJ6 (“she drives herself”), was raised the second-oldest of six children in a Polish-American family in Nutley, New Jersey, has one daughter, Alexis, and survived “a non-amicable divorce” from her husband of twenty-six years, Andrew Stewart (“Andy” on the site), who then “married Martha’s former assistant who is 21 years younger than he is.”

Contributors to the site’s “Opinions” page, like good friends everywhere, have mixed feelings about Andy’s defection, which occurred in 1987, while Martha was on the road promoting “Martha Stewart Weddings,” the preface to which offered a possibly prescient view of her own 1961 wedding. “I was a naïve nineteen-year-old, still a student at Barnard, and Andy was beginning Yale Law School, so it seemed appropriate to be married in St. Paul’s Chapel at Columbia in an Episcopalian service, mainly because we didn’t have anyplace else to go,” she wrote, and included a photograph showing the wedding dress she and her mother had made of embroidered Swiss organdy bought on West Thirty-eighth Street.

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HARRISON SALISBURY TAKES IT BACK:

DON’T LOOK BACK: a review of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. (ANTHONY LANE, 2004-03-15, The New Yorker)

Do you feel clever, punk? Well, do you? Because that’s the only way to get your head around the latest Charlie Kaufman flick. “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” is written by Kaufman, directed by Michel Gondry, and set in the kind of weather that makes you pray for five minutes of sunshine, never mind the eternal variety. On a biting Valentine’s Day, Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) calls in sick and sneaks off to the beach—a glum arena for the battle of sand and snow, and as vacant as the moon until the arrival of a snuffling figure in flame red. This is Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet), and she and Joel are strangers. Or, to be accurate, they have met before, on this same bleak strand, and spent the night together, and tumbled into love, and split in some distress. But today, unbeknownst to each other, they are starting from scratch.

The premise of “Eternal Sunshine” is that scratch is a pretty radical place to be. Kaufman, as he showed with “Being John Malkovich” and “Adaptation,” is not so much a conjurer with a trick up his sleeve as a guy madly sewing extra sleeves onto his jacket, and this mischievous new movie cannot restrain itself from pouring forth conceits. The two big ideas are as follows. First, the story runs backward, yanking us from the lovers on the frozen shore, through the fall and rise of their affair, and so on, until their original meeting. Second, both Clementine and Joel call on Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), who runs a sleazy little operation called Lacuna. There, with help from his assistants, Stan (Mark Ruffalo) and Patrick (Elijah Wood), Dr. Mierzwiak will take your money and blow your mind. Specifically, he will put you to sleep, set up a brain scan, and blow away portions of your mind, like cobwebs or particles of dirt, leaving you with a nice clean space where a memory used to be. Thus, one mournful lady sits in the waiting room with a dog’s bowl and bone, unable to bear the loss of her late Buster. She will presumably hand over his effects and then, after a blast from the Lacuna zapper, forget that the poor pooch ever existed. And so it is with Joel and Clementine: each deletes all traces of the other.

This is, of course, unrefined sci-fi, but one of the virtues of “Eternal Sunshine” is that, thanks to some careful roughening from Michel Gondry, it maintains the beautiful illusion of looking like [scatological reference deleted].

Okay, The New Yorker can be, or has been in the past, almost unbearably staid, but is it really improved by such totally gratuitous foul-mouthedness? David Remnick should be ashamed of himself.

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ANOTHER BIG REASON THE ELECTION MATTERS:

Is the Tide Turning on Torts? (Michael B. McClellan, 03/16/2004, Tech Central Station)

The US Chamber of Commerce and the American Tort Reform Association are now fully engaged in the nation-wide legislative battle to statutorily limit the structural incentives encouraging the litigation deluge. Similarly the American Medical Association has made reforming the medical liability system its number one legislative priority. Such organizations and others have accumulated powerful empirical data to support the reform cause.

The macroscopic evidence for reform is damning -- revealing massive costs and gross inefficiency. The overall costs of the tort system are rising dramatically, and given the expenses of legal representation and contingency fees, the majority of the money is not going to remedy plaintiffs' injuries. While US tort costs have risen a staggering 125% over the last decade, the system returns less than 25 cents on the dollar to compensate plaintiffs' economic loss. At 2.2% of GDP, the US tort system is the most costly of any in the industrialized world.

Anecdotally, this trend in tort law was wonderfully illustrated by well-known legal reform advocate Philip K. Howard at a recent meeting of the Federalist Society. He recalled that during his law school days in the early 1970s, a one million dollar jury verdict was so extraordinary that it made the front page of the Miami Herald. Today, a $100 million verdict barely makes the tenth page. "This is not due to inflation," he said.

Given such trends, it is unsurprising that in a 2003 Gallup Poll, 72% of Americans favored capping non-economic damages in medical liability cases.

So popular opinion-makers are speaking out, beleaguered professional and business groups are organizing, and the public is responding, but such does not necessarily equate to reform. Cynics invoke the political clout of trial lawyers as an impenetrable roadblock to meaningful reform. Trial lawyers are indeed among the most generous contributors to the Democratic Party, and the second leading candidate for the Party's Presidential nomination hails from among their ranks.

The GOP could do worse than run an ad campaign saying "We're the doctors' party--the Democrats are the lawyers' party."

---

AXIS OF GOOD FILES:

President Bush’s Muddled Policy on Taiwan (Ted Galen Carpenter, 3/15/04, Cato)

The Bush administration has gone from one extreme to the other with regard to U.S. policy on Taiwan. During the early months of his administration, the president gave a seemingly unconditional pledge to defend Taiwan from attack by mainland China— going significantly further than his predecessors had. He followed that assurance by approving the largest arms sales package to Taiwan in nearly a decade. In marked contrast to the Clinton years, high-profile visits by Taiwanese leaders to the United States have been encouraged, despite Beijing's protests.

That pro-Taiwan stance appeared to change dramatically in December 2003 during a visit by Chinese premier Wen Jiabao. President Bush publicly admonished Taiwanese president Chen Shuibian for seeking to change the political status of the island unilaterally and emphasized Washington's opposition to any unilateral actions. At issue is the Taiwanese government's intent to hold referenda on sensitive issues, which Beijing believes is the latest installment in an ongoing campaign to achieve independence.

Neither the earlier pro-Taiwan policy nor the latest pro-Beijing posture serves the best interests of the United States. It is not America's proper role to take a position on Taiwan's independence or other issues involving relations between Taipei and Beijing. Taiwan is a vibrant democracy, and the United States should respect that society's democratic prerogatives. At the same time, U.S. leaders should make it clear that Taiwan must bear all of the risks entailed in whatever policies it adopts. In particular, Washington should state that it will not intervene if an armed conflict breaks out between Taiwan and mainland China.

This is one area where criticism of the President's recent policy is well deserved. We should have long ago switched to a many China policy--starting with independence for Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Tibet--and in the case of Taiwan we should make it clear that we would be willing to use nuclear weapons if China attacks. Mr. Carpenter's notion that we should leave a vibrant democracy and steadfast ally to fend for itself is craven libertarian-isolationism.

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THE DEMOCRATS, A PECULIAR INSTITUTION (via Kevin Whited):

Second black seat test uneasy coalition (JAMES CAMPBELL, 3/14/04, Houston Chronicle)

Ousted state Rep. Ron Wilson claims he fell on his sword for the greater good of creating a second African-American congressional seat for Houston. Noble ...

Wilson was the only black state lawmaker to vote for a Republican-backed congressional redistricting plan that is expected to change Texas' congressional delegation from 16-16 to about 22 Republicans and 10 Democrats. For that, Wilson accused "white liberals" of undermining his bid to be re-elected to the District 131 seat he held for 27 years.

"Because I didn't do what white, liberal, extremist Democratic leaders wanted me to do, they're trying to punish me. It's a racist attitude. They think they ought to control the minds and hearts of every black in the Democratic Party, and if you don't do what they say, they're going to try to drag you back to the plantation like a runaway slave," Wilson said in a Houston Chronicle story. [...]

"To simply win an additional seat -- if you're in the minority party at this immediate juncture -- does not empower the greater (black) community," said Texas Southern University political science professor Franklin Jones.

The larger question that stemmed from the contentious race between Bell and Green is whether it created an irreparable schism between blacks and moderate whites in the Democratic Party? And, if so, what must both sides do to repair their uneasy coalition?

At least in the GOP you get to work in the big house.

---

NOT THE COMPASS THAT GOD STEERS BY:

It's the heart versus the Bible (Dennis Prager, March 16, 2004, Townhall)

With the decline of Judeo-Christian religions, the heart, shaped by what the eye sees (hence the power of television), has become the source of people's moral decisions.

This is a potentially fatal problem for our civilization. As beautiful as the heart might be, it is neither intellectually nor morally profound.

It is therefore frightening that hundreds of millions of people find no problem in acknowledging that their heart is the source of their values. Their heart knows better than thousands of years of accumulated wisdom; better than religions shaped by most of the finest thinkers of our civilization (and, to the believer, by God); and better than the book that has guided our society -- from the Founders of our uniquely successful society to the foes of slavery to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and most of the leaders of the struggle for racial equality.

This elevation of one's heart is well beyond self-confidence -- it is self-deification.

As Reinhold Niebuhr said:

[W]e may well designate the moral cynics, who know no law beyond their will and interest, with a scriptural designation of "children of this world" or "children of darkness." Those who believe that self-interest should be brought under the discipline of a higher law could then be termed "the children of light."

Every man would naturally like to be a god, but only the self-absorbed succumb to the temptation. The tragedy is that our culture has come to so celebrate the self that it is a breeding ground for narcissism.

---

THANK GOODNESS PETE LACOCK RETIRED::

From Bat to Verse: With training camps in full swing, it's time for an ode to the joys, and boys, of spring (Steve Rushin, February 26, 2003, Sports Illustrated)

Spring, for fans, has finally sprang:
We've seen Joe Torre's (Chien-Ming) Wang.
But will Bob Melvin have the guts
To pull his pitcher, J.J. Putz?
(No, these men are not impostors:
All are on spring training rosters.)
Pasqual Coco? Cesar Crespo?
How, again, does "Let's Go Mets" go?
And will those Mets, before too long,
Light up Atlanta's (young Jung) Bong?
These, and countless other questions
(And Fenway Frank-based indigestions)
Lay all winter, hibernating
In my head, like Zimmer's plating.

Birds return (to batting practice).
Nature blooms (with Grapefruit, Cactus).
Buds are opening (and Bud Lights)
And squads, like Pavarotti's tights,
Are split (by Solomonic skips).
And somewhere, warming up her lips,
Sits Morganna, aging kisser.
This year's Red Sox? Wicked pissah!
(That is, if the disabled list
Treads not on Nomar's fabled wrist.)
Dodgers fans, meanwhile, conjecture
That -- per New Age architecture --
Teammates Chin-Feng Chen, Paul Shuey
Give L.A. a good Feng Shuey.

Neil Diamond's words last year rang true
'Cause Expos pitcher Seung Song blew.
(Pity this Van Lingle Mungo
Shagging a bilingual fungo
In Quebec or Puerto Rico.
Bon voyage. Godspeed, amigo.)
Teams like Peter Angelos's
Stink like camel halitosis.
Spring, however, keeps us hopeful.
Faithwise, Cubs fans have a Popeful.
(To Sosa's gin, add this tonic:
Hee Seop Choi and Grudzielanek.)
Comiskey renamed for a phone?
It stinks, so Sox now wear Colon.

No apter name hath baseball wrought
Than Tampa pitcher Nick Bierbrodt.
For beer and brats -- like Kaats and Otts
Or, on the scoreboard, racing dots --
Somehow feel like baseball totems,
Like Ruth's nickname. Or John Odom's.
Melvin Mora, Alex Cora:
Hail the Latin diaspora,
Which now gives us once a week a
Name like Hiram Bocachica.
(Or, recast by Kurosawa:
Shigetoshi Hasegawa.)
Worst pitcher's name? Grant Balfour,
  though
The Mariners have Heaverlo.

Which reminds us of the immortal tune, Van Lingle Mungo (David Frishberg, 1970)

HEENEY MAJESKI
JOHNNY GEE
EDDIE JOOST
JOHNNY PESKY
THORNTON LEE
DANNY GARDELLA
VAN LINGLE MUNGO

WHITEY KUROWSKI
MAX LANIER
EDDIE WAITKUS
JOHNNY VANDER MEER
BOB ESTALELLA
VAN LINGLE MUNGO

AUGIE BERGAMO
SIGMUND JAKUCKI
BIG JOHNNY MIZE
   and
BARNEY MCCOSKY
HAL TROSKY
AUGIE GALAN
   and
PINKY MAY
STAN HACK
   and
FRENCHY BORDAGARAY
PHIL CAVARRETTA
GEORGE MCQUINN
HOWARD POLLET
   and
EARLY WYNN
ROY CAMPANELLA
VAN LINGLE MUNGO

AUGIE BERGAMO
SIGMUND JAKUCKI
BIG JOHNNY MIZE
   and
BARNEY MCCOSKY
HAL TROSKY
JOHN ANTONELLI
FERRIS FAIN
FRANKIE CROSETTI
JOHNNY SAIN
HARRY BRECHEEN
   and
LOU BOUDREAU
FRANKIE GUSTINE
   and
CLAUDE PASSEAU
EDDIE BASINSKI
ERNIE LOMBARDI
HUEY MULCAHY
VAN LINGLE

VAN LINGLE MUNGO

---

START THE CAR THELMA (via Brian Hoffman):

Spain's elections show why radical Islam can win (Spengler, 3/16/04, Asia Times)

Socialist voters may not have worked out the arithmetic; Jose Zapatero's supporter in the street simply does not want to be burdened with America's distant wars, especially if they draw fire at home. It all amounts to the same thing. Countries too lazy to produce their next generation will not fight. Who will lay down his life for future generations when the future generations simply will not be there?

Like other former strongholds of Catholicism, Spain has made an abrupt and terrible shift away from traditional family life toward egregious hedonism. Alone among Europe's great powers, Spain nipped Protestantism in the bud, avoiding the terrible religious wars that ravaged France during the 16th century, and killed off perhaps half the German population during the 17th century. By expelling its Jews, its Inquisition cut off access to the Hebrew language and Bible translation. By burning several thousand heretics in public, it offered a terrible object lesson to prospective dissenters. Not until 1936, when Catholic generals rose to overthrow the communist-tinged republic, did Spain finally have its religious war, with half a million deaths, of which one-quarter were from executions.

The victorious General Francisco Franco kept Spain firmly in the Catholic fold until his death in 1975, after which Catholicism shriveled in Spain like a vampire exposed to the light of day. Along with church attendance, the birthrate fell from one of the highest to one of the lowest in the world. That already has been the fate of other Catholic strongholds, such as Canada's province of Quebec. There the fertility rate dropped from 4.95 children per woman in 1961 to 1.57 in 1996.

Old Europe's people, religion, culture and fighting mettle have imploded together. The Europeans are not so much defeatist as resigned to extinction.

The problem is not that Spain is withdrawing from the war on terror--it has, as Spengler points out, been fairly adept at isolating itself from the worst of international ideological battle over the centuries. Rather, the problem is that, for the first time, the domestic government during that isolation will be of the Left rather than the Right. The real enemy, as always, is within. There is simply no chance that Socialists will address the myriad trends (secularization, declining fertility, etc.) that are destroying Spanish civilization--indeed, they'll embrace them in a deathgrip. Surrendering to al Qaeda is just a manifestation of the unwillingness to defend Western values.

---

MEANWHILE, FROM THE OFFICE OF REALITY DENIAL:

Change in Spain (NY Times, 3/16/04)

The terrorist bombings in Madrid last week were undoubtedly the main factor in Sunday's upset of the incumbent Popular Party, which supported the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. The victorious Socialists, like most Spaniards, did not. If Al Qaeda organized the bombings, as now seems to be the case, the outcome may be seen by some as a win for the terrorists. We disagree.

Nor was the U.S. withdrawal from South Vietnam a win for the Communists.

---

IDEALLY (via The Other Brother):

If you build it they will come: Blogging and the new citizenship (Tim Dunlop, 6/17/03, EVATT)

[T]hat's the image you should hold in your head: a group of people sitting at their computers, scouring the news of the day, reading everything from The New York Times (online, of course) to other people's blogs, and writing their own responses and interpretations of whatever grabs their attention. It's somewhere between an online academic seminar and Friday night at the pub.

Blogging does not (and should not) try and emulate the sophistication of, say, an academic presentation or paper. It shouldn't even try and emulate the precision of a news report, though paradoxically, as I've said, one its best functions is to fact-check such news reports. The attraction and strength of blogging is that it is informal, first draftish, and more than a little breathless.

For the individual blogger, or even for the reader who decides to leave a comment, there is a real blowtorch-to-the-belly aspect to blogging in that, by engaging in political debate in such a public way, people often move beyond their own knowledge horizon, or come up against people who are simply better informed than they are, or who have thought about the topic more deeply. Under such circumstances bloggers can be forced to do their growing up on a subject in public, which can be a difficult thing. But it is also good thing, and it gets us back to the idea, espoused most fully by conservative thinker Christopher Lasch, that argument precedes understanding and is central to democratic opinion formation.

Lasch says that democracy requires argument and that public argument involving ordinary citizens has been usurped by an elite, a group of insiders who either because of political connections, expertise or other institutional reasons have easier access to the media and are therefore able to dominate public discourse. Such debate then tends to happen within pre-defined parameters that reflect the education, specialisation and norms of that elite. Thus, not only do they dominate public argument by virtue of their elite access and knowledge, they also tend to define the topics, terms and presentation of such debate and are liable to judge any lay contribution as illegitimate.

The net affect is not only anti-democratic, in that democracy relies on public argument between all sectors of society, not just its elites, but the very idea of debate-as-learning gets turned on its head. Instead of seeing arguments as a source of knowledge, they become seen as a sign of lack of knowledge. This criticism is misplaced because as Lasch says, "our search for reliable information is itself guided by the questions that arise during arguments about a given course of action. It is only by subjecting our preferences and projects to the test of debate that we come to understand what we know and what we still need to learn. Until we have to defend our opinions in public, they remain opinions in Lippmann's pejorative sense - half-formed convictions based on random impressions and unexamined assumptions. It is the act of articulating and defending our views that lifts them out of the category of 'opinions,' gives them shape and definition, and makes it possible for others to recognize them as a description of their own experience as well. In short, we come to know our own minds only by explaining ourselves to others."

Lasch's ideal was that arguments aren't won by shouting down your opponent but by changing their minds.

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THINGS HAPPENED AND THEN THEY DID THINGS:

Humbling a Despot: How Bush put Qaddafi in his place. (Kenneth R. Timmerman, March 16, 2004, FrontPage)

In October 2003, with the help of Italian customs, a massive shipment of centrifuge components from Malaysia was seized in the Mediterranean en route to Libya. "It was a big shipment - the guts of what he needed," a U.S. official says. "That seizure broke the back of his program. Without it, he would have had to go back to square one."

The centrifuge parts were manufactured at Scomi Precision Engineering in Malaysia, according to specifications provided by Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdel Qader Khan. Shipped to Dubai, they were transferred onto a German-owned freighter, the BBC China, and labeled as "used machinery."
Democrats, including Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, have argued that the Libyan case shows that diplomacy works better in the war on terror than force. "If diplomacy was so effective," a Bush official involved in the interdiction effort tells Insight, "why did Col. Qaddafi continue to procure equipment at the same time our diplomats were talking?" After the seizure, the Libyans began to come clean. Only then were U.S. and British intelligence teams allowed to visit previously closed nuclear sites and to begin mapping out the true scope of the Libyan program.

Qaddafi now sought counsel from an unusual source, which Insight can reveal here for the first time. One month before Qaddafi's historic announcement on Dec. 19, 2003, he met in Tripoli with visiting Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma. "During their private meeting, Qaddafi asked Kuchma how America had treated him when he gave up his nuclear weapons after the fall of the Soviet Union," says Weldon, who heard the story directly from Ukrainian Foreign Minister Kostyantyn Hryshchenko. Kuchma suggested that Qaddafi broaden his ties beyond the administration and work with members of the U.S. Congress, as well.

The final event that sealed the fate of Qaddafi's nuclear-weapons program took place in early December 2003 along the borders of the Tigris River near Tikrit, when U.S. soldiers pulled former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein out of a spider hole."When Qaddafi watched a U.S. medic probe Saddam's hair for lice and poke around his mouth, he was stunned," several sources tell Insight. Western diplomats in Tripoli agree that Saddam's capture "traumatized" the Libyan leader. "What happened is very clear," an administration official says. "Things happened, and immediately afterward the Libyans did things in response."

Until Saddam's capture, "we were still negotiating. Both sides were sparring back and forth," a British official involved in the talks says. "Things radically changed course after that." Just 10 days later, Qaddafi made his official announcement that Libya was giving up its WMD programs and had invited U.S. and British experts into the country to verify the dismantling of his weapons plants.

The Kerry Doctrine is to not make things happen, just to wait and hope they do things.

---

WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU STUDY IN COLLEGE:

Scientists Confirm Phenomenon Of Falling Beer Bubbles (Mark Shwartz, Mar 16, 2004, Stanford News)

A new experiment by chemists from Stanford University and the University of Edinburgh has finally proven what beer lovers have long suspected: When beer is poured into a glass, the bubbles sometimes go down instead of up.

"Bubbles are lighter than beer, so they're supposed to rise upward," said Richard N. Zare, the Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor in Natural Sciences at Stanford. "But countless drinkers have claimed that the bubbles actually go down the side of the glass. Could they be right, or would that defy the laws of physics?"

To ask the question is to reveal an inexplicable lack of experience at raisin racing.

---

FARINELLI NATION:

The Spanish dishonored their dead (Mark Steyn, 3/16/04, Jewish World Review)

"When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, naturally they will like the strong horse." So said Osama bin Laden in his final video appearance two-and-a-half years ago. But even the late Osama might have been surprised to see the Spanish people, invited to choose between a strong horse and a weak horse, opt to make their general election an exercise in mass self-gelding.

That's John Kerry in the corner of the barn, stropping his razor...

MORE:
-Rewarding Terror in Spain (EDWARD N. LUTTWAK, 3/16/04, NY Times)

It must be said: Spanish voters have allowed a small band of terrorists to dictate the outcome of their national elections. This is not how democracies are supposed to react when they are attacked by fanatics. Americans were visibly united and hardened by Sept. 11; the Italians overcame deep political differences to unify in their determination to crush the Red Brigades; Israeli cohesion has only been increased by decades of terrorism. When threatened by a violent few, democratic political communities will normally react by enforcing the will of the many.

For many years, this has been the Spanish answer to the Basque separatist movement. But it was not the response to last week's bombings.

Before the attacks, the polls forecast a victory for Mariano Rajoy of the Popular Party, for the very good reason that he was the chosen successor of Prime Minister José María Aznar, who has led Spain on the path of modernization and prosperity with almost universally acknowledged success. Three days before the elections, Mr. Rajoy seemed to be headed for victory over José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, who campaigned on a pledge to withdraw the 1,300 Spanish troops stationed in Iraq if the United Nations did not assume control of the occupation. Mr. Zapatero's call was not merely to avoid more casualties, but to affirm that the Iraq war was an act of imperialist aggression that Spain should never have supported.

Even those who view the Iraq war as a strategic error for the United States — and I'm one of them — cannot take seriously the Zapateros of Europe, who seem bent on validating the crudest caricatures of "old European" cowardly decadence. It was an act of colossal irresponsibility for the Socialists and the Spanish news media to excoriate the Aznar government for asserting that ETA, the Basque separatist movement, was probably behind the attacks.

-Al Qaeda's Wish List (DAVID BROOKS, 3/16/04, NY Times)

I am trying not to think harshly of the Spanish. They have suffered a grievous blow, and it was crazy to go ahead with an election a mere three days after the Madrid massacre. Nonetheless, here is what seems to have happened:

The Spanish government was conducting policies in Afghanistan and Iraq that Al Qaeda found objectionable. A group linked to Al Qaeda murdered 200 Spaniards, claiming that the bombing was punishment for those policies. Some significant percentage of the Spanish electorate was mobilized after the massacre to shift the course of the campaign, throw out the old government and replace it with one whose policies are more to Al Qaeda's liking.

What is the Spanish word for appeasement?

Thankfully, Franco, who refused to appease Hitler, didn't live to see his countrymen fold to Osama.

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JEWISH FASCIST QUEERS:

Bombs, ballots and nation-building (George Will, 3/16/04, Jewish World Review)

[M]uch American rhetoric is now so routinely vituperative that it may strike foreign enemies as evidence of paralyzing national discord. And conceivably it is evidence of national divisions that could widen, not close, in the event of a large terrorist attack.

For example, in his Saturday response for the Democrats to President Bush's weekly radio broadcast, Sen. Edward Kennedy said that the administration's arguments for war against Iraq were not merely, in Kennedy's view, mistaken, they were a conscious dishonesty — a "distraction." Such statements are perhaps predictable from a senator who recently cited, approvingly, the writings of Karen Kwiatkowski.

The Weekly Standard reports that she, a retired Air Force officer, has written about "the Zionist political cult that has lassoed the E-Ring" of the Pentagon (the offices of senior civilian Defense Department officials). She says the war in Afghanistan was "planned of course before 9/11/01" because of "Taliban non-cooperation" regarding a trans-Afghanistan pipeline. She says that with "Bush and his neoconservative foreign policy implementers" — those E-Ring Jews — resembling propagandists such as Lenin, Hitler and Pol Pot, "all evidence" points to "a maturing fascist state" in America and, in foreign policy, "fascist imperialism touched by Sparta revived."

We've all grown accustomed to the reflexive anti-Semitism of the neocon-bashing Left, but that Sparta bit--an obvious homosexual smear--is beyond the pale.

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PREDICTING A CLINTON WIN?:

Poll finds pessimism about U.S. direction (Susan Page and Richard Benedetto, 3/15/04,USA TODAY)

Americans are increasingly gloomy about the state of the economy and the direction of the country, a Gallup Poll has found. That state of mind is a warning flag for President Bush as his re-election campaign begins in earnest. (Related item: Poll results)

In the poll, 60% said they were dissatisfied with "the way things are going in the United States at this time." Except for a survey two weeks before the invasion of Iraq a year ago, that is the most negative reading since 1996.

The question about the general direction of the country is one of the fundamental judgments voters make in deciding whether to support a president for re-election. That makes the public's pessimism, if it persists, a serious problem for the Bush campaign.

"The reality is that when people are dissatisfied with the country's direction, they tend to vote for change, and when they vote for change, they tend to vote out incumbents," says Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster and adviser to the likely Democratic candidate, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry.

Except in 1996.

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"THE RELATIVELY FEW INDIVIDUALS WHO SURVIVE...GIVE RISE TO THE NEXT GENERATION":

The War that Never Ends: a review of The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942 by Christopher R. Browning (Benjamin Schwarz, Atlantic Monthly)

[A]s Browning lucidly and vividly demonstrates, German anti-Semitism was hardly a fixed concept but, rather, evolved and mutated with the ever shifting circumstances...

An especially apt choice of words for what was essentially applied Darwinism.

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EVEN GEEKS CAN FIGURE OUT WHICH SIDE OF THE TOAST IS BUTTERED:

Tech titans give more to GOP (Jim Hopkins, 3/15/04, USA TODAY)

The tech industry, which favored Democrats in the 2000 federal elections, is betting more campaign donations on Republicans this year.

Bolstered by money from luminaries such as Yahoo CEO Terry Semel, tech has poured 55% of its $8.2 million in contributions into Republican coffers. That's up from 47% in 2000, says the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-partisan watchdog group. Among top givers, only doctors and other health professionals shifted more to the GOP. [...]

Republicans are viewed as more pro-business on topics of special interest to the tech industry.

Companies moving software development jobs overseas worry politicians will clamp down, says Rick White, CEO of TechNet, an advocacy group for Microsoft and other tech giants. John Kerry, the likely Democratic presidential nominee, has slammed "Benedict Arnold" firms for offshoring jobs.

A sales tax on Internet access, being debated in Congress, might crimp sales at firms such as eBay if it depressed Net traffic. The Bush administration opposes such taxes. EBay's political action committee has given 64% to the GOP this year, up from 56% in 2000.

It's amazing how little imprint Bill Clinton left on the Democrats who have now completely reverted to being the party of protectionism, unionism, taxes, torts, and top-down government.

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UNLIKED & UNKNOWN:

Poll: Bush Moves Ahead Of Kerry (CBS, March 15, 2004)

Eight months from Election Day, it is already a nip-and-tuck Presidential race. George W. Bush currently leads John Kerry by three points among voters, while two weeks ago Kerry was up by one. Seven in ten of each candidate’s voters say they have already locked in their choices, and most voters already have clear opinions of the two presidential candidates’ qualities and their potential strengths and weaknesses in office. [...]

VIEWS OF THE CANDIDATES
(Registered voters)

Bush
Favorable 43%
Unfavorable 39%
Undecided/Unknown 17%

Kerry
Favorable 28%
Unfavorable 29%
Undecided/Unknown 41%

That's pretty impressive for the Senator--he's just been through a kid-gloves Democratic primary but already has higher negatives than positives and a huge number of people don't know who he is, though Karl Rove will be happy to tell them.

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TOUCHES EVERY BASE BUT CREATION:

Sex and the Brain: Researchers Say, 'Vive la Différence!' (ANAHAD O'CONNOR, March 16, 2004, NY Times)

For almost a decade, researchers at Pfizer struggled to show that Viagra, the male impotence drug, could enhance sexual function in women.

Last month, they gave up.

Countless tests on thousands of women made it clear that the little blue pill, though able to stir arousal, did not always evoke sexual desire.

Viagra's failure underscored the obvious: when it comes to sexuality, men and women to some extent are differently tuned. For men, arousal and desire are often intertwined, while for women, the two are frequently distinct.

See if you can count the qualifiers in this story.

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LET'S CALL A SPADE A SPANIARD:

Spain: More al Qaeda links found (CNN, March 15, 2004)

CNN also has obtained a document posted on an Internet message board analysts believe is used by al Qaeda and its sympathizers that spells out the terrorist group's plan to separate Spain from the U.S.-led coalition on Iraq.

The strategy spelled out in the document, posted last December on the Internet, calls for the use of terrorism to drive Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar's Popular Party from power and replace it with the Socialists.

That was expected to drive a wedge between Washington and Madrid and result in the withdrawal of Spanish military forces from Iraq.

"We think the Spanish government will not stand more than two blows, or three at the most, before it will be forced to withdraw because of the public pressure on it," the document says.

"If its forces remain after these blows, the victory of the Socialist Party will be almost guaranteed -- and the withdrawal of Spanish forces will be on its campaign manifesto."

That prediction came to fruition in elections Sunday, with the Socialists unseating the Popular Party three days after near-simultaneous bombings of four trains killed 200 and shocked the nation.

Ninety percent of Spaniards had opposed Aznar's staunch support for the U.S.-led war against Iraq, and some have blamed Aznar's policies for the train bombings.

Prime Minister-elect Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said Monday he wants the 1,300 Spanish troops in Iraq to return home by June 30 if the United Nations "doesn't take control of Iraq."

"I think Spain's participation in the war has been a total error," he said.

Being Anti-War Won't Save You (Richard Littlejohn, March 15, 2004, The Sun)

THERE’s no getting round it, the outcome of the Spanish election is a serious setback for the war on terror.

It would be impertinent to criticise the deeply-traumatised Spaniards for casting their votes they way they did.

Impertinent my left foot--it was a craven act; one they should be deeply ashamed of as a nation. Far worse than Le Pen finishing second in France or Pim Fortuyn winning in the Netherlands.

MORE:
Rotten Europe (David Warren, 3/16//04, Ottawa Citizen)

Analysis and homily must converge in what I have to say today. There is no ambiguity in what has happened in Spain. The rotten heart of Europe has been exposed. The best comparison one can make is to Europe in 1940, when the entire continent had capitulated to Nazism and fascism, leaving Britain alone to fight. It thus came to be known as "Churchill's war", rather than "Hitler's war", only to revert when the Allies had won it, and a generation of Europeans, who had not lifted a finger, decided retrospectively that they had been in the Resistance.

The position of Tony Blair's government in Britain today is further undermined by the Spanish vote, so that it is quite possible that the British, too, may soon abandon what the Europeans now choose to call "Bush's war", rather than "Osama's war".

A good question might be asked of the Bush administration, in light of the Spanish election. It was articulated by an American friend yesterday: "Before we waste another drop of blood trying to create democracies in the Middle East, shouldn't we reflect a bit on how easily democracy in Spain was subverted by terrorists?"

One must not, under the present circumstances, sound an uncertain trumpet. All men of goodwill, regardless of nation, are fighting the Jihadists in Afghanistan and Iraq, as we fought the Nazis in Italy and France; and if the Americans must fight them alone, so be it. Then as now we made a lot of blather about "democracy". But screw democracy, we are fighting an enemy of civilization, an embodiment of real evil. There is no compromise with such an enemy, no capitulation to him, no way to avoid casualties, no easy way out. We defeat him, or he defeats us.

We do not retreat because our allies are cowards. We continue to fight, for ourselves, for our children, and for their children.

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WISE FOOL:

Stumping Kerry Sidesteps Blasts and Election in Spain (DAVID E. ROSENBAUM and JODI WILGOREN, March 16, 2004, NY Times)

Senator John Kerry has conspicuously avoided speaking out on the terrorist attacks in Spain and the fall of the government there, a departure from his practice of trying to use the events of the day to bolster his case against President Bush.

All year, Mr. Kerry has argued that the war in Iraq has diverted resources and attention away from what should have been devoted to a more pernicious target, terrorist groups, and he has accused the president of squandering alliances that previous administrations carefully cultivated.

Yet in a 25-minute speech on Monday about terrorism and domestic security to the International Association of Firefighters, the senator mentioned the events in Spain only in passing. He accused the president of being "short on action" in protecting Americans against terrorism and added, "As we saw again last week in Spain, real action is what we need."

Democrats inside and outside Mr. Kerry's campaign said on Monday that the situation in Spain now was too uncertain and delicate to use politically.

The Kerry campaign said the senator had no plans to delve into Spain, even though he planned to make a big speech on national security on Wednesday.

Mr. Kerry for once heeds the old adage: "Tis better to be thought the fool and remain silent, than speak and remove all doubt." All he'd need to do now is crow about Spain deserting the war on terror and he'd be picked over like roadkill in the press for the next week.

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THE GUARDIAN?!?:

Political fallout likely to embolden al-Qaida: Armed guards are planned for Olympic athletes, but the US presidential election campaign is seen as prime target for attack (Ewen MacAskill, Helena Smith in Athens and Giles Tremlett in Madrid, March 16, 2004, The Guardian)

Al-Qaida and its sympathisers will be emboldened by the impact of what is now assumed to be its first attack in western Europe. The governing party has lost the election and Spain is planning to pull its troops out of Iraq.

If it was al-Qaida, Spain will have become the first country "to have a prime minister owing his position to Bin Laden," said Jonathan Eyal, the director of studies at the London-based Royal United Services Institute. [...]

Although al-Qaida or one of its allied groups are unlikely to have realised that the bombings would have as speedy an impact as they had, the strategy had already been rehearsed on the internet.

Spain's La Razón newspaper reported yesterday that a document on Iraqi jihad, drawn up by the self-styled Institute of Information in Support of the Iraqi People and published on the internet in December, analysed the effects that attacks on Spanish troops posted in Iraq might have.

The Arabic language document suggested attacks in Iraq rather than in Spain, but predicted accurately what the outcome on the Spanish elections would be. "We believe that the Spanish government will not be able to resist more than two or three attacks, after which they would be obliged to withdraw as a result of popular pressure," it said.

"If their troops remain in Iraq after the attacks, a Socialist victory is practically guaranteed and withdrawal of the troops will feature in its election manifesto."

It added ominously: "The withdrawal of Spanish or Italian forces from Iraq would produce tremendous pressure on the British presence [in Iraq], a pressure that Tony Blair would not be able to withstand."

Man, when even The Guardian is willing to pin the blame on you for "emboldening al Qaeda" you've really biffed.

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TELL OLD PHAROAH... (via Mike Daley):

First-class ticket: Charter school makes history by reaching state final in 6th year (Jackie MacMullan, 3/14/2004, Boston Globe)

Someone was shaking him. Reggie Morris pried open one eye, looked at the clock -- 6:30 a.m. -- then glared at his mother in utter disbelief. "Get up," Isabelle Morris said. "And put these on."

She tossed him a pair of navy blue shorts and a white shirt.

"You're starting at your new school in an hour and a half," she said.

New school? It was Aug. 11. What kind of school held classes in the summer?

"I'll tell you on the way," she said.

There was plenty to tell. Isabelle explained to her son that she was concerned about his choice of friends. She was afraid he was slipping away from her, toward the junkies on the corner, and she couldn't allow that to happen. Without telling him, she had filled out an application for New
Leadership, a charter school in Springfield founded by the Urban League with hopes of rescuing underperforming city kids. Reggie would attend classes from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. He would wear a uniform every day. He would go to school 24 Saturdays a year. He would be required to take a training course in conjunction with the Army National Guard.

"No way, Mom," Reggie said. "I'm not going."

There's no end of wonders we could perform with kids if we could just let millions of such experiments bloom. It's not too much to say that opposition to school choice is opposition to improved education. There are perfectly understandable ideological reason for wishing a state monopoly--protection of union jobs, hatred of religion, etc.--but no good ones if the aim is to teach better.

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WHO HATE THEM NOW ONCE FOUGHT BY THEIR SIDE:

The Irish Soldiers of Mexico (Michael Hogan, March 2004, The Crisis)

One of the least-known stories of the Irish who came to America in the 1840s is that of the Irish battalion that fought on the Mexican side in the U.S.-Mexico War of 1846-1848. They came to Mexico and died, some gloriously in combat, others ignominiously on the gallows. United under a green banner, they participated in all the major battles of the war and were cited for bravery by General López de Santa Anna, the Mexican commander in chief and president. At the penultimate battle of the war, these Irishmen fought until their ammunition was exhausted and even then tore down the white flag that was raised by their Mexican comrades in arms, preferring to struggle on with bayonets until finally being overwhelmed by the Yankees. Despite their brave resistance, however, 85 of the Irish battalion were captured and sentenced to bizarre tortures and deaths at the hands of the Americans, resulting in what is considered even today as the “largest hanging affair in North America.” [...]

Before the declaration of war by the United States, a group of Irish Catholics headed by a crack artilleryman named John Riley deserted from the American forces and joined the Mexicans. Born in Clifden, County Galway, Riley was an expert on artillery, and it was widely believed that he had served in the British army as an officer or a non-com in Canada before enlisting in the American army. Riley’s charge was to turn this new unit into a crack artillery arm of the Mexican defense. He is credited with changing the name of the group from the Legion of Foreigners and designing their distinctive flag.

Within a year, the ranks of Riley’s men would be swelled by Catholic foreign residents in Mexico City, and Irish and German Catholics who deserted once the war broke out, into a battalion known as Los San Patricios, or “Those of Saint Patrick.”

The San Patricios fought under a green silk flag emblazoned with the Mexican coat of arms, an image of St. Patrick, and the words “Erin Go Braugh” (sic). The battalion was made up of artillery and was observed in key positions during every major battle. Their aid was critical because the Mexican had poor cannon with a range of 400 meters less than the Americans. In addition, Mexican cannoneers were inexperienced and poorly trained. The addition of veteran gunners to the Mexican side would result in at least two major battles being fought to a draw. At the Battle of Buena Vista, for example, the San Patricios held the high ground and enfiladed the Americans. At one point they even wrested a cannon from the Yanks and led General Taylor’s advisers to believe that the battle had been lost. Several Irishmen were awarded the Cross of Honor by the Mexican government for their bravery in that battle, and many received field promotions.

At the Battle of Churubusco, holed up in a Catholic monastery and surrounded by a superior force of American cavalry, artillery, and infantry, the San Patricios withstood three major assaults and inflicted heavy losses on the Yanks. Eventually, however, a shell struck their stored gunpowder, the ammunition park blew up, and the Irishmen, after a gallant counteroffensive with bayonets, were overwhelmed by sheer numbers. They were tried by a military court-martial and then scourged, branded, and hanged in a manner so brutal that it is still remembered in Mexico today.

In almost every Mexican account of the war, the San Patricios are considered heroes who fought for the noble ideals of religion and a just cause against a Protestant invader of a peaceful nation. In U.S. histories, however, they are often portrayed as turncoats, traitors, and malcontents who joined the other side for land or money.

It seems odd that anyone would defect from a superior force sure of victory to join an obviously inferior one certain to be defeated, even if, as most U.S. accounts assert, there were offers of money and land from the Mexicans. There was plenty of free land to the west, much easier to come by than risking one’s life in combat against a Yankee army. Simple desertion and refuge in the rich valleys of California would have accomplished that purpose. To determine the true causes of the defection of these men, it is necessary to reflect on the temper of the times.

The potato blight that began in 1845 (roughly coinciding with the Mexican War and lasting for its duration) brought a devastation to Europe more horrible than the Black Death. For the Irish, it was the beginning of massive evictions, starvation, sickness, and death. Of the many fortunate enough to afford the fare for an escape to the New World, tens of thousands would die en route as a result of the inhuman conditions aboard Great Britain’s vessels.

Victims of oppression in the Old World, they were to experience it again in the New. Confronted by enormous numbers of Irish-Catholic immigrants in the 1840s, American nativism reared its ugly head. “All the world knows,” wrote historian Thomas Gallagher, “that Yankee hates Paddy.” And so it seemed to those who had survived the perilous journey to America only to be labeled inferior by demagogic politicians and feared by Anglo-American workmen. Victims of prejudice in the New World, it should not be considered strange that they would shortly find themselves becoming sympathetic to the Mexicans. Here was another Catholic people being invaded by Protestant foreigners. According to a contemporary account, “On reaching Mexico they discovered they had been hired by heretics to slaughter brethren of their own church. On top of this they were confronted with the hatred of their fellow soldiers.”

Looked at through the lens of today's efforts by good Catholics, like Pat Buchanan, to keep Mexicans out of the country, this whole episode is so steeped in irony that at times it is laugh-out-loud funny.

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THEIR WAY OR THE HIGHWAY (via Tom Corcoran):

Secular Absolutism: The irreligious left tries to impose its religious views on everyone else. (Wall Street Journal, March 14, 2004)

Secular absolutism is becoming the most potent religious force in America. Just ask the Boy Scouts and Catholic Charities, which both fell afoul of secular orthodoxy and then found judges willing to punish them for it.

Start with Catholic Charities. The California Supreme Court just ruled that the social-services arm of the Roman Catholic Church must include contraceptives coverage to women as part of any prescription drug benefit it extends to employees. When Catholic Charities insisted that as an avowedly Catholic organization it fit the religious exemption provided by the law in question, the court simply said it was not a religious organization. Catholic Charities?

Leave aside the irony that of all America's Catholic institutions, Catholic Charities is arguably the most liberal and sympathetic to secular crusades. Even that didn't protect them. Nor did its practice of employing people outside the Catholic faith--which was used here as reason for denying its religious claims. If the state can order a Catholic organization to include contraceptive coverage as part of its health benefits or drop all drug coverage, it's not hard to see where that's leading. This is what passes for civil liberties now.

The lone dissent in this 6-1 decision came from Justice Janice Rogers Brown. Judge Brown, nominated by President Bush for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, has been pilloried for refusing to bow before this increasingly stifling liberal orthodoxy. As she tartly noted in her decision here, the California high court has "such a crabbed and constricted view of religion that it would define the ministry of Jesus Christ as a secular activity."

Compare this ruling with what's going on with the Boy Scouts. On Tuesday the U.S. Supreme Court turned down the Scouts' appeal of a Connecticut decision to kick them off a list of charities on its state-worker voluntary-donation plan. Meanwhile the American Civil Liberties Union has routed the Scouts in San Diego.

In a settlement reached earlier this year with the ACLU, San Diego agreed to revoke a Scouts lease for public campgrounds, where the Scouts have had a presence since 1918 and a formal lease since 1957. The city also agreed to pay the ACLU a whopping $950,000 for its efforts. [...]

What's going on here is an effort by liberal activists and their judiciary enablers to turn one set of personal mores into a public orthodoxy from which there can be no dissent, even if that means trampling the First Amendment. Any voluntary association that doesn't comply--the same little platoons once considered the bedrock of American freedom--will be driven from the public square. Meet the new face of intolerance.

It's really an astonishing reversal of the Founders' intent that they've effected: the only form of belief specifically protected by the Constitution has been turned into a liability where government benefits and regulations are concerned.

Comments

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WHERE THE WAR ENDS:

Pakistan gains in Al Qaeda hunt: Foreign fighters flee their village hideouts as Pakistani soldiers step up their crackdown. (Owais Tohid, 3/16/04, CS Monitor)

Many Al Qaeda and Taliban guerrillas in Waziristan are fleeing their village hideouts and heading up into the mountains along the Afghan border, according to tribal sources in the area.

Shunning their conspicuous Land Cruisers, the militants are camouflaging their movements by journeying with local woodcutters and shepherds, who head into the mountains to earn their livelihood.

Officials here say the fighters are being squeezed by the government's recent crackdown in the tribal region. Pakistan has deployed 12,000 military and paramilitary soldiers, and demanded help from tribal leaders, to round up Al Qaeda and Taliban elements.

"Our strategy against foreign terrorists is working very well," says Rehmatullah Wazir, a senior government official in South Waziristan. "They feel unsafe here. They are feeling the pressure, and we are coming down hard on their local supporters as well."

US forces in Afghanistan, meanwhile, have stepped up their hunt on the other side of the border, announcing over the weekend a new operation named Mountain Storm. US military officials have said they are coordinating their efforts with the Pakistanis to rid the region of Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

"It seems a part of the strategy of Pakistan and US-allied forces to herd them onto the mountains [for] a final battle there," says Sailab Mehsud, a writer and sociologist of South Waziristan.

Is this not Spain's fight either?

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SECOND PRIZE IS HE ENDORSES YOU TWICE

Sharpton endorses Kerry for president, plans TV job (AP, 3/15/04)

Al Sharpton, the New York activist who flashed quick wit and rhetorical jabs on the campaign trail but failed to spark a large following, on Monday endorsed John Kerry for president but promised to continue his own urban agenda campaign.

The mixed message — endorsing a former rival but not exiting the stage — came after a face-to-face meeting with Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

Can't wait for that convention speech.

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GIVE UP SOME TOMAHAWK CHOP:

The All-Onomatopoeic Team (Mikhail Horowitz, Elysian Fields Quarterly)

C Elmer Klumpp
1B Vince Shupe
2B Bobby Knoop
SS Everett Booe
3B Goldie Rapp
OF John Clapp
OF Merlin Kopp
OF John Poff
   
RHP
Eric Plunk
Stan Klopp
   
LHP
Joe Klink
Jung Bong
   
BENCH
Walter Plock
Bobby Clack
   
MGR Johnny Kling

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HEY, WAIT, THAT DOESN'T FIT THE STEREOTYPE:

Democracy for Sudan (Chris Ingram, 3/15/04, Washington Times)

The people of Sudan have endured decades of civil war between various regimes in the North and those seeking liberty both in the South and in the western and eastern peripheries. Today, peace between the two main warring factions is closer than ever with a peace deal all but certain.

Signing a peace deal between North and South isn't the end of the process — it's merely the beginning. Indeed, this is where the hard work begins — building a democratic state and a functional government.

This means the terms "democratic" and "functional" will not just be for the government that is to emerge from the South, it will cover all of Sudan, as the opposition Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) is expected to participate in Sudan's national government.

Thanks to the foreign policy established by President Bush, America is committed to helping expand democracy in Sudan.

America's greatest export is democracy. Around the world, people who have lived under repressive regimes are being freed because of the foreign policy of the United States. "Thank you America" was frequently heard in Sudan. In East Africa, U.S. involvement is not only needed — it is wanted and appreciated.

Bill Clinton may have been the first African-American president, but George W. Bush is the first to be meaningfully pro-African.

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LET'S MAKE A DEAL:

Beyond the Duck Blind (NY Times, 3/15/04)

Supreme Court arguments are only six weeks away in the Sierra Club's challenge to the secrecy surrounding Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force and the formulation of the Bush administration's energy policy. And Justice Antonin Scalia, Mr. Cheney's duck-hunting buddy, still stubbornly resists stepping out of the case. To protect the Supreme Court's integrity and legitimacy — and honor the rule of law — the final choice can no longer be left to Justice Scalia alone. Unless he suddenly reverses himself, the Supreme Court as a whole has a duty to intervene, much as it reviews the recusal decisions of lower-court judges. [...]

This problem is not Justice Scalia's alone. On the other side of the court's ideological spectrum, as another L.A. Times article noted, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg maintains involvement in a lecture series named for her that is co-sponsored by New York City's bar association and the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, which frequently participates in Supreme Court cases. Justice Ginsburg is relatively circumspect in her public remarks, but it's still unwise for her to retain an ongoing affiliation with such an active advocacy and litigation group.

That seems like a fair trade: Justice Scalia recuses himself from cases where the vice president is at issue and Justice Ginsburg recuses herself from those cases that involve women's issues.

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JOINING THE HEMLOCK SOCIETY:

Bombs shake up war on terror: The Madrid bombs have done more than shake up Spanish politics. (Paul Reynolds, 3/15/04, BBC News Online)

If al-Qaeda was behind the Madrid bombings, it could be said that this was a significant strike by the terror group. It has forced a change of government in one of Mr Bush's leading allies.

Not that Spanish voters support al-Qaeda, but nor do they support the policy in Iraq.

And, like the French and Germans, they want a rethink. In particular, they want a separation of the war on terror from the war in Iraq, which Mr Bush has said is the "front line" in the war on terror.

The arrival of the Spanish socialists back on the European scene will also shift the balance of opinion on Iraq within the European Union. Mr Blair has lost a close ally and may have to turn further east to the new members joining on 1 May to reinforce his position.

Whether they suffer rebukes from their own voters in due course remains to be determined.

Hard to believe the Tories, under Michael Howard at least, would be too much less pro-American/pro-war than Labour. But, obviously, if John Kerry were to win here it would completely change the scope and direction of our Middle East policy, tamping down the pro-democracy aspects -- which are too ambitious and universalist for the Left -- and ramping up anti-Saudiism, which could truly inflame the region, as we're seen meddling in the Muslim holy lands. On the other hand, Mr. Kerry is extraordinarily unlikely to win.

The real effect of the Spanish election then, contrary to the quickly assembled conventional wisdom, is not foreign but domestic. The Socialists are much more amenable to the Franco-German vision of the EU and that's disastrous for Europe.

MORE:
Socialist Spain a blow to US: Incoming Prime Minister Zapatero has signaled he will pull Spanish troops from Iraq. (Peter Ford, 3/16/04, The Christian Science Monitor)

"This changes all the equilibriums in Europe," says Sergio Romano, an influential Italian commentator on foreign affairs. "Spain is no longer America's main partner on the European mainland. It is definitely bad news for pro-American governments in Europe, and for sectors of the left that have tried to hold radical pacifists at bay." [...]

A troop withdrawal in the wake of the train attacks, now believed to be the work of Al Qaeda, would risk drawing accusations that Spain was appeasing terrorists. A videotaped statement purporting to be from Al Qaeda and claiming responsibility for the bombings said it was "a response for your collaboration with the criminals Bush and his allies. This is how to respond to the crimes you have caused in the world and specifically in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Polish Prime Minister Lezsek Miller, who has sent 2,400 soldiers to Iraq, told reporters Monday that he would keep them there.

"Revising our position on Iraq after terrorist attacks would be to admit that terrorists are stronger and that they are right" to continue such attacks, he said.

Spanish Socialists, however, angrily reject such charges.

It's not a blow to us--what, is Saddam going to retake Iraq because we don't have a handful of Spanish troops?--but to themselves.

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THE NEXT AMERICAN NOBELIST:

"Live" with TAE: Bill James: He is the guru who invented a whole new way for Americans to partake of the national pastime from their reading chairs. More recently he has gone to work in the major leagues to see if he can translate his baseball theories into wins on the field. Meet an American sporting icon. (Tim Rives, March/April 2004, American Enterprise)

Bill James has been called "the most influential baseball writer in the sport's history." In a sport shrouded in myth, James's success is itself the stuff of legend. Thirty years ago, while working in the boiler room of a pork and beans cannery in Lawrence, Kansas, James produced a series of self-published Baseball Abstracts, which analyzed the game and its players with wit, irreverence, and the orthodoxy-smashing use of statistics. (Using James's logic, bunting, stealing, and the use of a bullpen "closer" are sucker's plays.)

The Abstracts attracted a cult following, then major publishers, and eventually a wide readership that included, among others, future Boston Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein.

Michael Lewis's recent bestseller, Moneyball, described how the Oakland A's have used the insights of James and his fellow "sabermetricians" to outfox far wealthier teams. Last season, after years of writing his mordantly erudite fan notes, Bill James left the bleachers and joined the game as a senior baseball operations adviser for the Boston Red Sox.

Kansas historian Tim Rives interviewed Bill James at the Emerson Biggins sports bar in Lawrence, Kansas.

TAE: Just what does a so-called "sabermetrician" do?

JAMES: The human mind searches for order in everything it perceives. What a sabermetrician does is search for order and patterns--objective proof--on questions that are debated by baseball people. Sabermetrics starts with the question, "What are the characteristics of winning teams?" and then moves to "Why are these things characteristics of winning teams?"

We take an historical approach to the game. Because baseball is inherently meaningless, its history is more clear and less clouded than the history of things that are meaningful.

And we rely heavily on statistics (though no good analysis in any sport is driven solely by statistics). I've tried for 25 years to keep sabermetrics from being taken over by the bad habits of academicians--overspecialization, discussing issues that are of interest only to other academics, and discussing them in a manner which is inaccessible to anyone who hasn't been following the discussion for years. [...]

TAE: Was Babe Ruth the finest player in the history of the majors?

JAMES: Yes. Mays may have been as good, Honus Wagner may have been as good, Bonds may be as good. But Ruth had more impact.

Would anyone start Bonds over Ted Williams?

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RACHEL CARSON'S LEGACY OF DEATH:

Helping the Pearl of Africa (Fiona Kobusingye-Boynes, 03/15/2004, Tech Central Station)

Fighting malaria is not only a humanitarian need. It is also economically important, both for the developing countries and for aid providers like the United States. Something most people don't realize is that the same African countries that are most infected by malaria are also the poorest ones on our continent. That is because the disease makes so many millions of people in those countries too sick and weak to earn a living or cultivate their fields.

What can be done to save our people? The first thing we need is more support for medical research, to develop new medicines and help people who are already sick with malaria.

Second, we must try to kill the mosquitoes by spraying them. I know many well-meaning people say DDT is not good for the environment. But it is still the only fully effective means to kill the mosquito that causes malaria. It also keeps them out of our houses, because the mosquitoes do not seem to like the smell of DDT. And the way we use it won't hurt animals, birds or fish, because we just spray it on the walls of our houses.

Nothing works as well as DDT, and it is the only pesticide that the mosquitoes are not resistant to. We only need to spray tiny amounts on our houses one or two times a year and we are protected. Without DDT, the mosquitoes are everywhere, and they come into our homes and bite us whenever they want.

If people in Africa are to be saved, we must stop the primary cause, the mosquito that carries malaria. Of course we are concerned about our environment. We live in it. But should we not be concerned about our loved ones, our people, first?

Third, and just as important, we must help develop sanitation systems and dry out puddles and swamps that are breeding grounds for mosquitoes. We can educate our people about malaria. We can let them know that it is preventable -- that they must begin to take some responsibility themselves to eradicate this terrible disease from their families and our country. But we must have pesticides, too. We must have DDT.

What Silent Spring hath wrought.

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WHO'S THE LEADER OF THE GANG?:

Seeking Life as We Know It: To all appearances, it has to start with water -- but does it? What is the likelihood of an ammonia-based alien somewhere in space? (K.C. Cole, March 5, 2004, LA Times)

On the face of it, water seems a rather silly molecule — two hydrogen atoms attached to an oxygen atom in a way that looks like the head of Mickey Mouse. Even children know its chemical formula: H2O.

But the bonds it forms with itself and other molecules are anything but ordinary.

Atoms normally bond by sharing the negatively charged electrons that buzz around their positively charged nuclei, like people sharing popcorn at a movie.

In water, the oxygen shares one electron with each of its hydrogens, leaving four extras. These clump together as "lone pairs" that can grab onto other molecules like prehensile feet.

At the same time, the two positive hydrogen nuclei stick out the other side like arms. The "feet" of one water molecule grab the "arms" of the other, forming abnormally strong networks. Where one water molecule goes, the others tend to follow. Thus, water can climb tall trees — hand over foot, as it were — in defiance of gravity, carrying nutrients from the soil to the leaves.

Chemists say they would expect water to be a gas at room temperature because it's made up of just a few light atoms. But the strong bonds make the molecules stick together in a liquid form.

Luckily, the bonds aren't so sticky that they form a viscous gel — something that Boston University physicist Eugene Stanley initially found perplexing. Water flows freely, he and others discovered, because water molecules stick to each other only briefly, let go, grab another partner — whirling an ever-changing cast of partners around in a molecular square dance.

The upshot is that water stays watery over a remarkable range of temperatures (32 to 212 degrees Fahrenheit, to be exact).

This is a liquid bonanza for life, which seems to need some form of fluid to transport things from place to place. In solids, molecules stick together and can't go much of anywhere. In gases, the molecules don't get close enough to interact.

Water's unbalanced geometry — positive charges on one side, negative on the other — also gives it a distinctively schizophrenic personality (although chemists, like psychiatrists, prefer the term bipolar). This makes it an excellent solvent.

One side of a molecule grabs on to negative charges; the other side grabs the positive. This pulls most things apart, so water can dissolve almost anything. (If things didn't dissolve, they'd sink to the bottom, or rise to the top — not good for a free flow of chemical reactions.)

Why doesn't life just disintegrate altogether in water then? While water is one of the most strongly bipolar molecules, it is not the most reactive — meaning it can make things fall apart (dissolve) without changing their composition (react). So the parts can be endlessly rearranged.

And as it turns out, the few things water doesn't dissolve are equally important in assembling life's building blocks. Water hates fat. "It won't dissolve a spot of grease on my nice silk tie," Stanley said.

Water herds these hydrophobic (water-hating) and hydrophilic (water-loving) molecules into structures such as cells. The hydrophobes point away from each other, while the hydrophiles look inward. "It's like circling the wagons," McKay said.

Water, in other words, gives living things outsides and insides. The hostile outside is kept at bay, while inside, the proteins behind nearly all of life's mechanisms go about their business.

"You have 3,000 proteins, minimally, in every cell," said University of Massachusetts biologist Lynn Margulis, "and every reaction requires water. Everything else is negotiable."

What's the water doing with the proteins exactly? "Everything," Margulis said. "It's like a loom that you can do the weaving in. It's the matrix that's holding things in place. Nothing can go on without it."

The magical molecule does a whole lot more: For example, it absorbs heat slowly, and holds on to it for a long time. This stabilizes temperatures not only in the oceans, but also inside living things — which, lest we forget, are made mainly of water.

Finally, water expands when it freezes, contrary to nearly every other substance known. That's why ice floats, allowing it to form an insulating blanket on lakes and ponds for life beneath. Without it, fish would freeze before they hit the grocer's shelves.

Of course, it's hard to ignore one obvious reason life may depend on water. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. Helium is the second, but it's inert — so standoffish it doesn't bond with other atoms at all. Oxygen comes third. Maybe life is made of water simply because it's there.

But some otherwise habitable worlds just don't have water. Are they out of luck?

Not necessarily. "Water's a wonderful molecule," McKay said, "but there are other wonderful molecules."

Are molecules really perfectly round and do the H's and the O really line up in a V?

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WHAT HE LEARNED FROM HOWARD DEAN:

Kerry Remark on Foreign Leaders Faulted (JODI WILGOREN, 3/15/04, NY Times)

A Republican business owner here in this November battleground state and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell had the same questions Sunday for Senator John Kerry: Which foreign leaders told you they support your campaign, and when did you meet with them?

The questions, in a volatile exchange at a forum here and in an interview on Fox News Sunday, stemmed from a comment that Mr. Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, made last Monday at a Florida fund-raiser. It was the second time in recent days that stray comments by Mr. Kerry diverted attention from his themes of creating jobs and providing health insurance.

"I just want an honest answer," Cedric Brown, 52, who owns a small sign company, told Mr. Kerry.

"Were they people like Blair or were they people like the president of North Korea?" he asked, referring to the British prime minister, Tony Blair. "Why not tell us who it was? Senator, you're making yourself sound like a liar."

Mr. Brown's repeated questions came hours after Mr. Powell said on television that Mr. Kerry's vague claim to have the backing of unnamed foreign leaders was "an easy charge."

"If he feels it is that important an assertion to make, he ought to list some names," Mr. Powell said. "If he can't list names, then perhaps he should find something else to talk about."

Mr. Powell also challenged Mr. Kerry's recent assertions that Mr. Powell had been undermined in foreign policy debates in the Bush administration.

"Name a specific issue where it looks like I have been marginalized," Mr. Powell said.

That exchange with Mr. Brown should be a Bush campaign ad.

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THE NEXT ILLIBERAL DEMOCRAT TO GO:

US revealed to be secretly funding opponents of Chavez (Andrew Buncombe, 13 March 2004, Independent)

Washington has been channelling hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund the political opponents of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez - including those who briefly overthrew the democratically elected leader in a coup two years ago.

Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that, in 2002, America paid more than a million dollars to those political groups in what it claims is an ongoing effort to build democracy and "strengthen political parties". Mr Chavez has seized on the information, telling Washington to "get its hands off Venezuela".

The revelation about America's funding of Mr Chavez's opponents comes as the president is facing a possible recall referendum and has been rocked by a series of violent street demonstrations in which at least eight people have died. His opponents, who include politicians, some labour leaders, media executives and former managers at the state oil company, are trying to collect sufficient signatures to force a national vote. The documents reveal that one of the group's organising the collection of signatures - Sumate - received $53,400 (£30,000) from the US last September.

Jeremy Bigwood, a Washington-based freelance journalist who obtained the documents, yesterday told The Independent: "This repeats a pattern started in Nicaragua in the election of 1990 when [the US] spent $20 per voter to get rid of [the Sandinista President Daniel] Ortega. It's done in the name of democracy but it's rather hypocritical. Venezuela does have a democratically elected President who won the popular vote which is not the case with the US."

The funding has been made by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) a non-profit agency financed entirely by Congress. It distributes $40m (£22m) a year to various groups in what it says is an effort to strengthen democracy.

The point being that undermining Chavez is a democracy-building effort.

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FLAWED GIANTS:

It's India Above China in New World Order: Can India overtake China? That's the title of an influential new article in Foreign Policy magazine. A Q&A with authors Yasheng Huang of MIT and Tarun Khanna of HBS. (Martha Lagace, Mar. 15, 2004, HBS Working Knowledge)

[C]hina and India are the world's next major powers, according to the writers, Yasheng Huang, formerly of Harvard Business School and now a professor at M.I.T. Sloan School of Management, and Tarun Khanna, a professor of strategy at HBS. It is also important because the two countries have embraced very different models of development.

The reasons they have done so are complex but, in general, China has discouraged or actively undermined local entrepreneurship in favor of an foreign direct investment-dependent approach, they say. India, on the other hand, is building an infrastructure—however slowly—that allows entrepreneurship and free enterprise to thrive. By making fuller use of its resources, India's long-term outlook may be far stronger, they suggest. Macroeconomic statistics cited by Huang and Khanna show China clearly in the lead. "But," the authors wonder in Foreign Policy, "the real issue isn't where China and India are today, but where they will be tomorrow."

How these two models play out has great significance not just for Asia but also for other parts of the world that want to benefit from their lessons and avoid their mistakes.

Huang and Khanna recently collaborated on an e-mail interview with HBS Working Knowledge to discuss their Foreign Policy article, Can India Overtake China? [...]

Q: As you think about the future of both countries, what are your main concerns or worries, given these two different models?

A: Our concerns for China are these: how will China give political voice to the public, if at all, along with increasing economic autonomy? We are also concerned about instability caused by migration to cities and the large (though decreasing) role of bankrupt, state-owned enterprises that continue to play a Social Security-like role in China. But the biggest source of worry is the state of China's banking sector, which is technically insolvent. The banking problem is one of the biggest costs of the delay associated with developing a vibrant, domestic private sector.

Here are our concerns for India. How will India rein in its fiscal deficit? How will India discipline its political class? One challenge India faces is deregulation. India is also quite over-regulated compared to other countries at its level of per capita income.

Interesting how the fact that each has over a billion people so often warps the capacity to think clearly about them. Just take the problems they cite in China and consider what you think they'd portend for a nation of 20 million. Now ask yourself, are there likely to be more problems or benefits from trying to manage a billion people? Are these numbers likely to lend stability or exacerbate instability?

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HE'S NOT ONLY JFK, HE'S LHO:

HOW KERRY QUIT VETERANS GROUP AMID DARK PLOT: When Talk Turned To Assassination He Exited, Vet Says (THOMAS H. LIPSCOMB, 3/12/04, NY Sun)

The anti-war group that John Kerry was the principal spokesman for debated and voted on a plot to assassinate politicians who supported the Vietnam War.

Mr. Kerry denies being present at the November 12-15, 1971, meeting in Kansas City of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and says he quit the group before the meeting. But according to the current head of Missouri Veterans for Kerry, Randy Barnes, Mr. Kerry,who was then 27,was at the meeting, voted against the plot, and then orally resigned from the organization.

Mr. Barnes was present as part of the Kansas City host chapter for the 1971 meeting and recounted the incident in a phone interview with The New York Sun this week.

In addition to Mr. Barnes’s recollection placing Mr. Kerry at the Kansas City meeting, another Vietnam veteran who attended the meeting, Terry Du-Bose, said that Mr. Kerry was there.

There are at least two other independent corroborations that the antiwar group Vietnam Veterans Against the War, of which Mr. Kerry was the most prominent national spokesman, considered assassinating American political leaders who favored the war.

Gerald Nicosia’s 2001 book “Home To War” reports that one of the key leaders of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Scott Camil, “proposed the assassination of the most hard-core conservative members of Congress, as well as any other powerful, intractable opponents of the antiwar movement.” The book reports on the Kansas City meeting at which Mr.Camil’s plan was debated and then voted down.

Mr. Nicosia’s book was widely praised by reviewers as varied as General Harold Moore, author of “We Were Soldiers”; Gloria Emerson, who had been a New York Times reporter during the Vietnam War, and leftist Howard Zinn. Mr. Kerry himself stated in a blurb on the cover that the book “ties together the many threads of a difficult period.” Mr. Kerry hosted a party for the book in the Hart Senate Office Building that was televised on C-SPAN.

Another source is an October 20,1992, oral history interview of Scott Camil on file at the University of Florida Oral History Archive. In it, Mr.Camil speaks of his plan for an alternative to Mr. Kerry’s idea of symbolically throwing veterans’ medals over the fence onto the steps of the Capitol during the Dewey Canyon III demonstration in Washington in April of 1971.

“My plan was that, on the last day we would go into the [congressional] offices we would schedule the most hardcore hawks for last — and we would shoot them all,” Mr. Camil told the Oral History interviewer. “I was serious.”

In a phone interview with the Sun this week, Mr. Camil did not dispute either the account in the Nicosia book or in the oral history. He said he plans to accept an offer by the Florida Kerry organization to become active in Mr. Kerry’s presidential campaign.

Never mind the letter of resignation, can anyone produce a report of this plot to law enforcement?

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THE WAY FORWARD:

REVIVING MIDDLE EASTERN LIBERALISM (Saad Eddin Ibrahim, 15 May 2003, National Endowment for Democracy)

Democracy is the way forward. It is the only sure way to keep the Middle East from going to the brink of war every few years. In an article recently published in the Washington Post, I counted the number of times that the United States or other Western powers have had to form military coalitions or use large-scale armed force in the region to avert or resolve a problem. From 1958, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent U.S. Marines to Lebanon, up through the Iraq War of 2003, the rate of military interventions has averaged one every seven years. God knows when the next one will be, but without democracy they are sure to continue, and that is no light matter. It is time for us as Arabs to put our own houses in order.

There are a thousand and one difficulties facing us as we work to institute democracy in the Arab world and the larger Middle East. And yet what choice do we have except to try once, twice, or as often as we must? Government by consent, respect for human rights, and support for the rule of law are the only things that can finally and securely protect our countries, our region, and the world against the threats of terrorism and of crises that compel outsiders to come and use military force on our shores.

How do I rate the prospects for democracy in the Middle East? I think that they are surprisingly good. I am well aware of those who marshal evidence to show that instituting democracies and open societies in the region, or perhaps even in the larger Muslim world, is difficult or impossible. The difficulties are well known and undeniable. But they can all be overcome. In previous decades, authoritative voices said that Germany, Japan, Slavic countries, and even the Catholic societies would never, could never, be democratic. I am not speaking of popular prejudices here, but of high-level scholarship and expert consensus. Batteries of learned naysayers honestly believed that there was something about German, Japanese, or Slavic culture, or about Catholicism, that was fundamentally and unchangeably hostile to democracy and democratic values.

Experience, of course, proved that these doubts were not as well founded as they seemed. At the Ibn Khaldun Center, we are convinced that similar doubts about the potential for democracy in Arab cultures, the Middle East, and the Muslim world will ultimately prove just as feebly grounded. Indeed, I am heartened by the instances of modest progress toward greater political openness that we are already seeing. The successes are limited, but real. The most prominent has come in Turkey, which recently witnessed an alternation in power following a free and vigorously contested election-with a party of self-avowed "Muslim democrats" now running the government. Less dramatic examples of increasing political competition can be found in Morocco, Bahrain, Jordan, and Kuwait. Movement forward has so far been tenuous and uneven, but these countries-and also Yemen-do appear to be making some headway, at least.

From this I take a renewed measure of hope and determination, as do the many people throughout the region who think like me. And make no mistake, there are quite a few of them. They are not all famous or high- 8 Journal of Democracy profile, but there are plenty of people who are interested in democracy and its possibilities. Those of us who have made a public and systematic commitment to open politics and free societies have an obligation to reach out to these people. We need to engage them and make them partners in the cause of liberty and self-government.

In this project, civil society is crucial. That is the title that we have given to the Ibn Khaldun Center's major periodical publication. We define civil society as a free space within which people can assemble, work together, express themselves, organize, and pursue shared interests in an open and peaceful manner. This is the sort of thing that the Center was founded to encourage. The space available for the work may vary-at times it may shrink to the dimensions of a tiny prison cell, as it did in my case for a while. But even while I was locked in that cell, I felt freer than my oppressors, and that is what gave me strength for all of those three years.

Near the end of my time in prison, I heard about Professor Hashem Aghajari in Iran, a fellow intellectual who was arrested, tried, and condemned to death for blasphemy because he dared to criticize the rule of the mullahs over his country and to tell his fellow Iranians that they should not be blind followers. I had never heard of him or read any of his writings-he is a historian who publishes in Persian-but I felt an instant bond with him and sensed that we had something deeply in common. Prisons are seldom comfortable places, but I understand that he had a particularly hard time of it: He is an amputee, having lost one of his legs fighting in Iran's war with Iraq in the 1980s, and in jail his stump became infected.

In the Middle Ages there used to be something called the Silk Road, which was an overland trade route that ran from the Atlantic shores of Morocco to the Great Wall of China. It was a famous path, steeped in lore and plied by picturesque caravans. When I heard of Professor Aghajari and then of dissidents in Tunisia also languishing in jail, another picture popped into my head: The romantic Silk Road of yesteryear has in our time become a kind of Despots' Alley or Tyrants' Row, with various sorts of unfree governments lying end-to-end on the map from Beijing right on through to North Africa.

But then I reflected some more and thought, in all these storied lands there are people who are working for the same things that I am working for. Whatever might happen-whether prison or even death might await us-we could all feel that we were part of a larger freedom struggle whose value and significance humbled us even while they lifted us up. I've never believed anything more strongly in my life. This is not just about Egypt, or the Middle East, or the Arab peoples-this is a global struggle, a battle for the world. Those who are carrying it on in countries and regions such as mine need the help of citizens in mature democracies. Reach out to us, engage us in dialogue, give us a hand if and when you can, and let our message be heard in the West so our culture and our religion will not be unjustly condemned as intrinsically against freedom and democracy, because they are not.

People everywhere aspire to freedom and democracy. They might not always articulate their hopes in a lucid manner that would find a fair hearing here in the West, but they are there, believe me. They need opportunities to organize and to do the work that needs to be done. In Egypt, despite all our ups and downs, we have had a civil society sector for more than a century and a half. In 1840, Greek émigrés who had settled in Egypt founded the first group that you might call a modern nongovernmental organization; by 1900, there were more than two hundred such local groups. Great hospitals, relief organizations, and our first secular university all began as the works of civil society organizations. Likewise, Egypt could boast a vibrant multiparty parliamentary democracy, an independent judiciary, and one of the earliest movements for female emancipation anywhere in the world.

For about a century, then, from around 1850 until about the time of the Free Officers' coup that toppled the monarchy and brought Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser to power in 1952, there flourished in Egypt a Liberal Age that is all too often unjustly forgotten in discussions of Arab politics today. Leading thinkers and writers such as Taha Hussein and the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Naghib Mahfouz period, but there were literally hundreds of others. This was also a time of relative sectarian peace and tolerance. The great Oxford historian Albert Hourani's History of the Arab Peoples is a good primer on this and other aspects of political development in that period.

The Liberal Age came to an end after the Arab defeat at the hands of Israel in the 1948 war and the subsequent rise of military regimes across the Arab world. With ideological roots in populist nationalism, these governments soon became entrenched autocracies. Civil society groups, political parties, trade unions, and the independent judiciary were among their early victims.

Though it is not his focus, the important thing for us here is that--as after WWI, WWII, and the Cold War--if we leave despotic regimes in place we will just keep being drawn into conflicts regularly, and not on our own terms. Better to democratize them all in one fell swoop.

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JOHN KERRY WANTS YOU TO DO THIS JOB:

Faces of Globalization: A dilemma in India (Indrajit Basu, March 12, 2004 , UPI)

It's good for the economy; it creates employment, lots of it, and working nights at India's back offices is pleasing and financially rewarding for a huge number of young Indians.

However, India's money-spinning industry of taking service jobs from overseas is turning out to be a source of discomfort for U.S. and European politicians. And also the subcontinent is now fast realizing that its famed success in so-called Business Process Outsourcing may have come at the cost of a generation's mental well-being.

Owing to the 10 1/2 hour time difference between the Western Hemisphere, particularly the United States, which sends more service jobs abroad than anyone else, almost all Indian back office operations have to work at shifts typically running from 5 p.m. to 3 a.m. local time to coincide with the daytime office hours in the United States.

And it's this working at nights that requires adjusting the biological clock and social practices to a different time, which is turning out to be a major cause for health-related and social problems. [...]

Indeed, the high degree of dissatisfaction that is fast dawning on Indian back office employees is getting to be a major cause for worry in India's back office sector, which is billed as one of the country's most important sectors for economic growth.

In a recent survey of employee satisfaction in what the industry calls Business Process Outsourcing, a staggering 35 percent of respondents said they are likely to leave because they cannot handle the schedule. The survey also showed something else: Money remains the biggest reason why most people join call centers. Forty-five percent of all respondents across the industry said they joined up for the money, with another 42 percent adding that they would most likely leave for better opportunities, i.e. read money, elsewhere.

And 27 percent said they would leave either because of work stress or the sheer physical strain that was too much to handle.

Even work related ailments are reality. Sleeping disorders, digestive system disorders and eyesight problems are prevalent.

Low pay, bad conditions, no future--is that really the Democrats' vision for America?

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WE'RE NOT:

We Are All Spaniards: On 3/11, Madrid suffered the deadliest terrorist attack the Continent has seen in years. Spanish authorities are probing al-Qaeda links. And Europe is wondering who'll be next (JOSH TYRANGIEL, March 14, 2004, TIME)

Spaniards today made democratic elections more likely targets of terrorism.

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RED READS:

A Red Planet Forever in the Orbit of Science and Dreams (KIM STANLEY ROBINSON, 3/13/04, NY Times)

Mars and science fiction came of age together in the 1890's, and ever since they have had a tight relationship, a feedback loop that has made both famous.

It began with the American astronomer Percival Lowell, who built a technically advanced telescope and through it saw straight lines on the surface of the red planet. He explained that these had to be the canals of an alien race whose planet was drying out, forcing them to convey water from the polar caps, also visible.

Of course Lowell's elaborately postulated Martian culture was a kind of self-hypnosis, in effect a science-fiction novel already. But his speculative leap from limited evidence was not that different in method from the archaeology of Schliemann at Troy, or Sir Arthur Evans at Knossos. And so his Mars was widely accepted as a possibility based on real data.

The news galvanized the world. Other writers immediately recognized that if there really were a civilization on Mars, it could be anything; Lowell's version was only one guess. Quickly other Martian fictions appeared in all the leading industrial nations, and many had a major impact. In Germany Kurd Lasswitz's "Two Planets" (1897) sold several hundred thousand copies, and clubs formed to discuss it. Lasswitz described a Martian technological utopia, enjoying great domestic comfort through advances in food production, transport, urban planning and space travel. Young men like Wernher von Braun and Willy Ley were greatly impressed, so much so that they later became rocket scientists. It could even be said that it was Lowell's imagination that got us to the moon by 1969.

In Russia the book was "Red Star," by Aleksandr Bogdanov. Here the utopia is political, though also technically advanced. Mars's socialist civilization has been living in peace for five centuries, but when it sends emissaries to Earth, terrible problems arise. Can social progress be imposed on a less developed culture?

This very impressive novel, written in 1908, considers this and other questions while offhandedly predicting much of 20th-century history. It, too, inspired clubs, debates, professional and amateur sequels, and a generation of young scientists, including engineers in the Soviet space program.

A decade earlier in England, H. G. Wells considered what might happen if this advanced Martian civilization decided to come here and take our water, which would be as valuable to Martians as oil is to us. Wells intended "War of the Worlds" to remind British readers of the recent massacre of the Tasmanian aborigines — while putting them at the wrong end of the gun.

In the United States, on the other hand, the pulp-action adventures of Edgar Rice Burroughs's John Carter series abjured any heavy political message, except perhaps the idea that it would be fun to live in a fantasy Wild West forever, especially if you could leap much higher than the bad guys.

Thus from the turn of the 20th century through the 1920's, many scientifically literate people considered a Martian civilization quite possible, and fiction speculating about it was widespread and influential. By the end of the 1930's, however, the scientists were shaking their heads. Radio telescopes were revealing that the Martian atmosphere was extremely thin, and had neither oxygen nor water. Not only was civilization unlikely, but life itself looked as if it would have a hard time as well. And then Orson Welles's radio dramatization of "War of the Worlds" scared people and was declared a hoax, and this somehow debunked the whole idea.

I've always found Mr. Robinson's Mars series to be tedious reading, but Edgar Rice Burroughs's John Carter series is fabulous and Greg Bear's Moving Mars offers some interesting ideas about the future political strains of Earthly nations trying to dictate to colonies in space.

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HE'S SUNG:

Pavarotti Dies a Final Time at the Met (ALLAN KOZINN, 3/14/04, NY Times)

Luciano Pavarotti offered his farewell to the opera stage with a performance of Puccini's "Tosca'' last night at the Metropolitan Opera, and when the curtain fell on the third act, the packed house gave him a 15-minute standing ovation, including several minutes of insistent rhythmic clapping when it appeared that he would not return to the stage.

There was, surprisingly, neither the tossing of bouquets or the rain of program-book confetti that often occurs on such occasions. But after the third of 10 curtain calls, a large red and white banner on the second tier was unfurled and spotlighted. It read, ``We Love You Luciano,'' with a heart-shaped "o'' in "Love.'' The banner was from the Met.

The performance was the 68-year old tenor's 379th at the Met since his debut in 1968. Of those, 357 were in full-fledged opera productions; the rest were in galas (which often include operatic scenes and arias), special concerts and recitals. Of his operatic appearances, 61 were of the doomed painter Mario Cavaradossi, the hero of "Tosca.'' He also sang the role at the Met last Saturday and on Wednesday.

To paraphrase Richard Nixon: You won't have Pavarotti to orbit around anymore.

Comments

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IF YOU'RE A KEPT MAN ALREADY, DOES THE KEEPER REALLY MATTER?:

Inside The Dems' Shadow Party: How they're using soft money and private groups to combat the GOP money machine (Business Week, 3/22/04)

In 2002, as campaign-finance reform was about to become law, a few savvy Democratic activists saw the future -- and it was potentially devastating. The problem: While the Democratic Party raised $520 million in the 2000 election cycle, nearly half of it came in big-buck "soft-money" donations that the McCain-Feingold Act would all but eliminate. In the upcoming Presidential election, the Dems would be even more badly outgunned by the GOP, which in 2000 pulled in $712 million -- but only $246 million of it in soft money. To make an end run around the new campaign law, these behind-the-scenes players rushed to set up political committees that can legally collect soft money, pay for issue ads, and encourage voter turnout.

The downside: They cannot give to candidates or be directly connected to a political party. Known as 527s after a provision of the federal code that grants them tax-exempt status, the committees have been spectacularly successful since they got under way last year, having already raised almost $100 million in soft money. More important than the dollars, though, is the highly sophisticated political machine under construction -- a web of interlocking, like-minded organizations that could at once save and partly supplant the Democratic Party. And if the 527s don't give presumptive nominee Senator John Kerry an edge against George W. Bush, they will at least help level the playing field.

This strategy is largely the brainchild of Steve Rosenthal, former political director of the AFL-CIO. His group, America Coming Together (ACT), hopes to raise $95 million to build an elab- orate operation that will spur Democratic voters to the polls in 17 battleground states. ACT is working closely with the Media Fund, set up by former Clinton aide Harold Ickes, which hopes to raise an additional $50 million to target the same voters with issue ads.

These two big committees are coordinating with smaller 527s, as well as with more than two dozen left-leaning organizations such as the Sierra Club and Planned Parenthood (table). The two groups even have jointly hired their own pollsters, opposition research, and public-relations team. "We're a lot like a campaign, but without a candidate," says Ickes.

Looking at this from John Kerry's perspective, how much difference does it really make, giving George Soros a lufa rub for his money or pummicing the dead skin off of Teresa Heinz's feet for hers?

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BASQUETRY LOOKING LESS AND LESS LIKELY:

Moroccan arrested in Madrid was watched (NICOLAS MARMIE, 3/14/04, ASSOCIATED PRESS)

One of three Moroccans arrested in connection with the Madrid train bombings was already being closely watched by authorities in his homeland, where he was suspected of ties to an al-Qaida-linked group, a Moroccan official said Sunday.

Jamal Zougam, 30, was one of thousands of Moroccans put under surveillance by authorities after May terrorist bombings in the coastal city of Casablanca, a high-level official told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity. There were no formal accusations against him.

The other two suspects, Mohamed Bekkali, 31, and Mohamed Chaoui, 34, had no police record at home, the official said.

Spanish authorities arrested the three Saturday, along with two Indians, in connection with Thursday bombings in Madrid, which killed 200 people and injured 1,500.

All were taken into custody in connection with a cell phone and prepaid card in an explosives-filled gym bag found on one of the four trains bombed, Spanish Interior Minister Angel Acebes has said. Acebes also said one of the Moroccans may be linked to extremist groups but did not say which one.

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THE REICH BE SINKIN':

Pensions sink with workforce: Parliament passes legislation that will radically change state retirement fund (Elise Kissling, 3/12/04, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung)

In the future, the level of retirement benefits will depend on the size of the workforce in relationship to the number of retirees. Pensions will automatically decline as the German population shrinks over the next 25 years.

The government hopes the legislation will keep payments into the pay-as-you-go national pension system below 22 percent of gross wages in 25 years when there will be just over two workers to support each retired person.

Today, the working population is still four times as large as the number of retirees. But a very low fertility rate of 1.3 children per woman and a rapid rise in life expectancy mean that Germany will experience a particularly dramatic change in the age structure over the next 30 years.

Employees pay 19.5 percent of their gross salary into the system, which costs almost 12 percent of gross domestic product. That is 2.5 times as much as the U.S. Social Security system. But in contrast to other state pension plans, Germany's system offers a high level of retirement income based on a person's earnings history.

A last-minute concession made to the left-wing of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's Social Democratic Party has put the goal of keeping pension pay-outs in line with contributions to the system out of reach. It would prevent the government from reducing the average pension rate for a person with 45 years in the labor force to below 46 percent of net wages.

“It's nonsense. In all likelihood, we know that 46 percent of net income will be incompatible with a rate of 22 percent,“ said Axel Börsch-Supan, the director of MEA research institute, who played a key role in working out the new calculation method. “It would work if you increased the retirement age by two-and-a-half years. But the crew of people that wants to keep benefits at 46 percent is also against increasing the retirement age.“

The orchestra just kept on playing...

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SORROW DOES NOT SUFFICE:

It's not raining, Madrid is crying (JEREMY WATSON, 3/14/04, Scotland on Sunday)

AFTER the mass displays of collective anger came the shattering images of deeply personal grief.

Under a grey drizzle, the traumatised citizens of Madrid and its surrounding towns turned out in their thousands yesterday to bury their dead.

There was nine-year-old Marcos Gonzales, who should have been playing football in the park with his friends. Instead, he was bravely trying to wipe away the tears as he stood at the side of his father’s coffin.

There was the distraught but proud family of Federico Miguel Sierra who gathered in a rain-sodden cemetery to say goodbye to their army officer son.

They were scenes gruesomely replicated across the Spanish capital, awash with black mourning sashes, as the relatives of the first 60 of the 200 dead did what they had to do.

The first funeral masses took place in the sports pavilion of Alcala de Hanares, best-known up to now as the birthplace of Don Quixote writer Migel de Cervantes. Forever more it will be known as the place where three of the four ill-fated trains set off on Thursday.

Yesterday, the local sports hall should have been echoing to the sounds of youngsters taking part in their favourite sports. Instead, hundreds of mourners crammed into plastic seats for a mass for Felix Gonzales, an air force lieutenant, and Pilar Cabrejas.

It was left to Bishop Jesus Catala to put into words what many felt. "There is a divine justice that nobody can escape from," he said. "They will never escape from this justice." [...]

Grief blanketed the national pastime, football, last night. Players at Real Madrid’s home match against Real Zaragoza wore black armbands and observed a minute’s silence before kick-off, a mark of respect to be repeated at all Primera Liga games this weekend.

"It is not raining. Madrid is crying," said Jorge Mendez, a 20-year-old communications student.

Yesterday’s funerals were the first of many more that will take place over the next few days, spanning the generations and all walks of Spanish life. They will include an eight-month-old Polish baby, Patricia, found clinging to life on a station platform after being blown across the track from a bombed train. She died from serious blast injuries in the Baby Jesus Children’s Hospital despite frantic attempts to save her.

Her mother is still in hospital recovering from serious injuries. The whereabouts of her father are unknown. More than 41 people still remain to be accounted for after Thursday’s devastation.

An aunt told how Patricia’s parents had brought their baby to Spain for a better future. "They all felt very Spanish," she said.

We grieve along with them, but then what?

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THE EXCEPTION:

What's there to choose? (Ayaz Amir, 3/05/04, Dawn)

Three weeks ago I gleefully suggested that Bush might slip on the way to November. This was the price he'd have to pay for taking America into a war justified by outright lies and cheap propaganda.

Behind that prediction was not love for the Democratic frontrunner, John Kerry, or the rest of the weasel pack in the Democratic race. It was subjectivity, pure and simple.

George Bush and the neo-con gang around him had concocted the reasons for the invasion of Iraq. Since hubris should take a fall, he had no business being re-elected. And the American electorate would have to be dumber than usual to vote him into the White House again.

But as the presidential race gets into high gear, an uncomfortable truth is becoming clearer: that on the Iraq war there is really nothing to choose between Bush and Kerry.

Kerry supported the war all the way, voicing not the slightest doubts about its wisdom. Even now, about the only criticism of the war he allows himself is that Bush went ahead without taking America's allies along.

In the run-up to the war Kerry was a card-carrying member of the war party. "Iraq," he said, "has chemical and biological weapons" and even claimed it was "attempting to develop nuclear weapons."

On October 11 2002 he voted for the resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq. When the war started he co-sponsored a Senate resolution stating that the invasion was "lawful and fully authorized by the Congress" and that he "commends and supports the efforts and leadership of the President...in the conflict with Iraq."

Any backtracking or apology for the stand he took then? Not the least bit. The Democrats are not touching the Iraq war or facing up to it. Nor is Kerry. There seems to be a bipartisan consensus to simply fudge the issue and get on with other things.

The only person who had fire in his belly was Howard Dean. And look how he was squeezed out of the race, his views too radical for what is dubbed as "the American mainstream". Strange country, the U.S.: if you oppose the thuggery visited on Iraq, as Dean did, you are a radical.

Yeah, if only America were just like the rest of the world, where support for brutal dictatorships is the norm and belief in freedom and democracy radical...

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NOW HE'S JUST BECOMING PATHOLOGICAL:

Kerry's stances on Cuba open to attack (PETER WALLSTEN, 3/14.04, Miami Herald)

''I'm pretty tough on Castro, because I think he's running one of the last vestiges of a Stalinist secret police government in the world,'' Kerry told WPLG-ABC 10 reporter Michael Putney in an interview to be aired at 11:30 this morning.

Then, reaching back eight years to one of the more significant efforts to toughen sanctions on the communist island, Kerry volunteered: ``And I voted for the Helms-Burton legislation to be tough on companies that deal with him.''

It seemed the correct answer in a year in which Democratic strategists think they can make a play for at least a portion of the important Cuban-American vote -- as they did in 1996 when more than three in 10 backed President Clinton's reelection after he signed the sanctions measure written by Sen. Jesse Helms and Rep. Dan Burton.

There is only one problem: Kerry voted against it.

For someone who's been wrong as consistently as Mr. Kerry, flip-flopping may just be a healthy sign of repeatedly acknowledging error, but lying is another matter.

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CABANA BOY BLEW HIS ALLOWANCE ALREADY:

Kerry Calls for Rhetorical Cease-Fire (Matea Gold, March 14, 2004, LA Times)

After a week of increasingly shrill partisan sniping, presumed Democratic nominee John F. Kerry on Saturday called on President Bush to help him elevate the tone of the presidential campaign, urging his opponent to join him for monthly forums in the spirit of the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates.

In a related story, Bob's Cola has called for a rhetorical ceasefire with Coke.

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LET'S HEAR THE WHISTLE:

Insider trading: It's a good thing (Jascha Hoffman, 3/14/2004, Boston Globe)

Insider trading, defined by the SEC as the use of "material, nonpublic information" in stock sales, was first outlawed in the United States in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929. The rule went unchallenged -- and unenforced -- for decades. But soon after the first insider-trading conviction in 1961, economist Henry Manne stunned the corporate law crowd by arguing that insider trading, though harmful to some investors, should be legal nonetheless.

First, Manne argued, insider trades would make a company's stock more quickly reflect the company's actual value, making the market more efficient. The canonical example is Texas Gulf Sulphur Co., whose managers gobbled up the company's stock in 1963 and `64 before announcing they had struck ore in Canada, inflating their share price with their own demand -- and enriching fellow stockholders -- well before the good news was released.

More importantly, Manne saw insider trading as a form of incentive compensation, a way to turn rule-bound managers into "corporate entrepreneurs" who would want to create more good news for their companies so they could trade on it.

Don Boudreaux, chairman of the economics department at George Mason University, takes Manne's argument a step farther, claiming that insider trading can actually fight corporate crime by serving as a silent form of whistleblowing. If insiders who knew about malfeasance were free to sell their company's stock short, Boudreaux claimed in a recent interview, the resulting decline in share value would serve as a distress signal to investors, and might eventually encourage a takeover.

Why not just combine insider trading with public disclosure? Insiders could be allowed to trade provided that they publicly disclose the material information upon which they are trading a day or two in advance. It's obviously a more efficient way of revealing a company's true value, but avoids the unjust enrichment (or impoverishment) problem.

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