From The New York Times:

Young Right Tries to Define Post-Buckley Future
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

n 1954, when he was 28, William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review to bear the standard of a fledgling conservative movement defined by three commitments: to fight Communism, to diminish the federal government and to uphold traditionalism in social affairs.

That formulation held the movement together for five decades, as Ronald Reagan brought conservatives to power, George H. W. Bush declared victory in the cold war and Bill Clinton pronounced the end of big government.

Now, many conservatives say, the current Bush administration is testing that definition of conservatism as it has never been tested before, from the expansion of federal health and education programs to the campaign to remake Iraq. And as Mr. Buckley prepares for retirement by handing over control of National Review, a new generation of young would-be Buckleys is debating just what conservatism means when their side has taken over Washington, and yet they still do not feel that they have won.

"Conservative is a word that is almost meaningless these days," said Caleb Stegall, 32, a lawyer in Topeka, Kan., and a founder of The New Pantagruel, newpantagruel.com, an irreverent Web site about religion and politics named for the jovial drunkard created by Rabelais. "It tells you almost nothing about where a person stands on a lot of questions," he said, like gay marriage, stem cell research, the environment and Iraq.

The debate among members of the young right is unfolding on Web sites like Mr. Stegall's and Oxblog, oxblog .blogspot.com, set up by three Rhodes Scholars. It is discussed at roundtables and cocktail parties organized by groups like America's Future Foundation in Washington. In journals for young conservatives, they tackle subjects as heterodox as the perils of Wal-Mart and urban sprawl, the dangers of unfettered capitalism to family life, and the feared takeover of their movement by hawkish neoconservatives.

In May the Philadelphia Society, a prestigious club for conservative intellectuals, tapped Sarah Bramwell, a 24-year-old Yale graduate and writer, to address the views of the young right at its 40th-anniversary conference. "Modern American conservatism began in an effort to do two things: defeat Communism and roll back creeping socialism," she began. "The first was obviated by our success, the latter by our failure. So what is left of conservatism?"

Rearing new conservatives has long been a subject of keen interest to their elders. To counter what they considered the liberal dominance of the major universities and news organizations, a handful of conservative foundations has helped build a network of organizations to train young members of the movement, most prominently the 51-year-old Intercollegiate Studies Institute. It publishes journals and books, sponsors fellowships and administers a network of 80 conservative college newspapers.

"I think one of the principal, even signal, features of the conservative movement is its overriding concern for nurturing young people," said Jeff Nelson, 39, the institute's vice president for publications.

Mr. Buckley recently chose Sarah Bramwell's husband, Austin Bramwell, 26, as one of five trustees of National Review. Mr. Bramwell, a clerk for the federal appeals court in Denver and an alumnus of the institute's programs, declined to comment because of his job at the court.

Mr. Nelson said young conservatives' greatest challenge might come from their predecessors' success. "Buckley started the conservative movement athwart history, yelling `stop,' " he said, "but there has been a subtle shift in the conservative movement's view of itself, from history's opponents to destiny's child."

"We have a lot of conservatives who reflect the values of the mainstream culture," he continued. "There are polls that show younger-generation conservatives trust the government much more deeply than their parents did."

The increase in federal domestic spending under President Bush would have been "unimaginable" to conservatives a few years ago, he said, and so would foreign policies like the invasion of Iraq.

Doubts about the justification for the war are a common theme among young conservatives. "Many conservatives, especially since Sept. 11, believe that a major, if not the major, calling of conservatives today is to articulate and defend a certain brand of international grand strategy," Ms. Bramwell argued in her address to the Philadelphia Society. "I believe this view to be not only mistaken, but quite possibly harmful to the conservative movement."

Still, Ms. Bramwell, who now works as deputy press secretary for Gov. Bill Owens of Colorado, said in an interview that she nonetheless supported the war in Iraq as a chance to advance United States interests in the Middle East.

Daniel McCarthy, 26, an assistant editor at The American Conservative, the magazine founded by Pat Buchanan, said that although many of his contemporaries questioned the war, few were willing to turn against the president, as he had.

"I say we have to go back to before the conservative movement became a movement," he said, "back to when it was just a few tormented intellectuals who didn't necessarily see themselves as a coherent group, and even to the so-called isolationist and noninterventionist right. America is a nation state. It is not meant to be a sort of world government in embryo, not meant to be a last provider of justice or security for the entire world."

But some young conservatives argue that the United States may need to become more active, not less. Eric Cohen, 26, is the director of the biotechnology and American democracy program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington; the editor of its journal, New Atlantis; a consultant to the President's Council on Bioethics; and a contributor to The Weekly Standard.

In an interview, he argued that conservatives needed to accept an active role for government in dealing with advancing technology, whether in the form of terrorists' weapons abroad or attempts to change the nature of life at home. "The conservative project is making the case for progress abroad while confronting the dilemmas of progress at home," he said.

Mr. Cohen defended the Bush administration's preventive intervention in the Middle East as well as its limitations on federal financing for stem cell research.

"Medical progress is going to keep people alive longer than they would have been," he said. "I think prudent conservatives are going to have to find some responsible way to have sensible government to deal with the needs of aging generations. We have seen a version of this in the prescription drug bill, and there are going to be other obligations."

Mr. Stegall, an evangelical Presbyterian and the son of a minister, said he shared Mr. Cohen's support for government social programs, but for religious reasons. He said he and other theological conservatives had founded The New Pantagruel as an alternative to the politics of the older generation of Christian conservatives.

"If I could sum up what we stand for in one word, it would be sustainability," he said. By that, he explained, he meant theologically conservative views on sustaining family life, as well as typically liberal views on sustaining the environment and local communities and helping the poor. "For us, those two halves are inextricably linked," he said.

But several conservatives, young and old, said the greatest division in the movement pitted young traditionalists against their more libertarian peers. David Weigel, 22, the former editor of a conservative magazine at Northwestern University, a contributor to the libertarian magazine Reason and an intern at the editorial page of USA Today, said that last spring his college paper had trouble finding any conservatives on campus who supported amending the constitution to ban same-sex marriage.

He contended that even young conservatives who maintained a strict moral code for themselves were increasingly reluctant to regulate the behavior of others. "I am personally abstinent," he said, "and I plan to stay that way, but I have no problem with international aid programs that use or distribute condoms."

Ramesh Ponnuru, 29, a prolific writer for National Review, complained that the Republican party had been focusing on social issues because limited government did not have as big "a political payoff."

"There is a serious possibility that the libertarian wing of the conservative movement goes off in its own direction, either breaking off or allying with the Democrats," he said.

Mr. Buckley, however, said he was unperturbed. "The sweep of the Soviet challenge was what I call a harnessing bias, and now that harness has come apart," he said. "But I don't think the threads are by any means abandoned." He added: "There has never been a movement that doesn't go through this perplexion and development."

From The Wall Street Journal:

Liberal Loopholes
Edwards and Kerry want to raise taxes, but aren't wild about paying them.

In embracing John Edwards, John Kerry has also endorsed his populist "two Americas" rhetoric and has put tax increases at the center of the election campaign. So it's fair to ask the two Democrats: How much of those tax increases will actually hit the super-rich like yourselves, and how much will end up on the backs of upper middle-class wage earners?

For an answer, let's look at what the two Senators have themselves been paying in taxes. It turns out that the Kerrys and Edwards have exploited plenty of tax loopholes over the years. Of course, nobody is obligated to pay more than what the letter of the law requires. But the complex tax code benefits the wealthy, who can afford tax attorneys and complicated schemes to skirt the law. And high marginal rates give them plenty of incentive to do so.

Senator Edwards talks about the need to provide health care for all, but that didn't stop him from using a clever tax dodge to avoid paying $591,000 into the Medicare system. While making his fortune as a trial lawyer in 1995, he formed what is known as a "subchapter S" corporation, with himself as the sole shareholder.

Instead of taking his $26.9 million in earnings directly in the following four years, he paid himself a salary of $360,000 a year and took the rest as corporate dividends. Since salary is subject to 2.9% Medicare tax but dividends aren't, that meant he shielded more than 90% of his income. That's not necessarily illegal, but dodging such a large chunk of employment tax skates perilously close to the line.

The Internal Revenue Service takes a dim view of such operations and "may collapse the structure entirely and argue the S corporation is not truly a separate entity," in the words of Tax Adviser magazine. Attorney CPA magazine lists it as No. 11 of its "15 best underutilized tax loopholes," but warns that the IRS "has successfully litigated cases against individuals, particularly sole shareholders of personal service S corporations, reclassifying such deemed distributions as wages subject to social security taxes."

As a political matter, the dodge is especially hypocritical because the income limits on which Medicare taxes are paid were lifted by Democrats in 1993 specifically to hit "the rich," as Mr. Edwards likes to call people in his tax bracket. And the supreme irony? Mr. Edwards has claimed that he set up the subchapter S company to protect himself from legal liability. You know it's time for tort reform when even the trial lawyers say they're afraid of getting sued.

Senator Kerry's personal finances are not so complicated, since most of his income comes from his government salary and a modest inheritance. But he owes his jet-setting lifestyle and indeed some of his political success to the wealth of his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry. Her personal assets have been estimated at up to $3.2 billion, and the couple travel among their five houses scattered around the U.S. on a $35 million Gulfstream V jet. During a tough election for the Senate in 1996, Mr. Kerry sidestepped a gentleman's agreement with opponent William Weld to limit the spending of personal wealth on either side to $500,000 by having his campaign borrow $1.7 million from his wife.

Mrs. Heinz Kerry's finances remain largely a closed book, since she has so far refused to release her tax returns. What we do know so far is that she has prepaid $750,000 in federal taxes on $5.1 million in income for 2003--an effective tax rate of 15%. That is because a significant portion of the income came from tax-free municipal bonds, which is perfectly legal.

Even so, her net income must be much higher. We know that since the death of her husband John Heinz in 1991, Mrs. Heinz Kerry has invested shrewdly and possibly even doubled her inheritance. Even if one takes a conservative estimate of her net worth, say $1 billion, an income of $5.1 million means a paltry return of just 0.5%. More likely, the majority of her investment income is sheltered within trusts so that tax is deferred until she or her family actually wants to spend it. Again, perfectly legal, but this is a luxury that the average middle-class professional working for a wage does not have. These are the non-rich who will pay the bulk of any Kerry tax increase.

So when John Kerry and John Edwards say that they want to tax the wealthiest Americans, let's be clear about what they really mean. They want to tax the most productive people at higher marginal rates and close loopholes for corporations, while they themselves dodge taxes by exploiting loopholes they plan to preserve.

Mr. Edwards is right that there really are two Americas. The people who work for their money and want to keep more of their own paychecks. And wealthy politicians who want to raise taxes on the middle class secure in the knowledge that they won't have to pay.

Copyright © 2004 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

NAACP Hasn't Advanced Anything in a Long Time
Why should Bush speak to a hostile group that has outlived its usefulness?
By John H. McWhorter

John H. McWhorter, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is the author of "Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care" (Gotham Books, 2003).

July 15, 2004

Last week, for the fourth year in a row, President Bush declined the NAACP's invitation to speak at its annual convention. Predictably, NAACP President Kweisi Mfume railed that the Bush administration failed to recognize the nation's oldest and largest civil rights group as being significant or important in any way.

The sad thing is, the Bush administration's attitude toward the group is justified.

The NAACP is stuck in a mind-set that worked 30 years ago but makes little sense today. Mfume and NAACP Chairman Julian Bond boast that the organization is committed to "speaking truth to power," continuing the whistle-blowing tradition that the organization was founded upon in 1909. This was urgent in an America where lynching was commonplace and segregation was legal.

But almost a century later, black America's main problem is neither overt racism nor more subtle "societal" racism. Lifting blacks up is no longer a matter of getting whites off our necks. We are faced, rather, with the mundane tasks of teaching those "left behind" after the civil rights victory how to succeed in a complex society — one in which there will never be a second civil rights revolution.

To be sure, racism still exists and must be stamped out. But it has been clearly and distinctly marginalized. And it is simply a fallacy to say that the only way people can achieve is when there is absolutely no bias whatsoever against them. The burgeoning of the black middle class has made it clear that societal racism doesn't condemn African Americans to failure.

Yet Mfume and the NAACP's anger-based politics imply that black success can only be accidental unless the playing field is completely level. Instead of insisting on that, they should be working on specific cures to specific ills: creating a culture of achievement among black students, addressing the AIDS crisis in black communities and fostering constructive relationships between police forces and residents of minority neighborhoods.

These real problems are being addressed, but not by the NAACP. The National Urban League forges ties between blacks and corporate America. The Rev. Eugene Rivers' Ten-Point Coalition is spreading from Boston to other cities, getting wayward black youth off of the streets and into constructive lives. Operation Hope in Los Angeles helps poor minorities get home loans. Geoffrey Canada has the nation's attention with his Harlem Children's Zone program, blanketing 60 underprivileged blocks with a raft of uplift programs presented to each resident in the district, door by door.

There was a time when there couldn't be a discussion of racial issues without mentioning the NAACP. Where are the signature studies that it used to commission, such as "Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889-1919," which helped to eradicate the practice, or the Margold Report of 1930, which set the ball rolling for the dismantling of segregation? What innovative and sustained race initiative has the NAACP directed lately?

The measure of Bush's commitment to African American issues is disconnected from any gestures he makes to the NAACP. The only reason for him to speak at its annual convention would have been as a token gesture. But beside the fact that black Americans have endured quite enough tokenism, why should Bush court an organization whose national leaders regularly rake him over the coals?

On Sunday night, Bond charged that the Republicans appeal to "the dark underside of American culture" and "preach neutrality and practice racial division." Earlier, Mfume accused Bush of a "lack of concern" for the black community. But when Bush was touting his faith-based initiatives to help poor communities, Bond and Mfume decried it as discriminatory. How progressive was this of leaders representing a deeply Christian race whose communities are typically rooted in the church? And needless to say, the NAACP does not like private school vouchers. Obviously Bush cannot win here.

In fact, Bush ought not court an organization that considers him a racist, despises any race-sensitive proposal he offers and plays no serious role in addressing the problems of the community they purport to represent.

The NAACP is hardly the only political movement to have dissolved into posturing after the battles were largely won. What happens is that new leaders come along who are better suited to address the new problems.

For Bush to visit today's NAACP would be like dropping by a memorial. It would be a gesture, not an action. Black Americans deserves better.

From US News:

Blogging the watchdogs
By John Leo

On June 28, Paul Bremer gave a farewell speech as he stepped down as U.S. administrator in Iraq. Some Iraqis, at least, found the talk moving. Ali Fadhil, 34, a resident in pediatrics at a Baghdad hospital, watched it on television with a group in the cafeteria. He said Bremer's words choked up even a onetime supporter of April's Shiite uprising. We have this information about the Bremer speech because Fadhil and his brothers are bloggers who file their own reports on the Internet ( iraqthemodel.blogspot.com). I had never heard of "Iraq the Model," but Margaret Wylie of Newhouse News Service produced a good story June 29 about Fadhil's blogging and Bremer's talk.

Word that Bremer actually gave the speech is something of a collector's item among American reporters. The Washington Post said Bremer left without giving a talk. The Los Angeles Times did worse. It missed the speech, then insulted Bremer for not giving it. A July 4 Times "news analysis" said: "L. Paul Bremer III, the civilian administrator for Iraq, left without even giving a final speech to the country--almost as if he were afraid to look in the eye the people he had ruled for more than a year." This is a good one-sentence example of what readers object to in much Iraq reporting--dubious or wrong information combined with a heavy load of attitude from the reporter.

Not sorry. Bloggers in the United States have been all over this story, quoting one another, leaning on the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times for an apology or a correction. Last Thursday, the Times published a correction of sorts. No apology, though, and no regret for the zinger aimed at Bremer. The Times said that Bremer taped anaddress that was given to Iraqi broadcast media and "not publicized to the western news media." So nobody at the Times watches Iraqi TV or reads blogs? One blogger wrote: "Bremer's farewell address had been common knowledge among readers of Internet blogs since at least June 30," four days before the Times criticized Bremer for having given no speech. Apparently nobody at the Times reads the American press either. Margie Wylie's Newhouse piece discussing the Iraqi reaction to the Bremer talk ran five days before the Times said the speech hadn't been given.

The blogging world cackled a bit about the mess the Times made, mostly because many bloggers think the most powerful big-time news outlets are becoming more and more partisan. The Times may be on its way to becoming Exhibit A for this belief. Bloggers regularly pummel the Times for fact-free negativity about Iraq. One of the best and best-known bloggers, Mickey Kaus at slate.msn.com, tore apart one of the Times 's front-page we-can't-win efforts--"Iraqi Insurgency Showing Signs of Momentum; Analysts and some U.S. commanders say it could be too late to reverse the wave of violence." Kaus pointed out that no U.S. commander said any such thing in the Times report. The allegation was left hanging out there with no factual support. Another the-war-is-lost report was a front-page lead on July 6: "U.S. Response to Insurgency Called a Failure." It said "some top Bush administration officials" were criticizing the Pentagon for "failing to develop a coherent, winning strategy against the insurgency." But the alleged "top Bush administration officials" were AWOL in the Times, just like the absent "U.S. commanders." Kaus wrote: "Again, there are no quotes--even blind quotes, even blind paraphrased opinions--from 'top Bush administration officials' backing up the story's dramatic initial assertion."

The Times 's negativity about Iraq seems to leak out fairly frequently. A June 29 report depicted the new prime minister, Ayad Allawi, as obscure and unpopular: "little-known to most Iraqis after spending more than three decades in exile . . . . Many Iraqis have questioned the interim government's legitimacy." But four days earlier, the Washington Post reported that a large majority of Iraqis knew very well who Allawi was and backed him with confidence. Citing a survey commissioned by U.S. officials in Iraq and conducted by an independent pollster, the Post said 70 percent of Iraqis were familiar with their new leaders and 73 percent approved of Allawi to head the new government. Allawi had been appearing in the Iraqi media frequently, visiting sites and generating optimism. The poll was not reported in the Los Angeles Times, possibly because the poll was positive about the war and the Times is not. What's new about the press is that so many people who follow it with a critical eye now have an outlet to howl about inaccuracy and partisanship. The big media used to be able to shrug off critics like this. Now they can't.

Forget fluff, focus on jihad
by Stanley Crouch

The constant discussion of John Kerry and John Edwards in superficial, gossip-column terms may result in their soon being called John & John or J & J, but it will not change something that we have to keep our eyes on, here and abroad. The Islamic extremists bent on waging holy war will not disappear. They are intent on destroying secular governments and turning the clock back to a time when the worshipers of Allah ran what was then considered the world.
One can blame any government available for riling them up and inspiring others to join them, but the facts are what they are and will remain past November. They are at war with us, and we need to face the fact that changing an administration, if it comes to that, will not cause the Prophet to appear in the skies with a referee's whistle and blow it to signal that the extremists should stop the kidnapping, the decapitating, the car bombing and constant murdering.

If anything, the war against them should become even stronger and more resolute. They mean neither us nor the world any good, and they represent a fact as strong as the one Adolf Hitler did during World War II. Even regimes opposed to each other, like those of the West and those of Russia, found themselves in the same war vessel because the Nazi wolf was rabid and could be handled with no less than fire and steel. Talk was beyond question unless it was about the surrender of the Third Reich.

That is how it is and how it will be. Mad, brutal romantics though they might be, the soldiers of jihad are serious men. They were warming up during the 1980s and they have been pitching balls of fire since the early '90s. They do not care who sits in the Oval Office.

It is important to remember these hard facts when so much is made of how good John & John look together or how well their wives get on or how easily the four of them fit in a van or what kinds of suits they wear. Such trivia is part of the problem at the center of our time, because important questions are shoved aside in favor of the hollow obsessions with surfaces. If a television station has the choice between getting an exclusive with John & John's barbers and a learned opinion on their policies, it seems we would find ourselves looking at a guy with clippers and scissors.

These are not the times for trivial pursuits. What we need to know from Mr. Kerry and Mr. Edwards is what kind of a war strategy they have and what it would do to give us a better chance to defeat these enemies who do not go on vacations, follow elections or respond to polls. What, exactly, do these two men propose to keep our shores safe and to handle the troubles we are faced with in Iraq as well as with the growing body of jihadists? The rest is fluff.

Speak Softly, Mr. Bush
To beat Kerry, he must make clear that he hates war and loves peace.

by PEGGY NOONAN

Recently I wrote a column on a particular anxiety I've been feeling regarding the coming election and the prospects of President Bush. I stated that some voters may be feeling or come to feel that history has simply become too dramatic the past few years, and one way out of the drama might be to change presidents, and hire Mr. Kerry to, in effect, make things more boring and force history to calm down. This has given rise in the blogosphere (see this Instapundit entry, for example) to a question: Do I, and others who have written on this subject, think that what might be called the new nervousness should compel the Bush administration to stop fighting the fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, and change its policy in the war on terror? Should we, in a word, withdraw?

My answer is no. We cannot leave Iraq and should not leave Iraq. Certainly lately, since the transfer of sovereignty, things seem to be looking up, but that may well prove temporary. But the great reason, as I have written before on Iraq, is that there's no way 'round it but through it. We have to stay, and we have to win. I define winning as the yielding up of, at the least, a relatively stable society unafflicted by governmental sadism and dictatorship, and, at the most, a stable society in a fledgling democracy that demonstrates, with time, that the forces of Arab moderation, tolerance and peacefulness can triumph. Such an outcome would give so much good to the world. What a brilliant beacon this Iraq could be, and what a setback to terrorists, who thrive in darkness.

I do not feel America is right to attempt to help spread democracy in the world because it is our way and therefore the right way. Nor do I think America should attempt to encourage it because we are Western and feel everyone should be Western. Not everyone should be Western, and not everything we do as a culture, a people or an international force is right.

Rather, we have a national-security obligation to foster democracy in the world because democracy tends to be the most peaceful form of government. Democracies tend to be slower than dictatorships to take up arms, to cross borders and attempt to subdue neighbors, to fight wars. They are on balance less likely to wreak violence upon the world because democracies are composed of voters many of whom are parents, especially mothers, who do not wish to see their sons go to war. Democracy is not only idealistic, it is practical.

What I wrote about a few weeks ago was my fear that the American people have grown or are growing tired of the heightened drama of the times. Americans like drama in their lives--they like graduations and first jobs and prizes and the birth of a baby in the family; they like triathalons; they like to think about God. They like action on a personal level. But they do not want it on a historical level if they can avoid it. They don't want to send their sons, or daughters, off to war. They don't like that kind of excitement, or they don't like it for long. This is part of why we used to be called Isolationists. We weren't and aren't--we just have a bias for peace. Can that bias be overcome? Of course. Pearl Harbor overcame it. The Soviet desire to expand and impose communism overcame it. Sept. 11 did too.

Which gets us to Mr. Bush, and Mr. Kerry, and which of the two is likelier to make things historically boring again.

You may say history will never be boring again, and I'd agree with you. And you may say "Bush and perseverance" is the way to achieve progress, that victory in Iraq and against terrorism is the only path to something like the old boredom, and the old safety. I'm with you there, too.

Or you may decide that Mr. Kerry, by jumbling things and murking them up and speaking French will, by his very presence, tend to calm things down because--well, because he doesn't really seem deeply wedded to any particular principle, or even to long-term strategic thinking in the national interest. And the world can tell, and a good portion of the world will like him all the better for these flaws. And so will some voters.

That's my anxiety. If I am right, what can the president do to address this problem? How to approach an electorate that I believe respects Mr. Bush and likes him, but that is also capable of letting his contract expire and hiring Mr. Kerry for four years?

Here is a criticism I have spoken of but not written of regarding President Bush. When you are president and you are doing hard things in history like making war, and you are doing it in the jingle-jangle of the modern media environment, you have a kind of moral responsibility to make it clear that you hate war, really hate it, and love peace. This would seem obvious, but is not. Men and women in the midst of planning war forget to say it and insist it. Sly old FDR didn't forget, though. Lincoln didn't forget it either. He always made it clear he thought the impending and then ongoing war a painful tragedy. Mr. Bush has not made it clear, or has not repeated often enough, that he hopes for peace, yearns for peace, loves it. He seems part of the very drama he has been forced to wage, and seems sometimes to enjoy it.

This is delicate. A leader cannot seem ambivalent about crucial actions and decisions, and he can't seem so weighed down by the facts and implications of those decisions that people begin to wonder if he's lost his fight. There's a reason people like a happy warrior. A happy warrior tends to be a winning warrior. And yet. In the world we live in a leader must seem almost palpably yearning for life and peace even as he makes tough decisions that will soon deny either or both to some.

Lately I am reminded of something I learned from a pollster. I always thought I never learned anything from pollsters when I worked in politics, but this has stayed with me long enough to realize I absorbed a lesson. It was in the mid-1980's, I was a speechwriter for President Reagan, and we were working on a speech he would give on Central America. The speech centered on attempted communist incursions and mischief in El Salvador, Nicaragua and elsewhere. The president gave the speech, and explained U.S. interests and intentions: We will help this pro-democracy group here, that democratically elected government there.

As I remember it, shortly after the speech was given, the president's pollster, Richard Wirthlin, a smart man, came in and met with the speechwriters. He wanted to give us a read on how the speech had gone over. I remember silently disagreeing with several of his points but being struck by this one. I can't give you quotes so I'm going to give you what I remember Mr. Wirthlin saying in italics. People think we are declaring war all over the place, he said. We probably harrumphed back something like 'Well, we're in a war." Mr. Wirthlin told us, You're getting people nervous, as if America is launching a war here and here and here and here.

I imagined in my mind a map, and all the countries we had referred to as having problems that had to be addressed. I wondered if in other people's minds, as they had listened to Reagan, they weren't seeing something like a World War II planning map, and some captain with a pointer saying "We'll commence the bombing runs here and here at 0800."

And I thought, in time: Mr. Wirthlin may be right. There must be an equally candid but less unnerving way to speak of these things. Sometimes when you're doing the hardest things you have to speak in the softest language.

People get nervous. And they're not wrong to be nervous. Experience has taught them to be. Life is hard, and we all fear loss. I have had a very few conversations with Margaret Thatcher, and each time she has said something wise, but maybe the wisest was this. It was years ago, after she had lost power following an attempt to change the poll tax in Britain. She told me she had learned that in politics one must "never underestimate people's fears." At the time I thought that a surprising thing for the Iron Lady to say, or think. Those who know her well would know if she was saying what she'd always thought, or what she'd just learned, or relearned.

But it was knowing about human nature, and I think a little more of that kind of knowledge is what we need more of from the Bush administration. It won't make things boring again, but it might make people feel better, and that's not bad.

Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "A Heart, a Cross, and a Flag" (Wall Street Journal Books/Simon & Schuster), a collection of post-Sept. 11 columns, which you can buy from the OpinionJournal bookstore.

Copyright © 2004 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

From Touchstone's blog:

SPEAKING FREELY ABOUT NOT SPEAKING FREELY:

Something jolly from last Sunday's issue of The Sunday Telegraph: We must be allowed to criticise Islam by Will Cummins. The government, in the person of the Home Secretary David Blunkett, has proposed a new law "ban incitement to religious hatred," which is being taken to mean, and reasonably, to criminalize criticism of Islam.

The most interesting part comes from the middle of the article:

In a recent television panel, Iqbal Sacranie explained why the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), the organisation he leads, had pushed for this legislation. The British should be allowed not to believe in Islam, he said (thanks, Mr Sacranie!), but they should not be permitted to "criticise" it.
Ken Livingstone has gone even further. On Wednesday, the Mayor of London welcomed to City Hall the Qatari divine Dr Yusuf al-Qaradawi, according to the MCB "an Islamic scholar held in great respect throughout the Islamic world".
Basing his teaching on Islam's holiest texts, Dr al-Qaradawi has urged his fellow Muslims to beat their wives; to use child suicide bombers to kill female and infant civilians; to murder Jews, homosexuals and British servicemen; and to colonise, desecrate and usurp Christian Rome.
Mr Livingstone said that the newspapers that had condemned Dr al-Qaradawi for such views "showed why this legislation [Blunkett's] is necessary". It was the critics of Dr al-Qaradawi's beliefs, Mr Livingstone insisted, who were, as the Muslim Association of Britain put it, "the image of evil". Dr al-Qaradawi, a mainstream figure in a major religion, had endorsed Jew lynching and wife beating: Mr Livingstone seemed to imply that, like Islam, such activities should therefore be above criticism.

The writer argues well against the proposal and is willing to make some obvious but un-p.c. points, like:

This brings us to the nub of the issue: the fact that Islam's teachings are completely unlike those of other faiths. The Government shows no sign of understanding this. Defending his proposed legislation, Mr Blunkett, for instance, said: "It applies equally to far-Right evangelical Christians as to extremists in the Islamic faith."

But what "far-Right evangelical Christian" has ever proposed or endorsed anything as horrifying as what the moderate Muslim regards as normal?

My thanks to Kathleen Reeves for the link. This reminds me to mention the blogsite of her husband, the historian Thomas Reeves on the History News Network. Dr. Reeves is the author of the definitive biography of Joe McCarthy and abest-selling biographer of John F. Kennedy, author of The Empty Church, and a sometime contributor to Touchstone.

—David Mills

From Serious Popcorn, the movie blog by Martha Bayles:

Super Sized Rhetoric

The pundits have been intoning that Fahrenheit 9/11 will not change any minds. But they are not taking into consideration the outlook of someone like Nick Anderson, a 22-year-old resident of New York who told the Times that he "wanted to see it as soon as possible. This is easier for people to understand than reading books, reading newspapers or watching C-Span."

Michael Moore is a master rhetorician, in the ancient and not flattering sense. But his rhetorical language is not English. It is film – not narrative film, but the information-imparting kind known as documentary. There is no point in accusing Moore, as some have, of not being a documentarian because he’s dishonest and manipulative. That’s like saying Hitler wasn’t an orator because his speeches told lies. The test of rhetorical skill is not truth but persuasion. Just ask Plato.

And Moore is persuasive. As a polemicist of film he is witty, inventive, messy in just the right way, and a master at three essential skills: timing, segue, and (not least) ironic juxtaposition. For example, he uses music brilliantly. Over a sequence of two spiffed-up Marine recruiters cruising a run-down shopping mall, he runs bright, effervescent disco. When a pumped GI says combat is more fun "with a good song playing in the background," Moore plays the soldier’s favorite, "Burn" by the punk band Rancid ("We don’t need no water / Let the motherfucker burn") over footage of an Iraqi man fleeing with a bloody child in his arms.

So here’s a tip for pundits and (especially) politicians: Don’t underestimate the power of rhetoric delivered in the crowd’s native tongue, just because you can’t speak it.

But Moore is a lazy thinker. Look for the ideas behind the polemic, and you will find a mind as flabby and inert as the body. Fahrenheit 9/11 contains a total of one idea and eight-tenths of a conspiracy theory.

First, the idea. It is fixed, unmovable, a regular North Star: The rich are out to screw the poor. There’s a lot to be said for this idea (as perhaps Moore understands, now that he’s rich). But usually it’s better to combine one idea with another, and this Moore seems incapable of doing.

Once you figure out what Moore’s fixed idea is, you can negotiate what to a normal mind seems inconsistent. Take the American soldiers in Iraq. When Moore sees them as poor, hailing from economically depressed places like Flint, Michigan, then they are the ones getting screwed. But when he sees them as rich, riding around in fancy tanks and shooting at ragged Iraqis, they are the ones doing the screwing. Really, it’s no more complicated than that.

This simplistic worldview causes some weird effects. For example, the sequence in which several African-American members of the House of Representatives register objections to the outcome of the 2000 election, only to be told by the Rich White Dude on the podium that without the support of at least one senator, their objections don’t count. In a voice-over oozing with sympathy for the underdog. Moore sums up what the Rich White Dude is really saying: "Shut up and sit down!" The only problem is, the Rich White Dude is Al Gore.

Now consider Moore’s conspiracy theory. Eight-tenths of it are the same as the conspiracy theory held by millions around the world, from European leftists to angry Muslims, who see Bush as the clueless but conniving head of a gigantic imperialist plot to take over the Middle East (not to mention the rest of the globe). But Moore’s version is missing two key elements.

First, Israel. In this entire frenzied centrifuge of a movie, in which no corrupt, finagling, behind-the-scenes, back-scratching connection among presidents, princes, CEOs, sheiks, and terrorists is too tenuous to be credited, there is not one single mention of Israel. Given that millions of Moore admirers around the world believe that the rich Americans are in cahoots with the rich Israelis, why does he focus on rich Americans in cahoots with rich Saudis?

The answer is simple. Moore can do without the added PR boost that comes with being called an anti-Semite. Earlier this spring, Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ got just such a boost, but with it came widespread opprobrium. If Moore were desperate for box-office tinder, he’d probably light this match. But he’s got plenty of other matches to light. Indeed, he does something very clever: he trades on both anti-Semitism and anti-Arab prejudice by casting the Saudis in the role typically reserved for the Israelis.

Still, in a film about terrorism and the Middle East, the omission of any mention of American support for Israel is not just glaring, it is (to judge from the lack of comment about it) blinding.

The second missing element is the link that, if made explicit, would complete Moore’s paranoid logic: George W. Bush is responsible for 9/11. Think about it. Without this conclusion, the film’s critique (if you can call it that) is strangely attentuated and unresolved. With it, everything falls into place. The Bush family, the bin Laden family, Halliburton, the Carlyle Group, the Unocal company and the rest of corporate America worked together to kill over 3,000 people on September 11, in order to provide a pretext for cracking down on civil liberties, sweeping the poor off the streets to serve as cannon fodder, and in general creating the conditions for what George Orwell called "perpetual war." All for the sake of greater profits.

If this is Moore’s message, then he ought to come out and say it, instead of relying on innuendo. But that would require guts, as opposed to a big gut.

Sweet.

It's Clemens's Night, With A Catch

By Thomas Boswell

HOUSTON

Karma, not Mike Piazza, may have been Roger Clemens's catcher in the All-Star Game.

Justice, even baseball comeuppance, arrives in unexpected ways. On Tuesday night, Piazza, who was injured, then insulted by Clemens four years ago, had the best seat in the house to relish perhaps the worst embarrassment of Clemens's career.

Before this 75th Classic, the whole baseball world savored the perversity of Piazza and Clemens being forced by circumstance to be batterymates and make-believe buddies. They harbor one of baseball's best-known feuds, with Piazza the victim and Clemens the bully. Still, few could have imagined the irony, humor and instant lore that their misbegotten collaboration produced.

In the first inning, Piazza crouched behind home plate and put down fingers -- or, who knows, perhaps just one -- to call signals for the same notorious pitcher who hit him in the temple in '00 with a 96-mph fastball, then threw a shattered bat at him from point-blank range in the World Series. Few of Clemens's pitches ever arrived in Piazza's mitt. To Mike's delight?

As a stunned crowd of 41,886 in Clemens's home town watched in shock, Ichiro Suzuki doubled off the right field wall. ("Psst, what's your favorite pitch?") Ivan Rodriguez tripled off the right field wall. ("Here comes a fastball, Pudge.") Manny Ramirez hit a home run to left field on an 0-2 pitch. ("Do you want this one inside or outside?")

After Jason Giambi reached on an error, Derek Jeter singled. With two of Clemens's ex-Yank teammates on base, another ex-Yankee, Alfonso Soriano, hit the next pitch into the left field bleachers for a three-run homer.

While the first beer of the night was still cold, the American League had a 6-0 lead and Clemens was on the way to a defeat.

In the only inning of his life with Piazza as his catcher, Clemens had the worst inning of his entire 320-win career. He allowed a single, double, triple and two home runs: 14 total bases.

Unless he breaks every unwritten rule of the clubhouse, Piazza will never admit that he relished Clemens's embarrassment. But, unless he is ready for instant sainthood, he must have sensed that the gods were squaring accounts.

That is, unless Piazza actually took fate into his own hands and was tipping off Clemens's pitches to the hitters! Admit it, the thought crossed your mind. Or, perhaps, your sense of justice makes you wish that it were true. All will deny it. And they'll almost undoubtedly be telling the truth.

The notion even crossed Joe Torre's mind. "Yeah, Mike told us what was coming," joked the AL manager.

Perhaps that million-to-one conspiracy theory even entered Clemens's psyche as well. With Ramirez at bat and an 0-2 count, Clemens shook off Piazza's signs twice, backed off the mound, then shook off another sign before finally agreeing to throw what the Mets catcher had called. Ramirez hit it out of the park. On an 0-2 pitch. Like he knew what was coming, as they say.

On the mound, the usually intense Clemens had a wry smile on his face. The same odd expression greeted Soriano's homer.

Clemens looked out of sync and out of sorts from his very first off-target pitch.

"I can guarantee you it was the most unusual pregame ritual of his career," said Clemens's close friend, Curt Schilling. Both were singing on stage with country singer Clay Walker late Monday night, a far cry from Clemens's Spartan routine. "We were out kind of late," said Schilling.

On the other hand, maybe Clemens was just unsettled that, for the first time in his career, he had a catcher who wouldn't give him a sign for a knockdown pitch.

Before the game, Piazza joined Clemens in playing down any tension between the two, although Piazza said they "probably wouldn't get together for a round of golf. . . .

"Before the game, we'll have to get together to address a little strategy. I don't know. We'll see what happens. I think [the controversy] is funny. Well, anything to make the game more exciting."

Anything? Hmmm.

After the game, an NL official asked Piazza if he and Clemens had any trouble with the signals. "No," said Piazza. "Everything I put down, they hit."

Every aspect of Clemens's 35-pitch nightmare was overburdened by story lines. Not just Piazza catching. Not just the hometown crowd's gasps. Not just those three ex-Yankees teammates trotting across home plate in line. Perhaps the biggest blow was the two-run homer by Ramirez -- a Red Sox, the first team that Clemens left to become a free agent -- that ensured that Clemens's night would be a disaster. Perhaps that Ramirez home run marked the only moment in baseball history when every Red Sox fan and every Yankees fan cheered for the same event.

Remember, it was Manny who thought Clemens was throwing at his head in Game 3 of the AL Championship Series last October. Ramirez started toward the mound. The dugouts emptied. During the melee, then-coach Don Zimmer made a beeline for Pedro Martinez and the rest is slapstick Bosox-Yankees history.

Even the bottom of the first inning had its Piazza-Clemens twist. With two men on and two out, trailing 6-1, the NL might still have struck back quickly. Who came up in the clutch? Piazza. What did he do? Got ahead 3-1, then struck out. Et tu, Rog?

When the Rocket came out of his flirtation with retirement, he counted on more glory, but paybacks can lurk in the weeds, too. He could hardly have imagined this one. For the past season and a half, baseball has fallen all over itself to honor Clemens, who is on the very short list of pitchers who might truly claim to be the best ever. Every accolade has been deserved. The impression that Clemens has, over the course of his career, become a gradually changed and much improved fellow is valid.

"If you didn't get to know Roger, you might think of him as a mechanical man who doesn't have a heart," said Torre. "But there's a lot of little boy in Clemens. That's charming to me. He blends in with his teammates. He cares about people. He doesn't look like he'd be sensitive [to others], but he is."

Clemens has seemed to make a conscious effort to change both his image and his behavior since that rash moment when he hurled the spear-like remnants of Piazza's bat at him. But baseball is full of folks with long memories who, no doubt, enjoyed this night.

As a final twist, the game was stopped after the fourth inning so that Commissioner Bud Selig could present an Historic Achievement Award to "the great Roger Clemens." Surrounded by family and still in uniform, Clemens came on the field to speak to the crowd. "I put our guys in a hole," he said, "but we're going to win the game."

Actually, they didn't. All things considered, it just wouldn't have been good karma.



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

From the UK Telegraph:

The tearjerker
By Mark Steyn

Profile: John Edwards

'We've got better vision. We've got better ideas. We've got real plans. And we've got better hair," said John Kerry, introducing his running mate. The Kerry-Edwards vision, ideas, etc don't look so good in the cold light of day, but John Edwards's hair does.

I can personally vouch for his beautiful layered nape, having spent much of New Hampshire primary season looking at the back of his tanned neck on chilly winter mornings. He likes to campaign in the round, so all winter, in Legion halls and diners, the advance men rearranged the furniture and then the pretty-boy Southerner would come bouncing into the circle to the strains of Small Town (by has-been rocker John Mellencamp).

Radiating all the vigour and enthusiasm Kerry had surgically removed at birth, the honey-toned Edwards found himself adored by the media for his "two Americas" stump speech, a Disraelian portrait of Dickensian gloom conjured in the tones of a Depression-era sob-sister.

Even if you have never heard it, you know how it goes: there's one America where Dick Cheney's oil buddies are swigging down Martinis and toasting their war profits; but there's another America where "tonight a 10-year-old little girl will go to bed hungry, hoping and praying that tomorrow will not be as cold as today because she doesn't have the coat to keep her warm".

You would have to have a heart of stone not to be weeping with laughter at that line. But Democratic primary voters are not that rude. So they looked thoughtful and engaged, and they nodded and they applauded. And then they went out and voted for somebody else. After you've heard the speech a couple of times, you realise that John Edwards is perhaps the most condescending candidate in America. But the voters condescended right back, smiling politely at the clean-cut charmer, and then going away and forgetting about him.

In New Hampshire, he came a poor fourth. Likewise, New Mexico and North Dakota. In Delaware, he came third, with 11 per cent of the vote. In Oklahoma, he came second, managing to lose to loopy General Wesley Clark. The only place he won was the state of his birth, South Carolina. In Florida, he pulled 10 per cent of the vote; Maine, 8 per cent; Mississippi, Arizona, 7 per cent.

Edwards is a lawyer, and supposedly his great strength is his ability to make an argument and sell it to a jury. But the more the primary jurors heard his argument, the less they were sold on it. "There are two Americas," said Conan O'Brien on CBS. "Unfortunately for Edwards, neither one voted for him."

Who is John Edwards? Well, in a nutshell, he is the metaphorical brother of that non-existent coatless girl. Now 51, but looking a well-preserved 12, he was born in Seneca, South Carolina, and had a soi-disant dirt-poor, hardscrabble childhood in Robbins, North Carolina. His dad worked in the textile mills, and John was the first member of his family ever to go to college.

Where Senator Kerry's biography is full of problematic phrases like "Swiss finishing school", Edwards's is a classic American story - if one overlooks some of the details. According to Sidney Blumenthal, Clinton-stain-mopper-turned-Guardian-columnist, "He bears the memory of his father taking the family to a local restaurant after church only to leave when he realised he could not afford anything on the menu."

Really? Robbins was a town of just over 1,000 people, so presumably it was, if not the only restaurant, one of only two or three. In small towns, folks generally know what the local eateries charge. And, while the Edwards family was poor by comparison with John Kerry, dad was in fact the mill's production manager (though the son tends to leave that bit out). So, in a mill town, at a restaurant presumably priced to cater for mill workers, the management of the mill couldn't afford to eat?

Ah, well. There are two Americas, and, as a successful plaintiff's attorney, Edwards spent 20 years exaggerating the gulf between them. "Plaintiff's attorney" is American for the kind of lawyer who specialises in those suits that Britons find so fascinating - you spill the coffee on your lap, so you sue McDonald's for a gazillion dollars, etc.

Edwards worked an ostensibly less ridiculous seam: suing doctors and hospitals when babies were born with brain defects. He made his name with a 1985 cerebral palsy case, where he channelled the words of the unborn child as she waited in the womb, hour after hour.

"She said at 3, 'I'm fine.' She said at 4, 'I'm having a little trouble, but I'm doing OK.' Five, she said, 'I'm having problems.' At 5.30, she said, 'I need out'," Edwards told his hushed jury. "She speaks to you through me. And I have to tell you right now - I didn't plan to talk about this - right now I feel her. I feel her presence. She's inside me."

The jury came back with a $6.5 million award, and Edwards was the hottest trial lawyer in North Carolina. His line, in that and other cases, was that there would have been no brain damage if the doctor, instead of the breech delivery, had performed a caesarean. Thanks in part to lawyers like Edwards, there are now far more caesarean sections than ever before, yet without any reduction in birth defects.

The correlation between C-sections and birth defects is non-existent. But Edwards sold junk-science to jury after jury, for big bucks. In his "two Americas" routine, he talks about his commitment to "bringing down the cost of healthcare". One reason it costs more than it did is because of Edwards and his fellow ambulance-chasers.

Nonetheless, if the Bush campaign is figuring on tarring Edwards as a fancypants trial lawyer, they should rethink. He spent much of his life defending kids against corporations, and, whatever the fine print, the basic outline of that terrain is not favourable to Republicans.

For another, his own son died in a car accident at the age of 16 - the one stark tragedy in Edwards's effortless career rise and happy home life with his college sweetheart. Today, John and Elizabeth Edwards have three children - a daughter at college, and two youngsters born since the death of their first son. What the Republicans see as a shyster the media will paint as a champion of defenceless children driven by a heart-rending twist of fate.

It is standard on the Left now to insist that Bush's "war" is a fiction cooked up by Dick Cheney to enrich his pals. But Edwards's two Americas are the real fantasy. Take that 10-year old girl, hungry and coatless. In America, poverty doesn't mean hunger, it means fat - it's harassed moms shovelling 99-cent cheeseburgers into their kids because it's cheap and quick. Nor does poverty mean coatlessness.

Edwards's shivering 10-year-old can get a brand-new quilted winter coat for $9.99 at JC Penney, or secondhand for three bucks at my local thrift shop - at least until Edwards and Kerry crack down on the cheap textile imports they've been attacking these past two years. There may be two Americas, but Edwards's America doesn't exist anywhere from Maine to Hawaii. Even as a lurid Victorian melodrama designed to frighten prosperous soccer moms into voting against hard-hearted Republicans, it sounds ridiculous.

In the meantime, Edwards has nothing to say on foreign policy except a pledge to end "war profiteering by Halliburton". Once he discovered that you can't sue al-Qaeda, he seems to have lost interest in the subject, and his shallowness was embarrassing in some of the primary debates. As I wrote here in February, "His basic pitch is that the entire electorate are victims, and his candidacy is the all-time biggest class-action suit on your behalf." John Edwards's approach - the American people are helpless children - is the wrong message for dangerous times.

Back when his maudlin 'twas-Christmas-Day-in-the-workhouse shtick was still new, I offered to buy a brand new coat for every 10-year-old coatless girl the Edwards campaign could produce if in return he included one substantive passage on foreign policy in his stump speech. I'm still waiting on both counts.

© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2004.

Hillary, Top Dems Still Would Have Voted for War

Dave Eberhart, NewsMax.com
Tuesday, July 13, 2004

Last week Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said, "We in Congress would not have authorized that war – we would not have authorized that war with 75 votes if we knew what we know now."

ABC?s Ted Koppel, host of "Nightline," decided to put the words of the senior Democratic member of the Senate Intelligence Committee to the test.
Koppel?s findings, which aired on ABC Radio late Friday night, directly counter Rockefeller?s suggestion that the Senate would not have strongly endorsed the war against Iraq.
Koppel reported: "We wanted to see whether the conclusions reached by the Intelligence Committee would have made any difference to the other senators who voted to authorize the war in Iraq, so we called them.
"Of the 42 we reached, only three said they would have changed their minds had they known then 'what they know now.'
"Among those who say they would not have changed their minds, a number of prominent Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer and Tom Daschle."

Despite the media buzz last week that suggested the U.S. Congress may have been hoodwinked by the Bush administration and a politicized CIA into voting for the Iraq war, many leading Democrats apparently do not see it that way.
The 511-page report released last week by the Senate Intelligence Committee debunked much of what American intelligence had reported about Iraq.

As summarized by Republican senator and chair of the Select Committee on Intelligence, Pat Roberts:
"Here are some examples of statements from the key judgments. Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear program. Iraq has chemical and biological weapons. Iraq was developing an unmanned aerial vehicle, a UAV, probably intended to deliver biological warfare agents."
But the explosive committee report that lambasted U.S. intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Iraq?s Saddam Hussein, has not changed the mind of President Bush, who steadfastly maintained, "I chose to defend the country, and it?s exactly what I would do again."

Bush has consistently argued that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the United States.
But John Kerry?s position on Iraq has vacillated – and may have put him at odds with Senate Democrats who told ABC News they still would have voted for the war.
Kerry, along with his running mate, John Edwards, voted for the war.
But during the Demcratic primaries, Kerry began distancing himself from his war vote and claimed the Bush administration had lied to Congress.
Appearing on "60 Minutes" last weekend, Kerry told Leslie Stahl: "I think the president made a mistake in the way he took us to war. I am against the war – the way the president went to war was wrong."

At the same time, Kerry said he voted to give Bush the authorization to go to war "as a last resort." He added, "I believe, based on the information we have, it was the correct vote."
But Kerry did not say, as Koppel asked knowing "what we know now," if he would still have voted for the war.
Kerry again claimed to Stahl that "the way [President Bush] went to war was a mistake."
But if the war is such a mistake, the question remains whether Kerry would have changed his vote.

Already the Bush administration has seized on Kerry?s equivocating.
In a speech Monday, Vice President Dick Cheney chided Kerry for "simply trying to rewrite history for his own political purposes."
"When Congress voted to authorize force against Saddam Hussein, Senator Kerry and Senator Edwards both voted yes," Cheney said. "Now it seems they've both developed a convenient case of campaign amnesia."

Reich on Religion

An entry from the Touchstone blog quoting a column by Robert Reich. (Wonder if his middle name is "Third?")

A column on WorldNetDaily cites an article by Robert Reich, the former U.S. labor secretary under President Bill Clinton. Reich apparently believes people who follow God pose a more significant threat to the modern world than terrorists do:

"Terrorism itself is not the greatest danger we face, " writes Reich in a column titled "Bush's God" published in the American Prospect.

Reich begins his column criticizing the Bush administration as he pushes for a liberal understanding of America's separation of church and state.

He uses the term "religious zealots" and says their problem is that "they confuse politics with private morality."

Reich concludes his column:

"The great conflict of the 21st century will not be between the West and terrorism. Terrorism is a tactic, not a belief. The true battle will be between modern civilization and anti-modernists; between those who believe in the primacy of the individual and those who believe that human beings owe their allegiance and identity to a higher authority; between those who give priority to life in this world and those who believe that human life is mere preparation for an existence beyond life; between those who believe in science, reason, and logic and those who believe that truth is revealed through Scripture and religious dogma. Terrorism will disrupt and destroy lives. But terrorism itself is not the greatest danger we face."

Ah, science, reason, and logic—why didn’t I think of that? And versus . . . what? (Scripture =) Superstition & (dogma =) Ignorance!

We should be glad, I suppose, when people like Reich come right and say what he and so many others are really thinking.

But I do expect most of the persecution and violence to come from the modernists. Modernist ideologies have done a bang up job in the 20th century. The body count was impressive. Will it be worse in the 21st? God forbid.

If modernism means thinking like Reich, then I am certainly an anti-modernist, just on that score alone.

—James Kushiner

Buckley vs. Reagan (Jr.)
by Robert Novak

WASHINGTON -- Amid the spontaneous outpouring of respect and affection for Ronald Reagan following his death, a discordant note was sounded by his son. In a succession of television and newspaper interviews, Ron Reagan Jr. used the occasion to trash George W. Bush by drawing invidious comparisons between his father and the current president. Nobody knew how to respond in a time of national mourning. Nobody, that is, except William F. Buckley Jr.
 
The elder statesman of the conservative movement considered Ron Jr.'s remarks a public challenge that ought to be challenged publicly. Buckley wrote Reagan a letter that specifically addressed his claim in an interview with The New York Times that he, as a self-professed atheist, admired the Buddhist teachings of "mindfulness and loving kindness and compassion." Buckley told him: "You proceed in a single interview to profane/deride the faith of your parents, which is not very mindful."

 There was more than one interview. In his graveside eulogy, the son threw a dart at President Bush by saying his father never wore "his faith on his sleeve." That was just the beginning of attempts to dispel any notion that Bush was another Reagan. "My father did not know George W. Bush from Adam," he said on CNN, adding: "My father was a man -- that's the difference between him and Bush." As far as Republicans using the Reagan heritage, he said on MSNBC, "This is their war. If they can't stand on their own two feet, they're no Ronald Reagans."

 This fit the desperate effort by Bush-bashers to keep the president from politically benefiting as a result of national grief over Reagan's passing. With publication in The New York Times Magazine of Ron Jr.'s interview with Deborah Solomon, Buckley wrote the son with a point-by-point response.

 RR Jr.: The nude picture of his sister Patti in Playboy was "just something that is not too exciting."

 WFB: "Why then was there so much excitement about it?"

 RR Jr.: As for his father's reaction when he dropped out of Yale to join the ballet, "That was fine with him."

 WFB: "It wasn't fine with him and he enlisted my aid in trying to persuade you to stay in college."

 RR Jr.: Having three cats while being childless "is like having children."  WFB: "No, it's not like having children."

 RR Jr.: As to whether his mother helps him out financially, "Of course not. My father felt that children should make their own way."

 WFB: "I know, and you know that I know, something about that question. But to say that 'of course' your mother does not help you out suggests she will not do so even if there were a need. Are you saying she would not acknowledge you in her will?"

 RR Jr.: As to the Abu Ghraib prison abuses, "How can Christians tolerate it?"

 WFB: "I don't know of any Christians who 'tolerate it.' The perpetrators are reviled."

 RR Jr.: In an answer to a question, he said he did not vote for Bush in the last election.

 WFB: "Odd that you should permit this invasion of privacy whose only purpose is to remark the political infidelity of the son of Ronald Reagan."

 RR Jr.: His father "worked hard to impress upon his children the value of kindness."

 WFB: "If he did, he was manifestly unsuccessful."

 This is more than a wayward son, at age 46 with a career seemingly going nowhere, seeking 15 minutes of fame. He has signed with MSNBC as a "contributor" for the 2004 campaign. It is a windfall for Democratic operatives to quote the son of Ronald Reagan saying of Republicans: "I couldn't join a party that, frankly, tolerates members who are bigots for one thing, homophobes, racists."

 Buckley and his National Review magazine were in the forefront of early Reagan supporters. In his newly published "Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography," he paints a picture of a Ronald Reagan who "was zestfully concerned for the comfort of others." Nobody has better credentials than Bill Buckley to deliver a point-by-point rebuttal to the errant offspring. Those who know Nancy Reagan say she fully agrees with her old friend.

©2004 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Edwards' Life Clashes With Campaign Message
The candidate's 'slob like us' story won't wash with the real slobs
By David Gelernter

David Gelernter is a professor of computer science at Yale University and a contributing editor to the Weekly Standard.

NEW HAVEN, Conn. — Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina seems like a decent and likable man, the political equivalent of a handsome, slightly under-ripe bunch of bananas, just the thing if you are looking for bananas and can't find any ripe ones, or don't know the difference. But I can't believe the public is going to buy this act. Last week, I heard an admiring TV pundit explain, to general agreement from his fellows, that Edwards' "two Americas speech" is his No. 1 asset, followed closely by his self-made-man, up-from-the-working-class life story. The problem is, they cancel each other out.

That "two Americas" stuff suggests a country divided by a barricade, with the poor stuck on one side and the rich living it up on the other. We know this is false. Economic historians keep telling us so; they love talking about the high "mobility among income quintiles" that continues to typify this country. American society is a perpetual-motion machine, with constant movement from poor to medium to rich (and, sometimes, back again).

More important to the campaign: Edwards' life story shows that his message is false. If your story is "poor boy makes good," your message can't possibly be "this is a two-part nation where poor boys are prevented from making good." Exactly how dumb are the voters supposed to be? And if the real, implicit message is different — "Sure, you can get over the barricade, but it's so tough that only geniuses like John Edwards can make it" — I doubt this version will play any better.

Edwards' whole campaign shtick suggests he's a regular guy, just plain folks, a slob like us. So if he got over this barricade (or barrier or whatever it is), why can't anyone who really wants to? Answer: Anyone can, and everyone knows it. Edwards' story says so loud and clear. This is still the land of opportunity, where a talented working-class boy can grow up to be stinking rich and even be (a candidate for vice) president.

Benjamin Disraeli had a very different society in view when he first introduced "the two nations" idea in his novel "Sybil" in 1845. He was one of Britain's greatest prime ministers, and a charter neoconservative. (He started life as a radical left-winger.) And he is the founder of the progressive conservatism that has dominated the American presidency in recent decades. (Disraeli's idea was that conservatives and liberals were equally progressive; they differed insofar as liberals were detached from the past and looked to the international community for advice and approval; conservatives were detached from the international community and looked to the past for advice and approval — to their ancestors, their national history, their cultural heritage.)

Disraeli's "Sybil" made the dramatic claim that the queen reigned over two separate nations, "two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy … who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners and are not governed by the same laws … THE RICH AND THE POOR." (Victorians were too robust to be scared of capital letters.)

A brilliant stroke by a brilliant man: Traditional British society was divided, like a jumbo lawn tennis court, by a barrier of class and wealth that few Britons ever leapt. But American society isn't, and never was. Not only does Edwards' life clash with his message, his message never did make much sense.

Of course, if you don't have a job and you think Edwards will somehow help you get one, you couldn't care less about the logical consistency or historical validity of his campaign message. But how exactly is this retired trial lawyer going to convince anyone or his dog that he has the answer to unemployment? That is rich. How many people have been thrown out of work because of exorbitant insurance rates forced by lawsuit terror — rates that close down businesses while obscenely rich trial lawyers get richer? There are plenty of fine, upstanding trial lawyers out there (presumably). But damned few of them have the nerve to present themselves as champions of the unemployed.

Yet Edwards is on to something, in a way. Consider this proposition. "There is something out of whack about the connection between the U.S. economy and U.S. society. The wiring is fouled or the pipes are cracked or something, because the wrong activities (like trial lawyering) keep getting encouraged and rewarded. We need to think this problem through and solve it."

That I believe. What I can't believe is that Edwards will ever say it.

He is unlikely to say: "Ladies and gentlemen, why in God's name should I have made so unbelievably much money as a trial lawyer while gardeners, architects, policemen, civil engineers, physical therapists and Marine lieutenants make so (relatively) little? What does America want and need, more engineers and Marines to help build this country and protect it, or more trial lawyers to help tear it apart? Are you satisfied with a country in which so pathetically many smart young people want to grow up to be law school graduates like me?"

Nor is he likely to say: "Look at the Democratic presidential ticket, ladies and gentlemen; now look at the Republican ticket. Four rich candidates. Given that Democrats are the party of campaign finance reform, I'm hardly in a position to point out that our screwball campaign finance laws have turned every politician in the country into a money-grubbing beggar, unless he is too rich to have to bother; before long only multibillionaires will dare run for president.
"And speaking of money-grubbing: I'm hardly in a position to preach sacrifice — but isn't there any way to get more of our brightest young people to pass up law degrees or MBAs and become Talmudists, priests, physicists, archeologists?"

Two generations ago, nearly any married woman who felt like it could stay home and actually rear her own children. Today she's practically got to be married to a trial lawyer to afford it. Anyway, that's what people believe. Is this supposed to be progress? Why?
These are "liberal" questions. Too bad there are no liberal (or conservative) politicians with the cojones to ask them.

As for Edwards, he is one slick banana: easy to take, nutritious as fruit goes, recommended for children and sick people, thoroughly harmless. Is this the future of the Democratic Party?