Demographic Crisis of the GOP
By Pat Buchanan

January 11, 2006

It was from their success in Texas that George Bush and Karl Rove devised their grand strategy for regaining the "lock" on the presidency that had been the legacy of Nixon and Reagan.

Nixon's "New Majority" and the "Reagan Coalition" were built on the same foundation: a united Republican Party to which was added the socially conservative Democrats who would defect to the GOP on "God, gays and guns," and other battleground issues of the culture war.

Rove and Bush correctly perceived that, due to immigration, the Nixon-Reagan coalition, composed almost entirely of white voters, was shrinking in relative terms. Where, in 1960, European-Americans were nearly 90 percent of the population and an even higher share of the voters, today, they are less than 70 percent of the population.

Today, a Republican can sweep the white vote 55 percent to 45 percent, and still lose. And as President Clinton merrily predicted a few years ago, white folks will be just another minority in 2050, as they are already in California and Texas.

In short, Republicans need minority voters to survive as America's Party. The Bush-Rove solution to the looming demographic disaster is to go all-out to court the nation's fastest growing minority, Hispanics, who now number 40 million and 13 percent of the U.S. population. But, in seeking to win the Hispanic vote, the inherent defects of the Bush-Rove strategy have become manifestly clear.

First, Hispanics have never voted Republican in any presidential election. In his 49-state landslide in 1984, Reagan, despite a macho image that appealed to Hispanics, managed to win only 44 percent. In national elections, the Hispanic vote ranges between 56 percent and 75 percent Democratic. Thus, the more Hispanic America becomes, the more Democratic America becomes.

California, which Nixon carried on five tickets and Ronald Reagan never lost, is a harbinger of what is to come. With a fifth of the electoral votes needed to win the presidency, California has moved beyond the reach of a conservative Republican.

Reason: Though many Hispanics may be social conservatives, they believe in Big Government. Understandably so. For, as lower-income voters, they pay far less in income taxes than the average American, while benefiting far more from the welfare state: free education for their kids, food stamps, welfare checks, housing supplements, Medicaid, subsidized day care, student loans and grants, affirmative action, and earned income tax credits. At the local, state and federal level, Hispanics vote for the party of government.

Here, we come to the first hurdle in wooing Hispanics. The GOP is a small-government party whose faithful are appalled at President Bush's fiscal imprudence. But if Bush, who has governed as a Great Society Republican, starts to imitate Bob Taft, he will have to slash spending and open himself to charges he is "balancing the budget on the backs of the Hispanic poor."

In short, there is an inherent contradiction between being the party of small government and being the party of Hispanics, and that contradiction is tearing the Bush-Rove coalition apart at the seams.

Now, an irreconcilable conflict looms. In a House vote before the Christmas-New Year's break, Republicans endorsed a 700-mile security fence on the U.S.-Mexican border and tough sanctions on corporations that hire illegal aliens. No issue more fires up the populist base and white working-class Democrats than the issue of unprotected borders and the flooding of our cities and towns by some 12 million illegal aliens and counting.

For five years, President Bush has refused to deal with the crisis on the border, denouncing the Minutemen who went there to serve as spotters for a beleaguered Border Patrol as "vigilantes." For Bush and Rove believe that taking a tough line on illegal immigration will do to the national GOP what they think Gov. Pete Wilson's hard line on illegal immigration did to the California GOP.

But now that immigration has become the hot domestic issue and Republicans are taking a tougher line, repudiating Bush's guest-worker plan as amnesty, Bush is being compelled to come down harder himself against illegal immigration -- or become irrelevant.

The question Bush and Rove face is this: Can the GOP be both the party that secures the border against Hispanic invaders and sanctions employers who hire them, and still be the party Hispanics will vote for? In the old imagery, if Bush reaches for the bird in the bush, the Hispanic vote, by favoring open borders and amnesty, he may lose the bird in the hand, the support of the white working and middle class that is the heart of the Republican coalition.

Bush and Rove think they can have both. They can't. But if George Bush's father, 15 years ago, had only sealed and secured the border and begun to deport illegals, his son and Rove would not be facing the seemingly insoluble problem the GOP is presented with today.

Either Bush and Rove secure the border now, or we can kiss the GOP goodbye.

Who's Practicing McCarthyism Now?
by Patrick J. Buchanan

Posted Jan 12, 2006

It was during the second day of questioning that Sam Alito's wife broke down, wept and left the room after hearing Sen. Kennedy imply that her husband was a bigot.

What was Kennedy's evidence?

In 1985, Sam Alito belonged to Concerned Alumni of Princeton. He had joined to protest the ouster of ROTC from campus. Alito was neither an officer nor active, but like future Sen. Bill Bradley, he joined.

What were CAP's sins? Headed by National Review publisher William Rusher, CAP had a magazine called Prospect that carried an essay opposing affirmative action and regretting that Princeton had ever gone co-ed.

Yet support for single-sex education, as practiced at Smith and dozens of women's colleges, is hardly a mark of bigotry. And opposition to affirmative action and quotas is core conservative dogma.

So, what is going on here? Answer: a smear. Because Judge Alito belonged to an alumni group that had a magazine which had an offensive article, he must share those views. Therefore, he is a bigot and the Senate must reject him as morally unqualified to sit on the Supreme Court.

This is a textbook example of what liberals used to call McCarthyism.

Why are the Democrats disgracing themselves and disgusting decent people with such tactics? Why are they desperate to kill the nomination of Sam Alito?

The answer, in a word, is abortion. By the end of the third day of hearings, analysts had toted up the questions. The subject that had been brought up in more questions than any other was abortion.

Why? Because, as Sen. Chuck Schumer fears, Judge Alito may just vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.

For Alito has said that while he respects precedents and has an "open mind," Roe v. Wade is not some "super-duper precedent" or "inexorable command." And Sam's mom, in her 90s, when asked where her son stands on abortion, replied, "Of course, he's against it."

Why has the Democratic Party become a party of fanatics on abortion? Because the feminists of NARAL and NOW regard abortion as a sacrament and will cut dead any Democrat who fails to protect a woman's "right to choose" to kill her unborn baby.

Which brings us to the unspoken issue here. Judge Alito is Catholic. If confirmed, he will join three other Catholics on the bench: Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, who have already voted to overturn Roe.

On the Senate Judiciary Committee sit four Catholic Democrats: Leahy, Kennedy, Biden and Durbin. All have 100 percent pro-abortion voting records. All have attacked Alito out of fear he may overturn Roe.

Query: Why is the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops so deathly silent in this war of Catholics to decide if abortion on demand is to remain the law of the land forever in God's Country?

Where are the Catholic echoes of John Paul II's condemnations of the Culture of Death?

Where is Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, who was designated to address the moral obligations of Catholic politicians? When John Kerry ran as the Democratic nominee, McCarrick's task force refused to tell priests to deny him Communion. Suddenly, pro-abortion Kerry was seen at the altar rail and won half the Catholic vote.

Said McCarrick, "Our task force does not advocate the denial of Communion for Catholic politicians," for, otherwise, the "sacred nature of the Eucharist could be trivialized and might be turned into a partisan political battleground."

What should bishops do when Catholic politicians fight to uphold a decision that has caused the slaughter of thousands of times as many Holy Innocents as were massacred by King Herod?

Cardinal McCarrick urged "new efforts to teach clearly, advocate effectively, organize and mobilize Catholic laity, and to engage, persuade and challenge Catholic politicians to act on the moral teaching of our church."

Fair enough, Your Eminence.

Sixty-six years ago, Bishop Clemens von Galen took to the pulpit of Munster Cathedral to damn Hitler's regime at the peak of its power for "plain murder" in its euthanasia program and to direct Catholics to "withdraw ourselves and our faithful from their (Nazi) influence so that we may not be contaminated by their ... ungodly behavior."

Cardinal von Galen is headed for sainthood.

What is asked of you, Cardinal McCarrick, and your fellow bishops is less heroic. Just issue a statement before the 32nd anniversary of Roe v. Wade on Jan. 22, 2006, declaring:

"We pray to God that Roe v. Wade is overturned. We commend all Catholics and fellow citizens working toward that goal. We condemn any Catholic politician who would deny a seat on the Supreme Court to a fellow Catholic -- on the grounds that he might vote to overturn this abomination."

That too much to ask, Your Eminence? As Dante said, there is a special place in hell for those who, in times of moral crisis, fail to take a stand. By the way, Dante put a lot of bishops in there.

From The News & Observer ACC Blog:

Ol' Roy can coach
Posted by J.P. Giglio

There's a lot of hockey left, but Roy Williams sure looks like the coach of the year, and not just because of the old "they're better than the stupid media thought they'd be" reasoning.

Williams has become Dean Smith. With less than 5 minutes left, in a tight game last night, Williams had Wes Miller, Quentin Thomas and Byron Sanders on the floor. That's not quite the old "Blue" team but pretty close.

You might argue, "What choice does he have?" Well, compare that to what Coach K did last year with a similiarly short-handed roster. Duke ran its best four players into the ground. Sure they won the ACC title but they were gassed by the NCAA Tournament.

And Williams isn't just throwing these backups out there. He got 22 minutes out of Sanders, and relative production with six rebounds.

Thomas is another story altogether, he's still too panicky and turnover prone, but most coaches would have run him out of town after the Santa Clara game last year. Williams, at the minimum, is getting Bobby Frasor some rest by sticking with Thomas.

Of course, it always helps to have a stud like Tyler Hansbrough, who completely defied logic by out-playing Coleman Collins in his house. But still, Williams deserves to be commended for his management of this roster.

Given Kentucky's slide and all the mitigating factors working against UNC last night, the 64-61 win at Virginia Tech is their best win of the season so far.

I realize Virginia Tech is in last place in the league and that the Heels just beat State, but that game was in Chapel Hill.

Every rational reason pointed to UNC losing last night — experience, location, letdown, mismatches — and still the Heels found a way to win.

From C-Net: More "defense of freedom" from the Bush adminishtration:

Create an e-annoyance, go to jail
By Declan McCullagh

Annoying someone via the Internet is now a federal crime.

It's no joke. Last Thursday, President Bush signed into law a prohibition on posting
annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity.

In other words, it's OK to flame someone on a mailing list or in a blog as long as you do it under your real name. Thank Congress for small favors, I guess.

This ridiculous prohibition, which would likely imperil much of Usenet, is buried in the so-called Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act. Criminal penalties include stiff fines and two years in prison.

"The use of the word 'annoy' is particularly problematic," says Marv Johnson, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. "What's annoying to one person may not be annoying to someone else."

Buried deep in the new law is Sec. 113, an innocuously titled bit called "Preventing Cyberstalking." It rewrites existing telephone harassment law to prohibit anyone from using the Internet "without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy."

To grease the rails for this idea, Sen. Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, and the section's other sponsors slipped it into an unrelated, must-pass bill to fund the Department of Justice. The plan: to make it politically infeasible for politicians to oppose the measure.

The tactic worked. The bill cleared the House of Representatives by voice vote, and the Senate unanimously approved it Dec. 16.

There's an interesting side note. An earlier version that the House approved in September had radically different wording. It was reasonable by comparison, and criminalized only using an "interactive computer service" to cause someone "substantial emotional harm."

That kind of prohibition might make sense. But why should merely annoying someone be illegal?

There are perfectly legitimate reasons to set up a Web site or write something incendiary without telling everyone exactly who you are.

Think about it: A woman fired by a manager who demanded sexual favors wants to blog about it without divulging her full name. An aspiring pundit hopes to set up the next Suck.com. A frustrated citizen wants to send e-mail describing corruption in local government without worrying about reprisals.

In each of those three cases, someone's probably going to be annoyed. That's enough to make the action a crime. (The Justice Department won't file charges in every case, of course, but trusting prosecutorial discretion is hardly reassuring.)

Clinton Fein, a San Francisco resident who runs the Annoy.com site, says a feature permitting visitors to send obnoxious and profane postcards through e-mail could be imperiled.

"Who decides what's annoying? That's the ultimate question," Fein said. He added: "If you send an annoying message via the United States Post Office, do you have to reveal your identity?"

Fein once sued to overturn part of the Communications Decency Act that outlawed transmitting indecent material "with intent to annoy." But the courts ruled the law applied only to obscene material, so Annoy.com didn't have to worry.

"I'm certainly not going to close the site down," Fein said on Friday. "I would fight it on First Amendment grounds."

He's right. Our esteemed politicians can't seem to grasp this simple point, but the First Amendment protects our right to write something that annoys someone else.

It even shields our right to do it anonymously. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas defended this principle magnificently in a 1995 case involving an Ohio woman who was punished for distributing anonymous political pamphlets.

If President Bush truly believed in the principle of limited government (it is in his official bio), he'd realize that the law he signed cannot be squared with the Constitution he swore to uphold.

And then he'd repeat what President Clinton did a decade ago when he felt compelled to sign a massive telecommunications law. Clinton realized that the section of the law punishing abortion-related material on the Internet was unconstitutional, and he directed the Justice Department not to enforce it.

Bush has the chance to show his respect for what he calls Americans' personal freedoms. Now we'll see if the president rises to the occasion.

It's illegal to annoy

A new federal law states that when you annoy someone on the Internet, you must disclose your identity. Here's the relevant language.

"Whoever...utilizes any device or software that can be used to originate telecommunications or other types of communications that are transmitted, in whole or in part, by the Internet... without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass any person...who receives the communications...shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than two years, or both."


Copyright ©1995-2006 CNET Networks, Inc. All rights reserved.

From Asia Times Online:

When even the pope has to whisper
By Spengler

Islam is the unexploded bomb of global politics. US foreign policy - the only foreign policy there is, for the United States is the only superpower - proceeds from the hope that a modern and democratic Islam will emerge from the ruins of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Through democratic institutions, Washington believes, the long-marginalized Shi'ites will adapt to religious pluralism. Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani's Islam, fixed in amber since the High Middle Ages, will metamorphose into something like American mainline Protestantism.

Alas, the available facts suggest that the opposite result will ensue: more freedom equals more fundamentalism. Not the secular Shi'ite parties but the pro-Iranian religious parties dominate the Iraqi polls. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood quadrupled its vote despite heavy-handed measures to intimidate its supporters; Hamas threatens to displace Fatah in the Palestinian elections this month; Hezbollah has become the strongest electoral as well as military force in Lebanon; and, most important of all, Mahmud Ahmadinejad crushed a more pragmatic opponent in last June's Iranian presidential elections.

Islam was founded as a theocracy, such that the Western innovation of church-state separation remains alien to its culture. Is it possible for Islam to reform? A negative answer implies that Ahmadinejad's January 5 call for world domination falls within the Islamic mainstream. He told an audience of religious students, "We must believe in the fact that Islam is not confined to geographical borders, ethnic groups and nations. It's a universal ideology that leads the world to justice. We don't shy away from declaring that Islam is ready to rule the world. We must prepare ourselves to rule the world." The previous day, the London Guardian leaked a European intelligence report detailing Iran's efforts to acquire technology required to build nuclear weapons. A very few writers, including this one, have rejected the possibility of Islamic reformation, to the stony contempt of universally accepted opinion.

Now Pope Benedict XVI has let it be known that he does not believe Islam can reform. This we learn from the transcript of a January 5 US radio interview with one of Benedict's students and friends, Father Joseph Fessio, SJ, the provost of Ave Maria University in Naples, Florida, posted on the Asia Times Online forum by a sharp-eyed reader. For the pope to refute the fundamental premise of US policy is news of inestimable strategic importance, yet a Google News scan reveals that not a single media outlet has taken notice of what Fessio told interviewer Hugh Hewitt last week. No matter: still and small as Benedict's voice might be, it carries further than earthquake and whirlwind.

Fessio described a private seminar on the subject of Islam last year at Castel Gandolfo, the papal summer residence:

The main presentation by this Father [Christian] Troll was very interesting. He based it on a Pakistani Muslim scholar [named] Rashan, who was at the University of Chicago for many years, and Rashan's position was Islam can enter into dialogue with modernity, but only if it radically reinterprets the Koran, and takes the specific legislation of the Koran, like cutting off your hand if you're a thief, or being able to have four wives, or whatever, and takes the principles behind those specific pieces of legislation for the 7th century of Arabia, and now applies them, and modifies them, for a new society [in] which women are now respected for their full dignity, where democracy's important, religious freedom's important, and so on. And if Islam does that, then it will be able to enter into real dialogue and live together with other religions and other kinds of cultures.

And immediately the holy father, in his beautiful calm but clear way, said, well, there's a fundamental problem with that because, he said, in the Islamic tradition, God has given His word to Mohammed, but it's an eternal word. It's not Mohammed's word. It's there for eternity the way it is. There's no possibility of adapting it or interpreting it, whereas in Christianity, and Judaism, the dynamism's completely different, that God has worked through his creatures [emphasis added]. And so it is not just the word of God, it's the word of Isaiah, not just the word of God, but the word of Mark. He's used his human creatures, and inspired them to speak his word to the world, and therefore by establishing a church in which he gives authority to his followers to carry on the tradition and interpret it, there's an inner logic to the Christian Bible, which permits it and requires it to be adapted and applied to new situations.

The interviewer then asked Fessio, "And so the pope is a pessimist about that changing, because it would require a radical reinterpretation of what the Koran is?" Fessio replied, "Yeah, which is it's impossible, because it's against the very nature of the Koran, as it's understood by Muslims."

That is precisely what I argued in an essay titled You say you want a reformation? on August 5, 2003:

Hebrew and Christian scripture claim to be the report of human encounters with God. After the Torah is read each Saturday in synagogues, the congregation intones that the text stems from "the mouth of God by the hand of Moses", a leader whose flaws kept him from entering the Promised Land. The Jewish rabbis, moreover, postulated the existence of an unwritten Revelation whose interpretation permits considerable flexibility with the text. Christianity's Gospels, by the same token, are the reports of human evangelists.

The Archangel Gabriel, by contrast, dictated the Koran to Mohammed, according to Islamic doctrine. That sets a dauntingly high threshold for textual critics. How does one criticize the word of God without rejecting its divine character? In that respect the Koran resembles the "Golden Tablets" of the Angel Moroni purported found by the Mormon leader Joseph Smith more than it does the Jewish or Christian bibles.

I claim no originality whatever in this matter, for I simply follow the leading Muslim authorities, who are unanimous that Islam is in no need of reform. The immutable character of Islamic revelation makes the subject of Koranic criticism into a minefield. It is universally known among scholars that alternative texts of the Koran have been discovered in various archeological sites - something of an embarrassment for the Archangel Gabriel - but the subject has disappeared from the media. [1] When Newsweek in 2004 published a brief mention of the work of the pseudonymous German philologist Christoph Luxenberg, the government of Pakistan seized the entire print run. Luxenberg became famous for re-translating the Koran to read that martyrs would receive raisins in Paradise rather than virgins. One finds nearly 12,000 Google references to Luxenberg but not a single hit on Google News. The subject, once so passionately debated in editorial columns, has vanished from the media in their entirety.

It is dangerous to publish anything that Muslims might interpret as blasphemy, as Jyllands-Posten, Denmark's largest newspaper, discovered when it published 12 cartoons of Mohammed, some portraying the Prophet in violent acts. Muslim protests and threats caused two of the cartoonists to go into hiding. After Arab foreign ministers condemned Denmark for refusing to act against the newspaper, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen offered a near-apology in his New Year's address.

Strange as it may seem, the pope must whisper when he wants to state agreement with conventional Muslim opinion, namely that the Koranic prophecy is fixed for all time such that Islam cannot reform itself. If Islam cannot change, then a likely outcome will be civilizational war, something too horrific for US leaders to contemplate. What Benedict XVI thinks about the likelihood of civilizational war I do not know. Two elements of context, though, set in relief his reported comments concerning Islam's incapacity to reform.

The first is that Benedict's comments regarding the nature of Muslim revelation are deliberate and informed, for his primary focus as a theologian has been the subject of revelation. In his 1953 doctoral thesis, biographer George Weigel reports, Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope,

... following Bonaventure, argued that revelation is "an act in which God shows himself"; revelation cannot be reduced to the propositions that result from God's self-disclosure, as certain forms of neo-scholasticism tended to do. Revelation, in other words, has a subjective or personal dimension, in that there is no "revelation" without someone to receive it. As Ratzinger would later put it, "where there is no one to perceive 'revelation', no re-vel-ation has occurred, because no veil has been removed". [2]

The Judeo-Christian view of revelation, as summarized above by Father Fessio, expresses the mutual love between Revealer and recipient of revelation, a concept alien to Islam. [3]

A second element of context is Benedict's admiration for the US separation of church and state. In an essay published in this month's issue of First Things, Benedict makes the remarkable (for a pope) statement that the US model is what the early church really had in mind. He proceeds from the famous argument of Pope Gelasius I (492-496) that "because of human weakness (pride!), they have separated the two offices" of king and priest. Neither the state church model of Northern Europe nor the secular model of France, Italy and Spain has sufficed, Benedict observes. But he continues:

Situated between the two [failed] models is the model of the United States of America. Formed on the basis of free churches, it adopts a separation between church and state. Above and beyond the single denominations, it is characterized by a Protestant Christian consensus that is not defined in denominational terms but rather in association with its sense of a special religious mission toward the rest of the world. The religious sphere thus acquires a significant weight in public affairs and emerges as a pre-political and supra-political force with the potential to have a decisive impact on political life.

It is useless to bemoan the fact that Americans do not understand what they are until a European comes along and explains it to them; that has been true since Alexis de Tocqueville. It is most promising that a European, indeed one who speaks with the authority of the throne of St Peter, has explained the difference between the Christian foundation of the US political system and theocratic Islam - even if the explanation came in the form of a stage whisper. I expect this to have profound consequences.

Later in the same essay, Benedict takes up a theme I have addressed over the years, namely the moral cause of Europe's demographic implosion (see Why Europe chooses extinction, April 8, 2003), writing:

Europe is infected by a strange lack of desire for the future. Children, our future, are perceived as a threat to the present, as though they were taking something away from our lives. Children are seen - at least by some people - as a liability rather than as a source of hope. Here it is obligatory to compare today's situation with the decline of the Roman Empire.

My investigation of the causes of Europe's present decline was inspired by comments of then-cardinal Ratzinger in a book-length interview with the German journalist Peter Seewald published in 1996 as The Salt of the Earth. Nothing is really new in Benedict's present formulation except, perhaps, his sense of urgency as the hour grows late and the moment of truth approaches. In the cited essay, Benedict excoriates the pessimism of Oswald Spengler, who claimed to have discovered a deterministic pattern of rise and fall of civilizations. Instead, he argues that "the fate of a society always depends upon its creative minorities", and that "Christians should look upon themselves as just such a creative minority".

I agree with the pope, not with my namesake. My choice of nom de guerre is ironic rather than semiotic. The fact that the West still has such a leader as Benedict XVI in itself is cause for optimism. It might be too late for Europe, but it is not too late for the United States, and that is where the pope's mustard seeds may fall on fertile ground.

Notes
1. See Toby Lester, "What is the Koran?", in The Atlantic Monthly, January 1999.
2. God's Choice by George Weigel (HarperCollins: New York, 2005), p 167.
3. For more background see Oil on the flames of civilizational war, December 2, 2003.

(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.

From The American Conservative:

The Worst and the Dullest

The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, George Packer, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 467 pages

by Scott McConnell

The conventional wisdom has room for one book at a time per subject. David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest caught exactly what the prevailing mood wanted captured about the Vietnam War: the hubris of a WASPish foreign-policy establishment in its final act, overconfident and trusting of its technocratic rational models as it steered the nation into bloody quagmire.

For a brief time during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Kenneth Pollack’s hawkish The Threatening Storm held a portion of the stage. In Washington, it was the book most often seen plucked from briefcases for perusal by busy suits on the Metro—a city giving in to the case for war.

Now, with that war well into its third year, George Packer’s Assassins’ Gate has emerged as the book that most nearly shapes an emerging consensus. It’s not quite a bestseller—apparently not that many Americans take pleasure in buying books about Iraq. But among political readers, the New Yorker correspondent’s work—its title comes from the name U.S. troops have given the gate separating the American Green Zone from the rest of Baghdad—is on everyone’s lips. Packer appears as a guest on the most watched Sunday talk shows; he is praised by government officials who were close to the decision-making process as getting the complicated story more or less exactly right. And deservedly so.

Certainly The Assassins’ Gate works as vivid journalism. It is one thing to relate how Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon made no plans for post-invasion contingencies, even as it succeeded in blocking knowledgeable military and State Department officials from the postwar planning process. Or to describe how Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith—entrusted by Rumsfeld to prepare for the post-invasion—appointed his former law partner Michael Mobbs, a man with no relevant experience, to head civil administration in postwar Baghdad, and this personality—after clearing the matter with Scooter Libby —awarded Halliburton a $7 billion no-bid contract.

But it is even better to learn that Mobbs first showed up in the region “looking as if he were dressed for West Palm Beach” and, when he was unable to reach any decisions about civil administration, abandoned Baghdad to hang out in the Kurdish area with Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi exiles. Or to read that on day two of the war, Albert Cevallos, a young USAID human-rights official,was standing with some civil-affairs officers on the Iraq-Kuwait border. “Albert, what’s the plan for policing?” one of the civil-affairs officers asked. Cevallos replied, “I thought you knew the plan.” “No, we thought you knew.” “Haven’t you talked to ORHA [the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, the official postwar authority]?” “No, no one talked to us.” Cevallos later related that it felt like a Laurel and Hardy routine.

Two weeks after this exchange, looting broke out, and the American occupation authorities stood by and observed passively. The estimated damage was $12 billion, and in Packer’s telling, a signal to all Iraqis that the Americans had not sent a serious force to rule Iraq.

A premise of such reporting, of course, is that the invasion could have worked if planned more carefully or, more, that Iraq could have been truly liberated by American arms. Though this perspective would be considered shortsighted by most readers of this magazine, it is a boon to Packer’s reporting: it gives empathy and breadth to his portraits of the many administrators and intellectuals who planned the war and now work in Baghdad. As a backer of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Packer had more access than an Iraq War skeptic could have gained. And his disappointed “liberal hawk” perspective may be what the country is ready to embrace as its mainstream conventional view.

It would be many weeks after the invasion before official Washington recognized that things were not going well in liberated Iraq. While administration officials were still toasting one another at Washington dinner parties and mocking Colin Powell for his tedious insistence on international coalitions, Jay Garner, Rumsfeld’s man in Baghdad for the first weeks of the occupation, came by the White House to say goodbye and to deliver a memo that Iraq was well on its way to stability. Bush, apparently joking, asked him, “You want to do Iran for the next one?”

While Packer’s reporting on the war’s subsequent course—from within and without the Green Zone—is first rate, this book’s claim to lasting importance lies in its first 60 pages, in which he explores the ideas of the men who conceived of the invasion in the first place. While Washington is now immersed in the issue of whether and how the intelligence about Saddam’s weapons programs was distorted, it is necessary to remember that the squeezing of murky intelligence data to fit a preconceived pattern was the work of men for whom the concept of the war had been marinating a long time, well before the dubious reports of Saddam’s purchase of yellowcake and plans for aluminum tubes.

It is in this section that Packer’s liberal-hawk perspective may serve him best. It undoubtedly helped cement his friendship with such pro-war writers as the leftist Paul Berman, who argued in an intense book that Islamic fundamentalism was a variant of 20th-century European fascism, and the Iraqi exile Kanan Makiya, author of the comprehensive anti-Saddam tract Republic of Fear. His insight about liberals who began to shed their Vietnam-era resistance to military interventionism in the mid-1990s—“the first sip of this drink called humanitarian intervention carried a special thrill”—is perhaps born in introspection.

But while the exiles and liberal hawks held some cultural influence that helped grease the path to war, they had no real power. The neoconservatives who staffed the Pentagon and Vice President Cheney’s office did, and they too seemed to treat Packer as a friendly, opening up to him in interviews to his book’s great benefit.

Packer explores the evolution of the neoconservative case for war with great care and, for the most part, empathy, taking time to analyze its diverse strands, its origins in the muddled end of the first Gulf War, judiciously separating out the absurd from the plausible, the idealistic from the frankly Likudnik. He can be dead-on funny about such sideshows as the Leo Strauss cult. “At Yale,” he writes, “these disciples—almost exclusively male—wore bow ties and joined clubs with aristocratic-sounding names and generally cultivated an air of special knowledge and ‘excellence.’”

Discussion of the neoconservative role in the run-up to war has been made a sensitive issue, the Likudnik aspect especially so. As the war has gone sour and interest in the neocons has bubbled up around the globe, the neoconservatives have devoted no small amount of ink to either denying that neoconservatism exists, to claiming that users of the word are motivated by anti-Semitism, or to burying the concept under clouds of obfuscation—as in, for instance, presenting George W. Bush as the ultimate neoconservative, a ploy that seems to have fallen out of rhetorical fashion as the president’s poll ratings have dropped.

Nonetheless, truth and history have their own claims, and there was a group of men with similar ideologies and interlocking personal and institutional ties who did much to make the war happen. It is likely that Packer’s rich, nuanced, and in several ways manifestly philo-Semitic account of these men will do lasting damage to such efforts at historical cover-up. If—as seems quite possible—The Assassins’ Gate winds up on college reading lists and goes through many paperback editions, a great many Americans will acquire a finely honed view of the neoconservative role in igniting the war, one that may be better than they could get anywhere else.

Packer is generally laudatory of Paul Wolfowitz, an idealist with a talent of charming powerful people, “a good boy, the kind on whom adults fasten their dreams.” He suggestively writes that both Bush and Wolfowitz, who were never close themselves, yearned to break free of the “stifling authority” of Bush’s father, the balance-of-power realist who stepped back from finishing the job the first time around. For Wolfowitz, “Iraq stood for different things—an unfinished war, Arab tyranny, weapons proliferation, a strategic threat to oil, American weakness, Democratic fecklessness—and regime change there became the foreign-policy jackpot.” He is less indulgent towards Douglas Feith and David Wurmser and the “Clean Break” memorandum they, along with Richard Perle and others, prepared for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Nentanyahu in 1996. He gives “Clean Break” the most precise analysis I’ve seen in the American press, explicating it through the lens of Wurmser’s subsequent AEI-published volume, which argued (in 1999) that America’s taking out Saddam would solve Israel’s strategic problems and leave the Palestinians essentially helpless.

Wurmser joined Douglas Feith’s Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group, which collected raw data from Iraqi defectors in order to prove that Saddam had ties to al-Qaeda and would give WMD to terrorists. Later he worked for John Bolton before moving on to Cheney’s office. His and Feith’s work in intelligence gathering involved taking data that had been dismissed by the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the State Department and fashioning it into bullet points and PowerPoint slides and piping it into the White House, where the Pentagon neocons had allies in Scooter Libby and Elliott Abrams. Packer concludes, “this configuration of like-minded officials dispersed on key islands across the national-security archipelago allowed the intelligence ‘product’ … to circumvent the normal interagency process, in which the unconverted … might have raised objections. It was an efficient way of working if you knew what you wanted to achieve.” As Richard Perle told Packer, it was pointless to look back at old articles in the foreign-policy journals. What mattered was who held positions of power. “If,” Perle said, “Bush had staffed his administration with a group of people selected by Brent Scowcroft and Jim Baker, which might well have happened, then it could have been different. … The ideas are only important as they reside in the minds of people who were involved directly in the decision process.”

The ultimate responsibility for the war, or course, belongs to Cheney and Rumsfeld, who chose to staff the administration with neoconservative ideologues, and to George W. Bush. (A question that puzzles me is how anyone who had drafted position papers for a foreign government could receive a security clearance, much less a top foreign-policy job, but apparently this never troubled Cheney or Rumsfeld.)

The issue of how the Iraq War began will likely engage future historians as much as the beginning of World War I. It still remains, in a way, a mystery: Packer poignantly cites Richard Haass, the former director of policy planning at the State Department, as saying he will go to his grave not knowing why the United States invaded Iraq. “A decision was not made—a decision happened, and you can’t say when or how.”

In their efforts to probe the question, future historians are likely to go back to Packer’s work again and again, for it is superbly written and wonderfully judged, well sourced and speculative, a fusion of contemporary history and journalism at the highest level.

From The Baltimore Sun:

Looking to faith for comfort

When the Sago Mine blast tested a town's faith, Wease Day of Sago Baptist Church offered hospitality and strength of belief


By STEPHEN KIEHL
Sun Reporter

January 8, 2006

SAGO, W.Va. -- When it happened, before dawn Monday morning, the Rev. Wease Day thought it would be a good idea to open his church to the rescue workers, to give them a warm place to get coffee and doughnuts while they searched for the 13 miners trapped under the mountain across the river.

Two were his friends. As a boy, he had played football and gone hunting and fishing with George Hamner Jr. And for more than 20 years, Fred Ware Jr. had lived next door to the church and kept an eye on things for Day, who does double duty as a school bus driver. As Day headed to the church that morning, he felt confident that the miners would quickly be rescued.

But the pastor would not make it home that night, or the one after. Instead, his Sago Baptist Church became a place to sustain not just the rescue crews but the families of the miners, a place where thousands of prayers were sent heavenward and where - when it was all over - many questioned whether anyone had heard them.

For two days, as rescue workers slowly advanced toward the trapped miners, the families did the only thing they could: They prayed. Clergy from across this rural region of north-central West Virginia came to the church and held hands with the families. Candles were lit. Hymns were sung. Day's daughter played the piano.

And when word came late Tuesday night that 12 of the 13 miners had been found alive, the families were quick to give credit to God. It only made sense that, three hours later, when the families learned that 12 of the 13 miners were dead, they again pointed to God.

"We have got some of us saying that we don't even know if there is a Lord anymore," Anna Casto, a cousin of a dead miner, told CNN. "We had a miracle, and it was taken away from us."

Day, 49, would do as he had done for the past 40 years, since he was spiritually saved in the church he now heads: He would let the spirit in and trust the Lord.

"We heard about the tsunami. We heard about Katrina," the pastor said in an interview with The Sun last week after mine officials announced the deaths. "This one was here, and we had to deal with it. It's easy to play football from the stands. But when you get down on the field, it's a whole different ballgame, and we were standing in the middle of the field."

Ministering to these relatives and friends was a role Day is uniquely qualified to fill. He grew up in the hills around the mine, went to Sago Baptist Church before he was old enough to walk and returned as its pastor nine years ago. For the past 25 years, he has been a bus driver for the county school system.

"A lot of people who go to this church are my family, or, if not, they grew up with me or helped raise me," Day said. And though he might not see them in church every Sunday, he knows what they believe. "You can't live in these hills and work in those mountains without some faith in God."

As other local pastors prepared for their Sunday sermons, they thought about how to address the inevitable questions, the ones that defy easy answers. The Rev. Joseph Foster of the Good Shepherd Assembly of God in nearby Elkins said he understands why people who hurt would question their faith.

"There will be some who may become angry and bitter toward God, and those who resent him," said Foster, who spent time at the Sago church last week. "But whether we get what we pray for, we must praise God. Our salvation and our faith doesn't hinge on us always getting what we want. That would be a pretty selfish religion."

Day said he hasn't had time to think about what he will say when he stands before his congregation today. What the community needs, he said, is to express itself. So he expects to say only a few words and then let people talk.

"We'll just sit down as a family and discuss it," he said.

When the search ended last week, he told those assembled at the church that although their lives had changed, God had not. He is the same God they were praising when they thought the miners had been saved. And he did not do this to them, Day said.

"God is not the author of death and confusion," he said. "He is the God of life."

'Renewed spiritually'
Sago is little more than a crossroads at the entrance to the mine. There's one road in, which hews closely to the Buckhannon River. On one side of the river is the mine. On the other side is the church - a simple country church with white siding, a gravel parking lot and a small graveyard. Never before have the church and the mine been so closely intertwined.

Day reached the church about 10 a.m. Monday. Volunteers had already opened it to the rescue workers, and soon families of the trapped miners began arriving, too. It seemed the logical place to go.

"I knew the only comforting power they was really going to find would come from the Lord," said Day, who has the stocky build of a former football player and a warm, generous nature that suited him well to the task he faced.

He told the families to make themselves at home in his church, to ask for anything they needed. Folding chairs arrived at the fellowship hall, and the adjacent sanctuary was opened. There are strict rules forbidding food and drink in the sanctuary, but they were suspended.

"I told them these are only material things, and the Lord has said it's time to open the doors," Day said. He had always wanted to have a service where he could see people standing outside, looking in the windows, like when a preacher used to call for a revival. In a sense, that's what he got.

That first night in the church - Monday night - the lights were dimmed and some tried to sleep on the pews. Others kept singing or were simply too heartsick to move. To those who seemed to have lost hope, he asked what they needed, brought them coffee and listened to their fears.

"We live in a society where things change. Time changes things," Day said. "But Scripture teaches us that the spirit is being renewed daily. And they were being renewed spiritually as the moments went by."

Then, after hours of asking for a miracle, one seemed to occur. Word came from within the mine that 12 men had been found alive. Someone from the command center phoned someone in the church. That wasn't supposed to happen, but it did.

Day was in the breezeway between the sanctuary and the fellowship hall when he heard the celebration. At first he was confused. Officials had notified him in advance of all the previous announcements in order to alert the families and gather them together. This time, no one told him an announcement was coming.

He dwelled on that for only a moment, then he, too, was carried away in the euphoria. "It didn't take me long to join in," he said. "When people are shouting and praising God, I want to join in."

At the back of the church, a pull rope leads up to the bells in the white steeple, and Day ran to it.

"I thought about the old churches," he said. "If someone was killed in the mines, or even if someone died in the community, they always tolled the bell. I thought, man, if you toll the bell when someone leaves the community, then if someone's being granted back to you, it's time to ring the bells and beat on the bottom of kettles and whatever it takes. So I untied the rope and started ringing the bell."

Within 45 minutes, another message surfaced from the mine to the command center: Only one miner was alive, and just barely. Mining company officials waited to confirm the report, even as they knew about the bell-ringing and Lord-praising going on at the church.

'Worst of times'
Later, company officials would say state troopers had been asked to alert the clergy about the conflicting reports so they could calm the revelers. Day said he never got that message, and in any case it wasn't his to deliver.

"Were we ever given information that we were supposed to take out and announce to the people? No," Day said. "I have no authority to announce anything from the coal company. I can announce to the people that Christ has been crucified. I can announce to them that he could be their savior. I can announce to them that salvation was free and we was ready to help them get it."

He expects the tragedy to bring the families closer to God and help them realize what they still have. The problems within families or small disagreements that kept people apart probably won't seem so important anymore. Fences that had been built up will be torn down.

"You can't always feel like praising the Lord," Day said. "But in the worst of times, this is what we have: faith in God."

More than a few in the community say they haven't lost that. And they believe that those whose faith was strained by the disaster - as well as by the miscommunication - will weather it. "Their faith may have slipped down a little bit, but I know they're stronger today," said Jo Ann Casto, 50, of Sago, a member of the church who was also a friend to four of the miners who died. She was back at the church on Friday, where half a dozen women were mopping the floor and putting the church back in order for today's services.

"Being with people here, it just builds your faith up stronger," said Jo Linger, 60, who lives in Sago. "We know that with all this tragedy that happened, there's a loving God. The people had this little church to come to, and we were able to be with them and hold them and cry with them."

Acerbic commentary on Mark Steyn's recent Opinion Journal piece:

Mark Steyn's telltale mistake
By Steve Sailer

Mark Steyn's telltale mistake: In The New Criterion (and reprinted on the WSJ's OpinionJournal.com site), Steyn has an article on his favorite topic:

"It's the Demography, Stupid"
The real reason the West is in danger of extinction." ...

The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it requires a religious-society birthrate to sustain it. Post-Christian hyperrationalism is, in the objective sense, a lot less rational than Catholicism or Mormonism. Indeed, in its reliance on immigration to ensure its future, the European Union has adopted a 21st-century variation on the strategy of the Shakers, who were forbidden from reproducing and thus could increase their numbers only by conversion.

Much of it is quite good, although Steyn's schadenfreude at the troubles of those awful socialist Europeans is wearying. but Mr. Steyn misleads when he writes:

"In America, demographic trends suggest that the blue states ought to apply for honorary membership of the EU: in the 2004 election, John Kerry won the 16 [states] with the lowest birthrates; George W. Bush took 25 of the 26 states with the highest."

I was the first to publish these statistics (in my article "Baby Gap" in the December 20, 2004 issue of "The American Conservative"), but Mr. Steyn is distorting what I wrote, which was:

Bush carried the 19 states with the highest white fertility (just as he did in 2000), and 25 out of the top 26, with highly unionized Michigan being the one blue exception to the rule... In sharp contrast, Kerry won the 16 states at the bottom of the list, with the Democrats’ anchor states of California (1.65) and New York (1.72) having quite infertile whites.

Notice the difference? It's just one word, "white" (or to be technical, "non-Hispanic white"), but it's a big one.

Those numbers do not refer, as Mr. Steyn implies, to the "total fertility" rate among all women in the state, but just to the non-Hispanic white women. The correlation between white fertility and Bush's share of the vote was an extraordinary r-squared = 74%, but the correlation between overall fertility and Bush's performance was a significantly lower r-squared = 37%.

Among all ethnicities, Kerry won only 11 of the 16 states with the lowest total fertility rates, while Bush won 16 of the 19 most fertile states, and Bush's losses included the big states of California and Illinois.

This distinction has important implications for GOP strategists because immigration, especially of Hispanics, is driving up both the birthrates and the Democrats' share of the vote in many states. For example, in California, the 800 pound gorilla of the Electoral College, which voted Republican in 9 Presidential elections out of 10 from 1952 through 1988, but has gone solidly Democratic in the last four contests, as much of the state's Republican base was replaced in the 1990s by strongly Democratic immigrants.

A number of narrowly Republican states such as New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, and Colorado are likely to be driven into the blue columns in future elections by immigration, with North Carolina and Georgia at risk farther off in the future. Republicans thrive in states with what I call "affordable family formation," where non-Hispanic white people can afford to get married and have several children because houses with yards are cheap and public schools aren't inundated with poor students, and thus they become more supportive of the GOP's family values platform. It's nuts for President Bush (and Steyn) to support the Californication of more traditionally Red states through mass immigration.

This is characteristic of Steyn's flippant disingenuousness about the threats immigration poses to America. Steyn asks:

Will Japan be an economic powerhouse if it's populated by Koreans and Filipinos? Very possibly. Will Germany if it's populated by Algerians? That's a trickier proposition.

Okay, so will the United States be an economic powerhouse if it's populated by Latin Americans? Exactly how many economic powerhouses have Latin Americans run? That would seem to be another tricky proposition, but it's the kind of question that apparently never occurs to Steyn, who lives in a small town in New Hampshire. I could see America continuing on at a high rate of prosperity for awhile, but losing its economic dynamism as the culture comes to be dominated by a people who have never shown much interest in scientific, technological, or economic progress.

The more fundamental point is that Steyn is badly misreading human nature if he thinks that a people reason like this, "Oh, well, our descendents will be gone, but at least our territory will be inhabited by somebody else's descendents who will make lots of money off living here, and, really, isn't that all the same thing, so nothing to frown about!" Surely, Steyn will have noticed that from 132 AD to 1947 AD, Jews did not think that way about the Holy Land. He might even have noticed that the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution announces that the purpose of the document is to " secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity," not to somebody else's Posterity.

I was thinking of Steyn in particular when I wrote in The American Conservative about the smug American reactions to the French riots:

Many Americans are congratulating themselves for their brilliance in choosing to locate their continent north of a huge supply of unskilled Latin Americans rather than north of a huge supply of unskilled Muslims, like those idiot Europeans did.

Later, Steyn bloviates:

The refined antennae of Western liberals mean that whenever one raises the question of whether there will be any Italians living in the geographical zone marked as Italy a generation or three hence, they cry, "Racism!" To fret about what proportion of the population is "white" is grotesque and inappropriate. But it's not about race, it's about culture. If 100% of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy, it doesn't matter whether 70% of them are "white" or only 5% are.

Thank God we have those neuronal thoughtwave detectors mounted on the Mexican border making sure that 100% of all the illegal immigrants believe in "liberal pluralist democracy!" Of course, considering the superb track record Latin Americans have at running their own "liberal pluralist democracies," we can sleep well at night knowing that a flood of their least educated citizens into our country can only strengthen America's commitment to our traditional values.

You'll notice that Steyn is 100% against multiculturalism, but 100% for pluralism (at least in theory -- in practice, he lives in rural New Hampshire). Of course, much of the iMuslim mmigration into Europe came in the 1950s through 1973, before the word "multiculturalism" was widely heard. The highest term of praise then was "pluralism," which, in practice, meant immigration. You'll note (but Steyn won't) that the one Western European country that doesn't have a Muslim problem is the one that doesn't like pluralism or immigration: Finland.

Pope attacks "culture of death" at first baptisms
By Crispian Balmer

Sun Jan 8, 2006 By Crispian Balmer

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Benedict performed the first baptisms of his pontificate on Sunday, using the occasion to launch an impassioned denunciation of irresponsible sex and a "culture of death" that he said pervaded the modern world.

Pope Benedict, abandoning his prepared sermon, compared the wild excesses of the ancient Roman empire to 21st century society and urged people to rediscover their faith.

"In our times we need to say 'no' to the largely dominant culture of death," Benedict said during his improvised homily in the frescoed Sistine Chapel where he was elected Pope last April.

"(There is) an anti-culture demonstrated by the flight to drugs, by the flight from reality, by illusions, by false happiness ... displayed in sexuality which has become pure pleasure devoid of responsibility," he added.

Benedict did not spell out what he meant by a "culture of death", but the phrase was a rallying cry of his predecessor John Paul who regularly used the term to define abortion and artificial birth control.

With Michelangelo's dramatic depiction of the Last Judgment as a backdrop, Benedict attacked the "thing-ification of mankind", suggesting that people had become little more than objects to be traded, picked up and discarded at will.

He singled out ancient Rome's Colosseum amphitheatre and the gardens of the emperor Nero, where Christians were once martyred, as a "real perversion of joy and a perversion of the sense of life."

"The anti-culture of death was a love of lies and of deceit. It was an abuse of the body as a commodity and as a product. Even in our times there is this culture and we must say 'No' to it," he said.

It was the first time since he became Pope that Benedict has ignored the prepared text of his homily, sent to the media beforehand, and instead spoken at length off the cuff.

The official speech focused on the significance of baptism, which marks the admission of a person into the community of Christians.

Benedict was following in John Paul's footsteps by performing baptisms in the Sistine Chapel on the day when Roman Catholics remember Christ's own baptism in the river Jordan.

"This is a 'yes' to Christ, a 'yes' to the victors of death, a 'yes' to life," Benedict said before carefully pouring water on the heads of the babies - 5 girls and 5 boys.

John Paul baptised almost 1,400 infants during his 26-year reign, but was forced to miss the Sistine Chapel ceremony in the last two years of his pontificate because of ill-health.

From Godspy:

Return of the Kong

Peter Jackson's 'King Kong' is a marvel—a massive, special-effects extravaganza that dares to ask: Is it better to die for Love and Beauty, or live alone and unloved as King of the Jungle?

By John Murphy


King Kong the movie, like its namesake, is a fast moving, hard-hitting behemoth with a big heart. Between this and his monumental Lord of the Rings series, Peter Jackson has officially unseated Steven Spielberg as film’s foremost creator of big-budget wonders that are actually wonderful.

Too much hollow Hollywood fare these days has a soulless sheen, with one-dimensional characters that are imagined first as plastic action figures and then made to fit paint-by-numbers storylines. King Kong is a marvel, the magnificent dream of a nine-year old boy realized with the intelligence, sincerity, and passion of Moviedom’s currently most sophisticated filmmaking team: Jackson at the helm, co-writing with Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, aided and abetted by that mad Kiwi genius, Richard Taylor, and his WETA accomplices.

Jackson’s update is twice as long as the original 1933 Kong, but the story has the same essential beats. He builds tension by frontloading the first act—set in a luscious fantasy of Great Depression New York—with character-driven exposition. A less confident director would have dived into the Skull Island action ASAP, but Jackson’s nothing if not confident right now, and nothing if not smart. He takes his time. He gives us Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts), a struggling vaudeville actress reduced to stealing an apple from a sidewalk vendor. Her beauty and pathos catch the attention of Carl Denham (Jack Black), a movie producer best described (somewhat rhetorically) as ambitious, manipulative, and on morally shaky ground. Denham’s star is dimming, his financial backers are balking, and he’s in desperate need of a leading actress for his last stab at success: an adventure movie filmed on location at a mysterious, forebodingly named location: Skull Island.

In a charismatic, unexpected performance, Black gives Denham Orson Wellesian bluster; he’s a mad manic filmmaker with more vision than talent (true of Denham, not Welles). With the boys-in-blue hot on his heels, Denham shanghais soulful playwright, Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody, brooding), as his hired-hand screenwriter. Driscoll is an intellectual, a voice of the people, but some part of him seems primed for a bit of rollicking adventure. And so a crew of colorful misfits takes off on the steamer, Venture, headed for an uncharted island, straight into the Heart of Darkness.

After the exposition-heavy first hour, the movie shifts into high action gear on Skull Island. Skull Island is the land that Time forgot, a primordial jungle teeming with all sorts of spine-tingling life: vicious natives, rapacious dinosaurs, unspeakable sorts of creepy-crawlies, and a mighty big gorilla. Jackson, a true maestro, orchestrates one jaw-dropping sequence after another, pushing the limits of film technology and the PG-13 rating (think before taking the youngsters to this movie—I was squirming in my seat, half-covering my eyes at certain points).

The first hour spent with the characters pays off big-time in the second act: we care about what happens to Ann, Jack, the Venture crew, and even devious Denham. We know how they’ll react, though some surprise us. When Ann is captured by natives in need of their own lead actress—a luscious blonde sacrifice to the giant creature of the jungle—The Venture crew and the movie crew, with Denham toting tripod and camera, set out on a rescue mission.

Needless to say, in the dangerous and unpredictable heart of Skull Island, supporting characters are dispatched in a variety of marvelously entertaining ways (special points to Lumpy, the cook, played with mad glee by double-booked Andy Serkis). There’s a brontosaurus stampede, a hair-raising episode on a highly unstable log, and a long drop into a cavern filled with some seriously stomach-churning insects and arachnids—not for the faint of heart.

I recalled, at this point, Jackson’s early career as shlocky Z-movie director, the gross-out auteur behind such anti-classics as Bad Taste and Meet the Feebles. There’s a lot of more of that lowbrow sensibility on display here than that of the guy who cradled the golden man at the 2003 Oscars. Skull Island is Jackson’s Neverland, his gigantic movie playground. He brings all his giddy enthusiasm and technical mastery to bear on brash, broad-stroke storytelling. It’s great stuff: epic pulp, and a heart-racing paean to the glory days of adventure movie serials. I felt exhausted and exhilarated.

The action stuff wouldn’t be nearly as fun if the characters weren’t compelling. Though Jack, the writer, and Ann, the actress, share some meaningful glances on the Venture and a perfunctory liplock, the movie’s key relationship is the one that develops between Ann and Kong. Jackson, in a strategic move that surprised many, revealed Kong in all his simian glory in both the trailers and posters leading up to the movie’s release. Why not leave Kong a surprise? Not to do that was canny on Jackson’s part, because the real surprise about Kong isn’t how cool he looks (though he certainly does look cool); the surprise is how well he acts.

There is a real character here. Kong is “played” by Andy Serkis, the same actor who infused Gollum with fascinating pathos and life-likeness in the LoTR movies. He brings the same qualities to Kong. He never steps over the fine line between the credible and the schmaltzy. This Kong is an ape, a king of the jungle—he’s not human. He doesn’t need to be. He’s a battle-scarred survivor, the last of his kind, a ferocious warrior who is touched by Ann’s quirky originality. Jackson reinterprets the creepy sexual overtones of Kong’s devotion in the 1933 movie into something more chaste here. Ann entertains Kong and he protects her. They’re both outsiders, in their way, and Kong develops an obsession with keeping Ann safe.

But while Kong may be king of the jungle, he’s vulnerable in the jungle of Manhattan. In the metallic world of skyscrapers, motor vehicles, and tram lines, the climax is a violent showdown between Nature and Industry—or Mystery and Machinery. It’s a testament to Jackson’s storytelling skills that he’s just as invested in the quiet, tender moments as he is in the big-bang action sequences. A lovely bit between Ann and Kong on Central Park’s skating rink is a brief flush of happiness for the King before the mayhem. The tear-jerking ending is well-earned.

We all know the ending (Big Ape in the Big Apple atop the Empire State Building), but Jackson’s got some tricks up his sleeve. Recall that Return of the King did not climax with the earth-shaking Battle of Pelennor Fields, but rather with two hobbits and a slimy creature wrestling over a ring. Jackson is a master of intimate human drama against an epic backdrop, and the poignancy and pathos of the final sequence in Kong could now be called “trademark” Jackson.

Like Frodo, CGI Kong is a compelling a character because he’s spurred by something outside himself. Ann is a catalyst for self-sacrifice. Denham intones, “’Twas Beauty killed the Beast,” but Beauty is the Beast’s salvation. Denham kills Kong, whereas Beauty, Ann, gives Kong a reason to live. Which is better, to die for Love and Beauty, or live alone and unloved as King of the Jungle? To quote Dostoevsky, “Beauty will save the world.” How many Hollywood flicks are willing to make that claim nowadays?

In the end, Jackson’s re-envisioning of the 1933 movie that inspired him to make movies is a love letter to cinema. And like a lot of love letters its reckless gushiness compensates for the occasional grammatical error or misspelled word. Some of the special effects are cheesy, subplots trail off unresolved, and characters remain a tad two-dimensional (I, for one, would like to have seen Driscoll use his writer’s brains a bit more). Yet Kong is a movie so generous, so overflowing with great ideas and visionary imagination, that to fault it for not being word-perfect is like admonishing Mozart for writing an opera with “too many notes.” There’s enough passion, originality, and artistic ingenuity in this extravaganza to rival 2005’s quirkiest indie or classiest Oscar bait. I bow to this King.