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COVER STORY
Swallowed by Leviathan

Government spending has been growing faster under Bush than it did under Clinton, renewing the debate about how conservative Bush is. A minority of Bush’s supporters have celebrated the president’s alleged embrace of “big-government conservatism.”     By Ramesh Ponnuru

ARTICLES

Where We Stand by John O’Sullivan The situation in Iraq, and how to go forward.

The Great Escape (Cont.) by Byron York How did assorted bin Ladens get out of America after September 11?

Giving, and Taking Away by John J. Miller A controversy at Princeton offers broad lessons.

In Pol Pot Land by Anthony Daniels Ruins of varying types.

From ‘Activist’ to ‘Warmonger’ by John Derbyshire A handy glossary from Lucifer’s latest lexicographer.

Swallowed by Leviathan by Ramesh Ponnuru Conservatism versus an oxymoron: ‘big-government conservatism.’

Facing up to It in California by Victor Davis Hanson We must leap the ‘third rail’ of illegal immigration.

A Voice for Our Time by Jay Nordlinger Those who think that Bush can’t talk should think again.

BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS

Pandora Revisited — Wesley J. Smith . . . War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, by Edwin Black

Miller’s Centrist Tale — David Gratzer . . . The Two Percent Solution: Fixing America’s Problems in Ways Liberals and Conservatives Can Love, by Matthew Miller

Providence Lost — and Found? — M. D. Aeschliman . . . Law, Darwinism, and Public Education: The Establishment Clause and the Challenge of Intelligent Design, by Francis J. Beckwith

Barreling Around in Central Asia — Carlos Ramos-Mrosovsky . . . The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia, by Lutz Kleveman

Shelf Life: Bring Down the Walls — Michael Potemra praises pro-globalist Johan Norberg.

City Desk: The Upper Upper West Side — Richard Brookhiser escapes the crush and fret.

SECTIONS

Letters
For the Record
The Week
Notes & Asides
Help!
The Long View
Poetry
On the Right
What’s Right

letters to the editor

THE PENNSYLVANIA PRIMARY
Re John J. Miller’s article “The Awful Specter of Yet Another Term” (Sept. 1): Most Pennsylvania Republicans recognize that Congressman Pat Toomey’s candidacy would likely turn a safe Republican seat over to the Democrats. Pennsylvania recently elected a Democrat as governor by a wide margin.

Mr. Toomey’s campaign may cause Senator Specter to so identify himself with President Bush as to put Specter at risk against a vigorous Democratic opponent.

Robert E. Field
Lancaster, Pa.

Arlen Specter’s negatives could have filled the entire issue. A fact not noted is that after the Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill controversy, when Specter was in his next general-election race, he pandered to the Left and the feminists, denouncing his support of Thomas and apologizing for it. That’s his M.O.: do a few things right every six years to secure renomination, then turn left for reelection.

Many Pennsylvanians are prepared to vote for “anyone but Specter.” Congressman Pat Toomey has talent, ability, and integrity, so we can take pride in voting for him instead of just registering protest votes.

Albert H. Bienstock
Camp Hill, Pa.

MUSLIMS IN AFRICA
Anthony Daniels’s article “Big Men, Big Corruption” (Aug. 11) incompletely describes the political reality on the African continent.

Mr. Daniels makes no mention of the chronic tensions precipitated by the often violent incursions of radical Muslim forces into territories, from Sudan to Nigeria, with significant Christian populations.

Missionaries, if not the press, report that religious warfare is a major factor in African political/cultural/economic turmoil. We must not ignore this basic reality.

J. Thomas Whetstone
Arden, N.C.

AND ON THE GAY MOMENT . . .
In the July 28 issue, both Ramesh Ponnuru (“Coming Out Ahead”) and Gerard V. Bradley (“Stand and Fight”) use the term “gay marriage” in their articles. This is an oxymoron. Use terms such as “gay relationship” or “gay union,” but please don’t misuse the word “marriage.” We have few enough words left that represent important values.

Alan B. Williams
Augusta, Ga.

Conservatives should perhaps welcome Harvey Milk High School (The Week, Sept. 1). Finally, a high school that will have no problems with teenage pregnancy!

Denise Noe
Atlanta, Ga.

National Review encourages letters to the editor. Letters should be submitted by e-mail to letters@nationalreview.com or by fax to (212) 849-2835 or by mail to Letters Editor, National Review, 215 Lexington Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016. Please include your full name, address, and daytime phone number. Letters will be edited for space and clarity.

masthead

September 29 issue; printed September 11

EDITOR
Richard Lowry
Senior Editors
Richard Brookhiser / Jeffrey Hart
Ramesh Ponnuru / David Pryce-Jones
Managing Editor Jay Nordlinger
Washington Editor Kate O’Beirne
Literary Editor Michael Potemra
Executive Editor Dorothy McCartney
National Political Reporter John J. Miller
White House Correspondent Byron York Art Director Luba Kolomytseva
Production Editor Christopher McEvoy

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Executive Secretary Frances Bronson
Assistant to the Editor Jane Jolis
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Robert H. Bork / John Derbyshire
W. H. von Dreele / Rod Dreher
David Frum / Roman Genn
Jonah Goldberg / John Hillen
Florence King / Lawrence Kudlow
Mark R. Levin / Rob Long
Stephen Moore / John Simon
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Thomas L. Rhodes
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for the record

“Oh, yeah? — Well, my true inner self can whip your true inner self!”

In CBS News poll, Bush earns 55 percent approval rating, but only 39 percent approve his handling of economy. . . . Bush: “We have a responsibility that when somebody hurts, government has got to move.” . . . In CBS News poll, 33 percent say they’ll vote for Bush next year, 27 percent say they’ll vote for Democratic nominee, and 36 percent “don’t know yet.” . . . More Bush: “For America, there will be no going back to the era before September the 11th, 2001 — to false comfort in a dangerous world. We have learned that terrorist attacks are not caused by the use of strength; they are invited by the perception of weakness. And the surest way to avoid attacks on our own people is to engage the enemy where he lives and plans. We are fighting that enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan today so that we do not meet him again on our own streets, in our own cities.” . . . Deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz, in Wall Street Journal: “Foreign terrorists who go to Iraq to kill Americans understand this: If killing Americans leads to our defeat and the restoration of the old regime, they would score an enormous strategic victory for terrorism. . . . To those who think the battle in Iraq is a distraction from the global war against terrorism . . . tell that to our troops.” . . . In Washington Post poll, 69 percent say there’s a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11.

Gov. Gray Davis (D., Calif.), on NBC: “The voters are angry and I’ve gotten that. And this is a very humbling experience.” . . . Davis on Republicans: “They would rather shoot their mother than raise any taxes.” . . . GOP consultant Sal Russo, in San Jose Mercury News: “Arnold Schwarzenegger has the celebrity but no base. Tom McClintock has the base but no celebrity.” . . . California Senate GOP leader Jim Brulte, in Washington Post: “I’m at the point of saying to McClintock, show you can bring the resources to the table to win, or get out of the way.” . . . McClintock on why he’s not a spoiler, on MSNBC: “My suspicion is that a lot of the folks who are voting for me don’t trust Arnold’s fiscal policies and don’t like his social policies. I would be very concerned about those voters staying home.”

Rep. Dick Gephardt (D., Mo.): “This president is a miserable failure.” . . . Sen. John Kerry (D., Mass.): “The one person in the United States who deserves to be laid off is George W. Bush.” . . . Former governor Howard Dean (D., Vt.), on CNN: “No Republican president has balanced the budget in 34 years in this country. You can’t trust them with your money.” . . . Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D., Ohio) on whether Iraqis are better off today, on CNN: “It doesn’t appear so. . . . This whole [war] has been a disaster. It’s been a disaster for the people of Iraq. It’s been a disaster for the world community and it’s been a disaster for the United States.” . . . Sen. Joe Lieberman (D., Conn.), in Hartford Courant: “My opponents . . . threaten to take us back to the pre-Clinton time when the Democratic party was, in fact, in the political wilderness for the better part of two decades. I don’t want to do that.” . . . Lieberman warns of Dean’s trade policies: “If that ever happened, I’d say that the Bush recession would be followed by the Dean depression.” . . . Retired Gen. Wesley Clark insists it’s not too late to jump in race for president, in Newsweek: “I’ve got recon out there. I’ve got some heavy artillery that can come in. I’ve got good logistics, and I’ve got strategic mobility.” . . . Gov. Bill Richardson (D., N.M.), in Albuquerque Journal: “I’m not going to accept a spot on the ticket. I’m very firm.”

In Arkansas, Gov. Mike Huckabee (R.) and former Rep. Asa Hutchinson (R.) say they won’t run for Senate, giving big boost to incumbent Blanche Lincoln (D.). . . . Combined with decision of Rep. Jim Gibbons (R., Nev.) not to challenge Sen. Harry Reid (D.), Democratic Senate hopes brighten for 2004. . . . Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) on her support for school choice, in Washington Post: “I have begun to rethink public education, and I think we spend too much time supporting old structures and not enough time on what works for children.” . . . Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), in Newsday: “The Saudis say they are our partners, but they cut back [oil] supply when we need it most.” . . . In Arizona, GOP state representatives Randy Graf and Russell Pearce propose ballot initiative to fight illegal immigration by requiring proof of citizenship when registering to vote and proof of eligibility when receiving state services.

Former New York governor Mario Cuomo (D.) on Hillary Clinton, in New York Post: “I would support her in a flash if she came into the race [for president], absolutely.” . . . Hillary on seeking White House, according to Associated Press: “I am absolutely ruling it out.” . . . Richard Miniter’s new book, Losing bin Laden: How Bill Clinton’s Failures Unleashed Global Terror, chronicles how Clinton administration failed to respond to USS Cole bombing.

Polish commander takes control of 31,000-square-mile section of Iraq, including Najaf. . . . Peru says 69,000 people died during civil war between 1980 and 2000. . . . Moscow City Court holds first jury trial since 1917.

David Letterman: “Bill Clinton is in California helping Gov. Gray Davis campaign. Because, you know, nothing makes more sense than having a recalled governor getting advice from an impeached president.”

The Week

Schumer decides. Now what?

The Kerry camp wants to attack Howard Dean, but not just now. Maybe they’re waiting for a French okay?

A thought for 9/11 + 2 (from Grant by Jean Edward Smith). “[S]ometime after midnight [on the first day of the Battle of Shiloh] Sherman went looking for Grant. He had worked five hours to prepare his division to attack, but it seemed hopeless. His men had been thoroughly beaten and Sherman — who would have been the last to say so — thought it important ‘to put the river between us and the enemy.’ This is why he sought Grant, to see when and how the retreat could be arranged. The rain was coming down in buckets, punctuated by heavy thunder and lightning in the background. In this surreal setting Sherman found Grant standing alone under a large oak tree, dripping wet, hat slouched down over his face, coat collar up around his ears, a dimly glowing lantern in his hand, cigar clenched between his teeth . . . Sherman approached and said, ‘Well, Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?’ ‘Yes,’ answered Grant, puffing on his cigar. ‘Yes. Lick ’em tomorrow though.’”

Last year, California governor Gray Davis vetoed a measure to let illegal immigrants have driver’s licenses, calling it a security threat. This year, he is pandering to Hispanic voters in order to defeat a recall election brought on by his own misgovernance. So he has signed the measure. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the leading Republican candidate to replace Davis, opposed it. (Nobody seems to be advocating the appropriate solution, which is that the illegals be given free rides, back to Mexico.) But Schwarzenegger is still offering little to conservatives — except, now, insults. He came out against Ward Connerly’s Racial Privacy Initiative, which would keep the state government from collecting data on race. That’s disappointing, but there are honorable opponents of the initiative. What is less excusable is Schwarzenegger’s labeling of its supporters as “right-wing crazies.” The only candidate in the race who isn’t pandering is conservative Tom McClintock. Schwarzenegger skipped a debate with the other candidates in order to avoid giving a spotlight to McClintock. This was wise: The more people hear from McClintock, the more they will understand that he has convictions and knows how the state government should be run. McClintock points out that Schwarzenegger refuses to pledge not to raise taxes — and that it takes a Republican governor to raise taxes in California. We know that McClintock is currently behind Schwarzenegger in the polls. But we also know that if elected, McClintock would fight the spenders and taxers in Sacramento. About Arnold Schwarzenegger we know no such thing.

Ed Gillespie, the head of the Republican National Committee, met with editors of the Manchester Union Leader. To the editors, Gillespie seemed to be saying that the Republican party no longer stands for smaller government, but merely for increasing the size of government at a slower pace than the Democrats want. Not the most inspiring of battle cries. Gillespie claims that his remarks were taken out of context; the Union Leader stands by its interpretation of his remarks. No one who knows Gillespie will doubt that he is sincere in saying that he is still a Reaganite. But this is really an argument about President Bush and Republican officialdom generally, not about Gillespie. We are well aware that it’s difficult to shrink the government or even to restrain its growth, having advocated doing so without much success for 50 years. But the president could try a little harder. Will Bush attempt to pare back corporate welfare? Will he threaten to veto a Medicare bill that skimps on reform? Will he renew his campaign for personal Social Security accounts? Will he ditch the steel tariffs? If the administration ignores the restiveness of its base — or responds merely by sending emissaries to reassure conservative leaders — that restiveness will only increase.

The Democratic field is quickly separating into three camps: Howard Dean, Joe Lieberman, and Everyone Else. Everyone Else is worried about attacking Dean. Attacking Dean might make him look even more the front-runner. Worse, it might alienate Dean’s supporters. Better to wait for Dean to collapse, or for some other candidate to attack him. For the most part, Everyone Else is saying nothing worse about Dean than that he is unelectable, while aping his policy positions. In the candidates’ recent debate in New Mexico, Dean said that our troops in Iraq needed to “come home” — a statement his campaign quickly modified — and John Kerry said that we needed to “minimize” America’s role in Iraq and on no account should we send more troops there. Dean has also staked out the position that we should trade freely only when Mexican wages are equivalent to Sweden’s. Joe Lieberman is the only candidate who is pointing out that Dean is weak on national security and that his protectionism would devastate the economy. We hope that the Democrats will not choose to contest 2004 on Dean’s platform — but if they do, President Bush had better be prepared to explain why it’s wrong.

Chuck Schumer, Ted Kennedy, and Tom Daschle are very, very happy guys. Two years ago, they set out to kill the federal appeals court nomination of Miguel Estrada, one of President Bush’s premier judicial picks. But they had nothing — not even a phony allegation of racism or “insensitivity” to minority concerns — to use against him. Yet they still managed to pull it off; on September 4, Estrada, his nomination paralyzed by a Democratic filibuster, withdrew his name from consideration. In a gloating news conference, Kennedy called it “a victory for the Constitution.” He also praised Schumer, who had devised the strategy of opposing Estrada for allegedly not answering the Senate’s questions, even though Estrada had in fact answered all the Senate’s questions (and met personally with any Democrat who asked). Schumer had also come up with the “stealth” nominee idea, once saying that Estrada was “like a stealth missile . . . coming out of the right wing’s deepest silo.” All of that would seem kooky had not Schumer been able to convince more than 40 Democratic colleagues to support an unprecedented filibuster. In light of that — two other Bush nominees face filibusters, and others may soon follow — what are Republicans to do? GOP senators are often urged to make Democrats engage in an old-fashioned talk-all-night filibuster, but that’s not possible under today’s parliamentary rules (and with the GOP’s one-seat majority). Several Republicans now believe it’s time to try the “nuclear option” of changing the Senate’s rules on filibusters without summoning the supermajority that such rules changes usually require. But Republicans are not united on the idea; some don’t want to resort to unconventional tactics. So it appears that the real resolution might not come until November 2004. If the GOP can knock off a few Democrats who took part in the filibuster, they will a) have more votes available to break future filibusters, and b) remind Democrats that taking part in such obstruction carries a political price. Victory is very, very, very important.

The long-suffering parents of Washington, D.C., got a step closer to school choice. The House, and a Senate committee, both approved vouchers for the District — but not before liberal congressman Danny Davis warned that the message of the school-choice bill “goes far beyond Washington, D.C.” He said: “It’s D.C. today. It’s Chicago tomorrow. St. Louis, New Orleans, Los Angeles next week. Then it’s all of America.” From his mouth to God’s ear.

All politicians like to say they’re in favor of jobs in manufacturing, although it’s not clear why these are better than other jobs. President Bush, no exception, promised that an assistant secretary of commerce would work full time on manufacturing issues. He also sent Treasury secretary John Snow to China. Manufacturers have complained that China, by holding the yuan at an artificially low value, has hurt American exports. Snow was to get China to revalue the currency. But as the editors of the Wall Street Journal noted, China’s currency may actually be overvalued now, because China also makes it difficult to export capital from the country. Manufacturing jobs have been in steady decline, as a proportion of the workforce, for decades in the United States, as in other advanced countries. Using fewer people to produce more goods is what economic growth is all about. Luckily, no government official is likely to be able to stop that trend.

Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, passed in 1938, employers have to give overtime pay to some employees if they work long hours. Which employees? Well, that’s not always clear — and the confusion has made for rich rewards for trial lawyers. Elaine Chao’s Labor Department is trying to update and clarify the regulations. The current rule automatically grants overtime to anyone who makes less than $8,000 a year. Chao would raise that threshold, as labor activists have long demanded, to $22,000. But many workers would be reclassified so that employers would no longer be legally required to give them overtime pay. The unions have therefore launched an ad campaign accusing President Bush of being the Grinch who stole overtime. If we had our druthers, Chao’s new regulations would be scrapped, along with the old ones: Wages and work conditions are properly a matter to be worked out by employees and employers competing in an open market. But at the very least, congressional Republicans ought not let the unions scare them away from supporting Chao’s modest deregulation.

President Bush has signed the Prison Rape Elimination Act, legislation crafted by Republican Frank Wolf in the House and Ted Kennedy in the Senate. The bill provides $40 million worth of grants to help reduce rape in the nation’s prisons and jails, and will call negligent prison administrators to Washington to answer questions about their failures. Running state prisons in a responsible and decent manner is a duty of the states, not of Washington. But we’re glad that one of America’s most serious human-rights crises is finally getting official attention. By conservative estimates, the number of rapes behind bars exceeds the total number reported in New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Phoenix, and Boston combined. Other estimates put the numbers much higher: It’s even possible that more men get raped than women each year. The new law will not, of course, live up to its title. Violent, racist prison gangs (black, white, and Latino alike) all use rape to keep non-members in line, and many prison administrators turn a blind eye because the threat of rape often makes inmate populations easier to control. But thanks to the law, not everyone will turn a blind eye to this shameful aspect of American life.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, arrested in New Haven while lending his name to the employees’ strike against Yale University, boomed, “This is going to be for economic justice, as Selma was for the right to vote.” Hearing such talk, one turns away in disgust, and maybe with a rueful smile. As you might expect from a place such as Yale, the employees — clerical, library, dining hall — have generous agreements. They are paid an average of $32,000 a year, and recently rejected a package that would have yielded a 44 percent raise in five years. They get pension benefits that amount to about 85 percent of their salaries — and they can retire after 30 years. They have a minimum of seven weeks’ paid vacation. Yale will subsidize up to $46,460 in college bills for families. Etc. Yet Jesse Jackson rants about Selma and the right to vote. Please.

What about the far eastern leg of the Axis of Evil? The United States, shifting its stance, is dangling the possibility of American assistance to North Korea in return for its dismantling its nuclear weapons program and the weapons it has already built. One advantage of this maneuver is involving China in pressuring Pyongyang. But we must not count on a crazed dictatorship willingly to remove its only prop, the threat of force. The United States must prepare other options — an intrusive inspections regime, a pre-emptive strike. South Korea, which truckles cravenly to the monster on its doorstep, must be warned that it should devote a sizable chunk of the GDP that flourished under American protection to dealing with the results.

Just about everybody’s a critic of Islamofascism these days, but scholar Daniel Pipes was at it long before 9/11. This has earned him the right kind of enemies, who howled in protest when the White House announced that it would nominate Pipes to an unpaid position on the board of the U.S. Institute of Peace. There should be no controversy when a group such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations complains, but Ted Kennedy and a few other Democrats decided to kick up a fuss anyway. On August 22, Bush decided to avoid a nasty confirmation fight over a minor post and made a recess appointment of Pipes, who will now serve the interests of his country — including the peace-loving Muslims in it — for the next 16 months.

Mahmoud Abbas stepped down as prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, reportedly citing his frustration in dealing with America, Israel, and Yasser Arafat, whom he had supposedly superseded. America and Israel would not, in his view, follow the road map. What was Arafat doing? Abbas, at his last appearance before the Palestinian parliament, was greeted by dozens of masked, chanting members of Fatah, Arafat’s organization, who heckled him. This was not like the prime minister’s Question Time in the British parliament, rough though that can be. In American history, masks were worn by the Klan and other desperadoes intent on murder; that is why many states have anti-mask laws to this day. So it is among Palestinians, though there are no mask laws. Abbas looked out at the crowd, and saw that it was time for him to go. The United States will resume its efforts to broker peace with such partners.

Bombs began to explode in the Saudi capital of Riyadh in the fall of 2000, killing Westerners in what proved an al-Qaeda prelude to September 11. In their habitual style, Saudi officials refused to look at the evidence, instead accusing Westerners of killing each other in a bootleggers’ war. A hideous case was concocted against several Westerners. One of them was Sandy Mitchell, a Scot in his forties and an anesthetic technician in a Riyadh hospital for over 20 years. Still wearing his white coat and stethoscope, he was picked up one morning, accused of the bombings, chained and regularly tortured to extract a confession that he was acting under instructions from the British embassy, denied a lawyer, kept in jail for 30 months (half the time in solitary confinement), and finally sentenced to be crucified. In this barbarity, the victim is “partially” beheaded, then tied to a cross publicly for three days. But while Mitchell was in the throes of his ordeal, the bombings in the country increased so that the charges against him became absurd, even to the Saudis. Mitchell and two other English victims were made to write a groveling letter to Prince Nayef, the Saudi minister of the interior, who duly “pardoned” these broken men and put them on a flight home. It’s their culture, the Saudis like to say. Those princes and al-Qaeda share it equally.

According to Gerald Posner’s new book, Why We Slept, bagged al-Qaeda big Abu Zubaydah wasn’t frightened when the U.S. pretended to have handed him over to the Saudis. He was relieved. He proceeded to give his captors a phone number for a Saudi prince who would “tell you what to do,” and outlined the pre–9/11 arrangement whereby both Saudi Arabia and Pakistan secretly supported bin Laden. Whether Posner has the details of the interrogation right, or whether Zubaydah gave accurate information, is impossible to say. But Posner’s book serves as a reminder of all we still don’t know about 9/11, and how our “allies” have managed to escape giving a full public accounting of their relationship to al-Qaeda. Since the Bush administration shows little appetite for such an airing, Congress should keep at it, in hearings and investigations.

BUSH, INTERPRETED

Phase II planning wasn’t good.
Bremer did what Bremer could,
But Iraq’s so loose, Chirac
Makes his lips close with a smack.
Consequently — it’s a wrench —
Colin’s tapped to stroke the French.
(Just the thought leaves Rummy faint.)
Cornucopia, we ain’t.

— W. H. von Dreele

Hatred of Ahmad Chalabi seems almost de rigueur in the American media. Seldom has a man less deserved such hatred. Chalabi has spent his life opposing tyranny in his country, Iraq, forming the Iraqi National Congress, the most prominent and most promising exile group. But Chalabi is thought to be favored by the Defense Department, and whatever the Defense Department favors . . . many people feel obliged to attack. One of the things left-liberal journalists score Chalabi for is having been an exile. Just recently, a writer in Newsweek contrasted Chalabi to “rival contenders . . . who stuck it out inside Iraq during the decades of Saddam Hussein’s rule.” Stuck it out inside Iraq. The implication, of course, is that Chalabi is somehow cowardly or unpatriotic. What would his critics have had him do? Remain in fascist, Baathist Iraq to be imprisoned or killed? What good would that have done his countrymen? Further, do we hold it against de Gaulle that he was abroad while France was staffed by Nazis? And Chalabi’s critics must really hate the Dalai Lama — in exile, rather than in a PRC dungeon or dead. Chalabi has lived an admirable life; those who smear him aren’t fit to wipe the dust from his Iraqi boots.

Oriana Fallaci is famous as a free spirit. As a teenager she was already an anti-Mussolini partisan in her native Italy. Her specialty as a journalist was the probing interview, in which she said what she thought to the likes of Yasser Arafat and Muammar Qaddafi. Obliged to drape herself in a black chador to meet Ayatollah Khomeini, she ripped it off in front of him. Now living in New York, she wrote an impassioned book after September 11, The Rage and the Pride, to say that these terrorists might be Muslims but she could recognize fascists when she saw them. Accusing her of inciting racial hatred, some Muslims are bringing a case against her in — naturellement — Paris, world headquarters of the thought police. She’s 73, and suffering from cancer, but her refusal to attend the trial is the proper middle-fingered salute.

An odd feature of the last few decades is how many of the wilder kinds of political paranoia have migrated from right to left. Anti-Semitism, for instance, once characteristic of old-style “throne and altar” European conservatives, then taken up by early 20th-century ultra-nationalists, is now found mainly on the political left. Something similar has happened with water-fluoridation scares. Back in the 1950s, these were promoted chiefly by far-right outfits like the John Birch Society, which tried to persuade Americans that fluoridation was a Communist plot to poison us all. Nowadays it is hard to find a conservative of any stripe who gives a fig about fluoridation. The people objecting to it are environmentalists, anti-globalists, Greens, and others hostile to capitalism and national sovereignty. Not very surprising, therefore, to find that the anti-fluoridation nuts have now enlisted “diversity” to their cause. A British group called the National Pure Water Association has argued that it is a violation of Islam for Muslims to drink fluoridated water. “You don’t deliberately pollute the gift of God. There is no question it is against Islam,” they tell us. Something called the Islamic Medical Association has chimed in with support, and there is to be a march on Parliament. Water, declares a spokesman for this organization, is declared in the Koran to be “holy and blessed and healthy and safe.” So on your next trip to a Muslim country — Egypt, perhaps, or Yemen, or Bangladesh — you need have no qualms about drinking water straight from the faucet. It will contain no fluoride. It will be holy and blessed and healthy and safe.

Swaziland is a small (pop. 1 million), landlocked country in southern Africa, governed as an absolutist monarchy. The king, Mswati III, has nine wives and two fiancées. He was last in the news two years ago when, in an attempt to halt the spread of AIDS in his country, he ordered Swazi women to remain chaste until age 19. The effect of this edict was somewhat diluted when, a short time later, the king selected a 17-year-old girl to join his harem. The king fined himself one ox for the offense, but there was considerable grumbling nonetheless. Now the heavens themselves seem to be showing displeasure at King Mswati’s lifestyle. It is the custom in Swaziland for several thousand young women to assemble once a year before the king and dance bare-breasted. Mswati has frequently used the occasion to select a new companion for himself. This year, however, just as footmen were unrolling a red carpet so that the king could begin his inspection, a terrific hailstorm broke out, and the young ladies fled the scene. “Hailstones the size of peas,” says a news report. We certainly feel for the young ladies, under the circumstances, but can’t help wondering . . . Was the band playing “Hail to the Chief”?

NOT FUNNY

The above is a cartoon drawn by Don Wright of the Palm Beach Post. It is one of the most racist and abhorrent political cartoons we have ever seen. That newspapers in 2003 should publish it is astonishing. Conservatives have always maintained that liberals feel free to be as racist as possible . . . toward black conservatives. And they are never called on it. We are calling Mr. Wright and those who publish him on it. And, by the way, this same Wright drew a cartoon of John Ashcroft as a terrorist truck bomber driving into the U.S. Constitution. Nice.

“May God continue to bless America” is the typical closer for George W. Bush’s speeches, and this has brought a thoughtful response from Constance Hilliard, associate professor of history at the University of North Texas. Writing in USA Today, Professor Hilliard notes that “we are, after all, a pluralistic society,” and suggests that Bush might say “Allah bless America” too. This would show the same respect that so many Muslim nations give their Christian, Jewish, and Hindu subjects. President Bush, and we, have much to learn.

MTV is a pop music station on cable TV, and of course they have one of those endless self-congratulatory award ceremonies to honor the creators of music videos. At this year’s ceremony, pop stars Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Madonna performed a suggestive dance together to dull thumping music. At one point, the women kissed each other lasciviously. This caused a media sensation of the minor sort, which of course was the intention. Few noticed (columnist Michelle Malkin being an honorable exception) that Madonna’s six-year-old daughter was on the stage when this cynically obscene display took place. The child was dressed as for First Communion: white dress, lace gloves, and a crucifix — plus a studded belt with the words “BOY TOY.” Her father is of course far away; her stepfather was in the audience, smiling approvingly. “The ceremony of innocence is drowned.”

A 13-year-old schoolgirl in Beaver County, Pa., was suspended from school for engaging in oral sex with a boy of the same age while riding the school bus. The boy was also suspended. The girl’s mother promptly sued the school district for having violated her daughter’s constitutional rights. She further claimed that there was nothing in the district’s written policies to suggest that the particular activity for which the girl was suspended might be unacceptable. So far there is nothing very surprising in this story. It is just another slice of life in early 21st-century America. Now here’s the real stunner: The fool woman’s claim was thrown out of court! The judge — let his name be known: George E. James — upheld the girl’s suspension! That many of the nation’s children are utterly ignorant of any decent standards of behavior is not news; that their parents encourage and condone their ignorance and irresponsibility is not news, either; that at least one of our judges is willing to stand up for decency and common sense — that’s news. Any chance we can get Judge James nominated for the federal bench? Nah, he’d never get past Chuck Schumer.

The new general manager of the NBA’s Indiana Pacers, Larry Bird, fired the head coach, Isiah Thomas, replacing him with Rick Carlisle. Bird and Carlisle are white; Thomas is black. Who cares? Who cares? you ask! How long have you lived in America? Harvey Araton, sports columnist of the New York Times — the sports pages in which are as least as political as the editorial and op-ed pages — wrote, “ . . . here came Bird, in his first bold move as the Pacers’ general manager, to fire an African-American legend, intending to replace him with Rick Carlisle, his very white friend and former occupier of space at the end of the Boston Celtics’ bench.” A few questions: Why can’t Isiah Thomas just be a legend, instead of an “African-American legend”? And why is Rick Carlisle “very white” — not just white (if he has to be a color, instead of a person or coach, at all)? And would Araton, or any other Times columnist, or any other human being, ever, ever write the phrase “his very black friend”? Just asking.

Gary Coleman is one of the gang running for governor of California. He is the tiny actor who starred as Arnold on the sitcom Diff’rent Strokes. Appearing on Fox News, he was asked by Sean Hannity who the vice president of the United States was. Mr. Coleman could not come up with the answer. (Come on, Gary, Dick Cheney isn’t that self-effacing.) In a later interview with the New York Times, Mr. Coleman declared, “Hannity is evil. He didn’t ask Schwarzenegger that.” We would like to think of a closing comment that does not include “Whatchoo talkin’ ’bout?” — but cannot.

“Are you the famous Dr. Teller?” a man once asked. “No,” came the reply, “I am the infamous Dr. Teller.” As a longtime enemy of Communism, Edward Teller was infamous for all the right reasons. He was the chief inventor of the H-bomb and one of its strongest advocates, pushing for its development in spite of stiff opposition from arms-control liberals who underestimated the Soviet threat. In 1967, he introduced Ronald Reagan to the idea of missile defense and 15 years later became a crucial supporter of the Strategic Defense Initiative. Probably no other scientist had a greater political impact in the 20th century. His left-wing detractors are legion, in large part because Teller once testified against granting a security clearance to his old Manhattan Project colleague Robert Oppenheimer. Teller was ostracized for this decision and later said he regretted it, though his actions remain defensible: Oppenheimer had lied to federal investigators about his contacts with known Communists and was a member of the Communist party until at least 1942. On July 23, President Bush awarded Teller the Medal of Freedom. On September 9, at the age of 95, Teller died. A giant, who saw the moral issues of his time as clearly as he did the scientific ones. R.I.P.

AT WAR
The Fight Now

The administration’s policy on Iraq, as explained by the president’s speech September 7, will change in some important details, while remaining essentially the same.

The continuing theme of Bush’s Iraq policy is its context. “Two years ago,” Bush said, “I told the Congress and the country that the war on terror would be a lengthy war, a different kind of war, fought on many fronts in many places. Iraq is now the central front. Enemies of freedom are making a desperate stand there and there they must be defeated.” This is a snapshot of a world war. We did not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy, as John Quincy Adams warned. They came to destroy us. Saddam Hussein was one of many patrons. Now the terrorists — Baathists and al-Qaeda operatives, formerly sheltering in Iran — buzz like flies around the corpses of his sons and his state. We must continue to swat them down.

But American policy needs to adjust itself to realities on the ground. Iraq needs money — lots of it — for reconstruction, and to sustain our own operations. Bush’s price tag of $87 billion is a nice round sum, conveying seriousness and laying the floor for further requests, if they are needed. Nations will go into any amount of debt for necessary projects, so long as they are given a sense of the parameters. The United States will also be seeking “expand[ed] international cooperation in . . . reconstruction and security,” as Bush put it. He will be rattling the tin cup abroad, and asking the Security Council for a resolution that could give countries like India the aegis for sending troops. As long as they are under American control, they will be welcome.

Soliciting foreign troops suggests that we do not have enough of our own — a tender point to the administration. Some reporters argue that what our soldiers do is more important than how many there are: The 101st Airborne in the north and the Marines in the south show the flexibility of light infantry, which the armored divisions holding Baghdad and the Sunni Triangle might emulate. But technique is not everything. We need more troops to guard ammo dumps and patrol borders.

If the United Nations will not bless international efforts to send the necessary troops — or if France and Germany attach unacceptable conditions to a resolution — we will have to find the reinforcements ourselves, including National Guard units and soldiers deployed in other theaters. Over the longer run, President Bush ought to acknowledge that we downsized the armed forces too much during the holiday of the 1990s. We need a larger military.

The stubbornness and circle-closing that Bush’s men have shown is hardly unique to them, though they carry it to extremes. The best achievable result might be that they correct their errors, even if they never admit making them.

Finally, the pace of Iraq-ization should be kept brisk, as we expand Iraqi police and civil defense forces, and Iraqi control over them. The terrorists know the importance of this — hence their attacks on Iraqi policemen.

Bush and the American people must keep track of the elements of the strategic situation. Our troops have been splendid. As military historian Caleb Carr wrote, not since the professional armies of the 18th century have men at arms shown such coolness and discipline. Unlike Frederick the Great’s soliders, they have shown intelligence and initiative as well. Our enemies, meanwhile, have been forced back upon themselves. Only recently, they attacked American troops (Khobar Towers, the USS Cole), American embassies, and America itself. Now they are battling to stifle a free state emerging in the Arab heartland. Their dream of a worldwide Islamist empire looks increasingly desperate.

But there are also signs of American impatience and witlessness. The Maureen Dowd-Howard Dean Left, which wants all wars to be perfectly planned, low-cost, and over before they begin, represents a significant and seemingly unbudgeable chunk of American opinion. Should it ever win a presidential election, it will go hard with us.

notes & asides

Dear Mr. Buckley: To quote a recent Wall Street Journal editorial, “The House of Representatives, as everyone knows, is that place where the Members address each other as ‘The Gentlelady [one word] from Connecticut.’” I need some help on this.

“Ladies” and “Gentlemen” are terms to designate persons, female and male, of refined speech and manners. There are gentle ladies, but that is redundant. One could, I guess, say that a lady is a female gentleman. But the term “gentlelady” sounds stilted and not in keeping with the King’s English.

My eighth-grade English teacher would have none of it, and she was ever a lady.

Sincerely,
David D. Ansel
Annapolis, Md.

Dear Mr. Ansel: What you ask puts us face to face with a discomfiting fruit of the women’s movement. To refer to a “lady,” other than as a complement to a “gentleman,” is thought condescending. Clare Boothe Luce, e.g., reprimanded me on Firing Line for referring to her as a (“distinguished”) lady.

It’s similar to the problem bequeathed to us by the proscription against the use of “Dear Sirs.” That was such a manageable way, back then, to begin a letter addressed to the Department of Motor Vehicles or the Circulation Department of National Review, or the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, for that matter. But we can’t do that, those of us who are running for president: Can you imagine a letter, other than to a Carthusian monastery, beginning with “Dear Sirs,” and signed by Kerry, Dean, Graham, or any of those other people? He’d (Carol Moseley Braun gets in the way here) — he/she would be tossed out of Iowa and New Hampshire on his/her ear by all the gentleladies acting in concert.

So, we just have to struggle along with, e.g., “Dear Sirs or Madams,” but of course you do see the danger there. “Dear Sir/Ms.” might get you by, but that leaves you feeling anal-compulsive. “To Whom It May Concern” sounds portentous on a petition for a form to renew your dog’s registration, but what is there to do if one wants to retain some semblance of civility? Sorry I can’t help you.

Cordially, WFB

Dear Mr. Buckley: I agree with your correspondent Helen Wildermuth (May 19) on the proper use of thank you/you’re welcome, but she is mistaken about the German word danke — it simply means “thank you.” The answer to it is bitte, and the exchange goes as follows: Danke schoen/Bitte schoen or Danke sehr/Bitte sehr. There is one accepted and often-used variant: Danke schoen/Gern geschehen, which means “Thank you/It was my pleasure.”

While I thoroughly enjoy the English language, I can’t agree that English is a fuller language than German. A study of Goethe’s Faust easily dissuades one from that opinion, not to mention the difficult and complicated grammatical structure of German.

Although I might be talked into a draw.

Horst Brakel
New York, N.Y.

Dear Mr. Buckley: The June 30 issue of NR mentions “famine in the [sic] Ukraine.”

I hope that in the future one may read about famine in the Ireland, the China, or the India.

William J. McNamara
New Britain, Conn.

Dear Mr. Buckley: You extolled the virtues of peanut butter so eloquently in the course of a biographical sketch shown on TV that I have no doubt that you should be the one to compose an “Ode to Peanut Butter.” Do it well, lest the ode be odious, and do it without delay so that I may enjoy it before I gasp away, a fate known to happen to octogenarians in large numbers at unpredictable moments. The world cries out for an “Ode to Peanut Butter.” Are you up to the task?

Jim Schmitt
Ashland City, Tenn.

Dear Mr. Schmitt: Not a chance. Am not up to the challenge, and Shakespeare’s dead.

Cordially,
— WFB

Lawrence Jackson/AP September 7, 2003

AT WAR
Where We Stand
The situation in Iraq, and how to go forward

JOHN O’SULLIVAN

What the Bush administration most needs in its Iraqi policy is not greater U.N. involvement, or more soldiers, or even an infusion of $87 billion — but steady nerves. For it is in danger of being panicked into foolish new initiatives by the exaggerated claims and false arguments of a highly unusual coalition of enemies, unreliable allies, ideological opponents of the traditional state system of international relations, appeasement-minded bureaucrats, domestic political rivals, and the growing constituency of anti-American Americans and anti-Western Westerners. And thus far it is not responding to these challenges with firmness, persuasiveness, or indeed any very clear perception of what exactly is at stake. One crucial exception to that criticism must be made: In his September 7 television address, President Bush himself very clearly argued that Iraq is now the central front in the war against terrorism; his administration should heed his words.

The terrorists have made Iraq the main battleground by sneaking into the country, linking up with well-financed Baathist remnants, and embarking on a classic guerrilla-cum-terrorist campaign against Coalition forces and Iraqi patriots cooperating with them. For Islamist and Arab-nationalist terrorists, Iraq is the Spanish Civil War: their opportunity to confront and defeat the main enemy whom their own governments shrink from fighting. They believe, though perhaps with fading certainty, that the U.S. is vulnerable to guerrilla attacks because the American people cannot accept even a moderate number of casualties in foreign wars. That belief happens to be false. As Lawrence Kaplan establishes with a wealth of survey evidence in a recent New Republic article, it is not the people but the elites who shrink from casualties. What ordinary Americans rightly oppose is a war conducted without any clear aim or prospect of victory. And as yet opinion polls show an overwhelming majority of Americans believe the war in Iraq to be just, necessary, and winnable. But the terrorists’ faith in America’s lack of resolve helps to sustain their campaign.

It was imperative, therefore, that the president firmly declare that whatever the terrorists throw at us, the U.S. will stay in Iraq until the Iraqi people can operate and defend their own democratic government — which he did, with admirable clarity, on September 7. On less clear-cut issues, however, the administration’s case is not being advanced effectively. Let me briskly summarize the arguments of the anti-Coalition coalition.

One: The war is being lost. According to a British Foreign Office document, self-evidently written to be leaked and thus to increase the pressure for U.N. involvement, the Coalition faces “strategic defeat” in Iraq. In the less flamboyant rhetoric of a Washington Post report, Iraq is “engulfed in guerrilla violence.” In fact, virtually every reporter who actually travels outside Baghdad points out that most of Iraq is relatively peaceful, serious violence is largely confined to the “Sunni Triangle” between Baghdad and Tikrit, the long-predicted Shiite violence against Coalition forces seems not to have materialized, and the number of Coalition casualties is militarily insignificant. That last sentence will strike many readers, especially those with family members serving in Iraq, as harsh and callous. I appreciate that, and acknowledge that every death is a tragedy for some family somewhere. But the blunt truth is that the U.S. can withstand the death of one soldier a day — or fewer than 4,000 soldiers a decade — indefinitely, provided that the American people believe that the deaths are in a decent and winnable cause. And the sooner that fact is generally appreciated, the quicker the terrorists will lose the battle in Iraq and lose heart across the world. If, on the other hand, the U.S. loses heart and scuttles, then Iraq will become the headquarters and training ground for terrorist violence committed not in Iraq against soldiers but in American and West European cities against civilians. Take your choice.

Two: We need more troops on the ground — and that means troops from currently reluctant allies. Other things being equal, it would naturally be pleasant to have more troops in Iraq. But as several anti-terrorism experts have pointed out, increasing the number of troops is not as important as improving the intelligence those troops are provided. And the intelligence-gathering process is indeed paying off: 39 of the top 55 officials on the playing-card list of senior Saddamites have been arrested or killed. If additional troops are genuinely needed for military reasons, then the U.S. would do well to seek them from those national armed forces that have real military clout and experience in working with U.S. forces — namely, Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and some NATO allies in Europe. Simply adding a bunch of U.N. peacekeepers is likely to complicate and weaken the Coalition effort. Some of those advocating it do so in order to strengthen the U.N.’s claims over Iraq rather than to defeat terrorism more expeditiously.

Three: We need a greater U.N. role in Iraq in order to provide legitimacy for the Coalition. But legitimacy with whom? Not with the terrorists, since — as the bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Iraq amply demonstrated — the Islamists regard the U.N. as just another instrument of a corrupt and godless West. With the Iraqi people? But they will remember that the U.N. ran a “food for oil” program that benefited the U.N. far more than the Iraqi people. With reluctant allies such as France and Germany? But they favor multilateralism not as means of achieving joint objectives but as a mechanism for frustrating U.S. policy. With the non-governmental organizations that are leaving Iraq in protest at the failure of the Coalition to provide them with security? But, as Martin Peretz has pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, these NGOs remain in far more dangerous situations, such as Liberia, and their withdrawal is basically a political gesture against the Coalition. This is indeed a question of legitimacy: The U.N. and other transnational bodies wish to establish that military intervention is illegitimate and cannot succeed unless it is legitimized by U.N. approval. And this position is covertly endorsed by many Americans in the media, the academy, and politics, because they share this distrust of U.S. power, especially during a Republican administration.

These dubious arguments hold general sway in the public debate, while developments that would tend to support U.S. policy tend to be overlooked. Little attention has been paid to the evidence, outlined by Amir Taheri in the New York Post, that Syria is already responding to the “demonstration effect” of Iraqi freedom by modest steps toward liberalization and the ending of the one-party state. But this merely underscores the need for the U.S. to argue its case better, and to stay the course in Iraq.

Are there then no valid criticisms of administration policy? Certainly there are. The “swagger” element in the Bush foreign policy has been grossly overdone; a firm policy can still be advanced in soothing diplomatic terms. The vulgar undifferentiated attacks on “the Europeans” have distorted the reality of strong support for the U.S. in many European nations and alienated potential supporters across the Continent. At the same time, the failure to develop a serious long-term policy that would prevent France and Germany from conscripting the “New Europe” into an anti-American coalition will weaken the U.S. Nor has the State Department, in its dealings with the U.N., employed public diplomacy to explain why the U.S., as a constitutional democratic government rooted in accountability to the voters, cannot accept the exaggerated claims of transnational organizations, NGOs, and “soft” international law to embody the will of the “international community.” And so on.

The U.S. has quietly acquiesced over the years in the construction of a set of transnational rules, practices, and organizations that are hostile in principle to an international system based on nation-states and thus to the U.S. as the single most important state in that system. It is then unreasonably surprised when, in a crisis like Iraq, these transnational forces object to America’s pursuing its interests without due deference to the new structures. In thinking about U.S. policymakers, I am reminded of a remark about the Hapsburgs, by my old boss on the Daily Telegraph, Colin Welch: “They always fought in the last ditch. Never in the first.”

AT WAR II
The Great Escape (Cont.)
How did assorted bin Ladens get out of America after September 11?

BYRON YORK

Last year, on the first anniversary of September 11, there were serious, unanswered questions about the Bush administration’s decision to allow members of the bin Laden family living in the United States to leave the country in the days after the terrorist attacks. Now, on the second anniversary of September 11, there are still serious, unanswered questions. But ever so slowly, new information is emerging.

The basic story has been known for quite a while. Not long after the attacks, the Saudi government, saying it feared retribution against Saudi citizens, worked with the bin Laden family to gather up more than 100 family members and other prominent Saudis for a flight to Jeddah. A chartered jet made pickups in Los Angeles, Orlando, and Washington, D.C., before making a final stop at Boston’s Logan Airport, from which it departed for Saudi Arabia.

But the Saudis required permission to leave the country, and it has never been clear who in the U.S. government gave it to them. In interviews with National Review last year (see “The Great Escape,” Sept. 30, 2002), a State Department source said Foggy Bottom “played no role” in the matter; an FBI spokesman said the Bureau did not have the authority to make that decision; and the White House declined to answer questions. Recently, however, Richard Clarke, the former head of anti-terrorism at the National Security Council, gave some answers while testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on terrorism. “I do recall the State Department coming to us that week [after September 11],” Clarke testified,

saying that the Saudi Embassy felt that in the wake of the terrorist attacks, Arabs in this country, particularly Saudis, might be victims of retribution attacks, and they wanted therefore to take some Saudi students and the Saudi citizens back to their kingdom for safety, and could they be given permission to fly, even though we had grounded all flights. Now, what I recall is that I asked for flight manifests of everyone on board and all of those names need to be directly and individually vetted by the FBI before they were allowed to leave the country. And I also wanted the FBI to sign off even on the concept of Saudis being allowed to leave the country. And as I recall, all of that was done. It is true that members of the bin Laden family were among those who left. We knew that at the time. I can’t say much more in open session, but it was a conscious decision with complete review at the highest levels of the State Department and the FBI and the White House.

What Clarke could not testify to was the thoroughness with which the FBI questioned the departing Saudis. Last year, National Review reported that the FBI conducted brief, day-of-departure interviews with the Saudis — in the words of an FBI spokesman, “at the airport, as they were about to leave.” Experts interviewed by National Review called the FBI’s actions “highly unusual” given the fact that those departing were actually members of Osama bin Laden’s family. “They [the FBI] could not have done a thorough and complete interview,” said John L. Martin, the former head of internal security at the Justice Department.

At the Judiciary subcommittee hearing, New York Democratic senator Charles Schumer asked Clarke how closely the Saudis were questioned. “Sir, all I can tell you is that I asked the FBI to do that,” Clarke replied. “I asked the director and the assistant director of the FBI to do that. They told me they did it.” End of story.

Clarke’s statement — and Schumer’s questions — came as a result of an article in Vanity Fair that questioned some aspects of the Saudi exodus. Author Craig Unger reported that the Saudis made an additional pickup flight, on an eight-passenger Learjet that flew from Tampa to Lexington, Ky., on the afternoon of September 13, 2001. That flight, Unger said, occurred at a time when the Federal Aviation Administration had banned all private flights (commercial planes had just resumed flying). “Three private planes violated the ban that day, and in each case a pair of jet fighters quickly forced the aircraft down,” writes Unger. Yet the Saudi flight, he says, was allowed to travel undisturbed.

Vanity Fair suggests that that was the result of some sort of intervention by the Bush White House. But administration sources tell National Review they have looked into the matter and found no record of such a flight receiving any special permission to fly. The sources also say that charter aviation was allowed to resume on the morning of September 13, several hours before the Tampa-to-Lexington flight is said to have departed, which would mean that the plane, which Vanity Fair says was chartered, did not need any clearance to fly. Overall, it appears that all flights — the ones gathering up Saudis domestically and the one from Boston to Jedda — took place after the government allowed aviation to resume.

Yet the big question — Who decided to allow the bin Ladens to leave the country and why? — remains.

Vanity Fair quotes Nail al-Jubeir, the Saudi director of information, as saying that the Saudi flights were approved “at the highest level of the U.S. government” — just as Clarke said. So far, however, those highest levels are saying very little. The FBI’s account remains the same — “We didn’t clear them to leave the country, we don’t have that power,” a spokesman tells National Review. As for the State Department, Secretary Colin Powell, when asked about the subject on Meet the Press, said, “I don’t know the details of what happened, but my understanding is that there was no sneaking out of the country; that the flights were well known, and it was coordinated within the government.” For its part, the White House remains silent.

All of which has led to growing curiosity. “I think people need to know the facts,” says Arizona Republican senator Jon Kyl, who chaired the Judiciary subcommittee hearing the day Richard Clarke testified. “It’s a perfectly legitimate subject. Clarke very candidly testified that he had run it past the State Department.”

Roman Genn

The official silence has also led observers to wonder whether there is some information about the bin Laden flights in the 28 blacked-out pages of the House and Senate intelligence committees’ September 11 report. Those pages are apparently devoted to Saudi involvement in the terrorist attacks, but it seems they do not cover the Saudi departures. Sen. Kyl has read the material, and while he will not say what is in it — not even whether it discusses the Saudis — he says he is “unaware of any information in the intelligence reports that I have read that specifically goes into that.”

Finally, the administration’s silence on the Saudi question is having one more effect: It is allowing some Democrats to turn the issue into a political football.

The day after he questioned Clarke, Sen. Schumer participated in a news conference with the Senate Democratic leadership. “On September 12th and 13th [2001], hundreds of Saudis were able to take flights home back to Saudi Arabia when no one else could fly,” Schumer said. “I couldn’t fly. Senator Boxer couldn’t fly. Senator Durbin couldn’t fly. But relatives of the royal family, including two members of the bin Laden family, were allowed to get on airplanes and go back to Saudi Arabia.”

According to all available evidence, that is simply not true. Perhaps Schumer was unaware of the facts; at the hearing the day before, he confessed that he had not even read the Vanity Fair article, relying instead on a summary the magazine had released. In any event, he leveled an incendiary charge based on faulty premises.

Schumer has also written a letter to the president calling for an investigation of the Saudi flights. “For whatever reason, it appears as if these particular Saudis were given a free pass by the U.S. government despite their potential knowledge about 9-11,” Schumer wrote. “Allowing approximately 140 Saudi citizens with potential links to the 9-11 attacks to leave the United States without FBI interrogation in the days after September 11th is clearly a glaring investigative failure.”

Now, it’s possible that other Democrats will pick up the story as well. Presidential candidates Howard Dean and Richard Gephardt have both been highly critical of the administration’s dealings with the Saudis, and asking why George W. Bush let the family of the mastermind of September 11 leave the country shortly after the terrorist attacks might work very well in a campaign speech. In the end, the Bush White House might end up paying a political price for its refusal to answer a few simple questions.

PHILANTHROPY
Giving, and Taking Away
A controversy at Princeton offers broad lessons

JOHN J. MILLER

In 1961, Charles and Marie Robertson gave one of the largest gifts ever made to higher education. Today, their heirs are trying to take it back, in an unprecedented lawsuit that carries major implications for conservative philanthropy.

The Robertsons’ donation, coming from the fortune of the A&P grocery-store chain, was worth $35 million to Princeton University. It created the Robertson Foundation, which was known as the “X Foundation” for more than a decade because the Robertsons wished to remain anonymous. Over the course of 40 years and under the dual management of the family and the university, the foundation has dispersed more than $200 million to Princeton. The endowment itself is now worth about $600 million, supposedly for the purpose of helping graduate students “prepare themselves for careers in government service, with particular emphasis on the education of such persons for careers in those areas of the Federal Government that are concerned with international relations and affairs.”

In 2002, Princeton used the foundation’s vast wealth to produce exactly three students who fit this description.

“Princeton has lost the right to have these funds,” says Bill Robertson, the son of the original patrons. “The university isn’t abiding by the mission of the foundation.” Last year, he and four relatives filed a lawsuit that has become a critical battleground in the national fight over donor intent.

Over the years, violations of donor intent have caused conservatives great harm. The Left has captured billions of dollars in financial resources by seizing control of philanthropic foundations and ignoring the wishes of the people who endowed them. The Ford Foundation is perhaps the best-known example of this — Henry Ford II famously resigned from its board in 1977, complaining that the foundation started by his grandfather had turned against the capitalist system that made its very creation possible. Other egregious offenders include the MacArthur Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Conservatives don’t always lose these struggles. In 1995, Yale University returned a $20 million gift from Lee Bass following a four-year scrap: Bass tried to fund a program in Western civilization, the school delayed implementing his conditions, and Bass finally succeeded in getting his money back. Yet the Robertson case, which has received less attention, is almost certainly more important. Although the money Bass wanted to give is nothing to sniff at, it doesn’t match the amount of cash the Robertson endowment throws off each year in interest alone. What’s more, the Bass dispute quickly became politicized in ways that complicated the broader goals of conservatives. Perhaps they stopped a bunch of left-wing professors from running away with a particular piggy bank — but Yale came off looking pretty good among different audiences for protecting academic freedom from a right-wing insurgency.

The Princeton case, in contrast, can’t be politicized, because the Robertsons’ money never was earmarked for conservative purposes. “My parents made this gift because they believed training students for careers in security matters and international affairs was necessary to protect democracy,” says Bill Robertson. The foundation’s charter is clear on this point: “Its objective is to strengthen the Government of the United States and increase the ability and determination to defend and extend freedom throughout the world.” That was a useful project during the Cold War and it remains one today, especially given the War on Terror. The foundation promises to keep its charge by helping students earn graduate degrees at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School (WWS).

To Princeton, however, the Robertson Foundation’s expression of donor intent has become a nuisance. Indeed, the university’s briefs in the litigation scoff at the plaintiffs’ claims: “Alleged expressions of donative intent are legally insignificant.” What’s more, the foundation is said to have an “evolving mission” and the specific objectives outlined in the foundation’s incorporating articles are merely “aspirational goals.”

Princeton’s lawyers resort to such dismissive language in part because they can’t defend the university on the merits. In 2002, according to Princeton’s own data, the program funded by the Robertson Foundation produced 63 graduates. Of these, only 9 took positions with the federal government. What’s more, only 3 of these 9 students had an international focus to their studies. Most of the rest taking jobs went to work for NGOs, foreign governments, and the private sector. “That’s not what my parents envisioned,” notes Bill Robertson.

The numbers from earlier years aren’t much different, and Robertsons have grumbled about them before. In 1970, Charles Robertson wrote that Princeton was producing “a disappointing number of MPA degree holders in public service particularly in the international agencies.” He called it “a small output from large resources.”

Marie Robertson died in 1972 and Charles in 1981, but their children and other relatives have remained involved in the activities of the foundation — its governing structure, in fact, reserves spots on the board of trustees for members of the family. They don’t control the foundation, but they have a strong say in what it does — and everybody, including board members appointed by the Princeton administration, is supposed to abide by the foundation’s charter and guard its independence.

This isn’t how things have worked out in practice. In 1997, for instance, the university informed the Robertson board that it planned to construct Wallace Hall, a new building that would allow for the expansion of the WWS. Princeton said it would try to raise all the money for the project, but that the Robertson Foundation might be asked to make a contribution if the fundraising fell short of the $25 million needed. Bill Robertson wasn’t pleased about this, as an e-mail WWS dean Michael Rothschild sent to Princeton president Harold Shapiro acknowledged: “He is unhappy and if we use large amounts of Robertson money to pay for the building he will be more so.”

But the happiness of the Robertson clan has not been a Princeton priority. In 2001, the university withdrew more than $13 million from the foundation’s account to meet the budget for Wallace Hall. Today, the WWS occupies a chunk of the building, but so do the sociology department, the Office of Population Research, and something called the Center for Research on Child Wellbeing (whose advisory board includes former Democratic congresswoman Patricia Schroeder). “These programs have nothing to do with what the foundation is supposed to support,” says Bill Robertson.

He’s even more upset by Princeton’s attempt to commingle the foundation’s assets with the school’s general endowment. Since the early 1980s, the foundation’s independent investments have outperformed Princeton’s funds, earning about $150 million more than they would have under university management. Yet the school is eager to deposit the foundation’s cash into its own $8.3 billion endowment — and no doubt wait for the day when it doesn’t have to put up with those pesky Robertsons anymore.

On ethical grounds, the Robertsons appear to have a strong case. Whether they’ll prevail in their legal dispute is another matter, though they did win an important victory in June when a judge refused Princeton’s motion to have the case dismissed. The two sides have now entered a period of pre-trial investigation that’s expected to last at least a year.

No matter what happens, some good may come of the case if it creates skepticism among donors and leads to smarter philanthropy. “There’s always a concern that litigation like this can generate unfavorable publicity,” says Doug Eakeley, a lawyer for Princeton. This, of course, is Princeton’s point of view. For others, the “unfavorable publicity” can amount to a worthwhile education. Somewhere right now, there is perhaps a wealthy Princeton alumnus who has considered endowing a chair in the history department at his alma mater because he once enjoyed a class on the Civil War — but the Robertson case has convinced him that there’s a decent chance the administration will just grab his cash and fill the professorship with a feminist whose main research interest is cross-dressing in 17th-century Amsterdam.

Too many benefactors write checks to universities and simply assume the recipients will channel the money in wise directions. “Making unrestricted gifts to endowments is the worst thing you can do,” says Martin Morse Wooster of the Capital Research Center, a conservative watchdog group. Instead, donors should make their wishes explicit — perhaps putting a time limit on the spending commitment, or targeting the funding to specific individuals and organizations within universities whose ongoing work meets certain criteria.

The alternative is to lose more than your money. “My family used to have the highest regard for Princeton. It bordered on idolatry,” says Bill Robertson. “But now all those old school ties are gone and I don’t think we’ll ever get them back.”

ABROAD
In Pol Pot Land
Ruins of varying types

ANTHONY DANIELS

When I arrived in Siem Reap, the town next door to Angkor Wat, one of the many new hotels that have sprung up there recently and that look like pagodas crossed with mirrored sunglasses, was draped with a banner announcing a conference: Gender Analysis in Farmers’ Water Management.

This was strong evidence, I think, that the aid agencies were in town, for the conference (it seemed to me) was unlikely to have been arranged on purely Cambodian initiative. The aid agencies are one means by which our current fads, fancies, and obsessions are transmitted to, or should I say imposed upon, small and poor countries, usually with disastrous results. The last thing Cambodia needs, after all, is more deconstruction.

But aid is not the only means of transmission of our obsessions. It is curious how tourism, the constant search for exotic destinations by people disillusioned with their daily lives, always ends up by reducing the difference between the exotic destinations and the places from which tourists seek to escape. A brochure in my luxurious, French-run hotel informed me that Siem Reap was no longer the sleepy little place it once was (when, of course, it wasn’t in the throes of massacre and civil war). It was developing quite a night life:

When it comes to partying in bars or downing drinks, the old favorites are holding their own . . . Among the most popular [is] . . . le Tigre de Papier, a sophisticated little spot in the up-and-coming bar strip of Siem Reap. Granddaddy of this strip is the Angkor What? and it is still going strong after four years.

Four whole years! If a week is a long time in politics, four years is an eon in popular culture. As for the temples, built between 800 and 1400 — well, they’re history.

Le Tigre de Papier “rages into the early hours of the morning.” Again, it seems rather curious that, in a multiculturalist age when everyone is supposed to be alive to everyone else’s sensitivities, a bar’s name should make light reference to the words of Mao Tse-tung, who not only caused one of the greatest famines in world history, but was the chief ally and inspiration of the mad Khmer Rouge ideologues responsible for the deaths of between a fifth and a quarter of the entire Cambodian population. No one, I hope, would open a bar called Sonderkommando in Minsk, or Einsatzgruppen in Vilnius (though British Airways, in one of the most unfortunate advertising campaigns in history, did once promise their German customers Sonderbehandlung, the Special Treatment that was the Nazi euphemism for genocidal murder), but ironical reference to Communist horrors is still not only permissible but chic. Perhaps it demonstrates that one hasn’t quite abandoned the idealism of youth.

Whatever the destructive cultural effects of tourism, it is Cambodia’s greatest economic hope. Hotels are being constructed at a furious rate, in the expectation of a million visitors annually to Angkor within a year or two. The visa fee and airport departure tax alone will add 1 percent to the country’s GDP, and all in U.S. dollars.

Never has a country been so dependent upon the visible remains of its ancestral civilization. It is as if Italy depended upon visitors to Pompeii for its prosperity. But the temples at Angkor, spread over 30 square miles, are so spectacular that familiarity cannot stale them, nor will they ever disappoint those lucky enough to see them for the first time. Even a million tourists a year will not vitiate their overwhelming effect, though perhaps it will be difficult henceforth to visit them in the kind of solitude necessary to enjoy any ruins to the full.

Temple at Angkor Wat
David Greedy/Getty

It is difficult, though, even in solitude, to completely exclude reflections about Cambodia’s recent past from one’s romantic reaction to the temples. At the entrance to each of them, hopeful young salesmen tout books in English, mainly pirated editions, about the Khmer Rouge regime. “You want Pol Pot book, mister?” is a common refrain. It was as if Pol Pot had become a tourist attraction too.

There is indeed a connection between Pol Pot and Angkor: The grandeur of the site (first appreciated by the French colonialists) fed Pol Pot’s megalomania. He once said, and meant, that the people who built Angkor could do anything, a kind of racial-nationalist version of Mao’s thesis about people as blank sheets of paper upon whom the most beautiful characters could be written. People who can do anything have no need to take stark reality, either human or physical, into account. They can decree how much rice is to be produced by forcibly collectivized workers, whether farmers or not, a failure to meet the target therefore indicating counter-revolutionary sabotage rather than physical impossibility. People who can do anything can attack much stronger neighbors, such as Vietnam, and prevail. This Angkor-induced voluntarism led to the overthrow of Pol Pot’s regime.

You can’t help wondering what kind of labor produced the exquisite monuments of Angkor, with their serene and sublime sculptures. Were the armies of laborers necessary for the erection of the temples so devout that they were happy to toil for the glory of the Hindu gods and their avatars on earth, the Cambodian kings? Or were they wretched slaves? No one knows, but one ancient stone inscription in Cambodia describes how a worker called Viruna tried to escape from his temple and had his eyes gouged out and his nose cut off: not exactly a testament to labor’s freedom of movement.

The contrast between the captivating charm and physical grace of the Cambodians, and the inhuman cruelty of the Khmer Rouge, is a source of puzzlement to all visitors to the country. I caught a glimpse of the less attractive side of the Cambodian character at one of the temples. A deaf and dumb girl approached me when I reached the top of the temple and offered me a ring she had woven of palm leaf, obviously in the hope of a tip. One of the female temple guards (and guards are necessary, to prevent people from taking carvings home, a tradition joined if not started by André Malraux in the 1920s, when he tried to steal several carved Apsaras) shouted at the girl to go away and then used a switch to beat her, which she did with evident sadistic relish. My wife and I intervened to protect the girl from further beating, which was horrible in its heartlessness. If the guard was prepared to do this in front of foreigners, what would she have been prepared to do when not observed? We took the girl, crying, away.

But had we done the right thing? The girl, after all, was local and would have to stay where she was. Perhaps the guard, also local, would take her revenge upon her for being thus humiliated by our intervention. When you don’t know the culture, when you can’t read the script or speak a single word of the language, it isn’t easy to know whether you’re doing good or harm.

It isn’t easy to understand a country in which Sihanouk could still be head of state. He has had more incarnations than a Hindu god. He has been a playboy prince, a colonial front-man/king, a Japanese puppet, a fighter for independence, a populist prime minister with elitist tastes, a persecutor of Communists, a neutralist with anti-American and pro-Communist leanings, an exile in Peking, a head of state under palace arrest of a mass-murdering regime, a deposed head of state once more, a leader of an exiled opposition coalition including the party of the mass murderers who deposed him, and finally a figurehead king. But it seems to me probable that he is still widely revered. I think I could study Cambodia for many years, and still not understand.

Mr. Daniels is the author of, among other books, Utopias Elsewhere: Journeys in a Vanishing World.

CULTURE WATCH
From ‘Activist’ to ‘Warmonger’
A handy glossary from Lucifer’s latest lexicographer

JOHN DERBYSHIRE

Back in 1911 the American misanthrope and satirist Ambrose Bierce published his Devil’s Dictionary, 140 pages of scathing commentary on the folly, ugliness, and cruelty of the human race, laid out in the form of a dictionary, with “definitions” along the lines of (to give an actual sample): “Erudition, n. — Dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull.”

Without in any way wishing to endorse Bierce’s low opinion of his fellow man, I offer the following brief Devil’s Dictionary of terms current in the media today. Alongside each entry I have given the least charitable possible interpretation of the word or phrase listed. (N.B.: To save space and avoid unnecessary repetition, I have used an abbreviation — “DVG,” which stands for “designated victim group,” e.g., black people, homosexuals, illegal immigrants, etc.)

activist, n. Leftist troublemaker.
affirmative action, n. Quotas by race, sex, and often sexual orientation (though never by religion or political inclination).
Arab street, the, n. The cab driver who took your correspondent from Amman airport to the Hilton Hotel.
bash, v.t. To make uncomplimentary remarks about a DVG. To suggest that some particular member of a DVG has moral failings. E.g., “immigrant-bashing” — opposing illegal immigration.
bigotry, n. The open expression of conservative opinions.
celebrate, v.t. (In such bound forms as “celebrate diversity.”) To feign wholehearted enthusiasm for some theory, doctrine, law, ruling, or administrative fait accompli that strips you of some of your rights or property.
censorship, n. A refusal, on the part of the public authorities, to disburse public monies to performance artists (q.v.), transgressive artists (q.v.), and so on.
centrist, adj. Liberal. See also mainstream, moderate.
children, for the sake of our (slogan). Teachers unions, for the sake of the.
choice, n. The killing of human fetuses in utero, or the removal by suction of the brain of a newborn baby.
civil rights, n. The privileges to which DVGs are entitled.
Communist, n. A person who adheres to the economic and political theories of Karl Marx and V. I. Lenin. No member of the U.S. media knows any such person, nor ever has. Probably no such person ever existed. If such a person did exist, he or she was undoubtedly full of good intentions, though perhaps mistaken as to methods.
controversial, adj. (Applied to a nominee for any cabinet or judicial position requiring congressional approval.) Conservative.
deficit, n. An imbalance in state or national finances brought about by the willful refusal of the executive branch to support the ever-increasing levels of taxation required to fund the disbursements required by the legislature (q.v.).
discrimination, n. Formerly known as “freedom of association.”
diverse, adj. (Applied to a collectivity of persons.) Containing persons of all possible skin colors, sexes, sexual preferences, and immigration statuses, but preferably of identically mainstream (q.v.) opinions.
drastic cuts in government services, n. Reductions in the rate of growth of the rate of growth of the public sector’s rate of growth.
education, n. The activity engaged in by members of teachers unions, in the brief intervals between political lobbying, skills-enhancement sabbaticals, etc.
Episcopal Church of the U.S.A., n. A dating service for homosexuals, funded mainly by revenues from ownership of real estate in New York City.
gun lobbies, n. People opposed to the idea that the only armed civilians should be bank robbers.
hate speech, n. Words that are offensive to some powerful interest group.
inappropriate, adj. True, but unmentionable for political reasons.
inclusive, adj. Firm in the belief that no two people ought ever be treated differently by anyone at all in any context at all. Opposite of divisive.
International Criminal Court, n. A gathering of European and Third World left-wing jurists, committed to bringing to trial and punishing Henry Kissinger for the crime of having helped thwart a Communist coup in Chile, thereby depriving the Chilean people of universal free health care and 100 percent literacy (q.v.).
judiciary, n. A body of citizens charged with making those laws that Congress has omitted to make.
law school, n. An institution for the inculcation of politically correct ideas in young adults; a place where the process of extracting new rights and benefits from the Constitution is taught; the natural and proper aspiration for all young persons.
legislature, n. An institution whose purpose is to identify the few dozen noisiest, wealthiest, or most troublesome of many thousands of factions in a state, or in the nation, and to disburse public monies to them. In the event that a faction so identified is already a recipient of public monies, the legislature must ensure that the amount disbursed increases each year.
living wage, n. The latest wage demand by some public-sector labor union.
mainstream, adj. (Applied to a person’s opinions.) Liberal. See also centrist, moderate.
marriage, n. An archaic institution for the oppression of women and the abuse of children, from participation in which homosexual couples are cruelly and unjustly barred.
mean-spirited, adj. Insufficiently deferential to, or failing to acknowledge the inherent moral superiority of, some DVG.
media, n. A program of indoor relief for unemployable intellectuals.
military, n. A branch of the social-welfare services designated to work overseas at improving the lives of foreigners.
moderate, adj. Liberal. See also centrist, mainstream.
multiculturalism, n. The doctrine that persons of European ancestry are morally inferior to all other human beings.
nativist, n. A person who believes that citizens should have rights in law that are not available to foreigners, or that illegal immigration is illegal.
no child left behind (slogan). No U.S. citizen should do manual work. Everyone should go to law school.
no justice, no peace! (slogan). Give us money or we’ll riot!
non-violent offenders, n. Thieves, burglars, and junkies.
Ozzie and Harriet, n. Representatives of the false consciousness prevalent in the United States prior to the liberating movements of the 1960s. A married couple with no powers of imagination or self-awareness, trapped in such delusions as that unblemished domesticity is a satisfactory lifestyle, or that child-raising is best conducted with minimal state interference.

A peek at the original Devil’s Dictionary

partner, n. Husband, wife, lover, mistress, catamite, or “participating” pet.
peace, n. Appeasement of dictators or terrorists.
peace process, n. The handing over of a liberal, constitutional order to terrorists and gangsters, conducted so slowly that outsiders lose all interest.
performance art, n. Gross exhibitionism, usually of an obscene nature.
poetry, n. A form of writing, in which the random thoughts of a self-obsessed person are arranged on a page in such a way that they cannot be mistaken for prose.
poverty, n. The condition of being neither middle-class nor rich. Thirty million Americans are always “living in poverty,” regardless of the state of the national economy, improvements in the provision of public services, or any other changes in the life of the nation. This 30 million is a physical constant, like the speed of light.
public investment, n. Kiss your tax dollars goodbye.
questioning, adj. (As in “gay, lesbian, transgendered, and questioning youth.”) Thought to be a good prospect for seduction by adult homosexuals.
Religious Right, n. Persons who believe that the Bible is divinely inspired.
renewable energy sources, n. 300-ft.-high windmills costing $12 million apiece, each generating sufficient power to operate a small domestic refrigerator.
reparations, n. Monies proposed to be paid to the descendants of black slaves by the descendants of white serfs and yellow coolies.
road map to peace, n. See peace process.
simplistic, adj. Predicated on the belief, or apparent belief, that good and evil differ from each other in some fashion.
self-esteem, n. The mental state formerly known as “the sin of pride.”
social change, n. Higher taxes to sustain more government employees.
social justice, n. See social change.
socially aware, adj. Cringing before the overwhelming moral superiority of DVGs.
spew, spout, v.t. To speak in a way that is inappropriate (q.v.). A style of speech favored by bigots.
sustainable development, n. A style of national economic management favored by persons who wear sandals over socks.
tax cut for the rich, n. Tax cut.
transgressive, adj. Obscene, usually with homosexual content.
troubled, adj. Pretending, for political purposes, to be in a state of high-minded indignation. E.g., “Opponents of Justice [Priscilla] Owen are rightly troubled by her extremely conservative record as a Texas state court judge” (New York Times).
undocumented immigrant, n. A person whose first act on entering the United States is to violate our laws. Mildly offensive. Preferred terms: “day laborer,” “immigrant.”
universal free health care and 100 percent literacy, n. The principal features of life in Cuba, but nowhere else.
urban youth, n. Street punks.
warmonger, n. A person who wishes ill to his country’s enemies.

COVER STORY
Swallowed by Leviathan
Conservatism versus an oxymoron: ‘big-government conservatism’

RAMESH PONNURU

“We have a responsibility that when somebody hurts, government has got to move.” — President George W. Bush, talking to union workers on Labor Day

Franklin delano roosevelt’s rhetoric was more high-flown, and less therapeutic in emphasis. “Governments can err, presidents do make mistakes,” said FDR, “but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the constant omission of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.” Both presidents’ statements are, however, close enough in meaning. They are bookends: one spoken when big government in America was young and disputed, the other when it is old and accepted.

President Bush has compiled a record to match his rhetoric. Indeed, during his presidency the federal government has acted even when people were not hurting. Bush has increased the federal role in education, imposed tariffs on steel and lumber, increased farm subsidies, okayed new federal regulations on campaign finance and corporate accounting, and expanded the national-service program President Clinton began. Since September 11, he has also raised defense spending, given new powers to law enforcement, federalized airport security, and created a new cabinet department for homeland security.

No federal programs have been eliminated, nor has Bush sought any such thing. More people are working for the federal government than at any point since the end of the Cold War. Spending has been growing faster than it did under Clinton. Conservatives are, of course, inclined to tolerate, indeed cheer, most of the government’s efforts to wage the war on terrorism. But non-defense spending has been increasing almost as fast as defense spending. Excluding defense and also entitlements, spending is up 28 percent over the course of Bush’s first three years. Now Bush is seeking to expand Medicare to cover prescription drugs, at a projected cost — almost surely an underestimate — of $400 billion over the next decade.

Spending is not, of course, the only way that the government can commandeer society’s resources. The regulatory state is alive and growing as well. Bush just passed up the opportunity to eliminate one particularly noxious regulation, the Department of Education’s Title IX edict, which has universities killing men’s sports teams to achieve “gender parity.”

Over on the left, and even among moderate liberals, the idea that Bush is a right-wing maniac persists. Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect has suggested that Bush resembles no president in American history so much as Jefferson Davis in his hostility to progressive government. But Bush’s record is inspiring considerable angst among his supporters. Most conservatives are critical of the governmental growth that Bush has allowed or encouraged. Some conservatives are also expressing concern about the return of deficits. The debate about how conservative Bush is, which began when he walked on the national stage in 1999, has been renewed. This time it has gotten mixed up with the considerably less edifying debate about whether he is a neoconservative (and about what that term means).

BUT IS IT CONSERVATIVE?
A minority of Bush’s supporters, however, have celebrated Bush’s alleged embrace of “big government conservatism.” The term is that of journalist Fred Barnes, the only known self-confessed adherent to the creed. Big-government conservatives, according to Barnes, use “activist government” for “conservative ends.” He writes in the Wall Street Journal, “The essence of Mr. Bush’s big government conservatism is a trade-off. To gain free-market reforms and expand individual choice, he’s willing to broaden programs and increase spending.” Big-government conservatives are realistic, says Barnes, about what conservatives can accomplish given the public’s support for a large federal role. They “prefer to be in favor of things because that puts them on the political offensive.” They “support transfer payments that have a neutral or beneficial effect (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) and oppose those that subsidize bad behavior (welfare).”

Peter Berkowitz, a moderate conservative academic, writes in the Boston Globe that “Bush’s conservatism is certainly less rigid and doctrinaire than that of Newt Gingrich and his minions, who swept to power in 1994 and, in a most unconservative spirit, sought to remake the federal government by drastically reducing its size.”

Irving Kristol touches on the same subject in the course of an essay for The Weekly Standard on neoconservatism. Kristol’s purpose is to claim that neoconservatism is “the first variant of American conservatism in the past century that is in the ‘American grain’” because it is cheerful. Also, it is neoconservative policies that are responsible for whatever popularity Republicans have enjoyed. (That thesis would be less preposterous than it sounds if Kristol were correct in claiming that tax cuts are a distinctively neoconservative idea.) Neoconservatives want a government that promotes economic growth, combats cultural decay, and maintains a strong military and a robust foreign policy. They do not, however, fret about big government. “People have always preferred strong government to weak government,” he writes.

I may as well put my cards on the table at this point. I’m a small-government conservative who doubts there is any other kind. To put it in the positive terms that Barnes recommends, I favor the absence of all the government programs I’m against. I wish the Republicans of 1995 had succeeded in their modest plans to scrap a few of the less important cabinet departments, generally by placing the programs within them elsewhere, and to hold the growth of the federal government to $350 billion over seven years. I recognize that those Republicans were sometimes grandiose in their rhetoric. But I don’t believe that they should be spoken of as though they were a band of anarchist revolutionaries.

There are reasons to question whether big-government conservatism can succeed even on its own terms. A suspicion of statism and a love of individualism are very much in the American grain, but are sentiments somewhat alien to Kristol’s neoconservatism. An attachment to the right to bear arms, for example, is certainly a feature of the American Right that springs from our cultural history but with which neoconservatism has little to do. (And one doesn’t have to embrace the myth of America’s historical isolationism to wonder whether a sustained activist foreign policy is really in the American grain, either.)

Irving Kristol is too sanguine about the compatibility of a large welfare state, on one hand, and economic growth, cultural conservatism, and military strength on the other. Most conservatives believe that federal spending depletes resources that would otherwise be available to the private sector. Note, by the way, that the very programs that are doing the most to bankrupt the country are the ones that Fred Barnes reckons have “a neutral or beneficial effect.” These programs have also had cultural consequences. Social Security and Medicare helped to undo much of the economic basis of the multigenerational family, and Medicaid has been an invitation to fraud and abuse. More generally, the expansion of the federal role in health, education, and welfare has reduced the social role of organized religion (and would do so even if the government were less insistent on secularism; in that case, churches would over time become clients of the government).

Kristol’s notes toward a definition of neoconservatism conflate government’s size with government’s strength. That governments must be strong enough to effect their legitimate ends no sensible person would deny. But a central insight of conservatism has been that a government chasing after goals at once utopian, vague, and picayune — leaving no child behind, for example — is likely to neglect its core function of protecting its people from violence. Turning his gaze abroad, Kristol writes that “Europe’s democracies cut back their military spending in favor of social welfare programs.” Just so.

The strongest point in favor of big-government conservatism is the practical political one: A reduction in the size and scope of the federal government is, in the short term at least, impossible. Even this point can be (and frequently is) overstated. The difficulty for conservatives is not, as is so often said, that “the public likes big government.” It is true that the public likes many large federal programs, such as Social Security, Medicare, and student loans. But it’s not any deep public sentiment that keeps the Small Business Administration, or the sugar subsidy, alive.

It would be more precise to say that the constituency for smaller government is too weak to prevail. The beneficiaries of particular programs are intensely interested in their survival and expansion. Very few people are ideologically committed to their retrenchment or elimination. The outcomes of political battles are generally what one would expect given this balance of forces.

This political weakness is why the Gingrich revolution sputtered out, and Phil Gramm’s 1996 campaign never got going. Since then, antistatism has declined further. Welfare reform, the drop in crime, and the end of inflation made people look more benignly on government. President Clinton labored mightily to end the public’s association of government activism with hostility to middle-class values.

The weakness of antistatism has motivated every attempted ideological innovation within conservatism for the last 15 years. In different ways, Jack Kemp’s “empowerment” conservatism, Pat Buchanan’s “conservatism of the heart,” and John McCain’s “national greatness” conservatism have all sought to detach conservatism from a small-government philosophy that seemed to have no electoral value.

Although he is something of a prophet without honor in today’s Republican party, Kemp appears, in retrospect, to have been the most successful of these innovators. He was the most marginalized member of the elder Bush’s administration. Yet the second Bush has appropriated much of the political identity of Kemp circa 1990. Like him, Bush II is a tax cutter, a pro-Israel hawk, an unequivocal enthusiast for immigration. Kemp was fond of saying that people don’t care what you know until they know that you care, which is another way of saying that conservatives must be compassionate, and advertised as such. Like Kemp, Bush is eager to attract minorities and union members to his party, and is willing to embrace sometimes dubious outreach strategies to attain this goal. Like Kemp, Bush would rather reform than end government programs — and like Kemp, he is a big spender.

‘THROW AWAY THE BUDGET CUTTERS’
Small-government conservatives cannot say we weren’t warned about Bush. From 1999 through the present, he has taken plenty of opportunities to tell us that he is not one of those troglodytes who consider government to be the problem. For Bush, to say that government is the problem is, indeed, to take part in the “stale debates” of the past. Grover Norquist, a leading conservative activist, said that what united Republican voters was their desire to be left alone by the government. During the early days of his campaign Bush rejected that formulation: Government had higher purposes than merely leaving people alone. Marvin Olasky, an influence on Bush’s “compassionate conservatism,” said, “Let’s throw away the budget cutters. I see that coming with Bush.” Looking at the trajectory of federal spending, one certainly must give Olasky credit for prescience.

Yet if small-government conservatives should have had no illusions about Bush, we also had good reasons to support him in 2000. Those reasons include, but go beyond, the nature of the Democratic opposition and Bush’s conservative positions on foreign-policy and moral issues. There was also the possibility that Bush, as president, would shift American politics to the right. Tax cuts could restrain the growth of government spending. Tort reform could weaken an important constituency for liberalism. Trade liberalization could undermine government activism (and labor unions). Above all, a free-market reform of Social Security could change the American electorate by making every voter a member of the investor class. By the late 1990s, most conservatives active in politics had concluded that a frontal assault on the welfare state was doomed to failure, and that conservatives would have to try an indirect approach: enacting reforms that would create the conditions for success in the future. Steve Forbes campaigned as the conservative alternative to Bush on a platform no bolder than that. If Bush were to deliver such reforms, it would make up for the day-to-day annoyances that his presidency would surely bring.

It’s important to note that this small-government strategy does not amount to going along with any government program that makes Republicans more popular. An editorial in the Washington Times recently argued that a new prescription-drug entitlement would be worth the cost, because it would get more Republicans elected . . . and in a few years they would reform entitlements. But even if the Republicans were to get 60 senators in this fashion — a big if — a party that had thus gained power would be likely to find itself bereft of its reformist zeal. For partisans of small government, the goal should be to strengthen the coalition for conservative governance more than to strengthen the Republican party.

Liberals have been following their own version of this strategy for many years. Since the collapse of the Clintons’ health-care plan in 1994, for example, they have sought incremental reforms that would make people more receptive to government-provided health care. Both parties are aware that they are fighting a kind of trench warfare, contesting small territories in bitter engagements in the hope of winning a better position for tomorrow’s battles.

When they judge how well the president has served them, conservatives ought to ask whether he is advancing the cause of limited government given the political circumstances. Surprisingly often, the criticism of Bush ignores those circumstances. In the intra-conservative debate about Bush, it is assumed that to approve of Bush’s performance is also to approve of the big government he has expanded, and that to oppose big government one must also condemn Bush. But the attitude conservatives should have toward Bush does not follow straightforwardly from the attitude they should have toward excessive government, because political considerations have to be taken into account.

The president’s conservative critics sometimes make it sound as though the idea for a prescription-drug entitlement sprang from his (or Karl Rove’s) head. But it’s not Bush’s fault that voters, including self-described conservatives, like the promise of free medicine. The entire Republican party, from top to bottom, concluded in 1999 that it would be politically perilous to stand against the idea. That doesn’t mean that the president’s behavior in this matter is above reproach — it would be nice if he would demand that the bill contain real free-market reforms, not just that it be bipartisan — but criticism should be based on actually available alternatives. Similarly, people talk as though the president set federal spending levels all by his lonesome. Bush has indeed made decisions worth criticizing: He could, for instance, have vetoed the farm-subsidy bill. But where’s the criticism of the congressional spenders, Republican and Democrat (all too) alike? More to the point, where’s the effort to reform a budget process that is designed to pump up the government?

When judged in this manner, some of Bush’s compromises will appear to be reasonable, some to be gratuitous sellouts. Still others will take time to judge. The steel tariffs were probably necessary to get Congress to give the president the authority to negotiate free-trade deals; we won’t know if it was worth it until some time in Bush’s next term (assuming he has one). In some cases, conservatives may decide that Bush made the right call given the political circumstances but that they should denounce him anyway, as part of their effort to change those circumstances. The steel tariffs may fall in this category, too.

Bush’s record will look very different if he succeeds in reforming Social Security in his next term. That program accounts for a fifth of all federal spending. Transforming it would surely outweigh the extra funding for national service. And while it is true that Bush never talks about government the way that Reagan did, we should remember that Reagan, too, was in practice willing to compromise to meet his priorities. Nor is the rhetorical contrast entirely to Bush’s disadvantage. Reagan’s tax cuts were justified, in part, on the theory that they would not set the federal government back too much: They would generate economic growth, which in turn would generate revenues. In 2000, Bush sold his tax cut as a way of taking money away from the federal government. This was, indeed, the central domestic-policy promise of his campaign: He would take money from the government and give it back to the people.

Where does this leave realistic small-government conservatives and “big-government conservatives”? It leaves them, presumably, as allies on 95 percent of the issues being debated in Washington, even as they disagree on what they would like Washington to look like in ten or fifteen years. Conservatives should, however, lament the necessity of letting our bloated government grow even further in the short term. They should not try to dress up this necessity as a coherent philosophy.

PUBLIC POLICY
Facing up to It in California
We must leap the ‘third rail’ of illegal immigration

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

For the last two decades the issue of massive illegal immigration has been the third rail of California politics. Most state residents — of all backgrounds — were against it privately, yet precious few would say so publicly. Who wished to be vilified as a racist — especially in the lotus-eating years of a booming economy, and a new middle-class lifestyle made possible by the hiring of cheap, undocumented gardeners, housekeepers, and nannies?

A brief example: Recently I gave a small luncheon presentation about some of the issues and paradoxes of illegal immigration in California to a group of congressional staffers in Washington. The first questioner, Federico de Jesus, a press aide for Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader from California, actually posed no question, but offered a long rant to the effect that by questioning the current policy of de facto open borders I was promoting racism and xenophobia. He then stormed out — but not before attempting to steal a pizza at the rear of the room. What exactly had set Mr. de Jesus off? “You admitted you were a classist,” he yelled — apparently thinking that a “classicist,” who studies the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome, is synonymous with a “classist,” who, I suppose, might advocate class divisions. In explanation, Jennifer Crider, a spokeswoman for Pelosi, chose to ignore Mr. de Jesus’s slander, offering instead the bland statement: “A staffer thought a racially insensitive remark was made. He objected and left the briefing.”

So in such a charged atmosphere, the explosive issue has mostly been left to state referenda, in which voters in the privacy of the ballot booth have periodically passed laws on the subject — eliminating state aid to illegal aliens, and ending bilingual education and affirmative action. (Yet another referendum — which would end the state’s collection of racial data altogether — is on the October 7 ballot.) In most cases, its anger vented, the electorate shrugged when a) liberal federal judges threw out the ballot propositions or b) state agencies stealthily ignored the newly enacted laws, pleading that they were subject to contravening higher federal statutes.

Public sentiment is one thing, political discourse another — especially when the latter is guided by demography. Forty percent of the state’s population now claims some sort of Mexican heritage. An entire class of racial shepherds in our universities, legislature, and media owes its very existence to a permanent constituency of unassimilated voters — in the same manner that our contractors, agribusinessmen, and restaurateurs depend on a perennial supply of hard-working but inexpensive undocumented workers who live in the shadows of California civic life.

A DEFICIT — OF TRUTH
But money (or lack of it) and the quest for power are strong historical forces and they have now combined to weaken the code of silence. The $38 billion budget deficit, along with the fact that three prominent gubernatorial candidates — Cruz Bustamante, Arianna Huffington, and Arnold Schwarzenegger — are either immigrants themselves or consciously have identified with immigrants, has at long last prompted a raucous, indeed demagogic, debate.

Bustamante has managed to portray himself as an up-by-the-bootstraps immigrant, representative of the ordeal of the entire Mexican diaspora. In fact, he is a successful third-generation, middle-class Californian, who grew up speaking English in a typical San Joaquin Valley suburb as the son of a city councilman — and is himself a lifelong bureaucrat and political insider who has never really had to work outside government. In other words, he is a fine example of how legal and measured immigration, assimilation, and the melting pot make all of us more or less ordinary and indistinguishable Americans. In contrast, Schwarzenegger came here penniless from postwar Austria with a spooky accent right out of Hogan’s Heroes, and really did embody the first-generation American immigrant success story of creating a new autonomous and prosperous life ex nihilo. Only in California could the former be dubbed a triumphant underdog and the latter a privileged nativist. If Arnold had immigrated from Mexico in the 1970s, and Cruz’s grandfather from Austria . . . well, you get the picture.

The race has been narrowing to a contest between Bustamante and Schwarzenegger, and each is having problems with illegal immigration and the assorted landmines of identity politics that surround it. Bustamante remains unapologetic about his youthful, rite-of-passage membership in the separatist and patently racist MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan) student organization. Fair enough; we all do dumb things when we are young, and — despite conservatives’ comparisons to the Klan — the self-inflated, goofy MEChA was never as dangerous in the concrete as it was lunatic in the abstract. But the rules of politics are unforgiving.

So before this campaign is over, Bustamante will probably have to address the present — not the past — official policy of MEChA, which is actually antithetical to the idea of a multiracial and tolerant society. It will not do to say simply that MEChA embodies the high-flying rhetoric of the 1960s, was basically a benevolent student organization, or uses allegorical rather than concrete language — not with the odious proclamations in its current manifesto, including “We are a bronze people with a bronze culture” and “For the race everything; for those outside the race, nothing.” This is a silly group, but it is separatist nonetheless, calling for the “liberation of AZTLAN, meaning self-determination of our people in this occupied state and the physical liberation of our land.” “Gringos” are endemic in MEChA literature, along with incendiary phraseology and emblems of the Mexican eagle clutching dynamite.

Ideas, even puerile ones, do have consequences. If we put aside the pernicious philosophical effects of inculcating a racialist identity (in this regard “La Raza” is analogous to the old German concept of Volk), the logical wages of racist lobbying organizations like MEChA have been separate graduation ceremonies, bilingual education, and ethnic chauvinism in our college curricula. Decades of that have done quite a lot for an activist elite, but almost nothing to prepare the children of immigrants for the breakneck competition of American culture — not when 40 percent of students of Mexican heritage fail to graduate from high school and when fewer than 10 percent of Mexican-Americans hold bachelor’s degrees.

Bustamante so far has evaded the tough questions, reciting instead the mantra of thousands of impressive second- and third-generation Mexican-American success stories. Such therapeutics perhaps will work for a while; but millions of black, Asian, and white Californians wonder what is so difficult about a simple disclaimer, perhaps something like, “Once MEChA may have sought to instill pride in young Mexican-American youth, but its racist and separatist language has no place in present-day California.” Californians, of course, do not fear newcomers from Mexico — only the cynical exploitation of illegal mass immigration, coupled with organizations like MEChA that exist to maximize their own interests at the expense of the public good.

Bustamante, like most aging-yuppie former Mechistas, hardly believes in a reemergence of a mythical, separatist “bronze” AZTLAN — not with a bustling popular culture of Tiger Woods, Sammy Sosa, Jennifer Lopez, Penelope Cruz, and so on. But the fact that he has offered no such mea culpa suggests that he either does not wish to offend his politicized Latino base, or believes that he can pass off MEChA as a service organization analogous to the Kiwanis or Lions Club — or, still more likely, thinks the growing storm over his MEChA past is merely a weird sort of wedge issue in which he can play a beleaguered Hispanic politician hammered by “reactionaries.” Still, the problem will not go away in the minds of millions of moderate voters of all heritages until Bustamante and prominent Latino politicians renounce the present MEChA charter. In the meantime, his rallies are increasingly shrill, and appealing primarily to Latino voters. The old theme of “no on the recall, yes on Bustamante” has been replaced by “vote Bustamante” — to the exasperation of Davis supporters and mainstream Democrats, who don’t want the recall to become a primary and a general election all at once.

ARNOLD’S CHALLENGE
Schwarzenegger confronts a different sort of dilemma. He knows that Californians voted overwhelmingly for Proposition 187 — ending state aid to illegals — and would do so again. (Almost a third of the Latino voters supported it.) But much of the Prop. 187 campaign was seen as deeply offensive by citizens of Mexican heritage, ranging from the scary pictures of aliens swarming over our freeways to the specter of children being denied entrance to schools and access to emergency medical care. In the current demagogic climate, it will be hard for Schwarzenegger to continue to oppose today’s essentially open borders without being called a racist. His challenge is to focus on the poor and exploited, and explain the dimensions of the problem to state voters in starkly moral terms. Illegality and the failure to assimilate are the inevitable results of a system of de facto helotage that encourages millions of impoverished and uneducated people to enter California to work among the affluent, but live in apartheid communities. If Californians are told that it is neither wise nor moral to traffic in human capital — hand in glove with a corrupt Mexican government — most will realize that we must return to the more sensible policy of times past — when immigrants came in fewer numbers, legally, and were assimilated through English immersion and traditional civic education. In this regard, Schwarzenegger’s natural constituency is a growing Mexican-American middle class, who could appreciate his empathy and respect for its own distinguished record of achievement and playing by the rules. (Republicans have to be very careful, though, because much of the impetus for open borders came from deep-pocket cynical employers who wanted the laborers and expected the state to subsidize the costs of entitlements when the laborers aged, became injured, or were sick.)

The best solution to the problem of illegal immigration — at the level of both politics and policy — may be amnesty; but amnesty would work only if it were not rolling and perpetual, but instead coupled with a real crackdown in enforcement to close the border and return the immigration process to a legal and workable system. Unfortunately, Democrats who unthinkingly support massive reprieves refuse to discuss the necessary immigration reforms, and thus betray their real preference for an open border ratified by periodic blanket forgiveness to those who ignored the law. The restrictionists who stridently oppose amnesty also have a problem: They have not yet explained to us how — either practically or morally — we can expect border-patrol vans to crisscross the barrio, apprehending retirees in their 60s and 70s who have not set foot in Oaxaca in 40 years.

In short, the illegal-immigration problem won’t become easier to solve any time soon. When once asked about his position, Bustamante snapped to reporters that “My district requires it,” and cut off the questioning. The more principled Schwarzenegger has the greater burden of explaining to all Californians why the present system must, for both pragmatic and ethical reasons, be abolished. Somehow he must, with real empathy, decry the illegal exploitation of the poor and the immigrants, warn of the dangers of racial chauvinism, decry the amorality of trafficking in human capital, and preach the need to respect the law — in order to return the California immigrant experience to within the norms of past American law and practice — all without playing into Bustamante’s hands as a nativist or gratuitously offending the corporate or libertarian Right that has so profited from the present chaos.

The truth alone will set him free — and will determine whether we in the state will evolve into a truly multiracial society united by traditional common American beliefs and values or go the route of a separatist and strife-torn Balkans or Rwanda. The stakes in this election are really as high as all that.

Mr. Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and the author of Mexifornia: A State of Becoming (Encounter).

THE PRESIDENCY
A Voice for Our Time
Those who think that Bush can’t talk should think again

JAY NORDLINGER

For a man reputed to be “verbally challenged,” George W. Bush has given some important speeches — some impressive ones, too. Words matter a great deal to this president. In fact, when all is said and done, his presidency may be known for its rhetoric (among other things). Then George W. Bush, the tongue-tied embarrassment, will have the last laugh — yet another last laugh.

“Misunderestimated” once more.

Of course, it makes a difference that we are at war. September 11 “changed everything,” we’re told, and it certainly changed the Bush presidency. A president must find his voice in wartime, as in no other time. Woodrow Wilson gave many excellent speeches, on a wide range of subjects. But it is his war oratory we remember. Franklin Roosevelt had the Great Depression, but then he became “Dr. Win the War,” rising from a date of infamy to put paid to Tojoism and Hitlerism alike. Abraham Lincoln? He was sharp and eloquent on agricultural policy, as on everything else. But . . .

George W. Bush is an interesting mixture: He is a Texan and an Easterner; he is Establishment and counter-Establishment; he is fancy and folksy; he is forceful and jocular; he is presidential and everyday. His formal speeches tend to be elegant, polished affairs, composed by top-notch speechwriters (about whom, more later). But he does well enough on his own: whether winging it before an audience or responding to reporters. When he is most purely himself, he is blunt, unfussy, a little salty — Trumanesque.

In July 2002, he was asked about the status of Osama bin Laden. “He may be alive,” the president said. “If he is, we’ll get him. If he’s not, we got him.” Speechwriters could labor for weeks and not come up with anything better.

This is also a quick and funny president. We all have our favorite examples, and I will cite one of mine, impressed on me by David Frum (a former Bush speechwriter himself, and the author of the superb memoir The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush — and a contributing editor, of course, to this magazine). Ozzy Osbourne was a guest at a big, noisy Washington dinner. Pointing out his funky tresses, the famous rocker-druggie said, “Mr. President, you should wear your hair like mine!” Bush responded, “Second term, Ozzy, second term.”

WORDS TO GO WITH DEEDS
National Review has put together an interesting book. It’s called “We Will Prevail”: President George W. Bush on War, Terrorism, and Freedom. The book is a compilation of speeches and statements issuing from Bush since September 11. It contains very big speeches, like State of the Union addresses, and smaller — though equally resonant — statements: like the president’s message through a bullhorn to rescue workers at Ground Zero. It features the defining speech at West Point, but also what Bush said while lighting the national Christmas tree. We see him, and hear him, before a variety of audiences, in a variety of settings. He talks to military personnel, world leaders, the employees of the Dixie Printing Company (Glen Burnie, Md.). We get not only a sense of the time, but a sense of the job of president — and a sense, I dare say, of America itself.

To peruse this volume is to be forced to live through September 11 and its aftermath — once again. It’s surprising how much can be forgotten, in such a short space. (The Taliban, anyone?) The president himself recognized this tendency early on. Here he is on October 4, 2001: “I fully understand . . . there will be times when people feel a sense of normalcy — and I hope that happens sooner rather than later — and that September 11th may be a distant memory to some. But not to me, and not to this nation.” Some 13 months later, he said, “One of my jobs is to make sure nobody gets complacent. One of my jobs is to remind people of the stark realities that we face. See, every morning I go into that great Oval Office and read threats to our country — every morning. . . . Some of them are blowhards [!], but we take every one of them seriously. It’s the new reality.”

Indeed.

As has often been noted, the president, on September 11, 2001, was reading to schoolchildren — a common event in that more luxurious age. Then we suffered that shock. Quick as a flash — that very day — Bush said, “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.” Many times later, he would refer to this policy as his “doctrine.” He would state it and re-state it in assorted ways, giving the impression that he was ever more committed to it. He also said on September 11, “America has stood down enemies before, and we will do so this time. None of us will ever forget this day. Yet we go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world.”

That may sound like the language of a comic book — but it was, to most of us, suitable language, and it reflected Bush’s conviction that the current and ongoing conflict is one of good versus evil. One sees, in “We Will Prevail”, that he speaks frequently of “evildoers,” “the evil ones,” “the forces of evil,” and the like. And he has been subjected to some mockery for this.

But he addressed such criticism head-on in that speech at West Point (the graduation exercises, June 1, 2002): “Some worry that it is somehow undiplomatic or impolite to speak the language of right and wrong. I disagree. Different circumstances require different methods, but not different moralities.” And then he went into a flight of universalism worthy of Wilson: “Moral truth is the same in every culture, in every time, and in every place. Targeting innocent civilians for murder is always and everywhere wrong. Brutality against women is always and everywhere wrong. There can be no neutrality between justice and cruelty, between the innocent and the guilty. We are in a conflict between good and evil, and America will call evil by its name. By confronting evil and lawless regimes, we do not create a problem, we reveal a problem. And we will lead the world in opposing it.”

Well, then.

A HUGE JOB, AND A DELICATE ONE
In the days and months after September 11, the president did many things: He comforted the grieving; he exalted the dead; he assuaged fears; he encouraged alertness; he pledged victory. He stepped into — and up to — any number of roles. He was mourner-in-chief, explainer-in-chief, inspirer-in-chief — and, of course, as the Constitution dictates, commander-in-chief. We see, throughout the NR book, that he combined what you might call the soft and the hard. He said, “I’m encouraging schoolchildren to write letters of friendship to Muslim children in different countries.” He also said — just to take one example of thousands — “I’m going to talk about homeland security, but the best way to secure our homeland is to hunt the killers down one by one and bring them to justice, and that is what we’re going to do.”

That, too, is a constant theme from Bush: that there is no defense, traditionally understood, against our terrorist enemies. “In the face of today’s new threat, the only way to pursue peace is to pursue those who threaten it.” “My attitude is, the best way to secure the homeland is to unleash the mighty United States military and hunt them down and bring them to justice. And the best way to fight evil at home is to love your neighbor like you’d like to be loved yourself” (there’s the soft Bush).

Over and over, Bush has explained that this is a different kind of war, without obvious precedents. “There will be times of swift, dramatic action. There will be times of steady, quiet progress.” Note the following jab — a light one — at the press: “This is an unusual kind of war because it sometimes will show up on your TV screens and sometimes it won’t. Sometimes there will be moments of high drama, and, of course, good reporters will be going [now there’s a little audience laughter] — all kinds of hyperventilating, about this action or that action. And sometimes you won’t see a thing.”

The president has always understood that the world may be kindlier to an America that is down and bleeding than it is to an America that is on its feet and fighting back. To the United Nations, on November 10, 2001, he said, “After tragedy, there is time for sympathy and condolences. And my country has been grateful for both. But the time for sympathy has now passed; the time for action has arrived.” In my view, this is one of the most arresting, and meaningful, lines in the entire book. On September 12, Le Monde had a headline, immediately to become famous: “We Are All Americans.” Okay — and after?

Seldom does Bush shrink from talking straight about the nature of the enemy: “America is beginning to realize that the dreams of the terrorists and the Taliban were waking nightmares for Afghan women and their children. The Taliban murdered teenagers for laughing in the presence of soldiers. They jailed children as young as ten years old, and tortured them for the supposed crimes of their parents.” And “women were banned from speaking, or laughing loudly. They were banned from riding bicycles, or attending school. They were denied basic health care,” and so on.

The Beast of Baghdad? “On Saddam Hussein’s orders, opponents have been decapitated, wives and mothers of political opponents have been systematically raped as a method of intimidation, and political prisoners have been forced to watch their own children being tortured.” Unflinching assessments of this sort are often useful, in the eddies of debate.

A STYLE APPLAUDED AND DESPISED
As “We Will Prevail” unfolds, we see Bush in the full range of his moods. He is purposeful and defiant; humble and prayerful; cocky and sarcastic; angry and slashing; sentimental and weepy; playful and twitting. He has his favorite words, as we all do. One of his is “fabulous.” (“What a fabulous land we have, and the reason why is because we’ve got such fabulous citizens.” Bush says “fabulous” at least as much as any interior decorator.) He has a knack for speaking directly to people, without talking down to them: “I want to explain to you about Saddam Hussein, just quickly, if I might.”

Check him out as he argues for a Department of Homeland Security: “I’m a person who believes in accountability. One reason I believe in accountability is because I understand who the American people are going to hold accountable if something happens: me. And therefore, I’m the kind of fellow who likes to pick up the phone and say, ‘How we doing? How are we doing on implementing the strategy?’ I don’t like the idea of calling a hundred different agencies. I like to call one and say, ‘Here is the strategy, and what are you doing about it? And if you’re not doing something about it, I expect you to. And if you don’t, I’m going to find somebody else that will do something about it.’”

Clear enough.

Sometimes Bush is archly funny. Speaking to high-school students, he said, “You’ve been learning this by studying your history — at least some of you by studying your history.” Often he is funny-serious: “You know, when the enemy hit us, they must have not known what they were doing. I like to tell people, they must have been watching too much TV, because they didn’t understand America” (thinking that we were soft, materialistic, and cringing). On another occasion, Bush said, “See, they thought we’d probably just file a lawsuit or two! . . . They don’t have any idea about what makes the people here tick.”

And how about the president in his full Texas-sheriff mode (as I dub it)? Before a political audience in October 2002, he said, “We still got this coalition of freedom-loving nations we’re working with. And we’re hunting ’em down. The other day, one of ’em popped up — popped his head up — named al-Shibh. He’s no longer a problem.”

This is the kind of talk that thrills Bush’s fans, and exasperates his critics.

THE ‘CALL OF HISTORY’
I have been thinking about this president and words for some time now. In the fall of 2000, I took a leave of absence from National Review to assist the speechwriting staff on the Bush campaign (ah, the flexibility of the opinion journalist). At the time, the speechwriters were Michael Gerson (the chief), John McConnell, and Matthew Scully. They are still with George W. Bush, doing an extraordinary job (a fabulous job). And most would agree that Bush has grown in his ability to communicate, both in his prepared, professionalized speeches and in his unscripted remarks. In fact, some of us wish that they’d unleash him more — that he would unleash himself more. Let him mangle his syntax: He still gets his point across, usually effectively.

Proof of this lies in NR’s collection — which begins on September 11 and concludes with the Iraq campaign. There is much repetition in the book, which cannot be helped. But Bush’s utterances, taken together, are strangely compelling. As the War on Terror proceeds, he gives you new wrinkles, new information, new thrusts. When I went through the galleys, I got a shiver once or twice — reminded of something I’d forgotten. “I’m told [said Bush] that one of the pilots here, a fellow named Randy, was asked if anyone at Travis [Air Force Base] had personal connections to any of the victims of the attacks of September the 11th. And here’s what he said: ‘I think we all do; they’re all Americans. When you strike one American, you strike us all.’”

Not long ago, I did a radio interview, whose chief purpose was to discuss this book. The interviewer began roughly as follows: “First of all, are you serious about this book? I mean, Bush and oratory? Are you doing it with some irony? Is this sort of a joke book?” He could not understand how one could view Bush as a serious and important speaker, so completely had he swallowed the caricature of Bush as a stumblebum. My suspicion, however, is that “history” — if it is fair — will recall that Bush did a splendid job rhetorically, as well as in other, more concrete respects, in a most difficult time. When it mattered a lot, his words came true. Like Ronald Reagan, he speaks as though he believes what he is saying — because he does. (You can tell, very easily, when Bush’s heart isn’t really in it.)

Shortly before the Iraq campaign, Bush observed that “this call of history has come to the right country.” More than a few of us contend that — to borrow from David Frum’s title — it came to the right man, too.

Mr. Nordlinger is managing editor of National Review. This piece is adapted from his introduction to “We Will Prevail”: President George W. Bush on War, Terrorism, and Freedom, a National Review book published by Continuum (265 pages, $24.95).

THE THREAT WITHIN

The eight debaters (slapstick Sharpton
Wasn’t there) denounced
Bush as they would Beelzebub; though
Dean, who also pounced,
And, to the point, keeps pulling further
From their frontal view,
Was treated like the Holy Ghost — too
Frightening to boo.

— W. H. von Dreele

“Honest! When I said ‘Jesus Christ,’ I was swearing, not praying!”

The Sacramento Tales

[John Derbyshire reports: In the course of some renovation work at England’s Canterbury Cathedral, a wall broke open to reveal a hollow cavity, in which was found a parchment manuscript, since dated to the later 14th century. It appears to be the work of the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer. However, the text is much faded and barely legible in places, so that the work of deciphering this manuscript is proceeding very slowly. The first few pages have now been transcribed, and their content is given below. Not all of the references can be understood at this distance in time, but the manuscript appears to concern a miscellaneous party of pilgrims who have come together with the common desire to reach a holy shrine at a place called “Sacramento.” The front page of the manuscript, though much defaced by damp, seems to bear the title “The Sacramento Tales.”]

Whan that Septembre with his shoures sote
Summers droghte hath percéd to the rote,
And bathéd Napas vynes with swich licour
As makéth Gallo Brothers shayre price soare;
Whan al vacacioun tyme is used and gonne
And beaches emptye lye beneath the sonne,
Whan freeways clogge with workers offys-bounde
Whyl scole-buses mak roade rage all arounde.
Whan harlots on the Strippe crye to be payd
By Englishe heart-throbbes crusyng for rough trayd
(Whom Nature hath anon depryved of braynes!)
Than longen folk to run polityckal campaygns
And pollsters for to scanne ye publick moode
By telephoun and questionnaire intrude.
And specially, from every countys ende
Of Golden State, to Sacramento wende,
The Governour’s fyn castel for to wyn
And dwel with powre and glorie ful therein.

INCUMBENT was ther, gilty (so they seye)
Of budgets fals. And he was clepéd Gray.
His teethe bryght capt, his heer lyk helmet fixt
Grande master was he of lowe politycks.
Non intrest grupe had he disdaynd to schmuse,
Ne ATLA, CALPERS, Latynos, ne Jewes.
At fund-raisyng ther wiste no wight so wyse,
The governourshippe than becam his pryse,
And hem that to him had obeysance mayd
Saw al hir outlays manyfold repayd.
He seith not ones “nay” when they seith “ye.”
“Do this,” seith they; “al redy, sire,” seith he.
Whyl worthy folk of lower midel kynd
Wyth U-Haul hytched fled east and north to fynd
Som place wherin hir litel wealth might growe
Insted of into state tax coffers flowe.
Yet even swich as staid wer ful appalled
By car-tax hyk, so Gray shal be recalled.

Among us was a TERMINATOR bold,
A player who on many a stage had strold.
Ful big he was of braun, and eke of bone
A manly man, ful wyth testosteroun.
On TV he declayrd his wille to run
His candidacie than was fayr begun.
At ones began disputes upon his lyf
Wych, ere he toke a Kennedy to wyf,
Muche marred had been with lecherye and syn,
And eke was ther some matter of his kin.
His fader, in the German empyrs warres,
Had worn that emblem evry man abhorres,
The twysted cros. To wych his frends replyd:
“Lord Kennedy was eke upon that syd!”
But natheless dispute continued hotte
To knowe was he conservatyf or not.
Of policie he vauch-saifed next to nonne
Save only: “Al for children must be donne!”
Til sore complaynd those membyrs of his factioun
That first applauded this bold Man of Actioun.
And so, to soothe hir rancorous complaynts
The Terminator call’d upon two saynts:
St. Milton and St. Warren. They both blest
His enterprys, and sanctiond thus he prest
Ahead, as al perceived, on victoryes tracke.
(Or if not, reste assuréd, he’ll be backe.)
Latynos had hir man, with mustache speyr
High domed his hed, with fast receding heer.
LIEUTENANT to the Governour was he
And Spanish spak ful faire and fetisly,
After the scole of Ciudad Mexico
For Spanish of Castile he did not knowe.
In Englishe ones, amid a goodlie throng,
His mynde did cruellie betray his tonge
Whan he, addressyng Moorish clerks conven’d
To glorify hir history, had seem’d
To greete hem with the N worde — wych, wel note,
Is deeth to hem that seke the publick vote.
And folies mor lay lurking in his past.
Whan clerk at Fresno he his lotte had cast
In wyth a wilde and heretickall order
Wych ful denys oure nations southren border!
And preche vil crede, wych he refused to shunne:
“For oure race al, for other races nonne!”
The Terminators fader wolde have blushd
To say swich wordes, and spinmystres all rushd
To parse hem to som softe and gentyl sens,
But whyte and blacke alyk had toke offens.
And hard-corre gilty liberalles asyd,
No non-Latyno folk colde him abyd.
And greate as Latyn votyr count maye be
It lokés lyk: Hasta la vista, babye!

A WYF was ther, of Athenes cameth she
And eke her campaygn started on TV.
Of polles and raisyng fundes she knew perchaunce
For she coude of that art the olde daunce,
Her housbonde havyng troden paths polityckal
Before he turned to lifestyl sodomityckal
And lefte her. Yeares befor, whan she was yong
In London towne had somtyme dwelt among
Commentatours, pundittes, and swich kynd.
Wyth one of hem, a much admiréd mynd,
She lyved; but than despayrd, becaus, she said,
Her lovyere was not any gode in bedde.
Forsooth, in al oure mery companye
Ther was none fyner drest than she,
Rodeo Dryves fyn wares she knew ful wel:
Versace, Gucci, Tiffany, Chanel.
Ne fell her heer one lokke out of place
Ne wrinkel one, ne blemishe mark’d her face.
Allas, whan she did speken on TV
Ne man colde folow but one worde in thre.
. . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . .
[This is as much of the manuscript as Mr. Derbyshire has deciphered to date. Stay tuned.]

the long view

Coming soon, Married Eye for the Single Guy

MARRIED GUY: “Dude, what are you doing?”
SINGLE GUY: “Calling my girlfriend.”
MARRIED GUY: “Why?”
SINGLE GUY: “’Cause I said I’d call her around now and, like, she gets upset if I say I’m . . . ”
MARRIED GUY: “Are you married?”
SINGLE GUY: “What? You know I’m not.”
MARRIED GUY: “Answer the question, dude. Are you married?”
SINGLE GUY: “No.”
MARRIED GUY: “Do you want to be married?”
SINGLE GUY: “Um . . . no.”
MARRIED GUY: “Listen to me very closely. You need to stop it with the calling her all the time. Stop it with the romantic stuff and the surprise dinners you prepare and all of that . . . that baloney.”
SINGLE GUY: “Why?”
MARRIED GUY:: “Because I did all of that stuff, too, dude. And now look at me.”
SINGLE GUY: “Really?”
MARRIED GUY: “It starts with the regular phone calls, just to say ‘hi.’ It progresses to hanging out with her married-couple friends. Then it’s a romantic weekend away. People start assuming you’re a couple. You start keeping stuff at her place. She starts keeping stuff at your place. You turn around and all of a sudden she’s making wedding-invitation lists and you’re renting a morning suit and you’re in Hawaii and then suddenly you’re in Bed, Bath & Beyond on a Saturday afternoon buying something called a ‘pillow sham’ and telling her which shower curtain you think is best.”
SINGLE GUY: “Wow.”
MARRIED GUY: “Get. Out. Now.”
SINGLE GUY: “Maybe I won’t call her today.”
MARRIED GUY: “I’m here to help, dude.” (cell phone rings)
SINGLE GUY: “Is that your cell phone?”
MARRIED GUY: “Yeah. It’s my wife. I need to take this.”

Also coming soon, Left Eye for the Right Guy

LEFT GUY: “Great place. Great use of space.”
RIGHT GUY: “Thanks.”
LEFT GUY: “What’s this on the table?”
RIGHT GUY: “An ashtray.”
LEFT GUY: “Okay, that’s the first thing that’s gotta go.”
RIGHT GUY: “But . . . ”
LEFT GUY: “No no no. No buts. I’m here to help you. You want help, right?”
RIGHT GUY: “Right. But what if I have friends who smoke?”
LEFT GUY: “Dump them. You probably also have friends who are into school vouchers and capital-gains-tax elimination, too, right?”
RIGHT GUY: “Well, yeah. I mean, those are pretty popular positions, actually. When you look at the poll numbers . . .”
LEFT GUY: “What’s this?”
RIGHT GUY: “My bookshelf.”
LEFT GUY: “And what’s on the bookshelf?”
RIGHT GUY: “Books.”
LEFT GUY: “Anything by Toni Morrison?”
RIGHT GUY: “Um . . . no.”
LEFT GUY: “Noam Chomsky?”
RIGHT GUY: “No way.”
LEFT GUY: “Then what’s it good for? Let’s pull it down and put up some really explicit homoerotic art.”
RIGHT GUY: “What? But I’m not . . . ”
LEFT GUY: “What do you do for a living?”
RIGHT GUY: “I’m a tax attorney.”
LEFT GUY: “Yeah, that’s going to have to change, too. From now on you’re a sculptor working in large-format installations.”
RIGHT GUY: “What?”
LEFT GUY: “Your studio will be in the garage.”
RIGHT GUY: “What about my car?’
LEFT GUY: “You have a car?”
RIGHT GUY: “Yeah. I’ve got a Chevy Trailblazer. What’s wrong with . . . oh. Oh, right.”
LEFT GUY: “Yeah. ‘Oh, right’ is right. That’s the first thing we’re going to eBay out of here. Get yourself an electric car.”
RIGHT GUY: “I can’t afford an electric car.”
LEFT GUY: “Well then you’d better get cracking on some of those large-format sculptural installations, hadn’t you?”
RIGHT GUY: “But . . .”
LEFT GUY: “Okay! Big problem in the bathroom!”
RIGHT GUY: “What?”
LEFT GUY: “No bidet.”
RIGHT GUY: “So?”
LEFT GUY: “So what happens when the French foreign minister comes over for vegan sandwiches?”
RIGHT GUY: “But he’s never going to . . . ”
LEFT GUY: “I’m just here to help, man.”
RIGHT GUY: “I think this is too much change. Really.
” LEFT GUY: “Do you want tickets to the Dean inaugural or not?”
RIGHT GUY: “Well . . . ”

Also coming soon, Islamist Eye for the Secular Guy

ISLAMIST GUY: “Nice place. Good light.”
SECULAR GUY: “Thanks. My wife is a decorator, so . . . ”
ISLAMIST GUY: “Your wife is a whore.”
SECULAR GUY: “Beg pardon?”
ISLAMIST GUY: “Right after your facial we must stone her to death.”
SECULAR GUY: “Now wait a second . . . ”
ISLAMIST GUY: “Where do you keep your slaves?”
SECULAR GUY: “Um . . . I guess I haven’t gotten around to getting any . . . ”
ISLAMIST GUY: “No problem. Now let’s talk about your back hair.”
SECULAR GUY: “I don’t have any back hair.”
ISLAMIST GUY: “I know. It’s disgusting. I look at you in a tank top and all I see is pink skin. Not a good look. But there’s an easy fix. Rogaine, of course . . . ”
SECULAR GUY: “Rogaine? For my back?”
ISLAMIST GUY: “And shoulders.”
SECULAR GUY: “Wait a second . . . ”
ISLAMIST GUY: “And in the meantime, we’ll fit you with a back-and-shoulder wig.”
SECULAR GUY: “But . . . ”
ISLAMIST GUY: “I smell bacon.”
SECULAR GUY: “Yeah, I just had breakfast.”
ISLAMIST GUY: “You eat bacon?”
SECULAR GUY: “Yeah, I do . . . oh, wait, damn, I forgot. You guys are against that, right?”
ISLAMIST GUY: “Right. But it’s no biggie. It’ll just make the manicure go twice as fast.”
SECULAR GUY: “Why?”
ISLAMIST GUY: “Because I’m going to chop off your left hand.”
SECULAR GUY: “Um . . . ”

books, arts & manners

Pandora Revisited

War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, by Edwin Black (Four Walls Eight Windows, 592 pp., $27)

WESLEY J. SMITH

Edwin Black has written what may well be the best book ever published about the American eugenics movement and the horrific events it spawned. Combining exhaustive research, a very readable style, and just the right touch of moral outrage, Black splendidly conveys the evil depth and breadth of eugenics philosophy, the pseudo-science and social theory that unleashed a half-century of war against society’s most vulnerable citizens.

Eugenics (the name means “good in birth”) originated with an English statistician named Francis Galton. Influenced by the evolutionary theories of his cousin Charles Darwin, and also by Gregor Mendel’s genetic experiments with peas, Galton hoped to improve the human gene pool through “positive eugenics,” that is, encouraging those he deemed to have the best genetic stock, i.e., people like him, to marry and procreate bountifully. This may sound to some innocuous at first blush, but, as history repeatedly has demonstrated, once we accept the pernicious premise that some people are “superior” to others — the core principle of eugenic thinking — we open the door to great evils. The eugenicist who was first to move through that open door was not Galton himself but Charles Benedict Davenport — one of the true villains of the 20th century. As director of the Station for Experimental Evolution in Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y., from its founding in 1904 until his retirement in the mid 1930s, Davenport energetically promoted eugenics. For three decades Cold Spring Harbor was command-central for forces striving to “redirect human evolution,” a euphemism for the war waged by the strong in America and other countries against people with developmental and physical disabilities and those with allegedly inheritable moral failings such as criminality, alcoholism, promiscuity, and pauperism. (Cold Spring Harbor was made possible by generous funding from the Carnegie Institute. Carnegie realized the error of its ways only after Davenport retired; it pulled the plug on its eugenics funding in 1939.)

Involuntary sterilization was the primary weapon that practicing eugenicists wielded against those whom they judged “unfit.” Indiana in 1907 became the first state to legalize forced sterilization; several other states followed suit. But it took a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, the infamous Buck v. Bell (1927), to whip the winds of eugenics into full hurricane strength. Black’s 15-page rendition of the profound injustice done to Carrie Buck by the very people in medicine and law who should have protected her is heartbreaking. The daughter of a prostitute, Carrie became pregnant, allegedly after being raped by her foster cousin. After the baby’s birth, her foster family, who appear to have been exceptionally cruel, had Carrie declared “feebleminded by the laws of heredity” and forcibly institutionalized.

Virginia had just legalized eugenic sterilization. Here was a splendid case for eugenic action: A woman whose prostitute mother was also institutionalized for feeblemindedness had given birth out-of-wedlock to an infant who would undoubtedly also be feebleminded. This was precisely the kind of down-the-generations history that eugenicists were determined to halt. But Carrie’s tormentors saw an even greater opportunity in her plight: They decided to make Carrie a federal test case to gain explicit constitutional sanction for eugenic-sterilization laws. Toward that end, they picked a well-known eugenicist to serve as her lawyer: a man with close ties to Carrie’s institution who had himself approved many eugenic sterilizations.

Unfortunately, these predators got precisely what they were looking for when the misanthropic Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing for an 8–1 Supreme Court, eagerly ruled in favor of sterilizing Carrie Buck: “We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence . . . The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles is enough.”

As we have seen many times in our history, Supreme Court decisions play an important role in social leadership — toward moral redemption or moral ruin, as the case may be. In this case, it was the latter: The Supreme Court’s imprimatur opened the eugenics floodgates. There had been about 6,000 eugenic sterilizations in the U.S. between 1907 and 1927. By 1940, the total had climbed to nearly 36,000. By the time eugenic sterilizations ended in this country in the 1970s, nearly 70,000 Americans had been sterilized, all under the color of law.

One of Black’s most interesting sections details Margaret Sanger’s close ties to eugenics. Black is a fan of Sanger, believing her to have been a “visionary reformer.” He also unequivocally states his support for Planned Parenthood (apparently ignoring that organization’s support for late-term eugenic abortion). Thus, he clearly has no “pro-life” ax to grind, no desire to besmirch Sanger’s memory. This renders his clear and impeccably documented recitation of Sanger’s heartless eugenic beliefs and her tight embrace of social Darwinism — she opposed charitable efforts to assist the poor and downtrodden — all the more devastating.

“Sanger was an ardent, self-confessed eugenicist,” he writes, who turned “her otherwise noble birth-control organizations into a tool for eugenics, which advocated for mass sterilization of so-called defectives, mass incarceration of the unfit, and draconian immigration restrictions.” Not only that, but Sanger engaged repeatedly in what today would be labeled hate-speech, referring “to the lower classes and the unfit as ‘human waste’ not worthy of assistance,” and proudly spouting “the extreme eugenic view that human ‘weeds’ should be ‘exterminated.’” Sanger apparently never shed these odious beliefs; Black quotes speeches and comments she made in favor of eugenics as late as 1953. Such attitudes — basically, a rejection of the sanctity and equality of human life — led Sanger and many other eugenicists to embrace euthanasia of the unfit as another means of eugenically improving society, an approach that Black labels “eugenicide.” Some (although not Sanger) went so far as to advocate the use of “lethal chambers” for the mass killing of the unfit.

Unfortunately, Black’s chapter about the deep and abiding connections between eugenics and euthanasia is his weakest. A man of distinctly modernist instincts, Black strives to separate eugenic euthanasia from mercy killing for reasons of pain and illness. But that is far easier said than done: Permitting euthanasia of the seriously ill in the Netherlands has led directly to the legitimization and legalization of eugenic infanticide of babies born with disabilities. (According to a 1997 article in the British medical journal The Lancet, 8 percent of all deaths of Dutch infants result from lethal injections by doctors.) In Canada, Robert Latimer became a hero of the international euthanasia movement — and of many in the Canadian general public — when he murdered his 12-year-old daughter Tracy because she had cerebral palsy. The trial judge even called Tracy’s murder “altruistic.” (For those interested in a deeper exploration of the many ties between eugenics and euthanasia, I recommend the recent book A Merciful End: The Euthanasia Movement in Modern America, by Ian Dowbiggin.)

Thankfully, the U.S. balked at implementing eugenic euthanasia. But, as every reader knows, Germany did not: More than 250,000 disabled Germans were systematically murdered between 1939 and 1945. What is less known is that much of the inspiration for the Nazis’ eugenic euthanasia did not derive from Hitler’s ideology; rather, he and other German euthanasia advocates derived their inspiration from American eugenicists — who provided their German counterparts with what Black calls “the inspirational blueprints for Germany’s rising tide of race biologists and race-based hate mongers.”

The result was the Holocaust — and Black does not shrink from it, taking us on a harrowing journey through the eugenic horrors of the Third Reich and into the very bowels of Buchenwald and Auschwitz. It is difficult reading, but it is a subject we must repeatedly engage if “never again” is to remain more than a slogan.

For obvious reasons, eugenics faded from view after World War II. But it was only hibernating. It has reawakened, Black warns, in the guise of a utopian “newgenics,” advocated by “self-ordained experts” in bioethics and bioscience who urge that we harness the nature-changing power of genetics and the energy of entrepreneurial enterprise to once again chase in vain after the mirage of human perfection.

Black’s warning is well worth heeding. Over the last 30 years, academics and bioethicists have espoused beliefs and attitudes that are eerily reminiscent of those of Charles Davenport and his ilk, ideas that now, like then, threaten the most weak and vulnerable among us. As with the old eugenics, the new eugenics is led by the intelligentsia and academic elite. Once again, the most respected foundations are funding it. Today, the belief in the inherent moral equality of all human life has been badly undermined by advocates who would judge human moral worth upon subjective “quality of life” criteria. There is even a nascent social movement called transhumanism, which advocates seizing control of human evolution and creating a utopian “post-human” future through genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and cyber-modification of the human genome.

Many advocates of the new eugenics hubristically believe they can avoid the horrors of the old eugenics. But the acorn does not fall far from the tree. As Black’s powerful history demonstrates, once the odious notion that some of us are better than others of us achieves a critical mass of legitimacy, inexorable forces are set in motion that drive society with the implacable force of gravity toward the abyss.

Mr. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and an attorney for the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide. His current book is the revised and updated Forced Exit: The Slippery Slope from Assisted Suicide to Legalized Murder.

FOR YOU

I have taken your shadow
and set it as a sail for my fragile boat.

You tuned it to the North Star
far out in a rough sea.

You said it carried you to me.

I am lost in a river of heavy mist.
I cannot see the stars; I cannot see the shore.

But the wind and this sail
seem to know each other so well.

They have traveled this river before.

In their own way they are telling me
to trust what I cannot see,

that only my own blindness
can bring me to your door.

— OLIVIA SIMPSON ELLIS

Miller’s Centrist Tale

The Two Percent Solution: Fixing America’s Problems in Ways Liberals and Conservatives Can Love, by Matthew Miller (PublicAffairs, 283 pp., $26)

DAVID GRATZER

If good politics is more art than science, as Otto von Bismarck once suggested, then German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder is a master artist. In less than five years, Schroeder has skillfully avoided certain political death, pulling off a reelection victory after trailing by 9 percent. But his greatest masterpiece is his overhaul of Germany’s state-run health-care system, a plan that was endorsed by his political rivals this summer. Schroeder is giving the health-care system a dose of market reform: For the first time since the Second World War, patients must pay small fees when they visit a doctor or fill a prescription. Private insurers, once viewed with a skeptical eye by members of Schroeder’s Social Democratic party, will be given a more prominent role. But there are also leftist ideas in his plan, such as price controls for pharmaceuticals. Schroeder’s reforms come from the right and the left, aimed at twin goals: curbing runaway spending while maintaining the country’s universal health-care system.

Matthew Miller, a syndicated columnist and contributor to The Atlantic Monthly, doesn’t mention Germany in his clever new book — but Schroeder’s ideologically ambiguous reforms seem to be the exact template Miller espouses for change in the U.S. The spirit of compromise dominates this elegant read; labeling Miller can prove tricky. He is a Democrat, and served as a senior adviser to President Clinton’s Office of Management and Budget. He views the impeachment of his former boss as entirely politically motivated; he frets about defense spending; he portrays conservatives as obtuse Neanderthals. But he’s also no ordinary Democrat: He favors Social Security privatization with a zeal that would make the boys at the Cato Institute blush, and his views on Medicare reform would give Senator Kennedy heartburn.

There’s an old psychiatry joke that Attention Deficit Disorder is when your son breaks your neighbor’s living-room window with a baseball, but psychopathy is when your neighbor’s son breaks yours. For Miller, Democrats are timid, afraid of repeating the HillaryCare debacle and of offending suburban fiscal sensibilities; Republicans, in contrast, are just ignorant and psychologically damaged. Still, he remains optimistic. Solutions to vexing public-policy problems are not impossible, he says, but they require that liberals and conservatives set aside their differences.

Take health care. Polls consistently suggest that Americans are worried about the issue. This should not be surprising, because health insurance is built on the dated concept of third-party payership; in other words, someone else is paying for your health care. That’s an inherently unstable situation. Further complicating the picture is an almost endless list of federal and state regulations. In New York, for example, every policy is required to cover a variety of services, including infertility treatments, second opinions, and podiatric care. All Americans deserve healthy, bunion-free feet, but should podiatric coverage really be required by law? If car insurance were designed like health insurance, our employers would pay for coverage that included everything from gas to new paint jobs — and millions would not be able to afford a car at all.

To work out a solution for American health care, Miller sits down with two ideologically opposed congressmen, Republican Jim McCrery of Louisiana and Democrat Jim McDermott of Washington. McCrery favors a free market for insurance; McDermott fantasizes about a Canadian-style single-payer system. But both recognize the importance of compromise. McDermott concedes that private plans will deliver the best care to Americans; McCrery accepts a role for government in looking after the ailing poor. By chapter’s end, they reach a neat agreement, embracing conservative and liberal ideas to forward a more sane (and universal) health-care system. Most remarkably, McCrery and McDermott both see the folly of employer-sponsored health insurance: Your boss doesn’t buy your food, clothes, or home — why should he buy your health care?

The bad news is that, like so many great health-care schemes, their compromise is totally unworkable. What they have agreed on is total price control for health-insurance premiums, set uniformly for all Americans; this, coupled with other requirements, would make health insurance something more like a regulated utility.

This compromise is a perfect example of Miller’s work: innovative in its approach but not innovative in the solution it proposes. Scrapping third-party payership is a step in the right direction, but politicians have already spent a long time micromanaging health care in the way Miller envisions: In attempting to protect patients with various measures aimed at safety and fairness, they have succeeded chiefly in distorting the health-insurance market. To date, the result has been high-cost insurance and millions of uninsured Americans. Far from being a remedy, government regulation is part of the problem. The Miller-McCrery-McDermott health-care plan is a non-starter.

Miller tries to put together a similar compromise on education. He argues that school vouchers could, in principle, appeal to everyone, and tries to persuade different groups. In the end, though, it looks like he’d have more luck trying to craft a Middle East peace settlement. His proposals are shot down by various union officials. Kweisi Mfume, president of the NAACP, agrees to Miller’s voucher idea — only to have an aide call later to say that no, he doesn’t, really. Another Miller education initiative — higher teacher pay for greater teacher accountability — falls on deaf union ears. Moon landings and fiber-optic technology are feasible, but appraising the performance of a teacher is impossible.

Some of Miller’s other ideas are not quite as well conceived. For example, he likes the concept of a living wage, whereby the government would top up private-sector salaries so they reach $9 an hour. Neat stuff — but it would surely become a giant corporate handout as companies pared back salaries so that their workers would qualify. Miller’s lengthy list of initiatives also includes public day care and public funding of campaigns.

Miller reasons that America could afford all these initiatives by spending two cents on every dollar generated by the economy (or $220 billion, a 10 percent increase in federal spending). He says his plan would deliver the realization of LBJ’s dreams with a government that’s smaller than it was under President Reagan — but most of the money to finance his proposals comes from hiking taxes, trimming the growth of defense spending, and canceling the Bush tax cuts. Howard Dean would find little to object to in this agenda.

Miller seeks to reinvigorate American politics from the political center. He draws ideas from liberals and conservatives, envisioning Schroeder-style compromises. But reality intervenes: German health care, for example, is still centrally planned and inflexible. Schroeder celebrated his compromise this summer, but he will be back to the drawing board next summer when costs are higher and the problems have resurfaced. That is the fate of “New Democrats”: They champion thinking big, but end up thinking big government.

Mr. Gratzer, a doctor and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is the author of Code Blue: Reviving Canada’s Health Care System.

Providence Lost — and Found?

Law, Darwinism, and Public Education: The Establishment Clause and the Challenge of Intelligent Design, by Francis J. Beckwith (Rowman & Littlefield, 224 pp., $24.95)

M. D. AESCHLIMAN

As long ago as 1941, in his still-classic Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage, Jacques Barzun wrote of the Darwinian controversy that it is “a major incident . . . in the dispute between the believers in consciousness and the believers in mechanical action; the believers in purpose and the believers in pure chance.” He went on to say that “the issue is not local and limited but universal and permanent.” Sixty years later, in his magisterial From Dawn to Decadence, Barzun complained that in regard to the facts and presuppositions of evolution “the diversity of views is rarely confided to the student or educated reader.”

A succession of defeats in the U.S. courts has afflicted those groups of parents, teachers, and legislators who have crafted state laws that would allow or require the teaching of views about human origins and development that differ from the hard Darwinian line, views that take seriously the possibility of intelligent design and purpose and allow the inference from it to a Creator. The first of these great defeats — actually, a Pyrrhic victory — was of course the humiliation of William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes “monkey trial” in 1925, at the hands of Clarence Darrow and his appreciative corps of sophisticated and scornful journalists, including the acidulous H. L. Mencken. Bryan’s worries about Social Darwinism, immoralism, and atheism, and his concern for local control of schools, were then and have often since been mocked, despite their tragic relevance to the moral-political history of the period 1914–1945, not to speak of our own time. The play and film Inherit the Wind made Bryan’s name a joke, destroying his reputation and the memory of his long, noble life as a democratic political reformer.

The most recent major legal defeat for the effort to break the hard-Darwinian monopoly came in 1987, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana statute in Edwards v. Aguillard. The Edwards case is a prime focus of Francis Beckwith’s careful, detailed new book.

The Edwards decision had something in common with earlier hard-Darwinian victories: It was based on the view that the only alternative to full-strength Darwinism is a thinly veiled Fundamentalist creation science that can be easily dismissed as an impermissible attempt to establish religious orthodoxy in science teaching. But the problems with hard Darwinism have not been exclusively religious: The list of its scientific and philosophical opponents is long and impressive. (Students, of course, are rarely told this.) Critics from Darwin’s time to our own have noted, for example, the unwarranted, illogical attribution of purposiveness to “natural selection.” In the words of the philosopher Richard Spilsbury, in Providence Lost: A Critique of Darwinism: “The basic objection [to Darwinism is] that it confers miraculous powers on inappropriate agents. In essence, it is an attempt to supernaturalize nature, to endow unthinking processes with more-than-human powers — including the power of creating thinkers. . . . I find it impossible to share this faith that supra-human achievements can be encompassed by sub-human means and sub-rational mechanisms.”

Beckwith’s book shows conclusively that the opponents of hard Darwinism have a strong case, one that cannot be marginalized as a sectarian throwback. He provides a detailed introduction to a school of scientists and philosophers who have developed the critique of Darwinism to a high level of sophistication. This “Intelligent Design” school has always had proponents among physicists — perhaps now more than at any other time during the past two centuries, owing to the widespread acceptance of “Big Bang” cosmology. But it also has support among biologists and mathematicians, including figures such as Michael Behe and William Dembski, who have published widely and influentially.

The chief publicist of this movement has been Phillip Johnson, a former law professor at Berkeley who has been most dogged in identifying and critiquing the key argumentative and logical move that has underpinned the hard-Darwinian ascendancy: The exclusive naturalism of the hard Darwinians’ methodology ultimately entails that materialism will be the only acceptable worldview. Yet, as true rationalists have tried to explain to students ever since the days of Socrates, science is a subset of reason but not the whole set; it derives its principles and procedures from reason. “Scientific reasoning,” Alfred North Whitehead wrote, is itself — and must be — “completely dominated by the presupposition that mental functionings are not properly part of nature.” The assertion that they are part of nature is self-refuting, because it robs all thoughts and statements of any possible rational validity or truth.

In the battle between consciousness and mechanism, between human and sub-human, proponents of intelligent design wish simply to have students in tax-supported public schools introduced not just to materialist principles, but also to the arguments and evidences for the existence of design and purpose in the self, nature, and the universe — arguments and evidences that have persuaded and inspired reflective persons across many cultures and many centuries. Materialism should not be our established orthodoxy.

The demotion of the Bible in American culture may be irreversible, even though for Western people it was in fact the marriage of Hebrew monotheism and Greek rationalism, consummated in the New Testament, that eventually gave us the idea of the regularity of nature and its penetrability by reason. As Whitehead, Pierre Duhem, C. S. Lewis, and Stanley Jaki have shown, in the fullness of time this gave us the scientific revolution of the 17th century and the scientific and technological achievements that have grown from it. But the Bible is not a science book and cannot replace the proper elaborations of the sciences, though it is a permanent challenge to the materialistic tendencies of many modern scientists and the technological barbarity of much modern life.

Francis Beckwith’s judicious, important book deserves a wide audience. As he makes abundantly clear, the establishment clause of the First Amendment applies also to atheism, scientific materialism, and secular humanism, which are not to be favored over their opponents in tax-supported institutions of education at which attendance is mandatory. As Justice William O. Douglas rightly and famously wrote in Zorach v. Clauson (1952), American political “institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.” The inference to a Creator from the recognition of order, pattern, and design in self, nature, and universe must be a personal one, but the recognition and explanation of such evidences — the claim that there is a Providence to be found — cannot rightly be prohibited from our schools as long as this constitutional republic bears any trace and memory of its own founding.

Mr. Aeschliman is professor of education at Boston University, adjunct professor of English at the University of Italian Switzerland, and author of The Restitution of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Case Against Scientism.

Barreling Around in Central Asia

The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia, by Lutz Kleveman (Atlantic Monthly, 288 pp., $24)

CARLOS RAMOS-MROSOVSKY

This ambitious book is an account of the international competition for oil and influence in one of history’s most turbulent regions. Rudyard Kipling coined the phrase “the Great Game” for the 19th-century rivalry between Russia and Britain for empire in Asia; today, the players and the stakes are different, but the game continues — perhaps deadlier than ever. The author, veteran German reporter Lutz Kleveman, explores the link between the quest for Caspian oil and the war on terror.

On the whole, the book impresses. Kleveman risked his neck traveling across Central Asia to interview a diverse cast of characters: diplomats and mullahs, businessmen and border guards. A compact style and a sharp eye for detail — we learn how the dictator of Turkmenistan shuts down his capital for an annual all-you-can-eat “Day of the Melon” — help the reader digest a huge and complex subject.

The world is interested in Central Asia because of oil. Vast reserves of petroleum — up to 200 billion barrels — lie beneath the Caspian Sea. These supplies easily rival OPEC’s, making them a strategic and economic prize sought by three great powers: Russia, China, and the United States. Each has a preferred pipeline route and is determined to win the region’s wily (and frequently corrupt) leaders to its side.

Moscow wants the oil pumped north so that Russia can profit from the economic domination of its former empire. (Most countries in the region have precious little else to export.) Beijing wants the oil pumped east into Xinjiang to power China’s industrialization. Yet another player — Tehran — is offering to pump or swap the Caspian crude southward to tanker terminals on the Persian Gulf. Washington certainly does not want Central Asia’s oil producers to be economically — and politically — dependent on Russia or China, and much less on Iran. U.S. policymakers favor a complicated route that would stretch from Azerbaijan’s Baku oil fields, through Georgia, and then on to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. Competition among these plans makes for rough diplomacy, and sometimes even war.

Kleveman’s account of the breakaway Georgian province of Abkhazia offers just one example of the obscure but ruthless power struggles of the new great game. In the early 1990s, Moscow encouraged the Abkhaz ethnic minority to rebel against the central government. The war threatened to make the country too unstable for Western pipeline investors, and furnished the Kremlin with a pretext for marching Russian troops back into Georgia, this time as “peacekeepers.” Fighting continues to this day under the drooping gaze of a U.N. observation force.

Russia does not officially recognize the Abkhaz separatists, but Kleveman says Moscow remains intimately involved with them. The rebels’ self-styled foreign minister (whose office, Kleveman observes, contains seven framed pornographic pictures) is open about the Kremlin’s support: “Moscow is an important ally for us . . . so what? Georgia is getting arms from America, is it not?” The response from a Georgian representative is also blunt: “We need the big oil pipeline so that we will continue to have the United States on our side against Russia.”

What, then, of the war on terrorism? Its link to oil is, after all, the “big idea” of the book. Here, sadly, Kleveman’s analysis begins to disappoint. Having brilliantly explained the battle for oil, he struggles — unsuccessfully — to explain the war on terrorism in the same terms. He frankly admits to a predisposition to find the roots of conflict in “the struggle for raw materials”; in this specific case, while he notes that the U.S. military effort in the region “appears” to be targeted against terrorists, his book might just as easily leave one thinking that the war on terrorism is just another resource war — no different, really, from Russia’s intervention in Abkhazia. There are plenty of dark allusions here to the Bush administration’s oil ties; Kleveman also tells us outright that, despite all “the rhetoric of disarmament and human rights,” the Iraq war was actually about “control over the earth’s remaining fossil reserves, as envisaged in the May 2001 Cheney report on U.S. national energy policy.” Nearly all the people Kleveman interviews, be they ministers or mechanics, echo this theme. A characteristic quote comes from a Kazakh pipeline engineer: “Who believes anyway that for the Americans this so-called ‘war on terror’ is about Osama bin Laden? This war is about us — it is our oil they want.”

A not-quite-subconscious European delight in portraying Americans as clumsy imperialists is evident in Kleveman’s later chapters. His journalistic façade slips noticeably when he laments “how many soldiers and civilians have so far died in Iraq and other Great Game battlefields for the sake of brazen energy imperialism.” Nowhere does he even try to explain why the U.S. spent a decade embargoing Iraqi oil it could have bought cheaply. Oil is, of course, an important factor in countless aspects of the war on terror and American foreign policy. We should care about oil. But it is a fundamental misreading of U.S. foreign policy to imagine the war on terrorism as an exercise in energy imperialism. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 threatened much more crucial national interests than the price of crude.

Even so, Kleveman’s book reminds us of how other actors in the region view us. Afghans, Russians, Chinese, and Uzbeks (Kleveman did not interview Iraqis) all explain the U.S. presence as energy imperialism. Whether this is true is less important than that it is thought to be true. In this sense, too, Kleveman’s editorializing about the U.S. is informative even if it is annoying. He is clearly an intelligent observer whose views are representative of a large proportion of global opinion. (Nor, indeed, is Kleveman that anti-American — compared, at least, to the 30 percent of young Germans who claim that the U.S. government itself bombed the World Trade Center.) The war on terror is in many respects a battle for international opinion. After a brilliant exposition of the competition for oil, Kleveman is able to wrongly diagnose the war on terror as a war for oil; his error is common, and suggests how great a challenge we still face.

Mr. Ramos-Mrosovsky, a former NR intern, is a student at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He is the founding editor of American Foreign Policy, a publication at Princeton.

Bring Down the Walls

MICHAEL POTEMRA

If your heart beats with benevolence, and specifically with a high ethical commitment to raising up the poor people of the earth, you should be going to pro-globalization rallies. That’s the contention of Swedish activist Johan Norberg in his marvelous new book In Defense of Global Capitalism (Cato, 331 pp., $12.95). Norberg, a fellow at the Swedish think tank Timbro, has compiled a detailed and convincing case that capitalism indeed offers the greatest hope for improving the material well-being of the world’s poor. The facts he adduces about globalization are quite compelling:

Between 1965 and 1998, the average world citizen’s income practically doubled, from $2,497 to $4,839, adjusted for purchasing power and inflation. That increase has not come about through the industrialized nations multiplying their incomes. During this period the richest fifth of the world’s population increased their average income from $8,315 to $14,623, or by roughly 75 percent. For the poorest fifth of the world’s population, the increase has been faster still, with average income more than doubling during the same period from $551 to $1,137.

In short, when things are going well — which is to say, when freedom thrives and economic and political Berlin Walls tumble — the rich get richer, but the poor get richer at an even faster rate. A study sponsored by the Norwegian Institute for Foreign Affairs found that, once the statistics are adjusted to account for purchasing power, inequality among countries has actually decreased since the 1970s — and especially rapidly in the 1990s, when the trend toward globalization was in full force.

The global distribution of wealth remains dramatically unequal, admits Norberg, but this is because some poor countries still have too little capitalism — while other poor countries, the ones that have chosen economic liberalization and free trade, “have had faster growth than [even] the affluent countries.” U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan recognized this principle when he said: “The main losers in today’s very unequal world are not those who are too much exposed to globalization. They are those who have been left out.”

All this amounts to a forceful rebuke to the conventional wisdom of op-ed socialists and rent-a-mob slogan-chanters. Norberg is pointing the compassionate in a direction that will, in the end, make the objects of their compassion better off — not just materially, but in terms of a more basic human fulfillment. “The most important thing of all,” he notes, “is liberty itself, the independence and dignity that autonomy confers on people who have been living under oppression.” We should love capitalism not chiefly because it means we can own more stuff, but because it gives us more power to be ourselves, to fulfill the nature God gave us. This is an eloquent and passionate book; a young man’s book, but one full of mature wisdom.

Mavens of international affairs welcome just about any new book by Henry Kissinger. But Crisis: The Anatomy of Two Major Foreign Policy Crises (Simon & Schuster, 564 pp., $30) is captivating in a novel way: This highly suspenseful minute-by-minute account of the Arab–Israeli war of October 1973 and the fall of Saigon in April 1975 consists largely of the phone transcripts of then-Secretary of State Kissinger.

The phrase “fog of war” refers to the difficulty of making intelligent decisions in combat. Time is very short, the facts on the ground are rapidly changing, and your information isn’t 100 percent reliable — yet you are faced nonetheless with the necessity of choice. This book shows how similar diplomacy can be to combat, and gives the reader a fly-on-the-wall perspective on the nerve-wracking process of how crises are met and, if all goes well, contained.

Most of the volume is devoted to the Mideast war of 1973, in which Soviet attempts at overreach in the region risked touching off a war between the superpowers. The domestic backdrop further complicated the effort for peace: Even as Kissinger was negotiating with Brezhnev in Moscow one Saturday evening in October, President Nixon was perpetrating the notorious “Saturday Night Massacre” — in effect, firing the people who were investigating his misdeeds — and deepening the crisis that would destroy his presidency. Kissinger succeeded in thwarting the Soviets’ proposal for a joint superpower intervention in the region, and also their backup threat of a unilateral Soviet move against Israel. But he describes how leaders in Congress reacted to this diplomatic success: “They were at once supportive, rudderless, and ambivalent. . . . Their support reflected more the Vietnam-era isolationism than a strategic assessment. They opposed a joint U.S.-Soviet force because they wanted no American troops sent abroad; the American component of the proposed force bothered them a great deal more than the Soviet one.”

Kissinger’s book offers readers a sometimes uncomfortably close look at the world of high-stakes diplomacy.

Moshe Aumann served as consul general and minister-counselor for church relations at the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. From this vantage point he was able to witness the remarkable process of conciliation that has been taking place between Jews and Christians in the U.S. in recent years. His new book, Conflict & Connection: The Jewish-Christian-Israel Triangle (Gefen, 292 pp., $22.95), is an inspiring account of how, over the past half-century, the Christian world in general has been moving “in a new direction: the direction of ecumenism, reconciliation, and a spirit of inquiry aimed at a better mutual understanding” with other faiths, and with Judaism in particular. It’s already well known, for example, that American Evangelicals offer strong support for the state of Israel; less publicized, at least so far, has been the progress of Christian denominations generally in confronting the legacy of anti-Semitism. (Part of the problem is that the media love to play up highly politicized — but decidedly minor — incidents like the recent brouhaha over Mel Gibson’s Jesus movie. Talking about Hollywood is much more interesting than reading the umpteenth Presbyterian declaration of respect for Jews.)

Aumann points to a 1965 declaration by the Catholic Church — the Vatican II document Nostra Aetate — as pivotal in this history. He writes that Nostra Aetate was important not just because it rejected, at long last, the accusation of collective Jewish guilt in the death of Jesus, but also because it served as “a signal for the launching of yet another ground-breaking development” — the establishment of an ongoing Catholic-Jewish dialogue, which, in turn, emboldened Protestant denominations to go even further in reaching out to Jews. The author correctly points out that, even before Vatican II, there had been occasional pro-Jewish statements from Christian spokesmen. But he is also surely correct in believing that Nostra Aetate was incomparable in its impact, “a shock wave still reverberating through the Christian world.”

The years since 1965 have been marked by a proliferation of statements and dialogues betokening a warmer relationship between Christians and Jews. Problems, of course, remain. Christians are told, as part of their religion, to go forth and preach to all nations; Jews, mindful of the long history of persecutions in the name of the Christian faith, are understandably leery of “proselytism.” But even this circle might, in the end, get squared. Aumann quotes an interesting distinction made by Walter Cardinal Kasper, an important figure in Pope John Paul II’s Curia: “The term mission, in its proper sense, refers to conversion from false gods and idols to the true and one God, who revealed Himself in the salvation history with His elected people. Thus mission, in this strict sense, cannot be used with regard to Jews, who believe in the true and one God. . . . The Church believes that Judaism, i.e., the faithful response of the Jewish people to God’s irrevocable covenant, is salvific for them, because God is faithful to His promises.” A Christian who proclaimed his own faith to Jews with this kind of expression of respect for Judaism’s special status would be much less likely to be viewed by them as a threat — and the chance of a productive discussion would, accordingly, be greater. St. John was giving very practical advice when he wrote that “perfect love casteth out fear.”

The Bible in English (Yale, 899 pp., $40), by David Daniell, is one of the season’s more massive doorstops, but for anyone interested in the subject it’s a must-read. Daniell devotes less than 10 percent of his tome to the noisy Bible-translation controversies of the past 100 years; that ground has been thoroughly covered elsewhere. He focuses instead on the long-term social and theological impact of vernacular Scripture in the Anglo-American world over the past five centuries.

A well-known biographer of William Tyndale, Daniell makes an impassioned and persuasive case for the centrality of Tyndale in this story. He also argues for the traditional narrative of the Reformation (“people reading Paul”). This is valuable as a corrective to recent historiography that downplays the positive aspects of the Reformation, but is somewhat weakened by the author’s excessively angry tone in discussing the Catholics of the period. (For example, he declares that the pre-Reformation Church’s opinion that widespread reading of the Bible was not intended by Christ is not just mistaken or unwise, but “surely blasphemous.”)

Daniell mounts a good defense of the 1560 Geneva Bible, which he believes has been unfairly eclipsed by the famous King James Version of 1611. He is also capable of the occasional amusing analogy, e.g.: “There is a pattern in the making of altogether new translations. They are like city buses. Nothing comes for a long time, and then several arrive together.”

Last year, Lynne Cheney published a terrific children’s book called America: A Patriotic Primer. This year she offers a companion volume, A is for Abigail: An Almanac of Amazing American Women (Simon & Schuster, 48 pp., $16.95), which focuses on one of the most heartening aspects of the American story. “In Abigail Adams’s time,” Cheney writes in her preface, “women could not go to college, become professionals, own property once they were married, or vote. The transformation of women’s lives from then to now is one of our great national narratives, an inspiring story that our children deserve to know.” She is careful to point out, however, that women’s record of achievement did not begin in the age of “women’s rights”; women were making history, and shaping America’s character, even “before their [own] rights and capabilities were fully recognized.”

The American story is, fundamentally, a story of possibility. Cheney’s lovely, illustrated volume tells children about what women have made of that possibility. At a time when America is fighting against theocratic regimes that torture, silence, and otherwise oppress women, the book also offers parents an excellent opportunity to discuss with their children what our war against terrorism is all about.

Ronald Reagan liked to say that the federal budget reminded him of a baby: “an enormous appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.” All infants start out that way, so parents must undertake a task of civilization. Karen Santorum (wife of U.S. senator Rick) provides them some help, with Everyday Graces: A Child’s Book of Good Manners (ISI, 450 pp., $25), her useful new anthology of instructive stories and poems. This is a textbook on basic goodness; as Mrs. Santorum points out in her introduction, good manners have nothing to do with snobbery — and everything to do with kindness to others.

The Upper Upper West Side

RICHARD BROOKHISER

One of the goals of hopeful New Yorkers is to have a place outside New York, to escape periodically the crush and fret. But can they ever escape other New Yorkers?

Our place is two hours from the city, in a valley on the flank of the Catskills. This August the town of Rochester (not the city), where our house is located, celebrated its tricentennial. The party began with a perfect parade, only 25 minutes long. The line of march included a town official in colonial costume, riding a golf cart; the trucks of three local fire departments; a snowplow from the highway department; the Pop Warner football team and its cheerleaders; the VFW; an active-duty soldier in this FW, recently home from Iraq (big cheers for him); assorted old cars; somebody’s Belgian draft horses; somebody else’s llamas; trucks from three big local farms. One of these bore a sign with a proud boast: “Saunderskill Farm, Est. 1680 / Salutes Rochester, Est. 1703.” Even a weekender deals with many of these people regularly. Those born and raised in the valley, of course, have been dealing with them, in some cases, since the 17th century.

The valley sleeps like Rip Van Winkle, yet it is only two hours from Metropolis. How is it still different? There is no place to go for coffee. There are two diners where coffee can be gotten, but people go there (early) to eat. You have more luck finding maple syrup or heirloom tomatoes. The whole concept of coffee as an off-hours jolt is out of place, since all hours are given to work or rest. The many weapons in the valley are perfectly legal, and fired at targets or creatures. Soon enough the bow hunters and their camouflage will appear, followed by the rifle hunters and their anti-camouflage of orange vests. No one walks. A few kids ride bicycles or ATVs; everyone else drives cars, or trucks filled with lumber, tree limbs, or bulky unfamiliar machinery. Peg Leg Bates, a one-legged tap dancer, had a resort up in the hills that drew a black clientele, yet almost no black people live here. There are plenty of Mexicans, though, harvesting all those tomatoes. NR would tell the farmers to invest in new machinery, though I can’t see how it would pick the bosomy, misshapen heirlooms. There is more fauna in the city than we usually think, though except for birds, vermin, and pets, it is confined to the city’s parks. The fauna in the valley is freer and stranger. Once we saw in the trees out our kitchen door a fisher, a low-slung bounding beast like a large weasel, evidently furtive and somewhat dangerous. My wife named him Fisher Ames, after a Federalist congressman of the oldest school. We imagine him in the hemlocks, berating democrats and Jacobins. In the middle of the night we have heard barred owls, in their exigent baritones, asking “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all?” Between owls, there is stillness. When the bugs die, there will be another layer of it; when the rustling leaves fall, there will be a second; when the stream freezes, there will be the final third.

For all those differences how is the valley changing? For it does change. A few large farms anchor the valley floor, where the soil is best. As the hills rise and the ground turns rockier, the farms have molted away. One became a dude ranch where urban cowboys herd patient cattle. A few have converted to stables, or Christmas tree farms. In the local paper I read about an old Eastern European man around the corner from me who still keeps dairy cows the way he and his late brother did for most of their 80 years. When he dies, his place will convert to mullein, then to brush. Here and there are signs of farms that have gone the whole way: backyard chicken coops, grey with weather and time; family graveyards, thick with trees. People become truckers; or they work for the town, or the prison. They can’t wait tables at coffee houses.

Many of the old properties are divided into house lots, as in the suburbs, only minus the services. The pressure comes partly from local people who want better houses, mainly from New Yorkers seeking second homes. A friend told me he has been seeing a lot of lesbians at the dump. It was not a criticism, only an observation. I too am part of the process. My house started as a hunter’s cabin. Someone made it a weekend cottage. I added oil heat. Up the road my wife told me to stop at an unusually promising yard sale. Most show, as they flash by the side-view mirror, old toys and lugubrious clothes. This one displayed Turkish rugs. The seller turned out to be an old student at my wife’s psychoanalytic institute. The Catskills: the Upper Upper West Side.

The country place is an old urban dream. As New York City has grown, the country has fled before it. Gouverneur Morris’s estate was in what is now the South Bronx. He told Mme de Staël that “by the middle of September” she could “repose after your fatigues . . . gather peaches, take walks, make verses, romances; in a word . . . do whatever you please.” Alexander Hamilton’s country place was in what is now Harlem, Clement Moore’s in what is now Chelsea. As New Yorkers follow the countryside, they worry about other people like themselves. For twenty years New York magazine has been proclaiming the death of the Hamptons. Once they said northwestern Connecticut would replace it; now they are saying the Catskills.

We came back to the city on Labor Day. It was cold and raining. We saw two movies in one day, one about drag kings, one about naked babes in the south of France. We walked out of both of them. We had dinner at our Brazilian restaurant at ten o’clock, finished with café com leite. Home again.

on the right

WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.

Educational Blues

NEW YORK, AUGUST 26

There is some gloom in the land, expressing doubts as to whether the good old USA can successfully contend with all the burdens we face. At one end, there are the negative fiscal figures. The morning news tells us that the federal budget deficit next year may exceed the $500 billion anticipated.

We hear from Sen. John McCain that we are critically shorthanded in Iraq. And we learn incidentally that Iraq’s police-training institutes just can’t handle the 28,000 Iraqis we proposed to train as policemen.

We are told in a front-page story in the New York Times that President Bush’s “compassion” agenda has fallen gravely short of expectation, and that, in the words of one plaintiff, “[Bush’s] policy has not come even close to matching his words.” That, of course, should not be surprising — that there should be a disparity between the unburdened rhetoric of the politician, and the downed ducks spread out on the floor for us. But there is a special exasperation tracing to the paradox of high unemployment, and work undone.

On education, the indictment becomes fervid. A Times editorial speaks of straitened state budgets resulting in underfunding of education. Legislative “indifference” has led to raised tuition rates. “Some universities have begun to cannibalize themselves by increasing class size and cutting course offerings, making it difficult for students to find the courses they need to graduate.” This “downward spiral” began in the 1980s “when many state legislatures began to back away from their commitments to public higher education.”

That is not the view of things held by the California Association of Scholars, a branch of the National Association of Scholars. Their spokesman, professor and author Thomas Reeves, sends out what he terms “Heretical Thoughts for a New Academic Year.” These thoughts look at the doomsayers on U.S. education and ask truly subversive questions.

Professor Reeves gives some figures. “In Michigan, Colorado, Texas, and New York, academic tests have been altered or thrown out because of low scores.” But some data cannot be hidden. “A third of the freshmen at the relatively select University of Wisconsin-Madison do not return for a second year. I toiled for decades on a Wisconsin campus on which a mere 18 percent of the entering freshmen ever graduate.” That’s one problem, those who undertake to go to college but drop out.

The suspicion grows that the emphasis should be on reforming the work done in secondary education. High-school dropout rates have been sharply reduced, from 27 percent in 1960 to 11 percent today. But SAT scores move in the opposite direction, and professors addressing matriculated freshmen are often dismayed not only by the lack of preparation, but by the lack of genuine interest. “The most well-intentioned professor cannot educate those who refuse to be educated. All too often, such students demand that they be passed through the system and awarded a diploma, as they were in high school.”

America is a can-do society. We educate tens of millions and fight successful wars and create poets and musicians. But one reason we prevail against bad winds is that we isolate our shortcomings and criticize them, and end up coping simultaneously with college standards in Wisconsin and terrorists in Iraq. This aptitude for finding a way to do it is the American thing that most annoys our European friends.

Yale’s Capitalist Swine

NEW YORK, AUGUST 29

At this writing, Senator Joe Lieberman is scheduled to appear at Yale to give a speech supporting the strikers. It will be called, “Why Politicians Running for President Support Your Strike.” Jesse Jackson was already there. Say what you will about the wilting Jesse, he still has the power to bring listless partisans to their feet. What was his theme? You can get an idea from the name of the strikers’ tax-deductible organization. It is called “Hungry for Justice,” and they have a tame bishop there to handle contributions. What would you say if you were dispatched to New Haven to side with the strikers?

You would not be able to use the language of Tobacco Road. No, something less than that. The 4,000 strikers, who provide for the maintenance of the university including clerical aid and library and dining-hall service are paid an average of $32,000 per year. But that’s hardly all, Yale’s administration stresses in full-page ads. The employees are getting, or are offered in the contract they rejected over the weekend, raises which, cumulatively, would yield a 44 percent salary increase in five years. The two striking locals get pension benefits which, by Yale’s arithmetic, when combined with Social Security yield about 85 percent of their salary. Note: They kick in after 30 years’ work. It is hard to remember when 30 years’ work was on the order of a full career. Americans used to start work at 20 and quit at 65, which is 45 years later.

The employees and their families have free health care, to which they contribute no deduction from salary. They have a minimum of seven weeks of paid vacation. Yale will subsidize up to $46,460 worth of college bills of employees’ families, and help ($25,000) in getting mortgages in neighborhood housing.

Now add this complication. Some professors have announced that they will not teach if in order to do so it is required that they cross a picket line. That does put one in mind of New Deal rhetoric. Thou shalt not cross a picket line. That is a concept derived from the very idea of collective bargaining. Some sanctions used in the past by striking unions were illegalized by the Taft-Hartley Act (dubbed the “slave-labor act” by the labor movement), which forbade secondary boycotts (if your trucks bring food to Yale, we will strike all your trucks coast to coast). But the old pull of class antagonism is active still, and Jacksonian rhetoric is full-blown. Jesse Jackson several times stressed that Yale has an endowment of $11 billion, which makes it sound as though, with an endowment that large, why not double employee wages? The educational world learned several days ago that the headmaster of St. Paul’s School is paid $524,000 annually, relieving that cleric (he is an Episcopal bishop) of any of the privations of the poverty associated with the Christian ministry. If St. Paul’s can swing it, why not Yale?

There is the other point, of course. It is that Yale walks a fiduciary fine line. The $11 billion was donated in the cause of education. The endowment and the students more or less share the burden of maintaining the place. The endowment, and student fees, aren’t to be taken as an ATM machine for the two locals.

Well, the students can take it as field work, but they are paying about $3,000 per month ($36,000 per year) for their education. Do students ever strike?

One Up for the Asterisks

NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER 2

The incident was back in May, but the thunder heightens, and on September 1 it occupied the attention of Bill O’Reilly and his million listeners. Did the Lawrence Central High School administration go too far in punishing Drew LaMar?

What happened is that Drew bore a brief against Ms. Elizabeth Granger, who serves as faculty adviser to the student newspaper. He waited until the last issue of the year and published a piece on something or another, but the discerning eye caught the real meaning of the piece, which was a valedictory shaft at his teacher. If you studied it, which everybody at Lawrence Central High did, and abstracted the first letter of each paragraph, together they spelled F * * K G R A N G E R.

The administration did not think it funny, elevated it beyond the level of a mere school prank, and prohibited Drew from attending the graduation ceremony.

Oddly, not all the students booed the administration’s decision, some of them deeming Drew a little bit callous and unquestionably opportunistic. But most thought the judgment harsh, and raised the free-speech argument. Central High was ready for that one. Assistant principal Mary Ann Burden reminded the community that in Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, the Supreme Court had in 1988 okayed censorship in school-sponsored student publications when there was an educational reason for invoking it. Moreover, in the 1986 Fraser decision the Court had okayed penalties for lewd and indecent language in school-sponsored assemblies.

Lawrence’s decision upholding a blue-law approach to the F-word was cheerful news for those who cling by their fingernails to a wasting code that seeks to segregate that word from acceptable intercourse. If the word’s use in print under formal auspices is unchecked, there is movement in two directions. The word loses its bite, and the community loses one more battle against lewdness abounding. What is said routinely on The Sopranos is not said, and shouldn’t be, in student newspapers.

Reactions to the Lawrence Central High School ruling, expressed on FreeRepublic.com (a “Conservative News Forum”) have been spirited and sprightly. The high-school principal had held that the text was “a threat against the teacher.” One reaction: “This dumb*** needs to go back to school himself until he realizes that saying F**k Granger is an insult not a threat.” Another: “This is ridiculous! It’s not like the letters are even together. Punishing this kid for the first letter of each paragraph is a thought crime. The kid should have just said that it was one hell of a coincidence.” How had the hidden message been detected? “This guy must have bragged about it. In my high school nobody bothered to read any of the columns in the school paper, much less try to decode hidden messages.”

One resourceful commentator spelled out his judgment in his own text, the first letters of whose sentences read, “K I S S M Y ***.” Another commented on the Court’s action in Fraser: “Perhaps as an exercise in zero-tolerance they should dispense with the alphabet entirely. Someone in possession of one can find all sorts of unprotected speech in it.” And compliments are being paid: “Give the kid an award for being able to craft an anagram — a mighty feat, considering our brave new schools.” And, “I think this kid deserves a commendation for his efforts. His ability to subliminally tell the teacher off is a great stress reliever. There have always been bad teachers, and what better way to tell them so — without actually saying anything?” And, finally, “Why is this just now getting attention in the media, if it’s such a big deal? It is now mid-July. The kid was an idiot for going through with his stupid plan. His punishment, though, was rather harsh.”

The net of it is that the school’s right to exercise authority was affirmed, no court case is likely to spring from Drew LaMar’s anagram, and the F-word’s girdle of asterisks is fought for, and won. No one opines that Drew’s career is permanently damaged, but his sensibilities may have been sharpened.

— Universal Press Syndicate

what’s right

DAVID FRUM

License

Imagine for a moment that you are a terrorist. You have just infiltrated the United States and are hiding out in Los Angeles. What’s the first thing you need now?

Judging by the actual behavior of the last bunch of terrorists to pass through the United States, you might think the answer is: “a lap-dance from a Las Vegas showgirl.” But before you can enjoy the Great Satan’s devilish pleasures, there is something you need first: You need a new name and identity that allow you to hide from the Great Satan’s alert police.

And thanks to California governor Gray Davis, what you need is now available without fuss, trouble, or very much in the way of expense.

On September 5, barely a month before the California recall election, Davis signed a law to help illegal immigrants obtain California driver’s licenses. California will no longer require proof of citizenship — such as a U.S. passport — from applicants for licenses. Instead, all you will need is the bogus passport with which you entered the United States in the first place, plus a federal Taxpayer ID (available to anyone who asks for it), plus a canceled rent check or utility bill.

If you can get those things and then pass a driver’s test, you too may have a California ID, with which you can board planes, enter the State or Defense Department, obtain a credit card and one hundred other useful things as well.

It’s the driver’s license, for example, that is used to identify people for the background checks required of gun buyers. Bogus license equals bogus identity — neatly circumventing the gun rules that constrain actual American citizens.

True, the California driver’s license requires fingerprints — but that’s no special problem: The state won’t share the information from those prints with the Immigration Service, so even if your prints show up on a federal watch-list, California will never tell on you.

From your point of view, all of this is astounding luck — especially astounding because Davis himself vetoed a nearly identical law just twelve months ago. “The tragedy of September 11,” Governor Davis explained in September 2002, “made it abundantly clear that the driver’s license is more than just a license to drive; it is one of the primary documents we use to identify ourselves. Unfortunately, a driver’s license was in the hands of terrorists who attacked America on that fateful day.”

Davis was right. The 9/11 hijackers took advantage of lax laws in Virginia to license themselves in that state. In the weeks leading up to 9/11, the future hijackers kept being pulled over for their poor driving — one of them on the very day before the attack — but the cops who looked at their licenses never noticed anything suspicious.

You’d think it would now be a top priority to make driver’s licenses more effective and reliable. Yet Davis is doing exactly the opposite — making them more vulnerable to fraud, not less.

Our hypothetical terrorist may not much care why Davis changed his mind. Yet if you allowed yourself to read the American papers, you’d discover some clues about this Governor Davis’s real intentions.

Davis’s opponents keep blaming his flip-flop on his eagerness for Hispanic votes. On the surface this makes little sense: After all, those Hispanics legally eligible to vote are citizens, and therefore already entitled to a license.

But then again, in modern America, you no longer have to be legally eligible in order to cast a ballot. The Clinton administration’s “Motor Voter” Act of 1993 requires voter-registration applications to be given to everyone who applies for a driver’s license. Applicants are supposed to attest on a form that they are indeed citizens, but they are seldom asked for proof. By getting hundreds of thousands of alien drivers to the Department of Motor Vehicles by October 7, Davis may hope that some thousands of them may erroneously or mischievously register to vote — for him, of course.

Since Motor Voter became law, non-citizen voters have changed the outcome of dozens of state and local elections, where turnouts are typically low; and nobody is expecting the recall vote in California to be very high.

Through this recall election, Gray Davis has again and again warned Californians of the dangers of electing political novices. Experience, he reminds audiences, counts in government just as much as it does in anything else — say, impersonating killer robots in multi-million-dollar action extravaganzas. And maybe he has a point. But experience can be just as useful to those who wish to game the system as to those who intend to serve it — and there’s every reason to fear that in California, the system is being gamed.

Along the way to recall, Davis manipulated California’s electrical energy and its budget for his own partisan ends. There’s no reason not to expect him to do it again — he is doing it again! So, suspicious of Schwarzenegger as every principled conservative has to be, so long as this trickster is on the ballot, even the most dour skeptic has to join him in saying to the Old Guard in California politics: Hasta la vista, baby.