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Harken:
Is That a Scandal They Hear? On July 8, a couple of hours after President Bush held a news conference dominated by questions concerning his 1990 sale of stock in Harken Energy, DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe was blasting out e-mails — "Every day, more questions arise" — to reporters and activists. And the DNC e-mail was just one of dozens. Democrats have suggested that Bush engaged in insider trading when he sold the Harken stock, that he engaged in a cover-up by failing to report the transaction to the SEC until long after the deadline had passed, and that he is still covering up by refusing to release documents related to the sale. In short, they have suggested that Harken — the firm that bought Bush's struggling oil company in the 1980s — was a smaller, earlier version of Enron, with Bush in the middle of it all.
President Bush has called Zelman "just as historic" as Brown v. Board , which ordered an end to school segregation in 1954. "The Court," remarked Bush, "declared that our nation will not accept one education system for those who can afford to send their children to a school of their choice and [another] for those who can't." Actually, the Supreme Court said no such thing. Zelman does not present a mandate; it merely permits school choice to exist as an option. In another sense, it's a stay of execution. It was the opponents of school choice who brought the case — against a program that gives vouchers to about 4,500 poor kids in Cleveland — but the stakes weren't as high for them as they were for school-choice supporters. Zelman surely invigorates the movement, but at bottom it simply lets the debate go on.
Decades of government mismanagement have created a forest crisis of unprecedented dimensions, with an estimated 70 million acres of public forests vulnerable to wildfire and tens of millions more under all-out assault from insects, disease, and invasive species. The problem isn't too few trees; it's too many. That's because 90 years of systematic federal suppression of the small and moderate-sized fires that benefit forest health — following the fire-phobic dictates of Smokey the Bear — have turned many public forests into overgrown tangles that are ripe for wildfires and hasten the spread of disease and infestation. To most people, a dark and densely wooded forest may be aesthetically pleasing — but biologically, it may be choking itself to death. In an excruciating irony, environmental groups that most loudly proclaim their love for the forests have become the single greatest obstacle to saving them.
So dire are the injustices and the poverty suffered by Muslims and Arabs, and so threatening is the tyranny over their heads, that many are lost in pity for themselves, and hatred of everyone else. A slew of racists, radicals, and Islamists share a frame of mind that the West is selfishly conspiring against them, with the Jews once again secretly in charge. Catering to such people since the early '60s, editions of Mein Kampf have been put out in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, and it is reported to be a bestseller in the Palestinian Authority area. It is available in London stores selling Arabic books. As its Arabic translator Luis al-Haj expresses it in his preface, "National Socialism did not die with the death of its herald. Rather, its seeds multiplied under each star."
The first public evidence that the PLO had at least $10 billion came to light when the Pakistani-owned rogue Bank of Credit and Commerce International was shut down by the Bank of England on July 5, 1991. In 1993, Britain's National Criminal Intelligence Service called the PLO "the richest of all terrorist organizations." NCIS estimated the PLO's ill-gotten gains at $8-10 billion and reported that it enjoyed a further annual income of about $1.5-2 billion from "donations, extortion, payoffs, illegal arms dealing, drug trafficking, money laundering, fraud, etc." When $326 million disappeared from PA coffers in 1996, an investigation by the Palestinian Legislative Council found that nearly 40 percent of the PA's $800 million annual budget (coming mostly from foreign aid) had been lost through corruption and mismanagement. The PA's comptroller wrote: "The overall picture is one of a Mafia-style government, where the main point of being in public office is to get rich quick."
A May 22 report by a team of U.S. and European observers found that militias trained in the north "burn villages, loot cattle, rape and kill civilians, and abduct and enslave men, women, and children." Sudan's government remains on the State Department's list of sponsors of terrorism because it harbors Hezbollah and other groups operating against Israeli civilians. In April, Sudan's military urged "all parties, institutions, trade unions, students and youths, men and women" to go to militia training camps in solidarity with the Palestinian intifada. The Sudanese government is committed, at least rhetorically, to the destruction of Israel.
The congressional response to the Pledge ruling has been even more pathetic than the response to the 1989 flag-burning decision. Politicians have been content to take to the floor of Congress to recite the Pledge — and to vote for a resolution declaring themselves pro-Pledge. There has been enough mindless posturing to make anyone wonder, for a moment, whether judicial rule is all that much worse than representative democracy. Judicial errors are so hard to correct because we have come to hold an inflated view of judicial authority. We habitually treat the Constitution as though it were whatever the Supreme Court says it is. We assume that the Court has the job of determining the limits of everyone else's powers, which means, of course, that it has more power than everyone else. Such power, effectively unchecked, is bound to be abused.
Successful spying hinges less on Le Carré-esque betrayals than on cultivating international cooperation; during World War II, some 85 percent of our strategic intelligence came from the British. Only a reputation for good counterintelligence on our end will make other services confident that they can share information without putting their sources at risk. In 1973, however, CIA director William Colby decentralized, and effectively destroyed, CI. The counterintelligence staff once vetted sources and controlled access to files; it was now to serve only an "advisory" function. Case officers would be allowed to assess the bona fides of their own agents; and to ensure that each case officer knew "enough" to assess his recruitments, the CIA's files would be decompartmentalized. For the past three decades, in other words, the spy world's equivalent of virus-protection software has been turned off.
When the history of the 1990s is written, the most important story may not be the GOP takeover of Congress, the boom economy, or the Clinton impeachment. The big story may be the decade's unprecedented level of immigration — a social phenomenon affecting everything from the nation's schools to the political balance between the two parties. Newly released census figures show that the foreign-born population reached 31.1 million in 2000. This is by far the largest immigrant population in U.S. history, and represents a 57 percent increase from 1990. Even during the great wave of immigration from 1900 to 1910, the foreign-born population grew by only about 31 percent; over the past 30 years, the number of immigrants in the U.S. has tripled. If current trends are allowed to continue, the foreign-born share of the population will in fact pass the all-time high by the end of this decade.
Books,
Arts & Manners They Admit It!
— Terry Teachout Masters of the
Art — James Panero Music: Big Deals — Jay Nordlinger on the bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff and the cellist Natalia Gutman City Desk: Ward Healers — Richard Brookhiser on New York doctors |
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