 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Medicare is a word that sounds in Republican ears the way, say, Waterloo sounds to the French: "We took a bad thrashing there, and we're not eager for a return engagement." So now that Republicans have regained their Senate majority, they resist going anywhere near Medicare. And that caution is certainly reasonable and understandable. There's a problem, though: Medicare has been malfunctioning for some time. In the nearly 40 years since the program was created, American medicine has been revolutionized. Amazing new drugs deliver fantastic new results. Life spans have lengthened, and the demand for nursing care is growing correspondingly. Everything about health care has changed — except for the program that covers costs for the segment of the population that needs health care most.
There's no obvious way forward on Social Security, tax reform, or health care. Republicans do, however, have available to them a policy that would help them in all three areas — which is to seek a major expansion of IRAs, 401(k)s, and other tax shelters for savings and investment. People are taxed when they take money out of IRAs, or when they put money into them, but not both. If they were allowed to put in unlimited amounts of money and withdraw them later for any reason, the effect would be the elimination of double taxation on savings. An expansion of IRAs would broaden the investor-class constituency for Social Security reform. Expanded IRAs would also promote the goal of tax reform by reducing the double taxation of savings. They could promote market-based health care, too, if people were allowed to withdraw from their accounts to cover health expenses.
Ford got the results of the midterm elections. He realized that national security played a huge role, and he knew that Democrats were on the wrong side of the issue. Moreover, and unlike some of his colleagues, Ford fully grasps the fact that Bush is an extraordinarily popular and trusted president. "This president, who sometimes is right and other times is not, deserves to be supported when he's right," Ford said when he announced his candidacy for House minority leader. He urged Democrats "not just to be obstructionists or to engage in gridlock, which is what I hear a lot in what Nancy is saying." Ford has also pointed out that his party leaders in the House are "0 for 4" in their attempts to retake control after the disastrous 1994 midterm elections. The Gephardt leadership team lost in 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002, and now a member of that team, Pelosi, has been elevated to the top job.
Nowhere was the Republicans' big night bigger than in Georgia — and Chambliss's defeat of Sen. Max Cleland was only a piece of it. Over the last decade or so, every other southern state has seen a watershed election in which Republicans finally broke the Democratic stranglehold on state and local government. Georgia was the last holdout. On November 5, however, Sonny Perdue became Georgia's first Republican governor since Reconstruction. He made it there by beating incumbent Roy Barnes, who had been considered a potential Democratic vice-presidential nominee for 2004. And the Republicans' achievements didn't end there. On November 8, three Democratic state senators announced that they would switch parties, thereby throwing a chamber of the legislature into GOP hands — also for the first time since Reconstruction. At long last, realignment had come to Georgia.
Ziglar's uncontroversial appointment yet rocky tenure at the INS is symbolic of policymakers' schizophrenic treatment of the agency. Members of Congress typically castigate the INS for being insufficiently client-friendly, only to pounce opportunistically when the agency allows a bad actor, like sniper suspect and illegal alien John Lee Malvo, to slip away. There was no disagreement when Ziglar told the Senate Judiciary Committee, "I'm not one who likes the idea of people being detained unless they're convicted of a crime or a danger to society." But when notifications of approved student visas for two of the 9/11 hijackers arrived six months after the attacks, and a year and a half after they were requested by the flight school, liberals were outraged. Sen. Ted Kennedy, who is generally preoccupied with loosening visa requirements, angrily announced that "a flawed information-collecting and tracing system that allows potential terrorists to enter or remain in the United States" could not be tolerated.
Islam is, quite simply, anti-dog. Dogs are "unclean"; according to one widely cited hadith, angels cannot, or will not, enter a home that contains a dog. It is illegal to bring a dog into Saudi Arabia unless it has been certified as a seeing-eye, hunting, or guard dog. Even in secular Iraq, Saddam Hussein first made a name for himself as a boy by torturing and killing dogs with a white-hot steel bar. Moreover, dog ownership is perceived as a form of Westernization. "Regarding the spread of decadent Western culture in the society, the police have risen up against the propagators of corruption," read a police declaration in the Iran Daily. "Sometimes they go after satellite dishes, sometimes they go after the way women are dressed on the street, and sometimes they go after dogs," Artin Zaman told the Times. "It's a way of keeping people distracted so they don't think about bigger problems."
But all this does not add up to an inevitable emerging Democratic majority. Judis and Teixeira seem to take the 2000 vote — 48 percent for Gore, or 51 percent for Gore-plus-Nader — as a floor. But Democrats will not be fighting elections anytime soon with all the advantages they had in 2000. In 1996 and 2000 the Democrats were the incumbent party in a time of apparent peace and prosperity. Each time they failed to win a majority of the vote: Bill Clinton got 49 percent, Al Gore 48 percent. No Democratic presidential nominee will run from this advantageous position until 2008 at the earliest, more likely not until 2012, maybe not then: Clinton was the first Democrat to do so since Lyndon Johnson in 1964, when Clinton and Gore were not old enough to vote. The Democrats' 48 percent in 2000 might turn out to be not a floor but a ceiling.
He must be one of the most important writers of the second half of the 20th century, producing a string of books that — like Solzhenitsyn's — put the lie to Communism, in particular to Soviet Communism. In the early 1990s, Richard Nixon — a fair judge of world events — said, "[Conquest's] historical courage makes him partially responsible for the death of Communism." Another high tribute came from a member of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party — who denounced, and immortalized, Conquest as "anti-Sovietchik Number One." Those who endured the Soviet Union, above all, will never forget him for it. In 1989 — the super-thawing days of glasnost — Conquest returned to the Soviet Union for the first time since he was a student. Practically everyone there had read The Great Terror, under the pillow, as it were. One man asked to pinch Conquest, just to reassure himself that he, Conquest, was really there, on Russian soil.
HOLIDAY BOOKS Voices
of the One God — Michael Potemra Welcoming
the Enemy — Mark Krikorian City Desk: The Eternal Round — Richard Brookhiser on urban passers-by
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
<% dim printurl
printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%>
