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August 5, 2002 9:00 a.m. Him and her. Hombre of the Week. The Best Job in the World. And more.

o, Bill Clinton has told a Jewish audience that, if Israel were invaded, he’d get into a ditch and fight and die. Isn’t that nice? Clinton always had a knack for telling an audience — any audience — exactly what it wanted to hear. Remember when he told those rich donors that he thought he’d raised their taxes too much? Then had to take it back? The other day, you got the feeling he’d tell an Iraqi audience, “You know, if Israel invaded Iraq, I’d . . .”

Mrs. C.’s no different, of course. As I’ve commented before, too bad she chose to run for office in New York, and had to change her life-long views on the Arab-Israeli conflict. If only she had run for, say, mayor of Dearborn, Mich., she could have stayed true.

You know, we right-wingers are terrible about the State Department. I’ve always felt a little guilty about that. At least since McCarthy days, we’ve looked with suspicion on the “striped pants,” the State Department bureaucrats with jello for marrow, and leftism in their heads. Alger Hiss was only the beginning of it. Of course, we’ve had some liberal Democratic company, too: FDR, bless him, thought the State Department “a nest of appeasers,” as a friend of mine recently put it.

But then, something comes along — many things come along — that make you think, “Hmm: Maybe we wing-nuts aren’t so paranoid about State after all.”

And this is what I think about E-mail-gate, or whatever we should call it. Colin Powell has had to tell the striped pants to knock it off. In their e-mail, the bureaucrats have been blasting President Bush’s foreign policy, grousing about — as it happens — “McCarthyism” and “witch-hunts” and so on. (They’re referring to our efforts to thwart terrorism, and to keep terrorists from killing thousands more of us.) One State Department employee — one Columbia A. Barrosse — said that the White House would probably appoint a “neo-Nazi” to replace ex-assistant secretary of state Mary Ryan, the one whom NR’s own Joel Mowbray outed as a kind of visa Santa Claus for Saudis.

Yes, that’s just what George W. Bush would do, isn’t it? Appoint a “neo-Nazi.”

The State Department: Just when you think you’re being a little fringy . . .

I’m interested in the new deputy assistant defense secretary for East Asia. That is, I’m interested in his name: Richard P. Lawless. He was on the National Security Council staff under Reagan and used to work for the CIA.

But does he have to be named Lawless?

Turkey has abolished the death penalty, not because it opposes the death penalty, but because it wants EU membership more. The EU will not permit any nation that has the death penalty to join. Nice to know that this new European monolith has its priorities straight.

Like many people, I have long been ambivalent about the death penalty. But nothing makes me hotter than certain death-penalty opponents — in fact, most of them. I remember — long ago, now — when West Germany refused to extradite two Jordanian terrorists (I believe) to us — terrorists who had murdered Americans in cold blood — on grounds that we had capital punishment. Germany! The thought of it!

I’d better stop now, ’fore I blow.

Oh, sure, they’re sensitive to death — even for mass murderers, after an exhaustive legal process — now.

But I said I’d stop.

In the words of the AP, “Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tony Sanchez on Friday fired a staff member who put out a casting call specifying the racial mix of actors sought for campaign commercials.” This was in Texas. “A want ad posted by John R. Wright through the STAGE Web site said the campaign was looking for blacks for background roles in a TV commercial featuring Sanchez, and a ‘mix of people, with emphasis on Caucasian,’ for speaking parts in other spots.”

A Sanchez spokesman says, “What we had was an overzealous employee who has been dismissed from the campaign.”

So, so unfair: The Democratic party has made such racial particularity and obsessiveness its watchword for years — and the guy gets canned for doing what comes naturally? It’s bad enough for a party to have obnoxious principles; but to be hypocritical about them is even worse.

How do you feel when ancient Nazis — 85-year-olds, 90-year-olds — get caught somewhere, like Uruguay, and hauled into court and thrown in jail? I don’t feel bad.

Neither do I feel bad about the conviction in Miami of Mr. Eriberto Mederos, a 79-year-old former psychiatric nurse in Cuba. He stood accused of torturing political prisoners in a hospital. Actually, he stood accused of lying about his past, in order to gain U.S. citizenship, which he did in 1993. As one account of the trial had it, “prosecutor Frank Tamen called Mederos an evil servant of Communist tyranny who took sadistic pleasure in sending terrified inmates into convulsions three times a week from 1968 to 1978.”

The law has now reached him.

The other day, NR senior editor David Pryce-Jones, spending time in Italy, remarked that the government of Silvio Berlusconi has succeeded in abolishing the estate tax, known here, by us partisan Republicans, as the “death tax.” Interesting that Italy should have done it — a country thought to be far more socialist and leveling than we. Of course, Prime Minister Berlusconi must have had his own (vast) fortune in mind — and yet the people went along, seeing his reasoning, unresentful, comprehending that such a penalty is crazed.

That Italy should be ahead of Tom Daschle . . . but then, prairie socialism may be more tenacious than Italian socialism.

Feeling sorry for yourself? I have a cure. Be glad you’re not the person who wrote the New York Times Book Review’s Close Reader column on July 14. Check out this whale of a correction, from yesterday:

The Close Reader column on July 14, about the relation between daily life and intellectual life in Israel at present, referred erroneously to protests against the award of the Israel Prize to an Israeli Arab, Emile Habibi. The award, and the protests, occurred in 1992, not “recently”; the Israel Prize is given for a life of achievement, not any particular accomplishment. The novel “Arabesques” was misattributed; it was written not by Habibi but by Anton Shammas, also an Israeli Arab, in Hebrew, not Arabic.

The column misstated the title of a book that discusses political minorities in modern Hebrew literature, and misstated its timing in the author’s career. It is “Producing the Modern Hebrew Canon,” not “Constructing the Hebrew Canon,” published after the writer joined the faculty of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, not before. And his preferred transliteration of his name from the Hebrew is Hannan Hever, not Chanan Chever.

The column also attributed an honor erroneously to the novelist A. B. Yehoshua. He has never received the Sapir Prize (often referred to as the Israeli equivalent of Britain’s Booker Prize).

Jiminy Cricket! As I said, be glad.

Staying with the Times Book Review, the paper’s Boston bureau chief, Pam Belluck, had a review of Robert Reich’s new book, I’ll Be Short. (Nice that he’s self-deprecating, but then you read him, and all the charm goes away.) In it, Ms. Belluck describes the book as “an unabashedly passionate call for America to quit making the poor poorer as the rich get richer.”

This she entirely accepts — she’s not merely repeating Reich’s view. We, America, are making the poor poorer. I’m not surprised that a top Timesman holds this view — just a little startled at her openness.

She also refers to present America as “post-Sept. 11, post-Enron society.” That little phrase says a lot, doesn’t it? Have you thought of post-9/11 America as post-Enron — post-Enron — America too?

Maybe I’m slow.

Let me now hail the Times for an enthralling article, about an enthralling man — the Canadian writer Neil Bissoondath, who is a nephew of V. S. Naipaul. He has his uncle’s spirit and mind — no racialist whining for him, only a huge appreciation of the benefits of the free West, and an awareness of what imperils it, or spoils it. This is a man to warm the cockles of Ward Connerly’s heart, and mine.

I should quote extensively from it: but here it is.

I knew for certain that Impromptus-ites would like this little item, culled from the New York Post:

Country crooner Toby Keith is having the last laugh on Peter Jennings. Keith has gotten so much press after Jennings kept him from performing his controversial song “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)” on ABC’s 4th of July special that the album it’s on is likely to debut at No. 1 this week. While the CD, “Unleashed,” is expected to top the charts, Jennings’ special came in a dismal 66th in that week’s ratings.

66th. 1st. Cool.

Well, there’s no doubt about who gets Hombre of the Week. (Do we have that category?) That is David Parker, a 62-year-old man in British Columbia who, as Reuters tells it, is “recovering from serious injuries . . . after he managed to use a pocketknife to fight off a vicious attack by a cougar on a remote road on northern Vancouver Island. Attacked in the head, . . . Parker was able to pull out his small folding knife and kill the cat during the incident on Thursday evening. He then walked more than half a mile to get help from workers at a log-sorting facility.”

A mountie in Port Alice said, “The will to live was definitely in this person.” A friend of Parker’s said, “It’s very seldom that a person is a winner in a cougar attack. Usually it’s the cougar, so it’s quite something for Dave to do something like this all by himself, with a small knife.”

Yes, an hombre.

I was attracted by an article on the Internet titled “World’s Best Job.” What could that be? And do I have it?

It appears not. In Reuters’ words, “One of Britain’s most exclusive grocery stores needs a new chocolate taster — and will pay 35,000 pounds ($54,400) a year to the successful candidate. Fortnum & Mason in London’s Piccadilly — one of the capital’s most prestigious addresses — is looking for a chocolate buyer to travel the world, taste as much chocolate as possible and select only the best for its discerning customers.”

Indeed, Fortnum advertised the position in the Daily Telegraph as “the best job in the world.”

What can one say?

It’s getting late — I’m going a little long — but do you care for a little language? Oh, hang on: Before language, I wanted to give you this little snippet from the New York Times — the lead of one of its front-page stories, about South Africa:

“It is a breezy Friday afternoon and the prosperous men are swinging irons on the 18-hole golf course. Joe Mathebula, who is close to clinching a $50 million mining deal, swivels and swings and his nearly perfect shot whistles through the thorn trees as his colleagues hoot and his caddie scrambles.”

Hang on a sec: a nearly perfect shot whistling through thorn trees, as colleagues hoot and the caddie scrambles?

Perhaps I’m not picturing it right.

Okay, the language. I’m afraid that people are treating “reticence” as a synonym for “reluctance,” and it should not be. There ought to be a distinction between the words: “reticence” is silence, a reluctance to speak, and “reluctance” is . . . well, reluctance.

In the New York Times review of Dana Carvey’s new movie, we read, “Mr. Carvey wasn’t always so reticent to be provocative.”

It’s bad enough that Howell Raines has Nationized the newspaper, without this.

Another article had, “And as far as the amount of time her father actually spent living with the Bushmen, said Ms. Crichton Miller . . .” I’m afraid we have to tuck an “is concerned” or “goes” after “Bushmen,” to complete the “as far as . . .” phrase.

Hey, I don’t write the rules, just comment on them, as well as break or bend them once in a while.

Just one letter? Short? Okay.

“Your anecdote, ‘As many of my friends and readers know, I had a wonderful moment several years ago when my cousin’s wife — whom I had only recent met — said to me, “You know, Jay, I’ve never met a Republican who was a decent human being,”’ reminded me that I met a girl in 1995 who said to me, a Republican, ‘You know, I don’t think I could ever date a Republican.’ We got married this year. I convinced her to vote for Bob Dole in 1996 (she said when she made up her mind, ‘I have to believe that the president is a good man’). She voted for George W. Bush on her own.”

Ahhh.

Okay, one more — short. We’ve been talking a lot about hissing:

“As a law student at the University of Iowa (Iowa City is an Ann Arbor wannabe) in the late ’70s, one of the lefty law professors would refer to the now-chief justice as ‘Rehnquissssst.’”

Lovely — and exactly the kind of educational environment I experienced.

Ah, well: Kwitcherbitchin’, right?

(The missus and I once spotted that on a bumper in a parking lot at Cracker Barrel, as we were traveling through Virginia: “Kwitcherbitchin’.” A guide to life, for sure.)