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October 24, 2002 9:00 a.m. For a new ranch policy. His finest moment. “WAR DRAGS ON.” And more.

was struck by something Mark Steyn said several weeks ago: We really need a new ranch policy. That is, President Bush should craft a new policy for his Crawford ranch. Too many tyrants are going there, it seems to me: from Saudi Arabia, from China. I mean, Jiang Zemin at the ranch, chowin’ down on barbecue? Is that a privilege that should really be reserved to him, when the Chinese authorities are persecuting Christians and others with mad zeal?

Why not invite Australia’s John Howard, those Spanish conservatives, some Eastern Europeans — some good guys, with more salubrious records? Being a “realist” does not mean that you have to invite a tyrant into your personal space. If, like Ford and Kissinger, you want to keep Solzhenitsyn out of the White House, fine (though not really — I’m just making an argument); but then, you might not want to play Yahtzee with his jailers in your pajamas.

One further China note. I was semi-amused by something in an Erik Eckholm dispatch for the New York Times. He wrote, “After disclosures last week about nuclear weapons development by North Korea, Beijing’s erratic ally, Washington hopes China will help turn the screws on the North Korean leader, Kim John Il . . .”

Turn the screws: Is that the right phrase to use about a torturing dictatorship? Actually, I guess so!

Here, let me make a broad complaint. One hears a lot of Democrats and others contend that people like me are “eager for war.” They act like the president, the vice president, the defense secretary, and the rest of us are all itching for war, so in love with guts and glory we must be.

This is, of course, highly offensive, and untrue. No sane person is eager for war; no one thinks that war unto itself is a good. It’s that some of us have concluded that, with regard to Iraq, it is necessary, for the sake of more lasting peace and freedom. The Left complains — sometimes rightly, I suppose — that they are subject to McCarthyism in such debates. What is certainly true is that we are perpetually accused of belligerence, ignorance, and a callous disregard of human life.

“I hate war,” said FDR, in that magnificent, rolling, Hyde Park voice. But he certainly took it to Krauts and Nips when he had to, didn’t he?

I wonder if I might comment on Bill Clinton’s induction into the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame — he is the first white man to receive such an honor. I have written a lot about Clinton and race; it was one of my beats, one of my specialties, during his administration, and shortly after. (Remember the move — the retreat — to Harlem, in the midst of the pardons scandal?) I once contemplated a smallish book on Clinton and his use of race. Never came about.

All through his presidency, Clinton leaned on blacks. Hard. This was especially true when he was in any kind of trouble — personal, electoral. As the civil-rights figure Roger Wilkins told me in 1998, “He knows that if he goes to see black people, he’s going to get a warm bath.” This was never truer than during the Lewinsky mess. That first weekend, he invited an old nemesis, Jesse Jackson, to the White House, to watch the Super Bowl (ostensibly). Then Jackson went and got Betty Currie back on the reservation. Then the Black Congressional Caucus lined up to greet the president at the State of the Union address. Then the administration touted the closeness between Clinton and his chief bodyguard (black). Then they complained about the whiteness of Virginia juries, versus the purity of D.C. ones. Then they said that congressional Republicans were a bunch of Klansmen. Etc., etc.

At every turn, Clinton clutched his black constituents to him — and they, sadly (as I see it), clutched him back. He implied that the effort to impeach him was really — underneath it all — an attack on them. Very clever. And very slimy.

When Toni Morrison came along and confirmed Clinton as “our first black president,” it was his finest moment. Why? He has always counted on his black support to validate him as a human being; this support has always been central to his self-esteem. He may be an adulterer, a charlatan, and a liar, but, by golly, black citizens — the holiest Americans — love him, and therefore he must be okay.

So . . . when the Black Hall of Fame gave him his plaque, that must have become his finest moment, as he would see it (hell, as anyone would see it).

But that doesn’t mean he’s any good.

I have a quick follow-up on this Harry Belafonte nonsense. It seems that the singer — or ex-singer — got Condoleezza Rice (one of his “house slaves”) disinvited from a dinner sponsored by a group called Africare. This is according to the Wall Street Journal. Rice was to be the keynote speaker; Belafonte was to be honored in some way (as he always is). But Belafonte apparently prevailed on the organization to bar this disgrace to her race from its event.

Guess who’s not coming to dinner?!

Belafonte compared the national security adviser to a “Jew” who was “doing things that were anti-Semitic and against the best interests of her people.” I have a few people I wouldn’t mind comparing Belafonte to, but, just once, I’ll hold my tongue.

Has it been a while since we celebrated Don Rumsfeld and his use of language, among other things? I believe it’s been several hours.

The other day, Rumsfeld was doing a press briefing, when someone brought up an article written about him that said he was feared, disliked, etc., by Pentagon personnel. The questioner said, “[The article] says you’re a ‘tough hombre’ in your dealings and . . .”

Rumsfeld broke in and said, “I am sweet and lovable. Goddang.”

Rummy: You gotta love him, even if you’re the most pacifistic, SDI-hating person alive, simply for the way American English, c. 1955, sits in his mouth.

(For my December ’01 appreciation of Rumsfeld, please click here.)

You don’t gotta love the Conservative party, which banned Margaret Thatcher from its recent conference in Bournemouth. The Tories are trying to be soft and cuddly — or “kinder and gentler” — right now, believing that the public regards them as “nasty.” That’s the word used by Conservative chairman Theresa May in recent days. I believe that she was not merely describing a misimpression, but stating her own opinion.

This brought to mind a point frequently made by our colleague David Pryce-Jones: that conservatives (and Conservatives and others) have “internalized” criticisms — false criticisms — made of them, repeatedly, by their foes.

In The (London) Spectator, I loved the recent Diary written by Norman Tebbit, the remarkable man who may well have been prime minister if Irish terrorists hadn’t maimed his wife in their attempt to kill Thatcher. He said,

Gave seven or eight radio and television interviews, supporting [the Tories’] new policies but warning that chairman Theresa May was wrong to label us the “nasty party.” I enjoyed an interview with Nick Robinson, who told me that the Tory benches looked out of touch, with hardly a woman MP and not one from the ethnic minorities. “Well,” I replied, “I have had seven interviews today. You are my seventh white, middle-aged, male interviewer. Is the BBC the Nasty Broadcasting Corporation?”

Loved it. Tebbit went on to fear being kicked out of the party “for being white, male, heterosexual, nasty, and old enough to remember when the Tories won elections.”

What’s more, he is an avid gardener. Listen to this, with its bright humorous twist:

Autumn marks that time when guilt over last spring’s jobs undone is set aside to plan for early action next spring. Gardens are like Marxist economies, full of five-year plans and objectives unattained but simply rolled over for another five years.

What a fun — and effective — PM he would have made.

But I want to introduce you to an Englishman I like rather less, Rupert Cornwell, a columnist. Not long ago, he wrote,

My misgivings [about war with Iraq] revolve around another country in the region, whose name also begins with I. It was born amid terrorism of the sort Bush decries today. It does not merely pursue nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, but already possesses them. It, too, is in breach of various U.N. resolutions.

Why on earth cannot the U.S. see the blindingly obvious and truly lean on Israel as it girds for war against Iraq?

Yes, those nasty, terroristic, weapons-of-mass-destruction-possessing “I” countries. Watch out for Iceland, too!

Let’s have a little mail. A reader says, “Your comments on the media’s ‘quagmire’ mentality reminded me of a funny incident I saw on TV during the Gulf War. It was only Day 6 of the air-war phase, and Secretary of Defense Cheney stepped to the microphones to deliver a briefing. He opened by chuckling about a newspaper headline he had seen in that day’s Milwaukee paper: ‘WAR DRAGS ON.’

“Regrettably, we should expect more of the same.”

Sure.

Another reader says, “Check out Phil Donahue’s comment the other day, that an overwhelming majority of black and ‘Latino’ congressmen voted against the Iraq resolution because ‘It’s their brothers and sisters who will be fighting this war!’ As a ‘Latino’ former member of the armed forces, I always kind of thought that all Americans were my brothers and sisters in a sense.”

And, finally, in response to my note about the Democratic phrase “Taliban Republican,” a reader says, “I prefer to call myself a Barbra Streisand Republican: Because of Barbra Streisand, I’m a Republican.”