April 14, 2005, 8:03 a.m.
The wealthy’s “reward,” &c.

I will make an old point, but not a bad one — check out this lead from an AP report: “House Republicans on Wednesday pushed to make permanent a one-year reprieve on estate taxes, a change that Democrats said would reward the wealthiest families and increase the federal deficit by tens of billions of dollars annually.”

Ponder that phrase, “reward the wealthiest families.” It tells you how Democrats think about the matter: If government lets families keep what they’ve earned, it is “rewarding” them. Note, too, the suggestion that taxation ought to be punitive — that these people must be punished for what they have done. (Reward and punishment are opposites.) There is a meanness in this kind of thinking.

And what we once would have called an un-Americanness. Why do you pursue your dreams? In part to allow your offspring to have a more comfortable life than you — and to let them build on what you’ve achieved.

Look, if Warren Buffett wants to stiff his children and donate his money to the IRS, that’s his business: He knows that address, in Washington. But I don’t see why he has to impose his ideal of fatherhood on his 300 million fellow citizens. Many of us see nothing sinful about passing on your estate to your family.

I realize you’ve considered all these questions a thousand times — it’s Conservatism (or Common Sense) 101. But every now and then it’s nice to refresh.

You may have missed that Judge Guido Calabresi has been admonished by a judicial panel. Why was he admonished? Last June, he urged the defeat of President Bush. And in the bargain, Calabresi — a former dean of Yale Law School, and a Clinton appointee — compared Bush’s actions in the 2000 election to the machinations of Hitler and Mussolini. You betcha. (A story on the matter is here.) Calabresi was speaking before a left-wing group, cutely named the American Constitution Society. Have a sample of the judge’s thought: “Like Mussolini, [Bush] has exercised extraordinary power. One of the things that is at stake is the assertion by the democracy that when that has happened it is important to put that person out.”

Frankly, I sort of like it when Democrats speak their minds, à la Calabresi. Good for him. Comparisons of Bush to evil dictators are routine in liberal circles, such as the judge inhabits. (In truth, Bush is a bringer-down of evil dictators.) Why keep these beliefs hidden? Why pretend that Calabresi has ever been any other kind of thinker?

In a similar vein, I rather liked it when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg gave a speech defending the use of foreign law, and international law, in U.S. Supreme Court decisions. (This was a couple of weeks ago.) No sense being coy about it. If the U.S. Constitution can’t get the job done — by gum, call on Belgium’s, or someone’s.

What is most irritating is hiding, pretending — covering up. In a way, an honest left-winger is worth his weight in gold. That is doubly true of left-wingers in power.

The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen is an honest writer, basically. He wears his hates on his sleeve. In his 4/7 column, he wrote, “. . . I knew that the most alarming case against Saddam Hussein — that he was an imminent threat to the United States — was a lie.”

Please note that word “imminent” — and recall what President Bush said in his State of the Union address, before he went to war against Saddam: “Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations will come too late.”

Concluding his column, Cohen said, “The fact will remain that this war was fought for a lie.”

This is a cherished belief that liberals — and many conservatives, and others — will hold on to till the day they die. But the truth is that they can speak confidently about WMD because the U.S. invaded. And it’s odd that they never blame Saddam Hussein for failing to comply with the U.N., or the United Nations for failing to make him comply — or even to care whether he did. Indeed, the U.N. abetted him.

While I’m at it: Have you noticed, in the Bolton hearings, that some senators seem to reveal more allegiance to the United Nations than to the United States? That they like it better? That they are ashamed at the U.N.’s disapproval of their country, and share that disapproval? I realize that such a statement can be construed as pure McCarthyism. But that is one of the joys of working for an opinion magazine, allowing freedom of thought and expression — you can say what you think is true. Point out what is, in fact, plain as day.

The United Nations — which has stood by as thousands have been murdered in the Balkans, Africa, and elsewhere, and on whose human-rights committee Cuba and other totalitarian countries sit — should be ashamed. Instead, it is the U.S. that is made to feel ashamed.

Stupid world.

Imbibe the wisdom of another liberal columnist. Wrote Michael Kinsley (here), “Every time George W. Bush hears ‘Hail to the Chief,’ the odds go up that some unsuspecting country is going to find itself getting democratized — with all the violence, anarchy, foreign occupation, arbitrary arrests, torture of prisoners, suppression of dissent, and random deaths that word has come to imply.”

That is what Kinsley thinks of this country’s attempts at democratization — at loosening the grip of tyrannical hands around human necks, and buttressing American security in the process. Try to remember that, if Bush’s efforts succeed, and people say — as they now say about the Cold War — that “we did it.”

Kinsley et al. are determined to defame Allied achievements in Afghanistan and Iraq. This is what Martin Peretz, in his recent essay, called “the politics of churlishness.” That, really, seems too polite a phrase.

Were people this mean about the liberation of the Europeans (the West Europeans, I mean, after World War II)? I don’t know. But it seems to me they were not. And if there was this bile — it didn’t come from liberals.

Bear in mind that Charles Rangel is not some street-corner ranter. He is a member of the U.S. Congress, and the ranking Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee. If his party wins a majority next year, he will be chairman.

Rangel gave a speech about Social Security before black retired workers outside New York’s City Hall. Meghan Clyne of the New York Sun reports:

. . . For black Americans, the congressman added, the struggle against the proposed changes in the entitlement system was “not only a civil-rights fight, but a fight for America.” Mr. Rangel called on African-Americans to continue their “missionary” work against the Social Security proposals and likened the effort to his marching with Martin Luther King Jr. from Selma to Montgomery.

“We have to get rid of the bums that are trying to take it away from us,” Mr. Rangel said of the Social Security system, referring to Republicans in Washington and City Hall — “people who sleep with Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, and the rest of them.”

A member of the City Council from Brooklyn, Charles Barron, joined Mr. Rangel in urging African-Americans to stand against alterations to the system. “It’s bad enough they won’t pay us our reparations,” Mr. Barron, who for a time was seeking the Democratic mayoral nomination, said. “Now they’re trying to take away our Social Security!”

Neither Mr. Barron nor Mr. Rangel detailed at the meeting why the president’s proposals were harmful to the black community. When asked for specifics by The New York Sun after the event, Mr. Rangel said, “The progressive nature of being able to get returns means that lower-income people benefit more than higher-income people” from the Social Security system. Since members of minority groups disproportionately constitute the lower income brackets, the congressman said, they stand to lose the most from Mr. Bush’s efforts — which the congressman labeled “fraud” and an “impeachable offense.”

I’m trying to figure out which is most interesting: that Rangel considers opposition to Social Security reform a civil-rights stance; that he regards reform as an “impeachable offense”; or that he saw fit to invoke the name of Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy secretary of defense, in a speech demonizing Social Security reform.

Anything to get that name out, I guess — a name that, as Mark Steyn says, begins with a scary animal and ends Jewishly.

Above, I mentioned Martin Peretz, and that essay, and I wish to highlight some passages. I assure you you won’t mind.

Let’s go:

This was the state of U.S.-Arab relations in 2001: The United States was actually more frightened of the Arabs than they were of us. The extraordinary report of the 9/11 Commission about the delinquent reactions to the decade-long lead-up to the catastrophe of September 11 only confirms this impression of official U.S. pusillanimity.

Now try this:

The judge who was killed with his son outside his home on his way to work at the tribunal that will try Saddam knew that danger stalked him, and so did the rest of the victims of Sunni bloodlust. This bloodlust evokes an unmistakable but macabre schadenfreude among many critics of the war, who want nothing of history except to be proved right. It is as if suicide bombings and other sorts of helter-skelter murder were a just judgment on the wrongdoings — yes, there have been wrongdoings, some of them really disgusting — of the Bush administration. And, even if ridding western Asia of Saddam is reluctantly accepted as justified, what blogger couldn’t have accomplished what came after more deftly?

A triumph of mordancy, that last line. Let’s have some more:

In any case, this churlish orthodoxy tells us that the Sunnis need to be enticed into the political game lest it be deemed illegitimate. In this scenario, it is the murderers who withhold or bestow moral authority. John F. Burns, the defiantly honest New York Times journalist in Baghdad, who has consistently reported the ambiguous and truly tangled realities of the war, now sees the Baathist and Sunni warriors in retreat, if not actually beaten.

Linger over that description of Burns: “defiantly honest.” Defiant of whom? you may ask. Of his employer, for one.

Take one more swatch:

Lebanon was never perfect, but it worked reasonably well, until the aggressive Palestinian guests took to commanding Shia turf to establish a “state within a state.” (This was a phenomenon that the nimble Thomas L. Friedman did not much report on in the first leg of his journey From Beirut to Jerusalem, confiding that fear for his life and livelihood kept him from deviating too far from the Palestinian story as they wanted it told. Eason Jordan avant la lettre.)

Bingo.

While I’m in sharing mode, I can’t resist giving you Paul Johnson, in an extraordinary column on . . . goodness:

What is goodness? And, for that matter, what is good itself? Joseph Addison was quite clear: “Music is the greatest good that mortals know.” But among the greatest evils of our time, I would put pop music, its idols, its drugs and its diabolic possession of tender susceptible youth high on the list, certainly among the top ten.

As much as I’ve agreed with Paul Johnson, I don’t think I’ve ever agreed so vehemently — almost with relief, at a truth so readily grasped.

And after defending the use of fear in politics (!), Johnson writes, “It ought to be one of the prime objects of the Conservative election campaign to restore a strong, healthy and nutritious fear of what a new period of Labour government will undoubtedly produce.”

There is a free writer, Paul Johnson.

A “nutritious fear”!

Did you read this story? I bet not. Franklin Raines, Clinton’s OMB chief, was removed from the ethics group he helped create — for ethics violations. I don’t claim to know the full truth of the matter. But I do know this: If the personage involved were a conservative Republican, what fun would be had!

Long ago, I heard from someone what amounts to a truism: that the Democratic party rests financially on three pillars: the unions, the trial lawyers, and Hollywood. So I gulped a little when I saw the following headline in the New York Sun: “Unions, Trial Lawyers, Hollywood Shower Money on Spitzer.” (Eliot Spitzer is the New York attorney general who is running for governor, and will almost certainly win.)

Friends, I’ve had this item in my file for a long while, and thought I’d share it with you. Some weeks ago, Andre Agassi was unable to play a match against Lleyton Hewitt. This was in California. He had a bum toe, and simply had to withdraw. Never before had he had to pull out — in 1,092 matches. With his bum toe, he showed up at the court and said to the throng, “I apologize and thank you for your support.” According to the papers, “several fans yelled, ‘We love you, Andre!’ He drew loud applause both when he walked onto the court and when he walked off.”

Bear with me, but do you remember when Luciano Pavarotti withdrew from his farewell Tosca at the Met, owing to a bum throat? (This was before he was allowed to return for an actual farewell in Tosca.) Despite admonitions from the general manager, Joe Volpe, the Fat Man (as we used to call him, reverently) refused to come to the opera house to salute and apologize to the fans. As a very prominent impresario said to me, “All he had to do was show up, croak out ‘I can’t sing,’ and the audience would have gone nuts with adoration.”

Look, I didn’t say this was an important item — this was just something that occurred to me. You know how weird Impromptus is, so don’t complain to me (unless you’re a rookie reader, I guess).

A little language? Most every American knows what “inside the Beltway” means, but did you know it had traveled to other lands? It has at least traveled to England, where Boris Johnson edits The Spectator, and writes in it. Observed BoJo in a recent piece — at issue was some detail of British politics — “Some say this is just inside-beltway stuff. They are wrong.” Note the absence of “the” — “inside-beltway stuff.” And the lower-case “b”!

Still, I was charmed.

(I wonder whether London’s politicos say “in this town.” And is an idea or proposal going nowhere a “non-starter”?)

Readers expect me to say something about Tiger Woods’s victory in the Masters, and I have not yet formed the words. I’ll get back to you (probably). For now — nice win.

At the time of the tournament, I was in Georgia, though not in Augusta — I was in Savannah, where I sometimes go. I have spoken before about Ronnie’s, that foretaste of heaven on Dean Forest Rd., where they serve milkshakes — and malts — to die for. There is an old Italian saying: Vedere Napoli e poi morire (“See Naples and then die”). Well, have a milkshake or malt at Ronnie’s, and then die. Don’t miss the hamburgers, barbecue sandwiches, onion rings, etc., either. (The onion rings seem three-quarters batter, one quarter onions.) And why have straight fries when you can have curly? (That applies to Arby’s, too.) (Don’t get me started on jamocha shakes — the best fast-food shakes available, wouldn’t you say?)

An addition to Ronnie’s, since I was last there: a photo of Gen. Tommy Franks, over in Iraq. Someone had gone there. There is a lot of patriotic, Iraq-related material on the walls.

And the photo of Sen. Dan Quayle is still there — he stopped by Ronnie’s during the ’88 campaign. He will be forever young, within that frame, at Ronnie’s, and may that grub be forever good.

Some music criticism? For my March “chronicle,” archived at The New Criterion, please go here. For a review of a concert performance of Thomas’s Mignon, please go here. And for a review of the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Charles Dutoit, with pianist Martha Argerich, soloist, please go here.

Y’all, it’s been ages since I was able to read mail, and I’m afraid I have no letters to end on — I can’t even think of a joke! — but I wish you a successful and happy end-of-week, and I’ll see you soon.

No, no — before I go (and speaking of seeing you again soon): I would like to remind you that many of us NR and NRO types will be in Atlanta, on May 5. We’ll have a lot of fun, and advance the cause of our enterprise. You can find details of this event here. I ask you to consider attending, because you could help us out, and enjoy yourself, to boot. If I’m wrong, I’ll eat my hat. (And if you put hot fudge on it — I just may eat it anyway.)