With discussions continuing on the fate of the EU’s draft ‘constitution,’ its architect, Giscard D’Estaing (looking, in the photograph that accompanies this article, suspiciously like someone from Roswell, not France) has said that " ... we would have rather no constitution than a bad constitution…"

Now he tells us.

Like Derb earlier this week, I found much to savor in the Daily Telegraph’s obituary of the much lamented David Hemmings, including this:

"We were the poor man's Taylor and Burton," Hemmings recalled. At the wedding, a swimming pool was filled with doves dipped in puce dye, the Mamas and the Papas sang and Henry Mancini conducted the orchestra."

Doves dipped in puce!Lord Berners would have approved.

By combining self-regarding, preening preachiness with the ambition and tactics of Uriah Heep, the awful Joe Lieberman is quite possibly the least likeable of all the Democratic candidates, no small achievement in a field that includes a race baiter, a mad doctor, a star child and Lurch. Senator Heep’s latest idea, however, quite literally takes the biscuit. Having read somewhere that there is an ‘obesity epidemic’ Lieberman wants big government to intervene against big stomachs. His policy initiatives (directed against ‘junk’ food) are the usual presumptuous and insulting pap, but, best of all, perhaps, was the admission to NBC that, ahem, he doesn’t actually know what junk food is:

"Lieberman’s campaign officials said the senator will not define what junk food is, leaving that to dietary and health care experts."

He’s going to leave it to the “experts.” Oh, that’s OK then.

The Lancet used to be a serious medical journal. No more, alas. In a thuggish editorial (which has appeared, suitably enough, on the 70th anniversary of the repeal of Prohibition) it has now called for tobacco to be made illegal:

“If tobacco were an illegal substance, possession of cigarettes would become a crime, and the number of smokers would drastically fall. Cigarette smoking is a dangerous addiction. We should be doing a great deal more to prevent this disease and to help its victims. We call on Tony Blair's government to ban tobacco.”

In a way, I suppose, we should be grateful that this piece of trash has been published, for, it shows the anti-tobacco jihadists for what they are, bone-headed, presumptuous, arrogant and with a contempt for humanity so profound that it has, quite obviously, become pathological.

They also make the tobacco companies look honest by comparison. Do you remember all that talk about how much tobacco ‘cost’ society (always a nonsense calculation, by the way, in that it excluded the, cough, cough, savings in pension costs that a smoking habit was likely to entail)? Well, look at this, also from the same editorial:

”The UK public, though, is better at facing facts than its government, perhaps because the UK public does not have to consider directly the £9·3 billion per year raised in tax revenue on tobacco. Compared with that figure, the cost to the National Health Service of smoking-related diseases of £1·5 billion a year seems paltry. So does the £1 million the government spent on a television campaign with images of babies apparently smoking to illustrate the dangers to children of second-hand smoke, and the £138 million spent helping smokers to quit."

Well, while on the topic of idiocy, the only people dumber than the cretins (John Ashcroft’s Justice Department, presumably) who decided to prosecute Tommy Chong were the cretins who passed the law making the sale of a bong a criminal offense in the first place. The details of his arrest make staggering reading – an armed raid by a dozen gun-toting DEA agents, backed up by some of LA’s finest. The result of their efforts? The incarceration of a 65-year-old man. That’s a waste of his time and a waste of our tax dollars.

Now, there will be some that say that none of this is Ashcroft’s fault. His department was, they will argue, just doing its job. Yes and no. There is always an element of discretion about how much time and money to spend on any one aspect of law enforcement. The DoJ's resources are not, after all, infinite. The decision to go after Chong in this way and in this time, a time when the Department of Justice has rather more important matters to deal with, is not merely stupid, but irresponsible.

Free the Kern County Taft Correctional Institute One!

Kathryn,

Not only does NRO provide a daily dose of logic and laughter, but now you’ve made my Christmas shopping easier, too!

My father, a non-computer guy, is difficult to shop for – but not this year. National Review will be the perfect gift. I’ve ordered it and I’m confident he’ll be thrilled on a monthly basis. Thanks for the great product.

I’d also like to get him a book – maybe one that gives the reader a revealing look at the Clinton presidency, but I just can’t think of any titles off the top of my head. Maybe you know of one?

Kerry and I had what candidates call a “spirited exchange” in which he defended his vote. He said he felt betrayed by George Bush, whom he had believed, had not yet made up his mind to go to war when the vote was taken. He never expected a unilateral war given the way Powell, Scowcroft, Eagleberger and others were speaking at the time. He defends his willingness to trust the president of the United States, but now realizes that this was a big mistake. At one point, after answering somebody else’s question, he turned back to me and pointedly—one might evens say “passionately”—insisted, “And Eric, if you truly believe that if I had been president, we would be at war in Iraq right now, then you shouldn’t vote for me.”

Via the indefatigable Radley Balko and NRO, of course, earlier this week.

That article from the IndyStar to which you posted a link regarding the "Christmas" display at IU law school being banned made me chuckle in a "what's next" sort of way.

But it, along with what I've been able to gather (courtesy of David Limbaugh and on my own), makes me seriously wonder when (no longer if) some court somewhere will declare Christmas as a national holiday both a violation of the Establishment Clause and the Equal Protection Clause (since there is no corresponding federal holiday for all workers for Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur or for Ramadan).

The logic of how we can keep Christmas (not "Winter Holiday") as a federal holiday, supported by the force of government, yet we cannot have a crèche or, in the case of IU law school, even a fake-snow-covered tree that could be interpreted as being a Christmas tree (which the SCOTUS has said is a secular symbol, anyway) escapes me. Logically, it does not follow how we can have the one and not the others if we accept as given the current trend in Establishment Clause jurisprudence. We just simply allow the former, logic notwithstanding.

I am deeply concerned that, one of these days, a court somewhere will take the Establishment Clause path we're presently on to its logical conclusion. "Government, you must be open for business on December 25, and government workers, you must report to work on that day or else take a personal leave day." Do you not see that coming?

As you probably noticed, this flap over the Christmas tree was at the I.U. Indianapolis Law School and not the main IU campus law school in Bloomington, IN. (where such ivory tower behavior is to be expected). The Indianapolis Law School was traditionally a more practitioner-oriented, and some would say "blue collar" school: it was originally an evening school which educated returning servicemen from WWII -- many with families and jobs.

I can't believe that this type of pc cowardice is going to sit well with it's alumni -- speaking of which I wonder what it's most famous alumnus, Dan Quayle, would have to say in response.

Stephen Stanton revisits the whole non-brouhaha of South Park Republicanism. If all he's saying is that there's a socially moderate middle which is right now in the Republican column, I agree with him. But beyond that, I'm not sure. Regardless, I think he steals a few bases.

One is stylistic and I may be misreading him. But he seems to say that I'm wrong on South Park Republicans because I don't address his writings. Protecting what you see as your turf is fair game but, truth be told, I didn't have his writings in mind at all when I wrote my column about Brian Anderson's City Journal piece.

Second, it seems to me that Stanton is using SPR in a way that a lot of people aren't. At the outset he agrees with me that there is no uniform bloc of South Park Republicans. He even concedes that many South Park Republicans have never seen the show and have no coherent political outlook on actual issues of public policy. Rather, SPRs are merely moderates, middle of the roaders, centrists, libertarian or liberal Republicans or conservative or libertarian Democrats.

Well, if that's the case, why the hell are we talking about them in the first place? Doesn't this underscore my contention that this is largely a contrivance of the pundits and bloggers? I agree there are generational differences among younger conservatives and young people generally. My problem is with the rush to create seemingly insightful but actually distorting journalistic buzz-phrases for rather ordinary -- though important -- trends.

Also, Stanton seems to think there's rich irony in the fact that most South Park Republicans don't know we're talking about them and he suggests this fact is lost on many of us pointy-headed pundits. As for the first part, I agree entirely that they might be oblivious to this debate -- especially if they don't exist. As for the second part, who says? Stanton refers to the "incestuous circles of punditry" as if folks like Andrew Sullivan and I live in a bunker somewhere. Well, truth be told, I pretty much do live in a bunker but it never dawned on me that all of these millions of people would be aware of this tea-cup debate. I'm also aware, for example, that millions of urban Catholics are probably unaware Karl Rove is reaching out to them and that they live outside these incestuous circles as well. This is not news and presenting it as such doesn't wash.

Lastly, Stanton's concessions that South Park Republicans aren't a unified bloc are largely retracted by the end of his essay where he starts listing the policies that could win them over to the Democrats or keep them in the Republican column. Well, which is it? Is it true that "There is no single 'South Park Republican' platform. They have different views on drugs, guns, abortion and Social Security." Or is it true that, the GOP could lose their support by endorsing "anti-smoking legislation" or by raising tariffs?

We have a winner. (Nod to Arts & Letters Daily for the link). I would post the extended passage, but it's sufficiently graphic to violate K-Lo's rules against such things. You can find it at ALD.

It'll be interesting to see whether the Europeans blink.

This email was from my brother to our mother and his wife who is in [ Wiesbaden]. We have no idea how it 'got out' as we received it Thanksgiving morning. We had heard on the news that the Pres.had visited the airport (where my brother is based with the intel division) and so we (the family) knew we'd soon get an email from him. Sure enough, this one came and my mother read it to us all as we stood around the den. My mother sobbed and the rest of us got very teary-eyed as well...even my 18 year old son.

I had forwarded this to a friend of mine (who is a retired Navy Commander) whom I keep updated on my brother's 'goings on' and he wrote me yesterday that he had received the same email from several of his friends. He was flabbergasted that my brother's email came to him from other sources far and wide. He had not sent it to anyone. Interestingly enough, in the version he sent me the names are edited out with X's. In the version you published, the names were still there...i.e. my nephew.

So see? This is a real letter from a real patriot and soldier who is serving his country per his chosen responsibility. Not all warm and fuzzy sentiments are staged after all. My question remains...how the heck did it get 'out' unless Shelly passed it along to other mil. Personnel in Germany who may have distributed it. Never the less, the point, again, is that this is not a military PR ploy.

Thank you for your time,

Marsha Jefferson
Prairie Grove, Arkansas

From a reader:

My [community college] students likewise draw a blank when I refer to anything current on TV.

Given his longevity in the industry and his several mega-successful series, a couple of which I have loved, I marvel that Bellisario's work is always excluded from the sort of discussion you just posted. JAG is one of the most grown-up (in the best sense of the word) shows on television--consistently mature in outlook and in the themes it portrays. Magnum PI had Tom Selleck, which would have been enough, in addition to Hawaii and good story-telling. Bellisario's Quantum Leap was highly inventive, and ran for years. Why does no awards show or media writer acknowledge the man's existence?

We've been down this road before, most famously with Karen Ann Quinlan and Nancy Cruzan. In both of those cases, families fought hard for the right to discontinue treatment; treatment that they felt was futile. Today, the Schiavos are fighting equally hard to continue treatment; treatment that so many others feel is futile.

So little and so much has changed in the past ten years. Our science is no closer to understanding consciousness, but our society is more confident that those living in altered forms of it are closer to death than to life. In the era of Quinlan and Cruzan, the burden of proof lay on those who would deny basic care to the severely cognitively impaired. Today, the burden of proof is on those who would continue it. If that isn't a slide down the slippery slope, what is?

During Senate floor debate in 1996 on a bill to ban partial-birth abortion, Sen. Rick Santorum (R., Pa.) was told that he could not make a judgment about something that had never touched his life. Less than a month later, Santorum's wife, Karen, pregnant with their fourth child, had a miscarriage. Letters to Gabriel chronicles Gabriel Michael Santorum's twenty-week life. Although he spent only two hours outside the womb before he died, he had become a part of the family in utero. As Mrs. Santorum writes, Accepting partial-birth abortion as our only alternative to a difficult birth or a potentially disabled infant is to thwart two of our strongest human needs: those of love and memory.''

Just read your article on the Passion of Christ.

I would nominate my wife as my favorite feminist (before JPII and Mel Gibson, unfortunately, but after the Blessed Mother). After learning at 22 weeks that our daughter Clare Catherine was anencephalic, my wife faced a path akin to that chosen by the Blessed Virgin. Rather than acting "to end the suffering" (as so many cowardly counseled), my wife exercised her "right" by complying with Deuteronomy and choosing life. As with the Blessed Mother, my wife said "yes" to God's request. She agreed to take care of one of His most beloved children, who was also among the most vulnerable in our "culture of death."

My wife carried Clare until she was born at 40 weeks. It was a journey full of sadness, grief and pain, as one can easily imagine. More importantly, however, it was also a journey of love and hope. Clare's birth was anticipated and received with joy, and my wife spent the entire amount of Clare's life (20 hours) with her. How many parents can say they spent their child's entire life with them? Because Clare was allowed to come to term, she was able to receive the sacraments of baptism and confirmation (her godfather is the priest who gave her the sacraments), and now she is in heaven, hopefully working to keep her father on track.

We celebrated the second anniversary of Clare's birth and death (last Friday and Saturday) with mass, a cake, and for some, a visit to her grave. She was and is our greatest blessing.

After watching my wife go through this experience, similar in some ways to that of the Blessed Mother, I hope that someday examples like her will be viewed as the true feminism, the courage to respond to God's call to be all that a woman can be.

Thanks for reading.

AFGHANISTAN’S DECIMATED LIVESTOCK COULD TAKE 10 YEARS TO REGENERATE – UN REPORT

New York, Dec 4 2003 10:00AM

Four years of drought and many years of civil strife have decimated livestock in Afghanistan, a major source of income and food for farmers and their families, and it could take up to 10 years for the animal herds to regenerate naturally, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reported today.

Good article on Mel Gibson. Only, Jesus is my favorite feminist. Walter Wink has pointed out that Jesus upends social convention in every single scene in the Gospels in which he interacts with women. (Always for the better.)

It took time, but his influence slowly changed the world. Though people like Hugh Heffner...and Bill Clinton try to change it back, (upending post-Jesus social convention for the worse) Christ's feminist influence has even reformed views of women in India, China and Japan, to a large extent.

An Email from a Captain in Iraq

We knew there was a dinner planned with ambassador Bremer and LTG Sanchez. There were 600 seats available and all the units in the division weretasked with filling a few tables. Naturally, the 501st MI battalion got ourtable. Soldiers were grumbling about having to sit through another dog-and-pony show, so we had to pick soldiers to attend. I chose not to go.

But, about 1500 the G2, LTC Devan, came up to me and with a smile, asked me to come to dinner with him, to meet him in his office at 1600 and bring a camera. I didn't really care about getting a picture with Sanchez or Bremer, but when the division's senior intelligence officer asks you to go, you go. We were seated in the chow hall, fully decorated for thanksgiving when all kinds of secret service guys showed up.

That was my first clue, because Bremer's been here before and his personal security detachment is not that big. Then BG Dempsey got up to speak, and he welcomed ambassador Bremer and LTG Sanchez. Bremer thanked us all and pulled out a piece of paper as if to give a speech. He mentioned that the President had given him this thanksgiving speech to give to the troops. He then paused and said that the senior man present should be the one to give it. He then looked at Sanchez, who just smiled.

Bremer then said that we should probably get someone more senior to read the speech. Then, from behind the camouflage netting, the President of the United States came around. The mess hall actually erupted with hollering. Troops bounded to their feet with shocked smiles and just began cheering with all their hearts. The building actually shook. It was just unreal. I was absolutely stunned. Not only for the obvious, but also because I was only two tables away from the podium. There he stood, less than thirty feet away from me! The cheering went on and on and on.

Soldiers were hollering, cheering, and a lot of them were crying. There was not a dry eye at my table. When he stepped up to the cheering, I could clearly see tears running down! his cheeks. It was the most surreal moment I've had in years. Not since my wedding and Aaron being born. Here was this man, our President, came all the way around the world, spending 17 hours on an airplane and landing in the most dangerous airport in the world, where a plane was shot out of the sky not six days before.

Just to spend two hours with his troops. Only to get on a plane and spend another 17 hours flying back. It was a great moment, and I will never forget it. He delivered his speech, which we all loved, when he looked right at me and held his eyes on me. Then he stepped down and was just mobbed by the soldiers. He slowly worked his way all the way around the chow hall and shook every last hand extended. Every soldier who wanted a photo with the President got one. I made my way through the line, got dinner, then wolfed it down as he was still working the room.

You could tell he was really enjoying himself. It wasn't just a photo opportunity. This man was actually enjoying himself! He worked his way over the course of about 90 minutes towards my side of the room. Meanwhile, I took the opportunity to shake a few hands. I got a picture with Ambassador Bremer, Talabani (acting Iraqi president) and Achmed Chalabi (another member of the ruling council) and Condaleeza Rice, who was there with him.

I felt like I was drunk. He was getting closer to my table so I went back over to my seat. As he passed and posed for photos, he looked my in the eye and "How you doin', captain." I smiled and said "God bless you, sir." To which he responded "I'm proud of what you do, captain." Then moved on.

On Islam, Hayek, Catholicism, the rule of law, etc. I know from my own experience from my "Islam Needs a Pope" column, that some people will take exception with some of what Edward Feser writes here, and I have some disagreements too. But this really is a very interesting, albeit long, read. Check it out.

I want to call your attention to the editorial in the upcoming issue of NR for two reasons. First, it's well done and worth reading. Second, because I get so many emails from people who think NR is pro-gay marriage because I'm allegedly pro-gay marriage. Well, I'm not and neither is NR. The differences between me and the editorial borad of the mothership are real, but they are simply not what many people think they are. Regardless, I'm criticized in the editorial for opposing the FMA. Just thought you should know.

The “turkey prop” reminds me of a Navy Thanksgiving celebrated onboard my ship in the early 90’s. We were pierside in Okinawa, loading Marines and equipment for a major exercise in Korea. Mess Specialist David Robinson, preparing the meal for the officers’ mess made a beautiful bird stuffed with cornbread and sage sausage. When his prize bird made it to the table, our embarked Marine officers refused to carve it, thinking it was a prop. For the first go-round, they ate roasted turkey loaf. Robinson was disappointed beyond belief, at which point I told him to state his case to the senior officer present. He did, and the Marines promptly re-oriented themselves his centerpiece, picking the platter clean in very short order.

If you don't know how to use the word "neocon," don't. Seriously, don't. If you're even the teensiest bit unsure, don't. Because when you use it wrong you illuminate such vast swaths of ignorance so as to make it difficult to be taken seriously on other subjects. An amazing case in point from Tina Brown's column today defending Conrad Black:

The meager turnout was a bummer, since Black's 1,300-page biography has had stellar reviews. Historians from Alan Brinkley to Daniel Yergin have hailed it as the best single volume on the many perplexing aspects of FDR's political life. A belligerent neo-con before it was fashionable, Black has paradoxically contrived to write an admiring appraisal of Roosevelt's pre-Pearl Harbor reluctance to fight the Nazis and the economic interventionism of the New Deal for which neo-cons of the '30s bitterly reviled FDR as "that man."

Now, to the extent I understand the charges, I am all in favor of defending Conrad Black. But, Tina, there were no "neocons" in the 1930s, hyphenated or otherwise. As a matter of intellectual history, this is like referring to "Christians" in 500 B.C. Does Brown think that only "neo-cons" disliked FDR but authentic cons loved him? Seriously, when in doubt, shut up.

the foray has opened new credibility questions for a White House that has dealt with issues as small as who placed the "Mission Accomplished" banner aboard the aircraft carrier Bush used to proclaim the end of major combat operations in Iraq, and as major as assertions about Saddam Hussein's arsenal of unconventional weapons and his ability to threaten the United States.

Die Socialist Pig!

From us according to our ability, to you according to your want? Whatever happened to the ideal of self-reliance?