France continues to wrestle with the implications of its large Muslim population. Now our old friend Dominique de Villepin (he’s the interior minister now) is advocating the training of ‘French’ imams. Such a notion may sound strange to Americans schooled in the tradition of separation of church and state, but it’s not a bad idea, particularly when one considers the current reality:

“The problem of radical Islamic clerics preaching a message contrary to French law and values is a pressing one: government figures show 27 Muslim prayer leaders have been deported on public order or human rights grounds since 2001 - more than half of them since last July. Abdelkader Bouziane, the 52-year-old imam of a Lyon mosque, said in an interview that the Koran authorised husbands to hit their wives, that polygamy was right, that women were not men's equals and that music was a sin. Asked whether he approved of the stoning of unfaithful wives, he replied: "Yes." He was deported on Wednesday, a week after Abdelkader Yahia Cherif. The self-proclaimed imam of Brest in Brittany had asked his congregation to "rejoice in the Madrid bombings" that killed 191 people.

“According to the interior ministry, France's 5 million-strong Muslim community, Europe's largest, is ministered to by between 1,000 and 1,500 imams. Only 10% of them are believed to be citizens, less than half speak French, and "probably a majority" are illegal immigrants. Most hail from abroad - 40% from Morocco, 24% from Algeria, 16% from Turkey and 6% from Tunisia - where any advanced religious training they receive is increasingly likely to be in fundamentalist Islamist views that clash with secular French laws.”

The struggle against extremist Islam is a battle that will be fought as much within Islam as from the outside. De Villepin’s move is welcome recognition of that fact.

One of the obsessions with the EU’s leadership is that the bloc should catch up with the US economically. That’s a perfectly respectable aim, but the composition of a new “high level” group formed by Brussels to help that process along, suggests that this might take a while. The 13-person team is made up of representatives of, dread word, ‘stakeholders’ (defined as trade unions, business, political authorities, academics)," a stale corporatist concept that tells you that it is doomed to failure before it has even begun. Its membership comprises four politicians, one journalist (our old friend, Will Hutton, naturally), two academics, three trade unionists and, in a nod to the capitalism it is meant to be promoting, three (count ‘em) businessmen.

America can, I think, relax for now.

Why do I get angry about the drug war? Oh, stories like this:

”Although prosecutors admitted Paey was not a drug trafficker, on April 16 he received a mandatory minimum sentence of 25 years for drug trafficking. That jaw-dropping outcome illustrates two sadly familiar side effects of the war on drugs: the injustice caused by mandatory minimum sentences and the suffering caused by the government's interference with pain treatment. Paey, a 45-year-old father of three, is disabled as a result of a 1985 car accident, failed back surgery, and multiple sclerosis. Today, as he sits in jail in his wheelchair, a subdermal pump delivers a steady, programmed dose of morphine to his spine…”

Read the whole thing, and also notice, once again, the impact of “mandatory minimums”. They are not about justice.

Via Reason’s indefatigable Jacob Sullum.

Michael Moore, April 14th, 2004:

“The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not "insurgents" or "terrorists" or "The Enemy." They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow -- and they will win.”

Hi:

All of the polls are showing the race between Arlen and Toomey is neck and neck. I am very worried (this is an understatement).

Please take time and email and call your family, friends, neighbors and every Republican you know in PA and ask them to come out and vote for Arlen.

In November of 2003, Susan Gantman, who ran Statewide for Superior Court, won her race by 24 votes. 2 million people voted in this race.

People need to realize that their vote counts. People need to realize that this is going to be a tight race and need to be encouraged to come out and vote. Your friends, family and co-workers need to hear from you that it is important to vote in on Tuesday.

Several times a day, including today, people tell me Arlen is a shoe-in. This is not true! Today, a number of people told me they don't believe the polls on this race. The polls are accurate! Arlen is not going to win if voters have a complacent attitude and stay home on Election Day. We need a wake-up call to all Republican voters.

Please help with this effort. Please make calls and send out your own email, urging people to come out and vote for Arlen this coming Tuesday, April 27th. Please talk about the race with everyone with whom you come in contact.

If you need any facts on Arlen, check out his website www.specter2004.com .

Thank you.

Tracey

Belgium’s ‘far right’ Flemish nationalist party, the Vlaams Blok, is undeniably, a party with some very unsavory elements indeed. It is also a party that has benefited from the tensions caused by mass immigration and Belgium’s continued rule by a political establishment that is as revolting as it is corrupt. Take your pick from a few recent stories, whether it’s the endemic anti-Americanism, the foreign minister’s attempt to play down his country’s genocidal role in the Congo, the arrest of a distinguished investigative journalist or the increasingly troubling suggestions of a massive cover-up of the truth behind the Dutroux pedophile murders, and one is left with the impression that Belgium is a cesspit nation, a state that is rotten to the core. Add a long history of division between Belgium’s French and Flemish-speakers to an already poisonous political mix, and it should be no surprise that the VB has been gaining traction. In last year's parliamentary elections it won nearly 18 percent of the vote in Flanders and in 2000, 33 percent of voters supported it in municipal polls in Antwerp, the region's largest city.

That, clearly, is not acceptable to Belgium’s ruling class. A court has now found that some of the VB’s propaganda has broken the country’s anti-racism law. The party has been fined and, critically, will lose the state support to which most political parties are entitled. Now, and I should stress this, I don’t know what all the offending materials said, and political parties, of course, should not be above the law. Nevertheless, it’s difficult to read this story without the suspicion that the courts are being used to achieve that which free and open debate could not. And that’s not a pretty thought.

Stephen Pollard has more.

Again, Why George W. Bush Must be Tried as a War Criminal Tehran Times - 3 hours ago

Arinze was asked whether…Kerry should not request or be given communion for his unapologetic support of human rights, including a woman's right to abortion [emphasis added].

Someone who wasn't overly impressed with Pat Tillman's call to duty was Simeon Rice, a former Cardinals teammate who now is with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Earlier this year, on Jim Rome's national radio show, Rice said Tillman "wasn't that good, not really." He went on to imply that Tillman probably wasn't going to be around the NFL much longer anyway, so joining the Army was no big deal.

Only after Rome gave him repeated opportunities to amend his comments did Rice finally say, "I think it's very admirable, actually." He added of Tillman's motivation: "Maybe it was the Rambo movies? Maybe it's Sylvester Stallone and Rocky?"

American Collegians for Life and Feminists for Life are cosponsoring a Women Deserve Better® Symposium on Women and abortion for college students on Saturday, April 24. Speakers include:

Sally A. Winn, Vice President, Feminists for Life of America Dr. Angela Lanfranchi, MD, Breast Cancer Prevention Institute Georgette Forney, Co-founder of the Silent No More Awareness Campaign Cathleen Cleaver Ruse, USCCB Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities

”Those…who obstinately persist in manifest grave sin, are not to be admitted to holy communion.”

In any diocese, the decision about whether to enforce this canon rests with the bishop. Yet even where bishops choose to ignore it, canon 915 should enable the laity to ask a few very awkward questions. Consider, for example, several queries for the cardinal archbishop of Washington, Theodore McCarrick:

*Throughout his public career, Your Eminence, Senator John Kerry has supported abortion on demand, advocating federal funds for abortions in a variety of circumstances, and the very day you met him earlier this month Senator Kerry began airing pro-choice campaign commercials on television. In advocating abortion on demand, is Senator Kerry guilty of “manifest grave sin?”

*If not, Your Eminence, why not?

*If so, Your Eminence, why have you failed to ban Senator Kerry from receiving communion in your archdiocese? And why has Archbishop Sean O’Malley failed to ban the Senator from receving communion in Boston?

From a reader:

Jonah,

At the conclusion of Bill Clinton's trial in the
Senate, Arlen Specter's Scottish vote gave Ted Kennedy
the ability to crow that supporters of removal were
not even able to muster a majority (the final vote was
50-50). Kennedy used that fact to argue, with some
effectiveness, that Republicans had wasted the
country's time.

I vowed that day that if I ever had an opportunity to
vote against Arlen Specter in a primary, I would walk
over broken glass to do it. I am one happy
Pennsylvania Republican this week. My fingers are
crossed.

I am amazed by the number of angry liberals who've written to me arguing that Kerry's service in Vietnam equals being strong on defense. Period. Time and again the argument lacks any reflection or nuance. He served nobly in uniform [and you didn't!] therefore he's strong on defense and you're a traitorous scumbag for suggesting otherwise.

There's so much that is baffling about this position. First of all, no one among the Democrats ever made anything like this argument when Clinton was the standard bearer. Indeed, countless Democrats, including Kerry, ridiculed the suggestion that service in Vietnam or the lack of it was particularly relevant. Second, it should be noted that any number of legitimately traitorous scumbags, starting with Benedict Arnold, served honorably in uniform. Third, there's this odd identity politics thing going on which treats Vietnam vets as this homogeneous bloc that Kerry gets to speak for and who all think the same way. From my own limited experience, I've found Vietnam vets to be about as diverse politically as any other [Bleg: have their been surveys on their political attitudes?]. Even on the war itself, attitudes differ dramatically.

But most of all, what bothers me is the willful abdication on the importance of ideas. It's as if Kerry's voting record and speeches are entirely beside the point, as if what a candidate has done out of uniform matters not a whit compared to what he once did in uniform. This is man-on-a-white-horse thinking and considering how much the left pretends to reject such views, the hypocrisy is offensive...and a bit scary.

The Kerry campaign flubs a big one. From the Boston Globe:

WASHINGTON -- Vietnam combat records posted on John F. Kerry's campaign website for the month of January 1969 as evidence of his service aboard swift boat No. 94 describe action that occurred before Kerry was skipper of that craft, according to the officer who said he commanded the boat at the time. ADVERTISEMENT

On the site, the Massachusetts senator is described as the skipper of Navy boat No. 94 during several actions in late January 1969.

However, Edward Peck, who was the skipper of the 94 before Kerry took over, said combat reports posted by the campaign for January 1969 involve action when he was the skipper, not Kerry. Peck, who was seriously wounded in fighting that took place on Jan. 29, 1969, said he believes Kerry campaign aides made a mistake in claiming Kerry as skipper of the 94 at that time.

On the Kerry website, the report of the combat on that day on the 94 boat is posted as occurring during Kerry's time as skipper of the boat. Peck said Kerry replaced him after the Jan. 29, 1969, event.

"Those are definitely mine," Peck said, referring to the combat reports that the Kerry campaign posted as representing Kerry's action. "There is no doubt about it."

Standing at the bow of a 25-foot power craft called "Fishing Magician" inspecting coastal erosion in southern Louisiana reminded Kerry of his days as commander of a Navy "swift" boat 35 years ago.

"I looked out at the shoreline and I commented that parts of it looked a lot like the rivers and coastline that I went through in Vietnam," the Massachusetts senator said.

He told about 100 supporters sweltering in the heat on the banks of the Mississippi that he had spent a lot of time "in a habitat that looked a little like this" as a young Naval officer. He said the 50-foot gunboat he commanded was built "right here in Louisiana."

From a Jerusalem Post story on Farouk Kaddoumi, the PLO's hard-line "foreign minister":

Commenting on Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip, Kaddoumi said: "If Israel wants to leave the Gaza Strip, then it should do so. This means that the Palestinian resistance has forced it to leave. But the resistance will continue. Let the Gaza Strip be South Vietnam. We will use all available methods to liberate North Vietnam."

Let's not make too much of a habit of this sort of thing, this isn't a personals page. But he asked so nicely:

I'm a new library school graduate. I am very surprised that Corner reading librarians are in abundance given my experience in school and at national conferences. I've looked for some type of conservative librarian listserv, but the one that did exist is no longer active. Would you be able to post this email address? Librarians are generous when it comes to knowledge and resource sharing, and I'd like to trade business cards, so to speak. This might be a bit corny but I have been rather disappointed with the lack diversity in the field. newlibrarian@mail.com

A reader forwarded me an email from Ted Kennedy's office announcing two job openings. Here's position #2:

2) Driver for Senator Kennedy: Responsibilities will include driving, advance for events, and general administrative assistance. It is important that this individual be mature, well-organized, flexible, proactive, and hardworking. We are looking for someone who has a good head on theirs shoulders, is able to multi-task, has good interpersonal skills, and an interest in Government.

Joseph Bottum has an article in the Standard on the subject. This seems as good a time as any to respond to the couple of emails I got taking issue with, or asking me to clarify, my remark the other day that "I think that Catholic bishops are probably obligated to withhold communion from pro-abortion politicians (after first talking with them privately)."

I think two things have often been lost in the discussion about that idea. First: The withholding of communion should be seen not as a punishment so much as an act of charity. The Catholic church teaches that the act of denying justice to the unborn (by voting for abortion) is a grave sin. The politician who persists in it is endangering his soul. To encourage him to mend his ways is to do him a favor, albeit one that he will understandably not recognize as such. Second: The church cannot fail to offer this charity. If my reasoning is correct, this is not a discretionary matter for the bishops. Thus: Even if the bishops knew to a certainty that withholding communion from Kerry would generate a backlash that helped him, and the Bush campaign were pleading with them not to do it, they would, if I am right, still have to do it for Kerry's sake.

People concentrate too much on the fiscal side of the Social Security problem. But it's worth noting that higher productivity won't solve it. If higher productivity translates into higher wages, then it means higher benefits paid out of the program as well as higher revenues paid in. (Benefits are tied to wages.) So the problem is just pushed into the future. Bringing in more immigrants, or having more babies, similarly pushes the problem into the future. The structural imbalance between payout and pay-in rates remains the same.

To the extent that Social Security allows people to free-ride on other people's having children, I would favor payroll-tax cuts based on the number of kids people have. But there is no substitute for cutting future benefit levels. (Ideally, this would be coupled with private accounts.)

From a reader:

Regarding the responses to the "silly screed" on the Patriot Act - the reason why the readers can't figure out what the lady is talking about regarding the misc Section of the Patriot Act is because she's referring to the so-called "Patriot Act II" - WHICH NEVER PASSED CONGRESS.

So, basically, the lady is railing about "the Patriot Act" as cover for railing about things that were never made into law….sheesh!

See here for zany comments regarding "Patriot Act II":

The imperialistic, capitalistic Christian Crusaders and their Jewish overlords have made video games that are so good Arab kids can't avoid playing them even though they're racist:

Cairo - Glued to computer screens in a Cairo cybercafe, Egyptian teenagers lead United States forces against China and a shadowy Middle Eastern group, while most of the country seethes in anger against US policy in the region.

The US-produced computer game Command and Conquer: Generals portrays a scenario in which the US and China battle the Global Liberation Army (GLA), a Middle Eastern underground movement with a fondness for chemical weapons.

The teenagers say the game reinforces the western image of Arabs as "terrorists" with introductory scenes showing them gunning down civilians and stealing US aid, but the graphics and high-octane action keeps them hooked.

"I really like the game. I play it every day. I miss it if I don't play it for a day. I know it's racist but what can I do? It's a good game," said 16-year-old Ahmed Mohsen.

First from the gub'ment the second from the private sector:

Jonah,

I am a macroeconomic theorist. There is nothing about increasing rates
of productivity which requires a high or low birthrate.
Generally, increasing productivity is an unmitigated good thing. You
can use the higher productivity to produce the same
amount of stuff with fewer workers or fewer hours per worker, or use
the extra productivity to produce more stuff, or anywhere
in between.

But for all you keep saying that you don't know economics, as usual,
you have things basically correct. We could, in theory,
have relatively few do all the work as productivity increases. For
example, if all we wanted to do was have a 1910 standard of
living, we certainly could achieve this with a very small fraction of
the population working. Of course, we can do better than
this. Who wants that much leisure if your standard of living is that
low?

Generqally, economics is quite silent on what birthrates "should" be.

You're right, increased productivity helps ease the burden a lot. But the models that anyone runs to estimate Social Security obligations account for productivity growth. Of course, differing opinions on the speed of productivity growth will change the estimated date of bankruptcy for the program, but I don't think many economists expect productivity to grow fast enough to keep the program flush for baby busters.

I would be curious to hear NRO contributors comment on immigration policy as it relates to this problem.

In the wake of the Saudi car bombings, Saudi Arabia's top cleric declares that suicide bombers -- who kill Muslims, of course -- will "burn in hell."

From a Hill-wonk:

Jonah, your analysis on whether or not rising productivity will mitigate the problem of lower birth rates is a bit off. As far as output is concerned – you are completely correct. We can make more with less when productivity increases. With regard to Social Security, however, it’s a problem because the gross amount of taxes paid into Social Security are affected more by the quantity of workers than the quantity of output. At the moment, the cap on payroll taxes prevents the exploitation of the highly compensated (and I don’t think raising taxes is really the best way to face the demographic and fiscal challenges posed by Social Security). While it is unequivocally true that productivity in the long-run increases wages and standard of living, the demographic problem with Social Security independent of productivity is that we just won’t have enough workers paying taxes to support the vast number of retirees drawing money from the system. Outsized increases in productivity may actually serve to exacerbate the problem. This is not to say that productivity is bad – it’s not. It’s the primary means by which we increase our wages and standard of living while keeping inflation low. If anything, it’s yet another reason why Social Security needs to be modernized in the very near future so that we can avoid this kind of fiscal calamity.

Lots and lots of active Corner readers are librarians (draw your own conclusion about what that says about their workload). We welcome and appreciate them. Nonetheless, I do like this email:

Hi Jonah. As a professional librarian, in both the corporate and the academic world, for over 17 years I think I can provide you with some insight into why librarians are so sensitive about their image.

The dirty secret that no ones wants to own up to about this profession
is that it really isn't a profession at all, certainly not in the way
lawyers or doctors or engineers use the term. It's more like a trade
that any intelligent 20 year old could be trained to do in 6 months.
Sure, there are a lot of things that you pick up from experience but
the idea that you need a masters degree to do this job is just
ridiculous. But they (ALA, etc.) set up barriers, like the requirement
of a Masters, in order to provide the image that there is more to this
job then their really is. Librarians know this deep down, they
basically have a chip on their shoulders about not being taken seriously
as a profession, so they go out of their way to inflate their importance
to society. Thus we have the ALA's "Banned Book Week" when in fact any
intelligent person knows full well that there are no banned books in
this country at all. Just because a library doesn't have a book in its
collection doesn't make that book banned, but apparently the ALA defines
banned as meaning that someone might have to go on Amazon.com and buy it
themselves. The leftists at the ALA just can't stand that fact that some
right wing tax payer would have the gall to object to his or her tax
dollars being used to purchase books that they object to (Heather Has
Two Daddies, etc.). What they really object to of course is having
someone question their "professional" judgment. So they use a
deliberately provocative term, banned books, to conjure up images of
Nazis burning books. Likewise, the ALA has to treat the Patriot Act as
some monstrosity that we need them to protect us from in order for them
to be able to portray themselves as important to societies future.. It
is true that we keep circulation records confidential and there are good
reasons for that. But to say that because the FBI or some other law
enforcement agency now has the right to take a look at those (with a
court order I might add) that we are now in some sort of police state
only goes to show how desperate the majority of the "leaders" of this
profession are to maintain the fiction that they are important and
needed gate keepers for society.

Better not post my name with this if you put it on the Corner, this is
traitorous hate speech to this crowd.

I've gotten a lot of email from folks dissecting that silly screed about the Patriot Act I linked to yesterday in this post. I thought I was making it clear that I tought there were all sorts of other things wrong with the op-ed other than the thing about libraries, I just was too tired to get into all of it. Anyway, lots of folks have done my work for me. I particularly like this one:

Jonah,

There are no Sections 126, 128, or 129 in the USA PATRIOT Act. Title I stops at Section 106. As for Sections 321 and 322, Sec. 321 simply extends the definition of "financial institution" to credit unions and futures commission merchants, commodity trading advisors and commodity pool operators.

Sec. 322 applies existing law governing fugitive disentitlement to corporations if a majority shareholder or an individual acting in the name of the corporation is a fugitive from justice.

N.B. Although Sec. 322 of the Patriot Act says "Section 2466 of title 18", this is a misprint, as there is no Section 2466 in title 18. It meant title 28, and this has been corrected in the latest version of the US Code.

In addition, the author states, "[u]nder Section 312 of the Patriot Act, a suspected terrorist can be arrested and detained if he or she says something the government does not agree with." Section 312 is about standards for financial accounts maintained foreign individuals and has nothing to do with alleged seditious speech.

None of the sections described by that article (even the ones that actually exist) has anything whatsoever to do with "credit records, library records and homes", nor is Sami Al-Arian going to be prosecuted under the Patriot Act for "a statement he made ... in Arabic about Israel." In short, it helps to READ the bill before waxing apoplectic.

It seems that the issue I spent so much time boning up on at the begining of my "career" in Washington is moving back on the radar: Population trends. I used to work for Ben Wattenberg, author of the Birth Dearth and other controversial demographic polemics, and he would make me read about Total Fertility Rates in the Third World and everywhere else all day. Anyway, the other night I saw a scare-mongering documentary on Nova about population trends around the world and then yesterday I listened on NPR to an author from the New America Foundation talking about his book on the problems of declining birthrates here in the US. Plus the issue comes up more and more in the immigration and Social Security debates.

To sum it up, Americans -- like everyone else in the industrialized world -- are having too few babies. If, by "too few" you mean not enough babies to replenish the workforce going into entitlement-rich retirement. Not enough workers at the bottom of the system means not enough taxpayers to generate Social Security checks. In America we offset this problem to a certain extent with immigration. We import young workers to make up for the ones we don't manufacture at home.

Anyway, suddenly, some liberals are becoming pronatalists (i.e. someone who favors policy supporting higher birthrates) when a little more than a decade ago they were saying folks like Wattenberg were right out of the Handmaid's Tale. That's cool.

But here's my question and it is entirely theoretical (for I am still very much a pronatalist): Don't the unprecedented increases in productivity mitigate the pronatalist argument somewhat? In theory couldn't we make a comparatively small handfull of workers (or, heh, nanobot androids) so productive that we wouldn't need that many more workers? Is there anything in the realm of pure economic theory which says that a very large society couldn't simply exploit the highly productive (and therefore highly compensated) labor of a relatively small few? Or am I missing something having been absent from this issue for so long?

I was intrigued by this idea of half a million soldiers doing house-to-house searches in Frankfurt. What I found was that it was not limited to Frankfurt, that it was called "Operation TALLYHO", and that it occurred on the weekend of 21 July 1945.

The best resource I have found so far is in Chapter 17 of the book "THE U.S. ARMY IN THE OCCUPATION OF GERMANY: 1944-1946" by Earl F. Ziemke, published by the U.S. Army Center of Military History, available online here. [To quote:]

"As a kind of housewarming for the zone, USFET [U.S. Forces European Theater]planned and, in forty-eight hours beginning at daybreak on 21 July, executed a check and search operation code-named TALLYHO. The objectives were to check the credentials of all persons in the zone, civilian or military; to search all premises and individuals for prohibited articles, such as firearms and stolen US government property; and to search for evidence of black-marketeering. Staged in secret, to the extent that an operation employing 163,000 troops in the Western Military District alone could be kept a secret, TALLYHO apparently did at least take most Germans by surprise. It raised a fast-traveling wave of rumors: that there had been a jailbreak, that an American officer had been shot, that the Americans were making a last minute search for loot before turning the zone over to the Russians. After the surprise wore off, which took no more than four hours, the Germans became quite co-operative; and some of them began to arrange their property in neat displays, as if for ‘showdown inspection.’ The search brought in 2,747 illegal small arms, 2,658 miscellaneous items of Army clothing and equipment, 340 AWOL soldiers, and evidence for 23 fraternization cases. The confiscated black-market goods amounted to 100 gallons of gasoline, 1,000 pounds each of sugar and flour, 75 pounds of coffee, 138 automobile tires, and 300 pairs of shoes, which in total, [the American forces]…concluded with not quite flawless logic, constituted ‘no evidence of an organized black market.’ Of the 83,000 Germans arrested, 77,000 were held for nothing more than improper identification papers. In the end, however, USFET believed TALLYHO was a success in that it impressed German population ‘with the serious intention of the American troops.’”

It was Reagan who re-moralized American foreign policy after years of Nixonian detente and it's simply not accurate to say that Reagan did so solely or even primarily as a mouthpiece for the neocons.

Here is how the imperialist plot in Iraq was proceeding until recently. The Shiite Muslim pilgrimages to Najaf and Karbala and the Sunni pilgrimages to Mecca and Medina had been recommenced after a state ban that had lasted for years and been enforced in blood. A new dinar had been minted, without the face of the dictator, and was on its way to becoming convertible. (Indeed, recent heists at the Beirut and Baghdad airports suggested that the Iraqi currency was at last worth stealing.) The deliberately parched and scorched wetlands of the south were being re-flooded. At the end of June, the American headquarters was to be converted into an embassy. At that point, almost $100 billion was to become available for the reconstitution of the Iraqi state and society. By the end of the year, campaigning would be under way for the first open election in Iraqi memory, and the only such election in the region (unless you count Israel)….

Of what does this confrontation remind you? Why, of Vietnam, says Sen. Edward Kennedy.

I do hope no one thinks it too inappropriate that I pass on tidbits from pops. If it helps, it's not like I post all of them.

Derb - Please take this in the spirit it was meant. From Poppa Goldberg:

Derb cites the old cliche that nothing rhymes with "orange." For decades I have pointed out to those foolish enough to listen that the solution to this is "Not so far, Inge." William Inge is the famous playwright (now dead) -- Picnic, Come Back Little Sheba, The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, etc. I leave it to Derb - if he wishes - to create the poem or dialogue around this phrase....[I think] It is a better rhyme than the one he chose, which depended on spelling more than sound.

I'm too tired to wade into or care about all of this, but I love this part:

Under Sections 126, 128, 129, 321 and 322 of the Patriot Act, the government can search credit records, library records and homes of suspected terrorists or, as the Bush administration says, “enemy combatants” without obtaining a warrant. Someone someday is going to check your library records, people, so I suggest you be careful. [Emphasis mine]

What is so sacred about libraries? What, aside from access to internet porn, is so sensitive that critics of the Patriot Act single out libraries above all other things? Seriously, what's the worst case scenario? I mean even if you took out the most radically subversive tracts in history, no one would care. And for most of us it'd be funny, not scary. Dear God! The G-Men know I'm reading back issues of Cracked and Omni!

UPDATE: WOOPS! I didn't include the link. Here it is. Sorry about that.

David Cay Johnston's latest attack on Bush's tax cuts is one of his weirdest. Supposedly the tax code now violates principles of "horizontal equity" (similarly situated people should pay the same rate) and "vertical equity" (people with a greater ability to pay should pay more) that were valued by the citizens of Athens, John Locke, Adam Smith, and even the Cato Institute.

Johnston uses the Bush and Cheney tax returns to illustrate the supposed problem. The Cheneys had more than twice the income of the Bushes but paid about the same in taxes. The Cheneys paid a lower tax rate than most people in their income range. Much of the difference, as Johnston acknowledges, has to do with the taxation of dividends. But a reduction in the double taxation of dividends is compatible with both horizontal and vertical equity; it just changes the definition of that equity. To make the point as simply as possible: If all the dividends were taxed at the individual level and left untaxed at the corporate level, Johnston's "problem" would go away--yet nothing substantial would have changed.

It all depends on definitions of terms such as "income"--and "equity." Here's Johnston: "The Bush and Cheney returns also show the collapse of vertical equity, under which one's tax burden rises with income and which the libertarian Cato Institute calls a 'bedrock American principle.'" I googled "cato institute 'bedrock american principle'" and got an article that does indeed suggest that at least one Cato policy analyst is against something he calls "vertical inequality." But this analyst means something quite different from what Johnston means. He fairly clearly is suggesting that it is unfair to tax someone at a higher rate just because he makes more money. That's not quite what Johnston has in mind.

Libertarian Reluctantly Calls Fire Department

CHEYENNE, WY—After attempting to contain a living-room blaze started by a cigarette, card-carrying Libertarian Trent Jacobs reluctantly called the Cheyenne Fire Department Monday. "Although the community would do better to rely on an efficient, free-market fire-fighting service, the fact is that expensive, unnecessary public fire departments do exist," Jacobs said. "Also, my house was burning down." Jacobs did not offer to pay firefighters for their service.

Reporters Without Borders is expressing outrage over the treatment of ailing 75-year-old journalist Siamak Pourzand, who has been imprisoned in Iran since 2001. Pourzand, who is now in a Tehran hospital after suffering a heart attack, has reportedly been chained to his bed by authorities.

A reader writes:

Jonah, I fear you may be missing the point. "Fisking" would seem to mean simply a technique made by possible by the miracle of cut-n-paste. A "fisking" occurs when a text is copied and then responded to (yes, more often than not in a smarmy fashion, but let's let that pass) piece by piece. Thus when Sullivan says he "fisked" the N.R. editorial he doesn't mean he destroyed its arguments (though he may believe he has). Rather he is simply letting us know that he will be using this blog friendly method of response. He has copied the article and will be inserting his own comments in responce to lengthy quoted (cut-n-pasted) passages. CHUNK OF ORIGINAL TEXT. Comment. NEXT CHUNK OF ORIGINAL TEXT. Comment (most likely self-satisfied) And so on . . . Got it?

Me: Yes, I got it. But I'm afraid in the hot-house environment of the web, the original meaning has been overgrown by weeds. I was not referring to Sullivan's intent when I criticized the word, but to its new conotation.

Script for “Doublespeak”

President Bush:

I’m George W. Bush and I approve this message.

VO:

John Kerry says, "A lot of people don't really know who I am."

Well, actually, a lot of people do.

Kerry’s hometown paper says, “In his continuing effort to be all things to all voters … John Kerry is engaging in a level of doublespeak that makes most voters wince.”

The Wall Street Journal said Kerry's tax plan “would mean increasing the tax burden again, which would likely kill the recovery."

On Iraq, The Washington Post said “Kerry’s attempts to weave a thread connecting and justifying [his] positions are unconvincing.”

The Union Leader says Kerry has “waffled” on historic education reforms he supported in 2001, but now opposes.

And the non-partisan National Journal magazine ranks Kerry the most liberal member of the Senate – more liberal than Hillary Clinton or Ted Kennedy.

John Kerry’s problem is not that people don’t know him. It’s that people do.

I think Ramesh and Rich have done much better job than I could responding to Sullivan. I'd just like to add two points of agreement with Ramesh.

First, on the neocon thing. I know I've gotten too deep into this before, but Ramesh is exactly right. There's a double-spin on the history of conservative foreign policy which has been orchestrated in tandem by the leading neocons and by their liberal admirers. The idea that the mainstream conservative movement after 1945 was first and foremost "realist" or even isolationist in its orientation is largely myth. Many neocons, legend has it, had an annoying habit in the 1960s and 1970s of acting as if they "discovered" anti-Communism and that their ideological arguments were needed to provide the Right with backbone. This is nonsense. The neocons were more often less ideologically hawkish and more "realist" than the folks at National Review -- who were championing rollback, not containment. The real realists on the Right were in the Republican Party, not the conservative movement: Eisenhower, Nixon, Kissinger et al. The Goldwater-Reagan crowd criticized detente more passionately than even those idealistic neocons did. It was Reagan who re-moralized American foreign policy after years of Nixonian detent and it's simply not accurate to say that Reagan did so solely or even primarily as a mouthpiece for the neocons. The difference was and is that liberals tend to listen to the neocons more and hence conferred upon them a significance and aura of originality they did not deserve. This is just part of a long, long story of liberals trying -- and largely successfully -- to decide which conservatives are "legitimate" or "serious."

Second: "Fisking." I know the word began as something of a mode of criticism based upon critiques of Robert Fisk. But it has come to mean something else. I think Ramesh nailed this perfectly when he defined it as "criticizing with an unjustified air of having crushed the other side." In this sense, I don't mind "fisking" as a process or an adjective. What I detest is when it is self-declared. If fisking now means to humiliate through criticism and fact-checking or some such, fine. But it is in the minds of the audience to decide whether someone has been "fisked." This should be abundantly clear if you replace the word with its synonyms. I would sound fairly presumptuous if I declared "I've crushed Glenn Reynolds argument today."

I get emails from bloggers telling me they've "fisked me" all the time and, putting aside the fact this sounds like something unpleasant in a prison shower, when I read what they wrote I usually just think they've criticized me in fairly unimpressive ways. Leave it to the readers to decide who's been "fisked." None of this is particularly directed at Sullivan, but he may not fully appreciate the degree to which the meaning of the word has changed.

Just a few points to add to those Rich has already made:

1) National Review came out for regime change in Iraq in the very first issue that appeared after the invasion of Kuwait--in 1991. Maybe "[t]he war to depose Saddam was always an unlikely war for conservatives," for the reasons Sullivan gives, but that is never the way it has looked to my supposedly Tory colleagues.

2) Sullivan makes a distinction between a "blind realism" that doesn't see the strategic advantage of transforming the political culture of the Middle East and a better realism that does. He puts NR in the camp of the blind--immediately after quoting a paragraph from our editorial that takes his visionary view! (NR: "And forging a non-fascist, non-radical, non-hostile government in Iraq could affect the entire region's geopolitics for the better.")

3) Neoconservatives are constantly claiming to have added to conservative foreign-policy thought a recognition that ideology matters; Sullivan seems to buy this assertion. I don't. Conservatives didn't need to wait for Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz to see that the Soviet Union's communism mattered. Certainly NR was never blindly realist in the 1950s and 1960s.

4) This is just a general complaint about the blogosphere, not a specific criticism of Sullivan's piece: Of all of blogdom's self-congratulatory tropes, the term "fisking" is easily the most annoying. As far as I can tell, all it means is "criticizing with an unjustified air of having crushed the other side." More than half the time I read Person A's "fisking" of Person B, I leave thinking that Person B has the better side of the dispute--and many times I leave thinking Person A lacks basic reading-comprehension skills. Please, everyone, drop it.

The United States has had no better friend than Tony Blair over the last few years, which is actually different from saying we've had no better friend than Britain. Yes, the British -- as always -- have been our go-to guys, our wingmen, our hombres, but were it not for Blair it's not clear that the British would have gotten our backs on this one.

Nevertheless, Blair is staking his job on a new EU referendum. And, if the choice is between the abolition of Britain and the abolition of Blair's tenure then I think I'm going to have to hope for the latter.

A few emails on the whole defining God thing. The last emailer makes a good point about the word "creature" but then again that's the point of the dilemma, you don't know whether the "being" is a creature or the Creator. For the record, I agree that God defines you and not the other way around. The problem of course is coming up with a definition for That Which Defines Us. Some people and some religions can give themselves over to the mystery, contenting themselves with the un-definability of God. But even they must come up with some way of understanding what they don't understand, if you understand what I'm saying and by that point we are way deep into semantics.

Hey, it's late. Anyway, I am not looking to launch a big philosophical comparative religion debate here, in part simply because I won't be around much tomorrow to read the email, I'm not particularly qualified, and this Euthrypo thing has gone on long enough. Anyway, the emails:

Jonah-

On the off-chance you and your dad aren't aware already, I think the definitive work on the subject (and specifically the tenth trial of Abraham) is Kierkegaard's "Fear and Trembling." If you haven't read it, I can't recommend it enough. Also notable, but derivative and less comprehensible, is Derrida's "The Gift of Death," which is Derrida's rehash of Kierkegaard. It is pretty funny, if you are so inclined to think Derrida is unintentionally hilarious, which I am.

Not to be snotty, but truthful. . .

The "saving grace" of Christianity is that we _trust_ God at every turn.

One can find out if God is good or not. Just trust Him and find out.

And...

In this universe, God defines you! The word "creature" is a singularly
inappropriate description what he is. "Thing" would be better in your
context. "Person" would be even better.. Creatures are created by a
creator. Hope this helps.

It's good of you to put up with us maniacal Christians, btw. We really
do appreciate it.

There's a huge shake up at ABC, according to the Financial Times. What I didn't know was that George Costanza's arch-nemesis was the Chairman:

In a sign of continuing turmoil at Walt Disney, the US entertainment giant on Tuesday announced a sweeping management shake-up at ABC, its troubled television network. Advertisement

The changes include the departure of Susan Lyne, the network's top programmer, as well as Lloyd Braun, chairman of ABC. Two weeks ago, executives had said they expected Ms Lyne to remain in place, while Mr Braun was to take on a new role elsewhere in the company.

In re all the email about Plato's Euthrypho, this touches on a subject my dad has talked about for years. I don't think it's in Euthrypho (or in Star Trek), but where this dilemma leads to is the definition of God.

For example, if you see a miracle in the desert, such as a forest appearing instantaneously, and a supernatural being takes credit for it, all you can conclude is that the supernatural creature is supernatural, but you don't know if he's (or she, as the case may be) is good or evil.

If this being commands you to do abominable things -- such as commanding Abraham to kill his son Isaac -- you could reasonably conclude that this being is the devil, but of course we are applying our own instinctive appraisal of what is good and what is bad. Or, we could have done what Abraham did, which is assume that this creature was good and is God, and that whatever he commands has to be for good, either in the short or long run. But the bottom line is that we are defining God, because without us doing that he just as well might be the devil, especially since the ways of God are mysterious and the devil is a liar. The saving grace in Judaism, my dad always taught me, is that we question God at every turn.

It's a question he's always discussed with me and which has always fascinated him. Personally, I'm not sure the question is answerable to the satisfaction of everybody. But in the off chance that it is, I keep watching reruns of Star Trek.

I started a conversation with Jacob Levy about congressional approval of trade agreements last week and then got too busy to continue it. Levy argued that trade agreements are most reasonably seen as treaties and thus require 2/3ds approval from the Senate to conform to constitutional requirements. The current practice is to pass the agreements with a majority vote of the House and the Senate. Also, Congress, by passing "fast track" or "trade promotion authority" legislation, commits itself to considering the trade agreements without amendments (on the theory that other countries will not conclude agreements if their terms are up for grabs on the floor of the House).

Levy worries that the practical consequence of taking his constitutional concern seriously would be an end to trade liberalization. But perhaps his constitutional argument is a reason for going about that liberalization in a different way. Congress can (and should) repeal tariffs and quotas unilaterally. If trade agreements were replaced by what Brink Lindsey has called "co-ordinated unilateralism," the constitutional objection would fall away. And free traders would be able to make economically sound arguments for their objectives.

Mr. Goldberg-

It's been a while since I read an opinion piece as inconveniently timed as E. J. Dionne's column in today's Pos. Dionne says that recent developments have made the President afraid to talk about the war on terror, while Kerry is rushing to embrace such opportunities. It seems to me that when the President chose giving a press conference over delivering a televised address to the nation, he demonstrated he wasn't afraid to publicly address the subject. I can, though, put that down to Dionne confusing his own reaction to the speech with the actual public's reaction.

I wonder, though, if Dionne would like to rethink his premise given the numbers in today's Post and Gallup polls? If he's right, then when the President lets Kerry have the limelight to discuss national security, the reaction of voters is to trust Kerry less.

Oddly interesting article about the parties.

Lots of email making this point:

Jonah, Regarding your post on the Woodward and Clarke books: Your premise is both logical and factual: the two books should be accepted by the left and leftish media as a refutation of the Bush as puppet - Bush as liar crowd. You seem to miss the more salient point - one which you have written about extensively: there is no logic to the left or leftish media. The claims get reported as fact and when refuted, they do not correct, they simply move on to the next one.

This reader makes a good point:

Perhaps I missed the subtleties, but I always thought the "It's all about Oil" argument was just an adoption of the war protestors' "No Blood for Oil" mantra. And as I understood that "argument," it wasn't a nuanced claim that Bush was invading Iraq so that he could get more/cheaper oil from Saudi Arabia — it was that he planned to co-opt (or outright steal) oil from Iraq. So, as far as I can see, Woodward's claim — whether right or wrong — does not validate the anti-war "Oil" argument.

With all the hullahbaloo about the Woodward book, it'd be easy not to notice that the book helps Bush in a number of key ways, much as the Clarke book did.

First of all, it needs to be reiterated that Bush's critics from the Salon-Moore-Deaniac-Naderite crowd have not had consistent lines of attack on him. They've accepted the proposition that all criticisms of Bush are valid, including the ones which contradict each other. So just as a matter of math, the Clarke and Woodward books eliminate numerous criticisms which thrived in an environment of ignorance. By embracing Clarke and Woodward's accounts critics of Bush cannot have the luxury of also embracing theories which are directly contradicted by Clarke and Woodward.

I've already mentioned, for example, Joe Conason's lost outrage over Bush's plane ride after 9/11.

Now, the Woodward
account offers nothing but refutation to the ongoing -- and I fear undying -- charge that Bush lied, made-up and otherwise faked the WMD threat. According to Woodward's account, George Tenet swore the WMD case was a "slam dunk" case and that Bush even pressed him hard for more and better evidence.

As for the other "controversies" from the book -- that Bush allegedly decided earlier than previously revealed that war was on the table, that the Saudis agreed to sell cheap oil around election time, that Bush didn't consult with Cheney, Rumsfeld or Powell when he made the final decision -- these also undercut some of the favorite lines about Bush.

For example, the notion that Bush was determined from the begining to go to war runs -- and always has run -- completely counter to charge that he was pushed into war by the perfidious warmongering Jews and/or honorary Jews called "neoconservatives." If Bush was always fixated on toppling Saddam, for dad or whatever, then Paul Wolfowitz couldn't have Jedi mind-tricked him into doing it for Israel.

I should add that Woodward doesn't say Bush was set on war from the outset, merely that he was determined very soon after 9/11 which is a very defensible position.

Also, if Bush didn't consult with Cheney until late in the process, it's harder -- though not impossible -- to argue that Cheney's the real power behind the throne.

As for the Saudi allegation, this one is the exception in that it does help the "war for oil" thing. But I'm not sure I buy it or that it has legs. Still the scandal here, if it's true, isn't that the Saudis agreed to lower the price of oil, it's that they haven't lowered it already. And, aside from the fact that it is impossible to prove such a deal exists or even to prove that Woodward got the story right, I'm not sure Democrats will get a lot of mileage shrieking about unfairly dropping oil prices come August and September.

From a Canadian sympathizer:

Jonah – you’re lucky the long arm of Nova Scotian law can’t reach you. Inappropriately using “schizophrenic”? Forty lashes with a wet noodle!

And in typical Canadian/Soviet style, we’re supposed to inform on our neighbours.

But at least you’re giving the Star the royal pounding it deserves. For the last few days, columnist after columnist has been defending our First Family of Terrorism, the Khadrs. Father (aka Al-Kanadi – get it?) was one of Osama’s chief financiers and died in a gun battle with Pakistani security forces, one son was paralyzed in the same shoot-out, another son murdered a Canadian soldier in the course of a suicide bombing, another son is in Gitmo having allegedly killed a US special forces medic… mom and a sister were interviewed by the CBC singing bin Laden’s praises, too. Now, mom and paralyzed son have returned to Canada in order to soak our health care system – apparently that’s the only area where we beat out cave-dwelling jihadists: socialized medicare. And the liberals want us to leave them alone… a Star editorial a week or two ago actually tried to frame the Khadrs swanning home for free health care as a defeat for OBL (see very bottom). I mean, really… that’s head-up-arsedness of the most severe kind.

In today’s paper, Thomas Walkom compares Islamic fundamentalists with tax-cutting conservatives and the matriarch of our home-grown Al Qaeda family with the late, great Tammy Wynette…

Why are Canadian liberals so freakin’ lame? Hell if I know. Kick ‘em square in the nuts, they just say “please sir, I’d like some more” and wax rhapsodic about multiculturalism, tolerance, and the wonders of Trudeaupia.

Ah well. So when is it you guys are invading?

Or whatever it was Arlen Specter said when he invoked Scottish law to vote "not proven" during the Clinton impeachment trial.

I think you could do a bunch of ads keying off that vote -- maybe complete with one of Specter's meandering pompous explanations of same -- and then asking the rhetorical question(s):

Is Specter a reliable conservative?

Glenfiddich!

Is Specter fiscally responsible?

Laphroaig!

Is Specter a good steward for our state?

Not proven!

Etc...

Maybe if it's too late for TV ads, Toomey could get a good call-and-response from a crowd of college Republicans?

Mr. Lowry:

I’m looking forward to hearing you debate in the Twin Cities. I and another Corner-reader plan to attend—hopefully we won’t be the only ones!

Here’s a link to public info if you wanted to post it on the Corner.

From a reader:

About the WaPo poll numbers. And notice how closely they dovetail with the USA Today/ CNN /Gallup poll that came out yesterday. One particularly sweet nugget when you go deep into the numbers in polls - slightly more Americans blame Bubba than W. for 9/11. That must hurt Big Media bad.

Ryan Lizza offers an explanation.

Also: I shouldn't have put Wisconsin in the safe-Democratic column in my earlier post.

From a reader:

Whoa there, bub. As an archivist myself, I can say there's a bit more to this than perhaps you know. The archival world (or at least the hothouse of the Archives Listserv) has been debating this over the last week or two, and despite the usual liberal slant of many of the members, there are some real questions. In the first place, since the current AoUS is not officially stepping down until July, 2005, W is kinda jumping the gun on bringing in a replacement. There are reasons for it (skip hearings if you can, and what if W loses in November), but it is a little premature. My concerns are less about the politics of it than Dr. Weinstein's appropriateness for the post. While he is clearly a scholar, he has no background that I'm aware of in either archival or records management, nor does he seem to have a great deal of general management experience. That doesn't eliminate him from consideration (John Carlin was governor of Kansas prior to his appointment), but I do think he should be asked some key questions about managing the nation's archival materials and his strategic plans for the future of NARA. I recognize the issue is a tempest in a teapot, given all else we need to worry about these days, but archival records will (hopefully) remain long after the rest of us are gone. As an archivist and a citizen, I do think we have a responsibility to preserve our heritage, and the person chosen to lead us in that area should be vetted properly. My 2 cents.

Jonah, Is there any chance that NRO will talk about anything less esoteric and more in touch with 6 pack Conservatives? Yeats, Milton. Ockham? Who cares beside you guys? Home Depot OTOH.....

From a reader:

Jonah-

Regarding today's reader responding to yesterday's reader, I'm not entirely sure what he's talking about. To my understanding, the Euthyphro dilemma doesn't make Divine Command Theory go "poof," since Ockham decimated it. Indeed, it seems a bit disingenuous to refer to it as the "Euthyphro fallacy" since it isn't a fallacy at all. (Google "Euthrphryo fallacy," then "Euthphryo dilemma," see how many results each gets back (answer: zero, 692 respectively). Your reader may not *like* the theist's answers to the "emptiness" and "abhorrence" problems, but that doesn't mean he can pretend they don't exist or are fallacious.

Here's a quick review of the problem and answers.

Hope this helps fuel the fire,

Interesting email from a reader:

The reader who wrote in to say:

"It's important to understand that people did not go out of their way to
"make this stuff [relativism] up" -- all they were doing was following the
logical consequences of secularism, which disenthralled the traditional
absolutes derived from religion... "

is quite wrong, and making a mistake very common on the Right. Rejecting
ethical absolutism (or objectivism, with a small 'o') may be a *practical*
consequence of secularism (certainly many of the atheists and other
secularists I know are also relativists, although when I did an informal
survey, I was surprised that it wasn't closer to all of them). But it is
very far from a *logical* consequence. I won't bore you with the details
but let's just say that when pressed on this point, it's very rare for
theists to come up with an actual argument showing how relativism
*logically* follows from secularism. The best most of them do is something
along the lines of "Moral rules require a rulemaker", but this is merely
asserted, not defended, and in the even rarer instances when it is
defended, they run into the Euthyphro fallacy and go poof.

Despite one of the last relentlessly negative media campaigns in recent memory, Bush is ahead in the polls on various key issues and in the head to head match-up according to the latest Washington Post poll . Personally, I think the poll obsessions are overdone, but this would seem to show that Bush's ads are working and Kerry's attacks aren't. Indeed, what's more interesting is that Kerry's buying ads in "key states" -- i.e. normally safe Democratic states: New York, California, Washington, Wisconsin and New Jersey.

I can think of a bunch of reasons why Kerry would need to do that, but I can't think of any that would count as a good sign for the Kerry campaign.

April 20th, from noon to 2pm, the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington will host a discussion of proliferation Issues and weapons of mass destruction in the wake of the Iraq war, featuring Three of the nation's leading experts on weapons proliferation: Henry Sokolski Of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, George Perkovich of the Carnegie Endowment, and Tom Cochran of the Nuclear Policy program at the Natural Resources Defense Council. They'll talk and debate about what Recent revelations about the A.Q. Khan network have taught us regarding the channels of proliferation; what Libya's recent conversion on the weapons question (and revelations of its substantial weapons programs) mean; what current thinking is regarding Iraq's pre-war weapons programs; and how the Bush doctrine now looks, a year after the Iraq war began. The event is open to the public, and food and drinks will be available. You can get more information, and RSVP, here.

Just as an aside, speaking as a used book dealer who does most of his business through Amazon and who has consequently been shipping A LOT of used books to Iraq for the past year, I can say without hesitation that the biggest sellers have been Science Fiction and Fantasy novels (actually, more the latter than the former). At the moment I have four orders getting ready to ship to APO AE addresses (and based on the unit designations, I'm pretty sure at least three of those are heading to Iraq), and of those four three are Fantasy novels (one David Eddings, one Katherine Kurtz, one R.A. Salvatore) and the other is SF (S.M. Stirling, and in some ways is more quasi-Fantasy than true SF).

I would say I get between 5-10 orders to APO AE addresses a week. I can think of only one Romance novel that I've sold (a Nora Roberts, I believe) to an APO in the last six months. Besides her, the only other non-SF/F authors that I can think of off hand have been Dale Brown, Tom Clancy, James Patterson, Larry Bond, and one request for the Penguin edition of Thucydides. Notice a pattern here? :-)

O thus be it ever,
When free men shall stand
Between their loved homes
And the war's desolation;
Blest with vict'ry and peace,
May the heav'n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made
And preserved us a nation!
Then conquer me must,
When our cause it is just,
And this be our motto,
"In God is our trust!"

And the star-spangled banner
In triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free
And the home of the brave.

In WW II, our first aim was to conquer the Axis....When you conquer a people, then you must use overwhelming force to impose your will and to secure the place. Later, you ease up as the populace gets used to free markets, rule of law etc.

When we convinced ourselves that we would be greeted by the Iraqi people, we viewed our mission as one of liberation and not conquest and so, got off on the wrong foot. One major misjudgment was that we would be able to occupy the place with fewer than 200,000 troops. These forces aren't enough to impose our will. While we are too strong to be chased out of the country, we aren't strong enough to cow would-be attackers into staying out of our way.

To illustrate how it should be done: One weekend in July 1945, 500,000 U.S. troops conducted a house-to-house search in the Frankfurt area and arrested about 80,000 Germans (mostly veterans I think) who violated the Allies' weapons laws. We were able to use that much manpower because we still had millions of troops in Germany. By conducting operations of this magnitude, we were able to establish control of the situation despite the fact we were shipping troops out of Germany by the thousands each month.

Hi-tech may be a gee-whiz way to win wars rapidly but when it comes to occupation, God still favors the big battalions.

I was reading Fortune magazine (current issue with Trump on the cover) and came across a pretty astonishing paragraph. It's at the end of an article by Phillip Longman, author of "The Empty Cradle". The article deals with declining fertility rates worldwide and their effects on worldwide wealth and economic growth. Toward the end of the article Longman writes:

"Even more sobering are the implications for modern civilization's values. As urbanization and globalization continue to create a human environment in which children become costly impediments to material success, people who are well adapted to this environment will tend not to reproduce...So where will the children of the future come from? Increasingly they will come from people who are at odds with the modern world--who either 'don't get' the new rules of the game...or who believe they are (or who in fact are) commanded by a higher power to procreate. Such a higher power might be God speaking through Abraham, Jesus, Mohammed, or some latter-day saint, or it might be a totalitarian state. Either way, such a trend, if sustained, could drive human culture off its current market-driven, individualistic, modernist course, gradually creating an antimarket culture dominated by fundamentalism--a new dark ages..."

What a bizarre and repellant conclusion. His general idea that religious propogation leads to the Dark Ages is offensive and his specific shot at Latter-day Saints is easily refuted (Latter-day Saints tend to be highly educated and are no different from the average church-going population in terms of income and non-church associations (proxies for connection to society)). Apparently it is just fine to state that having a religious motivation for family life will destroy society.

An interesting thought experiment: if Longman had concluded his piece with a blast at gay marriage (and its negative effects on fertility), would Fortune still have published it?

It's my understanding that Werewolf guerilla attacks-- sabotage, mining roads, poisoning food and water, setting often-lethal traps for allied soldiers-- continued in Germany on a regular basis for months after V-E Day, and that the last incident may have been as late as 1947.

[A]lthough major hostilities ended when the war ended, significant hostile incidents occured in Germany for many months after the surrender. Nothing like the current fighting in Iraq, though.

Thanks for plugging the program to donate books to Iraq, but I'd be grateful if you could also suggest that readers donate some GOOD books -- conservative political books, history, etc. Things that are both worth reading and enjoyable. I'm here in Baghdad and we are swimming in America's second-hand pulp novels. Not that we don't appreciate the thought and I'm sure there are some people who go for that, but when a book with some real merit pops to the surface we end up fighting over it like hyenas tearing into a carcass. Just a suggestion -- and I'm going home soon (insh'allah), so I make it selflessly...

The consensus so far is that I'm wrong. Two emails:

I think you're wrong.

To call it a naturalist fallacy suggests that, without the observations of relativity, relativism would not have happened.

This is certainly quite false.

First, the idea of the relativity of morals, knowledge, judgment, etc. was heavily propounded in the late 19th Century particularly in Germany long before Einstein. Nietzsche, and the entire Neo-Kantian school picked up on this. (Ernst Cassirer is a good late neo-Kantian.) Poincare implied the same thing in his popular mathematical writings in France.

It's important to understand that people did not go out of their way to "make this stuff up" -- all they were doing was following the logical consequences of secularism, which disenthralled the traditional absolutes derived from religion, and following the the consequences of the "platform problem" that all philosophies then have (as Hume recognized from an empirical standpoint, and as the neo-Kantians did from an idealist standpoint.)

Einstein's theory -- which became most popular _after_ World War One -- simply became a focal point for popular understanding of a process of relativization (or non-absolutization) that had already been going on for many years.

And, from a Philosophy Prof:

Jonah,

You're wrong. The naturalistic fallacy is the fallacy of identifying the
property of goodness with some natural property (such as conduciveness to
survival, pleasantness, whatever). It's not really a fallacy in the strict
sense, that is, an invalid inference. But G. E. Moore got a lot of mileage
out of accusing those who disagreed with him of committing a fallacy. (If
he hadn't called it a fallacy, he would have been reduced to saying, "You
have committed the mistake of disagreeing with my view," which has rather
less oomph to it.)

I suppose you could use the term more broadly to designate any inference
from the-way-the-natural-world-is to some purported ethical truth. But to
say that any such inference is invalid is to take a huge substantive view
within ethics, one that itself needs considerable defense.

Thomas

From a reader:

As a Toronto resident (yes, you have fans in Canada) I have to put up with Canada's version of Pravda. They predicted that Donahue's show would succeed and provide a launching base for MSNBC and the left in AMerica.

Needless to say their predicitons on the outcome of American politcal media shows have a track record similar to Terry McAuliffe's electoral predicitons.

The 930-page epic is packed with $170 billion in tax cuts aimed at cruise-ship operators, foreign dog-race gamblers, NASCAR track owners, bow-and-arrow makers and Oldsmobile dealers, to name a few. There is even a $94 million break for a single hotel in Sioux City, Iowa.

From the Toronto Star:

NRO editor-at-large Jonah Goldberg, whose mother Lucianne ensured the world heard about Monica Lewinsky, attacked Franken for being "schizophrenic; unwilling to decide whether he's a comedian or political commentator."

He then criticized Air America for its response to Drudge: a tacky takeoff called "The Sludge Report." In that, Air America stupidly refers to Liu as a "Liu-ser" and "Liu-cifer," giving Goldberg an opening.

"I am delighted to hear that making fun of Asian last names is now socially acceptable according to liberals," he wrote. "I am grateful that Liu's last name isn't Dong or Wang. Who knows what those jokemeisters might have come up with then."

Goldberg has a point. But he shouldn't have misused "schizophrenic," doubtlessly — and deservedly — inviting criticism from mental health advocates.

I await the backlash from schizophrenics -- and schizophrenics.

Instapundit linked to this interesting article about the racist roots of gun control. For the record, I am always interested in these sorts of subjects, i.e. the illiberal roots of "liberal" legislation. Please feel free to send me articles, book reccomendations etc on the subject to my JonahResearch email account.

Also, I've been searching for a good chapter or essay on the cultural and political effects of Einstein's theory of relativity. Lots of books and articles make brief references to the rise of "relativism" in the wake of Einstein's general theory. For example, Paul Dirac, a Cambridge mathematical physicist complained that “relativity came along as a wonderful idea leading to a new domain of thought. It was an escape from the war…Relativity was a topic that everybody felt himself competent to write about in a general philosophical way.”

There must be extended discussions of this somewhere. I'm not looking for a 500 page book on this as it is a small part of my research. But if there are a couple of good scholarly essays on the subject, brimming with examples, I'd love to see them. Again, please send suggestions to my research email addy.

I just got this automated email from Amazon:

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Tim - I don't disagree with any of that. And again I really do like the movie and think this is all pretty academic. Nevertheless, if you figure that only, say, 1 in 10,000 relatively dedicated kids have any real success in rock & roll you have to assume as a matter of statistics that most of the kids in his class won't make it. In other words, these promising kids have been given the false hope and impractical ambition to become rock stars. If this was a movie about inner city black kids being told by their teacher to stop studying math, english, history etc in order to "stick it to the man" and become basketball stars, I think my point would be more obvious. Also, the personal growth Black enjoys is basically irrelevant since A) there's no evidence that he ever gave up his "rock is everything" mantra B) and his after-school program is more likely a sop to the parents since it's not like Jack could keep teaching rock to the exclusion of all other subjects.

But look (and I'm addressing persnickety readers now), the point of my comments could -- and rightly should -- be taken just as much as a caution to conservatives who want to blow every movie out of proportion. Sure, the message in School of Rock is problematic, but it's still a lot of fun. And if, say, Pat Robertson were going batty about the movie I would be saying, lighten up it's only a movie.

Kathryn - I've thought about that a lot too. It seems to me that Woodward is the greatest of all possible positions, he's an institution larger than the president. Here's how I see it. Everyone in Washington knows Woodward's going to write the book and the book will get huge publicity. Moreover, everyone believes that Woodward screws those who don't give him access and quotes. So if you look at it like game theory, what choice does the president really have? He can either help Woodward and hence encourage more favorable treatment in the book -- both as a quid pro quo, but also because Bush gets to actually have his say -- or he can snub Woodward at which point the author has ever incentive and few other choices but to lean more heavily on those who speak negatively about the President.

I haven't followed the Kremlinology of all this that closely, but it seems to me that Bush is actually getting some good news out of this. It sounds like Bush has put a lot of the "blame" on Tenet (WMDs are a "slam dunk" indeed) and clarified that Cheney and Rumsfeld were not calling the shots. There's no way Woodward would have written that if Bush hadn't cooperated.

I just happened to see "School of Rock" for the first time this weekend too. Unlike Derb & Co. I knew very well who Jack Black was (I love "Tenacious D" -- most decidedly not for little kids Peter). But I just couldn't get away to see it in the theaters. Anyway, I thought SoR was hilarious. It was the first film actually written for Black and it showed -- a lot of his other films were a mis-match.

So, I thought it was great, funny and I will see it many more times. But: since this is National Review and all, I thought I would make one cultural point. If anything like this actually happened in real life -- i.e. a rock-and-roll dufus taught your kids under false pretenses that there was no higher goal in life than to be a rocker and "stick it to the man" -- not only would parents be furious, it is objectively true that this would be an absolutely disastrous event in the lives of most of the kids in that class. Indeed, it may have been funny and easily dismissible as comedy, but the message of SoR is precisely the message -- minus the sex -- that conservatives complain about most: an ideological, all-contexts contempt for authority, traditional learning and "bourgeois" success.

Just throwing it out there.

on the Rod Dreher post below, I don't dispute it. but we're not going to be starving here. This is, after all, a war zone, so we are under no illusions. We'll probably draw MREs, but save them until we've eaten up all of our Sour Skittles and Girl Scout cookies first. Sympathetic Cornerites can mail us more Skittles (of all varieties) and Girl Scout cookies (of all varieties) to: CPA/CJTF-7 PAO, Baghdad, APO AE 09316

"I just can't let this impression stand," Ms. Rice said on CBS. "The secretary of state was privy to all of the conversations with the president, all of the briefings for the president. They were in almost daily contact about what was going on at the United Nations."

She added: "It's just not the proper impression that somehow Prince Bandar was in the know in the way that Secretary Powell was not. It's just not right. Secretary Powell had been privy to all of this. He knew what the war plan was."

I don't know what volume of e-mail you've received in negative reviews of the NR editorial but I'm one who found it to be poorly reasoned, diffident and as naturally full of holes as mesh. Really a shock from NR--or perhaps not. To be frank, I'd try to avoid the patrician eye-roll on establishing democracy, pardon the meme, "where there is no tradition." Japan's military cabal wasn't exactly pluralist, and the Meiji period was little more than oligarchical modernization. The island didn't know individual liberties from Ragtime, and yet MacArthur's most sweeping reforms were done before the seven-year occupation was half over. Different from Iraq, yes, but then different from Germany. And Italy.

I never thought I'd say this about NR but its distancing itself from Iraq with piquant one-liners is rather disgraceful.

When you are considering a movie for your kids – or yourself for that matter I guess--I would suggest you check out a movie website called Screen It at www.screenit.com. This woman (maybe she has a crew) reviews movies on the basis of content and not artistic quality. She goes into everything from Nudity/sexual content to smoking (don’t tell Stuttaford), disrespectful behavior, intensity or scenes, etc. She has over a dozen different categories designed to give us a “heads up” on what type of stuff and how much. For example she does not just say “Nudity” but describes what is seen on the screen--not in a prurient way (unless one is really desperate!), but matter of factly.

Anyway, check it out and you will know in detail any potentially objectionable thing in any given movie. Also, she is non-judgmental in that there’s no preachiness to it, just a good-old Sgt. Friday “Just the facts” presentation.

“The important thing is the situation in Cuba, where there are no UN guards with Mace to protect the fundamental rights of the Cuban people.”

That’s well said.

What is unacceptable is that the Greeks have accepted money from ‘king’ Fahd of ‘saudi’ Arabia to build it. Fahd is a disgusting individual, a disgrace to humanity, a decaying voluptuary of extraordinary moral, economic and political corruption, a man who turns everything he touches to filth, gold-plated filth, but filth nonetheless. His family presides over a regime where the incompetence is only matched by the cruelty and the greed, a sinister collection of totalitarians so hostile to independent thought that, to take one rather ironic example, they prohibit the construction of any church on their own territory.

To allow this ‘king’ to fund construction of a mosque in the West is an extraordinary declaration of moral weakness. Worse still, any mosque funded by this man will almost certainly peddle the wahhabist superstition that is now inflicting so much misery throughout the world. The Greeks should know better than this. The money should be flung back in Fahd’s face.

Ahead of the fall of Troy, a wise man said that he feared the Greeks when they came bearing gifts. He was right to worry. Well, these days, whether it’s in Athens, London, Washington DC or Crawford, Texas, we would do well to remember the same about the Saudis.

Some extracts:

[On the oppression of women in many Islamic communities] “Here, for once, are instances of unadulterated female victimhood, yet the silence of the feminists is deafening. Where two pieties—feminism and multiculturalism—come into conflict, the only way of preserving both is an indecent silence.”

[On the paradox of increasing Islamic fundamentalism in the West ] “The Muslim immigrants to these areas [of the UK] were not seeking a new way of life when they arrived; they expected to continue their old lives, but more prosperously. They neither anticipated, nor wanted, the inevitable cultural tensions of translocation, and they certainly never suspected that in the long run they could not maintain their culture and their religion intact. The older generation is only now realizing that even outward conformity to traditional codes of dress and behavior by the young is no longer a guarantee of inner acceptance (a perception that makes their vigilantism all the more pronounced and desperate). Recently I stood at the taxi stand outside my hospital, beside two young women in full black costume, with only a slit for the eyes. One said to the other, “Give us a light for a fag, love; I’m gasping.” Release the social pressure on the girls, and they would abandon their costume in an instant.”

[On the link between Islam and authoritarian rule] “The problem begins with Islam’s failure to make a distinction between church and state. Unlike Christianity, which had to spend its first centuries developing institutions clandestinely and so from the outset clearly had to separate church from state, Islam was from its inception both church and state… Muhammad’s power was seamlessly spiritual and secular… and he bequeathed this model to his followers. Since he was, by Islamic definition, the last prophet of God upon earth, his was a political model whose perfection could not be challenged or questioned without the total abandonment of the pretensions of the entire religion. But his model left Islam with two intractable problems. One was political. Muhammad unfortunately bequeathed no institutional arrangements by which his successors in the role of omnicompetent ruler could be chosen…Compounding this difficulty, the legitimacy of temporal power could always be challenged by those who, citing Muhammad’s spiritual role, claimed greater religious purity or authority; the fanatic in Islam is always at a moral advantage vis-à-vis the moderate. Moreover, Islam—in which the mosque is a meetinghouse, not an institutional church—has no established, anointed ecclesiastical hierarchy to decide such claims authoritatively. With political power constantly liable to challenge from the pious, or the allegedly pious, tyranny becomes the only guarantor of stability, and assassination the only means of reform. Hence the Saudi time bomb: sooner or later, religious revolt will depose a dynasty founded upon its supposed piety but long since corrupted by the ways of the world…”

[On Islam’s future] But the anger of Muslims, their demand that their sensibilities should be accorded a more than normal respect, is a sign not of the strength but of the weakness—or rather, the brittleness—of Islam in the modern world, the desperation its adherents feel that it could so easily fall to pieces. The control that Islam has over its populations in an era of globalization reminds me of the hold that the Ceausescus appeared to have over the Rumanians: an absolute hold, until Ceausescu appeared one day on the balcony and was jeered by the crowd that had lost its fear. The game was over, as far as Ceausescu was concerned, even if there had been no preexisting conspiracy to oust him…Islam in the modern world is weak and brittle, not strong: that accounts for its so frequent shrillness. The Shah will, sooner or later, triumph over the Ayatollah in Iran, because human nature decrees it, though meanwhile millions of lives will have been ruined and impoverished. The Iranian refugees who have flooded into the West are fleeing Islam, not seeking to extend its dominion, as I know from speaking to many in my city. To be sure, fundamentalist Islam will be very dangerous for some time to come, and all of us, after all, live only in the short term; but ultimately the fate of the Church of England awaits it. Its melancholy, withdrawing roar may well (unlike that of the Church of England) be not just long but bloody, but withdraw it will. The fanatics and the bombers do not represent a resurgence of unreformed, fundamentalist Islam, but its death rattle.”

Fascinating. Take the time to read the whole thing.

Will Hutton is one of Britain’s better-known political commentators (I’ve linked to him a few times on the Corner). A shining beacon of self-regard, self-righteousness and that sublime, almost surreal, stupidity that only the truly ‘intellectual’ can aspire to, he has made a career out of being wrong about almost everything, but today he has contributed to the merriment of the nation, and that's something for which he should be thanked. So, thanks Will! I'll leave it to the Daily Telegraph to tell you a little more about this paragon of progressive thought:

“Will Hutton, Britain's foremost critic of capitalism and an outspoken advocate for affordable social housing, is married to a property developer who has made a fortune out of selling and renting inner-city properties, often at rates which local council housing officers describe as exorbitant.”

Well, unless Hutton, perish the thought, is an utter hypocrite, that must make for interesting chatter over his breakfast table.