No smoking may be coming to Bondi Beach, apparently. The usual bogus reasons (and some unusual ones too: the threat to whales?) are given, including, yes…

“the dangers to children of passive smoking.”

Ah yes, ‘the children’, of course…

Here’s a stupid idea slouching its ugly way towards the legislature. Big government Republican Congressman Duncan Hunter is sponsoring a bill (laughably entitled the Parent’s Empowerment Act) that would “allow the parent or guardian of a minor to sue in federal court anyone who knowingly disseminates any media containing “material that is harmful to minors” if the material is distributed in a way that “a reasonable person can expect a substantial number of minors to be exposed to the material and the minor, as a result to exposure to the material, is likely to suffer personal or emotional injury or injury to mental or moral welfare.”

That’s so widely drawn as to ensure that almost any media could be drawn within its net, or at least tied up in nuisance litigation that would, inevitably, have a chilling effect on what is produced. That’s probably the idea, but if Rep. Hunter wants tighter censorship, he should just say so. This bill is as dishonest as it is bone-headed.

Whether it’s Eliot Spitzer smugly commenting that New York’s state prisons have a ‘certain edge,’ or whether it’s comedians joking about the perils of penitentiary showers, one of the most striking aspects of the cruelty and degradation of the American prison system is the way that such abuse is, apparently, tolerated. Now we have yet another example of how this brutalization has been internalized by those charged with managing the system, this time from the California prison guards’ union. What triggered it? Well, to his credit, Governor Schwarzenegger is trying to restrain some of his state’s prison spending. The response from a union official?

"In the prison system, if you give in to a bully, you're a punk. [The guards union] has never been a punk. I can't say it any more clearly than that."

What the official is also implicitly saying, in fact (as Matt Welch rightly points out over at Reason), is that the ‘punk’ (or, to use another word, rape victim), someone, incidentally, who his union members are meant to protect, is a creature beneath contempt.

Disgusting.

Prisoners, understandably, are often not individuals for whom the rest of America feels much sympathy, but, in a civilized society, humanity must not stop at the prison gate. And if a simple sense of decency is not enough to convince people of this, self-interest ought to do the trick. Brutalizing those who will one day be released back to live among the rest of us makes absolutely no sense at all.

From a reader:

Jonah : My Cosmo sweatshirt has finally arrived (The "IT" Dog of the Americam Right). I love it. I promptly put it on and stepped outside. Immediately squirrels and chipmunks started chattering and scurried up trees; little bunnies ran and hid in the bushes. Even the deer started snorting and pawing at the ground. The only problem is that my two goldens are ignoring me now; I think that they are jealous.

Rod: You're missing the point and changing the subject. 1) Regarding the meaning of Hastert's words, the first thing to note is that we cannot assume from the exchange that Hastert knew anything more about McCain's speech than was contained in the reporter's question. Hastert's words are certainly compatible with the uncharitable interpretation: that he was taking a stupid cheap shot at McCain for not knowing the meaning of sacrifice. But it is also compatible with his saying that the answer to the question, where is the sacrifice in this war, is found in military hospital beds. The Dallas Morning News could have provided the actual words from the exchange, instead of the totally misleading context it did provide. (You'd think from the editorial that Hastert had attended, watched, or read McCain's speech and made a response to it, rather than answering a reporter's question off-the-cuff.)

2) Has the DMN even been following the fiscal debate it's editorializing about? Hastert never claimed that McCain was at fault for not supporting higher spending. The fiscal issue on which McCain and the House Republicans have split in recent weeks is the question of budget rules. The House Republicans, like the White House, want a rule that constrains spending. McCain and the Democrats want a rule that constrains spending and tax cuts. That's not a ridiculous position, and you have every right to adopt it as your own (your own argument tends in that direction). But it can hardly be out of bounds for Hastert to say that McCain is voting with the Democrats when, in fact, he is. Nor is it out of bounds for him to point out that McCain does a fair amount of that. And if you do want to "object" to it, you don't have to call Hastert's comment "idiotic" and "offensive," tell him to "stifle it," and make a cheap shot of your own at his lack of Vietnam service. And by the way, the editorial comment was that McCain's argument was "entirely legitimate." In now saying that maybe McCain is a bit of a hypocrite, you're shifting ground.

From a reader:

Mr. Goldberg:

As a professional philosopher (and a conservative), I tend to disagree with you when you say that contemporary liberals do not have a well-articulated political theory. As a matter of fact, John Rawls (Theory of Justice, Political Liberalism, Law of Peoples, etc.) was very much a “liberal” in the current American manifestation (i.e. big government, redistribution of money and resources, prodigious welfare system, affirmative action, soft/weak capitalism etc.). Now, perhaps I’m going a bit too far by referring to Rawls as a “well-articulated” scholar (my God, man, it took him 12 years to write Theory of Justice and it reads as though it took him 12 days!), but a bastion of liberalism he is. Granted, his most prominent work never hit the NY Times best-seller list, but its influence cannot be over-stated in the academic community. That being said, his book did not come out until (I think) the late 60s or early 70s, so his influence is still being felt somewhat.

Ronald Dworkin, as well, might be identified as a close associate to the contemporary American liberal (legal and political theory), and like Rawls, few can claim to have systematized “theory” so prominently (Matter of Principle, Taking Rights Seriously, Law’s Empire). Still, though some of Dworkin’s insights might be utilized by conservatives, his defenses of affirmative action policy are well-known and wide-spread.

It’s up to we few conservatives to ensure that the combination of Rawls/Dworkin is met head-on with strong doses of Friedrich Hayek and Robert Nozick (and, of course, John Kekes)!

Take care, and have a pleasant trip!

Me This is the point I've been meaning all day to clarify. Of course there are many liberals well versed in a coherent "liberal" (Trans: progressive) philosophy. I'm sure that Josh Marshall knows a lot of history and philosophy (he's a PhD, right?) and I know that a few guys at the New Republic do. At the same time, I'd offer a few points:

A) I've said that I was speaking in generalizations more than once.
B) My point isn't that there aren't smart and educated liberals, of course there are. My point is that the weight of their own intellectual history does not seem particularly present in their arguments, their movement or their journalism and it's especially absent compared to libertarians, leftists or conservatives. I can't think of the last time I've heard a liberal politician or activist invoke Rawls.
C) This is a point that I think a great many liberals not interested in scoring points or worried that they might be seen agreeing with me in public would readily concede (I have had this conversation with liberals outside of the blogosphere, you know). Also, last month I read Rorty's Achieving Our Country and Rorty basically made exactly my point. He bemoans how so many college students and professors can tell you how Karl Marx was and what he believed, but couldn't talk seriously about what John Dewey or Hebert Croly had to say.
D) Lastly, let me just say that not only am I not saying "all liberals are ignorant" or anything of the sort I'm also not trying to pretend I have this super-impressive grasp of intellectual history. The whole reason this conversation began in the first place was that in the course of researching my book, I discovered so much I never heard or read about the "progressive" intellectual tradition and what I did know about it I generally learned from conservatives not from liberals.

I've been reading NR since the 1960's and have been a faithful reader of NRO since its inception. You and your colleagues have helped me immeasurably through the trials of recent years. I work just a few blocks from the World Trade Center site, and saw unbelievable carnage that day. Both before and since, I've started most days and ended most evenings reading the contributions on the website as I try to sort out where we are and what we should do.

Please accept my modest donation with my personal thanks for your great work. I really do feel like you are part of an extended family, and as such you are in my thoughts (and prayers) every day.

Sincerely,

Rob Donovan

Rod, Kathryn: I cannot agree with that Dallas Morning News editorial, which I found rather more disgraceful than Hastert's comments. First let's recap. Reporter to Hastert: "[McCain's] observation was never before when we've been at war have we been worrying about cutting taxes and his question was, 'Where's the sacrifice?'" Hastert responds: ""If you want to see the sacrifice, John McCain ought to visit our young men and women at Walter Reed and Bethesda. There's the sacrifice in this country. We're trying to make sure they have the ability to fight this war, that they have the wherewithal to be able to do it. And, at the same time, we have to react to keep this country strong."

Okay, it was a dumb statement--it opened up Hastert to the kind of criticism he's been getting. But I'm sorry, Hastert just didn't belittle McCain's own sacrifice in his statement.

As for McCain's being right on the underlying budget issues: There is room for doubt. McCain wants a budget rule that makes it harder to cut taxes or increase spending. But he has voted to waive the rules to allow more spending. House Republicans have noticed that, and they don't like it. Whoever's right, it certainly complicates the picture of McCain as apostle of fiscal rectitude.

Finally, the Dallas Morning News is either badly informed or disingenuous when it suggests that there is no reason at all to question McCain's Republican credentials. Everybody knows that there are plenty of issues on which McCain has moved left over the last five years.

To compare Hastert's remark to Kennedy's "under new management" line about Abu Ghraib is, to say the least, overheated. Whoever wrote the editorial needs to calm down.

The New York Times seems to be saying US troops are deliberately targeting the media, or at least have tried, or want to, or something. I'd love to know what Mr. Wong is talking about:

Iraq has become one of the most dangerous places in the world from which to report, with enormous potential for journalists to be deliberately targeted by either side or caught in the crossfire.

From a policy gnome at Cato:

"but I would stack any random intern from Reason or the Cato Institute against almost anyone at the Center for American Progress when it comes to arguing philosophy."

Awwwwww... I'm getting all misty-eyed--I'm a random intern from Cato and I'm S-M-R-T!

But it's true, we do learn our stuff here. The intern program here at Cato is designed so that we don't leave without reading and discussing a whole helluva lot of Locke, Hayek, Friedman, etc., etc. I mean, what would interns at CAP or Brookings read--Sontag, Naomi Klein, the NYTimes op-ed page? I'll take the real stuff, thanks.
ps. this goes without saying, but please don't use my name if this goes on the Corner--thanks.

Matt Yglesias' increasingly knee-jerk dyspepsia toward conservatives continues. He writes of my position of Chalabi: "Jonah Goldberg, wisely, pronounces the whole issue too hard to understand, thus ensuring that whichever faction comes out on top in the end, he'll be okay."

Um, isn't it possible I'm not biding my time in some Machiavellian scheme to "come out on top" (Oh, the glory that will rain upon the conservative who is on the winning side of the Great Chalabi Debate!), but I'm actually being intellectually honest? For the record, I don't think I've ever written a whole paragraph about Achmed Chalabi, though I did interview him by satellite once for a BBC show I was on. I've never been able to figure out what the story is on him. My guess is that this is one of those times when both sides are more right than wrong. He is a con man and a political hustler. But lots of good history has been made by people who fit that description (if liberals want nothing to do with such people, I await the purge of Jesse Jackson from liberal ranks, by the way). I guess my problem has always been that I couldn't ever figure out whether he was the right hustler for the job. I'd share more, but my snitches tell me the pro-Chalabi faction is ascendent and I don't want to blow my chances at a coupon for a free stuffed-crust pizza at the Baghdad Pizza Hut.

Steve - Very interesting points. I'll stop saying how I'm trying to keep my powder dry on the book, but I entirely agree that American conservatives, by and large, are inspired by the classical Liberals of the 19th century and in that sense this is all an argument within liberalism. Sam Huntington wrote an amazing essay in 1957, I think, on Conservatism as an Ideology which pointed out in detail that American conservatives were trying to conserve liberal institutions. This is why Hayek excludes American conservatives in his essay "Why I Am Not a Conservative." He was complaining about the European conservatives, De Maistre et al, who wanted to remain frozen in time until they get go backwards in time. But don't get me started on that.

Instead, let me offer a few nice words for the Libertarians by way of responding to liberals who claim they don't need to understand intellectual history because they're so gloriously dynamic and change-loving -- which is so much self-serving propaganda for a movement dedicated to preserving the clunky apparatus of the New Deal and Great Society.

Libertarians of almost all flavors, including the folks I have the biggest disagreements with, are much more dynamic and change oriented than any other political group except, perhaps, for anarchists and the mentally deranged. I mean Virginia Postrel wrote a wonderful book called The Future and Its Enemies for pete's sake, but I would be terrified to debate her on intellectual history (okay not terrified, but scared enough to do a lot of homework). Indeed, all the professional libertarians and most of the amateur ones I've ever met know their philosophy and history very, very well -- quite often better than their conservative peers. As conservatives we may not always agree with them, but I would stack any random intern from Reason or the Cato Institute against almost anyone at the Center for American Progress when it comes to arguing philosophy. Yeah, I'm overstating things, but not by that much.

In other words, claiming you love change and therefore don't need to know your intellectual roots isn't an argument, it's a cop-out. This was a point, I read somewhere, Herbert Marcuse tried to hammer into 1960s radicals who thought they could put a torch to the past without caring about what got burnt.

Now I think there are reasons for all of this and I don't think they all reflect poorly on liberals. American Liberalism -- "progressivism" really is the better word -- has always been more devoted to action than ideas. Action may leave more buildings and bodies in its wake, but it doesn't leave that many books. Conservatives and libertarians -- sibling movements at first and now certainly no more distant than cousins -- have always felt like they were on the outside looking in. Minority cultures always feel the need to work harder at justifying and analyzing their minority status and understanding the majority's arguments. That's true on college campuses where conservatives share much in common with black activists and feminists in their enthusiasm for celebrating/wallowing in their outsider status and its true at the national level. Meanwhile progressives constructed the welfare state and defended it against attackers -- often by viciously demonizing them -- for so long and so successfully, they've forgotten why they're inside the castle walls in the first place and they are now instinctually and culturally hostile to ideas which question the philosophical status quo, even though many of them can't explain or adequately defend the ideas which support the status quo.

And yeah, there are other reasons for all of this too, I think. But I'll stop there for now.

From the Joint Economic Committee:

From the Joint Economic Committee (JEC), Chairman Robert F. Bennett…

Today, the Department of Labor released its latest report on state-by-state employment data for April 2004. The complete release can be found here: ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/news.release/laus.txt.

Highlights:

* Over the past year, the unemployment rate has fallen in 47 states.
* Non-farm payroll employment increased in 45 states in April.
* Over the past year, employment has increased in 44 states.

The latest state-by-state data are consistent with recent job growth nationwide. In the past 8 months, over 1.1 million new payroll jobs have been created. Over 800,000 new jobs have been created in 2004 alone. If the current pace of job growth for 2004 continues, over 2.6 million jobs will be created this year. In addition, the current unemployment rate is 5.6 percent, well below its recent peak of 6.3 percent and below the average unemployment rates of the 1970’s, 1980’s, and 1990’s.

Non-farm payroll employment by state: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/laus.t05.htm

Unemployment rates by state: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/laus.t03.htm

National employment data for May 2004 will be released by BLS on Friday, June 4. When it is made available, you will be able to find that data here: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.toc.htm.

I was talking with an expert on the Middle East this morning and he said that he'd heard from a bunch of Pentagon and State types that the allegation Chalabi forwarded info to the Iranians is real and really serious.

Personally, I find this to be one of those issues -- like the Balkans -- that the more you study it, the less you understand it.

The raid on Chalabi's house, personally approved by CPA administrator L. Paul Bremer, encapsulates what has gone wrong with the American administration in Iraq. Bremer came to Baghdad and planned to rule by dictate. He scuttled Jay Garner's desire for early sovereignty. In late July, Bremer vetoed a Governing Council proposal to create a prime minister, saying that this might undercut his power. Fearing any challenge to his authority, Bremer gave a series of condescending radio addresses mocked by Iraqis. Rather than promote the new generation of Iraqi politicians, Bremer put himself at the center of press attention. For example, Bremer decided that he, rather than an Iraqi official, would announce the new Iraqi currency. Iraqification became second stage to Bremer's desire to replace Secretary of State Colin Powell should Bush win reelection. There was no room for assertive Iraqis who refused to grovel.

The response from various liberal readers to my post yesterday on generalized liberal amnesia to their own intellectual roots has been frustrating and depressing.

Frustrating because lots of them repeat points made when we had this go-round last April, which is nicely ironic since part of my point is that liberals condemn themselves to repeating their mistakes by not knowing their history -- even, it turns out, when it's a month old.

It's depressing because it has revealed a root to the problem liberals have -- or at least the problem conservatives have with liberals: The arrogant belief that they don't need to have a philosophy or "right way of thinking" because they are so dynamic, decent and good while conservatives are so hidebound with dogma, mean and bad. Here's how one guy put it (this is an excerpt since the whole email is too long):

I'm sitting here chuckling because I can imagine you smacking yourself in the forehead once you "get" this one. With all due respect, the nature of your criticism is an almost too-perfect encapsulation of the fundamental difference between liberals and conservatives. Think about what you wrote: "...liberals -- again as a gross generalization -- are much less interested in, and knowledgeable of, their own intellectual history." First of all, what might clear up some of your apparent confusion is a better understanding of liberalism. Conservatives tend to think of liberalism as "what Hillary Clinton says"; at least, most of the criticisms directed at liberals by conservatives center around the policies of the leftward side of the Democratic party. In some ways, I can't really fault you as a conservative for thinking this way, because that world view quite literally defines conservatism. For better or worse, conservatives believe that everything has its place, and for the most part that place can be determined by what has come before. Liberals, on the other hand, view the world as a far more dynamic, constantly evolving system to which humans must adapt in order to progress (hence the term "progressive"). Now, this is a very clinical definition of liberalism, but what it really means is that liberals do not subscribe to the notion that maintaining the status quo (or returning to a status quo ante) is always preferable, nor that it is impossible to overcome certain limitations imposed by the "human condition" (such as poverty, war, etc). So, to come back to your point, the "intellectual history" of liberalism is inherently less of a factor for liberals because a core ideal of liberalism is for each person to develop his or her own ideas without being indoctrinated into a specific way of thinking. Any dogmatic approaches to politics you see from the left most likely come from the simple, pragmatic fact that our adversaries on the right have so many more weapons of mass persuasion at their disposal than liberals do. Make no mistake about it: there is no "liberal" mainstream media, just (and I'll use a "gross generalization" here) a relatively tolerant (in ethnic terms), flag-waving collection of stooges who usually pander to whichever faction of the Republicrat party happens to be in power until a shift in the political winds is detected. Fox "News" is probably the only exception to this rule, but fortunately I don't believe any station can maintain credibility even among its redneck audience for very long. With more and more people getting their news from the Internet, it just doesn't seem like it will be possible for very much longer to so blatantly distort events in that uniquely Foxian way.

Me: I left in all the blather about Fox and Republicans because I think it illustrates my point. Without knowledge of its own past, liberalism cannot have a serious political philosophy, it can only have feelings. I was amazed last summer at a political conference for college kids at the way the professional Democrats and liberals on a panel -- with the exception of Peter Beinart -- all began their presentations with "I believe" this or "I feel passionately" that. The conservatives and libertarians (save one lame "conservative feminist") all started either from first philosophy or history (and the lame conservative feminist was lame because she tried to do that and failed).

It is a sign of the arrogance of liberals that they brag -- as so many have done in their emails -- that they don't "need to know what to believe" or to know history or to have a philosophy or to, in effect, know their homework. They simply know what's right. Even Kevin Drum subscribed somewhat to this point. It is also a sign of the triumph of two strains in liberal intellectual history converging: pragmatism and intellectual radicalism (by which I mean critical legal studies and the like). Both schools of thought reject the notion that "dogma" and "tradition" are useful sources of knowledge or morality, respectively. The critical legal types know a lot of history, but only to condemn American institutions as sexist, racist etc. The pragmatists reject history on principle. It is amazing how brilliant so many liberals are at dissecting beliefs and arguments and so un-brilliant at presenting their own set of beliefs. Quick: What does Michael Kinsley, the "Dean of Smart Liberalism" believe?

I've spent a lot of time thinking about this for my book, and I've concluded that the problem with liberalism isn't lack of money or organization or media access (please God, stop their whining about Fox News and the American Enterprise Institute for pete's sake, they look ridiculous). Their biggest problem is they don't have a philosophy. This causes a lack of organization. This causes a lack of popular ideas. This is why the Democratic Party defines itself in such reactionary terms -- blocking Republicans, creating lockboxes, yelling "stop" and "no" a la Al Gore and so on. Today the only issue that unifies liberals or the Democrats is their hatred of George W. Bush and to a lesser extent "his" war. That's not a program, that's not a philosophy, that's not even liberalism. That's a gripe.

We felt a little like we'd fallen down a rabbit hole this week on hearing that an artillery shell that tested positive for sarin had been discovered in a roadside bomb in Baghdad. It wasn't the nasty stuff itself that was curious — as Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld intimated, some stray chemical munitions could signify any number of things, or not much at all. The extraordinary part was the tizzy the media and various noteworthies were in to discount it. It hadn't been but a few hours since the news broke when former U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix grabbed a microphone somewhere to huff that the discovery meant nothing. Others briskly offered that the shell was more likely the bounty of a scavenger hunt by yahoos who didn't even know what they had. Fair enough to be sure: At this point, none of us knows. But even forgetting the potency of one drop of liquid sarin, when did the prospect of the accidental use of loose WMDs become reassuring?

k-lo,

Have you considered asking for donations of fine jewelry? It's easy to liquidate, and when all is done, would probably exceed your fundaising goals.

Lots of us have extra stuff laying around. You could expect to get 10-15% of it's retail value.

Kathryn:

I am a certified Corner addict (accounting for roughly half of your page hits each day), so I figured it was my duty to support the cause. Since I canceled my subscription to NRODT a few years ago for budgetary reasons, I decided to do my bit by subscribing to NR/Digital.

I was SHOCKED at how cheap it was!

Now I feel compelled to give an additional donation, just so I don't end up looking like a cheapskate. How clever of you...

Keep up the great work!

Doug Weatherston
Terre Haute, IN

From a reader:

I am an attorney in California, and I represent management in employment disputes. The reason that you should not like Governor Schwartzenegger's 75% tax on punitive damages is two-fold: 1. In those states that have such a tax, courts have been less likely to reduce exorbitant punitive damage awards from run-a-mok juries. Could it be that judges see such a tax as a wonderful way of filling the state coffers, which in turn will hopefully increase budgets for state courts and salaries for court officials (like judges)? Ummmmm, could be . . . . 2. Also, note that such taxes usually come with a "lawyers eat first" provision. Thus, the lawyers take their cut and then the rest is awarded to the state. This is why businesses oppose this tax but the trial lawyers see no problem with it. Sort of contradicts your concern that punitive damages are paid to attorneys, eh? No names please . . . .

Mark Schmitt at the American Prospect responds to my observation that contemporary liberals don't know very much about their own intellectual history. Alas, he seems needlessly scornful of my "mostly incorrect" assertion, considering the fact that it launched a new column at The American Prospect and was sufficiently true to keep him thinking about it for more than a month. This seems especially so since I wrote at the time of my assertion: "Obviously this is a sweeping -- and therefore unfair -- generalization."

Anyway, he has some thoughts about all of it. He's right, by the way, that liberals in the mid 1990s did talk a lot more about Herbert Croly. But, again, I guarantee you that if I were to ask an audience of college Democrats "Who can tell me who Herbert Croly (never mind -- gasp -- Rexford Tugwell) was and what did he believe?" I wouldn't get more than a few raised hands and not many good answers. If I were to ask an audeince of College Republicans the same question about, say, Friedrich Hayek I'd get a lot of good answers. If I asked, by the way, Who was Margaret Sanger -- a few feminists might know the answer but I doubt they'd know what a racist she was.

This partly has to do with the nature of liberal-leftism on college campuses (which are more spread out into different and often competing identity politics groups concerned with complaining more than arguing) as opposed to the right (fairly unified into one or two organizations).

But I don't need Schmitt to confirm for me what I've observed first hand for several years now; liberals -- again as a gross generalization -- are much less interested in, and knowledgeable of, their own intellectual history. In fact, many of the intellectual liberal journalist types I've met seem to know the intellectual history of conservatives better than they know their own side's. I could be wrong about that but I don't think I'm very wrong.

All this talk about money, NRO get-togethers, fundraising, tree houses, mortgages etc has phrenologically engaged. Maybe one of these days NRO should host some kind of barn-raising, house-building type thing. I may detest Jimmy Carter but Habitats for Humanity doesn't offend me. Maybe there's something like that we could all do? Beers, picnic grub and some sort of construction type thing for a good cause? Conservatives talk about civil society being better than government, maybe we could do something like that, help out NRO and have the oft-discussed but never materialized "meet-up" of NROniks.

Or am I particularly high?

Now readers want to know what I make. Well, good luck finding out. I will tell you that I am essentially on half-pay from NRO (imagine the sound of a saltine cracker being snapped in two) until the G-File is back and I start writing for the mag again (remember I'm on quasi leave to write the Neverending Story, er, my book). Also, I've always been a glorified consultant to NRO. I carry my own freight on health care and I make extra money taking care of Derb's rain gutters on weekend (generous Wall Street tycoon that he is).

I'm not really complaining (much). The suits at NR have actually been quite kind to me over the years, despite my ribbing. But, again, if you think people work at NR for the money, it's time to get off the pipe. And, even if we were the best-compensated journalists in America, making Vanity Fair wages or some such, I would still say Kathryn is grossly underpaid.

From a reader:

Hey Jonah

You got me with that article as well! I am an NRO-addict, and it was about
time that I shelled out on a NRDigital subscription and stopped freeloading
- I hope the cash is useful and the chaps at NRO are now able to splash out
on a new mug, or piece of fly paper.

The work that you all do is extremely important, and whilst this particular
Englishman finds some of the subjects that really seem to tug the chain of
you Yanks somewhat esoteric, the paper is well written, well thought out and
always entertaining. Thank you all.

You said you were in London next week - planning a beer-age session at all?
I am sure there are heaps of us in London who'd love to buy you a drink, or
Cosmo a sausage!

Best regards,

Simon

Ramesh - I know we've discussed the lapse in Congress' obligation to uphold the Constitution on its own before. But isn't that second argument -- "2) Congressmen are obligated to vote for abortion by the Supreme Court" even more pernicious? Or am I missing something? Is it a widespread point of view that the Supreme Court's rulings bar Congressman from voting in favor of things the Supreme Court might have ruled unconstitutional? Am I misunderstanding something or isn't that troubling regardless of the abortion issue?

I won't over do this for fear of elicting a Corner ban. But here are a few emails from readers:

Hello Jonah, Yes, the finale did seem rushed but it also conveyed - intentionally, I believe - the idea that "the work" (battling evil) goes on. I hope Angel does land on another network, but I think Joss deliberately set this ending up to illustrate that Angel and the crew's battle will continue, we just won't be witness to it. And some day, on some battlefield, Buffy and Angel will once more stand side by side against the forces of darkness and I hope that moment occurs on the silver screen of a multiplex near me.

And...

Yes, you are wrong.

I think Whedon probably ended Angel in that manner for two reasons:

1- Every other show in the history of TV (or at least during the last 5 years) has sought to tie up all the loose ends for their series finale. Whedon didn't tie up the loose ends; he ended with a cliffhanger, perfectly against the conventional TV wisdom.

2- The moral of the ending was that there will always be a battle of good vs. evil, and while evil may outnumber good, may outgun good, and may out-everything good in every single way, there will always be heroes like Angel, Spike, Gunn, etc..., to fight the good fight. Remember the gist of their final words (from memory, not even close to exact) "what are we going to do?"

"What we always do"

Finally, if you think Whedon isn't thinking about putting together a Buffy-Angel movie, you're nuts.

And...

Dear Jonah, I hope you are right, that Angel does come back. I thought it was a little rushed as well, and set up such that Angel can "jump networks" like Taxi, or more recently, Buffy did. I had heard that Joss has a deal to make a few TV movies/specials/microseries, but you know how things are in Hollywood. Nobody's word means a damn thing until after the film is distributed at the theaters, or the program is on the air. Why does everyone have this thing about dragons? That is one spot that really upset me, Angel's closing line about how he wanted to kill the dragon. Just because you are big, winged, breathe fire, and have a taste for virgins, everybody is on your case. There is way too much anti-dragon bias in television, the movies and fiction in general.

And, lastly:

Jonah: Unfortunately, the sets have been struck, some even destroyed. Joss is busy getting the "Firefly" movie into production. However, I was thinking the same thing last night. I kept waiting for Andrew and Giles and Buffy to show up with about a hundred Britney Spears clones. Wesley sure could have used Willow's help, but I am pretty sure he went there to die so he could be with Fred.

Man, I am SO glad that I'm not the only male fan of the Whedonverse. Great
minds think alike I guess.

Have a great day.

Your piece today convinced me that it's not enough for an open-minded liberal like myself to read NRO daily, I must pay my fair share of the cost by subscribing.

So I did.

[Name withheld]

PS: Personally, I'd like to see this country become less red and blue and more purple. MG

An article on Monday about the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling that ended school segregation misstated a word in a paraphrase from President Bush, who attended a ceremony in Topeka, Kan. He called for a continuing battle to end racial inequality — not equality

Kerry promised during the primaries to appoint to the Supreme Court only justices who favor Roe v. Wade because "people who go to the Supreme Court ought to interpret the Constitution as it is interpreted, and if they have another point of view, then they're not supporting the Constitution, which is what a judge does." Yesterday, he said that he would be willing to appoint anti-Roe justices so long as the Court had a pro-Roe majority. ("Supporting the Constitution" was apparently no longer a requirement for his nominees.) The abortion lobby expressed its displeasure, and reasonably so given its principles--if Clinton had followed that policy, the Court might have upheld bans on partial-birth abortion and pro-lifers would need to switch only one more vote to overturn Roe. So now Kerry is saying that he will nominate only pro-Roe justices.

The flop-flip was accompanied by some unconvincing spin. Here's what Kerry said yesterday: "I will not appoint somebody with a 5-4 court who's about to undo Roe v. Wade. I've said that before. But that doesn't mean that if that's not the balance of the court I wouldn't be prepared ultimately to appoint somebody to some court who has a different point of view. I've already voted for people like that. I voted for Judge Scalia." Nedra Pickler's AP story has Kerry aides saying that "some court" was a reference to lower federal courts, not the Supreme Court.

Aides said later that "some court" was not a reference to the Supreme Court, only lower federal benches. That is hard to reconcile with his prefatory reference to a 5-4 Supreme Court or with the Scalia example--in other words, with anything he said.

Still unclear is whether he would appoint appeals-court judges who are anti-Roe. But he has been supporting filibusters of Bush judicial nominees for less than that: A major complaint against Priscilla Owen has been that she read a parental-notification law in a way the abortion lobby found disagreeable.

-Where do you live?

-In Sadr city.

-Oh I see, but what do you think the cause of this insecurity?

-Is that a question?? They are those thugs and thieves.

-Who are those?!

-Sadr followers.

-I agree, but I don’t understand your people there. Why do they support them!?

-Do you really believe that?? I swear to God they are no more than a couple of thousands terrorizing millions and hiding behind slogans like jihad and resistance. The whole city has got sick and tired of their doings. We just want to work, feed our children and take a break. We are tired of all this bullshit. They can’t deceive us anymore.

This idiot is taking advantage of his father’s name and we know the people who are gathering around him. Most of them are gangsters and ex-convicts with some foolish teenagers. They are anything but Muslims. Every now and then one of these cowards come hiding his face and fire against the American troops and when the Americans respond innocents get hurt. I was encouraged by his attitude and asked: -Why don’t you try to do something about it?

-Who says we aren’t? I’m one of the people who reported some members of the Mahdi army to the IP and now they are in prison.

-Really!? God bless you. That was brave of you. These people really belong there.

-Sure they do! Did this idiot forget who killed his father!? And who took his revenge? Could he have ever raised his voice if it wasn’t for the same people whom he’s fighting now? Well let the Iranians help him now! Believe me brother when I say that the majority of Sadr city people are grateful for the Americans. We didn’t fire a bullet at them when they entered our city. We gave them the reception of liberators and they are. Why would we fight them now!?...

The Crisis

By Rob S. Rice

In these dull dreary days the truly brave man knows
That steel, true steel, is tempered by blows.
Fools sneer and deride, let them cheer for our foes
So much harder steel that they temper with blows.

Honor is eternal, though fools disregard
The tests they despise, or consider 'too hard.'
Or in scheming for power they chatter, like crows,
But steel, true steel, is still tempered by blows.

We face scheming murderers with calm defiance.
They have soulless evil, we have self-reliance.
They butcher civilians, their cruelty shows.
Our steel, true steel, is tempered by blows.


Let them come and dare face us, or run, if they choose.
In battle or treachery, the wicked shall lose.
For the acts of their madness are in truth their death throes.
They'll die on our steel that they've tempered, with blows.

I watched the series finale last night and struck me as a rushed season finale. Considering the show's popularity and the WB's relative lack of same, I really think the network suits should be ashamed of themselves to let the show die the way they did. My hope is that Joss Whedon left it as such a cliff-hangery show precisely because some other network might pick it up. I said this was my hope, not my expectation. Though such things have happened before. Remember "Taxi" switched networks.

Am I wrong or did the final scene seem perfectly set-up for the calvalry-like arrival of the slayer army?

Here's a letter distributed by the superintendent of the US Naval Academy:

Dear Midshipmen, Faculty & Staff:

I want to make you aware of a decision I have made with regard to our
Alma Mater, "Navy Blue and Gold."

An important aspect in the implementation of the Naval Academy's
mission is to develop midshipmen into combat leaders who can build unit
cohesion and teamwork. In order to accomplish this, we seek to develop
a professional command climate that fosters dignity and respect amongst
all midshipmen, regardless of gender, religion or ethnicity. We want to
be inclusive rather than exclusive in all that we do.

In combat, success is not determined by skin color, ethnic background,
religious beliefs or gender. Success is based on building a team to
win. We want you as leaders to value diversity and form teams that take
full advantage of each person's unique contributions and recognize
that everyone counts. To foster these qualities in our leaders, we must
start by ensuring that our culture and its symbols accurately portray
who we are.

The foundation of who we are is the oath we take to "Support and
defend the Constitution of the United States." Our Constitution says
that Congress passes laws and the President signs them. In October
1975, President Ford signed a law that offered new opportunities for
women in the military and authorized women to be admitted to the service
academies. The following summer, the first class to include women
entered the Naval Academy.

Since the first graduate in the Class of 1980, 2322 women have earned
their commissions at the Naval Academy. Another 670 women are currently
working toward their commissions as part of the Brigade. Unfortunately,
our Alma Mater, "Navy Blue & Gold," unintentionally excludes these
graduates and members of the Brigade who have chosen to serve their
country as officers in the Navy and Marine Corps. Every midshipman,
whether woman or man, has earned admission into the Academy.
Furthermore, those midshipmen who meet our high standards earn their
commission as leaders in our Navy and Marine Corps. Our traditions and
activities should not disenfranchise any of our shipmates. This includes
the words of "Navy Blue & Gold," which should serve to honor the
bond of midshipmen, past, present and future.

Accordingly, as Superintendent, I am directing two small, but important
changes in the first verse of "Navy Blue & Gold" to ensure it is
fully inclusive of our Brigade and our Alumni. In the first line,
"college men" will be replaced by "colleges." In the third
line, "Sailor men" will be replaced by "Sailors brave." Without
changing the meaning of the song, these words will make our Alma Mater
inclusive of all who cherish it.

Why would I do this? Is it a response to political pressure? No. Is
it being directed from higher up? No. Nor is it a result of recent
headlines. This is my decision alone. It is a decision consistent with
our values. It is the right thing to do.

I need the support of each and every one of you. At the Graduation
ceremony on 28 May, and from then on, I want you to sing "Navy Blue
and Gold" with these two changes. As Supe, I don't think I have yet
asked the Brigade, Faculty and Staff to do something for me. So, I am
now. Help me effect these two word changes. We need to move beyond
where we are and support all midshipmen and graduates who have earned
the right to wear the Navy Blue & Gold.

Best wishes for a safe and rewarding summer. Whether you're on
cruise, PROTRAMID, here for summer school, on detail, attending
training, or enjoying some well deserved time off with family and
friends, be safe and be smart. We want to see everyone back and
motivated for the Fall semester!

Sincerely,
VADM Rempt
Superintendent

A year ago everyone had written Democrats off. The media had taken for granted the reelection of George Bush. Isn't it fun to prove them wrong?

The Bush-Cheney campaign has blown $70 million on negative ads, but is still tied in the polls with John Kerry. Your work has sent a powerful message to George W. Bush and those who would reduce this campaign to a petty exchange of attack ads: we know what this election really means -- and we won't stop until we've won.

We need to make a "Miracle in May" happen and keep our momentum up. This ten million dollars is not just about money. It's about showing the media, the Bush campaign, undecided voters, and the rest of the country, that the Kerry campaign is not a fluke and is going to win in November.

Please make a secure contribution by clicking here:

https://contribute.johnkerry.com

We all know the stakes in this election are incredibly high. If we win, we'll have John Kerry in the White House leading America with the hope, optimism, and sense of common purpose that have always been at the center of America's response to challenging times.

If they get their way, you and I will be living in an America governed not by our hopes, but by our fears. We'll be living in an America where we see our freedoms diminished when they ought to be embraced, our rights restricted when they ought to be strengthened.

We'll be living in an America that shrinks away from the political and economic challenges of the 21st century, rather than rising to those challenges and working together to meet them.

Don't let Republicans create an America we won't recognize.

Peter - Sorry for the radio silence. I've been pondering your invitation. You know how much A) I'd like to do your show, B) nicer Palo Alto is than DC in June C) I'm looking for reasons to procrastinate. Can I get back to you soon?

As for my post on Drum's odd history, so far nobody -- including Drum himself -- has mustered a defense. I like Drum and I think he's a smart guy, but on more than one occasion I've been pretty shocked at the lapses in his historical analysis.

What’s really amazing about the column is how poorly it reads. Is this the best Senate staffers can do? Does the paper have no copy editor to clean it up and make it read like a coherent piece of thinking? “But Cheney's man, Chalabi, made a mess of the de-Baathification of Iraq by dismissing Republican Guard leadership and Sunni leaders who soon joined with the insurgents.” Does he think his constituents know of Chalabi? What the Republican Guard was?

The last paragraph boils on incoherent: Terrorism is to be defeated by diplomacy and negotiation. You get Osama to the bargaining table, Fritz.

Coalition Forces raid suspected foreign fighter safe house near Syrian border

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- At 3 a.m. May 18, Coalition forces conducted a military operation against a suspected foreign fighter safe house in the open desert, 85 km SW of Husaybah, and 25 km from the Syrian border.

During the operation, Coalition forces came under hostile fire and close air support was provided. Coalition forces on the ground recovered numerous weapons, 2 million Iraqi and Syrian dinar, foreign passports, and a SATCOM radio.

From a reader who might be too quick to lump the Brits with the Europeans:

Jonah --

I'm always amazed when I hear stories like this. After 30 years of left-wing control of Europe, there are still some Europeans, like the Argyll and Sutherland highlanders, who still have the cojones to fix bayonets and charge. It gives me hope that not every European is a linguine-spined left-wing internationalist wimp.

Fritz Hollings is defending himself saying that he can provide quotes from Jews in America and Israel to support his position. I'm sure he can to some extent. But so what? His charge isn't that Jews support democracy in the Middle East to secure Israel's security (and because they support democracy). His charge is that Bush went to war to placate those Jews. The quotes he needs to prove his point aren't from Jews in Tel Aviv, they're from White House officials in Washington.

I can provide plenty of "quotes" from oil executives saying that securing the flow of oil is vital to American security. Does that prove it was a "war for oil"? Hell, give me time and I can get you quotes from people saying we went to war in Iraq because their cats won't stop staring at them in the shower, that doesn't prove Bush went to war for feline prurience.

Aussie Prime Minister John Howard:

"If we lose heart, if we abandon our friends, if we choose to give the wrong signal to the terrorists, that will not only make the world a less safe place but also damage the reputation of this country around the world."

And:

"The reality is that international terrorism has invested an enormous amount in breaking the will of the coalition. The terrorists know that if democracy is installed in Iraq they have lost. Iraq is the key to creating new hope for the people of the Middle East."

Read it all.

Um... Wow:

OUTNUMBERED British soldiers killed 35 Iraqi attackers in the Army’s first bayonet charge since the Falklands War 22 years ago.

The fearless Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders stormed rebel positions after being ambushed and pinned down.

Despite being outnumbered five to one, they suffered only three minor wounds in the hand-to-hand fighting near the city of Amara.

The battle erupted after Land Rovers carrying 20 Argylls came under attack on a highway.

After radioing for back-up, they fixed bayonets and charged at 100 rebels using tactics learned in drills.

Yes, a great name for a band. But that's also what Hollings does in his column. He writes: "Led by Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Charles Krauthammer, for years there has been a domino school of thought that the way to guarantee Israel's security is to spread democracy in the area."

Funny how the only names are Jewish. What? Jeanne Kirkpatrick doesn't count? Jack Kemp? Bill Bennett?

Yes, a great name for a band. But that's also what Hollings does in his column. He writes: "Led by Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Charles Krauthammer, for years there has been a domino school of thought that the way to guarantee Israel's security is to spread democracy in the area."

Funny how the only names are Jewish. What? Jeanne Kirkpatrick doesn't count? Jack Kemp? Bill Bennett? I wonder why.

He's no conservative, but he had some choice words at the big Brown v. Board of Ed bash Monday night, according to the Post:

Bill Cosby was anything but politically correct in his remarks Monday night at a Constitution Hall bash commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. To astonishment, laughter and applause, Cosby mocked everything from urban fashion to black spending and speaking habits.

"Ladies and gentlemen, the lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal," he declared. "These people are not parenting. They are buying things for kids -- $500 sneakers for what? And won't spend $200 for 'Hooked on Phonics.' . . .

"They're standing on the corner and they can't speak English," he exclaimed. "I can't even talk the way these people talk: 'Why you ain't,' 'Where you is' . . . And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. And then I heard the father talk. . . . Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. . . . You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth!"

The Post's Hamil Harris reports that Cosby also turned his wrath to "the incarcerated," saying: "These are not political criminals. These are people going around stealing Coca-Cola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake and then we run out and we are outraged, [saying] 'The cops shouldn't have shot him.' What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand?"

When Cosby finally concluded, Howard University President H. Patrick Swygert, NAACP President Kweisi Mfume and NAACP legal defense fund head Theodore Shaw came to the podium looking stone-faced. Shaw told the crowd that most people on welfare are not African American, and many of the problems his organization has addressed in the black community were not self-inflicted.

I know I talk about Star Trek a lot, but I can't think of a show that contributed more to the vernacular of my later years in high school than The Odd Couple. Talk about Star Trek back then and you'd invite the same sort of ridicule you get around here. But Odd Couple was huge among most of the guys. I don't know why most girls didn't appreciate it. Sure, smaller subsets of us were huge "Young Ones" enthusiasts, for example. But almost everyone knew at least a little "Odd Couple."

All the guys I'm still friends with from high school can do quote The Odd Couple all of the time. The last time I saw one buddy of mine he even threatened to twist my little rigoletto. Bernaise Barbara, a midget named Harry, the frog wounded by the typewriter, "I shoulda said throat!"...good times, good times.

From a reader:

Hi Jonah. Nice column today, I actually watched this as it was happening on sunday and couldn't figure out for the life of me why Russert's undies were in such a bunch.

But here's my real problem. I assume that Ted Kennedy could also be considered a "taxpayer-paid employee". I didn't notice Tim, or any other news person, expressing any outrage when Kennedy abruptly cut of questions at a news conference by walking out when he was asked about some of his staff members orchestrating a delay in the confirmation of a judicial nominee in order to make sure that said nominee wouldn't have the ability to cast a vote in the controversial Michigan admissions case. As you said, happens all the time.

Matt Yglesias chimes in on that odd op-ed from yesterday in the Times. He agrees that it's -- again -- odd to say the GOP today is more conservative than Goldwater, though he comes from a more hostile perspective. He goes on to suggest, not entirely outlandishly, that the allegedly "more conservative" conservative movement hasn't accomplished much.

I don't want to take the bait on trying to list everything conservatives have or haven't done. A few things come immediately to mind. First of all, so-called liberals were increasingly useless in the second-half of the Cold War. Second, conservative free-market arguments brought about a wave of deregulation which created immense material prosperity and improved health (see David Frum's book on the 1970s). Third, James Q Wilson's "broken windows" theory helped reverse America's seemingly permanent descent into criminal violence more than any liberal idea in the last half-century. I can think of plenty of other examples, of course. But you get the point.

And one last thing. Whenever I point out that America's environment has gotten so much better or that the "Population Bomb" was a dud, environmentalist liberals always say these benefits were the result of activists raising the alarms and causing changes in public policy. It's a fair argument as far as it goes, but it hardly justifies the lies of the environmentalists. Nonetheless, I think it's fair to remind folks of how unbelievably bad the ideas of the left in the 1960s and 1970s were. From the National Welfare Rights Organization insisting that welfare payments constituted reparations for slavery (and should therefore be increased and expanded) to the Nuclear Freeze movement and so on. I wish conservatives had accomplished more, but the one accomplishment I'm very grateful for is that they stopped the left from translating so many of its ideas into policy.

I'm sorry if I sounded more glum than I intended in my post about anti-Semitism. I'm getting all sorts of nice buck-up emails from folks. While they're appreciated, they're not necessary. Sure, sometimes the anti-Semitic stuff is a bummer, but generally it's really quite easy to ignore and I know it represents a tiny minority of folks. Seriously, I do know this Haliburton launched Zion Eye IV a few years ago. It's a very powerful satellite which tracks anti-Semites throught their fillings. I know where all of them live thanks to my regular ZOG newsletter.

Michael Rubin's essay on NRO really is worth reading. I don't read that much on the "Jews are neocons, neocons are Zionists, Zionists killed my dog" hysteria these days, mostly because it's so depressing and because it's rare anything new gets said. But Rubin's is a very nice recap of the state of play.

I can certainly confirm that anti-Semitic email is way, way up. Of course, it doesn't help that I have the most Jewish-sounding name this side of Sasha Finkletsein.

But what I find so fascinating about most of it is the incredible amount of literary imagination these folks bring to it without benefit of any facts. They "know" that I am a frequent visitor to Israel (I've never been there), that I'm an immigrant or of recent American vintage (Mom's side -- not Jewish -- comes from Mayflowerish stock, Dad's side's been here for more than a century), that I speak regularly with the White House, the Pentagon or Likud officials to get my "marching orders" (please), that Israel is all I think about etc. Some also work on the assumption that I must be a hypocrite because, well, hypocrites are bad and usually Jewish. Therefore they'll assume I took different positions when Israel's (sweaty palmed) interests weren't at stake.

But what's perhaps most interesting is how many of them -- though certainly not a majority -- believe they are being calm and rational and not at all insulting. They "know" the truth and are therefore engaging in a reasonable exchange of ideas with me. They will always and everywhere speak of "the Jews" collectively as if they are all one thing or another and that I am bound by the gravitational force of however they define my tribe. They know I can't help it, I'm one of "the Jews" after all, and therefore they just want to talk about it, about how I'm deliberately destroying America and Western Civilization and all that --- but, honestly, no offense intended!

The other day I got an email from someone who concluded by saying something like "I liked the Jews better when they were all Communists" -- i.e. instead of war mongering, bagel-snarfing neocons.

Breaking a general policy, I wrote him back to say "I liked a**holes better when they kept their opinions to themselves."

The problem Kathryn is that every reference to reporters and/or mass media in later versions of Star Trek directly conflict with multiple references in TOS and TNG which specifically mention the death of mass media, specifically television, in the 21st century.

When I saw those reporters on the bridge in Star Trek 7 I almost fell out of my movie seat.

Fair point from a reader:

Jonah;

Keep up the good work.

But I, ahem, note that you stated "Even before the Soviets GOT the bomb..."

I believe you would be more accurate and correct with: "Even before the Soviets STOLE the bomb..."

It's not any holiday I can think of so now is not the time for candy coating reality.

After linking to, and quoting from, Wesley Clark's cover story in the Washington Monthly, Kevin Drum writes:

Clark's point is a simple one: Neither Reagan nor any of the seven Cold War presidents before him ever attacked either the Soviet Union or one of its satellites directly. This wasn't because of insufficient dedication to anticommunism, but because it wouldn't have worked. In the end, they knew that democracy couldn't come at the point of a gun; it had to come from within, from the citizens of the countries themselves.

Is this right? To argue otherwise is to suggest that our Cold War strategy was also wrong. Perhaps we should have rolled our tanks across the Iron Curtain after World War II, when the Soviet Union was exhausted and weary. Or attacked China instead of accepting a truce in the Korean War. Or sent NATO troops into Hungary in 1956.

Of course not. Even if we had "won," we wouldn't have won. In the end, the patient strategy of military containment and cultural engagement was the right call, and it's the right call for the war on terror as well. Too bad George Bush doesn't seem to get this.

Me: Am I alone or is this not a strikingly odd interpretation, even for a foreign policy liberal? First of all, where's the mention of nuclear weapons? The main argument against directly confronting the Soviet Union was the whole problem of mutually assured destruction, not that democracy can't be imposed at the point of a gun. In fact, at the dawn of the Cold War we were imposing democracy at the point of the gun in most of Germany and in Japan. We would have loved to have re-established democracy in most Eastern Europe, if it wouldn't have gotten us nuked. In fact, later in the Cold War liberals constantly said rhetorical hawks were too hawkish because nothing was worth risking nuclear war.

But even before the Soviets got the bomb, the reason for not invading -- i.e. liberating -- Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, the Baltics, Eastern Germany, etc. wasn't that "democracy couldn't come at the point of a gun." It was because the frickin' Red Army was already set up in those places and the American Army -- and public -- was too weary to fight another war which had nothing to do with our original war aims.

While it's fun to hear liberals embrace the morally sterile realism of detente, it's also worth pointing out that while we didn't attack the Soviet Union directly, we did fight a number of deadly proxy wars with the Soviets in order to contain them. We would have -- and should have -- done a lot more if nuclear annihilation weren't a risk (National Review did call for "rollback, not containment"). Meanwhile, the threshhold for toppling Saddam was lower than the threshhold for toppling Stalin precisely because we could topple Saddam at a lower cost to ourselves -- in much the same way that if we could liberate North Korea easily, I would say we should do that too.

Drum's -- and I presume Clark's (though I haven't read his article) -- Iraq analogy is absurd in one basic sense. He is comparing the captive nations to a hodgepodge of Iraq-like states when they were mostly, if not all, much more like mini-Kuwaits. According to Drum's analysis we should have left Saddam in power in Kuwait and waited for liberation and democracy to "come from within." (By the way, How does Drum's standard square with toppling Milosevic?)

The victims of Yalta did not want to live under the Soviet yoke and its puppet governments and Drum's insinuation that they did is somewhere between nonsense and highly partisan revisionism. The Ukranians often greeted the invading Nazi soldiers as liberators for Pete's sake.

I could go on, but maybe I'm missing something.

Four readers' theories:

1) "According to Tom Burnham and The Dictionary of Misinformation, Fitzgerald spoke as a playwright. The second act of a play is where plot and character development takes place, spinning subplots and character reveals to give a play and its characters emotional weight and depth. The third act is meant to tie all of this together into a meaningful resolution. What Fitzgerald meant wasn't that Americans don't get second chances; he meant that Americans have no depth or development and tend to be rather two-dimensional, or worse. In fact, the remark is incredible snobbish -- about what you'd expect from Fitzgerald."

2) "I think it is often taken to mean there are no second chances, but I think that is wrong. What is a second act? In a two act play, the first act is all a building up and the second act is all dénouement. I tend to think he meant that in America, there is always opportunity and new beginnings, and none of the fatalistic inevitable failure of European thinking."

3) "I've never assumed that it meant that there no second chances -- I've seen
other people imply this, but always felt that this was wrong. The word 'act' indicates the second act of a play, thus he is saying that what would typically occur in the second act of a play does not occur in a typical American life. Note
that the second act of a play is not a second chance for all/one of the characters in it... it's when things get complicated in interesting ways. I have thought (from the first moment I heard this quotation, and after all further thought) that his meaning was that Americans are born (get to know
their cast of characters), then die without anything of interest happening
to them in the meantime. Note that Fitzgerald had a number of expat years... his second act was in Europe. Scanning some Google hits, it seems that EVERYONE thinks that FSF meant 'second chances'. Don't you think a writer would have said 'second chances' if he'd meant that?"

4) "Don't plays typically have three acts? I always thought that, given that, Fitzgerald was saying that American lives happen, comparatively, really fast."

A reader writes:

Didn't disagree with anything in it, huh? How about "Fast forward to today. A Republican Party that is more conservative than Mr. Goldwater could have imagined controls the White House, Congress, many governors' mansions and a majority of seats in state legislatures." Now I can't say for sure, but I bet ol' Barry could have imagined a Republican Party that is more conservative than the Medicare-enlarging, No-child-left-behind-ing, campaign-finance-reform-signing crew we've got in the WH right now. I know I can. Even on foreign policy, btw, while commendably hawkish, this group is tough to classify as "conservative" in any historical sense.

Me: I'm glad I got corrected on this because I missed it in the op-ed. The reader's right. Without looking up the details this second, I would say that Goldwater was certainly more hostile to the New Deal and the Great Society than Reagan, Gingrich or the Bushes. And his talk about lobbing a nuke into the Kremlin was certainly more "hawkish" than fretting about collateral damage as we do now.

The opening scene of the seventh Star Trek movie featured the launching of the Enterprise-B. The bridge was full of reporters from various services covering the big event; Kirk couldn't move without a camera (or a dozen) being pushed in his face. When disaster hit, he made the reporters help out.

On Deep Space Nine, Captain Sisko's son Jake, an aspiring writer, paid the bills by being a reporter. During the Dominion occupation of the station, he stayed behind and, despite attempts to censor him, he managed to sneak stories (and, along the way, resistance messages) out in unique ways.

I know your eyes are glazing over, so I'll stop.

I agree with Kieran at Crooked Timber that conservatives might be poised to make too big a deal about The Day After Tomorrow,, but there's also more than a little disingenuousness in his swipe at Instapundit. After all, liberal groups and Al Gore are the ones who are definitely making too big a deal out of the movie already. Why is it okay for them to score political points by exploiting this apparently dumb movie but rebutting those points somehow worthy of scorn? His "it's just a movie" criticism also fails to take account of the fact that global warming is no less of a political hot button than, say, the JFK assasination but everyone put their two cents in on Oliver Stone's (presumably) equally idiotic movie.

"The quotation means whatever you want it to mean. It was never part of a novel or story; instead, Fitzgerald wrote it in a notebook devoted to scraps and stray thoughts. The sentence has no context and appears by itself, separated from the previous and subsequent items (which are unrelated) with a horizontal line. So any guess as to what Fitzgerald meant is just that--a guess.

"For what it's worth, Fitzgerald wrote these notebooks when he was working on The Last Tycoon, which was unfinished at his death. Elsewhere in his notes, he planned the structure of that novel as a Shakespearean-style five-act play. So any suggestion that Fitzgerald had a three-act play in mind when he made his cryptic remark must be viewed with suspicion.

"My point of view is that whatever follows the first act is, by definition, the second act. So if there's no second act, that means the first act is all there is. But as I said, the sentence exists in isolation in Fitzgerald's notebook, so you can read into anything you want."

My comment: Thanks. Given the uncertainty about what Fitzgerald meant, maybe people should hold off declaring him to have been dead wrong--which is the usual context in which the quote is brought up.

Interesting point from a reader:

Hey Jonah!

What will really be interesting about the, um, new Olympics will be the reaction from feminists as male-to-female transgenders begin reaping in medals for women's events. What will that say about natural sex differences? I mean, even though these athletes will have been altered in ways too unimaginable to ponder, they will still have greater strength and stamina that natural-born females. Which side will be right in this debate, the transgenders or the feminists?

Of course, that could be the next Olympic event: pitched battles between two opposing camps of PC thought. May the best man...um, woman...er, whatever...win.

Best wishes,

Cody L. Stanford

Kathryn I would have missed that piece if you hadn't linked to it. I agree with you that the silence of the Buckley and National Review omission is deafening. If I had more time I'd be interested in seeing the book -- there was a time when I reviewed books about conservatives more regularly, sigh. Obviously, the authors are focusing much more on organizational history than intellectual history -- "political brawn" not "brains" as they put it -- which probably explains the omission of pretty much any major conservative thinkers from the piece (and the inflation of the ACU into the right's Third International).

I don't think that's a bad approach necessarily and I really don't disagree with anything in the piece. But I can't shake the feeling that the Times' reasons for running it are quite contrary to the authors' reason for writing it. The Times certainly believes that conservative ascendancy is a trick, the product of the right's dishonesty at framing the public debate, using "wedge issues" etc. And, yeah, maybe the right is better at organization than the left -- though I think that's a muchless settled question than these guys do. But I'm sure most Times' readers, and editors, see this op-ed as proof that the right doesn't have better ideas, it's just more effective at hawking them.

**Good columns put people in the mood to contribute, so Jonah needs to write a column with so many Simpsons references that he gets sued by 20th Century Fox. Tell Derbyshire to write a column in which every third word is "buggery."

**Challenge VDH to write a column that doesn't mention Athens, Sparta, Roman legions, the Goths, or any battle fought before the Battle of the Hastings. If he loses, he chips in $500 to NRO.

**Sell wood shavings and bent nails from Derbyshire's hilarious and eventually fatal attempt at treehouse construction.

**Organize a slap-fight (a real one, not a virtual one - we've seen a lot of those) between Jonah and Andrew Sullivan and sell tickets.

**Cajole Fr. Neuhaus into persuading bishops to withhold the Sacrament from those Catholics who fail to contribute to NRO…

**Charge Jonah 25 cents every time he calls..anyone from Reason "my friend."…

**Ramesh has too many letters in his last name. Sell off an N or a U to the highest bidder.

From a reader:

Jonah, Balster's Blog got very close to, but missed, the really huge news behind the sarin gas shell. The thing was not marked. This is not the way you manufacture, store or deploy chemical munitions. They require special handling and careful considerations when used to avoid endangering your own troops. So why in the world would this chemical munition not be clearly marked? 1. Hiding the things from inspectors. Chemical weapons, disguised as conventional ordinance, would be extremely difficult to detect by anyone, especially if they were mixed in with conventional ordinance at weapons dumps, with innocuous markings (perhaps simple numbers) to allow handlers to tell the difference. If this be the case, our missing WMDs may very well be hiding in plain sight to this day, undiscovered until terrorists grabbed what they thought was a regular conventional artillery round from an unsecured sight that inspectoirs may have already gone through. 2. Disguising the things from Saddam's own commanders. It was no secret that America was serious about WMDs, and threatened war even during the Clinton administration over it. It was also no secret that WMDs were what American military commanders most feared in the event of an Iraqi invasion (remember the worries during the first Gulf War?). Saddam surely would have anticipated America appealing directly to Iraqi field commanders not to use chemical weapons, and may have known that we would hold those who did personally responsible in war crimes trials post invasion. We threatened exactly that. Faced with the possibility that his own commanders may not follow orders to use chemical weapons, he issues artillery shells and other weapons that are devoid of known markings that distinguish between types of ordinance. That means that if Iraqi cammanders shoot anything at all, the will likely shoot chemical weapons in the mix. Ironically, that may have backfired on Saddam. Many Iraqi Republican Guard Units deployed around Baghdad melted away faster than expected. What if that is because Iraqi commanders that suspected they had chemical weapons "in the mix" refused to use any of their weapons and abandoned their post? Of course, this is loaded with speculation. But whatever the reasoning, the story of unmarked chemical weapons munitions turning up randomly in central Iraq is bound to get real interesting. Real fast. Joe Frye

From the December 15, 2003 Time magazine story on the Iraqi insurgents (I got from Nexis so no link):

Financing and armaments appear to be in plentiful supply. When Abu Ali's network runs low on resources, it turns to a man identified only as "the Emir," a shadowy loyalist leader who summons Abu Ali to meetings at irregular intervals. "We are not rich men," Abu Ali says, "but we have everything." Old Soviet surface-to-air missiles that had been stockpiled by Saddam's regime go for upwards of $ 1,000 apiece on the black market, yet Abu Ali's organization has them in abundance. It also has access to a pipeline of weapons flowing across Iraq's borders. Another major Baghdad cell leader, Mohammed, happily displays the latest acquisition, a batch of 60mm mortars with markings in English that were hidden in a boggy field and retrieved by a farmer's wife. When asked how the group obtained them, Mohammed responds in a word: "Syria."

Abu Ali's most frightening plans involve his desire to employ unconventional weapons. His most prized possession, he says, is a cache of 82mm mortar rounds. Mohammed displays one of the rounds and proclaims, "This is a chemical mortar." Encased in a green storage tube with a flip-lock lid, the weapon has liquid sloshing inside a bulbous head reeking with a putrid odor that burns the nostrils. The Russian markings on the weapon identify it as a TD-42 liquid, high-explosive mortar. It's impossible to know what is really in the device or if the boasts of Abu Ali and Mohammed are true. Iraqi scientists in the Military Industrialization Commission in the 1980s and early 1990s imported Soviet munitions to refill with unknown substances. Abu Ali claims that his cache came from that commission, and he is convinced the mortar contains a highly lethal gas. His group, he says, is just waiting for the right U.S. target and the right meteorological conditions to use it. When a reporter expresses skepticism, Abu Ali smiles and says, "Wait and see."

From a reader:

Tax exempt status does not keep my priest from spewing liberal garbage from the pulpit each week. To me, this is the Fox News syndrome. Nobody cared until the message became conservative.

The IOC has announced that men who undergo sex change operations will be allowed to compete in the Olympics as women. I doubt this will be a huge issue in the near term, but I think it's grossly unfair in general and probably sets a bad precedent. I know that the feminists like Colette Dowling believe it's a myth that women are naturally less athletic in any way, including strength, than men. But here in the real world where we use Earth logic this is nonsense. I'm sure feminists hail this as a step toward unisex sports, which is fine. But don't expect a lot of natural women to take the gold in greco-roman wrestling or play half-back in the NFL any time soon.

A while ago, I said I would look into a bill underlying a dispute between Jonah and Andrew Sullivan. The latter said that Virginia had passed a law that made it impossible for gay couples to make certain contractual arrangements. He said that conservatives should denounce the bill, especially since many conservatives had suggested the use of contracts as a substitute for the practical benefits of same-sex marriage.

Here’s the Virginia law in question: “A civil union, partnership contract or other arrangement between persons of the same sex purporting to bestow the privileges or obligations of marriage is prohibited. Any such civil union, partnership contract or other arrangement entered into by persons of the same sex in another state or jurisdiction shall be void in all respects in Virginia and any contractual rights created thereby shall be void and unenforceable.”

So let's say two men purchase property jointly and sign a contract stipulating that if one of them dies, the other gets the property to the exclusion of any other heirs. That would be a private contract that mimicked an arrangement that married couples have as a matter of course. On Sullivan’s reading of the law, the contract would be void and unenforceable because it would be “purporting to bestow the privileges or obligations of marriage.” If that's right, such a contract would have to be unenforceable even for two brothers--which is such a weird result that it ought to raise a question about the reasonableness of the interpretation.

The alternative view is that the law is a way for Virginia to block recognition of civil unions from other states without blocking purely private arrangements. The first sentence restates that Virginia does not have civil unions under any name, and the second blocks the courts from importing them from Vermont. Two people of the same sex would be able, then, to reach any contractual arrangements unless Virginia had reserved them to married couples. So, for example, if Virginia had a law saying that only married couples could have joint adoption rights, it would be impossible for same-sex couples to arrange joint adoption in Vermont and have that arrangement recognized in Virginia. Nor could two men enforce an out-of-state “contract” saying, “We two enter a relation that has all the privileges or obligations of marriage,” where enforcement would require the government to grant them something the law reserves to married couples.

If, on the other hand, the law allowed any two people to do something--create durable powers of attorney, living wills, etc.--then the law would not prevent a same-sex couple (or two brothers) from doing the same thing just because they were of the same sex.

The narrower reading seems to me much more plausible. The theory behind this reading is that confronted with the words “the privileges or obligations of marriage,” a court or executive agent should look to the other laws of Virginia to figure out what those privileges or obligations are--and not try to derive some other meaning for them from another source. For the purpose of state law, the privileges and obligations of marriage are whatever state law says they are. The purpose of the law is to prevent any other state’s decision about these matters from overriding those of Virginia.

What are the implications of this reading for what we should think about the law? If you support same-sex civil unions or marriage, you will of course object to the Virginia law. But if you accept its decision in the matter, it seems reasonable also to accept its decision to ensure that other states do not override that decision. And if you oppose civil unions but favor same-sex couples’ having all the rights that any two unmarried people have, then you will support the law.

So here we have a person who comes to the United States and commits crimes of selling dope and the government asks me to put him in prison for 10 months. And then we have an American citizen who buys land, pays for it with his own money, and he moves some sand from one end to the other and government wants me to give him 63 months in prison. Now, if that isn't our system gone crazy, I don't know what is. And I am not going to do it.

"Then marvel not, thou great and complete man, That all the Greeks begin to worship Ajax; Since things in motion sooner catch the eye Than what not stirs. The cry went once on thee, And still it might, and yet it may again, If thou wouldst not entomb thyself alive And case thy reputation in thy tent; Whose glorious deeds, but in these fields of late, Made emulous missions 'mongst the gods themselves And drave great Mars to faction.

"Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back, Wherein he puts alms for oblivion, A great-sized monster of ingratitudes: Those scraps are good deeds past; which are devour'd As fast as they are made, forgot as soon As done: perseverance, dear my lord, Keeps honour bright: to have done is to hang Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail In monumental mockery. Take the instant way; For honour travels in a strait so narrow, Where one but goes abreast: keep then the path; For emulation hath a thousand sons That one by one pursue: if you give way, Or hedge aside from the direct forthright, Like to an enter'd tide, they all rush by And leave you hindmost; Or like a gallant horse fall'n in first rank, Lie there for pavement to the abject rear, O'er-run and trampled on: then what they do in present, Though less than yours in past, must o'ertop yours; For time is like a fashionable host ..."

From a reader:

You've railed against the Black Caucus many times. So now I use it as a quick yes/no vote when I see someone in the media. So, Dennis Miller had some guy "blah blah Black Caucus blah blah".

I started my watch and waited for him to say something dumb. Sure enough, he got asked about Michael Jackson and said "I can't judge him by my standards.". Well now... Even more funny was him insisting Jackson was innocent until proven guilty because "we're a land of laws" while later insisting that some people who murdered a black child (and were acquited) be tried again!

Anyways, thanks for the handy tip. It streamlines my day, as much of NRO does!

"For time is like a fashionable host
That slightly shakes his parting guest by the hand,
And with his arms outstretch'd, as he would fly,
Grasps in the comer: welcome ever smiles,
And farewell goes out sighing.

"For beauty, wit, High birth, vigour of bone, desert in service, Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all To envious and calumniating time. One touch of nature makes the whole world kin, That all with one consent praise new-born gawds, Though they are made and moulded of things past, And give to dust that is a little gilt More laud than gilt o'er-dusted. The present eye praises the present object. Then marvel not, thou great and complete man, That all the Greeks begin to worship Ajax; Since things in motion sooner catch the eye Than what not stirs. The present eye praises the present object. Then marvel not, thou great and complete man, That all the Greeks begin to worship Ajax; Since things in motion sooner catch the eye Than what not stirs."

Ramesh, when I was, briefly, the token conservative on this thing called the Spitfire Tour , the issue of abolishing the tax exempt status of churches came up constantly. I was fairly bowled-over at first because I had no idea so many people felt so strongly about it or could be so ignorant about the financial or constitutional issues (I'm insinuating no such thing about Brainbridge or anybody involved in that debate, by the way). The speakers, most especially Jello Biafra, and the kids in the audience routinely asserted that elimination of the tax exemption would raise more than enough money for [Insert huge socialistic public policy here]. Moreover, whenever I mentioned that there were constitutional hurdles involved in expropriating the assets of various religious institutions, they looked at me as if I had said, "not everybody thinks it's cool to smoke pot."

So, while I agree with you that it's outrageous, I don't really find it that shocking.

[Note: for some reason in the original post I'd said "financial and technological issues." I changed it to "financial and constitutional issues."

If you send a check directly to me for $250 - $500 you can get a shirt signed by me and with the signatures of ten NR writers -- including several deceased ones -- forged by me!

From a reader:

Jonah -

Are ye mad?!!

You realize that traveling across the U.S. with wife, 18-month old, and
Cosmo intact is the "Kobiyashi Maru" - The ultimate no-win scenario. Wife,
Baby, and Dog in the car. The odds of al three being happy the entire trip
are roughly equivalent to successfully navigating an asteroid field.

If you do this, your name will be legend.

1 : existing at or dating from birth congenital idiocy congenital malformations : belonging to or associated with from birth : INNATE congenital good health : constituting an essential characteristic : INHERENT the congenital State Department fear of newsmen A.H.Vandenberg 1951 : from birth or by nature *a congenital liar*

2 : acquired during development in the uterus and not through heredity -- compare ACQUIRED, FAMILIAL, HEREDITARY synonyms see INNATE

From a reader:

Jonah, Interesting tidbit about Russert. On the morning sports show here in Boston (Dennis and Callahan on WEEI), the 2 hosts were referring to this story about Powell's aide cutting the interview short and the outright hypocrisy Russert is showing. Mr. Russert came on to their show last week to promote his new book and the press aide for Mr. Russert was, according to the two of them, very heavy-handed in making sure that the interview not take longer than 10 minutes (the same length of time the Powell interview was supposed to last). Apparently it's all right for Russert to go over the allotted time during an interview he is conducting, but not one that he is giving. Unacceptable indeed.

Look, I think the abrupt ending of the Russert interview with Colin Powell was spectacularly stupid on the part of the press aide responsible. But I also think Russert's hamming it up unnecessarily. He said on CNN yesterday: "This is the United States of America. It really is unacceptable." (Quote found in the Hotline)

Oh come on. Russert knows that interviews are cut off abruptly every day -- every hour -- in Washington. What made this a bigger deal is that Russert -- an 800 pound gorilla in terms of his media stature -- had it happen to him and his vanity was bruised. I agree that the theatricality of it was bad and made Powell look bad -- which is why he insisted the interview continue. But if cutting off a taped interview after it exceeds the allotted time is a sign of something ominous then every press conference which concludes with "no more questions" is an example of censorship.

I find the buzz and adulation about Moore's movie simultaneously so pathetic and so depressing, I haven't been able to muster much energy to read up on it. That said, this tidbit from Drudge piqued my interest. "Movie shows video of U.S. soldiers laughing as they place hoods over Iraqi detainees, with one of them grabbing a prisoner's genitals through a blanket..."

It does cause me to wonder how Moore got that particular footage. If it was shot for the film with cooperation of the troops, then that raises some interesting legal-ethical issues for Moore and for the soldiers. Since I think Moore's a deeply dishonest guy, it wouldn't shock me if the scene was staged. Which would also raise some issues for Moore and for the lessons of Abu Ghraib. There may be a completely above-board explanation which is even in the film itself. One way to find out would be for me to see it, which as of right now is too high a price to pay.

From a reader:

Helprin's a good man, but he's wrong on several levels. This was my response to his article:

Mark Helprin has an admirable vision of a larger and more powerful military, but he conflates that with his own sense of disappointment about Iraq. For those following the progress of the everyday reality of Iraq (the tortoise), it is clear that the the bloody headlines and the thugs who generate them (the hare) will not win the race there. The United States has placed the winning bet on civil society as the great army, with [the American] military playing the role of security force.

Civil order in any society exists for a reason, and holds through government a monopoly on force, and Iraqis know that an alternative of disorder unto civil war is unacceptable to both them and the United States. Mr. Helprin confuses the uses of a strategic military force with the more subtle needs of restructuring a nation, where success falls almost entirely on the shoulders of the people of that nation themselves. Secretary Rumsfeld's recent homely and apt analogy to
teaching a child to ride a bicycle was precisely on target, with all due respect to Mr. Helprin's desire for a stronger military.

From a reader:

Watching Wolf Blitzer interview a CNN reporter The reporter answering Blitzer's question about whether the Sarin constitutes the "smoking gun", the reporter says (I paraphrase) that US intelligence, every intelligence agency, the UN etc ALL believed Saddam had not destroyed....blah blah. Get it? Now EVERYONE believed it all along. Stunning....but not unexpected.

Far-call’d our navies melt away--
One dune and headland sinks the fire--
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget!

Lots of email like this:

Jonah,

Bread & Water is still a punishment used by the US Navy. During a Captain's Mast, the Captain of the ship can order that you to be held in the brig, and put on bread & water. You get all the bread & water you want, but that's all you get. And, there's no guarantee that the bread is not green & slimy.

I was going to refrain from commenting on the latest piece about this issue on the theory that we have a few readers who aren't Catholics and may not care about this question quite as much as I do. But I'm writing about it anyway because: 1) While the theology of communion in the Catholic church is obviously specific to it, people of other faiths or none have to wrestle with some of the same questions of justice and moral standards. 2) The resolution of the issue may have some political effects, so non-Catholic readers may be interested in it. 3) I just can't help myself.

We're given, in the linked piece, two arguments for why the bishops should offer communion to Catholic politicians who support legal abortion. First: "How many of us Catholics are completely worthy every Sunday of receiving what we believe to be the body and blood of Jesus? The church understands this and has long left it up to the individual to wrestle with his or her conscience as to whether going to Communion is appropriate. To turn the tables and make the giving of Communion contingent on a public, political litmus test would politicize a sacred ritual that is and always should be beyond politics."

Actually, none of us are worthy to receive the Lord, and we even say so beforehand. If legislators voted on abortion by secret ballot and did not disclose their positions to the public, it would indeed be appropriate to handle the issue in the confessional rather than in public. But the sin under discussion--that of unjustly denying the unborn legal protections that everyone else has--is committed in public. A public denial of communion is thus necessary to prevent people from reaching the false conclusion that persisting in this sin is compatible with staying in communion with the church.

Second, the denial of communion would make the church seem to be allied with the Republican party. The article ignores the existence of two to three dozen pro-life House Democrats, which is not an insignificant faction of the entire caucus even if it gets little public attention. But leave that aside. The argument boils down to this: The bishops are supposed to let members of their flock endanger their souls without doing much to help them, because of a political calculation about the effects of this pastoral care. You don't have to be familiar with canon law to see that the bishops just can't follow this advice.

From a reader:

Hi Jonah, I lived in Singapore and can say that I'm not so sure it is preferable. They instituted caning for too many traffic offenses (in Malaysia there was the case of a 13 year old getting caned for drowning puppies. Just I thought)! This is what I've been told about caning. First hit hurts like nothing else, second draws blood and on the third you are unconscious. Afterward you butt is swollen to the size of a basketball and you can't sit for about a month. But, in the case of Singapore, caning isn't the only deterrent. Changi prison holds its own special dread. It is the old British Colonial prison and since those days the only upgrades have been electricity and running water. And the guards are all Ghurkas, no soft Singaporeans to do the job. All in all it is a place that would make the ACLU howl. But all that said, it works. While I was there we once went through a 90 day stretch without a single felony being committed. Name me any other metropolitan area with a population over 2 million that can make such a claim.

Email from Poppa G:

Derbyshire quotes an informed emailer, stating that being put on bread and water is still an approved punishment in the British navy and is still inflicted. Can you imagine the uproar in the U.S. if we put enemy terrorists on bread and water (let alone our own servicement)? And yet we don't regard the British as savages. Traditions can - and should - take a long time to die. (Until the mid-nineteenth century, the Dutch navy still inflicted keelhauling as a punishment at sea, and I believe the British still practiced drawing and quartering until Napoleonic times. As you know, it entailed disembowelment in addition to the other non-nice things. I am not recommending these things, just pointing out that we live in a cruel and sometimes barbaric world. I do favor flogging as a substitute for jail time, as it seems to be effective in Singapore and I would prefer to be flogged than spend two years in jail.)

I was just reading the Kerry Spot (not sure about that name) on the McCain-as-veep boomlet.

I'm sorry but I think it's all very cynical and very sad. Kerry's smart to name-drop McCain everywhere he goes because it's a nice symbolic way of reaching out to pro-war and pro-McCain moderates and independents. I like McCain translates into "I'm not the soft-on-Communism, soft-on-defense, UN loving peacnick my voting record suggests I am." Though I could see this hurting Kerry down the road when he ends up picking someone far more liberal and far less exciting.

But the idea that McCain could or would be Kerry's Veep is so profoundly cynical it really bothers me. Andrew Sullivan, for example, is in full swoon over the idea because he thinks McCain's right on defense and the war and all that. Fine, but McCain's voting record is completely opposed to Kerry's on defense. And McCain would be the Vice President, as in the one who normally has to shed all of his views in order to be in sync with the guy at the top of the ticket (remembeer Joe Lieberman's Vice Presidential Fire Sale of Principles? Everything Must Go!). Sure, maybe Kerry would flip-flop again in order to tailor his views to McCain's -- but that would be a boon to Nader and an outrage to the base -- or, more likely, McCain would have to change his views for political reasons which would undermine his over-hyped integrity.

The cynicism in all of this becomes even more apparent when you consider Kerry's recent suggestion that both Carl Levin and McCain were on his short list for Secretary of Defense. This is like saying that Steve Forbes and Dennis Kucinich are on short list to run Treasury.

But forget about defense. What about abortion? McCain's pro-life. He may not be adamantly so, but that's the way he votes. A prolifer on the Democratic ticket? Please. As Kate O'Beirne noted during 2000 campaign, abortion is still the one untouchable issue among Democrats. If McCain stood his ground on the issue it would be a nightmare for Kerry. If McCain flip-flopped on such a bedrock moral issue, he would defenestrate even more of his integrity.

Ultimately, what I find so distasteful about all of this is the degree to which it reveals issues don't matter. Popularity and personal relationships count more than beliefs. McCain's popular and he gets along with Kerry and the press, so who cares that with the exception of campaign finance "reform" McCain's a fairly conservative Republican and foreign policy hawk and Kerry's a fairly liberal Democrat and foreign policy dove? The Kerry-McCain boosters say "that's the genius of it! It would be a unity ticket!"

Fine, I just don't believe that false unity is better than honest disagreement.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- A roadside bomb containing sarin nerve agent exploded near a U.S. military convoy, but there were no casualties, the U.S. military said Monday.

If someone writes a check for the the full fiddy-thou, I will gladly take them out to lunch, dinner whatever. It will be as boozy or as dry as you like, but I promise a good time. My guess is I could convince Derb and a few others to join in too.

However if we raise fiddy-thou today thanks to a tidal wave of small donations, I will not be taking out 1,700 people to lunch.

Paragraph 2181 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

"The Sunday Eucharist is the foundation and confirmation of all Christian practice. For this reason the faithful are obliged to participate in the Eucharist on days of obligation, unless excused for a serious reason (for example, illness, the care of infants) or dispensed by their own pastor. Those who deliberately fail in this obligation commit a grave sin."

Not that [a mistaken] view isn't widely held. The last time I tried to confess missing Mass without good reason, the priest would have none of it. After some probing into my state of life (married, children, hectic weekend, etc) the priest concluded that I must have had a dozen good reasons for missing Mass, never mind what my own examination of conscience had led me to believe. Since at this point I wanted to slap the silly man, I simply proceeded to my next sin (having a terrible temper) and let it drop.

I’m about to be placed into the parish ministry, and I’m determined, after 5 years or so in part-time parish experience, to spend the first year or so homiletically concerned with our catechism. For teaching purposes, we divide the christian faith into 6 chief parts: the Ten Commandments, the Our Father, the Apostles’ Creed, The Lord’s Supper, Baptism, and Penance. It seems necessary to do this so that I can figure out what weaknesses and strengths a given parish might have in the Faith.

At any rate....there seems to be a move among the clerics across the “catholic” board (except for those poor anglican types), to actually make their people learn the substance of their faith.

There's a George Orwell site that has Orwell's entire 1942 "Rudyard Kipling" article. The URL for the article is

The quote is in the last full paragraph.

The ruling power is always faced with the question 'in such and such circumstances what would you do?' - whereas the opposition is not obliged to take any real decisions. Where it is a permanent and pensioned opposition... the quality of its thought deteriorates accordingly.