EDITOR’S NOTE: “Window on The Week” acts as our weekly, quick-and-punchy, “between-the-issues” survey of some of the hot topics of the day. “Window on The Week” gives you a sense of what “The Week” — a popular feature that appears fortnightly in National Review — looks like.

‐Earlier this week, Rep. Steny Hoyer, a Maryland Democrat, said that Michael Steele, the GOP Senate candidate in Maryland, has had “a career of slavishly supporting the Republican party.” In describing the activities of black politicians such as Steele, it is probably best to avoid the adverb “slavishly.” But impolitic words are not necessarily sinister. When Steele called the description “racist,” Hoyer quickly responded: “I shouldn’t have used those words. If Mr. Steele did in fact take offense let me assure him that none was intended.” That should put an end to it. Yet it must also be said that Steele has endured an enormous amount of abuse simply because he is both black and Republican. Four years ago, at a debate during his successful campaign for lieutenant governor, Democrats threw Oreo cookies at him. (Get it? He’s black on the outside and white on the inside.) The Baltimore Sun, in a fit of liberal condescension, claimed that Steele “brings nothing to the [GOP ticket] but the color of his skin.” When he announced his candidacy for the Senate last year, a left-wing blogger doctored photos of Steele to make him look like a minstrel. Markos Moulitsas, the impresario of the far-left Daily Kos website, called these images “edgy.” If conservatives were to treat black Democrats similarly, the denunciations would be deafening. But Steele continues to press ahead in a gutsy, underdog race against Democratic congressman Ben Cardin. Recent polls have given Cardin a lead of anywhere from four to 15 points, though a new SurveyUSA poll has the contest tied. Steele may be just the candidate to end Maryland voters’ practice of slavishly sending liberal Democrats to the Senate.

‐As the justification for the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative becomes more obvious, the opposition to it becomes more intense. The ballot measure, to be decided by Michigan voters on November 7, would ban racial preferences in state-government hiring and state-university admissions. These preferences discriminate against students who, because they do not belong to the desired minority group, must attain much higher standards of academic achievement to gain admission. The Center for Equal Opportunity has just released a study analyzing admissions data from the University of Michigan. In 2005, median SAT scores for admitted students were 1160 for blacks, 1260 for Hispanics, 1350 for whites, and 1400 for Asians. Median GPAs followed the same pattern: 3.4 for blacks, 3.6 for Hispanics, 3.8 for whites, and 3.9 for Asians. Blacks were about 70 times more likely to be admitted than whites with the same SAT scores. But this is the way many people want it: A recent radio ad attacked the ballot initiative, saying that “the elimination of affirmative action” would be a “national disaster” comparable to Hurricane Katrina and 9/11. Those comparisons are transparently grotesque — but then, this is exactly what we have come to expect from those who cling to the Left’s favored racism.

‐ David Kuo worked on President Bush’s faith-based initiative for the White House. Now he is disillusioned. In a new book, he says that the president didn’t fight hard enough for the initiative, or give it enough money; the administration spent its energy on tax cuts for high earners. Members of the White House staff, whom Kuo does not name, disparaged some evangelical leaders, calling them “nuts” and “goofy.” The administration used the initiative to curry favor with those leaders. The liberal press is treating Kuo’s complaints as revelations. But there is nothing especially shocking here. The president was right to place a higher priority on tax cuts than on the faith-based initiative. Some evangelical political leaders are nuts, as are some figures in other parts of the political and religious worlds. Every administration pushes its policies in part to please voting blocs who favor those policies. To act as though these inevitable features of political life constituted some kind of scandal is a little, well, goofy.

‐ Washington is alive with speculation about what the James Baker/Lee Hamilton Iraq Study Group will recommend after the election. The leaks and statements from Baker aren’t encouraging. There is a suggestion that we would de-emphasize the democracy agenda in Iraq. But it’s not clear what that could possibly mean at this juncture, after we have already established a democratically elected government under a democratically endorsed constitution. Baker has spoken of the desirability of talking with our enemies, specifically Iran and Syria. There is nothing wrong with talking to an enemy — Reagan did this — if there is some hope of achieving something from it. It’s doubtful, however, ßthat Iran and Syria are going to become any more supportive of an American ally in their midst merely through our buttering ßthem up with some “dialogue.” Meanwhile, the most important question in Iraq is whether Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has the will to crack down on the Shiite militias that are one of the main forces making the country ungovernable and driving it toward full-blown civil war. He gives mixed signals, although the removal of two death-squad-tainted senior police commanders is encouraging. We have to keep the pressure on him, and should consider forging a series of deadlines for Iraqi performance of the sort that guided Iraq through the political process in the first three years after the invasion. We shouldn’t have unrealistic expectations of Maliki, but neither can we look the other way as he dithers — or, worse, accommodates some of the worst political actors in the country.

‐ Adam Yahiye Gadahn, a 28-year-old Californian, was a pacifist when he converted to Islam in the mid-1990s. Now he belongs to al Qaeda, and is the star of Osama bin Laden’s propaganda videos. For that, he has received a richly deserved treason indictment, and could face the death penalty if convicted. But the charges against him are especially hard for the government to prove. As in all treason cases, it must produce two witnesses who can testify in detail about the accused’s cooperation with the enemy; the last conviction was in 1952. The difficulties are compounded by the fact that Gadahn’s whereabouts are unknown. (He is thought to be in Pakistan.) Let us hope that in due course he finds himself face to face with American soldiers capable of dispensing a swifter and more efficient justice.

‐For decades, the guiding force of Europe’s immigration policy has been multiculturalism: Let them come, but by no means make them Europeans. In practice, this has been an invitation for the forces of savagery within Islam to infiltrate Europe and demand that it accommodate them. British foreign secretary Jack Straw’s description of the veils worn by Muslim women as a “visible statement of separation and difference” is, in reality, a distraction from the main event: If you want separation and difference, look to the murders of French Jews and Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, the riots in the Muslim ghettoes of Paris, the Hamburg Qaeda cell. People should have the right to wear the symbols of their faith in public, and Straw did not deny this. But they should not have the right, in the name of their faith, to Islamify the political and social institutions of the West beyond recognition. Straw’s comment — and Tony Blair’s agreement that veils are a “mark of separation” — was a step toward acknowledging that Europe’s refusal to utter the word “assimilation” is tantamount to suicide.

‐Kelsang Nortso is the latest Tibetan victim of Chinese oppression. A 27-year-old Buddhist nun, she and 72 other refugees came under fire from Chinese soldiers while trying to enter Nepal via a Himalayan pass. According to members of the group who reached Nepal, Kelsang was killed, a 23-year-old man named Kunsang Namgyal was shot in the leg and captured by the Chinese, and other refugees, including children, were detained. Thirty members of the party remain unaccounted for. The Chinese government, after initially denying the shootings, claimed the soldiers acted in self-defense. That assertion is contradicted by the testimony of mountain climbers who witnessed the shootings and first reported them on the website MountEverest.net. They subsequently produced photographs and a video showing that the refugees were not attacking the soldiers, and were shot from behind. “The Chinese . . . were hunting Tibetans onto the glacier . . . shooting them like rats, dogs, rabbits — you name it,” said Sergiu Matei, a Romanian mountaineer. As China’s role in the “international community” grows ever more prominent, let us remember that its political system has changed little since Tiananmen Square — and that its victims have names.

‐ What? So liberal talk radio isn’t a big success after all? After one of the splashiest rollouts in history, aided by loyal fans at the New York Times and the Washington Post, it appears that Air America, the Left’s answer to Rush, Sean, Laura, and the conservative radio juggernaut, is kaput. Or nearly kaput. The radio network declared bankruptcy on Friday, the 13th of October, saying it had lost more than $40 million since its debut in March 2004. As do many bankrupt enterprises, Air America pledged to keep going while it reorganized itself, but there’s no telling how long that will be. Now, there are several theories as to why the network went bust. Some say liberals already have all the radio they need, what with National Public Radio. Others say Air America’s personalities just aren’t very good. Still others say the company’s business model was terrible from the get-go. All of that is true, but we like the analysis of Rush Limbaugh, who knows a little bit about radio success. “They were not a broadcasting concern to begin with,” Rush told his listeners. “They went into business to affect elections.” Air America never knew the difference between being a business and being a Democratic 527. R.I.P.

‐ 299,999,998 . . . 299,999,999 . . . 300,000,000. The population clickers of the Census Bureau hit the big 3-octuple-0 at 7:46 a.m., Tuesday, October 17. All that is guesswork, of course. No one knows for sure when exactly that momentous American appeared; given the number of undocumented illegal aliens, our population may be much higher. Three hundred mil is a blessing and a headache. Much of the increase is due to recent immigrants who, thanks to multiculturalism and the pace of immigration itself, assimilate slowly. Green elites are exercised by uglification and sprawl, not always wrongly. Without an abortion regime, there would be more Americans born to native Americans, especially blacks. Still, it is better to be us than geriatric Japan, or geriatric Europe with its Islamist underclass. The New York Times noted that October 17 was the anniversary of the battle of Saratoga (actually, of the British surrender; the battles of Freeman’s Farm and Bemis Heights had been fought and won earlier). With due wisdom, we all should be able to maintain our independence, and our happiness.

‐ Married couples have been falling as a proportion of all American households for years, and have now dipped below 50 percent. More people are shacking up, and singles are waiting longer to get married. The decline of marriage as a lived reality is in part the result of its strengthening as an ideal: People exalt marriage so much that they don’t feel up to it. We suspect that a less marital society will be an unhappier one, and certainly a less conservative one. There is a limit to how much government can or should do to reverse the trends. Changing tax and welfare policies that discourage marriage would help.

‐ Petty Officer 2nd Class Michael A. Monsoor, a 25-year-old Navy SEAL, saved the lives of three comrades by throwing himself on a grenade in the Iraqi town of Ramadi. The grenade had hit Monsoor’s chest and fallen to the floor of the sniper hideout the SEALs occupied. “He never took his eye off the grenade,” said one of the survivors, “his only movement was down toward it. . . . We owe him.” As do we all. R.I.P.