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.

LISTEN to “Window on The Week” read by NRO’s media reporter, Stephen Spruiell, here.

‐ Let’s get this clear right away: Democrats and their allies on the left have a deep, deep respect for the need to protect classified information. We learned that during the CIA leak investigation, when they accused the White House of blowing the classified status of CIA employee Valerie Plame Wilson, and then cheered as prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald dragged top aides before a grand jury time after time. But that was then. Now they are oddly silent about the deeds of Samuel Berger, one-time Clinton national security adviser and top foreign-policy aide to presidential candidate John Kerry. We’ve known for a couple of years that Berger sneaked highly classified Clinton-era documents out of the National Archives when he was vetting them for the September 11 Commission. But he claimed it was all inadvertent, an unfortunate accident. Now we know better. A new report from the archives’ inspector general describes how Berger stashed the documents in his pockets, left the archives building, headed toward a nearby construction area, looked around to see if the coast was clear, and then stashed them under a trailer, where he would later pick them up, take them to his office, and destroy them. The documents Berger was taking were copies of an after-action report on the Millennium terrorist threats — a report that was critical of the Clinton administration’s handling of the matter. Berger has never fully explained what he was doing, and you can be sure he never will, since the Bush Justice Department let him off easy with a plea deal for a $50,000 fine and 100 hours of community service. The whole episode is a travesty, especially in light of a recently released report by House Republicans showing that Berger’s actions compromised not only the information provided to the 9/11 Commission, but national security as well. ‐ President Bush has given up the fight for four of his nominees to the federal courts of appeals: Terrence Boyle, William Haynes, William Myers, and Michael Wallace. All had been waiting a long time for confirmation, and all had come under vicious attack from Democrats and their allies on the left. Some of the villains are easy to identify. One is a Democratic senator from Vermont whose initials are P. L. Another is a Democratic senator from New York whose initials are C. S. You get the idea. But in these cases — and especially in the case of the longest-waiting nominee, Terrence Boyle — it’s hard to blame the Democrats alone. Republicans didn’t confirm these men when the GOP had 55 votes in the Senate. Why not? Well, some, like Wallace, were not sterling nominees. But others, like Boyle? Republicans can’t really tell you why they failed. “What the hell happened?” one GOP source told us plaintively last week. “How is it that we didn’t move Terry Boyle in four years of Republican control of the U.S. Senate?” How indeed. ‐ President Bush has a new White House counsel, and he’s not at all like the old White House counsel. Fred Fielding — veteran of the Nixon and Reagan White Houses and Washington lawyer extraordinaire — will be the president’s attorney, replacing Harriet Miers. It’s a good move, and overdue, in our opinion. Everyone knows that, with Democrats now in control of the House and the Senate, the White House faces a barrage of subpoenas. Democrats will be demanding sensitive documents on the war in Iraq, on the treatment of suspected terrorist detainees, on the president’s energy plan — you name it. There’s no doubt some of those documents will be legitimately privileged, and the White House needs the best lawyer available to stand up to Democratic attacks. Fielding, respected by both Republicans and Democrats, is that guy. “He brings enormous credibility to both sides, but he’s the president’s counsel,” a friend of Fielding’s told the New York Times. “He’s not there to represent the views of the Congress.” Precisely. ‐ The House voted 253–174 to fund embryo-destructive stem-cell research. The Senate is expected to follow suit, and the president to veto the bill. But science may be mooting the debate. According to the advocates of funding, embryonic stem cells have more promise than adult stem cells because they are “pluripotent”: They can become any number of other types of cell. But it is becoming increasingly clear that pluripotent stem cells can be derived without killing human embryos. One area of research involves reprogramming regular cells to become stem cells. And a new study has found that stem cells taken from amniotic fluid are pluripotent — and may be more stable than embryonic stem cells to boot. One sometimes gets the impression that some supporters of embryo-destructive research are chiefly concerned to smite the pro-lifers. As the science progresses, however, they may lose the backing of people who are more interested in cures than controversy. ‐ For the Left — and, unfortunately, much of the public — conservatives’ opposition to raising the minimum wage is proof that we are the kin of Scrooge. Our position is especially heartless because, according to the liberal talking point of the moment, studies have proven that increasing the minimum wage doesn’t cost jobs. It would take very strong studies to establish something so counterintuitive: Common sense says that when the price of something is set above market rates, people will buy less — even when that “something” is labor. Most studies, as it happens, confirm the point: On balance, a higher minimum wage kills jobs, especially among the unskilled. Some people will get raises, yes — although few of them will be the people supporting a household who are invoked to arouse our compassion. To help them, we should cut the payroll tax or increase the child tax credit. The minimum wage, meanwhile, should be abolished, not increased. ‐ When the highest court in Massachusetts amends the state constitution, how are the people to amend it back? In the case of marriage, supporters of the old law gathered signatures and went to the legislature to put the issue on the ballot. Only a quarter of the legislature had to approve to move the issue forward. But liberals put up a roadblock. They said that “fundamental rights shouldn’t be put up to a vote” (in which case it is hard to see why the Founders bothered to hold constitutional conventions). The Democratic majority chose to kill the amendment by not holding a vote. Supporters of the amendment then went to the supreme court themselves. The court criticized the legislators’ misconduct but said, quite properly if uncharacteristically, that it could not order a remedy. Shame, for once, did the trick; the legislators held the vote; and the issue will probably now be put before the people. Traditionalists are by no means guaranteed a victory, but they are at least to have a voice. ‐ In his book Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis wrote of Jesus: “Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse.” The answer, it turns out, is the last — that is, if we are to believe Hugo Chávez, who pronounced Jesus Christ “the greatest socialist in history.” (It was presumably in the name of Christianity, then, that Chávez recently announced plans to nationalize Venezuela’s electrical and telecommunications industries. And perhaps he has discovered a Biblical warrant for shutting down opposition TV stations and seeking to rescind presidential term limits?) It is unclear exactly why Jesus should be considered a socialist; but, then again, it would be easier to fit Hugo Chávez through the eye of a needle than to make sense of his flabby reasoning and over-inflated rhetoric. What is clear enough is that the appetite for power of El Jefe Gigante remains unsatisfied, and he longs to swallow up the Church, along with Venezuela’s prosperity and democracy. Here’s hoping he chokes. ‐ Condoleezza Rice has a trip to Libya penciled in her diary. There is an impediment. In a Libyan hospital back in 1998 as many as 426 children began to show signs that they were infected with the AIDS virus. Contaminated needles and poor hygiene were the cause, according to Western experts. This would never do for the Libyans. Moammar Qaddafi accuses the CIA and the Mossad of deliberately infecting the children, some 50 of whom have died. Selected from a number of others to be charged with this improbable crime, five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor on the hospital staff have now spent almost eight years in custody, subjected to the worst treatment. In the process, they have been sentenced to death. Qaddafi is apparently willing to drop the charges if the family of every child receives $10 million. This just happens to be the exact sum he agreed to pay to victims of the Lockerbie bombing for which he accepted responsibility. In the event that she goes to Libya, the secretary of state should make it plain that there can be no indulgence of insanities like these. ‐ ‐ Elizabeth Fox-Genovese possessed a brilliant mind, as do many. What set her apart was courage. She began her academic career as a secular liberal, but eventually concluded that abortion is a “choice” by one human being to kill another. That was intellectual honesty; courage was what it took for a founding mother of Women’s Studies to passionately advocate this view. She broke wholly with the ideology of the sexual revolution, defended marriage and traditional morality, and embraced Christianity. She leaves behind a valuable body of scholarship, and, more important, a powerful witness to the sanctity of human life. R.I.P. ‐ President Bush awarded yesterday only the second Congressional Medal of Honor for actions in the War on Terror. Like the one awarded Paul Ray Smith in April 2005, it was given posthumously. Marine Cpl. Jason L. Dunham was assisting an ambushed convoy in Karabilah, Iraq, searching vehicles leaving the site of the ambush. An insurgent jumped him, but Dunham refused the help offered by two of his Marines; he had spotted the grenade his attacker was clutching. When the live grenade was dropped, Corporal Dunham didn’t hesitate, covering it with his Kevlar helmet and smothering it with his body. His actions saved the lives of his men; he died eight days later of his wounds. As the president said Thursday, “He was a Marine’s Marine who led by example. . . . He was the guy who signed on for an extra two months in Iraq so he could stay with his squad. As he explained it, he wanted to ‘make sure that everyone makes it home alive.’” Thanks to his heroism, his men lived to return home. A true Marine, he. R.I.P.