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.

‐Sam Brownback, the Republican from Kansas, is a fine senator: His lifetime voting record, as rated by the American Conservative Union, is 95 percent. On right-to-life issues and the humanitarian aspects of foreign policy — AIDS relief in Africa, assistance to North Korean refugees, etc. — he has established himself as a legislative leader. He played a constructive role in turning back the Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers. But now Brownback appears to have succumbed to the temptation that all senators seem to face: He’s on the verge of running for president. “We’re very close with announcements,” he said on November 26, appearing on ABC’s This Week. “I think there is room, on the Republican side, for somebody that’s a full-scale conservative.” Several other GOP candidates may quarrel with that assessment, and they’ll be quick to point out that Brownback supported both the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law (initially, at least) and the McCain-Kennedy immigration bill. A lot of “full-scale” conservatives opposed both, and vigorously. If Brownback does choose to run, he will no doubt acquit himself honorably. He may also do so irrelevantly. Or worse: He could fracture the conservative base and contribute to the success of a “half-scale” Republican. If Brownback wants to advance conservatism, perhaps he should consider pursuing the governorship of his own state in 2010 and seeing where that leads. He’s only 50 years old. Or he could stay right where he is, doing what he’s already doing.

‐Charlie Rangel is a smoother cat than John Kerry, but he has similar opinions about the men and women in America’s armed forces. “If a young fellow has an option of having a decent career, or joining the Army to fight in Iraq, you can bet your life that he would not be in Iraq,” Rangel said. “If there’s anyone who believes these youngsters want to fight, as the Pentagon and some generals have said, you can just forget about it.” Rangel ignores the data (a Heritage Foundation report shows that the percentage of recruits from the poorest neighborhoods has declined, from 18 percent in 1999 to under 14 percent in 2005). Rangel also slanders the patriotism and commitment of those who devote their lives to defending their country. He and other Democrats want to perpetuate a Vietnam-era myth of dumb, desperate soldiers, the better to shame us into never fighting. If anyone believes Rangel puts strength and honor above cheap demagogy, you can just forget about it.

‐Paul Volcker’s $35 million inquiry into the U.N. Oil-for-Food scandal offers a fine example of how not to conduct an investigation. It 1) was accountable to the body being investigated, 2) took place in total secrecy, 3) did not substantiate its findings by publishing the documents on which they were based, and 4) explained those findings in a muddled prose that only a career bureaucrat could appreciate. A much better effort now comes from Australia, where a highly transparent government investigation has detailed how the Australian Wheat Board lined Saddam’s pockets with $220 million in kickbacks. This report offers reams of documentary evidence to back up its clearly worded conclusions. For the whole sordid story, see Claudia Rosett’s reporting on National Review Online. Here’s a taste, though, if you can stomach it: The report finds that “Kofi Annan, his deputy, his chief of staff, and the director of Oil-for-Food, as well as the Security Council, were broadly aware of Saddam’s demands for kickbacks from contractors.”

‐It has been six months now since the U.N. Human Rights Council was created. And how goes the good fight? No resolutions concerning human-rights abuses in Burma, in China, in Cuba, in Iran, in North Korea. The council regrets the genocide in Darfur, but has nary a word of blame for the Sudanese government. Don’t worry, though — it has been hard at work damning Israel (most recently in two resolutions passed on Monday). Things in the General Assembly are, if possible, even worse. Uzbekistan and Belarus, both notorious rights violators, recently succeeded in getting the assembly to pass a resolution “discourag[ing] all U.N. human rights bodies from condemning any country on human rights.” Despots have feelings too, you know, and far be it from any “human rights body” to hurt them. Whence comes the U.N.’s “moral authority,” we shall never know.

‐After quoting a 14th-century Byzantine emperor’s hostile opinions of Islam in his September speech in Regensburg, Pope Benedict XVI began a four-day visit to Turkey speaking of “dialogue,” “brotherhood,” and “reconciliation.” Backing and filling? Hardly. Benedict XVI is engaged in diplomacy of the mind, reaching out to Islam on the basis of a common commitment to reason as the ally of faith. Do significant numbers of Muslims have such a commitment? If they don’t, then our situation is far, far worse than the gloomiest stories from Iraq and Iran suggest. At the same time, the pope hoped to cement relations between the Roman Catholic Church and Orthodoxy, whose ecumenical patriarch, Bartholomew I, lives in Istanbul, while trying to be encouragingly apolitical about Turkey’s bid for membership in the European Union (when Benedict was a cardinal, he opposed it). True diplomacy is so much more than realism; it is hope with dirt under its fingernails.

‐Alexander Litvinenko is someone to be remembered with pity and horror. A former officer in the KGB (and its contemporary remake, the FSB), he held President Vladimir Putin responsible for the darkness descending on Russia, the Chechen war, corruption, the murder of critics, and much else too. A brave man, he nonetheless moved to Britain, became British, and with other Russian exiles continued his campaign against Putin. Another dissident was the prominent journalist Anna Politkovskaya, recently gunned down in Moscow, and he was conducting his own investigation into her murder. This cost him his life too. Somehow, probably in a hotel or sushi bar, he was secretively slipped a dose of polonium-210, a radioactive material that killed him as though it had been a diminutive nuclear bomb. No murder had previously been committed by this means. Very few laboratories in the world have the complex processes for producing polonium-210 in this form, and all of them are state-controlled. In a statement on his deathbed, Litvinenko directly accused Putin of responsibility for the crime. In reply, Putin made the strangely offhand remark that this was not a violent death, but was being exploited for “political provocation” — a favorite phrase of the Soviets for anything they disliked. The British establishment in fact appears extremely anxious not to point the obvious finger at Russia, to which the diplomats and police are instead appealing for help. It seems certain that Litvinenko’s scientifically proficient killers will never be identified, and justice will be subordinated to (short-sighted) power politics.

‐The Chinese government sees any fast-growing religious movement as a challenge to its power, and endeavors to stamp it out by means fair or foul. Things got particularly foul last week, when Xu Shuangfu — founder of the Three Grades of Servants Church, an underground Protestant group — was put to death along with two of his subordinates. (Nine members of the church had already been executed before last week.) Xu’s organization once claimed over a million followers, but when members of a rival church were found murdered, the Chinese government charged Xu and his colleagues with the crimes. They were — as inevitably they would be — found guilty sentenced to death. No advance notice of the execution was given either to Xu’s lawyer or to his family, who learned of his fate only when they were told to collect his ashes. We do not know whether Xu and his colleagues committed the murders of which they were convicted, although it is worth noting that they maintained their innocence to the end, and that Xu’s lawyer claims the conviction was based on testimony obtained under torture. What is apparent, however, is that their guilt or innocence was a matter of indifference to the government that wished to silence them.

‐According to Navy lieutenant Michael Dean, a CENTCOM spokesman, the Iraqi “police captain” that the AP has used as a source in at least eight stories since last April “is not a Baghdad police officer or an MOI [Iraqi Ministry of the Interior] employee.” Dean’s statement was subsequently confirmed by a spokesman for the MOI. Nevertheless, the AP is sticking with its source. AP spokesman Linda Wagner told USA Today that the “captain” — Jamil Hussein — “has been a regular source of police information for two years, and had been visited by the AP reporter in his office at the police station on several occasions.” She also said, “Navy Lieutenant Dean’s statement seems to suggest that the news media should work solely from a government list of ‘authorized sources.’” But that’s not at all what Dean said. Is it really too much to ask that the AP strive to ensure that its sources are the people they claim to be?

‐Chicago city officials asked the organizers of the city’s Christkindlmarket (which, though not sponsored by the city, takes place in Chicago’s Daley Plaza) to remove The Nativity Story, a film about the birth of Jesus Christ, from the list of festival sponsors. The organizers acquiesced to the city’s demand. What problem could the city of Chicago possibly have with the Christmas story at a Christmas festival? In an initial explanation, a city official expressed concern about insensitivity to non-Christians; a revised explanation said something about inappropriate commercialization. The first explanation was absurd; the event is a Christmas festival, and its name, “Christkindlmarket,” is German for “Christ child market.” If advertisements for The Nativity Story are enough to offend, we will be lucky if the festival itself does not occasion a riot. As for the second explanation, it seems at least somewhat disingenuous. This is a Christkindlmarket, after all, where you can buy jewelry, clothing, toys, food, wood carvings, and so on. How odd if a commercial endeavor that tells the Christmas story were to be considered an inappropriate sponsor of a commercial endeavor that celebrates Christmas.