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.

‐ Are we allowed to be against Obama?

‐ We’d like to say this about the political speculation that has swirled around the illness of South Dakota Democratic senator Tim Johnson: Lay off. We would rather see a healthy Senator Johnson, and the Senate in Democratic hands, than an ill Senator Johnson and the Senate controlled by the GOP. This is a human issue; the man has been stricken, and we hope he gets well.

‐ Sen. Patrick Leahy, the incoming Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, gave a speech this week in which he announced procedural changes that will make it easier for Democrats to block President Bush’s judicial nominees. We expected no less from him. When Leahy chaired the committee in 2001–2002, he blocked fully half of George W. Bush’s nominees to the federal courts of appeals. And that was when the president had just arrived in office, and had even made conciliatory gestures to Democrats by renominating two Clinton nominees who hadn’t made it through the Republican-controlled Senate. When Leahy assumes the chairmanship, there’s not much Republicans can do to stop him, other than exert as much political pressure as possible. That helped Republicans win the Senate in 2002, and it would be a good way to unite the Republican base today.

‐ Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad specializes in hatred, and he is extremely skillful at arousing it. A stunt entirely characteristic of the man is the conference in Tehran called to discuss whether the Jews really suffered genocide at the hands of the Nazis. Some 67 of the most unpleasant people in the world accepted his invitation to agree with him that the Holocaust is “exaggerated” and a “myth.” The only one missing from this Nazi-minded company is the British writer David Irving, who happens to be in an Austrian prison precisely for Holocaust denial. The purported aim of the conference, according to its spokesman, is “to scientifically study the Holocaust and listen to both sides before reaching a conclusion.” In reality, the aim is to psych up the unfortunate Iranian masses for the heralded showdown with the West. Israel in particular is to be wiped off the map. The Iranians are denying one holocaust while proposing another.

‐ Has there ever been a sadder failure, even at the United Nations, than retiring secretary general Kofi Annan? Consider him on his own terms. In one of his farewell speeches, this one in honor of International Human Rights Day, he deplored mass murder in Darfur. “Sixty years after the liberation of the Nazi death camps, and 30 years after the Cambodian killing fields, the promise of ‘never again’ is ringing hollow.” But how could this impotent organization, including all the world’s tyrants and despots, do anything constructive in Darfur, or anywhere else? Only the United States and a coalition of the willing could make good Annan’s human-rights talk. But all he offered in return was international oversight and demands for money. As a result, nations good and bad pursued their own agendas. With nothing better to do, the U.N. sank into corruption, as exemplified most flagrantly by the Oil-for-Food program in Iraq. One of George W. Bush’s greatest failings was to take this tainted sad sack and the organization he presided over so seriously.

‐ Predictably, reverberations are already being felt from the late-November ruling by a federal judge in California that purports to invalidate the president’s authority to “specially designate” global terrorists. Such designations cripple terror organizations by making it illegal to provide them money and other material support. The executive authority at issue — concerning foreign relations, where presidential power is nearly plenary and judicial competence at its lowest ebb — is found not only in the Constitution, but also in a 1977 congressional statute. Nevertheless, Judge Audrey Collins held that it was unconstitutionally vague for the president to designate as terrorists the Tamil Tigers and the Kurdistan Workers Party, organizations with the blood of tens of thousands on their hands. Collins, a Clinton appointee who has previously discovered vagueness in the Patriot Act and in 1996 anti-terror legislation, this time found objectionable the president’s “unfettered discretion.” Now, as night follows day, the Holy Land Foundation, a Muslim “charity” charged with being a front for Hamas, has used the ruling as justification to move for dismissal of the lengthy indictment against it. The government is opposing the motion and, one hopes, mulling an appeal of Collins’s decision.

‐ After years of criticism from Wall Street, the civil-liberties lobby, and the white-collar defense bar over its enforcement tactics, the Justice Department has issued field guidance making it more difficult to indict a corporation. The new guidance also discourages prosecutors from requesting that businesses cooperating with them waive attorney-client privilege. These are reasonable changes. Corporate fraud is best discouraged by prosecution of the persons responsible for wrongdoing; in most cases, going after entire business unduly harms innocent employees and shareholders. Even if no crimes have been committed, public disclosure that a company is under investigation can be catastrophic, and indictment is a death knell. Moreover, Sarbanes-Oxley and similar reforms have created increasingly burdensome regulations, making boardroom consultation with lawyers more essential than ever. To insist that companies waive the confidentiality of their communications with counsel perversely creates incentives for them to shut lawyers out of their compliance deliberations, raising the likelihood of faulty public reporting. Prosecutors can build strong cases, and businesses can exhibit good-faith cooperation, without these excesses.

‐ Remember last year when the media ran story after story about how the U.S. Armed Forces were not meeting their recruiting goals? The relentless media hype led a number of commentators to declare that Bush’s Iraq policy had broken the Army and that a draft was right around the corner. Shortly after that temporary dip, however, recruiting numbers rebounded. On Tuesday the Pentagon announced that all four branches of the armed services either met or exceeded their recruiting goals last month. Needless to say, the military’s success in recruiting this year has not garnered anywhere near the same amount of press coverage as last year’s shortfall. The press is fond of defending itself along the lines of “It’s news when a plane crashes, not when one lands safely.” But if coverage of a plane crash leads to undue pessimism about the safety of air travel, the press has a responsibility to give subsequent success stories equal time.

‐ Did the Clinton administration spy on Princess Diana? All the National Security Agency will say is that it did not target the late princess in the final months of her life. Speculation about a U.S. intelligence role popped into the news in anticipation of the Lord Stevens report on the car accident that killed Diana in August 1997. The most sensational newspaper accounts suggested that U.S. intelligence agencies were spying on Diana because of her friendship with American businessman Theodore Forstmann. But when the Stevens report came out Thursday morning, there was nothing about Forstmann, and nothing to suggest that the administration had spied on him or Diana. Never mind.

‐ The military coup led by Augusto Pinochet in Chile in 1973 deposed a Socialist president, Salvador Allende, who had ruined the economy as a first step in taking his country down Cuba’s path. The world would acquire enough Communist regimes in the Seventies; it didn’t need another. Pinochet approved market reforms that made Chile prosperous once more. On losing a referendum to extend his power in 1988, he stepped down. These accomplishments shine beside the records of most tyrants, right or left (compare the Argentine generals, or Castro). In one respect, however, Pinochet played to type: He murdered thousands of his opponents, and tortured thousands more. Few criminals save their countries; few saviors are criminals to such an extent. Dead at 91, R.I.P.

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