I’ll be flying down to New York later today for the first Powerline Book of the Year gala. This year it’s going to World War IV by Norman Podhoretz, who makes a better case for the Bush Doctrine than Bush’s foreign policy team is prepared to do these days. It’s apparently a bigger cash prize than the Pulitzers, but it goes to charity – in this case, Soldiers’ Angels. Norman, Henry Kissinger, the Powerline lads, and I will be chewing over the book’s thesis, which not everyone at NR (from Jonah to Derb to WFB himself) is on board with. Nonetheless, it attempts, as almost no other book does, to grapple with both the scale of the present struggle and its relationship to 20th century history – and to ask, as The New York Sun notes, the key questions. I hope amidst all the singing and dancing and Sally Fieldian acceptance speeches we’ll have a chance to get to the real meat of the questions raised by Norman.