• Of course Obama hasn’t read the health-care bill — he’s probably still working his way through the stimulus.

• Sarah Palin’s independence day came just before America’s, when she announced that she would step down as governor of Alaska not next year, when her term ends, but now. She complained of fire-ant political attacks, though they surely will not cease, and said she wanted to spare Alaska the tenure of an absentee lame duck, which was a backhanded acknowledgment of her ambition. She should be ambitious — she has zealous followers, a novel persona in same-old same-old politics, and an ability to “connect” that rivals would die for. To succeed, she will need to work hard. Her retirement speech was a mess, something like an enormous celebrity “tweet.” She needs to expand her knowledge base from energy to a host of other issues (her experience in state government won’t play so well now that she has forsworn the governorship). If she can learn and grow while hauling in the bucks and the plaudits, all the current objections will become moot. Good luck.

• President Obama’s stimulus is a failure on his own terms. Obama: “If we don’t act immediately, millions more jobs will be lost, and national unemployment rates will approach double digits.” We acted immediately. Millions more jobs were lost. National unemployment rates are approaching double digits. Ipso facto: failure. Democrats, following Paul Krugman’s rhetorical pompons, have hit upon a bizarre argument: No matter how spectacularly the stimulus failed, they maintain, it failed because it wasn’t big enough. Like the eleventh-hour Bush stimulus before it, Obama’s $787 billion package was plenty big. It failed to stimulate because government cannot fiat wealth and productivity into existence; it can only move money from taxpayers to tax recipients, taking a generous cut for itself in the process. In the case of the Obama stimulus, that meant shunting money from taxpayers to Obama allies in the public-sector unions, the college administrations, and the federal, state, and municipal bureaucracies. Krugman & Co. now argue that the answer to a failed Bush stimulus and a failed Obama stimulus is . . . a third stimulus. But spending must be paid for, today or tomorrow, and every dollar spent on non-stimulating “stimulus” is a dollar taken out of the productive economy. If it were possible to spend one’s way to economic health, there would not be a poor nation in the world.

• Congress has found a perfect issue: one that complicates life for the CIA and evokes the evil specter of Dick Cheney. After 9/11 the CIA thought, off and on, of striking back at al-Qaeda’s leaders — perhaps by capturing or killing them. The National Security Act of 1947 requires that Congress’s intelligence committees be “fully and currently informed” of intelligence activity, including “significant anticipated” activity — except when briefing them might compromise “exceptionally sensitive matters.” (The intelligence committees consider themselves informed when the Gang of Eight — senior bipartisan leaders of both committees — are.) Vice President Cheney thought the embryonic program should be hidden until it became more fully developed, and the CIA’s directors agreed — until the current director, Leon Panetta, decided that it had gone nowhere and told Congress. Lots of plans dead-end and deserve to be killed. But now Congress, miffed, wants to rewrite the rules. The intelligence authorization bill would require all 37 members of the intelligence committees to be informed of covert activity. Even the Obama White House will veto that provision. Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D., Ill.) said the CIA during Cheney’s tenure as vice president showed “contempt” for Congress. Indeed.

Stars and State

I’m writing from Umbria, Italy. Earlier this week, the latest National Review Cruise came to an end, and my wife, my daughter, and I decamped for the hills just across the border from that trendier region, Tuscany. (Fah, Toscano! I spit at you!)

I’m also writing upon the much ballyhooed 40th anniversary of the first moon landing. It’s funny how the media coverage is so self-congratulatory — as if the press had also done something great in July 1969. But what was so special? They had no correspondents on the scene, needless to say. For the most part, they merely took footage from a government agency and relied upon government experts and military personnel to provide context for the viewers.

Perhaps the recent demise of Walter Cronkite, who announced the moon landing with panache, heightened the press’s nostalgia for its allegedly golden moment. But surely part of the story is that the moon landing reminded today’s TV journalists that there once was a time when broadcasters had the loyalty of the American people.

I don’t mean to belittle the fourth estate, particularly when they do it so well themselves. In fact, I think America could use more moments like the moon landing, when everyone — young and old, black and white, rich and poor — is equally compelled to watch an event in awe and wonderment.

Which brings me back to Italy. Everywhere you go in Italy there’s a beautiful church or magnificent cathedral. Many are little more than tourist attractions now, but their beauty endures. I know a little about cathedrals (years ago I made a documentary about Paris’s Notre Dame). People today forget that they were in many ways the moon landings of their time, not just because of the technical feats involved in creating them, but because of the unifying and edifying spectacle they provided. In the 13th century and beyond, they were used to inspire (which shares a Latin root with aspire and spirit) all of Christendom. Most people could not read, so they told their stories through art, primarily sculpture and stained glass. The large squares in front of many cathedrals are modern inventions; originally you were supposed to turn a corner and see a cathedral suddenly before you. Your eyes would be instantly lifted heavenward.

The argument against cathedrals was that they cost so much money amidst so much poverty. The response was that they were the only form of art and awe available to rich and poor, belonging to the living and posterity, alike. The debate over space exploration mirrors this ancient controversy. After the moon landing, American liberals argued that it was a waste of resources when so many went wanting on earth. “If we can put a man on the moon, we can [spend billions on social program X, Y, or Z].”

President Obama himself offers such locutions on an hourly basis. Among the myriad problems with such hucksterism is that it rests on a false analogy, turning man’s aspiration on its head. Putting a man on the moon lights a fire in mankind’s imagination. Expanding Medicare disbursements, while perhaps worthwhile, is dross to the human spirit. I for one yearn for the day when we set things aright and proclaim, “If we can socialize medicine, we can send a man to Mars.”

— JONAH GOLDBERG

• “Not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida’s tortured confessions,” two Washington Post reporters boldly declared on March 29. The problem with this assertion? It’s simply untrue, as Marc Thiessen explained on National Review Online’s blog The Corner — and as the reporters themselves conceded (without actually admitting they’d gotten anything wrong) in a second story. According to that story, Zubaida became a “font of information” after the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, and only then provided the information that led to the capture of al-Qaeda’s José Padilla — who was apprehended in Chicago on a mission to carry out attacks in the U.S. This brings the tradeoff we face into sharp relief: Sometimes it takes harsh treatment to elicit information about mortal threats. It would be easy if enhanced interrogation didn’t work; we could simply end it without consequence. But the world is not so simple.

• In its original form, the mendaciously misnamed Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) would have stripped American workers of the right to conduct secret-ballot elections on the question of whether to organize a union. In place of a traditional one-man/one-vote secret ballot, the EFCA would have imposed a regime of union-boss thuggery known as “card check,” wherein labor activists pressure workers to sign off on a union-organizing petition, a much easier way to reach a serviceable majority. Democrats now have signaled their willingness to remove the card-check provision from EFCA. But the bill would still allow the National Labor Relations Board to impose contracts on businesses unilaterally. President Obama has picked a former Teamsters lawyer to chair the NLRB, and his other NLRB picks are equally radical if not more so. Businesses thus would find themselves in a double bind, forced either to negotiate with the unions from a position of weakness or to throw themselves on the mercy of the union-dominated NLRB. EFCA is invasive and anti-democratic, a naked sop to the unions that spent tens of millions of dollars electing Obama and his fellow Democrats. Congressional conservatives should labor mightily against it.

• Goldman Sachs reports strong profits for the quarter, and the world rages. Why? The point of the bailout was to restore stability to the banking system, and profitable banks are necessary for that. Goldman Sachs has repaid bailout money out of those profits and seeks to repurchase the taxpayers’ ownership interest. Goldman Sachs is an easy bank to hate, because it is a political operator as well as a financial one; but to the extent that politicians are interested in business, it is necessary that businessmen be interested in politics. Still, don’t weep for Goldman Sachs: If government is backstopping your business, government has an interest in every aspect of your operation, including the salaries it pays. And Goldman takes an interest in government’s business, too: As California spends itself into pauperdom, Goldman Sachs profits handily by underwriting billions in state bonds. Anyone for the separation of bank and state?

• Several members of the U.S. military are resisting orders to deploy to Afghanistan under the specious argument that the president of the United States holds his office illegitimately. This is an extension of the canard, lamentably immortal in some conservative circles, that there is some question as to Barack Obama’s citizenship status. The president’s birth certificate has been examined, photographed, and analyzed by reporters. The authorities in Hawaii, where the president was born, have confirmed its authenticity. A scan of the document has been released to the general public. Obama’s birth announcement appeared in the Honolulu newspapers in the week following his birth. FactCheck.org has extensively documented its study of this urban legend, and a handful of legal actions initiated under this theory have been dismissed as baseless. To those soldiers resisting their deployment, we send an editorial white feather. To those conservatives still trafficking in this nonsense, we send a word of advice: There are plenty of real reasons to oppose Barack Obama and his statist ambitions — being the party of reality, conservatives have no need of imaginary ones.

• Al Franken (D., Minn.) took his seat in the U.S. Senate. We will spare him and ourselves all the rim-shot lines about his past and give credit where credit is due: He ran a strong enough race to fight an incumbent to a draw, then out-hustled and out-lawyered him during the recounts. Democrats (with a small “d”) believe that the voice of the people is the voice of God, but when sifting the vox dei, the voice of the courts must sometimes also be heeded, as George W. Bush well knows. Minnesota Republicans can avoid a repeat by doing a better job before Election Day.

• Marion Barry, four times mayor of Washington, D.C., and currently a council member representing the city’s eighth ward, can always be relied upon to add to the gaiety of the nation. The 73-year-old councilman’s electoral appeal seems only to have been increased by his previous run-ins with the law (drug possession, tax evasion). In early July he was arrested again, this time on suspicion of stalking his ex-girlfriend, 40-year-old Donna Watts-Brighthaupt. That charge was dropped, but in the course of inquiries it emerged that Ms. Watts-Brighthaupt had been put on the city’s payroll two months after she began dating Barry, eventually being paid $15,000 for city work. What did she do? She “researched and formulated guidelines to implement the Emerging Leaders Ward 8 program,” says the Washington Post. Valuable and essential work, obviously. We shake our heads, smile, crack a joke or two, and pass on from good ol’ Marion’s doings to matters we consider actually important — a category that does not include the governance of our nation’s capital.

• President Obama’s address to the Ghanaian parliament in Accra may be the best speech of his administration so far. Obama told his audience to look in the mirror for their problems, and their solutions. “Africa’s future is up to Africans. . . . The West is not responsible for the destruction of the Zimbabwean economy over the last decade, or wars in which children are enlisted as combatants. . . . No business wants to invest in a place where the government skims 20 percent off the top. . . . Development depends on good governance, [which] is a responsibility that can only be met by Africans.” He offered American help in fighting disease and praised George W. Bush’s efforts to combat AIDS. He also offered American help in building civil society, the task with the longest arc and the one with which foreigners can help the least — but they can do better that than dumping aid packages on kleptocrats. Well done.

• Obama also addressed the NAACP. He spoke a fair amount of left-liberal claptrap. But he also spoke some bracing realism. Black kids, like other kids, may be poor or face long odds, he said. “But that’s not a reason to get bad grades. That’s not a reason to cut class. That’s not a reason to give up on your education and drop out of school. No one has written your destiny for you. Your destiny is in your hands — you cannot forget that. That’s what we have to teach all our children. No excuses. No excuses.” Bravo.

• The crackdown in Iran is intensifying. Nobody knows how many people the regime has killed. Families are searching through prisons, hospitals, police stations, and the Revolutionary Court for those missing. Scores of journalists and activists have been arrested and are now untraceable. One such is Shadi Sadr, a prominent lawyer and women’s-rights advocate. As she was out walking in Tehran, plainclothes officers pulled her into a car and were seen to beat her. “Supreme Leader” Ali Khamenei and his presidential candidate, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, lead a faction with a monopoly on force. The rival faction consists of former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mir-Hossein Mousavi, one of the candidates defeated in the recent rigged elections, and their appeal is to public opinion. Tens of thousands turned up at Tehran University to listen to Rafsanjani preach. Astonishingly brave, they chanted anti-regime slogans, and the police responded with clouds of tear gas. Rafsanjani criticized the election and its aftermath. The public can no longer trust its representatives, he said, and this is the cause of “bitter” crisis. Still, he seemed to be suggesting a deal whereby he and his faction would call off the protests and demonstrations if the election results would be referred to the supreme court for final judgment. The Khamenei-Ahmadinejad faction will have none of that, and warns its rivals to be careful. That this power struggle calls into question the legitimacy of the entire clerical establishment only adds to the likelihood of further violence.

• A Jerusalem Post interview of a member of Iran’s Basiji militia has shed light on horrific practices toward female inmates in the country’s prisons. Under the mullahs’ laws, it is illegal to execute virgins, and therefore young women who have been sentenced to death (sometimes for minor crimes) are routinely “married” to prison guards and raped by their “husbands” on the eve of their executions. Thus Islamist justice is done.

• In 2001, Robert Fisk, the hard-Left, jihad-sympathetic British journalist, was attacked by Afghan refugees along the Afghan–Pakistani border. He wrote that “young men . . . began smashing stones into my face and head. I couldn’t see for the blood pouring down my forehead and swamping my eyes. And even then, I understood. I couldn’t blame them for what they were doing. In fact, if I were the Afghan refugees . . . I would have done just the same to Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find.” Flash forward to November 2008. A Dutch journalist, Joanie de Rijke, is kidnapped by the Taliban in Afghanistan. They did “horrible things to me,” she has now written in a book. They raped her for days on end. But “they also respected me.” And “they are not monsters.” Between bouts of rape, they gave her tea and biscuits. And the commander, she explains, “could not control his testosterone. I had the impression that afterwards he regretted what had happened.” De Rijke denies that she is suffering from Stockholm syndrome. But she and Fisk are suffering from something.

• The political showdown in Honduras is about far more than the future of a tiny, strategically insignificant country nestled between the Caribbean and the Pacific. It is about setting a precedent that authoritarian maneuvers of the Hugo Chávez variety will not be tolerated by modern Latin American democracies. The Venezuelan leader continues to insist that deposed Honduran president Manuel Zelaya be restored to his former office. Zelaya warns that if he is not reinstalled as president, “other measures will be taken.” The Obama administration badly bungled its initial response to Zelaya’s ouster, which was both necessary and constitutional. The administration is now supporting diplomatic negotiations brokered by Costa Rican president Óscar Arias. But Zelaya refuses to compromise. It should be obvious that a president who was arrested and exiled for trying to hijack his country’s democracy can never recover his legitimacy. Early elections and a conditional amnesty for Zelaya strike us as the most equitable solution. The interim Honduran government seems willing to accept that. Zelaya does not, and has called for an “insurrection.” No U.S. official should pretend he is fit for office.

• When Secretary of State Clinton visited India, she signed accords on issues of importance to both nations: a defense pact that will allow the sale of advanced American weaponry to India, a commitment to cooperate in commercial space exploration, and an agreement that will permit U.S. companies to sell two civilian nuclear reactors to India. (Indians can build new nuclear reactors, but Americans cannot build nuclear power plants — why is that, precisely?) The Obama administration does well to continue the work begun by Pres. George W. Bush, whose careful diplomatic attentions to New Delhi refreshed relations between the world’s two largest democracies, the relationship between which had long been fraught with residual mistrust from the Cold War. But some things were not up for much discussion on Clinton’s trip: Affirming that India has no intention of cutting greenhouse gases, environmental minister Jairam Ramesh gave the secretary of state the rough side of his tongue on the subject of Obama’s fanciful green agenda: “There is simply no case for the pressure that we, who have been among the lowest emitters per capita, face to actually reduce emissions,” he said. “And as if this pressure was not enough, we also face the threat of carbon tariffs on our exports to countries such as yours.” Ramesh’s concerns are well placed. India is a key ally, situated between China and Pakistan, and the Obama administration ought to think twice before it launches a trade assault on it in the name of global warming.

• During his visit to Moscow, Obama signed a new arms-control deal with Russian president Dmitry Medvedev. The preliminary agreement, designed to replace the 1991 START I Treaty, would reduce U.S. and Russian stockpiles of nuclear warheads and strategic delivery systems. “We must lead by example, and that’s what we are doing here today,” Obama declared. “We resolve to reset U.S.-Russian relations so that we can cooperate more effectively in areas of common interest.” Unfortunately, the areas of U.S.-Russian discord are more important than those of “common interest,” and the Obama-Medvedev pact is a pointless distraction at best. American policy toward Moscow should have three main objectives: Get the Russians to stop threatening their former Soviet client states; get them to cease aiding Iran’s nuclear program; and get them to accept a U.S.-built missile shield in Eastern Europe. Obama made zero progress on these issues. In fact, he indicated a willingness to negotiate over missile defense, much to the consternation of our Polish and Czech allies. If only we could hit “reset” on Obama’s foreign policy.

• Arab News reported that executives of Human Rights Watch have raised funds from Saudi plutocrats by touting HRW’s harsh criticism of Israel. The story prompted charges that HRW is selling out its ideals, but the real scandal is that it isn’t: HRW’s commitment to smearing Israel and whitewashing its enemies is no tactic of expediency, but a course of deepest principle. The group doggedly recycles discredited tales of Israeli war crimes, yet after a fundraising jaunt to a certain oil-rich land where juveniles are publicly beheaded, rape victims are executed, and anyone advocating democracy can be locked up, it fed the media this: “Human Rights Watch said Friday Saudi Arabia has pledged to improve women’s rights by eliminating gender discrimination.” HRW originated as a stalwart monitor of Soviet repression, and even today it does some good work in other parts of the world; but its monomania about Israel and its unhealthy dependence on tainted money are rapidly poisoning whatever credibility it retains.

• “We are told not to work on Saturdays, and Protestants take this to mean that we are not to play on Sundays,” grumbled Bertrand Russell in regard to the Fourth Commandment. It is difficult to see why the French, whose republican ideals are hostile to religion, should pay any regard at all to Sabbath observance. Oddly, they do, and the French economy labors under (or rather, is prohibited from laboring under) laws restricting commercial activity on Sundays. Now the Sarkozy administration is lifting some of the restrictions. A law to this effect narrowly passed the French lower house in mid-July. It was opposed by Socialists, whose labor-union sponsors want to keep the mandatory day off, and Greens, who think there is far too much commercial activity already. All credit to President Sarkozy for trying to introduce some flexibility into his nation’s economy. Now, Monsieur le Président, about the month of August . . .

• A Nuremberg gallery owner created a furor when he placed a garden gnome giving the Nazi salute in his shop window. A resident complained that the gnome violated Germany’s constitution, which prohibits the display of Nazi symbols unless they are used in an unequivocally critical way. The artist, Ottmar Hörl, professed to be stunned and pointed out in his defense that he has made 700 of the gnomes and displayed them in Italy and Belgium. Prosecutors didn’t know what to make of that. The gallery owner, Ernst Weigl, says he never realized that the gnome was giving the forbidden salute: “To me, it looks a bit like when you gesture to a dachshund to jump up to your hand.” And understandably so — who thinks of Nazis in Nuremberg? Still, Weigl and Hörl will be interviewed, and if their anti-Nazism seems insufficiently vehement, they risk being sentenced to three years in prison. This could be the first case on record of a political artist’s going to jail for being too subtle.

• In his new encyclical on the Catholic Church’s social teaching, Caritas in Veritate, Pope Benedict XVI stresses humanitarian action rather than the profit motive as the solution to man’s socioeconomic problems. In its practical recommendations, however, the encyclical appears to be riding two horses — the russet horse of those who think the state is the main road to the common good, and the pale horse of those who think a strictly limited state should spur a thousand free initiatives and civic actions as a surer way to the common good. But as the pope takes pains to remind us, Catholic social thought does not provide technical solutions and does not prescribe specific programs and policies. On these, Catholics of the Left, the center, and the Right can continue to disagree. Still, the pope’s practical reflections on political economy and current perplexities help to sharpen the arguments. The parts of the encyclical that most clearly bear the familiar marks of Benedict’s own caritas are the ones most likely to endure.

• President Obama has made an excellent choice in his nomination of a new director for the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Francis S. Collins is not only one of the world’s most distinguished geneticists — as head of the Human Genome Project, he joined President Clinton and fellow scientist J. Craig Venter in announcing the working draft of the map of the human genome in 2000 — but also a believing Christian. In 2006, he published a major book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, in which he argued firmly against both dogmatic atheism and intelligent-design theory. His is an independent mind, to be welcomed at NIH.

• The office of surgeon general has never really recovered from the incumbency of Joycelyn Elders in the early Clinton years. Though sober and capable officeholders since then have tried to restore some dignity to the post, the recollection of Ms. Elders’s injunctions to self-abuse, together with that Ruritanian uniform, sustain the general feeling that the surgeon general belongs more to the world of show business than to serious government. President Obama’s nomination of Dr. Regina M. Benjamin as our next surgeon general has generated another risible controversy. Though clever, accomplished, and public-spirited, Dr. Benjamin is . . . portly. What kind of example is that? ask the health nags. Portly she may be, but Dr. Benjamin is not obese, and public discourse already defers far too much to the nags. We welcome her as a counterweight (so to speak) against the odious doctrine that in America you can never be too thin or too rich.

• The Sears Tower, once the tallest building in the world, and then merely the tallest building in America, is no more. It still stands. And it’s still the tallest building in America. But now it is called the Willis Tower, for a British insurance company that agreed to lease three floors. We well understand the capitalist imperative. But, sometimes, it’s hard to lose names. Chicagoans say they will never stop calling their building “the Sears Tower.” But they will, over time — just as Mt. McKinley is disappearing, in favor of “Denali.” Farewell, “Sears” Tower, nice to have known you! (Already, the name “Roebuck” is pretty much a footnote in history.)

• Tom Watson is one of the greatest golfers of all time, the winner of eight majors, plus many other tournaments. He was the chief rival of Jack Nicklaus during the last stage of Nicklaus’s (supreme) career. They had a famous duel at Turnberry, Scotland, in the British Open of 1977. Watson won. And he was back at Turnberry in mid-July for another British Open. He was, is, 59 years old. And he was leading the tournament on the 72nd hole, which is to say the last hole of regulation play. He did not hold that lead. And in the playoff, he faltered badly, and lost (to another American, Stewart Cink). In his four rounds at Turnberry, Watson showed the grace, poise, and mastery for which his golf is famous. He owns — still owns — one of the five or so greatest swings ever. He came within inches of the miraculous: namely, winning a major at his age, something never done before. (Julius Boros won the PGA at 48.) Watson did not close the deal, but he gave the golf-watching world a thrill not soon to be forgotten. And we hope that, despite the loss, he is somehow thrilled, too.

• Those images, strange not because of the scenery, which was prosaic, but because of the peculiar brightness; the astronauts’ scratchy voices and bulky movements; the windless flag they planted . . . There has been a lot of other news in the 40 years since Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon, a lot of it arguably more consequential. But none of it has been entirely new; everything, in the words of Ecclesiastes, has been seen under the sun, one way or another, as long as there have been men on earth. These men, and the ten that followed them in the Apollo space program, went to another earth, small, subsidiary, airless, useless; amorous, maddening, blazing, watchful. Juliet asked Romeo not to swear by it, and barbershop quartets sang of its silvery light. Our astronauts touched it, and left their footprints. The first of many, there and elsewhere.

• Walter Cronkite, longtime anchor of the CBS Evening News, was the voice of received opinion. His career tracked the era of nationalist liberalism that came out of World War II expecting to run and improve the world. His media peers were the anchors of the two other networks; the editors of Time, Newsweek, Life, and Look; and newspapermen sobered after the years of Hearst and Pulitzer. When Cronkite declared that the Vietnam War was lost, Pres. Lyndon Johnson was not only dismayed, but, one feels, a little impressed. Many forces eroded that cultural consensus, including the conservative movement: When Spiro Agnew attacked “nattering nabobs of negativism,” he had Cronkite (among many others) in mind. Our era, churned by cultural and technological upheaval, is multiform, chaotic, often raucous or stupid; but there is light as well as din. Consumers and producers alike must make the best of it. Dead at 92. R.I.P.

• When President Kennedy asked 44-year-old Robert McNamara to be secretary of defense, McNamara said, correctly, that he was “not qualified.” He took the job anyway. McNamara was a systems analyst who had helped turn Ford around; he had risen to the rank of lieutenant colonel in World War II, teaching statistical methods to air officers. Better if he had worked on a political campaign or served in a platoon. As Kennedy’s and Johnson’s SecDef, he made a few good calls, but he failed to understand warfare. He thought the Vietnamese Communists could be bombed by increments, and lost heart when that strategy needed to be changed. He spent the remainder of his life mired in guilt, which only sharpened the taunts of his left-wing enemies. “War is so complex that it’s beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend,” he said in the 2003 documentary The Fog of War. That means that the harder-minded will wage it. Dead at 93. R.I.P.

• The world’s oldest man, and one of the few remaining survivors of World War I, died in England, aged 113. Henry Allingham joined Britain’s Royal Naval Air Service as a mechanic in September 1915, and saw action both on the Western Front and in the great sea battle of Jutland. Allingham had clear memories of Queen Victoria’s funeral (1901) and the Wright brothers’ first flight (1903). He was a founding member of the Royal Air Force, which was formed in April 1918, but always considered himself a Navy man. After his war service he entered useful employment and married the woman he loved. The marriage lasted half a century, to Mrs. Allingham’s death. Henry’s living descendants include 14 great-great grandchildren and one great-great-great grandchild. “The oldest hath borne most: we that are young / Shall never see so much, nor live so long.” R.I.P.

Condition Critical

There are several urgent problems with the U.S. health-care system, and the Democrats have found the wrong solutions to most of them. The problems are these: A number of people lack health insurance because they cannot afford it; others have insurance but are tied to employer-based plans that cost too much and provide too little, while leaving families insecure in their coverage as unemployment rises; and a number of factors — including the lack of real nationwide competition in the insurance market, poorly administered government-entitlement programs, and rapacious personal-injury attorneys — conspire to drive up health-care costs. What Americans need is reform that provides better choices, lower prices, and security of coverage through an open marketplace that is competitive and consumer-driven. What the Obama administration and congressional Democrats offer is rationing under a government monopoly.

Central to President Obama’s health-care agenda is a “public option,” i.e., a government-run insurance program. Notwithstanding the government isn’t doing a great job with the insurance firms it already runs (see AIG), it is likely that such an enterprise would quickly come to dominate the market: Backed by Uncle Sam’s strong arm, the insurer would be able to pass along its costs to its private-sector competitors and, like most government enterprises, probably would be exempt from taxation and the thousand unnatural shocks that private-sector business is heir to. Millions would be forced into the government-run program, because the proposed legislation would restrict new private-insurance enrollments after the bill became law. If your employer dropped your coverage, for example, you’d be forbidden under the Democrats’ proposal to buy a new policy in the private market.

The Democrats are trying to bowl Americans over with the rhetoric of crisis, and there’s a good reason for that: The more time Americans have to study this proposal, the less they like it. Obama is falling in the polls, and he is falling in particular on the question of whether Americans trust him on health care. They have good reason to believe that the president is not playing it straight with them. Obama keeps saying that nobody who is satisfied with his current health-insurance plan will be forced out of it, but the House bill would do just that to about 80 million Americans. As a candidate, Obama promised not to raise taxes on the middle class, but his mandates on both individuals and employers amount to hidden taxes on middle-class workers. On top of all this, Obama’s vision comes with a price tag of between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion, and entitlements almost always cost more than originally advertised. Put another way, on health care alone Obama proposes to spend more than the entire U.S. federal budget in 1986.

Conservatives are right on the argument, and the polls suggest that the electorate is increasingly on their side. Their aim should be nothing less than the total defeat of Obamacare.

Unsettling

Who is the real Sonia Sotomayor? At the start of her confirmation hearings, that was the central question: Is she the unremarkable but relatively mainstream jurist of her 17 years as a lower-court judge, or the race-baiting grievance-monger of her many speeches and years of activism at the leftist Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund? After three days of testimonial contortions, three things could confidently be said: We still don’t have an answer to the question; she will sail to confirmation thanks to the wagon-circling by Senate Democrats determined to take credit for elevating the first Hispanic to the high court; and, despite having a filibuster-proof majority that would enable confirmation of any liberal nominee, no matter how extreme, Democrats and Sotomayor herself realized that their interests lay in presenting the nominee as a center-right moderate — one who, at times, sounded more like Robert Bork than like the “wise Latina.”

Some of Sotomayor’s retreats were breathtaking. First and foremost, she adamantly rejected the criterion that got her nominated in the first place, the Obama “empathy” standard: The judge’s only proper function, she said, is to apply “settled” law to the facts of each case. She weaseled about the concept of “settled” — asserting that Supreme Court precedents are only as enduring as the notoriously pliable doctrine of stare decisis requires. There was, however, no mistaking her insistence that judges not base decisions on anything as capricious as their subjective sense of justice for the downtrodden.

In that vein, she stubbornly denied her past radicalism. The set-up for her infamous, oft-repeated remark that a “wise Latina” would make better decisions “than a white male” had been a pointed disagreement with former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who had observed that a “wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases.” Yet Sotomayor now claims she agreed with O’Connor all along — we were all just missing her point. Sotomayor walked away from her recorded comment that federal appeals courts are “where policy is made,” repeating like a mantra that Congress alone makes policy while judges simply apply the law. And despite having only a few months ago told the ACLU of Puerto Rico that judges should resort to foreign law to “help us understand . . . whether our understanding of our own constitutional rights fell into the mainstream of human thinking,” Sotomayor repeatedly stressed her current — and, she claims, non-contradictory — belief that “American law does not permit the use of foreign law or international law to interpret the Constitution.”

Try as she might, the nominee could not explain sweeping under the rug, in a curt, unpublished order, the discrimination claim of New Haven firefighters, most of them white, who were denied promotions even though black applicants did not do well enough on the promotional exam to secure any slots. She postured about having followed precedent but clearly had not. And though she gamely attempted to spin the Supreme Court’s recent reversal of her decision as a “new test,” even the four dissenting Supreme Court justices rejected her indefensible handling of the case.

Nothing — not even the pained cries of leftist legal analysts dismayed by Sotomayor’s confirmation conversion — will derail this nomination. We can take comfort only in the fact that this unimpressive nominee will not be a force on the Court.