Via Pejmanesque, a remark from radical professor of Middle Eastern studies Juan Cole. Regarding last evening's GOP convention speech by Zainab al-Suwaig, an Iraqi woman who supports the overthrow of Saddam and is excited about the potential of her homeland as a free nation, Cole had this to say:

"The Republicans also had an Iraqi woman speak. Apparently they could not find an eloquent Iraqi with good English who still would come and support them. This woman at one point alleged that there have been recent free municipal elections in Iraq. I doubt that very much. Or, if any municipal elections have been held, they wouldn't be considered free or fair if done in the same way in Topeka, Kansas."

I guess it's useless to point out just how outraged the media would be should someone on the right utter such a statement about anyone, anywhere. Not that the disgust wouldn't be justified regardless of the political leanings of the bigot who said such a thing. But the left often drops its guard when the wrong kind of minority speaks up, and Cole has just shown his true colors.

Glenn Reynolds's column at TCS, "Media Meltdown?," is getting a good bit of attention from the blogosphere. Some of his points have been made before, including here and here, but he draws together many strands of the story to present a coherent, and convincing, warning to old media barons.

Anyone who suffered through American cars in the late '70s will love this:

"The biggest problem is that, like most monopolists, they've spent so many years enjoying their position and not worrying about quality that they're left floundering now that competition is exposing their faults. Like the folks at GM who couldn't understand why people were buying Toyotas all of a sudden back in the 1970s, today's Big Media folks are shocked to see ratings and circulation numbers falling while readership for Internet sites skyrockets. And, like the auto executives, they're even starting to mumble about the need for protection.

"But it won't work, of course. And -- much like the release of the Chevrolet Vega, the Ford Fairmont, or the AMC Pacer -- the press's coverage of the 2004 presidential election has revealed an industry in deep trouble."

Via Patterico, Chrenkoff has the ninth installment of his Good News from Iraq. It's a long but worthwhile read, complete with numerous links to sources around the Middle East and at home. Here's one of his opening paragraphs:

"Experts might debate exactly how much water there is in the Iraqi glass, but there is little doubt that - yet again - while the cameras and microphones were pointing towards the carnage, violence and corruption, Iraq has continued its slow and steady march out of its three-decades long nightmare into a much more normal tomorrow. Below are some of the positive developments and good news stories of the past fortnight that for most part received very little media attention. It's a pity because the story of 'Iraq, the phoenix rising from the ashes' is in many ways a lot more interesting, not to say consequential, than the usual steady media diet of 'Iraq, the Wild East.'"

To back this up, he quotes from a recent editorial in the Arab News:

"[L]et us not begrudge Sadr's 15 minutes of fame... Students of journalism, however, know the difference between the events that furnish most of the daily headlines and the undercurrents that shape the broader context of a society's political life. Now what are the undercurrents that, with eyes fixed on the current events, are largely ignored?

"The most important is that post-liberation Iraq, defying great odds, has succeeded in carrying out its political reform agenda on schedule. A governing council was set up at the time promised. It in turn, created a provisional government right on schedule. Next, municipal elections were held in almost all parts of the country. Then followed the drafting of a new democratic and pluralist constitution. Then came the formal end of the occupation and the appointing of a new interim government.

"Earlier this month, the political reconstruction program reached a new high point with the convening of the National Congress."

He closes with this from a young native of Baghdad now at Dartmouth (from the Boston Globe, but the link is now archived):

"Next time you have a drink, make sure you invite Barakat Jassem for a glass of water. Jassem, a native of Baghdad and a one of 18 children, has been until recently working as an English translator for Iraqi TV. Once, when working on a Bette Davis movie, 'The Virgin Queen,' a mistake he made had angered Uday Hussein so much that Jassem was thrown into jail for 30 days. Jassem is now studying at Dartmouth College under the newly reinstated Fulbright program. He has this to say:

"'I see the Americans working hard day and night to establish the basic needs for the Iraqi people... I think people (in America) are divided because it's a war. War is always a bad idea. [But] I want to emphasize this point. For me, it was 100 percent a liberation. There's nothing worse than a dictator.'
It often happens that the people who have been thirsty for a long time can tell you the most about water.'"

Hugh Hewitt talked to some politicos last evening in NYC and reports on some of their thoughts. (Modest observation number 4.) Most interesting to me were their comments (paraphrased by Hewitt) on the new media:

John Podhoretz and David Frum: "New media has won. Old media knows it. And old media are very unhappy."

From Brent Bozell: "Don't underestimate the power of a handful of bloggers, recalling that it was three East Gedrman students who in essence organized the 1989 revolution via a mimeo machine and a battered car."

From Hewitt himself: "The reason the new media is so powerful is that people with opinions no longer need to persuade people to be allowed to persuade people. The gatekeepers are finished."

That last point is crucial and is of course why I'm writing this and why you're reading it. That's not to say that gatekeepers aren't important, per se, but that the gatekeepers of the elite media abused their powers to advance their own agendas rather than engage in consistently rigorous journalism. Like Kerry's implosion over Vietnam, they have only themselves to blame.

At Captain's Quarters, Captain Ed was up early (or late) to record his impressions of the convention's first night. He gives bloggers in attendance a good grade for their perseverance amidst chaos and tight security and wants to know your opinion on how you think bloggers are doing -- so stop by and share your thoughts. I was most taken, however, by his extensive comments on Giuliani's speech. He nails the dangers of appeasement, something I've written about often.

"It's been asked by myself and others what would have happened to Churchill had his advice on Hitler been heeded, even as late as Munich in October 1938? Europe would have gone to war, certainly precipitively in the minds of many. Churchill would have suffered tremendous political damage for his actions. Absent the camps, the Aushcwitzes, the Polands and the Ukraines that followed, the world would have concluded that Churchill was a war monger who loved nothing but battle and the shedding of blood -- a criticism he suffers to this day among a few anyway. And he would have saved tens of millions of people from the death and destruction of Nazi Germany that ensued."

Meanwhile, Power Line has extensive and insightful commentary from the Gardens. For example:

"By far the loudest response McCain got--probably the strongest response anyone got--was when he denounced Michael Moore as 'a disingenuous filmmaker who would have us believe that Saddam’s Iraq was an oasis of peace, when in fact it was a place of indescribable cruelty...' I think the Republicans should do more of this. The problem with Moore isn't that he is fat, crude or unpatriotic, although all of those things are true. His main fault is that he is a liar. He is also the intellectual leader of today's Democratic Party. The Republicans need to do more to hang him around the Democrats' neck, while empasizing his untruthfulness."

And he had this to say about Giuliani, who took it upon himself to make up for big media's silence on 9/11: "Giuliani spent the first part of his speech recalling the events of September 11 and their immediate aftermath. This was important and necessary because of the media embargo on images of the terrorist attacks. Giuliani described watching people jump to their deaths from the upper stories of the World Trade Center and the wall of smoke and dust that rolled down the street when the first tower collapsed. His own leadership, and even heroism, on that day are well known, so the Democrats can't challenge his right to tell those stories. But it is shameful that the media, and in particular the television networks, have adopted a policy of not broadcasting images of September 11, for what appear to be transparently political reasons. So it falls to the Republicans to remind voters what that day was like."

More blog coverage of the convention can be found by following the links on this page.

Could anybody have said it better?

When I opened the New York Times yesterday morning, the article on page A3 caught my eye: "Canada Reinforces Its Disputed Claims in the Arctic." An accompanying photo showed two Canadian soldiers with their Eskimo guide in the far north near the Arctic Circle. Several paragraphs read like something from nineteenth-century British history, including the one I quote below, but with a twist. See if you pick up the hint that things have changed:

"The $4 million exercise is the most prominent sign to date of Canada's intensifying effort to reinforce disputed claims over tens of thousands of miles of Arctic channels and tundra. Once nearly permanently frozen, forbidding and forgotten, the region is today seen by officials from Canada and competing nations as a potential source of both wealth and trouble."

The key words are "once nearly." Read on and you'll find this gem:

"Most important, climate change has begun to make more real the dream of opening a northwest passage that would shorten ship travel between Europe and Asia by thousands of miles, over the decades to come. Canadian policy makers want to reserve the right to regulate and tax such a passage."

Even the Defense Minister can read the meteorological tea leaves: "Defense Minister Bill Graham noted that global warming had created 'new possibilities and new threats' in the Arctic that Canada must adjust to. 'We need more resources up there and we are going to look for ways to deploy them,' he said in an interview. 'The sense is now the time has come.'"

Canada isn't alone. Spurred by the belief that global warming will free up resources and passages in the far north, the Danes have also rediscovered their sense of adventure: "The patrol was Canada's response to an unlikely challenge from Denmark, which in two previous summers had landed marines from ice-cutting frigates on Hans Island, a desolate piece of rock in the Kennedy Channel, between Greenland and Ellesmere Island. The Danes believed that the island and its surrounding waters had enough fishing and gas potential for them to pound Danish flags and plaques into its rocky surface [emphasis added] and stir up a diplomatic incident that is still not settled."

An obvious question is, what if global warming is a myth? What if the variations in weather patterns are so poorly understood (think of the accuracy of your local forecast) that the considerably large group of scientists who don't buy the theory of global warming are correct?

But in many circles, including no doubt the governments of Canada and Denmark, it's at least considered a worthwhile risk to bet on global warming's veracity. Dominic Standish writes at TCS of the ways global warming has become what he calls a "secular faith." In his words, "Many responses to the swarms of locusts and other extreme conditions have been reminiscent of biblical, pre-scientific times. Most media commentators report weather-related events without recourse to the science of climate change. They employ the language of global warming to 'explain' problems in a manner common to pre-modern superstition."

I've written before on the intellectual bankruptcy of the left, something I think we're seeing played out in this year's presidential election. Absent an intellectually coherent guiding philosophy that's open to rigorous debate, positions of any group become solipsistic. The protesters in NYC don't really, I suspect, plan on converting anyone to their cause. And John Kerry seems less interested in answering the charges of the Swift Boat Vets than in silencing them through litigation and threats, just as the campus left has long since become a bastion of pro-censorship rules exercised through speech and conduct codes.

But I still have a question regarding the conflict between our allies in the far north: Were those hammer-wielding Danes wear horned hats?

This nation has a lot to be proud of this week. Don't miss the Virginian-Pilot's front page today.

Israel is done no favors by the likes of mid-level Department of Defense official Larry Franklin, who according to anonymous FBI sources, shared with staffers of AIPAC -- the Israeli lobby in the United States -- a memo with sensitive information about Iran.

If the rumors are true, Franklin needs to be canned, not because what he did was wrong, but because what he did was stupid. There are official diplomatic channels in which intelligence relevant to Israel can be passed along and it's not in a meeting with political action committee with ties to Israel.

Via Instapundit, David Adesnik at Oxblog is all over the real story of the demonstrators in NYC (see my comment # 1 below in today's first post). He has an interesting take on the way journalists covered yesterday's march which is even more damning than what I expected:

"What I can say with a good amount of confidence is that the stories already up in the NYT and WaPo give a very superficial and often misleading impression of what it was what like to be at today's protests."

Then: "The first thing wrong with these stories is their focus on the few inconsequential arrests and mishaps that took place. Many of the journalists I saw just seemed to be waiting for something to go wrong. Because things going wrong is news, whereas the actual ideas and policies favored by the protesters are supposedly boring. . . . At one point, a small commotion broke out when the police escorted a protester away with his arms pinned behind his back. About a dozen officers moved in swiftly to make sure the commotion didn't spread. Then suddenly, dozens and dozens of journalists swarmed toward the knot of police officers like locusts from some biblical plague."

The result among protesters: "If I were a protester, I'd probably feel that the NYT and WaPo did the marchers a disservice by failing to recognize just how orderly and peaceful the protest was and how the organizers successfully defused the most important potential conflict of the day, i.e. the disappointed hope that the protest march would culminate with a massive rally in Central Park."

And yet comment #1 was confirmed (not a difficult call, to be sure): "Now, if I didn't like the protesters, I would tell you that the NYT and WaPo did them a tremendous favor by downplaying the degree to which they represented the leftmost edge of the American political spectrum. I've posted before about what UFPJ stands for, so I won't repeat myself. Suffice it to say that neither the Times nor the Post tells you anything about UFPJ's history or what it stands for."

Misrepresenting the degree of violence in the crowd while whitewashing their ideological radicalism. That's pretty sorry journalism and makes the elite sound like little more than ambulance chasers. "If it bleeds, it leads" seems to apply to the production of news stories well beyond the purview of your local nightly news. Makes you wonder just how much is beyond the purview of the big boys, too.

Steven Taylor at Poliblog wrote an op-ed for yesterday's Mobile Register (registration) reminding us again that Chavez's radicalism may destabilize not only Venezuela but the whole region. Exporting revolution with oil dollars is nothing new -- the Saudis have become adept at it over the years. Doing it through the destruction of a country that formerly served as a model for Latin American democracy, however, is both new and disturbing.

My comments on the recent election, and Jimmy Carter's role in sanctioning Chavez's corruption, may be found here.

Update: Brent thinks I overstated Venezuela's democratic record in the above post, and I'll buy that with the proviso that in pre-Chavez days it was far more of a democracy than it's likely to be under Chavez. Certainly from 1958 onwards the country could have benefited from a thriving entrepreneurial class so that the middle class might have grown considerably, and I didn't mean to imply the existence of an American-style democracy pre-Chavez. As for the election, Rafael Alfonzo of Caracas has a letter to the editor in today's WSJ ($). As a member of the commission that helped negotiate the the election monitoring agreement between the opposition, the Carter Center, and the OAS, he contrasts Jimmy Carter's desire that care and patience be exercised four years ago in Florida with his careless acceptance of the results of Venezuela's election.

The GOP convention this week provides an excellent laboratory in which to examine the role of bloggers and other new media. It's not that earlier conventions weren't covered by talk radio or cable news (in fact, you'll have to turn to FNC, CNN, or C-SPAN for most of the action, including tonight's speeches, since the networks are limiting their coverage). What will be new, of course, is the presence of so many bloggers post-Swift Vets. I think they'll play a significantly greater role in covering the convention and the antics of anti-war mobs than bloggers did in Boston during the Democratic convention for the same reason blogging has taken off in the first place: their adversarial relationship to the mainstream press. Hugh Hewitt and the Captain's Quarters are only two among many superb analysts I'll be reading this week.

Those organs that fawned all over the Kerry camp up in Boston -- the Times, the Post, the Globe, the wire services, the networks -- will no doubt turn a selectively close eye to the GOP in NYC. I say selectively because, for every story they scrutinize, they're bound to ignore others either from ignorance or malice. (John Podhoretz has an insightful column on the old media's blindness to the new players in today's NY Post.) And that's where the bloggers (plus talk radio and cable news) come in. Because many of them share at least some of the President's agenda, they are likely to have plenty of grist for their mills as the week rolls along.

Here are some blog-related developments to look for this week from NYC:

1. The behavior of demonstrators: Will the demonstrators get violent with police and/or destroy property? And will the mainstream press cover it to the same degree as the bloggers might? We know that the old media consistently play down the size of crowds at, say, anti-abortion rallies while playing up opposing events, or that they ignore the wilder elements in gay pride parades while exposing only the unexposed. Those prejudices will be more difficult to get away with this week.

2. Splits among conservatives: Big media always love in-fighting on the right, and not so long ago we had to suffer through the expertise of chameleons like Kevin Phillips and David Gergin to give the "conservative" side of the argument. There was the traditional conservative press, of course, but it was neither instantaneous nor distributed widely enough to counter the defeatist nonsense from the media's favorite spokesmen for what they viewed as the right. Today, the new media can cover those splits more accurately and intelligently. Small fights won't easily be labeled civil wars, and the real splits on the right can be examined with significantly greater knowledge brought to bear on the real causes and effects of such disagreements. (Brent and I commented on one such split here and here.)

3. The tone of the convention. This overlaps some with point #2 above. Many media commentators love to refer to anyone to the right of Michael Bloomberg as "far right," "hard right," or "fundamentalist." Therefore, it follows that just about anyone to Bloomberg's right who delivers a speech will be "divisive," "hate-filled," "intolerant," and "partisan." New media can ensure that the contents of any speech are not drowned out by partisan commentary from self-declared objective reporters. And, for the same reasons they can cover intra-party splits more accurately than most old media folks -- knowledge of the issues -- they'll most likely have a better angle on the overall tone of the affair.

4. Comments from the floor. Dan Rather's comments from the Garden are getting significant attention, but he'll have real competition for breaking real stories once things are under way. Put it this way: If you were a conventioneer on the floor or in a bar, to whom would you feel more comfortable speaking: A network lackey with an axe to grind (the better to chop off your head), or a blogger or talk radio host you trust?

Put on your lab coat and keep tuning in.

Please pardon this aside, but I must make a confession: I made the switch. I bought a Macintosh PowerBook G4 (12" display) last weekend; I love it. If you’re thinking about buying a new computer, I strongly suggest eyeing the new line of Macs. OS X is incredible (and stable), and I can do everything I need without the hassle of crashes or worry of viruses. All this love from someone who has been an anti-Mac troll for years. Kudos to Steve Jobs and his team at Apple for ginning out an excellent product.

Via Pejmanesque, Daniel Drezner quotes from an AP story on Philippine President President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo's ban on allowing Filipinos from going to Iraq to help rebuild it. Her action follows the kidnapping of Filipino Angelo dela Cruz by Iraqi thugs. In exchange for his release, Arroyo agreed to pull Filipino troops from the Coalition ahead of schedule. During a protest demanding the lifting of the travel ban, police used water canon to disperse the crowd and made arrests.

The protesters want to take advantage of relatively lucrative contracts with the U.S. military, which would pay them some $650 per month ($7,800 per year) in a country with a per capita GDP of $4,600. Forty percent of the population lives below the poverty level and over eleven percent is unemployed.

Through her actions, President Arroyo is hampering the ability of workers to escape the dire poverty of their homeland and support their families as best they can. The free movement of people provides for both those needs. Absent that freedom, they are left to the designs of local employers and corrupt government officials. Like all workers, they desire alternatives, and the competition provided by their free movement is needed to help force domestic industry to modernize and improve its treatment of workers.

Beyond that, Arroyo's cave-in awards the radicals in Iraq who'd like nothing better than to rid the country of "infidels" from outside the area. As Drezner says, this is what happens when you appease terrorists.

As I watch the storm over Kerry's Vietnam record grow, I believe that future historians will mine the historiography of both the mainstream media and the blogosphere in much the way they do manuscript collections, old newspapers, and diaries. Because in addition to the more traditional scholarly and primary source literature that every important election leaves behind, this one will be the first to include blogs.

That will be an immense and important task. No one could have predicted only a couple of years ago that blogs would force the hands of the major media. Rather than killing stories through neglect, the big papers and networks have been embarrassed into covering them, albeit often late and with a sneer. Wilfred McClay was correct when he wrote here this past week that blogs are often parasitic to the mainstream media. That is, few of us possess the resources (or the time) to do the footwork necessary to uncover and interview sources. That said, Hugh Hewitt, Glenn Reynolds, Captain’sQuarters, Powerline, and others did indeed engage in primary source work, and their stories on the Swift Boat Vets – including research into the veracity of the Vets’ claims – have played key roles in both keeping the story alive and in bringing about additional coverage from the big papers. That role, and the roles played by countless smaller blogs, has already had an enormous impact on the coverage of an election still two months away.

In some sense blogs are fulfilling a mission analogous to that held by referees for scholarly journals. Once an article is submitted to such a publication, an editor sends it to other specialists so that its integrity can be verified. In the humanities, the goal isn't to ensure universal agreement with the author's conclusions – that’s not the way such scholarship works. Within the sciences, a key goal is the possibility of replicating the results claimed by the authors. Such a system can help ensure that charlatans are kept out of key journals or presses.

But of course any system is only as good as the people who oversee it, and when those responsible for ensuring that conclusions are supportable through traditional methods of research supplement advocacy for fair-mindedness, a system is seriously weakened. That’s what happened to America’s mainstream media in the post-WWII period: liberal elitism supplanted what was earlier seen as partisan coverage of major events, but it did so under the aegis of objectivity. Of course, similarly slanted coverage posing as enlightened thought occurred in the pre-war period – think of the loathsome and mendacious denial of Stalin’s starvation policy in Ukraine that won the New York Times’s Walter Duranty a Pulitzer – but it wasn’t until after the war that a sufficient number of major dailies, supplemented by the new medium of television, tilted the balance of daily news coverage.

Dave Kopel, writing in today’s Rocky Mountain News, compares the presidential election of 1964 with today’s. Lyndon Johnson lied about his WWII service baldly and repeatedly, and yet, as Kopel argues, journalists gave him a pass. Their willful ignorance had two principal causes: first, any reporter attempting to break the story would have found his story buried. That’s because of the second reason: LBJ was “the darling of the establishment media” in 1964. He carried the mantel of the martyr of Camelot, JFK, and his opponent, Barry Goldwater, was the politician most hated by the left since Joe McCarthy.

Jonathan Last of the Weekly Standard chronicles the blogoshere’s role in the Swift Vets’ story:

“But the big news on August 6 was that Regnery allowed people to download the ‘Christmas in Cambodia’ section of O'Neill's book. While [Keith] Olbermann and others were worrying about mystical jazz, the new media swung into action. Hugh Hewitt, Glenn Reynolds, Powerline, and other bloggers immediately began investigating the book's allegations. The blog JustOneMinute was the first to find the 1986 ‘seared —seared’ speech in which Kerry described his memory of being in Cambodia in December 1968. On August 8, Reynolds took his digital camera to the University of Tennessee law library and photographed the section of the Congressional Record with the Kerry speech, further verifying the chapter’s central claim. That same weekend, Al Hunt talked about the Swift boat ad on CNN's Capital Gang, calling it ‘some of the sleaziest lies I've ever seen in politics.’”

As he goes on to prove, and as close observers know, mainstream news organs finally paid some attention to the story, but most of that coverage was spurred by Kerry’s denunciations of the Swift Vets and did little more than provide an echo chamber for his denials. Yet Last’s principal point, which he shares with bloggers, remains: “[T]he baying of the Times and the rest of the old media is a sign of capitulation. Against their will, the best-funded and most prestigious journalists in America have been forced to cover a story they want no part of – or at the very least, they've been compelled to explain why they aren't covering it.”

Which brings us back to the sources for scholars of this election. If you’re still getting used to footnote citations of web sites, wait until you see them for blogs. Not most blogs, mind you, any more than footnotes include most articles or most books. But certain key blogs that uncovered important information, or whose corroboration of claims gave life to stories whose impact, in retrospect, can fairly be called significant, will make their way into the literature of the period. As will, no doubt, the rise of the blogosphere and other alternative media (talk radio, cable television) and their collective roles in transforming opinion-making in America. We’ve turned a corner, and historians will be looking back to discern how we did it, and what it means.

Patterico has, with the help of Instapundit, forced the hand of the LA Times. As he explains, the Times ran a story charging that no members of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were aboard John Kerry's boat in Vietnam in spite of the fact that Steve Gardner, a member of the group, did indeed serve on Kerry's boat. Despite repeated efforts, the Times continued to ignore their mistake, but today ran a correction (registration).

I wouldn't be surprised if other readers contacted the Times about the error, but there's no question that the attention brought about by Patterico and Glenn Reynolds made a difference. It took the paper seven days to act, and although I appreciate the difficulties involved in making any correction, better fact-checking and less politicking right up front would have made for better journalism and PR. Just a few years ago, ignored letters to the editor would have remained, well, ignored.

Rock stars and professors should stay out of politics, because they usually don't get it, with the exception of hard rocker Alice Cooper of course, who says he was disgusted to learn about plans by Bruce Springsteen, R.E.M., Sheryl Crow and James Taylor to do a series of concerts to promote the Democratic ticket. "If you're listening to a rock star in order to get your information on who to vote for, you're a bigger moron than they are. Why are we rock stars? Because we're morons. We sleep all day, we play music at night and very rarely do we sit around (with) the Washington Journal."

While Niall Ferguson just might sit around reading the Washington Journal in his office overlooking Harvard Yard, after reading his column Republicans for Kerry, he should probably cancel his subscription and leave the political prognaticating to Alice Cooper or someone else (by the way I'm impressed that Alice Cooper knows of the Washington Journal).

It's Ferguson's premise that conservatives would be better off if George Bush fails to win a second term? Here's why:

"If he secures re-election, President Bush can be relied upon to press on with a foreign policy based on pre-emptive military force, to ignore the impending fiscal crisis (on the Cheney principle that 'Deficits don't matter') and to pursue socially conservative objectives like the constitutional ban on gay marriage. Anyone who thinks this combination will serve to maintain Republican unity is dreaming; it will do the opposite. Meanwhile, the Dems will have another four years to figure out what the Labour Party finally figured out: It's the candidate, stupid. And when the 2008 Republican candidate goes head-to-head with the American Tony Blair, he will get wiped out."

But Ferguson makes his analysis on a set of faulty assumptions. First, he presumes there is waiting in the wings of the Democratic Party an "American Tony Blair," quite a remarkable assumption indeed after witnessing post-9/11 the incredible leadership of the man currently residing at 10 Downing Street. Second, he reveals his poor judgment of skill and character when comparing President Bush to Former Prime Minister John Major -- no doubt a lovely man, but one that who the charisma, political acumen (just think of the Swift Vote Vets ads) and fortitude of the current President. And perhaps most insulting to the soldiers sitting in front of that God-forsaken shrine in Najaf, he forgets that September 11 happened; that we're at war -- a circumstance that John Major chose not to face in his refusal to send troops to Bosnia. No, President Bush would be better compared to another British Prime Minister: Winston Churchill

Per my comments from earlier today on Chavez, Andres Oppenheimer of the Miami Herald, writing for PetroleumWorld.com, puts the consequences of Chavez's rule in perspective:

"If Chávez won, it was thanks to a combination of massive intimidation, unabashed use of state resources for propaganda, and the use of $1.6 billion from the country's oil income for cash subsidies to the poor. Chávez handed out $160 a month in cash to hundreds of thousands of people who for the first time received something concrete from their government."

And: "In addition, intimidation was visible everywhere. The Chávez government in recent months fired thousands of government workers who had signed a 3.4-million signature petition to hold Sunday's referendum. And it installed 12,000 fingerprinting machines in voting places for Sunday's vote, allegedly to keep people from voting twice, but at the same time spreading fears that people's vote would not be secret."

The intimidation and beatings continue: "On Thursday, while touring the downtown Caracas area of El Centro, I saw the whole place covered with pro-Chávez signs but not one single one from the opposition. 'Every time the opposition tries to put up a sign, the chavistas beat them violently,' the opposition mayor of Caracas, Alfredo Peña, told me. 'My own office has been attacked 26 times by armed chavistas on the government payroll.'''

Now that his rule has been sanctioned by Carter and the feckless OAS, Chavez and his supporters feel free to tighten their grip on the rest of society. It's good to remember just how extensive Chavez's power grab already is. Again Oppenheimer: "Chávez already controls Congress, the Supreme Court, the electoral tribunal, the central bank, the armed forces and the PDVSA oil monopoly. Pro-Chávez legislators in Congress have already proposed bills to curtail press freedoms and to dismantle the Caracas police and other local police forces run by opposition mayors. In addition, Chávez has promised to strengthen his Bolivarian Circles, his Cuban-modeled neighborhood watch committees."

Oppenheimer thinks the 45% of the population who're vehemently opposed to Chavez, combined with international pressure, may be sufficient to prevent him from closing down the opposition press, which he acknowledges are the "last line of defense against his near-absolute powers." And he thinks that oil prices will fall sooner or later, signaling an end to Chavez's ability to keep the unearned cash flowing to the poor and bringing on their discontent. Given the violence and intimidation already rampant there, however, such predictions seem overly optimistic. Especially with the U.S. State Department firmly behind the Castro-wannabe.

Mary Anastasia O'Grady is proving to be the Dorothy Rabinowitz for Venezuelans. Just as the irrepressible Ms. Rabinowitz wrote exhaustively in the WSJ about the horrendous and illegal jailing by Massachusetts of members of the Amirault family, so Ms. O'Grady keeps coming back to Venezuela's recent election. I think today's Journal column ($), wherein she notes that the EU refused to monitor the election because of Chavez's insistence that they accept significant limits on their monitoring capabilities, is fatal to Carter's reputation, such as it is. When even the EU can't find a reason to support an anti-American leader, you know something's up.

Such as: "Given how Jimmy Carter's presidency turned out, it is not surprising that he is desperate to salvage his legacy as an international election observer. That effort took a turn for the worse this week when verifiable reports emerged conflicting directly with Mr. Carter's rendition of what happened in the Aug. 15 Venezuelan recall referendum. The Carter claims of omniscient oversight aside, testimony from reliable independent sources shows that the process did not meet any impartial standards of fairness. To start with, observer rules were absurd, so much so that although the European Union wanted to play an observer role, it graciously declined in the interest of honesty. 'Unfortunately, it has not been possible to secure with the Venezuelan electoral authorities the conditions to carry out an observation in line with the Union's standard methodology,' the European Commission declared."

This is damning, because it reveals Jimmy's letter to the editor of the Journal to be as vacuous as I charged at the time. He omitted the details either because he's so naive and ignorant that he really doesn't know them, or because they would sink his case that Chavez didn't steal the election.

I don't claim to be either a computer whiz or an elections expert, but anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of the modern world should understand that electronic voting machines can be programmed to manipulate results. The only way to ensure fairness is to allow objective monitoring of elections, and a large part of that must include the freedom to inspect the software of those machines. Ms. O'Grady supplies some stats:

"To support his case, Mr. Carter keeps repeating in the press that Súmate had the same "quick count" as he did. This only creates confusion because 'quick count' totals are merely the sum of totals coming from Chávez-controlled voting software. The only way to check the accuracy of the government's claim of "victory" was to count ballots. But as Súmate describes in clear detail, Mr. Chávez blocked that process: 'When the authorities decided against counting the ballots, the CNE agreed to a very limited audit with the other actors of the process, to count the ballots of only 1% of the ballot boxes, in other words, 192 ballot boxes. Only 76 of the 192 ballot boxes were audited, concentrated in 20 of the 336 municipalities around the country. Promoters of 'SI' [Chávez's opposition] were present at only 27 of these audits while international observers were present at only 10 tables. Inexplicably, this did not represent a cause for concern or alarm to the international observers who endorsed the partial results issued by the CNE without that fundamental piece of information.'"

More statistics that reveal at least highly questionable voting patterns can be found at the Salon blog Venezuela. He cites the work of two Venezuelans who are Professors in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Bruno Sanso and Raquel Prado, to show highly irregular patterns from the official voting results as compared with the exit polls that Carter and other Chavez supporters reject.

A Journal editorial yesterday ($) hits State for its absurd, self-defeating response to the bad news: Unquestioned embrace of the hemisphere's newest dictator. "On Monday, a Foggy Bottom spokesman declared that, 'In order to address those charges of election fraud, an audit was conducted. The audit found that -- did not find any basis to call into doubt the results of the elections.'
As 'audits' go, however, this was akin to Arthur Andersen scrubbing Enron. The sample for the audit was selected by the National Electoral Council (CNE), which is controlled by Mr. Chavez, and was too small to be considered statistically reliable."

A message for Venezuelans: Elements of the conservative press here, joined by bloggers and (I assume) some talk radio hosts, are your friends. The State Department, run by pro-status quo lackeys who rarely meet a dictator they don't embrace, former President Carter, who knows a thing or two about hugging thugs, and the mainstream press are happy to see you go under the boot heel of Chavez.

Stay tuned.

As I told a friend the other day, you know you're hooked on blogging when you feel uninformed because you can't get to a pc. And there's no doubt that at those times you're at least less informed than you need be. We hosted family this week, but I'm back at the keyboard.

On Tuesday I posted comments by Wilfred McClay, "The Passing of an Era?" (If you didn't read it, our upsurge in traffic tells me you may like it.) Two sentences of that fine blog stand out. To the question of why so many media elites, among them Chris Matthews and Tom Oliphant, are "reacting with such uncontained fury and condescension," McClay says:

"It’s because the case of Kerry is a proxy for a whole set of assumptions that the boomer elites have made about the world, and managed to install as our conventional wisdom, about the arrogance of American power, the unmitigated evil of Nixon, the goodness and altruism and truthfulness of the antiwar movement (and therefore themselves), and so on. That whole complacent and self-congratulatory narrative---which is, in some sense, encapsulated in Kerry’s famous testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee---is being implicitly challenged now."

He then writes: "It’s all very well to make the 'long march' to control institutions. But what happens when those institutions have lost their commanding authority? What kind of information environment are they, and we, now entering?"

Those are keen observations and crucial questions. What happens when the institutions through which a dominant elite exercises control over much of a society cease to enable the continuation of that control? The boomer elites are faced with a rear-guard action to preserve their status lest they descend into mere remnant status. But that action is bound to be futile if indeed central institutions have been so hollowed out through the perfidy of those same elites that they're significantly weaker than most people imagine.

The institutions in question -- the networks, many big newspapers, news magazines, academe -- have ridden the boomer wave for three and a half decades now. Partly through the spinelessness of the previous generation of academics, absurd and naive ideas were accorded a level of respect they never deserved. The anti-Americanism that passed for high thought in many quarters was never more than bastardized Marxism, but its dominance of university life allowed it to (temporarily) ignore its critics, many of whom moved to think tanks and conservative publications. And blogs.

But the blogosphere, joined by talk radio and the conservative press, is undercutting boomer elites by doing an end run around their declining institutions. It's helping new institutions and new communities to form around ideas, opinions, and shared interests. Big media hate that, since it breaks their comfortable monopoly, but they're powerless to stop it. Ranting is the natural reaction of a child who is denied his wants, since he possesses neither the reasoning power nor the vocabulary to formulate a rational response. We're seeing the rant of media (and academic) elites softened through decades of self-congratulatory success.

I'll have much more to say on the superb article recommended by Wilfred McClay, "Media Matters: A Devil's Bargain," by Frederick Turner. If you enjoy this and similar blogs, you'll find Turner's work well worth the time. But let me end with his concluding sentences:

"As such institutions as coffee-houses, town meetings, old fashioned barber shops, primary caucuses, soap box gatherings, debates, and suchlike fell into disuse, and the networks and newspapers took over, the Public itself began to disappear, to be replaced by a segmented demographic mass swayed by centralized journalistic voices and shaped by polls. What is now happening is that rather swiftly a new Public is forming, self-organizing around Google and link lists and blog chatrooms. And it will demand a new Res Publica."

[Note: Democracy Project received the following poem for submission to our blog. Russ is a Vietnam veteran, in the 101st Airborne Division no less, and obviously has been reading our posts of late regarding media bias in the coverage of the Swift Vote Veterans for Truth. Enjoy and thanks Russ for your submission. Brent Tantillo]

For years we have said as we've watched and read,
That the Media is liberally left leaning.
When news only we sought, what we usually got
Was some coiffed commentator's "true" meaning.
Just seeking the news, we instead got their views
And too much Peter Jennings-like preening.

We are fair they declare and your charge is unfair
Everything we put out is uncanted.
Then they snidely deride any charges they've lied
Though it's clear where their left feet are planted.
They deny overmuch liberal leanings and such
While it's plain they're all Rather slanted.

What they call reporting we see as distorting
So obvious that it does appall us.
But they think we're all sheep, unthinking, asleep,
And care less if their bias does gall us.
As Sunday eves dreadful they feed us a headful
Of that oh so impartial Mike Wallace.

And as for the press, what a self-righteous mess,
Intoning our right to know all.
While the grand New York Times, dismisses and slimes
Those, who for the truth, loudly call.
And the Washington Post sets it columnist host
To impugning these men, one and all.

So election year's here and it's crystalline clear
That John Kerry's the media's hero.
They praise him in war and completely ignore
Those brave men who rate him a zero.
With utter disdain for truth in the main
This Media's fiddling like Nero.

At some future date, when it's far, far too late,
To ever atone for their bias,
Finally faced with their fate that they carry no weight,
All those talking heads will be so pious,
As without any shame they will loudly declaim
How on earth did that phony get by us?

Russ Vaughn
2d Bn, 327th Parachute Infantry Regiment
101st Airborne Division
Vietnam 65-66

The previous post is a superb essay by Wilfred McClay, wherein he argues that the mainstream media, reflective of the unctuous, arrogant boomer generation, is getting its due with the Kerry fiasco. We've commented on this topic here before -- most notably here, here, and here.

Other bloggers are following this story with remarkable vigor. Some of the best commentary I've seen is on The Truth Laid Bear, where you'll find this:

"Another thought from the Dept. of Conspiracies: Ok, now we've all discussed in the past how Bush is extremely good at luring his opponents out onto a limb and then sawing it off. Consider that it is entirely possible that Bush might be able to use this moment to shame the existing 527's into withdrawing, or at least curtailing, their participation in the remainder of the campaign.

"Putting on my tinfoil hat for a moment, could neutralizing 527's have been Bush's plan all along? With SBVT out in front showing what an impact a 527 can have on the campaign, that gave Bush the excuse to come out against all of them --- which he has just done. He and the RNC are now perfectly positioned to keep the pressure on the Democratic 527's to shut the hell up.

Is this the Mother-Of-All-Rope-A-Dopes?"

Perhaps a better formulation of this would hold that the Bush folks, seeing Kerry's campaign supported by 527s to a much greater degree than the GOP and knowing that his reliance on his Vietnam record made him particularly vulnerable to questioning it, has played the situation almost perfectly. Otherwise, you might have to assume that the Bush folks are in contact with Swift Vets, which seems unlikely given Rove's reputation for caution. When your opponent's hanging himself . . .

TLB links to OpenSecrets.org, where you'll find Swift Boat Veterans for Truth has spent $158,750. Compare that to some anti-Bush 527s: Media Fund ($28,127,488), America Coming Together ($26,905,450), and Moveon.org ($9,086,102).

The rich lefties who sought to remove money from politics weren't any more serious about actually doing that than they are about living simply or donating their wealth to the Federal government voluntarily. For a bunch that claims to see money as the root of all evil, it comes in pretty handy to have a big stash around when you need it.

[Note: Democracy Project board member Wilfred McClay has contributed the essay below to our blog and we're most grateful for his participation. A historican of American intellectual history, he is SunTrust Bank Chair of Excellence in Humanitities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Prof. McClay is also a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and a member of the Society of Scholars at the James Madison Program at Princeton University. He's a regular contributor to the Weekly Standard, Commentary, and First Things, among many publications.
Winfield Myers]

"The Passing of an Era?"

I’m hardly the only one to be struck by the vehement, uncontained rage of media figures like Chris Matthews and Tom Oliphant, and the sweeping, completely unearned condescension of the New York Times and Washington Post, directed at the Swift Boat Vets and their gallant campaign against John Kerry’s candidacy. Why such an angry, petulant---but also, be it noted, completely self-righteous---reaction? Why the shift in tone, the loss of control? It seems to me that, aside from the obvious partisan particulars, there are two larger and interlocking reasons for this, and taken together, they suggest why the struggles now underway may have consequences far beyond their immediate content.

First, it seems we are experiencing one of those moments when history shifts its gears, and the accredited elites cannot seem to grasp what is happening, and cling desperately to the pieces of their fraying reputation. It’s a shift that the army of talented bloggers out there, part of one of the most genuinely populist movements ever to arise in modern American politics, has been announcing for a long time---perhaps a little prematurely and self-interestedly, but what they have been predicting is now clearly upon us. The baby-boomer generation’s journalistic and academic elites sought, and gained, control over the nation’s chief organs of knowledge production, accreditation, and communication, with all the enormous power and influence that has entailed. But now the Gramscian monopoly is crumbling, and they cannot see how they are themselves largely to blame for their own discrediting. The moves by Kerry’s campaign to stifle discourse---threaten booksellers, bully publishers, file lawsuits, seek regulatory restraints---are all too indicative of a reflex to control speech, and thereby deprive a democratic society of the oxygen it needs to thrive. Those of us who live and work in universities have been all too familiar with this reflex, which has been more triumphant than not in the academy, to the enduring detriment of academic discourse. But it is much harder to control and stifle journalistic and non-traditional media of expression. The credential-flashing of Mr. Oliphant (who somehow neglected to mention that his daughter is employed by the Kerry campaign, an uncomfortable fact brought out by the bloggers) looks more and more like the flash of an empty suit.

For those who have chafed under the years of this so-called mainstream media’s arrogant domination, this really is a remarkable moment in our nation’s history, in which one feels the atmosphere becoming palpably freer, as the big organs of propaganda show themselves to be permanently weakened. It would be far too much to say that it doesn’t matter anymore what the Times says, or what Time, Newsweek, and the major TV networks do. That’s clearly not so. But they continue to discredit themselves, in ways that are almost beyond repair. If they want to know why Fox News and the blogosphere have been so successful, they need only look (to quote a prominent Democratic politician) deep into the mirror of their own souls. These large media will not go away, and the blogosphere is parasitic upon it in ways that it does not always acknowledge. But the MSM will never again be able to operate without the potent check of the alternative media, a new epicycle of checks-and-balances that reflects the genius, and continuing fertility, of American politics. This is a very, very healthy development for American democracy.

There is a second deeper reason why people like Matthews, Oliphant, et al. are reacting with such uncontained fury and condescension. It’s because the case of Kerry is a proxy for a whole set of assumptions that the boomer elites have made about the world, and managed to install as our conventional wisdom, about the arrogance of American power, the unmitigated evil of Nixon, the goodness and altruism and truthfulness of the antiwar movement (and therefore themselves), and so on. That whole complacent and self-congratulatory narrative---which is, in some sense, encapsulated in Kerry’s famous testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee---is being implicitly challenged now. Bush’s foreign policy challenges it, and if it can be shown that Kerry is a comprehensive liar---and in fact the Cambodia lies alone, which have been admitted to, would surely have been enough to end a Republican candidate’s entire career---it calls into question everything about the great boomer narrative. It threatens their sense of world-historical rectitude, their moral amour-propre. Hence the indignant reactions. They cannot and will not give in gracefully on this; but they don’t know how to fight back effectively. So expect to see the same sneering and dismissive gestures, and expect them to seem increasingly ineffective. It’s all very well to make the “long march” to control institutions. But what happens when those institutions have lost their commanding authority? What kind of information environment are they, and we, now entering?

That is a vast subject for another occasion, but I recommend that readers of this blog take a look at a brilliant exploration of this theme by Frederick Turner at Tech Central Station. This analysis, which deserves to be widely promulgated and discussed, suggests that, as so often happens in history, this great institution (i.e., the mainstream media) may be losing its power because of its own folly.

That was the mantra of the writing center at which I was employed while a grad student. I think the ideal holds true.

A piece in today’s OpinionJournal.com discounts to some degree the essential skill of writing. Although I didn’t attend Harvard, I did get a business degree, and I must say writing is crucial. It’s not an academic skill; it’s a life skill — all students, including business students, should do it well.

I have family visiting and was out of town for a couple of days, so my blogging time is very limited for the moment. But I can't let Jimmy Carter's letter to the editor in today's WSJ pass by without comment. Brother Jimmy is responding to the devastating column by Mary Anastasia O'Grady last week, which I commented on here.

Jimmy's letter amounts to little more than a vague, finger-wagging lecture. He supplies no details and rebuts none of Ms. O'Grady's charges. The man whose Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, resigned rather than approve of military action to free Americans held by Iranian thugs has no recourse beyond a bland recitation of events. If this is how he teaches Sunday school down in Plains, his pupils' most prayerful moments must occur as they stifle their urge to scream (or sleep) as he drones on about good Christian generalities.

But piety is never an adequate substitute for knowledge; far less can sanctimoniousness stand in for virtue. Carter admits that the military had control of the voting machines after the polls closed, but his defense of this brazen act -- that it's always this way down there -- neither dispels suspicions of fraud nor takes into account the often violent, revolution-plagued atmosphere in contemporary Venezuela. Nor does he broach the fact that Chavez's thugs opened fire on unarmed protestors -- something my friend Thor Halvorssen wrote about last week in the WSJ and on which I commented here and here.

Today's Miami Herald runs a column by Carlos Alberto Montaner that again pins the blame on corrupt computer programmers. As Ms. O'Grady argued, it isn't difficult for voting machines to be set to cap the number of anti-Chavez votes:

"There is also a reasonable accusation that the number of 'yes' votes at some polling stations was 'capped' by software tampering. The charge is supported by the discovery, in some locations, of two or three machines recording the exact same number of 'yes' votes and substantially more 'no' votes. The opposition is claiming that it has proof that this occurred at 500 polling stations. Again, if Mr. Carter and the OAS observers had demanded an open auditing process instead of blindly endorsing government claims, cheating would have been uncovered. But Chávez refused open audits and the observers went along with him."

Carlos Alberto Montaner thinks there is a possible solution that takes into account the inability of the Carter Center to back up its claims:

"What to do? In my opinion, the most sensible thing would have been not to make a pronouncement, but rather create an international tribunal of experts to analyze and verify the electoral results. After all, neither the representatives of the Carter Center sent to Venezuela nor the OAS observers have the technical capability to analyze criminal manipulations of computer software."

He concludes: "I began this article conceding that I had erred by believing the electoral predictions in Venezuela. How did I err? I erred by believing that, faced with a huge defeat, Chávez would have to submit to the will of the people. Chávez was not counting on the people for his victory. A handful of crooked computer programmers would suffice. I should have realized this sooner. My regrets."

That puts Mr. Montaner ahead of Carter, who never met a dictator he didn't trust.

Sunday’s Houston Chronicle delivers a surprisingly unbiased article on the ten-year anniversary of the GOP’s Contract with America, a brilliant strategic stroke by then-GOP leader Newt Gingrich.

I was fortunate recently to pick a paperback copy of the Contract, which I enjoyed reading immensely. It hearkens back to Barry Goldwater in many ways, and I appreciate its simple beauty.

But the Chronicle points to a sad truth: the GOP has moved away from the conservative principles it embraced in 1994. Republicans control the world, and I’m not sure that’s necessarily a good thing (not always, at least).

Pat Buchanan in his new book points to the left-leaning paunch that has grown from the GOP’s spendthrift nature of late. Are we “libertarians who find a home in the Republican party” in danger of losing that home? Frankly, I little care to squat elsewhere, but President George W. Bush is my man.

Let’s just hope he’s reading up on Jesse Helms for post-Nov. 2 inspiration.

My friend Thor Halvorssen emailed from Venezuela to say that his mother, about whom he wrote in the WSJ last week (I commented here) to say that she is improving, but there's a chance that she will be crippled for life. Hopefully, she'll make a full recovery and will be up and around in a few months. Please keep her in your thoughts and prayers.

He says that the situation in Venezuela has "gone from bad to worse. Beyond the betrayal by Carter (he really seems completely uninterested in knowing more about the existing situation, but rather just wants the opposition to shut
up and let Chavez get on with taking control of what remains of the country so he can consolidate his 'Bolivarian Revolution') there are many new developments that make it apparent that we were all victims of a sophisticated electronic swindle. This is not surprising. For Chavez eight more years of government would mean U.S. $1 trillion in revenues. In a lawless country this is a hefty reward for the victor. More so if he can perpetuate himself
in power. He has stated repeatedly that he does not intend to
give up power until 2021."

This is a dire situation in a country whose location and oil resources make it vital to America's future. We shouldn't let it slip off the front pages, or we'll all pay for it down the road. As for Jimmy Carter -- I don't have the time to comment now, but I have plenty more to say.

The Venezuelan blogger I mention in the update below is in fact called The Devil's Excrement (Satan's Poop is the copyright name). He has extensive commentary on the voting machine controversy and his blog is well worth reading.

Satan's Excrement is explained at the top of the blog: "A famous Venezuelan referred to oil as the devil's excrement. For countries, easy wealth appears indeed to be the sure path to failure. Venezuela might be a clear example of that." Fareed Zakaria would agree.

Daniel Henninger poses a poignant and altogether salient question in his column on today’s OpinionJournal.com: How many Olympians are free to compete today thanks to American interventionism?

Henninger points to an American ideal of doing what’s right — albeit not necessarily “neoconservatism” — that the United States will spread democracy when and where it can. And so it has in many, many places:

It baffles me still that critics of President Bush and his liberation of Iraq remain steadfast in their hatred. Can they not see the good that comes from freeing people from the heel of tyranny? Someday soon, I hope, for the truth will set them free.

And the truth is that the people of Iraq, Croatia, Afghanistan and so many other countries are free because of American courage to do the right thing when fate put freedom on the line.

As a resident of Northern Virginia, who hesitantly crosses over the Potomac each morning to work in downtown DC, I couldn't agree more with Win's Sins of Omission I blog earlier today, as evidenced by the fact that the Washington Post barely covered the Unfit for Command story until it ran this refutation of it on yesterday's front page and then again today with this story, also on the front page, claiming that the group of Swift Boat Veterans is "a front for Bush."

First off, whether the group is a front for Bush or not, the Democrats started this mudfight with Terry McAuliffe calling Bush "AWOL" when he served in the Air National Guard. Kerry said "Bring it On" and his fellow Swifties did and now Kerry doesn't like it.

Having been in close contact with the Bush Campaign in 2000, I can assure you there is absolutely no coordination between the Swift Boat Veterans and the Campaign because Karl Rove will make sure of it. A close friend once formed an ethnic group supporting Bush and made the mistake of contacting Rove in an e-mail to tell him about it. Within the hour a Bush-Cheney attorney was on the phone demanding the group be dissolved, the website shut down, and the friend was personally castigated for his stupidity. That's how tight a ship and how serious the Bush-Cheney team takes the campaign finance laws regarding coordination. Maybe Kerry-Edwards handles its relations with MoveOn.Org differently?

In the previous post I address the return of open partisanship among the media elite and use the ongoing Christmas-in-Cambodia story as an example. The same partisanship is on display in the coverage of Sunday's election in Venezuela, which I commented on here and here. The WSJ's news and editorial pages are almost alone in entertaining the possibility that Chavez has stolen the election. The New York Times, in an "analysis" remarkable for its contentiousness even by their own standards, blames Chavez's hostility to America (and, I might add, democrats) on American hostility to his regime. Their take is summed up in the article's title: "The Chavez Victory: A Blow to the Bush Administration."

The Journal's news room ($) is considerably fairer, although you have to keep reading to get to the more skeptical lines:

"[O]ne Carter official acknowledged that their initial monitoring of Sunday's vote left some questions unanswered. Venezuelan election officials had agreed with the opposition to audit 1% of the 19,200 voting machines -- or 192 machines. The Carter Center was supposed to audit five machines, and the OAS another eight, of that number, according to officials from the Carter Center. On the night of the vote, however, the Carter Center and OAS audited only one machine each -- in part because voting didn't end until early Monday and workers from both organizations were exhausted. They say, however, that results from both audits matched the electronic record.

"The wider audit also had problems. Just 84 of a planned 192 audits were carried out, according to the National Electoral Council. The government says opposition members were present at 64 of those, but opposition officials say they witnessed just 27 audits. Furthermore, some of the government's audits weren't carried out properly, officials from the Carter Center say. For instance, officials counted the total number of ballots, but not how many were 'yes' votes and how many were 'no' votes. Despite the problems, both former President Jimmy Carter and OAS Secretary General Cesar Gaviria publicly endorsed the results at a news conference midday Monday, based mostly on a so-called quick count of computerized results from the stations -- something that wouldn't have detected manipulation of the electronic vote count."

Well, that's a bit of a problem, no?

The Journal's Mary Anastasia O'Grady ($) jumps all over this mess in her weekly Americas column. Noting the yawning gaps of such non-monitoring efforts, she writes:

"On Monday, the Carter Center along with the head of the monumentally meaningless Organization of American States, Cesar Gaviria, endorsed Chávez's claims of victory in the Venezuelan recall referendum, rather too hastily it now seems. The problem was that the 'observers' hadn't actually observed the election results. Messrs. Carter and Gaviria were only allowed to make a 'quick count,' that is look at the tally sheets spat out by a sample of voting machines. They were not allowed to check this against ballots the machines issued to voters as confirmation that their votes were properly registered. If there was fraud, as many Venezuelans now suspect, it could have been discovered if the ballots didn't match the computer tallies. The tallies alone were meaningless. The problem was clear by Tuesday but it didn't stop the State Department spokesman Adam Ereli from chiming in. 'The people of Venezuela have spoken,' he proclaimed."

And John Lott of AEI told her that "You can easily write a program that tells the voting machine to record something different in its memory than what it prints out on the receipt that is to be dropped in the ballot box."

Ms. O'Grady is right to take the administration to task for its cave-in to forces at State, the OAS, and within the pro-status-quo academic community. "But Americans have a right to expect a sterner approach from the administration of George W. Bush. State's endorsement of this referendum without a fair audit is a sorry betrayal of not only the Venezuelan people but American ideals. It is tantamount to yielding to terrorism. Observing Washington's supine reaction, Chávez will not hesitate to escalate his efforts to restore authoritarianism on the South American continent."

Pejmanesque is following this story; no update yet on the condition of Thor Halvorssen's mother.

Update: Via Swanky Conservative, a Venezuelan blogger at Salon with the bizarre name Satan's Poop has photos of the shooting that killed one woman and wounded Thor's mother. He also helps explain the seemingly unlikely "coincidence" that in about 500 cases, according to the WSJ($), "votes to oust Mr. Chavez tabulated by one voting machine matched the result in a nearby voting machine."

I've long known that media partisanship expresses itself not merely by what's reported, but by what is omitted. That's true of the ongoing story of Kerry's Christmas-in-Cambodia, which has been ignored by the Washington Post and New York Times but covered by the conservative press, talk radio, and the blogosphere. Willful ignorance has always been practiced by the elite media, but it's more obvious now thanks to the new sources noted above, and because it's more brazenly partisan than it's been in many decades. The era of supposed objectivity among big media journalists isn't just coming to a close, it has ended. We entered a new era of an openly partisan media some time back -- it's just that many of the bigger players have yet to admit it.

I don't see this return to partisanship as a bad thing. In fact, it's the norm in modern journalism, by which I mean the newspaper business as it developed from the nineteenth-century onward. What it really signals, though, is the end to liberalism's hegemony in the news business (which I commented on here and here. Talk radio alone indicates this, and the preponderance of conservatives on the airways demonstrates not conspiracy by right-wingers, but the lack of market demand for a liberal alternative.

Bloggers who're following the Cambodia story closely include Instapundit, Patterico (via Instapundit), Hugh Hewit, and the Captain's Quarters.

All of these souces attack the front-page hit-piece by the Times this morning that attempts to destroy the credibility of the swiftboat veterans who've questioned Kerry's credibility. I'd say that the Texan who supported the swifties' efforts got his money's worth, especially compared to the lack of effectiveness of George Soros's millions to support Kerry.

Not the soaring oil prices aren't cause for concern, but I've often wondered when reporters would bother to report those prices in constant dollars. (I often have similar thoughts when the Dow rises or falls and it's reported as a "record" yet no adjustment is made for the DIA over time.)

Stephen Bainbridge has raised the same issue and comments:

"After you adjust for inflation, today's oil prices are roughly $10 per barrel below the pre-Gulf War high back in 1990. So lighten up and go for a drive." To boot, CNN (to which he links) reports that, in 2004 dollars, oil prices in the 1980s would be about $80 per barrel.

As Bainbridge says, he understands that reporters like to sensationalize the news, but a bit more accuracy would be welcome. As would, I might add, the opening of more American territory for oil exploration.

That line in an op-ed by Thor Halvorssen in today's WSJ (free) leaped off the page. I've known Thor for years and was glad to see his name under the title "The Price of Dissent in Venezuela" when I opened the Journal early this morning. I didn't pay much attention to the picture of the lady at the center of the story and began reading about a peaceful protest that was broken up by gunfire from pro-Chavez thugs. Then I read the sentence, "Hilda Mendoza Denham, a British subject visiting Caracas for her mother's 80th birthday, was shot at close range with hollow-point bullets from a high-caliber pistol. She now lies sedated in a hospital bed after a long and complicated operation. She is my mother."

I thought I recognized the name, and I knew his mother (whom I've met) lived in London. Then I read that awful line. It's a horrible tale, and it is being repeated across Venezuela as Hugo Chavez consolidates his rule after throwing the recall referendum to his favor this past Sunday. Thor watched the shooting on television, as he was preparing a complaint "regarding the fact that I had been mysteriously erased from the voter rolls and was prevented from casting a vote on Sunday." He says he watched events unfold with "indescribable agony."

Thor also says that some of the shooters were "wearing red T-shirts with the insignia of the government-funded 'Bolivarian Circle,'" and his claim is backed up by the photo in this story (in Spanish, which I found via Jefferson Morely's piece in the Wash Post). Stromata Blog is also following the situation there.

He goes on to report that the companies hired to supply the voting machines and software are tainted by Chavez's scheming:

"Many in the opposition are baffled by the inverse relationship between the projected numbers and those reported by the Chávez regime. One possible clue to this remarkable phenomenon lies with the companies hired to supply the voting machines and the software. Smartmatic Corp., a Florida company that has never before supplied election machinery, is owned by two Venezuelans. The software came from Bizta Software, owned by the same two people. The Miami Herald recently revealed that the Chávez regime spent $200,000 last year to purchase 28% of Bizta and put a government official and longtime Chávez ally on the board. After the story broke, Bizta bought back the government-held shares and the official resigned from the board. But not until after the two companies were granted a significant part of the $91 million contract for the referendum. Executives at both Smartmatic and Bizta have denied any political allegiance to the Chávez regime and have issued public statements saying the contract was awarded purely on the merits."

The news section of today's WSJ ($) also reports on this matter, but doesn't take it too seriously. I'll take Thor's word on this one, but credit the reporters at the Journal for reporting on the conflict: The NYT omits that element of the story altogether.

About Jimmy Carter, about whom I commented yesterday, Thor has this to say:

"Later that morning the most important observer, former President Jimmy Carter, declared that he was shown the computer tally by government supporters and that everything seemed in order. Mr. Carter then left Venezuela, and the opposition groups that had put their faith in him to facilitate a peaceful resolution to the crisis. Mr. Carter, who was vociferous and insistent about patience, transparency and hand-tallies during the Florida recount, left Venezuela to attend Mrs. Carter's birthday party."

Our prayers are with Thor's mother and the rest of his family.

Update: James Taranto of Best of the Web Today has some choice words for Gail Collins, editorial page editor of the Times, and Jimmy Carter.

Via Professor Bainbridge (who includes a good quotation), a new study is out from the London School of Economics that argues that fundamental freedoms, such as property rights, along with religiosity, reduces a populace's support for revolution. The article is available from the Social Science Research Network's Electronic Library. The study's authors are Robert MacCulloch of Princeton and Silvia Pezzini of the University of London.

I haven't read the piece, but there's little surprise in its findings (which are nonetheless most welcome). Is it a stretch to move from support for revolution to support for terrorism or at least sympathy with terrorists? That's a complex question. On the one hand, the terrorists of 9/11 were mostly college-educated and middle or upper-middle class. That said, most came from Saudi Arabia, where an oppressive and corrupt regime combines its own rules with radical Wahabi Islam -- not a likely environment to inculcate respect for anyone's rights or the cultivation of the virtues necessary for freedom to thrive.

Additionally, what are the shared traits of revolution and terrorism? It depends on their targets, surely; revolutionaries might be virtuous (the Founders) or cold blooded killers (Bolsheviks). But terrorists are never, pace Reuters, freedom fighters or remotely virtuous because by definition their purpose is to take innocent lives and cause terror. Still, most recent revolutionaries take Lenin and/or Mao as their model, and one has to think that radicalism's failure to win over majorities in prosperous countries has more than a little to do with the points made in the new study.

Those of us who favor granting basic rights to the Muslim inhabitants of the Middle East may have found some statistical support to bolster our policy-oriented and moral arguments.

Our cerebral vice president gets it right here: "America has been in too many wars for any of our wishes, but not a one of them was won by being sensitive. A sensitive war will not destroy the evil men who killed 3,000 Americans. ... The men who beheaded Daniel Pearl and Paul Johnson will not be impressed by our sensitivity."

Various news outlets report the jailing of Alex Ho, a pro-democracy activist in Hong Kong and a candidate of the Democratic Party there. He was picked up on the mainland, charged with soliciting prostitution, and sentenced to six months in prison without a trial or access to a lawyer or family member. That time will conveniently remove him from Hong Kong during the September 12 elections.

Today's NYT, which refers to him simply as Alex Ho, says that he initially refused to sign a confession that said he'd hired a prostitute, but did so after being assured that "he would be released on Monday if he signed, and when threatened with prosecution for rape if he did not sign."

Aaccording to the LA times (registration), which provides more complete coverage, Mr. Ho was framed and, according to his wife, beaten and denied food and water until he confessed. The Daily Telegraph is more to the point: "He said he was asleep in his hotel when police burst in. While they beat him up in the bathroom they produced a prostitute, took photographs and video film and put condoms and women's underwear on the bed."

Two theories are put forth in the LA Times to explain his detention. The first, that he's being removed from contention in next month's elections in order to weaken the pro-democracy forces, seems self-evidently true. To boot, it isn't contradicted by the second theory, which holds that Mr. Ho is a pawn in a mainland power struggle between the more reactionary forces of former President Jiang Zemin, who still exercises substantial power, and the more reform-minded allies of President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao.

This heavy-handed approach to would-be reformers occurs regularly in both Hong Kong and in mainland China. I've commented before on the plight of Dr. Jiang Yanyong, who was arrested after blowing the whistle on the cover-up of the SARS epidemic and calling for Beijing to apologize for the Tiananmen Square massacre. I've also written often about Hong Kong's democrats, who are regulary bullied by Beijing's henchmen.

China clearly has no intention of allowing democrats to gain power in Hong Kong, much less on the mainland, but their ham-fisted approach may backfire again. Let's hope so.

With Hugo Chavez's claim to victory backed up by Jimmy Carter, and his corrupt and increasingly dictatorial regime supported by his ideological comrade Fidel Castro, Venezuela is sinking into a totalitarian mire. Worse, it threatens to take much of the region with it.

While the election and the opposition's skepticism of the results is getting a fair amount of coverage in newspapers, the blogosphere is unusually quiet. Partly that's a result of the ongoing coverage of Kerry's Cambodia story, which the major papers are either ignoring or just beginning to cover.

The most notable exception here is David Adesnick at Oxblog (via Pejmanesque), who closes his commentary by noting that, contrary to the claims of the Washington Post's reporter, "Rather than a revolution of the poor, Chavez is demonstrating the poverty of his so-called revolution."

Yesterday's WSJ ($) ran an editorial that summed up the gloomy forecast for democrats in South America:

"Sunday's vote is a metaphor for the sorry state of Venezuela's "democracy." Mr. Chavez controls the military, the Supreme Court, the Congress, the National Electoral Council (CNE), the state-owned oil monopoly and the intelligence services. There is no balance of power, no transparency, and Venezuela is fast becoming an authoritarian state.

"Equally worrying is that when the oil-rich Mr. Chavez claimed victory, he claimed it for all of the Americas, reinforcing his commitment to spread revolution on the continent. With Fidel Castro as his closest ally, Mr. Chavez is a dangerous presence in the region. . . .

"Mr. Chavez has already made it clear that it is his way or the highway for Venezuelans. . . . In recent years Mr. Chavez has praised Middle Eastern terrorism as heroic and lobbed rhetorical grenades at George W. Bush. On his own continent he has given Columbian guerrillas sanctuary inside Venezuelan territory."

Today's news is no better. The AP reports: "Strengthened by his victory in a recall referendum, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez set his sights Tuesday on centralizing power, including exerting control over the courts, local police and the nation's broadcast stations."

It adds: "Congress, which is controlled by Chavez supporters, recently approved a measure allowing that body to remove and appoint judges to the Supreme Court. One Supreme Court justice has already been ousted for allegedly falsifying his resume, a charge he denied. The government is also seeking to exert control over TV and radio stations, many of which are deeply critical of Chavez and carry one-sided news reports against him [emphasis added]. The government plans to submit a bill to Congress that would allow the government to ban programming it sees as slanderous or an incitement to violence and to punish violators. The government is also studying the possibility of unifying municipal and state police forces into a national police force, wresting control from mayors and governors, many of whom are Chavez opponents."

Juan Pablo Toro, the AP reporter, may not approve of what he and Chavez supporters call "one-sided coverage" when it's critical of Chavez and his henchmen, but I'll bet we won't read such criticism once the coverage is one-sided in its coverage of Venezuelan democrats, which it will be soon if the regime gets its way with the proposed "reforms."

The WSJ today ($) reports that Chavez has imported 17,000 Cuban "doctors, dentists, therapists and sports trainers" to the barrios. After noting the popularity of such moves among the poor, it reveals some of the results of Chavez's efforts to purchase the electorate at the expense of the country's infrastructure and future:

"It has been less effective in providing jobs and easing poverty: In the past five years, extreme poverty has nearly doubled in Venezuela to 40% of the population, according to a recent study by the Social and Economic Research Institute of the Andres Bello Catholic University. Unemployment is 15%.

"In a country where government largess is as common as beauty queens, Mr. Chavez's approach is nothing new. Throughout Venezuela's recent history, political leaders have handed out oil wealth liberally. Citizens enjoy gasoline that currently costs about 20 cents a gallon, and price and currency controls help keep the cost of key goods down. But the country long has delayed changes to its economy that might make it more competitive and create jobs."

Which brings us to Brother Jimmy Carter, who is telling Venezuelan democrats to drop dead: "There is no evidence of fraud, and any allegations of fraud are completely unwarranted." Given Chavez's overt seizure of the judiciary, military, media, and other vital elements of civil society, how Sunday's election could be billed as fair and open is a mystery. Then again, Carter has rarely seen a dictator he didn't embrace. From Leonid Brezhnev to Hafez al Assad to Yasser Arafat (Carter's fellow Nobel Peace Prize winner) to Chavez, the list of men Carter has trusted is a rogue's gallery of our era's worst violators of human rights. No reputable scholar would place Carter anywhere near the top of a list of America's best presidents, so here's a suggestion for making him number one: In a ranking of the worst former leaders of any country, Jimmy gets my vote for first place.

The mainstream media is paying more attention to the Kerry Cambodia story. Several bloggers are following developments closely: Hugh Hewitt, Prestopundit, and Instapundit are doing the most consistent job of any I've seen. Still no mention in the New York Times or Washington Post. Perhaps their reporters are all on vacation this month.

The "times" in the title means our day -- the temporal world in which we live -- and not the newspaper on the famous New York City square. Among the many subjects set in clearer relief since 9/11 is Europe and its place in the democratic world. I commented earlier about old Europe's pathologies, most importantly the anti-Americanism rampant among its elite and that group's commonalities with America's own left-leaning elites in Washington, New York, and Hollywood. Together they represent a new form of the reactionary formerly associated with the far right but today most common among leftists.

A couple of recent stories – the new European Commission and America’s decision to bring some troops home from Germany – bring into clearer focus some historical shifts of power within Europe and the U.S. that are occurring before our eyes but aren’t visible to every observer. As is always the case with such developments, elites are split into warring camps identifiable by the policies they advocate and the worldviews they embrace. Just as during the Cold War many intellectuals became Soviet apologists as much from spite toward America as from love of the USSR (there were notable exceptions), today the American intellectual left has its own European favorites. And just as, in retrospect, we know that yesterday’s left embraced the day before yesterday’s ideas, so today their cultural heirs – leaders in Hollywood, academe, and the Democratic Party – are engaged in a love-fest with history’s losers. Then again, that’s what reactionaries do.

Who are these losers? Let’s begin with France and Germany, the anchors of post-war Europe. There was every reason to celebrate and support the Franco-German alliance formed in the aftermath of WWII. Their bloody war-mongering in the preceding 100 years culminated in the destruction of the European order. A world once ruled from the Continent began its slow climb to a newly constituted world in the aftermath of Empire, sometimes building upon sturdy legacies (as in India), at other times falling into torpor (Algeria, much of sub-Saharan Africa). The bi-polar world of the Cold War was, emotionally at least, centered in Europe and its competing alliances for good reasons. East and West, or what seemed that at the time, stared one another down through gun sites; free peoples juxtaposed to enslaved nations set a dramatic stage against which conflicts the world over were set.

American policy makers shaped our response to crises against this backdrop. The principal surface conflicts revolved around how best to deal with a world in which every move by each Superpower was calculated to aid one bloc while harming the other. But on a deeper level, as the eulogies for Ronald Reagan reminded us, the real conflict was between those who saw Communism for what it was – an unmitigated evil – and those whose vision was more myopic or, as we say today, nuanced. Reagan the reactionary turned out to be a visionary, while his backward-looking opponents already had one foot on the dust heap of history. The then-dominant camp, which distrusted American power almost as much as it ignored Soviet adventurism, included members of both Houses of Congress, the intellectual establishment, major publishing houses, newspapers and television news, and most of the diplomatic corps. Détente, SALT, and ABM were their terms; defeat, retreat, and decline were their results.

Looking back, we now know that post-Reagan came to mean post-Cold War, but not everyone learned the lessons that new historical juxtaposition should have taught us. (Not even some former members of Reagan’s administration learned these lessons, as I argue here and here.) Not only does appeasement never work (whether the year is 1939 or 2004 – that is one of the constants of history that observers in every age miss), but the ground over which those struggles were fought has also shifted in importance. France and Germany, strong nations and advanced democracies that they are, no longer form either the key team within Europe or a strategic alliance literally between competing blocs. They’ve been usurped both by their own relative decline to other powers in Asia, by the decline in importance of their territory, and by the expansion of the EU eastward.

Mark Steyn has a superb piece that draws on Jim McGreevey's statement that his "unique truth" is that he's a "gay American." I wonder how many "unique truths" are created by focus groups? Yesterday's NYT, in a long chronological report of his downfall, says that the latter phrase "was developed by the group [Human Rights Campaign] and was a poll-tested phrase used to reframe the debate about gay causes from one about sexual liberation to one about civil rights."

Steyn argues that McGreevey has taken a page from the Clinton playbook -- recall Bill and Hillary's confessional hour with "60 Minutes" when he put forth the idea that he had girlfriends in every state because he was "flawed" and that, golly, that's just how he is. And now, Steyn says, we're getting the same kind of line about John Kerry's Cambodia story.

Kerry's "unique truth" is that his epiphany, which supposedly came to him in Cambodia on Christmas Eve, 1968, was a lie. As I argued yesterday, we're not supposed to read too much into this, since the elite media has mostly cold-shouldered not the Senator but his critics and their story. (That's changing to some degree, as Prestopundit's ongoing log of such stories shows. Hat tip, Instapundit.)

Steyn's best paragraph: "A handful of Mr. Kerry's 'band of brothers' are traveling around with his campaign. Most of the rest, including a majority of his fellow Swift boat commanders and 254 Swiftees from Mr. Kerry's Coastal Squadron One, oppose his candidacy. That is an amazing ratio and, if snot-nosed American media grandees don't think there's a story there, maybe they ought to consider another line of work. To put in terms they can understand, imagine if Dick Cheney campaigned for the presidency on the basis of his time at Halliburton, and a majority of the Halliburton board and 80 percent of the stockholders declared him unfit for office. More to the point, on the Swiftvets' first major allegation — Christmas in Cambodia — the Kerry campaign has caved."

As this story unfolds, I'll be searching my soul for my "unique truth." If I find it, I'll let you know.

Jim McGreevey's ugly saga is the subject of several insightful pieces this morning. The WSJ's leader ($) argues for a speedy election to replace him rather than the absurd November 15 date the state Democratic machine set in order to ensure the accession of Senate President Richard Codey while giving Jon Corzine time to arrange his own campaign for '05. John Fund pens a particularly insightful piece on corruption in the Garden State, where the main crop -- politicians on the take -- suffers from systemic root rot.

As the Journal's editorial says, "But the ultimate political casualties of the Democrats' tactics are the people of New Jersey. It's hard to see how voters, who recently learned that al Qaeda terrorists were eyeing targets within the state, are best served by being shut out of the process for choosing the immediate successor of their Governor, whose alleged lover and homeland security adviser, Golan Cipel, quit amid questions about his qualifications for the position."

John Fund, however, has strong words for those same voters:

"How did the nation's ninth-largest state compile such a record of mismanagement and corruption? Traditional explanations include the fact that the state is dominated by the huge broadcast markets of New York and Philadelphia, voters get shortchanged on local Jersey news. Others blame the state's Byzantine proliferation of hundreds of self-governing towns, which they say allows the perpetuation of local machines. The electorate also bears part of the blame. Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Alan Caruba says that 'something is terribly wrong with voters who have demonstrated a virtual death wish so far as any sensible governance of the state is concerned.'"

To boot, says Fund, the media were afraid of being labeled homophobic if they pursued rumors about McGreevey's pal Golan Cipel (who now claims he's heterosexual and was assaulted by McGreevey). Chalk up another one for spinelessness in the face of political correctness.

Perhaps some of Jersey's problems emanate from its affluence, which has historically meant that no matter how much money politicians passed around under the table, living standards continued to rise. As long as the voters didn't seem to be hurting economically, they turned a blind eye toward rampant corruption. (Let me add that, as a former resident of Louisiana, the politics of that state don't hold a candle to New Jersey's -- not to mention that the politicians are funnier and the food's better.)

Yet as John Fund also points out, two top rating agencies have lowered the state's bond rating because of its repeated borrowing to pay for McGreevey's numerous political favors. In short, corruption is an expensive and inefficient way of doing business, and Jersey residents should remember that Atlanta, Houston, Charlotte, and a dozen other Sunbelt cities are happy to take their jobs.

Despite a small post-outing bump in the polls, McGreevey may go down as one of the most corrupt politicians in state history. Can civil society in NJ arise from this muck? Does Brett Schundler have a prayer in his next run for governor? Perhaps, but reformers will have to break the back of the machine first, since it has thwarted grassroots cleanup efforts successfully thus far. I have family in Jersey and visit it often, but my current vantage point suits me just fine: Perched on a hilltop looking across the Delaware into the swamps.

This campaign season has become a laboratory in which Americans can measure the willingness of the elite media to cover each candidate fairly and thoroughly. And as I've commented before, the press isn't fulfilling its end of the bargain. Back in mid-May I asked: "Have the NY Times, the Wash Post, and the networks finally overplayed their hands? September 11 didn't change everything -- nothing does -- but it did reduce Americans' appetite for jejune, narcissistic displays by morally challenged elites." I was writing about the moral equivalency drawn between the beheading of Nick Berg and the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

But in order to draw such odious equivalences, you must first cover a story. As a close read of the New York Times and Washington Post will reveal, neither paper has broached the Kerry/Cambodia story to date. Instapundit has done superb work on this, and Hugh Hewitt has also been indispensable. Naturally, talk radio has addressed it, and the Fox News Channel continues to follow it. Some newspapers (via Instapundit) are beginning to show interest. But the two major players in New York and Washington continue to ignore the story. At best that makes them look sloppy (like Sandy Berger, I guess), but more likely they're just covering for their boy.

It's become a commonplace that the blogosphere and talk radio are forcing to the frontlines stories that would otherwise go unreported by the elites, and the Kerry/Cambodia non-story offers further proof of just how true this is. But let me put forward another element of this story that's easier to miss. Because conservatives (and libertarians of the non-paleo variety) see the elite media as partisan and willfully blind, their use of blogs and radio reveals more than simply a recourse to media that fulfill their needs. So blatant is the partisanship of the elites that anyone who relies on them for information on vital issues will necessarily be ignorant of crucial facts. If stories aren't merely slanted but entirely missing from coverage, how informed can consumers of these vehicles be?

In other words, conservatives have turned to alternative media because they see the mainstream outlets as dumbed-down. No one whose curiosity extends beyond simple-minded party rallies can be intellectually satisfied with what passes for coverage of even major issues. That is, I don't mean coverage of pet stories that, while key to small constituencies, don't enter into the larger picture. Rather, I mean the larger picture itself and the ways the willful ignorance of the elite press can distort it beyond recognition.

I addressed this back in June in response to a Pew study that purportedly demonstrated that today's news consumers are more partisan than ever before. As I said then, that's because conservatives have choices available to them now that didn't exist in earlier years. Everyone in the country loves vanilla ice cream best until you introduce chocolate (and strawberry, and peach -- let us praise variety) and then, voila, people become partisan in their choice of flavors.

That same Pew study showed that Rush Limbaugh's listeners follow hard news more closely than that of any other broadcast outlet on radio or TV. While correlation isn't causation, this looks like a case in which at least a key part of the causation is clear: Real news hounds are dissatisfied with the coverage from the elites because it's too thin and partisan. The best-informed consumers of news know when they're being misled by sins of omission, and they vote with their loyalty (and time & money) to go to other, more balanced, sources.

Here's an exercise you can perform at home: Try watching the News Hour with Jim Leher (or network news) or listening to Don Imus interview, say, Bob Schiefer. Are you as struck by what's left out as by what's said? Does you feel like you're touring the charming village of Potemkin? Can you complete this assignment without cursing? If contemplating this task doesn't make your hair hurt, you probably aren't reading this sentence.

Norman Podhoretz has penned a lengthy article on America's ongoing attempt to defend herself from radical Islamism. In World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win It, which appears in the September issue of Commentary, Podhoretz analyses the domestic and foreign reaction to 9/11 and the ongoing war. My hard copy of Commentary hasn't arrived, but a quick read of his new essay tells me that it will become one of the most debated assessments of American foreign policy to appear in many years. As is his custom, Podhoretz pulls no punches in his articulate description of the various factions, at home and abroad, that continue to debate America's place in the world. It's a much-needed overview of why fighting Islamism is the only realistic alternative to succumbing to it, and why appeasers and isolationists of the left and right misread the import of this historical moment.

I'll have more to say about this important new work soon.

Just in case you thought American elites were peculiarly mad, a story from England will enlighten, if not gladden, your hears. It seems that the Rt. Rev. Stephen Lowe, Church of England Bishop of Hulme, wants to strike the hymn "I Vow to Thee, My Country" from the hymnal.

The good bishop finds the hymn "racist" and "totally heretical," and said, according to the Daily Telegraph, that "the hymn's popularity was a symptom of a 'dangerous' increase in English nationalism which had parallels with the rise of Nazism."

The paper added that Bishop Lowe says of the hymn: "Its associations with the British empire were also questionable in a multi-faith, multi-cultural society.

"The patriotic hymn, which is set to music from Gustav Holst's The Planets, is a popular choice for Remembrance Day services and other national occasions.

"It was sung at the wedding of the Princess of Wales, who said it had been a favourite of hers since her schooldays. It was also sung at her funeral in 1997. A version was adapted as the anthem for the Rugby World Cup."

The English, it seems, are becoming like us (bad). Sayeth the bishop: "'It is like American culture where there is this view that America is the land of the free when we know it is not. But there are those in America who want to maintain that it is and want to impose their understanding, their culture, their way of doing things on everybody else. That is dangerous.'"

It's an old trick for old hacks: attacking patriots whose sacrifices secured the right of such parasites to speak their minds -- including advocating the banishment of beloved works of art they don't like. Here's hoping parishes across the Realm sing "I Vow to Thee, My Country" with full-throated enthusiasm this Sunday.

The editorial on today’s OpinionJournal.com points to a disturbing new threat against First Amendment freedoms. This isn’t the first time in recent years, however, that judges have shaved away the barriers that protect journalists’ free press rights.

Vanessa Leggett, a journalist writing a book about a murder in Houston’s posh River Oaks neighborhood, was jailed for 168 days for refusing to deliver notes and testimony regarding her discoveries in the case.

The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Leggett’s case that reporters cannot refuse to give testimony to a grand jury. The Supreme Court has not taken that case, leaving many questions unanswered.

In that vein, a U.S. district judge has held Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper in contempt for refusing to testify about who leaked CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity. Conservative columnist Robert Novak divulged that information in a column last summer, and a federal prosecutor is now investigating how he obtained that information. Novak, of course, rightfully has refused to name his sources.

Aggressive pursuit of those who divulged Plame’s identity certainly is worthwhile — putting CIA operatives in jeopardy must not be tolerated, especially in this day and age of crucial intelligence gathering. What cannot be negotiated, however, is reporters’ right to work freely and independently of the government and judiciary. If the media allows this encroachment on free press, such rights will become but one of many more liberties eroded over time.

The Journal puts it best here:

’Twould be prudent for our mass media, liberal or not, to remind the government of Mark Twain’s wise advice: Never pick fights with people who buy ink by the barrel.

Democratic polities are not immune to corruption, obviously, but when corruption is discovered they usually handle it better than other forms of government. That's the result of myriad characteristics of both the populace of democracies and of institutions inside and outside of government. To name a few: a free press, the rule of law, an independent judiciary, high levels of affluence, widespread literacy, and a civic ethos that gives citizens pride in their country.

All of this is brought to mind this morning because of the unfolding corruption scandal across the river from me in New Jersey. With his melodramatic news conference yesterday afternoon, soon-to-be former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey did his best to deflect attention from looming corruption charges by playing the gay card. That he's likely to fail in these efforts speaks volumes about democracy's resilience, even in New Jersey.

One of the best commentaries I've read this morning is by Errol Lewis of the New York Daily News. You'll have to read his op-ed to get the long (but still incomplete) list of corrupt NJ politicians, but here's some choice bits:

"McGreevey's personal drama is likely to serve as a smoke screen for what may well be the true motive for his resignation: the fact that a tidal wave of political sleaze swirling around the Garden State was about to swamp the governor's leaky, rickety boat.

"It's hard for many New Yorkers to grasp the depth of public malfeasance going on across the river. Over the last three years, federal prosecutors have pursued 55 major political corruption cases in New Jersey and indicted or convicted the mayors of Irvington, Paterson and Asbury Park, as well as former Essex County Executive James Treffinger."

Other worthwhile commentary on this scandal include Jabob Laskin in the American Spectator; Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine; Robert Sterling at Memefirst; and PoliticsNewJersey.com.

Read any one of those sources and you'll see how widespread the corruption in New Jersey is today. From the local level to Trenton and, with Torricelli, to D.C., a remarkably crooked political class, aided by eager citizens from seeminly every major jurisdiction, has taken root. Will voters stand for this? The answer to that question will tell us just how corrupted New Jersey's civil society itself has become.

Yesterday, Saudi Arabia announced that it would increase its oil production by 1.3 million barrels per day, but the price of a barrel didn't budge. In fact, it went up. Why? According to today's Washington Post, many industry analysts no longer believe Saudi Arabia even has the capacity to pump that many barrels a day, an opinion that, if it bears true, will have important consequences for how the United States government deals with the Saudi royal family -- particularly its support of radical Wahhabism.

Last month, the Hudson Institute held a conference, "Saudia Arabia in Crisis." The keynote address was by respected oil and gas investment banker Matthew Simmons (also quoted in the Post article) who was given unprecedented access into Saudi Aramco's vault, i.e. their reserve reports and geological data, and finds they fall short. He's posted a brilliant analysis of why Saudi Arabia falls short here. If he's right, $2.00 gallon gas will seem cheap, and War in Iraq, ironically, even more necessary.

Or, if you're going to educate us, let us each write our own story. That seems to be the m.o. of the authors of history textbooks the world over, according to a recent book review in the Washington Post. How Textbooks from Around the World Portray U.S. History is a new work by Dana Lindaman and Kyle Ward. As the reviewer, Francis FitzGerald, notes, the simple act of reading scores of history textbooks alone should evoke both gratitude and sympathy for the authors. Their principal observation: historical narratives written abroad and read by millions of foreign school children paint an often uncomplimentary picture of America; this helps explain the negative views others often hold of us.

That's not a shock, of course, but it is helpful to see some examples of foreign bias in action, especially after being told by multiculturalists here at home that America is uniquely guilty of ethnocentrism and vice. Other than the claim by French textbook writers that Paris was freed from Nazi rule almost entirely by the efforts of the Resistance (wonder what they say about Vichy?), the most eye-catching sections deal with Canada's portrayal of America as an aggressive bully.

Lindaman and Ward cite the actions of LBJ to illustrate what Canadians take to be America's attitude toward Canada -- itself a fact that should make LBJ aficionados proud. In the reviewers words:

"During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Prime Minister John G. Diefenbaker, concerned that Kennedy's belligerence might lead to a nuclear war, waited three days before announcing that Canadian forces had gone on the alert. In the next election, the Americans used their influence to topple the truculent prime minister. Diefenbaker's successor, Lester Pearson, aligned Canada more closely with the United States, but in 1965 he annoyed Lyndon Johnson by calling for a bombing pause and a negotiated settlement to the Vietnam War. In a meeting after the speech, Johnson grabbed Pearson by the lapels and shouted, 'You pissed on my rug.'"

My own favorite example of Canadian paranoia and provincialism is from the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea. We lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan, at the time and our cable company carried the Canadian Broadcasting Company, or CBC. I remember that station mostly for its weekly look at churches around Canada -- can you imagine PBS producing such a show? -- in which the film crew visited parishes of every denomination, interviewed the pastor and many church members, and attended picnics, suppers and the like. To me it came to symbolize an important slice of Canadian life which, in many ways, resembled my own boyhood in Georgia. It was warm (emotionally if not climatically), local (very local), and utterly average. I guess that's why I enjoyed it.

But when the Olympics rolled around that year, we saw a different side of those flat-talking semi-Midwesterners across the Detroit River. For reasons I've forgotten we watched a boxing match between a South Korean and Canadian on the CBC. The referee was an American. As the Korean pounded the Canadian, the announcers said, almost matter-of-factly, that it was obvious that the American referee was throwing the fight in favor of the Korean. Their words were something like: "Jim, our man is suffering from the bias of the American judge, who's giving points to the Korean, eh." "Yup Bill, I'm seeing the same thing, eh."

We were astounded. What kind of paranoid, inferiority-suffering sportscaster would make such an audacious claim, and with no evidence to back it up? They were not only impugning the integrity of the referee, but were playing to the same feelings of the folks back home. We may lose this fight, they said, but it's only because the Americans stole it from us so that the Korean could win. It wasn't clear to me whether they thought the American would have happily thrown the fight to any other nationality, so long as they were fighting a Canadian, or whether they thought he played to the local Koreans.

If I'd been asked, I would have broken the news to the Canadians that the number of Americans living in border states who joined me in watching that fight was miniscule, and that the idea that any American could have cared about its outcome enough to cheat over it was absurd. But to the announcers, if Americans cared enough to act dishonestly against them, they mattered. For some folks, even malice is a form of flattery.

A former roommate of mine (over 20 years ago) once commented that he never wanted to grow up but, rather than becoming a cynical adult, wished to remain youthful his entire life. Fortunately, he quickly forgot such rot and is today a successful businessman with a beautiful family. But the impetus toward such a wish has been strong since the 1960s, when we were told not to trust anyone over 30.

Today, a better formulation might be: Don't trust anyone under 55, but always act as if you're under 16. Call them rebels without a brain. Rather than face a world filled, as it has always been, with perennial problems that require wisdom, courage, and perseverance if they're to be treated (many will never be solved), some elder members of the Boomers generation retreat into the world of their youth. In fact, "retreat" might be the wrong word here, as it implies a venturing forth into maturity at some point, and it's not at all clear that many of these benighted souls have bothered with such a perilous journey.

I've written on this form of adolescent behavior before -- it's irresistible -- and Victor Davis Hanson has a new essay in which he treats this malady's impact at some length. It's worth a thorough read and is, I think, one of his better pieces of late.

Here's a taste: "In a word, we have devolved into an infantile society in which our technological successes have wrongly suggested that we can alter the nature of man to our whims and pleasures — just like a child who expects instant gratification from his parents. In a culture where affluence and leisure are seen as birthrights, war, sacrifice, or even the mental fatigue about worrying over such things wear on us. So we construct, in a deductive and anti-empirical way, a play universe that better suits us."

And: "We too are reverting to our childhood and thus are in the same weird mood preferring fantasies and stories to reality. The Democrats know it. And so the unifying theme of their otherwise contradictory messages is that we can return to the infantile delusions of September 10, and not the crisis-filled adult world of post-September 11 that now confronts George W. Bush."

Now, as someone once said, go read the whole thing.

[Note: The following are the thoughts of Donna Hughes (see more about her here), Professor and Eleanor M. and Oscar M. Carlson Endowed Chair in the Women's Studies Program of the University of Rhode Island. She shared her experiences after reading our postings by John Agresto from today and yesterday. As she explains, her experiences regarding the reaction to American generosity abroad were strickingly similar to Prof. Agresto's. We're pleased to share her thoughts with our readers. Winfield Myers]

Donna Hughes: "In 1994, a small group of us from rape crisis centers in Pennsylvania, responded to a request from a newly founded rape crisis center in Yugoslavia to come and help them get started because many women were being raped in the wars. We raised our own money and went. Upon arrival, we were asked by a number of people why we would come so far to help them. At first, we didn't even understand the question: we were all feminists who had spent a good portion of our lives volunteering at women's centers. It was just what women did if you wanted to help victims of violence. When they found out we were all volunteers, that no one was paying us to be there, and that three of us were using vacation time to come, they were even more amazed and confused. One of the leaders at the center explained to me that since they were raised in a socialist/communist country, they didn't understand the concept of volunteering, and she had to spend a lot of time convincing the Yugoslav women that they should work at the women's center to assist other women for free. Interestingly, the women who understood the best, were those in their 70s who were part of the resistance in WWII. They seemed to understand that there were some things worth working, even fighting, for that no one was going to pay you to do.

"Over the last decade, I've encountered these questions and attitudes frequently in my work in former socialist/communist countries. Most recently, as a prepared to go the Czech Republic, I got an email from a woman who expressed her amazement and gratitude that I would come so far to help people I had never met.

"Like John Agresto, I didn't even know that this wasn't common behavior. I'm still a bit confused when I'm thanked, not for something specific I've done, but for engaging in behavior that is intended to help others that I don't know. For a number of years, I've supported women, who I consider to be friends, in their work to resist the theocracy in Iran - just because, to me, it's the right thing to do. I was surprised one day when one of them said that for a long time they waited for me to ask for something in return. They too didn't believe that some people help others for free."

I'm saddened to learn that Brian Lamb is pulling the plug on C-SPAN's Booknotes. It has been a Sunday evening fixture in our home for many years. As reported in the New York Post , Lamb says he's "just switching gears." No doubt preparing for the weekly program was a chore few of us would want to take up. "'It got to be an obsession,' said Lamb. 'Every author expected you to have their book read. I wanted to get out from that requirement.'

"He likened the long-running series to 'going to school and having a test every week.' Although at 62, he found it tiring, he said he loved it. 'I wasn't a particularly good student in school, so this was like earning a master's degree for me.'"

As the Founders knew, education is a necessary ingredient to a thriving democracy, and Brian Lamb has contributed significantly to American's civic knowledge. He's done that rare thing -- create an institution in C-SPAN that has become an everyday part of the lives of millions (especially us news hounds). But who'll read all those books for us?

Via Milt Rosenberg, David S. Hirschman at Media Bistro has conducted an interview with Sam Tanenhaus, who was recently appointed editor of the New York Times Book Review. Tanenhaus is author of a marvelous biography of one of our heroes, Whittaker Chambers, and I'm sure he'll be a positive influence on the Review. In the interview he acknowledges the rise of competition, including the New York Review of Books. I'd add that the Claremont Review of Books is well worth your time, and that the book review sections of a variety of weekly and bi-weekly magazines, including the Weekly Standard and National Review, have been beefed up in recent years.

Speaking of book reviews, don't miss Democracy Project Board member Wilfred McClay's review of two new books on Nathaniel Hawthorne; it's in the latest issue of the Weekly Standard.

[Note: Yesterday I posted the first half of John Agresto's commencement speech to the graduating class at Samford University. Agresto was at that time still serving as the Coalition Provisional Authority’s Senior Advisor for Higher Education and Scientific Research in Iraq. He's also featured in a front-page story in the current issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. A graduate of Boston College, he holds the Ph.D. degree in Government from Cornell University. His distinguished career includes government educational service and the presidency of St. John’s College, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

The second half of his address begins below. Winfield Myers]

Now, when I look at Iraq, I’m quite uncertain of its future. Compared to what we have here in America, education there is not liberal and liberating but narrow and confining. A few months ago I went with two assistants and visited a university president in the North of Iraq. Over dinner one of my assistants got into an argument with the president. My other assistant told me I should stop it - that they were fighting. But it was clear to me they weren’t fighting but arguing: laying out their positions, marshaling evidence, debating the consequences. They were doing something I had not seen in my then six months in Iraq - they were having a rational argument. Before this I had seen many Iraqis fight but never make an argument - a real argument. To them, deliberation simply meant stating a position and declaring your belief in it. If more people applauded you than applauded the other guy, you won the argument. But it never had anything really to do with argument or reason or persuasion truly, but simply assertion.

When I asked the university president why this was the first rational political discussion I had heard in six months in Iraq, he gave me these reasons -
• First, their religion: the truth was written, and if written was not to be questioned.
• Second, their fathers: if their fathers said it, and if his father said it, then it was true. To question what your father has said is tantamount to saying he hasn’t told you the truth: so no questioning there either.
• And third, their education - the professors and the textbook are there to tell you the truth - you are not to question it, you are to memorize it and repeat it. And if you memorize and repeat it exactly as it was said, you will get a good grade. To question your professor is to say he may have been wrong, or not explained it well. This way of teaching and learning, the university president said, had so “infected” the Iraqi mind that he wondered if Iraqis could ever be free, since they were incapable of thinking for themselves. They would always wait to be told what to do, wait to be told the truth.

But this, he said, would change. If I would help him, he and a few other university presidents would begin universities, or reform their current universities, so that thinking, questioning and deliberation could take place. We can’t change the nature of their religion; we can’t change the character of their families - but we can change their educational experience. We can let students think about their course of study, choose their majors freely, see more than just their specialties and give them breadth and not just narrow, expert depth. Give them, in summary, the ability to reflect and choose. Give them the tools for rational deliberation. Then, maybe, democracy might grow. But only then.

And I learned - looking back on America - how fortunate we are to have not just education, not just training, but truly the experience of liberal and liberating education. And I am for the first time seeing how our success as a democratic people has depended to some large measure, on our particular kind of colleges and universities. How here, to use this time a phrase from James Madison, we see liberty and learning leaning on each other.

Well, I learned one more thing in Iraq about democracy. Again, this falls under the heading of how difficult and not easy democracy is. Let’s go back to my young friend who started being charitable in order to be more “American.” What he really was trying to be, as I think I indicated, was “neighborly.” He was trying to do something alien to him - have a personal relation with people not of his family or tribe.

In America we express this neighborliness in a thousand small ways: we have our clubs - Rotary, Elks, Knights of Columbus. We have library guilds. We have Alumni Associations and friends of Samford University. We have non-profit organizations, charitable foundations; we have, in sum, a thousand organizations to teach us to consider our neighbor. To think of his needs. To think about working together for common goals. To think about something more than ourselves. I don’t think we realize how closely we Americans are tied to each other until we see people who have no common ties beyond their family or tribe. I don’t think we realize how much we Americans actually like one another and are willing to sacrifice for each other. But there is no democracy without that.

I know we talk a good game on the other side. We talk about rugged individualism, and privacy, and being left alone. But, when we need to, we really are willing to sacrifice our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor for one another. I don’t know that the Iraqis are.

I’m struck by the fact that we, indeed, liberated them. And I have to tell you the vast majority of Iraqis are very happy that we deposed Saddam. This alone to them, and to me as well, was worth the war. But we liberated them, we did not join them in their liberation of their own country. Unlike Afghanistan, there was no Northern Alliance we helped support; unlike Eastern Europe there was no Solidarity to give aid to. No, we did it for them. They did not fight for their own liberation. More importantly - they did not fight for the liberation of their neighbors. And I do not know how you build democracy where there is not only no democratic history but no civic association, no Rotary Clubs helping out others, and no neighborliness.

We are now over there desperately trying to build “civil society” in an Iraq where there is none. Maybe we will succeed. And, if we do, then democracy has a future in Iraq. But if we fail, then I’m back to considering how hard it is to make a democracy where there is no democratic constitution, no sense of shared purpose, and no civic friendship.

There’s so much more to talk about - how Saddam turned a whole nation into people afraid to take any initiative whatever. How no matter how free we tell them they now are, they still seek permission before they try anything. How, more than tyranny, socialism taught them that they should expect to be fed and housed, and that work was irrelevant to success. How a culture of dependency and a culture of entitlement can and does break the human spirit.

So let me end where I began. I have now spent just under a year seeing what tyranny does to people, what kind of people Iraqis are and, above all, what kind of people Americans are and how generous we are; how naive we are, especially when it comes to things we hold dear, like education and democracy. And, above all, how blest we are. We inherited what we didn’t work for; and what little we achieve is only because others gave us the tools.

I think you graduates should go forth in gratitude, in humility, in pride in your country, and, as we heard last night, in actively contributing to hope in this world.

Thank you.

Donna Hughes encourages Democracy Project regulars to visit the Belmont Club, which has a fascinating post today on the success of U.S. forces in the War on Terror.

At least one blogger took the time to disagree with my recent post on the left's lack of ideas. But of course I'm hardly the only one who's noticed just how vast the intellectual vacuum on the left has become. Today (via Instapundit), the Belmont Club weighs in on this problem. Addressing the near total lack of meaningful debate on the war on terrorism, it says:

"It is unlikely that a meaningful national dialogue on the future of world can occur until the Left frees itself from the taboos which have stultified its intellect. The dead hand of Vietnam and its attachment to the cultic nonsense of the 1960s lies heavy on Democratic Party. That spectral limb will grip them by the throat until they shake free. Until then, forward to wherever. We'll know where we're going when we get there."

And: "The death of public discourse over the War on Terror was at least partly the result of the self-lobotomization of the Leftist mind. That operation was necessary to prevent an admission of the obvious: the basic Leftist tenets were bankrupt and sustained only by ever more tedious extensions to the original discredited theory . . . ."

Plus: "The Left, shackled by its epicycles, became speechless in the face of the rapid changes transforming the world, as conservatives, armed with nothing but common sense, simply acted; unless one excepts the commentary provided by Michael Moore."

Yesterday, James Glassman, writing at Tech Central Station, weighed in on the intellectual and, he says, moral bankruptcy of modern liberalism:

"What passes these days for the artsy-intellectual set in America has gone completely bonkers over the prospect of George W. Bush winning a second term as president."

Indeed. He cites as examples Michael Moore's absurd film, Whoopi Goldberg's vulgarity-laced screed for Kerry, and Nicholson Baker's new book, Checkpoint. The latter is, as you've no doubt heard, a novel based on the idea of assassinating George W. Bush.

When you're out of ideas, you lie, use vulgarities, and imagine how nice it would be if we resorted to violence to settle domestic differences -- by killing the president, no less. Politics and polite have the same root -- polis (city). That doesn't mean that politicians should be polite in the effeminate sense, but it does point toward a political tradition that serves as an alternative to civil war. Civility shares a root word (civitas) with city. The key point is that the art of politics was learned in the city, where people learned to settle differences through the rule of law and political debate. When law failed and debate broke down, they killed each other. I'm not suggesting we're headed there -- the loony left is still recognized as such by most people. But we might do well to take their rants more seriously as signposts toward a road most of us never want to go down.

[Note: John Agresto, who's contributed to this blog before, was kind enough to share with us a commencement address he gave on May 22 at Samford University in Birmingham, Ala. He was at that time still serving as the Coalition Provisional Authority’s Senior Advisor for Higher Education and Scientific Research in Iraq. He is also featured in a front-page story in the current issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription). As you'll see, he emerged from Iraq cautiously optimistic that we'll succeed, but he sees many difficulties down the road ahead. The opportunity for a liberal education that broadens intellectual and moral horizons is clearly much needed in Iraq, and we shouldn't be naive about the enormity of the task. A more liberal Iraq won't be Iowa, but it won't be a brutal land run by murderous thugs who invade their neighbors and threaten the region's stability, either.

This is the first half of his address. I'll post the second half tomorrow. Winfield Myers]

A LOT OF WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT AMERICA
I LEARNED IN IRAQ
John Agresto, Ph.D.

Let me tell you a story - a true story. Soon after I got to Iraq, I befriended a young Iraqi working for the Americans as a clerk. He had an undergraduate degree in pharmacy, but he quit pharmacy to work with us. He asked me for a favor - could I help his younger sister switch from one program to another at her university. This seems like the easiest request; but in Iraq, where everything is regulated and regimented, it verges on the impossible. Still, after many phone calls and some begging, I managed to get her sister transferred to the program of her choice - computer science.

Well, in this young man’s eyes I was both the symbol of American power and American goodness. (Remember, all I did was make a few phone calls.)

A week later he visits me again, with a report. He was trying, he said, to be like an American: he gave a poor man begging on the street some money, and he gave a ride to a mother struggling to get her kids to school. How, I asked, did this make him like an American? It did because, for the first time in over 25 years, he personally worked for the good of people he didn’t know.

This is, in many ways, the character of Americans. Despite all the talk about American self-interest, American materialism and consumerism, the deep truth is that Americans have hearts of gold, they go out of their way to help. We are, despite all the glib media babble, the most generous nation on earth, bar none.

This acting from the heart may not be, always, the wisest policy. Let’s not forget that we have slogans that warn us against it - “Nice guys finish last,” we say. Or, “No good deed goes unpunished.” Or, may favorite, “It’s not the earth the meek inherit but the dirt.” But, still, the truth is we are, as Americans, incapable of acting otherwise. This is why we should not hold back in condemning the sadistic and perverted abuses we have seen in Abu Ghraib prison: this is behavior unworthy of Americans and a perversion of what it means to be American.

In thinking about why we are this way, this generous way, I sometimes think our countrymen gloss over what a difference Christianity has made. Consider just the story of the Good Samaritan. With that one story we began to see strangers as neighbors. We were told to expand the narrowness of the Ten Commandments - where we are instructed not to covet our neighbor’s goods or our neighbor’s wife and not to be a false witness against our neighbor - that is, against another member of our tribe or sect - and start to see all people as our neighbors. And we try.

I’m reminded of the collapse of the twin towers: when everyone was running, frightened, down the stairs, there were hundreds of men - policemen, firemen - running up the stairs to save their neighbors - neighbors they had never met. And they died. We have to remember that goodness and success do not always follow.

Why did I go to Iraq? Why, after this, am I going back? Not because I wanted to fight to topple the tyrant Saddam. I’m not in the military - that was something they had to do. Not to find weapons of mass destruction - I have, I assure you, no interest in them, and wouldn’t know what one looked like on a bet.

No, I went because I was asked to help re-construct the nearly 70 universities and vocational schools that cover the map of Iraq. I’m not a brave person; I’m not a daring person; and I’m not a young person - but I am an American, and I think that explains what I’m doing and why more than any psychology.

The Iraqis, I must say, do not understand this. They have, by and large, no conception of going out of one’s way for others just because they are others. I think all of them, in one way or another, think we’re there for oil. One of the deans of the College of Science at Baghdad University, went so far as to tell me he believed that we drove the planes into the World Trade Center ourselves so we could blame it on the Arabs and come and take their oil. When I told him we could buy all the oil in the world for what we would be spending in Iraq, he changed his mind and said we were doing it to make slaves out of Arabs because we weren’t allowed to have blacks as slaves anymore. He was very satisfied with this explanation. At least, to him, it made more sense than going to strangers in order to “help.”

Now, my academic field is not humanitarian studies or sociology but political science. And I’m afraid you are all waiting to ask me, “Will we succeed in Iraq?” And I’ve told you these stories in order to let you know that we may not. Charitable intentions do not, as I’ve said, ensure success. If this were a war for oil, there is no doubt we’d win it - but a war for the liberation of Iraqis and the future security of a democratic Middle East - well, that might be over the long run a bit too abstract and high-minded a goal even for Americans. Moreover – and more importantly -- to win in Iraq might depend more on Iraqis than on us: and that we have little power over. I’m not saying we will not be successful - only that I think we have had too easy-going a view of what it takes to forge democratic and free countries.

The Art Cyclopedia defines surrealism as "a style in which fantastic visual imagery from the subconscious mind is used with no intention of making the artwork logically comprehensible. . . . [it is] deeply influenced by the psychoanalytic work of Freud and Jung."

In their opposition to not only the war in Iraq, but to the belief that American diplomacy can be an instrument of liberalization in unfree lands, today's foreign policy realists might be more accurately characterized as surrealists. They've performed their own Freudian analysis of the Arab (and Muslim) mind and found it insufficiently sophisticated for the demands of the modern world. They posit an anti-democratic complex as an innate and permanent feature of the archetypal Arab: Created to be brutal and brutalized, no force will civilize him, no power can subdue his feral soul.

Hence the near hysteria of the realists in Washington, where critics of a proactive foreign policy have fallen into lapses of logic, incomprehensible rage, and the labyrinths of conspiracy theories to attack their foes. In the old bipolar world wherein super powers vied for client states, the surrealist school could at least argue that their policies enhanced American security. Countering the spread of communism could, they believed, be accomplished by brutal regimes that remained open to Western aid and overtures.

But the Iranian Revolution of 1979, not to mention Reagan's arms build-up the following decade, should have ended that myopic mythology once and for all. America sold Iran sophisticated arms, including F-14 Tomcats and Spruance class destroyers, and 50,000 Americans lived and worked in that country. Yet today, 25 years after the overthrow of the Shah and 15 years after the Berlin Wall fell, Iran remains a steadfast enemy of the U.S. and a dangerous rogue state bent on acquiring and, one must assume, using nuclear weapons. A lesson on liberty could be drawn from these events, but since they don't fit their a priori conceptions of foreign minds, realists remain blind to the lessons of history.

Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute, writing in today's New York Times, notes that John Kerry's father, Richard, "once criticized the Reagan administration's 'fatal error of seeing U.S. security as dependent on illusions of propagating democracy' in the Soviet bloc." Such a statement says as much about the elder Kerry's (and, unfortunately, his son's) opinion of others as it does their own lack of imagination. And if regional stability is their goal, Pletka argues persuasively that:

"[T]he Arab world is hardly short of violence and repression as things now stand, and change that comes too slowly might prove the biggest danger. Indeed, the fruits of 'stability' are hard to find in the latest Arab Human Development Report issued by the United Nations Development Program. It describes the Arab Middle East and North Africa as the least politically free region of the world. It also describes a region where 65 million adults are illiterate, almost two-thirds of them women, and where one in five citizens lives on less than $2 a day."

Pletka's thesis is that the Middle East is already changing, and that the realists' lack of faith in the ability of seemingly exotic peoples to govern themselves decently prevents them from reading history as it unfolds. "[W]ithout change, the United States will face one collapsing dictatorship after another and an instability much greater and more threatening than any that would come from an aggressive American push for democracy." That's a genuinely realistic reading of the region, and it's offers the peoples who live there a means of liberating themselves from surrealism's Jungian mythology.

The New York Times reports today that Iran and North Korea have made substantial progress in their nuclear programs over the past year. A headline writer put it best: "Diplomacy Fails to Slow Advance of Nuclear Arms." In fact, that short headline better explains the situation in both countries than does the article itself, which tries but fails to suggest that nuclear proliferation has quickened since the overthrow of Saddam.

This strange view of the world, in which war with Iraq has supposedly diverted America's attention from, first we were told, fighting al Qaeda and, now, preventing Iran from going nuclear or reigning in North Korea, is wearing thin. The first charge, that the war on terrorists has been slowed thanks to Iraq, is proved false by the recent arrests of al Qaeda suspects here and in Britain. (No doubt Howard Dean will soon retract his absurd claims that the recent raising of terrorist warnings is further proof of a conspiracy to politicize the warning system.)

The second charge -- that we're ignoring nuclear proliferation -- is equally false. Do administration critics really believe that Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan would have come clean on his efforts to give Muslin nations the bomb absent US action in Afghanistan and Iraq? And Libya's erratic ruler Qaddafi, who cannot be trusted yet, nevertheless possesses sufficient reason to know that he's better off abandoning his own nuclear aspirations than facing justice after the manner of Saddam. Again, who can argue that Libya would have taken this turn absent overwhelming U.S. force in the region?

Iran and North Korea remain stubborn problems, but the failures of the Clinton administration in each country mimic its failures in fight against terrorists. In each case, endless negotiation merely postponed problems rather than solving them. Islamic terrorists grew bolder while nuclear weapons programs in Iran and North Korea advanced with little outside interference. In the case of Iran, as I noted earlier, the Israelis have the most to lose and are unlikely to sit idly by while their sworn enemies develop the ability to destroy them. America, too, faces the very real threat that the mullahs would share their bomb with al Qaeda or other terrorist groups sworn to bring the U.S. to its knees.

We've said it here many times before, and we'll keep at it: appeasement never works; it always fails.

The news is awfully heavy for a beautiful Friday morning. If you need to lighten up a bit, try Ben Kepple's take on the madness of a group called Re-Code. They advocate switching around bar codes on products in order to "free capital." You couldn't make it up, and Ben didn't.

It’s morning in America, my friends: Peggy Noonan is back in the saddle.

Noonan, a former speechwriter for Presidents Reagan and Bush (41), announced this morning in her Wall Street Journal column that she take three months’ unpaid leave to volunteer for the George W. Bush campaign.

Noonan is among my all-time favorite writers. Her prose evokes emotion and stirs the conscience, and her conservative fortitude should be an example for us all. She is prolific but profound, and she will be a tremendous asset to the Bush team:

We all can contribute to this valiant battle. We need not be marking time, for now is a time for choosing. And we must choose to send George W. Bush back to the White House, lest terrorists send us running for our lives.

Ms. Noonan, bully for you. All the best.

Looks like I'm going to have to clean out my CD collection, as many of my favorite bands are specifically lining themselves up against conservative values and the War on Terror.

Bruce Springsteen, the Dixie Chicks, James Taylor, Pearl Jam, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, John Mellencamp, Dave Matthews Band, Babyface, and REM, and others have agreed to do 34 shows in 28 cities, with all cities being in the critical swing states of Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Wisconsin, and, of course Florida.

Not that their point of view comes as a surprise to me, but it is admittedly the first time many of these stars have come out to actively campaign for a candidate. They believe this election is that important, as do I.

The concerts are sponsored by the liars at Moveon.org -- another reason to sell off your CD's and download their music for free at whatever file sharing site of your choosing (of course, I am just kidding).

Money from the shows will go towards a group called American Coming Together, whose website states their mission is to "derail the right-wing Republican agenda by defeating George W. Bush."

Might it be time for the Dixie Chicks to change their name to the Yankee Ditzes?

Yesterday's WSJ warned against rushing into reforms of America's intelligence services in the wake of the Commission's recommendations. It argued that the commissioners needed to remember that they aren't elected representatives, much less "a group of unaccountable policy ombudsmen."

Yet they're acting more like Moses with the Tablets than appointed public servants. Most egregious is the grandstanding of former New Jersey governor Tom Kean, who can't seem to resist the klieg lights. This morning's New York Times quotes him advising voters in November to weigh the candidates' response to the Commission's report in deciding whom to support. He said he was "gratified" that both Bush and Kerry responded positively to the report.

Gall, chutzpah, narcissism -- the words roll out in thinking how best to describe such self-importance. Granted that the Commission's work should be studied, Gov. Kean's pronouncements -- he's gratified that presidential candidates take him seriously? -- are out of line and absurd.

Here's how the Times reports Kean's reaction to the President's reaction:

"In announcing this week that he supported the idea of a national intelligence director, Mr. Bush left vague many of the job's responsibilities, and White House spokesmen have since made clear that under Mr. Bush's plan, the intelligence director would not have the direct power over intelligence budgets and personnel that the commission had wanted.

"'We believe that the position has to have budget authority and appointive authority,' Mr. Kean said, echoing comments of recent days by other members of his commission. 'Otherwise it's not going to be much better than what we have now.'''

As the Journal stated about the Commission members yesterday, "Now if they really want to do us all another favor, they'll remove themselves to an undisclosed location until, say, November 2."

All of this was predicted by critics who argued that the Commission's work was too important to be released in an election year. John Kerry's immediate embrace of the report in toto illustrates this. Before the ink was dry, he was trying to score points against Bush by calling for the entire work to be adopted post haste. Tom Kean, flattered by Kerry's cooing, just can't leave the spotlight.

The real work on intelligence reform must be done by our elected representatives, not by appointed wise men who relish their return to the public eye. Some commission members did a great service through their work; others were politicized from the start. But they'd all do well to remember that the judgment they'll receive in the years ahead will be far more thorough -- and longer lasting -- than the temporary return to fame they're enjoying today. The beach is calling, gentlemen.

When I was growing up, most everyone around me viewed Europe sympathetically. My father, along with almost every man his age, fought there in WWII, we were of European heritage, it held history and romance, and the Cold War meant that it was always in the news. Who could not sympathize with a people who, as late as the 1960s, were still recovering from war even as their continent was divided by the Berlin Wall and threatened by Soviet arms? We were in a fight together, and even anti-American protests of the '80s didn't phase us. When fellow graduate students in that decade told of European friends who hated us, I brushed if off as evidence that they needed new friends. To boot, a month-long trip there in 1979 revealed no evidence of anything but admiration for the U.S. and, behind the Iron Curtain, even adulation of our presence.

The end of the Cold War was, in retrospect, the ending of all that. No doubt I overestimated the warmth present among Europeans in earlier years. America's response to 9/11, however, has sharpened our perspective so that we now see some Europeans, led by the French and Germans, as neutral semi-allies if not, in the non-military sphere, vigorous opponents.

Today we face a severely divided community of democracies. Among the most astute commentators on the new era we've entered is Victor Davis Hanson, whose writings we've mentioned often. Writing in the WSJ (free), Hanson reports from Europe on their gross misreading of American sentiment about the upcoming presidential election.

A choice paragraph: "More serious Europeans point out that the anger of our seasoned ex-diplomats and retired generals is further evidence that Americans are tired of Mr. Bush's unilateralism. Of course, out-of-work diplomats are keen to find fault with their successors. And few American administrations have proved as controversial in refashioning American foreign policy as have the blunt-speaking George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld. All are fat targets after radically altering America's prior relationships with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Libya, dividing Europe into Old and New, questioning the role of American troops in NATO and in South Korea, and parting with Yasser Arafat. Yet all these sensationalized developments were long overdue, and precisely for that reason they may well become institutionalized, so much so that even a Kerry victory can do little to overturn them."

Hanson nails the legitimizing effect of the old guard's comments. And, as he says, the decrepit foreign policy edifice that Bush's team has brought crashing down was ripe for implosion. (I've commented on this here.) Europeans also point to the among of press received by Michael Moore to argue -- mistakenly -- that he represents a grassroots revolt against Bush and the Republicans.

Then Hanson takes off the gloves: "Maria Teresa Thierstein Simoes-Ferreira Heinz Kerry is a big hit in Europe, as if a native of colonial Mozambique has unique insight into the pathologies of the American experience. But as the summer wears on, fairly or unfairly, this force-multiplier of her husband's Europeanism is beginning to grate like some character out of a Henry James novel -- reflecting our own unease with the predictable mixture of acquired fortune, haute culture and aristocratic disdain. The private luxury jet and save-the-planet environmentalism go down in Fresno about as well as 'Shove it' buttresses her sermon on the need for a new 'civility.' Ms. Kerry's gratuitous use of 'un-American,' both on '60 Minutes' and again to a persistent journalist, reflects a complete ignorance of the considerable baggage that such a cheap epithet carries in the collective American memory."

David Hornik has a defense of neoconservatism up at The Prowler, the web pages of The American Spectator. He makes some of the same arguments that Brent and I made in our recent article, Confusing Axes. Key paragraph:

"The question, though, is where neoconservatism comes into all this. If one claims that Bush took the optimistic route because Richard Perle and William Kristol pushed him into doing so, one makes a totally unsubstantiated allegation that, for one thing, presumes to look inside the president's mind and motives and, for another, goes against what we do know about his strong personality and leadership. It seems much more plausible that Bush was, and still is, ready to make a go of democracy in Iraq because, for one thing, the possibility faced him, open and enticing -- much more enticing than the option of 'installing a strongman'; because it offered hope of positively influencing the rest of the Arab world and, concomitantly, reducing the threat to America; and also, if psychologize we must, because it jibed much better with an ingrained American optimism that is part of Bush's makeup. Some claim that, in this context, that optimism was closer to naïveté; and in today's Iraq both democratization and "strongman" advocates can still find much evidence for their positions. But the point is that the neoconservative connection is hard to see."

A question for readers: Do conservative critics of the war in Iraq see Bush as naive and therefore manipulated by neocon handlers; or do they think he's one of them? This interests me because either way it's a commentary on Bush himself. It mirrors the criticism he receives from the left, which alternately sees the President as a dunce or an evil genius. He's in charge, or he isn't. I don't see much gray area here, especially regarding something as serious as the decision to go to war.

Comments encouraged.

If you haven't already read Mark Steyn's send-up of the Kerrys for their sham trip to Wendy's -- followed by take-out from Nikola's Bistro at the Newburgh Yacht Club -- you'll find it here . It's devilishly hilarious.

Has the left ever been more intellectually bankrupt than it is today? Other than a few social issues dealing with sexuality -- none of which makes for winning issues with most voters -- for what do they stand? A weaker, compromised America? Even more government? Nationalized healthcare? The old mainstays of the intellectual left, including the rights of workers, the universal franchise, civil rights, women's liberation, and human rights abroad, are today much-diminished in importance, not least because they've received so much attention over the past several decades. JFK's "rising tide" cliché is true, inasmuch as unions account for only 13 percent of the labor force in America, no serious politician suggests restricting the franchise, the black middle class is expanding rapidly, women exercise considerable power, and so forth.

The growth of affluence hasn't solved all of our problems, of course, and it never will. Only a strict materialist could be so naive as to believe that an earthly paradise will be ours. But today's left searches in vain for another big idea. The paucity of alternatives helps explain their hostility to the Bush administration: regardless of what the president does, the left hates him and opposes his policies.

Our war in Iraq perfectly illustrates this, since the left used to criticize the right for cuddling up to dictators and ignoring a regime's human rights record in order to contain communism. Yet the overthrow of a non-communist dictator who committed mass murder and invaded his neighbors is opposed because -- well, just because. You can fill in the blank -- Iraq threatened the region's stability, his removal helps America, Israel stands to benefit, and on and on. With no positive platform on which to build an intellectual movement, the left can give few coherent reasons for much anything that it does or says.

This paucity of ideas is highlighted in a new book reviewed in today's WSJ ($), Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Hardt and Negri co-authored Empire in 2001, a book the Journal's reviewer, Gary Rosen, calls "a ramshackle, theory-stuffed disquisition on globalization and its discontents." Their new work is no better, says Rosen, and who should be surprised?

Rosen writes: "For Marx, the indispensable agent of revolution was the proletariat. For Lenin, the vanguard. For Mao, the peasantry. For Messrs. Hardt and Negri, as we learn in their much-anticipated sequel, it is the multitude, a motley collection of 'counterinsurgencies' and 'movements of resistance' arrayed against the hypercapitalist, war-driven international order that they call Empire (with a hegemonic capital E) and that the rest of us call globalization. Singularities of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your Big Macs, the IMF and the Pentagon!"

I've long thought that a principal reason left-liberals, joined sometimes by the paleo-right, opposes "globalization" is that free trade and the movement of peoples around the globe is beneficial to America. It increases the affluence of peoples around the globe by knocking down traditional structures that often kept the masses in their place. And if those multitudes are out of line, meaning rushing to join the middle class, then of what use are they to ideologues whose business is minding other peoples' business? For one side, they're not oppressed and so make for unlikely revolutionaries. For the other, they're getting out of hand and so ruin both romantic visions and the proper order of things.

Rosen sees this same discontent in Hardt and Negri: "Most of all perhaps, the high-flown rhetoric of postmodern insurgency allows Messrs. Hardt and Negri to dismiss the humdrum institutions of liberal democracy -- and to indulge in fantastic speculation about the revolution ahead. Constitutionalism, they inform us, is an outdated invention of 18th-century aristocrats; mere representation is a fraud; the idea of universal rights, especially property rights, is little more than a humane cover for the ambitions of Empire. In short, 'the historical moment of liberalism has passed.'"

Would-be revolutionaries are always opposed to liberty and the empowerment of the masses, since it drains their own lives of purpose. Grand planners who would direct the actions of billions by denying them the freedom to act on their own will always see darkness in mid-day. Many problems remain to be addressed in our increasingly affluent world. But the left has little to offer beyond affectation, self-importance, and intellectual vacuity.

Brent and I have a new article up at American Daily. It's a response to a recent piece by Stephan Halper and Jonathan Clarke in which they argue, unpersuasively we think, that "neo-conservatism" is a recurrent (and harmful) syndrome in American history that has led to an "axis of confusion." We find their argument, well, confusing.

Not that they were ever gone, but they're back with a vengeance. I'm speaking of the members of the so-called realists school of foreign policy wonks and former diplomats. They make up the bulk of official and unofficial advisors, employees, retirees, and grandees at the State Department, major editorial pages, the editorial boards of key journals, and other organs of entrenched officialdom.

Although they've always had opponents on the right, including writers for National Review and the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, over the past 15 or so years their opponents have multiplied as thinkers more interested in solving problems than merely managing them gained new outlets. The efforts to overthrow dictators rather than cuddle up to them that have gained strength under the Bush administration -- just ask Saddam if they're serious -- have the old school boys mounting their own counter-attack. Call it the Revolt of the Realists.

The rear-guard nature of their attack may seem odd, given the realists' unquestioned numerical strength which, coupled with the eagerness of administration opponents to de-legitimize the war in Iraq as well as the broader War on Islamism, makes allies of some of their old enemies on the left. But most of the realists are out of power now (the revanchists within the bureaucracies at State and the Pentagon, like the poor, are with us always), so their efforts to win back lost territory ride on books, strategic leaks, and, in the case of Sandy Berger, simple theft.

One recent example of their revolt is a new study by the Council on Foreign Relations titled "Iran: Time for a New Approach." Produced by a task force co-chaired by Zbigniew Brzezinski and Robert Gates, both of whom served under presidents who did little to nothing to stunt the growth of worldwide terrorist organizations, the report amounts to a call for legitimizing the mullah's regime in Teheran. This isn't surprising, since "engagement" and "normalcy" are totems for these folks, who sought to "manage" rather than win the Cold War and have opposed the liberation of oppressed peoples the world over for decades.

These days, with the mullahs in Teheran working toward a nuclear capacity that would allow them to attack any city into which a weapon could be smuggled by their terrorist allies, the stakes couldn't be higher. Israel clearly has much to lose, beginning with Tel Aviv, to a nuclear-armed Iran. Yet the CFR report calls for the U.S. to pressure Israel to refrain from a pre-emptive strike against Iranian nuclear facilities on the premise that such a move would cause America problems in the region by angering Muslims and strengthening the Iranian regime via a nationalistic backlash.

No one can argue that regime change in Iran would be easy, but is the risk of nuclear war in the Middle East -- as Israel would certainly strike back at Teheran for any such attack on its own soil -- a development we should encourage through our inability to think or act boldly as circumstances demand? To boot, as today's Wall Street Journal argues ($), the 9/11 Commission "fingered the Islamic Republic as -- at a minimum -- an important enabler of al Qaeda terrorism. Another two weeks have now passed and the mullahs also appear to be tearing up a European-brokered deal on their nuclear program to resume uranium enrichment."

And this only days after the CFR claimed that appeasement is the only path to peace. The Report claims, naively: