"Feddie" of Southern Appeal is a contributor to the group blog Confirm Them, which is dedicated to seeing the President's federal judicial nominees granted an up or down vote in the Senate. From it I learned of Steven Calabresi's excellent piece in the Weekly Standard, "Minority Rule?" It is the best article on this controversy I've read, and I urge you to read it start to finish. Calabresi has an endowed chair at Northwestern University's law school.

THE LEGAL LEFT IS DANGEROUSLY close to winning the political war it has been fighting against the Bush administration over the future direction of the federal courts. The evidence of this is that whenever rumors are floated of possible Bush Supreme Court nominees, there are some very prominent conservative names that aren't mentioned, though they should be.

The eminently qualified conservatives Democrats have quashed include Miguel Estrada, who is Hispanic, Janice Rogers Brown, who is African American, Bill Pryor, a brilliant young Catholic, and two white women, Priscilla Owen and Carolyn Kuhl. By keeping these five nominees off the federal courts of appeals, Democrats seem to have blocked Bush from considering them for the Supreme Court.

When George W. Bush became president in 2001, the legal left and the Democratic party rallied around the slogan "No more Clarence Thomases." By that they meant that they would not allow any more conservative African Americans, Hispanics, women, or Catholics to be groomed for nomination to the High Court with court of appeals appointments. The Democrats have done such a good job of this that, today, the only names being floated as serious Supreme Court nominees are those of white men.

As Calabresi goes on to demonstrate, this tactic -- forcing Republicans to nominate only white men -- allows the Democrats to achieve two goals. First, white men are much easier for the left to demonize than are minorities and women (not that they're above that -- see the post below). That makes it easier for liberals to keep conservatives off the court. Second, and, I'd add, in a move with longer-term strategic and electoral consequences, by introducing what amounts to a racial means testing (my term) for federal judicial nominees, the left keeps conservative minorities and women out of the public eye, lest they serve as an example that others in their communities might follow.

This helps the left maintain the charade that only white men are conservative, something they must do if they're to keep their grip on the votes of minorities and, to a lesser extent, women. And it reveals the left's shameless, and decades-old, efforts to define black authenticity so as to exclude conservatives or libertarians as legitimate members of their race.

Plus, as Calabresi says:

Conservative African-American, Hispanic, Catholic, and female judicial candidates also drive the left-wing legal groups crazy because they expose those groups as not really speaking for minorities or women. They thus undermine the moral legitimacy of those groups and drive a wedge between the left-wing leadership of those groups and the members they falsely claim to represent.

As long as white liberals are allowed to define the parameters of authenticity for minorities and women, the national interest groups will continue to exclude members of those groups whose view the exclusionary left deems heterodox. In the past, the groups could count on a sympathetic press to reflect their moral posturing, but today, as we know, that has changed. Or, at least, it has changed regarding other stories. We'll all learn soon whether or not the old status quo still lives when it comes to race and the judciary. If Republicans succeed in removing the Democrats' ability to break with 214 years of Senate history to require a super-majority for appointments to the federal bench, it'll be a sure sign that a new day has dawned.

I've written a bit about the efforts of Senate Democrats to utilize an apparent litmus test for appointees to the federal bench. Are they serious Catholics or Evangelicals? Yes? Forget it! Although some respected law professors such as Eugene Volokh (most recently here) has argued that there is no proof of anti-Catholic bias at work, I've agreed with his UCLA colleague Steven Bainbridge (most recently here), who's argument has moved from the legal sphere to, most recently, the moral. That's surely the correct way to view these battles, with the political angle thrown in. What the left cannot impose through the ballot box, it's attempting to win through judicial fiat. By refusing to allow an up or down vote on the President's nominees, Democrats are, in effect, administering a religious test for office. And, like many others, I don't accept the premise that everyone on the left's team is free of religious bigotry, at least as applied to people who take their religion too seriously for their tastes.

A nominee for the U.S. Circuit Court of the District of Columbia, however, hasn't received as much individual attention as she deserves. Janice Rogers Brown, who happens to be the daughter of black sharecroppers, was born in Jim Crowe Alabama in 1949. Her story is featured in a new column by Terrence P. Jeffrey, who calls Justice Brown, a member of the California Supreme Court, the left's "worst nightmare."

As indeed she is. For she represents the same kind of threat posed by another daughter of Alabama, Condoleezza Rice, or one of Georgia's most famous sons, Clarence Thomas. What makes the Democrats' patronizing bigotry so transparent isn't simply the lectures Justice Brown must suffer from her lily white interrogators; it's the fact that she was elected easily to the California Supreme Court on more than one occasion. Here's how Jeffrey sums up that portion of her career:

When California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown faced a 1998 retention, 76 percent of Californians voted to keep her on their state's highest court. In San Francisco, perhaps America's most liberal city, she won 79.4 percent.

Justice Brown won more votes statewide than any of the other three justices up for retention that year -- though she had cast a (dissenting) vote in favor of the state's parental-consent law. But when President Bush nominated Justice Brown to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 2003, her demonstrated support in places like San Francisco did not matter to Senate Democrats.

It certainly didn't, since they've filibustered her nomination for almost two years. Jeffrey states at one point in his column that the left won't approve an intellectually honest person, meaning one who isn't guaranteed to maintain abortion-on-demand as a Constitutional right. He's correct in this, without doubt, but I think the racial angle simply adds to the left's antipathy for Justice Brown.

If the left is bankrupt intellectually, as Martin Peretz and others on the left have admitted, nowhere is that status more obvious than in the realm of racial politics. By vilifying the ability of the free market to create opportunities for all people, and by demeaning the remarkable progress made by African Americans over the past 40 years, the left has engaged in a Ponzi scheme with their largest constituency. But the hidden commodity in this version of the game isn't money that's shifted from victim to victim, but the utter failure of liberal policies to achieve their proclaimed ends. Add to that the malicious race-baiting that has long been a mainstay of Democratic politics, and the threat posed by the Janice Rogers Browns of the country becomes clear.

Here's how Jeffrey concludes his column:

When she was a child in the South, Senate Democrats used the filibuster to defend segregation and keep Janice Brown out of whites-only schools and accommodations. Today, they use it to keep her off the federal bench. Now, no less than then, they use the tactic to maintain a morally indefensible policy they fear sustained national attention and debate would crush.

Republicans must not let them get away with it.

Indeed they must not, for the good of the country, and for the honor of Justice Brown.

Fr. Robert Sirico of the Acton Institute thinks Pope Benedict XVI will be seen not as a conservative, but as a liberal; a classic liberal, that is.

That would be most welcome, and I don't doubt that he's right. As Cardinal Ratzinger, the new Pope certainly had no patience with liberation theology. Also, as a survivor of the Nazis who saw part of his homeland turned into a communist hell hole after the War, he's unlikely to favor a stronger role for the state, or to believe that civil society, Burke's "little platoons," should be subsumed to state power.

Yesterday, Daniel Henninger used his weekly WSJ column to comment on the rise of the conservative media. Speaking of Brian Anderson's new book, South Park Conservatives, he wrote:

As described by Mr. Anderson, a writer with the Manhattan Institute, conservatives established their first beachhead in the early 1990s with talk radio. Then Fox conquered cable news and finally a virtual Mongol horde of conservative-to-libertarian bloggers swept across the Internet [emphasis added]. In the 2004 election, these electric horsemen (apologies to Jane Fonda) pulled down Dan Rather and haunted John Kerry's war hero with Swift-boat ghosts.

I rather liked the description, not because of any particular fondness for the real Mongols of old, mind you, but for what it says about the MSM's perception of the pajama-clad-clueless-amateurs who've proven to be such a pain to the Brahmins of big media.

But Arthur Chrenkoff, best known for his tireless efforts to catalogue good news from Iraq and Afghanistan, spilled the beans about his own ancestry:

As probably one of only a few bloggers with any Mongol blood in them, I feel eminently qualified to comment. Well, not really eminently, and my Mongol heritage reaches back to the 16th century, when my Polish family intermarried with some Tartars who were much sought after by the noble families of what was then the Grand Duchy of Lithuania on account of being very good with horses and hunting dogs, but that's the beautiful thing about our "Mongol horde" of the blogosphere - everyone can fire their arrow into the fray.

He then notes that the Mongols were really a flash-in-the-pan, a wild people who were soon assimilated into their conquered nations through intermarriage and acculturation. For that reason, he thinks, the MSM should wish that bloggers prove to be nothing more than a Mongol hoard, since we'd soon be absorbed by the industry we're harassing today.

That's not an unthinkable fate. If blogging follows the pattern of virtually every other industry, consolidation will occur, at least at some level. Indeed, just this week Roger Simon announced the formation of Pajama Media, an aggregation of bloggers who intend to form a news service and pool their advertising resources.

So let's imitate, figuratively, the Mongols of old (no horse blood for me, please) and ride circles around the old boys when we can, or when they deserve it. But let's also be careful about our own version of assimilation. There's little doubt that the Mongols had more to gain than did the Poles when they intermarried. I don't think that anology works in the current situation, although I'm always willing to discuss cash infusions.

I've posted several times over the past few days on the disagreement between, on the one hand (that would be the correct one), Steve Bainbridge and Juan Non-Volokh, et al., on the other, Eugene Volokh, Cathy Young, et al. Bainbridge has argued, persuasively I think, that the refusal of Senate Democrats to allow a vote on Catholics or Evangelicals who believe, as an article of faith, that abortion is wrong amounts to religious discrimination in practice if not in intent.

Today, Bainbridge has another post , the heart of which is this hypothetical exchange:

Senator: "Do you support Roe v. Wade?"

Nominee: "Senator, I would attempt to follow and apply the law to the best of my ability."

Senator: "If you had a case before you that required you to follow Roe v. Wade, would you do so?"

Nominee: "Senator, with all respect, I don't think I should try to forecast how I would rule in particular cases. As I have said, however, as a circuit court judge, I would attempt to follow and apply binding Supreme Court precedents to the best of my ability."

Senator: "You're a devout Catholic, aren't you?"

Nominee: "Yes."

Senator: "Do you believe what the Church teaches about abortion?"

Nominee: "Yes."

Senator: "Well, in light of your last two comments, I don't think you can be trusted to be on the bench."

Maybe that's not technically a religious test, and maybe it's not technically religious bigotry, but when it happens over and over again wouldn't it start to look like the Senator has hung up a sign reading "Catholics need not apply unless they're willing to renounce Church teaching"?

To be sure, no Senator likely would be so blunt or foolish as to make those last couple of comments. (Although some have come awfully close.) Query, however, whether one cannot reasonably infer that some Senate Democrats are thinking such thoughts?

Perhaps, more effectively than his earlier posts, this one gets to the heart of the matter. I argued initially that the arguments of Volokh and his allies in this debate had turned the matter into a mere legal debate better suited for the classroom and, in doing so, ignored more pertinent, and real world, events unfolding in the Senate. It has never been a matter of legalisms, but of prohibition, because the event is unfolding not in a courtroom or classroom, but in the political arena. Perception is vital in this contest, and I think Steve Bainbridge has illustrated that well today. He's surely correct that some Democrats have given plenty of evidence that, even if they would stop short of stating outright that people with deep religious conviction are unworthy for the office, they're acting as if such a prejudice dominated their reaction to the nomination of such a person to the federal bench.

Although Daniel Henninger's column today concentrates on a different matter (the rise of the conservative media), he describes the current impasse in the Senate perfectly:

For Democrats, judicial philosophy is a cultural Armageddon. Harry Reid and Ted Kennedy have turned the Senate into a Branch Davidian compound. No one in the liberal cult is allowed to leave, including the hostage nominees--unless they recant their conservatism. How many Senate Democrats plan to be in this bunker when Bill Frist's ATF squad detonates the "nuclear option"?

Canned biscuits, anyone?

For some time we've argued that the real intent of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, better known as McCain-Feingold, is to squelch political speech critical of incumbent politicians. Whether clipping free speech rights on the web by targeting blogs, as a court ordered the FEC to do, or preventing anyone from buying television time to criticize politicians in the days leading up to an election, the goal of the "reformers" and their deep-pocket foundation supporters is crystal clear: shut down groups or individuals who take issue with the way we lead before, through the exercise of their First Amendment rights, they kick us out of office. The real issue here isn't corruption or clean elections; the real issue is preserving the perks of the political class.

An excellent editorial on this runs in this morning's New York Sun. Although it doesn't mention BCRA's threat to the Net, it does hit its mark regarding the "reformers" efforts to ensure not only that politicians aren't criticized, but that they get special rates from broadcast outlets for their own self-serving ads. Here's the core of their argument:

The latest move afoot in Congress is to limit sharply contributions to groups such as Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which are known as 527 organizations. In the Roll Call article, Senator Lott may have been unintentionally candid when, as the paper reports, he said, "his first priority was taking care of this '527 business before we're all embarrassed.'"

Well, the First Amendment protects the freedom of political speech, not the right of politicians to be free of embarrassment.

It also, one would think, protects owners of television stations from laws requiring them to give special discounts to politicians, as does the amendment passed yesterday by the Senate Rules Committee, that, as Roll Call describes it, would require television stations to charge candidates the lowest commercial rate they offer other, nonpolitical organizations throughout the year. Roll Call reports that a similar amendment passed the Senate in 2002 but was taken out by the House of Representatives, as the amendment's sponsor, Senator Durbin, put it, "because they don't buy as much TV time as we do." What's next, an amendment guaranteeing senators the lowest prices available all year on airline tickets? On automobiles?

The Sun's editors are being facetious in those final lines, but would anyone be shocked if such a proposal was put forward? Using Sen. Durbin's logic, why not? Here's one rendition of an argument we just may hear:

"Sen. X: We have to fly every weekend back to our home states (or districts, if Rep. X is speaking), and then travel extensively in those districts once we're home. The expenses of this travel are enormous, and what that means to the folks back home is that I have to be out raising all that extra money from supporters when I could be doing the people's work. Not only that, but money is the cause of all the corruption we see in politics these days, and anything we can do to remove the need to inject even more cash into the election cycle will, I believe, help our nation and receive the people's support."

But why stop there? Why not apply these wage and price controls to every facet of politicians' lives? Housing costs in Washington got you down? Try rent control for Congressmen. And hey, why not their staffs, as well? Can't expect a young staffer to raise a family in high-priced DC on the money we give him, can we? While we're at it, how's about a housing allowance for the home district or state, so that we won't have to give up our property, which we only want to pass along to our children, just to serve the people. It's only fair.

The BCRA should be re-named the "political class security act." Better yet, it should be abolished, and similar legislation defeated, quickly.

I was glad to see the President defend John Bolton at last night's press conference, and I hope he and his allies make a full court press to ensure that the absurd charges against his nominee to become America's U.N. ambassador don't stick. Having already been confirmed by the Senate four times in two administrations, Bolton deserves to add a new title to his resume, more for our sake than for his.

This morning, Victor Davis Hanson combines his usual grasp of facts with his (also normal) sense of moral outrage to defend John Bolton in the Washington Times. The best paragraphs of his op-ed are reserved for a frank look at the records of some of Bolton's harshest critics. As Hanson shows, they're public lives hardly give them room to cast stones at John Bolton:

Then there is the unmentioned hypocrisy of John Bolton's most vociferous inquisitors. California Sen. Barbara Boxer slams the nominee in the manner she hammered Condoleezza Rice. Yet she paid her own son a six-figure fee out of her publicly raised campaign funds. In another scandal, Mrs. Boxer circumvented channels to ram through special favorable legislation for the Miwok Tribe that wanted a gaming franchise. The tribe later hired her same peripatetic offspring as a consultant.

Sen. Chris Dodd now wonders out loud if John Bolton's conduct is indictable. After the recent Enron meltdown that cost consumers billions of dollars, many wondered the same thing about him for sponsoring unusual legislation for his own mega-dollar campaign donors. Mr. Dodd's intervention relaxed auditing accountability and allowed suspect firms like Arthur Andersen to circumvent legal culpability with disastrous results.

Mr. Biden's past slips and slurs make Mr. Bolton look like a Boy Scout. Not long ago he threatened representatives from the airlines with, "I will [hurt] you badly," and dubbed the United States at war in Afghanistan a "high-tech bully." Mr. Biden has fought accusations of intellectual misrepresentation going all the way back to law school -- repeated charges about character that aborted his previous presidential ambitions.

As Hanson says, the point here isn't that Boxer et al. are themselves uniquely hypocritical or evil. It's that, by raising the bar on nominees to an impossibly high level, they bring our democracy's operating to a standstill while making hypocritical fools of themselves. As I've written several times before, Bolton's opponents know that, time after time, the political positions he represents have been right, while those taken by his opponents have been wrong. To boot, as Hanson points out, Bolton's enemies do not see America as a force for good in the world, but instead adhere to the outdated, and never correct, vision of the U.S. as a malign force that, under George W. Bush, has careened out of control. Throughout the battle ahead, it's good to remember who Bolton's opponents are, and what they're made of themselves.

Update: The group blog Confirm Bolton features great posts, with much information, by the likes of Mike Krempasky, David Frum, Joel Mowbray, and Cliff May.

Ward Churchill continues to make news, or at least make a spectacle of himself. I've concentrated on other subjects lately, but the pachyderms at Elephants in Academe are keeping a watchful eye on the stonehead of the Rockies, and today they have an excellent post, titled, aptly, "Next Stop, Crazyville."

They link to this article in the Rocky Mountain News, which tells of Ward's address to a ragtag group gathered to protest life. Read the Elephants' report for more insight into what passes for oppression in the modern American campus. It used to be called bullying, but that's an ethnocentric view.

Years ago in a faculty colleague's office, that colleague and I expressed to a third professor, a young up-and-coming, stop-at-nothing type, our deep reservations toward the French Revolution. (And you wonder why I'm not in academe?) When she said that her students received a positive picture of the event, I said something to the effect that, well, lining up priests and nuns and murdering them might not be the way to go. She just shrugged, grinned, and walked away.

Today we're reminded that Chinese communist officials, whose desire for power and revenge mimics the French of old, have never really stopped acting like the Reds of old, at least not in any sphere of life that threatens their corrupt one-party rule. Their target is often the clergy, and for similar reasons the Revolutionaries of '89 struck out against priests and religious in their day: church personnel owe their allegiance to an authority that lies beyond the reach of the state. As such, they represent the hope that, with time, the iron rule of the regime can be broken. It's analogous to the trouble the Nazis (and their intellectual heirs) have with Jews: as Walker Percy said, they're a reminder that, regardless of what a utopian regime promises or attempts, history is not on their side. There remains something larger than the polity, longer lived than the state.

I discovered this story via David Mills at Mere Comments, who quotes from the press release from the Cardinal Kung Foundation relaying word of the arrests of priests in China, and says:

Well, they are Communists. I know that even among political conservatives, the ascription of wicked behavior to Communists because they are Communists is no longer done, but their being Communists does accurately explain why they act like Communists.

Yes, it would indeed.

Every right-of-center blogger is familiar with Andrew Sullivan's defection from the right, and with the reasons he decided he could no longer be seen as a conservative. I used to read his blog daily, at a time when most of the blogs I visit today (not to mention the one I write for) didn't even exist. But, like many others of my ilk, I rarely stop by any more, not because he never has anything interesting to say -- I'm sure he does -- but because he's become monotonous and boring.

Joe Knippenberg has posted a good deconstruction of Sullivan's latest assault on his former allies, which comes in the form of a long article in TNR. Joe finds it intellectually incoherent and, although I haven't read it yet, given Sullivan's predilection for such discourse over the past year or two, I'll bet Joe's right.

As I read through the papers early this morning on my living room couch, I saw a television ad, not for the first time, that withholds identification of its sponsor until the final seconds. You've probably seen it, too. (Download it here; it's the third listing, right-hand column.) It features three CEOs: Michael Dell of Dell Computers; Steve Ballmer of Microsoft; and Howard Schultz of Starbucks. Here, in chronological order, are their comments.

Howard Schultz: "You have to have the ability to inspire others. Success is not an entitlement; it has to be earned."

Michael Dell: "We had a great dream to be the leading computer systems company in the world. At first, my parents were pretty upset with me when I dropped out of college. But, after a while, they got over it."

Steve Ballmer: "When I first came to Microsoft, my father asked me what software was. My mother asked a more interesting question: 'why would a person ever need a computer?'"

Howard Schultz: "I am still as inspired today as I was when I first joined the company."

Michael Dell: "A leader today needs to have a distinct view of where the business is heading, as well as a tremendous passion for getting there."

Howard Schultz: "But it takes courage, it takes an entrepreneurial spirit, it takes vision."

Steve Ballmer: "As I look five, ten, fifteen years into the future, we're just scratching the surface of what's really possible."

Voice of each man: Dell, Starbucks, Microsoft.

Steve Ballmer, off camera: "Listed on NASDAQ. NASDAQ 100 companies."

The list of visionary risk-takers could be expanded easily because business, despite red tape and trial lawyers, still holds out the possibility of rewarding such behavior. Entrepreneurs who begin with a hunch, an insight, an intuition, can go on to build huge commercial successes. It's the dream of everyone who works hard at developing the knowledge base, colleagues, and know-how to turn a vision into a reality. And it takes courage, as Howard Schultz says, along with passion and a willingness to ignore bad advice, go with your gut, and plough ahead regardless of the criticism from jealous, envious naysayers who'd rather take the comfortable route to mediocrity.

Yet, the virtues lauded by these men and their peers are neither peculiar to the world of business nor applicable only to commercial ventures. Indeed, they're qualities found in leaders throughout history, and sometimes they even manifest themselves in more academic types who are determined to do the right thing, rather than build a consensus for its own sake. One such example is found in John Bolton.

I wrote Tuesday about Bolton's original sin: he has been consistently right in the face of pro-status quo bureaucrats at State and the CIA. Bolton's misfortune is that his own vision, passion, and courage have been exercised in a town that punishes, rather than rewards, success as the real world defines it. That's because the plutocrats who run official Washington are always with us, and, with the federal budget larger than ever, the permanent staffers and special interests groups who run the show have tremendous power over the direction of the country.

That doesn't mean that a plutocracy didn't exist in earlier days, when the federal government was but a shadow of its current self and Washington was, in the words of David Brinkley, a "sleepy Southern town." Pick up a copy of Witness by Whittaker Chambers if you're inclined to such naiveté.

But, with the expansion of federal power into virtually every realm of American life, the ability of the permanent plutocracy to thwart reforms within any branch of government has grown. We're seeing it today with the rejection of appointees to the federal bench who display too much, or the wrong kind of, faith. And, with the Bolton nomination, the forces of stagnation and, in a post 9/11 world, decay, have marshaled their troops to ensure that one man who spoke truth to power will not go unpunished.

So we get a series of phony charges that John Bolton isn't a sweetheart of a boss, that he had the temerity to question official Washington opinion, and that he's somehow engaged in intrigue to damage his critics. Yet if anyone's engaged in intrigue over the Bolton nomination, it's surely Colin Powell and his legions of pro-status quo friends at State and in the media who are as repulsed by a true maverick as they are by the thought that someone will upset what Jonah Goldberg calls "the nuances and subtleties of the Japanese tea ceremony that is international diplomacy." Most of all, they fear their beautiful world will be soiled by a smart, independent man who works for a different boss: the President. And so the permanent plutocracy is pulling out all the stops, and turning over all the rocks, to find enemies of John Bolton past and present.

Goldberg mentions one Lynne Finney, a witness against Bolton discovered by Barbara Boxer's staff, who claims that, over 20 years ago, Bolton (in Jonah's words):

[A]sked her to persuade U.N. functionaries to loosen the rules on marketing infant formula in the Third World. When she refused, she alleges, Bolton threw a hissy-fit, tried to fire her and, when that didn’t work, transferred her to a windowless room somewhere.

Head to Ms. Finney's website, and here's what you'll find:

A golden eagle flies free above the rainbow, cradled in Love's light. From Lynne's new book WINDOWS TO THE LIGHT Enriching Your Spirit with Haiku Meditations . . .

These pages, updated sporadically, are dedicated to each one of you. My mission is to help people overcome limiting beliefs, realize who we really are, tap into our inner power, live with passion, and discover the amazing power of our minds - and see the miracles all around us.

. . . This is a time of rapid evolution and intense transformation for us all. New discoveries in quantum physics, psychology, and spirituality are revealing ways to create wonderful new realities. It's estimated that more than 14 million people have already become enlightened or Self-realized. Some are visible but most lead ordinary lives. Each time someone reaches Self-realization, it affects the collective Mind. Things are heating up. Like popcorn, we are all popping faster and are reaching enlightenment at a rapid rate. At times, it may be challenging to keep your faith and to realize that God/Love/Truth/Beauty/ Universe/Light/ Spirit/Energy/your true Self are in control and all is well. Go inside in silence and know that it is true. All the answers you need are inside you.

Groovy, man.

Another critic of Bolton, one given to inventive renditions of reality that rival those of Ms. Finney, is Sidney Blumenthal, a mainstay of the conspiratorial left. Writing in the Guardian, Blumenthal of course attacks Bolton. More to the point, however, his article is a litany of praise for Colin Powell. And, in this current fight, that's a key point.

From the redoubt of his retirement, former secretary of state Colin Powell is beginning to exact revenge. His sterling reputation was soiled, having lost most of the important battles within the administration during the first term. While he lamented that he had been "deceived" into presenting false information before the United Nations to justify the Iraq war, he acted as the good soldier to the end, giving every sign of desiring to fade away.

But now he has re-emerged to conduct a campaign to defeat President Bush's nomination of conservative hardliner and former undersecretary of state John Bolton as US ambassador to the UN.

In seeking to prevent the bullying and duplicitous ideologue from representing the US before the international organisation, Powell is engaging in hand-to-hand combat with his successor. Secretary of state Condoleezza Rice's first true test has not arrived from abroad. Caught by Powell's flanking movement, she is trapped in a crisis of credibility, which she herself is deepening.

Powell's closest associate, his former deputy Richard Armitage, is orchestrating much of the action. Wavering senators are directed to call Powell, who briefs them on Bolton's demerits. Powell's former chief of staff, Lawrence B Wilkerson, has surfaced to give an interview to the New York Times, declaring that Bolton would be "an abysmal ambassador".

Other former foreign-service officers have queued up to provide ever uglier details of Bolton's career as a "serial abuser" and "a quintessential kiss-up, kick-down sort of guy", as Carl W Ford Jr, the former director of intelligence at the state department, described him before the Senate foreign relations committee.

So there's the playbook, and the core of the argument against Bolton can be gleaned from its author, Colin Powell, the biggest single mistake George W. Bush has ever made.

More than almost any other Washington insider of the past 20 years, Powell has played the role of lackey for the permanent plutocracy with extraordinary skill. As is the want of this breed, Powell always wants things both ways: loyal soldier and diplomat doing the bidding of his boss; anguished moral conscience of those-who-know-best undermining his boss and staff loyal to the big man through careful leaks and, now that he's retired, an overt orchestrated campaign against his successor. Petulance is never pretty, but it's rarely uglier than when carried out by a former soldier.

As Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he opposed the first Gulf War and, loosing that battle, succeeded in saving Saddam for another day. In the Iraq War, he opposed acting against Saddam yet again and, having lost that war, hopes to destroy his own government's capacity for dealing with the a dysfunctional, corrupt U.N. Such actions win the unquestioned allegiance of the political class, for whom success is defined not by advancement of any vision, or the exercise of any passion, but by the preservation of the perquisites which they enjoy on the backs of people whose creative energies they siphon.

You'll find more on the Bolton nomination in this morning's Washington Times; in the WSJ editorial page leader; and in Max Boot's L.A. Times op-ed. Also, don't miss Victor Davis Hanson's article on the "experts" whom history has proven to be wrong-headed time after time.

Update: Peggy Noonan also has a fine column on Bolton that treats, in slightly different form, some of the problems discussed above.

Update II: Roger Bate of AEI has an article up at TCS on just the latest example of why Bolton is needed at the U.N.: "This week it was confirmed that Zimbabwe has been one of 15 countries chosen by members of the UN's Economic and Social Council in New York to serve on the UN Commission on Human Rights."

That's what James Kushiner at Mere Comments calls Bill Moyers, the man whom PBS made rich. Moyers blessedly retired from his own show on PBS back in December. At that time, I wrote about him and linked to several nice pieces that took an unsentimental look at the king of sentimental pseudo-journalism. Here's a taste of what James Kushiner wrote about him today:

Just in case you missed it, and are like more than a few people concerned or interested in the future of the Roman Catholic Church, Bill Moyers on PBS last night provided viewers with a sure-fire path to a secure future: married priests and women priests. If both of these things were allowed by the hierarchy, Moyers assured worried Catholics and other viewers, the Catholic Church would become "an unstoppable force."

Unstoppable? I waited for him to go on and say, "As in, like, the gates of hell wouldn't be able to prevail against it." But he didn't. Married priests and women priests (and, one assume, female bishops and--popes!)--these are the keys to the future unstoppable kingdom.

Kushiner also recounts the ahistorical observations of historian James Carroll, who eagerly awaits a Gorbachev to free the Catholic Church. Of course, if such a pope really did emulate Gorbachev's accomplishments, he would destroy the very edifice he set out to save. That's called getting it all wrong in most circles, but since Carroll belongs to the same crowd that celebrated Gorbachev while condemning Reagan, Thatcher, and John Paul II, I hope he'll understand if we refuse to take his advice this time 'round.

Democracy Project board member Wilfed McClay delivered a brilliant lecture in February, titled "The Evangelical Conservatism of George W. Bush: Or, How the Republicans Became Red," at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. It was well received in Washington (Brent and I were there), and today William F. Buckley, Jr., has devoted a column to examining it. Be sure to read both works and reach your own conclusions regarding both Wilfred McClay's essay and Mr. Buckley's comments.

Eugene Oregon at the Coalition for Darfur, of which Democracy Project is a member, has posted a retrospective on the key role played by Professor Eric Reeves of Smith College in bringing much wider attention to the genocide occurring in that region of Sudan. You'll want to read the entire post at the Coalition's home page.

All that is needed to put the allegations – which deserve a full investigation – against Tom Delay in context is to read this article about the Swaziland's King’s birthday bash. The King, whose subjects make an average of less than one dollar a day, spent $1.7 million for a party in a stadium with:

energetic dances by warriors and barebreasted young girls, a 21-gun salute, several hymns, and a military band which played an hour-long eclectic medley teaming up Happy Birthday to You and the 1970s chart-topper Congratulations with traditional English ballads such as Greensleeves and the more martial Colonel Bogey march.

But that’s not the end of the King’s excess:

In December, the king bought a $500 000 DaimlerChrysler flagship Maybach 62 as his debt-ridden country battled crippling poverty and what the United Nations Aids agency has said is the world's highest Aids infection rate, at close to 40 percent.

While the King's antics are certainly gross and represent a real need for democracy in the Swaziland, they don't rise to the level of evil and maliciousness of China's ruling leader Hu Jintao, who in a recent secret speech (which happened to be obtained by the Washington Post) before the Chinese Communist Party's Central Committee made the following points:

Hu warned that "hostile forces" were trying to undermine the party by "using the banner of political reform to promote Western bourgeois parliamentary democracy, human rights and freedom of the press," according to a person given excerpts of the speech.

Hu said China's enemies had not abandoned their "strategic plot to Westernize and split China." He blamed the fall of the Soviet Union on policies of "openness and pluralism" and on the efforts of "international monopoly capital with the United States as its leader." And in blunt language that party veterans said recalled Mao Zedong's destructive Cultural Revolution, he urged the leadership to be alert to the danger of subversive thinking.

"Don't provide a channel for incorrect ideological points of view," the person who had read some of the speech quoted Hu as saying. "When one appears, strike at it, and gain the initiative by subduing the enemy."

Hu said relaxation of such efforts to manage ideology could endanger the party and argued that the Soviet Union collapsed because Mikhail Gorbachev allowed the United States and others to spread subversive ideas there, according to those with knowledge of the speech.

While life in Russia could certainly be better and freer, democracy has brought new liberties and new life to citizens of that country and to the people living in the former satellite republics of the USSR, such as the Ukraine, the Baltic states, and of course countries such as Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and many others.

Last month, we experienced serious problems with the trackback component of the software we were then using. We think the trouble stemmed from our need, shared by many other bloggers, to blacklist the ever-morphing poker (and worse) sites that leave trackbacks seemingly at random on archived posts. The damage wasn't slight, however: not only did many bloggers find it impossible to ping us, but our archives were mostly wiped clean of accumulated trackbacks, which (if I recall correctly) peaked at around 40 for one of my posts on the FEC.

We've since upgraded our software, and it seems to be working well. Should you have any difficulting pinging us, please do let me know immediately.

In this one case, however, I hope NOT to hear from anyone!

The discussion between Steve Bainbridge and his UCLA Law colleague Eugene Volokh continues, with each man weighing in and a blogging colleague of Volokh's, the pseudonymous Juan Non-Volokh, takes Bainbridge's side.

At issue is whether or not Democrats' efforts to block appointment of Bush's judicial nominees constitutes, or is analogous to, anti-religious (and especially anti-Catholic) bigotry. Here's a portion of Juan Non-Volokh's take on the matter:

I think it is fair to say that at least some Democratic Senators -- and some outside interest groups -- have taken the position that an individual who accepts the Catholic Church's teaching on abortion, and who therefore believes that abortion is murder, is unfit for the federal bench. While I would not call this anti-Catholic bigotry, it is quite anti-Catholic in effect.

Eugene Volokh , responding those words, argues again that, while the effect of the Democrats' policy may be the exclusion of Catholics, their intent is based not on opposition to Catholics qua Catholics, but on opposition to a belief (that abortion involves the murder of a human being) held by Catholics. Volokh goes on to offer a couple of analogies, including one in which Bush refuses to appoint judges who are not in favor of the death penalty. This, he says, would have the same effect: banning Catholics.

Here, however, Volokh is wrong. Although John Paul II taught that he believed the death penalty should almost never be applied, Catholics are under no obligation to agree with him. That is, it is not an article of faith, and it was not pronounced ex cathedra, from the Vatican as ratified by the Pope and the College of Cardinals. Catholics should take this view into account, but they're not obligated to agree or to act on the late Pope's beliefs on this matter.

Another of Volokh's analogies claims that a college's decision to admit students only on the basis of high test scores wouldn't make it anti-black, even though such a policy might have the effect of admitting fewer blacks. But here, the subject has shifted from analogy to alternative argument, because we've moved from a discussion of argued opinion (or faith) as a basis for exclusion to one of qualitative criteria as a measurement instrument for qualification to office and/or admission. No one, that is, has challenged the professional qualifications of Bush's nominees, as would be the case if they discovered that Nominee X graduated dead last in his class, took 14 years to make it through law school, and cannot articulate his views on any legal matter. Were that the case, then Volokh's example would suffice as an analogy; as it stands, he's changed the subject of the debate.

That said, neither Volokh nor Cathy Young has demonstrated that Democrats who oppose Bush's federal judicial nominees aren't, in practice, so opposed to some central beliefs of Catholic doctrine that they are not, in effect, anti-Catholic. This is not a qualitative measure of the appointees suitability for office, but rather part of a larger cultural movement within secular liberalism (and in some quarters of what Walker Percy called "post-Protentant" belief) that is implacably hostile to traditional religious dogma. In that sense, the Democrats who oppose any Bush nominee who is Catholic would surely oppose, just as fervently and with perhaps more outward displays of condescension, an evangelical who was also pro-life.

Let's put the question another way, a way that reflects not cold academic debate (read the Federalist Papers and tell me if our founding beliefs were offered as utterly rational, bloodless, ahistorical logical proofs, or if you think we'd be better off if they were): How many opponents of abortion are also atheists? I can think of one -- Nat Hentoff -- but no more. I'm sure there are others, but few would argue that the overwhelming majority of people who oppose abortion do so on overtly religious grounds. Therefore, to exclude, a priori, any who oppose abortion from the federal bench is to, of necessity, create a situation in which de facto discrimination against persons holding widespread religious beliefs is practiced.

Paul Greenberg discusses the anti-religious bent of modern liberalism, as it's played out in the Senate, with specific reference to Mark Pryor.

It's unbecoming, you see, for church people to participate in the low rough-and-tumble of politics. Their tactics, he says, could "make the followers of Jesus Christ just another special interest group."

So shut up, he explained.

It's all enough to bring back memories of the good ol' bad old days in these Southern latitudes. Back in the Furious '50s, those defending the political status quo relied heavily on the filibuster, too, and they, too, objected to preachers sticking their noses into politics and riling folks.

Back then, it was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (talk about mixing politics and religion) that caused all the trouble and stirred up folks for no good reason.

Religion may be a fine, stained-glass thing in its purely ornamental place, but to actually take a stand on religious conviction and fight for it, whether it's picketing a lunch counter or driving the money-changers from the Temple, well, then you've gone from preachin' to meddlin' -- and become a special interest, to use Mark Pryor's damning description.

Greenberg goes on to argue, persuasively, that religious convictions have played a central role in American politics since our founding, and that neither Pryor nor any of his colleagues on either side of the aisle have any business trying to exclude one group's religious beliefs from the public arena. That's what we're seeing in action today, even if the left isn't hanging up signs that read "No Catholics, No Jews, No N******." What they fear may not be one's ancestry, per se -- after all, the Senate if filled with men and women whose ancestors doubtless found abortion an abomination. But the effect of the litmus test they're applying to judicial nominees strikes at the soul of the believer just as surely as older forms of bigotry struke at skin color or ancestry. The exceptions to this, of course, can be seen whenever conservative blacks or Hispanics are nominated for high office. Just ask Miguel Estrada or Condoleezza Rice.

Update: Steve Bainbridge has posted some responses to his earlier arguments.

The conflict over judicial nominees, along with many other contentious issues in our society, revolves around the role of religion in public life. One of the more thoughtful posts I've read on the role of religion in public life was posted by Marc Comtois at Anchors Rising. Comtois links to and quotes from a recent essay, the Deist Minimum, by the estimable Avery Cardinal Dulles, whose father was Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.

While the essay is too long to attempt any synopsis here, the Cardinal is concerned with demonstrating that Thomas Jefferson, whose Deism was the most pronounced of any of the Founders, still understood that religion was necessary for the preservation of the Republic. Beyond that, Cardinal Dulles understands that the Deism of Jefferson's day was imbued with a Christian metaphysics and lived out in a society formed by Christian norms.

Here are Cardinal Dulles's closing paragraphs. The essay appeared in the January issue of First Things.

Jefferson would probably have insisted on the positive articles of deism as a required minimum. For him and the other Founding Fathers, the good of society requires a people who believe in one almighty God, in providence, in a divinely given moral code, in a future life, and in divinely administered rewards and punishments. He and they expected that the example and teachings of Jesus, as known from the Gospels, would be accepted in principle by the great majority of citizens. Although Jefferson wanted the state to refrain from meddling in the particulars of religion, he counted on families, churches, and educational institutions to perpetuate and disseminate in more vivid and concrete forms the basic truths also taught in his moderate form of deism.

If he were alive today, Jefferson would doubtless ask himself whether the welfare of the republic can stand in the absence of the minimal consensus I have described. If pluralism goes unchecked, will the nation still have a corporate vision sufficient to sustain the sense of mission and collective purpose that have characterized it at its best? Will factionalism, corruption, violence, and aimlessness proliferate? Each of us must strive to answer these questions as best we can with the help of the Sage of Monticello.

To which we may add, in light of the discussion that Steve Bainbridge is having on the banning of some judicial candidates because of their religious beliefs, can a nation that prohibits religious people from participating fully in civic life hold itself together as a civil society?

Here is the latest press release from the Committee on the Present Danger, of which I am a member. The Advance Democracy Act is a key piece of legislation that will strengthen America's ability to make our nation more secure by advancing the cause of liberty worldwide. And, I'm proud to say, Democracy Project's own Brent Tantillo, through his position at the Hudson Institute, played a key role in drafting this important legislation.

Committee on the Present Danger
contact: Barbara Dlugos
202/778-1032. E-mail: info@fightingterror.com

April 26, 2005

COMMITTEE ON THE PRESENT DANGER BACKS “ADVANCE DEMOCRACY” ACT

The Committee on the Present Danger has endorsed twin bills in the Senate and House which, if enacted, will constitute the Advance Democracy Act. The legislation is intended to expand the U.S. Government’s efforts to encourage democracy movements in non-democratic countries.

S. 516, sponsored by Senators Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) and John McCain (R-AZ), and HR1133, sponsored by Representatives Frank Wolf (R-VA) and Tom Lantos (D-CA) would, according to a summary of the bills, promote freedom and democracy as a fundamental component of U.S. foreign policy in order “to see an end to dictatorial and other non-democratic forms of government, and to strengthen alliances with other democratic countries to better promote and defend shared values and ideals.”

Provisions of the bills would:

• Make permanent the State Department position of Undersecretary for Global Affairs, and an office of Democracy Movements and Transitions to be a point of contact for democracy movements in such countries;

• Create a Democracy Promotion Advisory Board to provide the knowledge of outside experts to the Department of State on democracy promotion. It would also conduct a study on the efficiency of current U.S. democracy assistance.

• Require from the Secretary of State an annual report on the status of democracy movements, including an action plan to promote transition to democracy in non-democratic countries. The bills anticipate that the State Department, in preparing the report, would confer with individuals and organizations within various democracy movements.

• Encourage U.S. ambassadors in such countries to make their embassies “islands of freedom” by meeting with representatives of democracy movements and speaking out on democracy and human rights, especially on college and university campuses;

• Establish a Congressional Democracy Award for U.S. Government officials who have made extraordinary efforts to promote democracy;

• Create an official democracy and human rights website, collecting materials relevant to the spread of democracy, including (in several languages) the Department of State’s annual report on International Religious Freedom, the annual Trafficking-in-Persons Report and the new annual Report on Democracy.

“The provisions of these bills are more than rhetoric,” commented CPD co-chairman R. James Woolsey. “They will provide solid encouragement in countries where democratic movements got a boost from the January 30 Iraq elections. In this day of instant communications by satellite television and the internet, no country can wall itself off from the spread of democracy. The events in Georgia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan and Lebanon are proof of that,” he said.

Former U.S. Ambassador Mark Palmer, lead author of the CPD’s Iran policy paper, is expected to testify in favor of the twin bills before committees of both houses of Congress this month.

###

Yesterday, I agreed with Steve Bainbridge's argument, contra Cathy Young and Eugene Volokh, that the exclusion of Catholic and Evangelical judges from consideration or approval to the federal bench amounted to unwarranted harm being rendered to them, whether or not religious bigotry played a role in those exclusions.

Today, this post, by Rick Duncan at Red State Lawblog, argues that, regardless of whether targeted religious bias or disparate impact is at work in this conflict, people otherwise deemed qualified for the position are being denied a job because of their religious beliefs.

Surely this is the case, and to deny it is to be blinded by pure legalisms in an arena that is far more political (and real world) than academic. In other words, regardless of the de jure interpretation of what's happening here, de facto, religious beliefs are keeping people from being approved. The debate, therefore, is not about ideology, unless one posits that religion is merely an ideology. And while I don't doubt that many on the left see it as nothing more than that, surely it is they who represent an overly legalistic approach to this issue.

Then again, they have little choice. Since opponents of religious nominees cannot base their arguments against pro-life appointees on that person's religious beliefs, they resort to arcane legal arguments to defend their actions. And with legal hair-splitting as their only weapon, we're sure to see more legal-speak to defend the exclusion of religious people from the judiciary.

Update: Steve Bainbridge has responded to his critics, especially to Cathy Young, and he, again I believe, makes the better argument. He links to many who've both agreed and disagreed with his argument, and, as I write above, it's really too much to assume, even for the sake of argument, that the left harbors no hostility to religious judicial nominees. In his concluding paragraph, he writes:

We should hold their feet to the fire and make them explain why having a religiously-motivated opposition to, say, abortion is a job-related qualification.

Exactly. Hiding behind specious hypotheticals (see the end of Steve's post) or classroom legalese won't do on matters of this magnitude.

We've paid a considerable amount of attention to attempts by left-wing foundations to shut down the political speech of people they don't like, and we'll continue to cover that story. But no one who's concerned about the federal government's efforts to reign in campaign speech should forget that similar efforts are underway on the state level, where they generally receive far less press (and blogger) coverage.

Ryan Sager of the New York Post, who broke the Sean Treglia story and has written extensively on BCRA, reminds us of this in his post column this morning. He reports that George Soros's Open Society Institute, along with the Joyce Foundation, have poured $3 million into efforts by organizations in Illinois to outlaw spending by corporations and unions on all elections in that state.

Most recently, under the innocuous-sounding moniker the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform, they worked (unsuccessfully) to defeat a Republican candidate of the Illinois Supreme Court, Lloyd Karmeier. In a stunt not unlike what they've attempted with more success on the national level, the "cleanies," as Sager labels them, used contributions from the trial lawyers' lobby to set up ICPR, which was billed as a bi-partisan champion of clean government.

You'll want to read all of Ryan's column, because he nails the phony reformers for what they are: people who'd rather stop their opponents from speaking their minds than engage in debate on crucial issues. I'd add that, in that, they closely resemble their left-wing academic sympathizers, who've tried to squelch speech with which they disagreed since the 1960s. They, too, have had mixed results, but they remain a dangerous force for speech restrictions on scores of campuses nationwide.

Manufacturing phony grassroots campaigns, such as that orchestrated by Pew and other giant trusts over the past decade and more, isn't just a problem in national political debates. As the Illinois case demonstrates, all of us are susceptible to the soothing promises to promote "clean government" made by those who bill themselves as honest brokers in political debate. That they're anything but honest is a fact that the MSM has consistently ignored. This time round, it's time for the rest of us to do our own research and reporting, lest we allow our precious First Amendment rights to be further weakened by the intrigues of the political class.

John Bolton has many friends in Washington, most notably George W. Bush. Others include Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, and no small number of foreign policy experts in and out of government. Even a few journalists, mostly conservatives like Bill Kristol, are firmly on his side.

But over the years, John Bolton has committed the unforgivable act of being right, time after time. He was (and is) right about the tyranny of Fidel Castro, and about the incompetence and corruption of the United Nations. Going back a few more years, he was right about the nature of the Soviet Union in particular, and about communism in general. And in official Washington, the most serious sin doesn't involve infidelity to one's spouse, but to a political class that claims exclusive rights to determine the boundaries of acceptable debate. In this case, the same pro-status quo wonks who sought to thwart President Bush's move into Iraq, having failed in their efforts to kill the nomination of Condi Rice, are demanding the scalp of the next genuine threat to their policy of process for process's sake.

So John Bolton is now subjected to an assault on his character and trustworthiness -- his "temperament" -- for his past actions and for the threat that he'll take the administration's reform-minded message to Kofin Annan's self-serving, corrupt, sanctimonious U.N.

To be sure, his treatment of subordinates, from what we can tell, was at times somewhat -- somewhat -- abrasive. But these underlings, who've nursed their grudges for years, didn't lose their jobs, and they haven't been forced into early retirement or career changes. Bless their bleeding hearts, what would they have done had they had the misfortune to work in private industry, where insubordinate or obstinate staff are fired every day? What if, that is, they didn't have the ear of Douglas Jehl of the New York Times?

Jehl relies on the usual suspect for a NYT story -- an anonymous source with an axe to grind -- for his front page tale of Bolton's behind-the-scenes efforts to -- brace yourself -- disagree with the CIA! Yes, John Bolton has had the audacity, the unmitigated gall, to take issue with the wise men at Langley who missed, oh, you know, the fall of the Soviet Union, the massacre at Tiananmen Square, 9/11, WMDs in Iraq. Oh, and don't forget the rise of Castro, the nature of the Sandinistas, and other little trip-ups along their primrose path to near-obsolescence.

Here's Jehl's breathless introduction:

John R. Bolton clashed repeatedly with American intelligence officials in 2002 and 2003 as he sought to deliver warnings about Syrian efforts to acquire unconventional weapons that the Central Intelligence Agency and other experts rejected as exaggerated, according to former intelligence officials.

Ultimately, the former intelligence officials said, most of what Mr. Bolton, then an under secretary of state, said publicly about Syria hewed to the limits on which the C.I.A. and other agencies had insisted. But they said that the prolonged and heated disputes over Mr. Bolton's proposed remarks were unusual within government, and that they reflected what one former senior official called a pattern in which Mr. Bolton sought to push his public assertions beyond the views endorsed by intelligence agencies.

Well, no wonder he's unqualified for office! He engaged in "prolonged and heated disputes" with members of the permanent bureaucracy at Langley -- and at Foggy Bottom, to boot. Never mind that his public pronouncements toed the line; they pushed it, too, and for that he must pay.

But wait: it gets worse. Much worse. I can hardly stand the tension.

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has asked the C.I.A. to provide the committee with a copy of its objections to Mr. Bolton's prepared testimony in 2003.

Damn right, Joe. You get to the bottom of this mess, and do it soon. Because any man who questions the authority of the political class, which is inherently, and permanently, soft on dictatorships of the left, needs to be turned inside out.

Beyond the phoniness of this brow-furrowing and hand-wringing, the most obvious objection to these partisan attacks and paybacks is simple: the CIA is not now, and has never been, a policy-making branch of the federal government. It is not the place of CIA underlings, nor of their peers at State, to set the course for the nation's foreign policy. That job belongs to the elected administration and its appointees, which include John Bolton.

This morning's Washington papers, both the Post and the Times, do a better job on the Bolton story, because they actually report the news (at least this time) rather than manufacture it. The Post's headline captures the gist of their story: "Foreign Policy Disputes are Subtext in Battle over Bolton."

In public, the controversy over John R. Bolton's nomination as United Nations ambassador has focused on his handling of personnel issues and his managerial skills. But the first big battle of President Bush's second term also reflects long-standing tensions among Republicans over the thrust of U.S. foreign policy.

Allegations that Bolton has been abrasive have become a metaphor for the broader problem of the United States' image abroad, with Republicans who favor a less confrontational and unilateral approach seeing an opportunity to press their point of view. It is all the more striking at a time when the Bush administration, led by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, has tried to rebuild relations with allies in Europe and Asia.

Bill Kristol, speaking to the Post, makes a key point:

"A lot of people are conservative and remain conservative when they enter government. But they don't try to reshape the bureaucracies to carry out their policies or the president's policies," said William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard. He noted that many of the people who have spoken out against Bolton to the committee are regarded as allies of Armitage and Powell, making the accusations in his view a form of "payback" for past policy disputes.

In that sense, Bolton is being punished, as all presidential nominees who run afoul of received wisdom are, because he's a proxy for the President. For that reason alone, the White House should work tirelessly to ensure his appointment to the U.N. post. A few phone calls to Senators might be in order.

The Washington Times's Bill Sammon assures us that this is what's happening:

"We are going to make the case from here on out that this is about reform -- or more of the same -- at the U.N.," a senior administration official told The Washington Times.

"Senators are realizing this is about the U.N.," added the official, who discussed Mr. Bolton on the condition of anonymity. "And they know the president is firmly behind him."

As I said yesterday (and as many others have pointed out), if the left and its proxies in the permanent bureaucracy want to defend the modern United Nations, let them try. Perhaps they can explain to the American people why John Bolton, and the policies of the President he follows, represent a greater threat to U.S. security than do all the vengeful minions throwing darts at their colleague. And while the President's men are explaining why the U.N. needs to be reformed, they might toss in a couple of lines about two other wrong-headed and increasingly useless bureaucracies that stand in the way of meaningful reform and national security: those at the State Department and the CIA.

As a native Georgian living in the North (northern Delaware is the North; Southern Delaware is fairly Southern), I found this story at Red State interesting, disappointing, but not terribly surprising. It's about an attempt by Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Lt. Gov. Tim Kaine, to belittle his Republican opponent, Jerry Kilgore, for the latter's mountain Southern accent. Kaine, it seems, is from Missouri, which he seems to belive places him in a position to ridicule Southerners. Kilgore, who hails from Southwestern Virginia, sounds like -- well, like a Virginian from the mountains.

Much of this particular case stems from Virginia's bi-polarism, a condition caused by the rapid influx of people from all over the country to the Washington suburbs. But it goes further than that, too, since a strong Southern accent is assumed by some to indicate low intelligence. No one has accused me of that -- at least not because of my accent! -- but I've been told that I talk too fast for a Southerner, or that I move too quickly, or that it's remarkable that I at one time taught Renaissance history.

None of that really bothered me, in no small part because those expressing such sentiments didn't generally harbor any ill will. Plus, not many of them struck me as particularly sophisticated themselves, so that I felt reasonably confident that their comments could be ignored.

To boot, I've never agreed with those who seek victimhood because of their region of birth. If someone dislikes me because of my origins, I'm not quite sure why I should care.

But in the Virginia story, we're seeing a non-native attack someone born and bred in the Commonwealth for being too much of a Virginian. I hope he doesn't get away with it, because, on principle, his attacks are beneath contempt. Kaine may assume his speech marks him as a man of class, but the words he's using belie that assumption.

It all depends on what your meaning of "name" is. Michelle Malkin lists some variations on the theme of "maverick," as in "A herd of maverick Republicans are stampeding toward policy positions approved by the chattering classes."

As a member of the Committee on the Present Danger, I want to bring to everyone's attention a recent memo that addresses the efforts by Iranian students to bring democracy to their oppressed land. With the danger of terrorism ever present, it is vitally important that movements such as this receive significant support from America.

April 22, 2005

TO: Members and Friends of the CPD and CPD-I

FROM: Peter Hannaford

SUBJECT: Iran student democracy movement

On April 14, 15 and 18 the Committee on the Present Danger was host to Akbar Atri, a leader in the Iran student democracy movement. He is a member of the central committee of Takhim Vahdat, the largest student organization in Iran. He is in the United States to seek support for the movement’s national referendum petition. The petition calls on the government of the mullahs to hold a national referendum for a new constitution, in effect, for democracy.

The CPD arranged meetings for Mr. Atri with officials at the Departments of State and Defense, the National Security Council, Freedom House, three Senatorial offices (Alexander, Kyl, Lieberman) and several members of the CPD who specialize in Iran issues. He received very positive expressions of interest wherever he went during his visit.

In his presentations, Mr. Atri makes the point that so long as the nuclear issue is the focus of all attention, the regime positions it internally as a matter of national pride. By gaining international support for the referendum, other issues rise to the same level, issues which put the regime on the defensive: support for terrorism, human rights abuses, the denial of democracy.

Steve Bainbridge rather easily dispenses with an argument put forward in today's Boston Globe by Cathy Young. Her position, which is defended in a post by Eugene Volokh, is that the Democrats' hostility to religious judicial nominees does not amount to religious bigotry. Here's a bit of Young's op-ed:

The conservatives' stance eerily mirrors the left-wing shibboleth that opposition to race-based preferences in hiring or education is racist and opposition to radical feminist orthodoxy is anti-female. Suppose Senate Republicans were blocking the judicial nomination of a feminist legal scholar who had argued that in rape cases, the accused should be presumed guilty until proven innocent. Not many conservatives would be impressed with the argument that this is a sexist attempt to keep women off the federal bench. And I can imagine the glee on the right if, say, Hillary Clinton jumped on the bandwagon of such a complaint.

Like sexism and racism, anti-religious prejudice really exists (though the notion that Christians in America are persecuted rivals in absurdity the notion that women in America are oppressed). But some conservatives are now using it as their ticket in the victimhood sweepstakes. The left has the race card and the gender card; the right has the ''faith card."

This right-wing political correctness is noxious for many reasons. It is an insult to religious believers who don't hold conservative views on abortion, homosexuality, and other social issues -- including Republicans like Rudy Giuliani or Arnold Schwarzenegger. It is also blatantly hypocritical, since conservatives have repeatedly used a ''religious test" to suggest that the non-religious or even the not-religious-enough are unfit for office. President Bush himself has said that ''we need common-sense judges who understand that our rights were derived from God." (For true religious bigotry, look at Ron Forster, a high-ranking Republican legislator in Georgia, who opined in 2003 that judges or public officials who don't believe in God are ''more likely to be corrupt.")

To which Volokh adds, in what amounts more to an assertion than an argument:

Young's analysis strikes me as quite right. One can plausibly fault the Senate Democrats' opposition to the President's judicial nominees on various grounds, but "religious bigotry" is not one of them. As best I can tell, the Senators care about the nominee's politics, ideology on contested legal questions, and likely future votes on such questions, not about the nominee's religion.

Of course, there may well be a correlation between certain political or judicial views and religion. But as Young's examples show, this doesn't turn political and ideological hostility -- whether that hostility is justified or excessive -- into religious bigotry.

Here's Bainbridge's reply:

What both of them have overlooked, of course, is the principle of disparate impact.

It is a basic principle of discrimination law that overt evidence of bigotry is not required to find that someone has dsicriminated [sic]. As an HR source explains the relevant legal principles:

Even where an employer is not motivated by discriminatory intent, Title VII prohibits an the employer from using a facially neutral employment practice that has an unjustified adverse impact on members of a protected class. ... The plaintiff must prove, generally through statistical comparisons, that the challenged practice or selection device has a substantial adverse impact on a protected group.

Obviously, I am not claiming that the Senate is violating Title VII. Instead, I am simply pointing out what strikes me as an apt analogy.

The Democrat litmus test for judges has a disparate impact on devout Catholic and Evangelical nominees for judicial office, which is a perfactly [sic] appropriate ground for criticizing that litmus test.

He's absolutely correct, and the effort to reduce the consequences of effectively banning devout Catholic and Evangelical nominees for judicial office cannot be reduced to the consequence of placing their ideas into the political arena. Bainbridge's analogy works because the consequences he illustrates are the same as they would be even if no religious bigotry is present. But, given the hostility of so many on the left to devoutly held religious belief, whatever the origin, the historical evidence is also on Bainbridge's side.

Update: Steve Bainbridge has posted some of his critics' arguments, along with further rebuttals, and I think that, again, he comes out on top. See also my post above.

"Emails More Damaging than Cannabis" reads the headline in this article at Vnunet.

Researchers at the University of London Institute of Psychiatry have found that the constant distractions of email and texting are more harmful to performance than cannabis.

Those distracted by incoming email, phone calls and text messages saw a 10-point fall in their IQ, more than twice that found in studies of the impact of smoking cannabis, according to the researchers.

Some 1,100 volunteers were used in the study, sponsored by HP. Half of those questioned said that they reply to emails instantly or as soon as possible, and one in five admitted to breaking off meals or social engagements to deal with email.

This constant shifting of concentration makes the brain more tired and less focused, and causes the temporary IQ fall-off.

Email and SMS are also making us work longer. Over 60 per cent of those questioned answered work emails at home or when they are on holiday.

The phenomenon of email addiction is well known, not least to users of RIM's BlackBerry devices.

Intel president Craig Barratt and many others refer to these devices as 'CrackBerrys' because of the obsessive email use they inspire in their owners.

Having been in the presence of people who are addicted to their CrackBerrys, this doesn't surprise me. I love the new technology that allows us to communicate so quickly and effortlessly, but, as in all things, there must be a worthy end beyond simply engaging in the act of communicating. Staying in touch for the sake of being in touch -- with everyone, all the time -- is worse than useless; it's downright harmful.

CrackBerryheads: lay down your device and walk away!

How to Hear the Show:

Tune in to WDEV 550 AM/96.1 FM or to WSYB 1380 AM to hear TRUE NORTH live, from 11:05 a.m. till noon, Monday through Friday.

Should you miss a show, don't forget--each week we post the previous week's shows on our website, so you can listen to those you missed online. Just go to truenorthradio.com and click on ARCHIVES

Monday: A DOUBLE-HEADER TODAY! First, State GOP Chairman JIM BARNETT will comment on what Senator Jeffords’s announcement that he’ll not seek re-election means for the Republican party. We’ll also explore the possibilities opened up, should Congressman Bernie Sanders decide to run for Senator. Then, KEVIN DORN, Secretary of the Agency of Commerce and Community Development will be discussing the devastating consequences for Vermont business, should the Senate approve H.524 (the health care bill) in anything resembling the form in which they received it. Kevin’s letter to Speaker Symington, which Kevin’s office shared with the press, is one of the most eloquent, thoughtful, and persuasive assessments of the unintended consequences of H. 524 that I’ve read. I’ve copied it for you, below: just click "read more."

Tuesday: JIM BEERS, who retired from the US Fish and Wildlife Service after a 30-year career as a wildlife biologist, wetlands biologist, special agent, and refuge manager. Jim was a Congressional Fellow in Washington, D.C., and held the high position of Chief of Operations for the National Wildlife Refuge System. He was, for seven years, the wildlife biologist in the National Wildlife Refuge System’s Central Office. During the Clinton Administration, Jim exposed $45 million of government-agency abuses done in collusion with animal rights and environmental organizations. (You can read his Congressional testimony online.) He was rewarded for exposing this monumental corruption by having all work assignments taken from him, and being sent home. After 9 months, Jim accepted a cash settlement and retired. He then began writing columns and has become a much sought-after speaker on property rights. You can read some of Jim’s columns in Outdoors Magazine (see www.outdoorsmagazine.net) and elsewhere on the Internet, at www.allianceforamerica.org.

Wednesday: DENIS BOYLES, author of VILE FRANCE: Fear, Duplicity, Cowardice, and Cheese. Denis is National Review Online’s “Euro-Press” columnist, and is the author of African Lives, among other books. He’s written for National Lampoon and for Playboy, and is Editor-at-Large for TV Guide. He lives with his family outside Paris.

Thursday: BILL SAYRE, formerly with the U.S. Federal Reserve, now a Member of the Board of Directors of Associated Industries of Vermont; of the Vermont Chamber of Commerce; and of the Vermont Forest Products Association. A student of Milton Friedman's (among other Nobel Laureates), Bill received his MBA in economics/finance from the University of Chicago. We’ll be talking about H. 254, and the consequences for Vermont business of moving even further toward socialized medicine than even former governor Howard Dean brought us.

Friday: Best of True North

You might assume that, in our post-9/11 world, illegal aliens who are caught by Department of Homeland Security agents and deemed a threat to national security would be detained and, possibly, expelled. After all, had such action been taken against the 19 hijackers who flew planes into soft targets, thousands of Americans who died on that day would still be alive.

But in a disturbing column, Joel Mowbray reveals that reason has only a minor role in DHS's ability to apprehend and deal with potential threats:

In a bullet-point list, the October 2004 memo — obtained exclusively by this columnist — separates all captured illegals into four categories: "Mandatory," "High Priority," "Medium Priority," and "Lower Priority."

Only the worst violent felons (think rapists and murderers), individuals known to be terrorists, and those who have been previously deported are deemed "mandatory" holds. Everyone else can be released if no space is available. Among illegals not deemed "mandatory" holds:

* "Aliens who are subject to an ongoing national security investigation."

* Aliens whom we aren't sure are terrorists but who still "raise a national security concern" based on "specific information or intelligence specific to the individual" — in other words, suspected terrorists.

* Aliens who "exhibit specific, articulable intelligence-based risk factors for terrorism or national security concern."

Perhaps more disturbing: Buried beneath the four groups listed as "mandatory" and eight as "high priority," suspected drug smugglers and human traffickers are merely "medium priority."

Joel goes on to discuss the paucity of funds dedicated to this key enterprise, which in turn has led to an operation that has little means to detain all but the worst offenders. Political correctness also trumps national security, as agents are forbidden to consider race or national origin in searching for potential offenders. Or, as Mowbray puts it:

In other words, 19 Saudi Muslims are considered no greater security threat — or deemed more important for detainment — than 19 Mexican farm hands.

Border patrol agents call this policy "catch and release," and it's a willfully blind approach that may lead to another disaster. The real tragedy, however, will be that, this round, we knew what to look for and how to deal with high-risk suspects, but lacked the nerve to do the right thing. I hope it doesn't come to that, but it's impossible not to worry that a pre-9/11 attitude hasn't already become part of the worldview of policy makers who, undoubtedly, know better.

Roger Simon has reported on the Volker Commission's recent splintering, as he broke the story of UN Oil-for-Food investigator Robert Parton's resignation. Now Parton has spoken out to the Telegraph, among other news outlets:

Last night, in the most explicit criticism so far directed at the report, Robert Parton, one of the senior investigators, told a lawyer involved with the Volcker inquiry that he thought the committee was "engaging in a de facto cover-up, acting with good intentions but steered by ideology".

The lawyer, Adrian Gonzalez, told The Sunday Telegraph that he believed the committee, headed by Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, was determined to protect the secretary-general.

According to Mr Gonzalez, Mr Parton felt that the committee had effectively divided the body of evidence relating to the oil-for-food scandal into testimony that it did want to hear, and testimony that it did not.

While the "field teams" led by Mr Parton and Miranda Duncan, who has also stepped down, were coming to one conclusion, he said, committee members appeared to want to draw a different conclusion to protect senior UN officials.

"Mr Parton said that there was a whole set of facts... not mentioned, pressed or taken to the logical inference," said Mr Gonzalez, an American lawyer based in Paris who acts for Pierre Mouselli, a former business partner of Kojo Annan.

Simon goes on to say that Gonzalez tells him that the Telegraph misquoted him, although Simon still draws a harsh, and surely accurate, conclusion:

However you parse this, the Volcker Committee is a now an unmitigated disaster. Just as it is ludicrous to think that Kofi Annan is the one to reform the United Nations, it is ludicrous to think this committee the means to investigate the scandal.

Sisu blogged (Sissy Willis) the formal installation of Benedict XVI yesterday, and her comments are both informative and entertaining. Quoting an MSNBC reporter, whose guest says of the Pope's message, "He will give a simple, profound, accessible message of faith," she writes:

We were reminded of Ann Althouse's call yesterday for bloggers to be easy to read and contribute something to the mix. It applies to anyone who has something to say and wants to be heard. Another of Chris Jensing's guests notes the new pope's "kind of winsome public personality."

That rings true to all we have seen and read about this man -- other than the predictably agenda-driven bashing -- since the former Cardinal Ratzinger sprung onto the world stage as Pope Benedict XVI. Was it just his love of cats and Mozart -- not to mention the fact that the dictatorial relativist Left is beside itself -- that has so endeared him to us?

She's also transcribed some of the text from the Pope's sermon, with commentary.

On a different element of the installation, Jannelson at Red State reports on the presence in the official U.S. delegation to that event of Maryland Lt. Governor Michael Steele:

Steele is a prominent elected official from a state with a rich Catholic heritage, a high-ranking African-American politician, a practicing and devout Catholic, member of the Knights of Columbus, and he spent three years as a seminarian at Villanova.

Then, too, he's the Republicans' best hope to win the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by the retiring Senator Paul Sarbanes, D-MD. Selecting Steele for a high-profile spot on a Vatican visit will undoubtedly produce significant PR benefits.

There's more in Jannelsen's post on Steele's political future, which he thinks has been helped by his trip to the Vatican. It's a good sign that the White House recognizes both Steele's potential and the need to reach out to Catholics in Maryland and beyond.

It's Monday (as if you didn't know it), and that means another installment in Arthur Chrenkoff's Good News series. This week, it's from Iraq, Part 26. If you're not familiar with Arthur's round-ups, you should be. With seemingly inexhaustible energy, Arthur assembles stories that received less coverage than they deserved because, by and large, they don't fit the media's pre-determined conclusions about Iraq in particular, and U.S. foreign policy in general.

As if we needed another reason to distrust, and dislike, the current structure of the U.N., now comes word that the Chinese delegation was able to silence and humiliate a Chinese dissident who was invited to speak there about religious persecution in China. Arthur Chrenkoff reports on the story of the Rev. Bob Fu of the China Aid Association. The story is here, in Word:

"During his speech on April 5, 2005, with previous agreement from both the Commission secretary office and the UN security guards, Rev. Bob Fu displays and demonstrates an electric-shock baton smuggled out of China recently [pictured here]. It was made in China used by the Chinese police and interrogators to torture victims of religious victims. However, the Chinese delegate immediately registers a complaint to UNCHR that the electric baton made them 'feel threatened'. Then Both Rev. Bob Fu's UN badge and the electric baton were taken away by the UN security officials without giving any explanation. Rev. Fu was ordered to leave the UN complex immediately. At the same time, according to those who were present there, for about an hour, China uses the plenary floor attacking A Woman's Voice International and threatening to shut up all the NGOs. China demands apology from AWVI and Bob Fu."

This bullying can't be allowed to stand, and China should be put on notice that its strong-arm tactics against "unapproved" (i.e., state controlled) Christians will prevent it from becoming a full member of the community of nations. The administration's ongoing democracy campaign should include China, which is increasingly volatile at home and abroad. A growing middle class there will not accept political totalitarianism indefinitely, and the regime's bullying of Taiwan may destabilize the entire region.

As for the corrupt leadership of the U.N., such a display of cowardice only further confirms the dire need for a thorough house cleaning and new leadership. It further confirms the organization's place as an empowerment zone for dictatorships, and an enemy of democracy and liberty.

This is the organization that Democrats are defending through their absurd, intellectually vacuous attacks on John Bolton. If they, and their weak-kneed Republican helpers, want to stake their political survival on this issue, then let's have it out in the court of public opinion. It will be interesting to see how the American people react to attempts to prevent reform at the U.N. through squashing any chance that reformers can set foot in the door, whether they're Chinese dissidents or American policy makers. Not all those who empower dictators, after all, reside in Beijing.

Joe Knippenberg calls my attention to this offensive piece by Colbert King in today's Washington Post. Joe quotes what he sees as merely the most offensive passage:

They [religious conservatives] are not now and never will be the final arbiters of Christian beliefs and values. They warrant as much deference as religious leaders as do members of the Ku Klux Klan, who also marched under the cross.

Joe also quotes from the Interfaith Alliance’s C. Welton Gaddy, although I can't get the link to work. But here's a taste:

I oppose the election of judges who will, in the name of religion, make decisions that politicize religion and blunt the vitality as well as compromise the integrity of the rich religious community in this nation.

The cause of all this "outrage" is nothing more than Sen. Bill Frist's participation in the Family Research Council's Justice Sunday tomorrow. A leading Senator speaks to a Christian group, and the left becomes unhinged -- again.

So we've seen this week both misinterpretations of the election of Benedict XVI, and now (in an ecumenical insult) barbs directed at conservative Protestants and the politicians who notice them. It seems that the left won't be satisfied until religion really is driven from the public square, or at least neutered and reduced to the recitation of platitudes. They won't succeed, of course, but they'll always be with us.

Don't miss Linda Seebach's latest column, titled "When Bloggers do Journalism." It's a sympathetic look at blogging, illustrated by apt references to Ed Morrissey's excellent work to Canada's "AdScam."

You'd think journalists would recognize journalism no matter who is doing it and in what media, but that's by no means a universal reaction. Jonathan Klein, at the time a CBS vice president who oversaw the "60 Minutes Wednesday" debacle of the fabricated Bush National Guard documents, famously declared, in the program's defense, "You couldn't have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of checks and balances and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing."

Actually, he was correct about the contrast; CBS was gulled, and the bloggers were right. But he was wrong about the pajamas. Earlier this month, when I was visiting my son in Minnesota, we had dinner with Captain Ed, his wife the First Mate and their colleague Mitch Berg (whose blog is www.shotinthedark.info). They were all wearing perfectly normal daytime clothes.

I expected no less.

As the news stories on the new pope continue to pour in, David Mills at Mere Christianity has assembled a very useful commentary filled with links to some of the best writing since Cardinal Ratzinger's election. Among them is this piece by Sandro Magister, where we find this:

Over the years, accusations of fundamentalism have been scattered against this German theologian who today is the new head of the Catholic Church.

During the 1960’s, the young Ratzinger followed the second Vatican Council as an expert consultant for the cardinal of Cologne, Joseph Frings. He launched his first darts against the Holy Office, “out of step with the times and a cause of harm and scandal,” which he would direct many years later. But very soon after the end of the council, he began to denounce its effects, which were “crudely divergent” from what was to be expected.

The path he took was parallel to that of two other first-rate theologians of the time, his friends and instructors Henri De Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar, both of whom also became cardinals, both of whom were also accused of having turned aside from progressivism to conservatism. Ratzinger never paid any attention to the label that was applied to him: “I have not changed; they are the ones who have changed.”

His was a strange conservatism, in any case. It was apt to disturb, rather than pacify, the Church. One of his favorite models is Saint Charles Borromeo, the archbishop of Milan who, after the Council of Trent, did nothing less than “reconstruct the Catholic Church, which was almost destroyed in the area around Milan as well, without returning to the Middle Ages to do so; on the contrary, he created a modern form of the Church.”

Today the transformations in civilization are no less epochal, in his eyes. The culture that has established itself in Europe “constitutes the most radical possible contradiction, not only of Christianity, but also of the religious traditions of humanity,” he argued on April 1 at Subiaco, at his last conference during the reign of John Paul II. And therefore the Church must react with all the courage it can muster, not conforming itself to the times, not falling to its knees before the world, but "bringing, with holy consternation, the gift of faith to all, the gift of friendship with Christ."

This touches on, at a much deeper level, the subject I addressed earlier today in my commentary on David Gelernter's L.A. Times op-ed on the reactionary left. Contra those for whom conservatism is little more than a caricature, the ends toward which a thoughtful conservatism moves are, after all, not with us at the moment, else one wouldn't need to move in order to reach them. In this light, perhaps the recalcitrance of the left, both within the Church and within a very different setting, the American political arena, reflects a fear of moving beyond where we are, toward any end not already in their possession or only recently lost. It is here, in the adoration not of God, but of the mores of a particular time and culture, that makes the current alliance between the extremes of left and right possible. Their principal differences lie merely in the particulars of the times and cultures they revere.

In an earlier post today, I discussed Colin Powell's unwillingness to remember that he's no long Secretary of State, and I called him and his followers "reactionary." It's not the first time I, or many others, have labeled the left as the bastion of today's most reactionary politics. As so many have said, so many times: if you're out of ideas, there's little left to do but stand in the way of those who still bother to learn, reason, and debate.

David Gelernter's op-ed in today's L.A. Times (registration) makes many similar points, and eloquently. In "To Dems, It's 1974 Forever," he states a plain truth: the parties have reversed their stances on the idea of acting on new ideas. If once the Democrats stood for tackling problems with new ideas, today they demand a halt to all debate, all efforts to bring new research and evidence to bear on perennial problems at home and abroad.

Read Gelernter's piece, as he's always a stimulating writer whose passion for ideas never wanes. By and large I agree with his assessment, and I'd refer everyone to a path-breaking lecture delivered by Democracy Project board member Wilfred McClay at the Ethics and Public Policy Center earlier this year. What McClay asks, and what Gelernter will hopefully address in a future piece, is the type of change the right should embrace, and the means by which it can conserve what is worthy of conservation.

That isn't an argument for reaction on the right, mind you: there's been plenty of that in the past, and there are still pockets of reactionaries on the far right who've long since made their peace with their contemporaries on the left. It is, however, a reminder that change should be pursued not for its own sake, but for an end that is worthy of the sacrifices required to gain it. Gelernter offers several examples that qualify: in education, foreign policy, economics, social issues, and more. And on every count, he's exactly correct: the status quo is unacceptable, and change is needed in order to either attack problems effectively, or, at least, to get out of the way so that states and localities can take charge.

At root, what Gelernter recognizes is shared by a huge number of conservatives across the land: conserving what is good and honorable in the past is a virtue, while attempting to make time stand still is both foolish and destructive. The agent of change most celebrated by today's conservatives, and most loathed by the reactionary left, is liberty. As Gelernter writes:

"Today's Democrats dislike democracy on principle, like Russian nobility circa 1905."

It's important to bear in mind, again, that conservatives can be enthusiastic about change if and when the ends are virtuous and worthy of praise. After all, the left's mindless embrace of revolutionary change, from the '60s forward, served to damage the country's social fabric and ruin more than a few institutions, most obviously academe. The right's embrace of change today is a sign both of its desire to repair the damage wrought by the left, and of its willingness to use the knowledge and means available to us to work toward a better world for ourselves and others. That's the kind of change thoughtful conservatives should (and do) embrace, even if in its democratic nature precludes support from the contemporary left.