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David Warren offers a prayer for Mugabe’s removal.

… The West, and in particular, former Rhodesia’s departed imperial master, Britain, can take no satisfaction in the turn of events. In the Lancaster House Agreement, of almost thirty years ago, Lord Carrington and the panjandrums of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office delivered the future Zimbabwe into the hands of its most revolutionary faction, in the fairly complete knowledge of what they were doing, in order to wash their hands of the place. They knew then that Mugabe was violent and depraved.

This is a long and cumbersome diplomatic history to which the moral, in retrospect, needs to be affixed. We must eventually abandon the cynical diplomatists’ belief that by cutting the legs out under the most moderate, reasonable, and even popular faction, and delivering a country into the hands of murderous revolutionaries, “progress” will be most efficiently served. In Zimbabwe today, upwards of three million starve, in payment for post-colonial “realpolitik.” …

Times, UK says Mandela has finally spoken out.

Nelson Mandela accused President Mugabe of a “tragic failure of leadership” last night, as southern Africa turned its back on the Zimbabwean leader.

Mr Mandela spoke of his concern and sadness at the chaos engulfing Zimbabwe, amid clear indications that the patience of Mr Mugabe’s remaining allies was at breaking point.

Wielding the moral authority of the world’s best-known statesman, Mr Mandela broke his silence at a fundraising event to mark his 90th birthday celebrations in London.

Hours before he spoke, Zimbabwe’s neighbours presented a united front for the first time and urged Mr Mugabe to call off Friday’s presidential vote. …

But, according to Marty Peretz, Andrew Young still defends Mugabe

So has Israel been practicing an Iranian attack? George Freidman of StratFor says it was a head fake.

… There are also explanations for the extreme publicity surrounding the exercise. The first might be that the Israelis have absolutely no intention of trying to stage long-range attacks but are planning some other type of attack altogether. The possibilities range from commando raids to cruise missiles fired from Israeli submarines in the Arabian Sea — or something else entirely. The Mediterranean exercise might have been designed to divert attention.

Alternatively, the Israelis could be engaged in exhausting Iranian defenders. During the first Gulf War, U.S. aircraft rushed toward the Iraqi border night after night for weeks, pulling away and landing each time. The purpose was to get the Iraqis to see these feints as routine and slow down their reactions when U.S. aircraft finally attacked. The Israelis could be engaged in a version of this, tiring out the Iranians with a series of “emergencies” so they are less responsive in the event of a real strike.

Finally, the Israelis and Americans might not be intending an attack at all. Rather, they are — as the Iranians have said — engaged in psychological warfare for political reasons. The Iranians appear to be split now between those who think that Ahmadinejad has led Iran into an extremely dangerous situation and those who think Ahmadinejad has done a fine job. The prospect of an imminent and massive attack on Iran could give his opponents ammunition against him. This would explain the Iranian government response to the reports of a possible attack — which was that such an attack was just psychological warfare and could not happen. That clearly was directed more for internal consumption than it was for the Israelis or Americans.

We tend toward this latter theory. Frankly, the Bush administration has been talking about an attack on Iran for years. It is hard for us to see that the situation has changed materially over the past months. But if it has, then either Israel or the United States would have attacked — and not with front-page spreads in The New York Times before the attack was launched. In the end, we tend toward the view that this is psychological warfare for the simple reason that you don’t launch a surprise attack of the kind necessary to take out Iran’s nuclear program with a media blitz beforehand. It just doesn’t work that way.

Was Iraq worth the effort. Tony Blankley has an answer.

… Fighting and winning always impress. Even merely fighting and persisting impress. Shortly after the fall of Soviet Communism, I had dinner with a then-recently former senior Red army general. He told me that the Soviets were astounded and impressed by the fact that we were prepared to fight and lose 50,000 men in Vietnam, when the Soviets never thought we even had a strategic interest there. They thus calculated that they’d better be careful with the United States. What might we do, they thought, if our interests really were threatened?

The full effects of the vigorous martial response of President Bush to the attacks of Sept. 11 will not be known for decades. But if history is any indicator, military courage, persistence and a capacity to kill the enemy in large numbers usually work to the benefit of such nations.

On Sept. 10, 2001, many Islamists thought America and the West were decadent, cowardly and ripe for the pickings. (Hitler thought the same thing about us.) On the basis of President Bush’s political courage — and supremely on the physical courage, moral strength and heartbreaking sacrifice of all our fighting uniformed men and women (and un-uniformed intelligence operatives) — America’s willingness and capacity to fight to protect ourselves cannot be doubted around the world. This may prove to be the most important global political fact of the first decade of the 21st century — with implications even beyond our struggle with radical Islam. …

Jennifer Rubin and Peter Wehner from Contentions write on Blankley’s piece.

As you note, Jennifer, Thomas Friedman argues in his New York Times column today that Iraqis, in the wake of their liberation of Basra, Amara, and Sadr City from both Mahdi Army militiamen and pro-Iranian death squads, “now have their own narrative of self-liberation.” This, in turn, has created self-confidence and legitimacy for the Maliki government and the Iraqi military. And there is, I think, a lot to Friedman’s analysis–and, it should be pointed out, it is an insight that General Petraeus has long had. It is one of the pillars of his effort to create “sustainable security” for Iraq.

There is, though, a paragraph from Friedman’s column that I wanted to take issue with: …

Karl Rove says they’re both economic illiterates.

Barack Obama and John McCain are busy demonstrating that in close elections during tough economic times, candidates for president can be economically illiterate and irresponsibly populist.

In Raleigh, N.C., last week, Sen. Obama promised, “I’ll make oil companies like Exxon pay a tax on their windfall profits, and we’ll use the money to help families pay for their skyrocketing energy costs and other bills.”

Set aside for a minute that Jimmy Carter passed a “windfall profits tax” to devastating effect, putting American oil companies at a competitive disadvantage to foreign competitors, virtually ending domestic energy exploration, and making the U.S. more dependent on foreign sources of oil and gas.

Instead ask this: Why should we stop with oil companies? They make about 8.3 cents in gross profit per dollar of sales. Why doesn’t Mr. Obama slap a windfall profits tax on sectors of the economy that have fatter margins? Electronics make 14.5 cents per dollar and computer equipment makers take in 13.7 cents per dollar, according to the Census Bureau. Microsoft’s margin is 27.5 cents per dollar of sales. Call out Mr. Obama’s Windfall Profits Police! …

IBD editors on Obama’s ethanol policy.

Barack Obama says he represents change. He also criticizes John McCain for trying to drill our way to energy independence to add to the profits of Big Oil. But it’s Obama who’s playing politics by trying to plant our way to energy independence, buying votes with alternative fuel subsidies that benefit ethanol producers such as Archer Daniels Midland.

ADM is based in Illinois, the second-largest corn-producing state. Not long after arriving in the U.S. Senate, Obama flew twice on corporate jets owned by the nation’s largest ethanol producer. Imagine if McCain flew on the corporate jets of Exxon Mobil.

Corn-based ethanol gets a 51-cents-a-gallon tax subsidy that will cost taxpayers $4.5 billion this year. McCain opposes ethanol subsidies while Obama supports them. McCain opposed them even though Iowa is the first caucus state. Obama, touted by Caroline Kennedy as another JFK, was no profile in courage in Iowa. …

Victor Davis Hanson thinks we have become the “can’t do” society.

… With gas over $4 a gallon, the public is finally waking up to the fact that for decades the United States has not been developing known petroleum reserves in Alaska, in our coastal waters or off the continental shelf. Jittery Hamlets apparently forgot that gas comes from oil — and that before you can fill your tank, you must take risks to fill a tanker.

Building things is a good indication of the relative confidence of a society. But the last American gasoline refinery was built almost three decades ago. As “cowards of our conscious,” we’ve come up with countless mitigating reasons not to build a new one. Our inaction has meant that our nation’s gasoline facilities have grown old, out of date and dangerous.

Maybe Americans can instead substitute plug-in, next-generation electric cars that can be charged at night on the nation’s grid powered by nuclear power plants? Wrong again. We haven’t issued a single new license that actually led to the building of a nuclear power plant in over 30 years. …

Walter Williams points out the problems with centralized control.

… You might argue that saving for retirement is important, but so is saving for a home or your children’s education. Would you want Congress to force us to put money aside for a home or our children’s education?

Oblivious to the huge information problem in the allocation of resources, the people in Washington have confidence that they can run our lives better than we can. Charles Darwin wisely noted over a century and a half ago that “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” Suggesting that Congress is ignorant of the fact that knowledge is highly dispersed, and decisions made locally produce the best outcomes, might be overly generous. They might know that and just don’t give a hoot because it’s in their political interest to centralize decision-making.

Thomas Jefferson might have had the information problem in mind when he said, “Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread.”

Amazing volcanic eruptions on the floor of the Arctic Ocean.

Brit historian Paul Johnson reviews comparative bio of Churchill and Gandhi.

… It is often said that Churchill’s knowledge of India was shallow and out of date. But he was proved right in his prediction that independence would mean the end of unity. Gandhi had argued that the Hindu–Muslim divide was superficial and could be bridged by patience and statesmanship. He was proved totally wrong on this fundamental point. Not only was Pakistan created, despite all his efforts, but it in turn split into two, when the eastern section, now Bangladesh, refused to accept government by the western section. The key problem of Kashmir — the most beautiful part of the subcontinent, where the elite was Hindu and the majority population Muslim — was left unsolved by partition, and smolders away. It has already caused two wars between India and Pakistan; if the Muslim extremists take over Pakistan, a nuclear exchange may well occur, justifying Churchill’s worst fears.

In the meantime, India has taken the route of high technology and advanced capitalism, and is racing along it. For the first time scores of millions of Indians are tasting affluence. By mid-century India will have over a billion inhabitants and, quite possibly, the world’s largest economy after the United States. This prospect would have delighted Churchill, who always believed that the Raj had set India’s feet firmly on the road to long-term prosperity. It would have horrified Gandhi, who deplored Western living standards and wanted Indians to lead simple, pure, and prayerful lives close to the subsistence level. His chief reason for espousing independence was that India would thereby escape the corruption of the West. So who was right about India? The answer is that both Churchill and Gandhi were right — and both were wrong. But this juxtaposition of these two extraordinary men makes for a fascinating story.

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Daily Telegraph editors say there is finally some movement against Mugabe in Africa, and that it’s time for Nelson Mandela to do the same.

John Stossel wonders if McCain understands how markets work.

… This is not the first time McCain has displayed what I would call an anti-capitalist mentality. In an early presidential debate he countered former businessman Mitt Romney’s claim to superior executive experience by saying, “I led the largest squadron in the U.S. Navy, not for profit but for patriotism”.

Why the put down of profit?

It’s clear McCain does not understand how markets work or why they are good. He certainly doesn’t understand the role of speculators and other middlemen. He’s not alone. Speculators are among the most reviled people in history. When they were members of ethnic minorities, they have been easy targets for economically illiterate people who were jealous of their success.

McCain wonders “whether speculation has been going on.” He needn’t wonder. Speculation always goes on. Speculation means to take a risk on what the future holds in hopes of making a profit. The world’s stock and commodities markets are based on this principle. Sen. McCain must have meant it when he said, “I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues”. …

Denver Post’s David Harsanyi takes a dim view of McCain’s battery prize.

… But this is about politics, of course, so it can’t make much sense. And McCain’s theatrical prize money offer grabbed headlines for a day.

Job done.

But when McCain peddles prize money, he also feeds the perception that industry and scientists aren’t already working diligently on energy breakthroughs — with batteries and areas unknown — or that the market doesn’t incentivize them to do so.

Worse, McCain makes it seem that a cure for oil is just beyond our grasp. Around $300 million away.

In this arms race of goofy ideas between the candidates — windfall taxes and gas-tax holidays, to name two — we’re sure to see more poorly thought-out plans in the near future.

Let’s hope they are just empty promises.

Jennifer Rubin thinks Obama is losing his Teflon sheen.

Barack Obama is endangering his status as the media darling of the 2008 presidential campaign. In fact, he has been the villain in the campaign story over the last few days. Two decisions — one small and one large — showed the dangers he faces. And a third showed that the post-racial candidate is no longer in evidence. It is no secret that the media has been openly rooting for Obama for months. His gaffes would have felled other candidates, his relationship with hate-mongering preachers would have disqualified mere mortal candidates and, of course, his lack of any national record of accomplishment might have prevented all but the most ego-inflated from even mounting a White House run. But it was hanging together fairly well until last week.

The trigger for the downward slide was his decision to abandon public financing. The decision made cold political sense given his likely enormous advantage over the McCain camp but there were two complicating factors: he had shaped his career as a “reformer” and he specifically promised that he would take public financing and the rules that go along with it.

To make matters worse he concocted a false and misleading, indeed an  operatic” explanation that those mean Republicans forced him to take private money. …

And Bill Kristol slams MoveOn.org’s latest ad.

… Here’s what the mother of an actual soldier has to say about the remarks of the mother of the prospective non-soldier in the ad:

“Does that mean that she wants other people’s sons to keep the wolves at bay so that her son can live a life of complete narcissism? What is it she thinks happens in the world? … Someone has to stand between our society and danger. If not my son, then who? If not little Alex then someone else will have to stand and deliver. Someone’s son, somewhere.”

This is the sober truth. Unless we enter a world without enemies and without war, we will need young men and women willing to risk their lives for our nation. And we’re not entering any such world.

We do, however, live in a free country with a volunteer army. In the United States, individuals can choose to serve in the military or not. The choice not to serve should carry no taint, nor should it be viewed with the least prejudice. If Alex chooses to pursue other opportunities, he won’t be criticized by John McCain or anyone else.

But that’s not at all the message of the MoveOn ad.

The MoveOn ad is unapologetic in its selfishness, and barely disguised in its disdain for those who have chosen to serve — and its contempt for those parents who might be proud of sons and daughters who are serving. The ad boldly embraces a vision of a selfish and infantilized America, suggesting that military service and sacrifice are unnecessary and deplorable relics of the past.

And the sole responsibility of others.

The Economist reports on the growing use of windpower.

ON A ridge near Toledo in Castile-La Mancha stands a row of white windmills. Literary buffs, even if they have never been to Spain, will recognise them as the ferocious giants attacked by Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes’s fictional 17th-century hero. These days, however, they are dwarfed by legions of modern wind turbines that grind out not flour but power, helping to make Spain one of the leading producers of wind-based electricity in Europe.

Does this amount to tilting at windmills? There is no doubt that Spain’s wind turbines would not have been built without assistance from the highly visible hand of a government that wanted to prove its green credentials. But wind power is no illusion. World capacity is growing at 30% a year and will exceed 100 gigawatts this year. Victor Abate, General Electric’s vice-president of renewables, is so convinced that by 2012 half of the new generating capacity built in America will be wind-powered that he is basing his business plan on that assumption.

Wind currently provides only about 1% of America’s electricity, but by 2020 that figure may have risen to 15%. The one part of the United States that has something approximating a proper free market in electricity, Texas, is also keener than any other state on deploying the turbines. In May, T. Boone Pickens, one of the state’s most famous oil tycoons, announced a deal with GE to build a one-gigawatt wind farm—the world’s largest—at a cost of $2 billion. …

When the Russert wakes went over the top, you knew Hitchens was itching.

… But it was precisely around the time of these various wakes and memorials that the thing began to get seriously out of hand. One started to hear whispers about something more than the merely ordinary, as if a numinous and mysterious element had crept into the everyday obsequies. I quote from an e-mail entitled “The Russert Miracles,” which came to me from someone quite well-known in the world of Washington TV and media:

The first “Russert miracle,” as attendees called it, happened at the private funeral service held at Holy Trinity Church in Georgetown; the family had requested that Senators Obama and McCain sit together. … CNN Washington Bureau Chief David Bohrman describes the scene to Newsweek: “They sat side by side and spoke for twenty minutes. The body language was total friendship. … I kept thinking here we are at the funeral of the son of a sanitation worker, and the presidential candidates are having their first one-on-one conversation here.”

So at this point we are supposed to celebrate the holy miracle of “bipartisanship,” an everyday occurrence in the Senate of which both men are members. …

Thomas Malthus was the first and Jeff Jacoby says he’s not the last. Malthus claimed in 1798 the world would be overcome with population growth. The problem is exactly the opposite. Jeff has two columns on the subject.

… Like other prejudices, the belief that more humanity means more misery resists compelling evidence to the contrary. In the past two centuries, the number of people living on earth has nearly septupled, climbing from 980 million to 6.5 billion. And yet human beings today are on the whole healthier, wealthier, longer-lived, better-fed, and better-educated than ever before.

The catastrophes foretold by Malthus and his epigones – some of them in bestsellers like “The Population Bomb,” which predicted that “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now” – have never come to pass. That is because people are not our greatest liability. They are our greatest asset – the wellspring of every quality on which human advancement depends: ambition, intuition, perseverance, ingenuity, imagination, leadership, love. …

From the second column.

In 1965, the population of Italy was 52 million, of which 4.6 million, or just under 9 percent, were children younger than 5. A decade later, that age group had shrunk to 4.3 million — about 7.8 percent of Italians. By 1985, it was down to 3 million and 5.3 percent. Today, the figures are 2.5 million and 4.2 percent.

Young children are disappearing from Italian society, and the end isn’t in sight. According to one estimate by the UN’s Population Division, their numbers will drop to fewer than 1.6 million in 2020, and to 1.3 million by 2050. At that point, they will account for a mere 2.8 percent of the Italian nation.

Italy isn’t alone. There are 1.7 million fewer young children in Poland today than there were in 1960, a 50 percent drop. In Spain 30 years ago, there were nearly 3.3 million young children; there are just 2.2 million today. Across Europe, there were more than 57 million children under 5 in 1960; today, that age group has plummeted to 35 million, a decline of 38 percent. …

List Verse with the top 30 failed technology predictions.

Throughout history man has been making predictions of the future. With the advent of technology, the predictions moved away from religious topics to scientific and technological. Unfortunately for the speakers, many of these failed predictions have been recorded for all future generations to laugh at. Here is a selection of the 30 best.

1. “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” — Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC), maker of big business mainframe computers, arguing against the PC in 1977.

2. “We will never make a 32 bit operating system.” — Bill Gates

3. “Lee DeForest has said in many newspapers and over his signature that it would be possible to transmit the human voice across the Atlantic before many years. Based on these absurd and deliberately misleading statements, the misguided public … has been persuaded to purchase stock in his company …” — a U.S. District Attorney, prosecuting American inventor Lee DeForest for selling stock fraudulently through the mail for his Radio Telephone Company in 1913.

4. “There is practically no chance communications space satellites will be used to provide better telephone, telegraph, television, or radio service inside the United States.” — T. Craven, FCC Commissioner, in 1961 (the first commercial communications satellite went into service in 1965). …

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David Brooks says finally Bush got something right in Iraq.

Let’s go back and consider how the world looked in the winter of 2006-2007. Iraq was in free fall, with horrific massacres and ethnic cleansing that sent a steady stream of bad news across the world media. The American public delivered a stunning electoral judgment against the Iraq war, the Republican Party and President Bush.

Expert and elite opinion swung behind the Baker-Hamilton report, which called for handing more of the problems off to the Iraqi military and wooing Iran and Syria. Republicans on Capitol Hill were quietly contemptuous of the president while Democrats were loudly so.

Democratic leaders like Senator Harry Reid considered the war lost. Barack Obama called for a U.S. withdrawal starting in the spring of 2007, while Senator Reid offered legislation calling for a complete U.S. pullback by March 2008.

The arguments floating around the op-ed pages and seminar rooms were overwhelmingly against the idea of a surge — a mere 20,000 additional troops would not make a difference. The U.S. presence provoked violence, rather than diminishing it. The more the U.S. did, the less the Iraqis would step up to do. Iraq was in the middle of a civil war, and it was insanity to put American troops in the middle of it.

When President Bush consulted his own generals, the story was much the same. Almost every top general, including Abizaid, Schoomaker and Casey, were against the surge. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was against it, according to recent reports. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki called for a smaller U.S. presence, not a bigger one.

In these circumstances, it’s amazing that George Bush decided on the surge. And looking back, one thing is clear: Every personal trait that led Bush to make a hash of the first years of the war led him to make a successful decision when it came to this crucial call. …

Bret Stephens says the cure for Zimbabwe is for the Brits to apply the Bush Doctrine.

Here’s a prediction: Zimbabwe’s Morgan Tsvangirai will win this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

He would be its worthiest recipient since the prize went to Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi (one of the prize’s few worthy recipients, period) in 1991. He deserves it for standing up – politically as well as physically – to Robert Mugabe’s goon-squad dictatorship for over a decade; for organizing a democratic opposition and winning an election hugely stacked against him; and for refusing to put his own ambition ahead of his people’s well-being when the run-off poll became, as he put it last weekend, a “violent, illegitimate sham.”

Here’s another prediction: Mr. Tsvangirai’s Nobel will have about as much effect on the bloody course of Zimbabwe’s politics as Aung San Suu Kyi’s has had on Burma’s. Effectively, zero. …

John Tierney looks at cartels in diamonds and in oil, and asks if they will go on forever.

As Lab readers were debating Malthusianism and oil reserves, I noticed a couple of interesting items about diamonds, one of the most expensive and restricted resources on Earth.

The diamond cartel has survived more than a century, making it what Edward Jay Epstein calls “the most successful cartel arrangement in the annals of modern commerce.” The DeBeers cartel has kept prices of diamonds artificially high by limiting supply (and by creating demand through marketing like its 1947 slogan, “A diamond is forever.”)

Lately, though, the cartel has been under strain. “Cartel-free” diamonds are being mined and sold in Canada, where huge reserves have been discovered. (For an engrossing account of the epic quest to find diamonds near the Arctic Circle, see Kevin Krajick’s “Barren Lands.”) And now, as Ulrich Boser explains in Smithsonian, there’s a whole new threat: “virtual diamond mines” that are creating diamonds in laboratories that even the expert eye of a jeweler can’t distinguish from one found in the ground. …

Speaking of the oil Cartel, Barron’s cover story this week wonders if oil has peaked.

Oil’s sharp move up — prices have doubled in the past year — caught the world by surprise, including almost everyone involved in the petroleum market, from major exporting nations to big energy companies to the global analyst community. The rally has emboldened oil bulls, who argue the world is bumping up against oil-supply constraints, and that demand will rise inexorably, despite sharply higher prices, as the four billion to five billion people in emerging economies like China and India get a taste of the energy-intensive good life, replete with the cars, air conditioners, refrigerators and computers that Americans and Western Europeans have long enjoyed. Statistics support their view that demand growth is in its infancy in the developing world: U.S. per-capita oil consumption is 25 barrels annually, while Japan uses 14 barrels per person. China’s 1.3 billion people consume just two barrels each per year, however, and India’s 1.1 billion use less than a barrel a year.

In the next decade, oil indeed may hit $200 a barrel. But prices could fall to $100 a barrel by the end of this year if Saudi Arabia makes good on its pledge to increase production; global demand eases; the Federal Reserve begins lifting short-term interest rates; the dollar rallies, and investors stop pouring money into the oil market. China raised prices on retail gasoline and diesel fuel by 18% Thursday, in a move that is expected to curb demand.

It’s tough to know how much of the surge in crude-oil prices — up 40% just this year — reflects fundamental supply and demand, and how much is due to other factors, including the dollar, commodity speculation and interest from institutional investors. Like some others, we suspect the run-up was fueled by more than economics. …

Pickerhead was thoroughly annoyed with William Manchester when, in 1992, instead of the next volume of his Churchill biography, we got instead A World Lit Only By Fire. Then Manchester was forgiven when the book was read. Cafe Hayek has an excerpt that is good for getting our lives in perspective.

The late William Manchester’s 1992 book A World Lit Only By Fire provides a well-paced and vivid look at life in late-medieval and renaissance Europe.  For example, consider his description of the homes and some common experiences of peasants (pp. 52-54):

Lying at the end of a narrow, muddy lane, his rambling edifice of thatch, wattles, mud, and dirty brown wood was almost obscured by a towering dung heap in what, without it, would have been the front yard.  The building was large, for it was more than a dwelling.  Beneath its sagging roof were a pigpen, a henhouse, cattle sheds, corncribs, straw and hay, and, last and least, the family’s apartment, actually a single room whose walls and timbers were coated with soot.  According to Erasmus, who examined such huts, “almost all the floors are of clay and rushes from the marshes, so carelessly renewed that the foundation sometimes remains for twenty years, harboring, there below, spittle and vomit and wine of dogs and men, beer…remnants of fishes, and other filth unnameable.  Hence, with the change of weather, a vapor exhales which in my judgment is far from wholesome.”

The centerpiece of the room was a gigantic bedstead, piled high with straw pallets, all seething with vermin.  Everyone slept there, regardless of age or gender — grandparents, parents, children, grandchildren, and hens and pigs — and if a couple chose to enjoy intimacy, the others were aware of every movement.  In summer they could even watch…..

If this familial situation seems primitive, it should be borne in mind that these were prosperous peasants. …

Volokh Conspiracy tells a disturbing story from the University of Chicago.

The University of Chicago has decided to establish an economics research institute named after the late Milton Friedman. Normally, a university’s decision to name an institute after it’s most famous and successful professor would be a completely uncontroversial nonstory. However, over 100 University of Chicago professors have signed a letter protesting the decision. Essentially, they object to naming a research institute after Friedman because he was a libertarian rather than a liberal or leftist – even though Friedman’s academic distinction is such that he clearly deserves the honor. It is inconceivable that you could find 100 academics at Chicago or any other major university who would sign a letter opposing the creation of an institute named after a liberal academic whose intellectual achievement’s were as great as Friedman’s. …

Thomas Sowell wonders why we should imitate Europeans.

… Yet there are those who think that the United States should follow policies more like those in Europe, often with no stronger reason than the fact that Europeans follow such policies. For some Americans, it is considered chic to be like Europeans.

If Europeans have higher minimum wage laws and more welfare state benefits, then we should have higher minimum wage laws and more welfare state benefits, according to such people. If Europeans restrict pharmaceutical companies’ patents and profits, then we should do the same.

Some Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court even seem to think that they should incorporate ideas from European laws in interpreting American laws.

Before we start imitating someone, we should first find out whether the results that they get are better than the results that we get. Across a very wide spectrum, the United States has been doing better than Europe for a very long time. …

Samizdata says there might be a tax revolt in Massachusetts.

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Today is Kelo Day. We have contemporaneous columns from three of our favorites    Mark Steyn takes us back with his July 3rd, 2005 column for the Chicago Sun-Times.

… A couple of days beforehand, the majesty of the law turned its attention to “eminent domain” — the fancy term for what happens when the government seizes the property of the private citizen. It pays you, of course, but that’s not much comfort if you’ve built your dream home on your favorite spot of land. Most laymen understand the “public interest” dimension as, oh, they’re putting in the new Interstate and they don’t want to make a huge detour because one cranky old coot refuses to sell his ramshackle dairy farm. But the Supreme Court’s decision took a far more expansive view: that local governments could compel you to sell your property if a developer had a proposal that would generate greater tax revenue. In other words, the “public interest” boils down to whether or not the government gets more money to spend.

I can’t say that’s my definition. Indeed, the constitutional conflation of “public interest” with increased tax monies is deeply distressing to those of us who happen to think that letting governments access too much dough too easily leads them to create even more useless government programs that enfeeble the citizenry in deeply destructive ways. …

Next for Kelo Day, John Tierney’s NY Times column for July 5, 2005 on eminent domain abuse in Pittsburgh.

… Pittsburgh has been the great pioneer in eminent domain ever since its leaders razed 80 buildings in the 1950′s near the riverfront park downtown. They replaced a bustling business district with Gateway Center, an array of bland corporate towers surrounded by the sort of empty plazas that are now considered hopelessly retrograde by urban planners trying to create street life.

At the time, though, the towers and plazas seemed wonderfully modern. Viewed from across the river, the new skyline was a panoramic advertisement for the Pittsburgh Renaissance, which became a national model and inspired Pittsburgh’s leaders to go on finding better uses for private land, especially land occupied by blacks.

Bulldozers razed the Lower Hill District, the black neighborhood next to downtown that was famous for its jazz scene (and now famous mostly as a memory in August Wilson’s plays). The city built a domed arena that was supposed to be part of a cultural “acropolis,” but the rest of the project died. Today, having belatedly realized that downtown would benefit from people living nearby, the city is trying to entice them back to the Hill by building homes there.

In the 1960′s, the bulldozers moved into East Liberty, until then the busiest shopping district outside downtown. Some of the leading businessmen there wanted to upgrade the neighborhood, so hundreds of small businesses and thousands of people were moved to make room for upscale apartment buildings, parking lots, housing projects, roads and a pedestrian mall.

I was working there in a drugstore whose owners cursed the project, and at first I thought they were just behind the times. But their worst fears were confirmed. The shopping district was destroyed. The drugstore closed, along with the department stores, movie theaters, office buildings and most other businesses.

You’d think a fiasco like that would have humbled Pittsburgh’s planners, but they just went on. …

Debra Saunders had a good Kelo column too.

AMERICANS who want to keep government out of the bedroom, beware. Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision that makes it too easy for the government to seize your bedroom — and kitchen, parlor and dining room — then hand your precious home over to a corporation.

The Fifth Amendment stipulates, “Nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” Lawyers call it the Takings Clause.

In its decision, the Supreme Court expanded the concept of “public use” to apply it, not to a highway or school or railroad, but to economic development sanctioned by a government entity.

The city of New London, Conn., found itself in economic doldrums. Redevelopment was supposed to be the bromide. State and local officials created the New London Development Corporation. That unelected entity decided to increase tax revenues by pushing middle-class families out of their waterfront homes and using eminent domain — the other E.D. — to make way for a revitalization project, anchored around a Pfizer Inc. research facility.

Some families in the redevelopment area agreed to be bought out. Susette Kelo and Wilhelmina Dery, who was born in her home in 1918, were among those New Londoners who balked. The city didn’t contend there was any blight in the neighborhood to warrant government action. Why should they move out because Pfizer wanted in?

In a 5-4 ruling on Kelo written by Justice John Paul Stevens, the Big Bench answered the why question: Because the government says so. …

Gabriel Schoenfeld writes on the ways to defeat Iranian tunneling.

Israel has just carried out a major aerial exercise, putting a hundred or so F-15s and F-16s into the skies over the eastern Mediterranean, evidently a rehearsal for a strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities. The move follows the statement earlier this month by Shaul Mofaz, Israel’s deputy prime minister, that an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear program is “unavoidable.” Israel almost certainly knows the location of some of the critical nodes in the Iranian program that it must hit if it is to set the Iranian effort back by several years. It also possesses the technology to assure that its bombs will fall close to or on their targets. But would such a strike succeed?

We cannot know the answer, and neither can the Israelis. The question calls attention to what might be called the ongoing Counterrevolution in Military Affairs.

The Revolution in Military Affairs was based upon silicon, in particular the computer chips that make for precision-guided weapons. In the 1980s, the United States developed the technology to drop munitions near enough to their targets to ensure a high chance of destruction. In World War II, the circular error probable–the radius of a circle into which a projectile will land at least 50 percent of the time–was more than half a mile. Today, thanks to GPS systems and laser- and infrared-guiding devices, the radius is less than two dozen feet. Almost any given target can be knocked out by the use of just one or two conventional bombs.

In the face of the threat of such efficient destruction, Iran has not stood still. …

Pickerhead got to vent last week on the GITMO decision with Ann Coulter. Now we have a couple of serious people. Richard Epstein, Chicago law prof who has graced these pages before, is first. He likes the decision.

LAST week’s Supreme Court decision in Boumediene v. Bush settled a key constitutional issue: all prisoners detained at Guantánamo Bay are constitutionally entitled to bring habeas corpus in federal court to challenge the legality of their detention.

This 5-4 decision was correct. The conservative justices in the minority were wrong to suggest that the decision constitutes reckless judicial intervention in military matters that the Constitution reserves exclusively for Congress and the president. (Disclosure: I joined in a friend-of-the-court brief filed on the plaintiff’s behalf.)

Yet Boumediene is rich in constitutional ironies. In addressing whether non-Americans detained outside the United States are entitled to habeas corpus, the court passed up an opportunity to clarify the law, and instead based its reasoning, flimsily, on a habeas corpus case that was decided just after World War II. This is too bad, because issues as important as habeas corpus should turn not on fancy intellectual footwork but on a candid appraisal of the relevant facts and legal principles. …

Stuart Taylor is next.

Our Constitution works best when its custodians–the president, Congress, and the judiciary–behave well. In the matter of suspected “enemy combatants,” all three have behaved badly. That’s why the Guantanamo Bay prison camp has been such a running sore. Even if Guantanamo ends up being closed, the human-rights and public-relations debacles that it symbolizes will continue until a new president and Congress take a grown-up approach to some extremely thorny problems.

Problems such as: What should we do with a Guantanamo detainee who, the best available evidence suggests, is probably a jihadist bent on mass murder but who cannot be convicted of any crime?

Don’t hold your breath waiting for a clear answer from the Supreme Court, which has asserted its supremacy in such matters–while raising more questions than it has resolved–in three cases, culminating in its big 5-4 ruling on June 12 that Guantanamo detainees have a right to broad federal judicial review of their petitions for release.

The Bush administration has perpetuated a global scandal since 2002 by stubbornly refusing to provide these detainees–who could be locked up for life–with a fair opportunity to prove that they are innocents seized and held by mistake. Bush and a few of his top political appointees imposed these policies over objections from many of the military lawyers and other professionals whose expertise ordinarily helps shape presidential decisions and helps entitle them to judicial deference. …

Ilya Somin in Volokh, posts a comparison of soccer to normal US team sports.

The conjunction of the Celtics-Lakers NBA Finals and the European Soccer Championship led me to reflect on two important advantages of US pro sports over international soccer: soccer often promotes nationalist and ethnic violence and provides propaganda fodder for repressive or corrupt governments, while US pro sports (with extremely rare exceptions) do not.

European and Latin American soccer rivalries are commonly linked to nationalistic and ethnic antagonisms (e.g. – England vs. Germany, England vs. Ireland, Germany vs. Poland, etc.). Even the fan bases of teams in internal national soccer leagues often break down along ethnic lines. This conjunction of sports rivalries and nationalistic/ethnic rivalries often leads to violence. The most notorious example is the 1969 “Soccer War” between El Salvador and Honduras – a conflict which might have been funny except for the fact that 2000 people were killed and tens of thousands displaced from their homes. And there are many lesser cases of riots and other violence resulting from soccer games.

Many European and especially Latin American soccer teams are also closely associated with governments. This often allows repressive and corrupt regimes to obtain propaganda benefits from the teams’ victories. …

John Podhoretz posts on a publisher who’s had enough of the NY Times Book Review.

The many-hatted Roger Kimball, who runs Encounter Books when he’s not running the New Criterion and writing art criticism and trying to keep the universities honest and sailing boats and God knows what else, has made an extraordinary decision: Encounter Books will no longer send review copies of its work to the New York Times Book Review. He writes:

In the last month, Encounter has had two titles on the extended New York Times best-seller list: Climate Confusion: How Global Warming Hysteria Leads to Bad Science, Pandering Politicians and Misguided Policies that Hurt the Poor by Roy Spencer, and Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad, by Andrew C. McCarthy. But that list is the only place you will find these books mentioned in the pages of The New York Times….

Once upon a time, and not that long ago, it meant something if your book was reviewed in The New York Times Book Review. A Times review imparted a vital existential certification as well as a commercial boost. Is that still the case? Less and less, I believe. The Times in general has lost influence as the paper has receded into parochial, left-liberal boosterism and politically correct reportage. And where its news and comment have become increasingly politicized, its cultural coverage has become increasingly superficial and increasingly captive of establishment, i.e., left-liberal, pieties and “lifestyle” radicalism.

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Don’t forget, Monday is Kelo Day at the Institute for Justice.

David Warren reduces Israel’s current problem to one simple right, that of self-defense.

It will be recalled, by readers who follow world news, that the President of Iran has on many occasions unambiguously declared both the desire to annihilate Israel, and the expectation that Israel will soon be annihilated. It will also be recalled, that on the balance of evidence, the Iranian state has been working assiduously to acquiring the means for this act of genocide. Iran is in direct defiance of UN resolutions to stop enriching uranium, and playing Saddam-like games with UN inspectors.

If a man were threatening to kill you, and declaring that you will soon be dead, while reaching for a gun, I think most readers would allow you were within your rights to kick that gun out of his reach. …

Watching Obama throw campaign finance reform under a bus, David Brooks compares the two Obamas we have seen so far.

… The media and the activists won’t care (they were only interested in campaign-finance reform only when the Republicans had more money). Meanwhile, Obama’s money is forever. He’s got an army of small donors and a phalanx of big money bundlers, including, according to The Washington Post, Kenneth Griffin of the Citadel Investment Group; Kirk Wager, a Florida trial lawyer; James Crown, a director of General Dynamics; and Neil Bluhm, a hotel, office and casino developer.

I have to admit, I’m ambivalent watching all this. On the one hand, Obama did sell out the primary cause of his professional life, all for a tiny political advantage. If he’ll sell that out, what won’t he sell out? On the other hand, global affairs ain’t beanbag. If we’re going to have a president who is going to go toe to toe with the likes of Vladimir Putin, maybe it is better that he should have a ruthlessly opportunist Fast Eddie Obama lurking inside.

All I know for sure is that this guy is no liberal goo-goo. Republicans keep calling him naïve. But naïve is the last word I’d use to describe Barack Obama. He’s the most effectively political creature we’ve seen in decades. Even Bill Clinton wasn’t smart enough to succeed in politics by pretending to renounce politics.

Mark Shields, the liberal pundit on PBS ripped into Obama. Ed Morrissey with details.

Dick Morris points out Obama’s fatal prosecutorial flaw.

In an ABC interview on Monday, Sen. Barack Obama urged us to go back to the era of criminal-justice prosecution of terror suspects, citing the successful efforts to imprison those who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993.

It was key to his attack on the Bush administration, which he charged, has “been willing to skirt basic protections that are in our Constitution . . . It is my firm belief that we can crack down on threats against the United States, but we can do so within the constraints of our Constitution. . .

“In previous terrorist attacks — for example, the first attack against the World Trade Center, we were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial. They are currently in US prisons, incapacitated.”

This is big — because that prosecution, and the ground rules for it, had more to do with our inability to avert 9/11 than any other single factor.

Because we treated the 1993 WTC bombing as simply a crime, our investigation was slow, sluggish and constrained by the need to acquire admissible evidence to convict the terrorists. …

David Harsanyi on the Marines slimed by John Murtha.

Now that foreign terrorist suspects have the right to habeas corpus, maybe U.S. Marines will be extended the courtesy of a trial before being smeared as cold-blooded murders.

A surprising number of Americans are eager to believe the worst about our fighting men and women. In the case of the infamous Haditha “massacre,” their motives are transparently political, ugly and deceitful.

The Haditha story — reminiscent of some twisted Oliver Stone fantasy — was first reported by Time magazine. According to reports, Marines were allegedly involved in a firefight on Nov. 19, 2005, murdering 24 civilians in retribution for a roadside bombing that killed a fellow Marine.

For power-hungry Pennsylvania congressman John Murtha, the tide of negative public opinion on Iraq made Haditha the perfect self-serving political opportunity. After all, other than being the focus of corruption investigations, Murtha had never been bequeathed such extravagant attention. And when Murtha, a former Marine, spoke about Haditha, he spoke with certitude — and the national headlines mirrored it. …

American Spectator reminds us how much we owe Tim Russert.

Polls in late October showed Sen. Hillary Clinton comfortably leading the Democratic presidential field. For all his talk of “hope” and “change,” Sen. Barack Obama was trailing Hillary by ten points in the most recent Iowa poll, and the “inevitability” argument was still on the side of the front-running former First Lady.

And then Tim Russert asked a simple question.

“Senator Clinton, Governor of New York Eliot Spitzer has proposed giving driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants,” the NBC host said in an Oct. 30 Democratic debate at Philadelphia’s Drexel University. “You told the Nashua, New Hampshire editorial board it makes a lot of sense. Why does it make a lot of sense to give an illegal immigrant a driver’s license?”

Those three sentences — 46 words — arguably transformed the entire campaign. Clinton’s initial answer was evasive, saying that Spitzer’s plan was an attempt to “fill the vacuum” created by the failure of Congress to enact “comprehensive immigration reform.” …

AdamSmith.org reminds us of the benefits of failure. Joseph Schumpeter of “creative destruction”  fame would approve.

Capitalism is based on failure. But that’s no problem, since life is based on failure. That’s the view of Professor Paul Ormerod, who outlined the idea at an Economic Research Council meeting I attended in London.

Ormerod points out that over 99.99% of all known species are dead. And roughly 10% of all US companies disappear each year too. …

Rousseau’s concept of the “noble savage” had done endless mischief. Michael Medved notes our American version.

Political correctness portrays untamed America before European invasion as a natural paradise, where Indians maintained an exquisite ecological balance, living in a harmonious, idyllic relationship to the natural world. According to conventional wisdom, this pre-Columbian Eden flourished for peaceful millenia until brutal disruption by thoughtless, menacing and mercenary white colonists. Stewart Udall, one-time Arizona Congressman and later Secretary of the Interior for President Kennedy, became an early advocate of this point of view in his influential 1973 article, “Indians: First Americans, First Ecologists,” urging modern citizens to follow the native example of treating the landscape with love and respect.

Udall’s arguments received powerful support from the popularization of the moving speech of Chief Seattle, the Duwamish elder who addressed a meeting in 1854 in the raw settlement in Washington Territory that ultimately took his name. “Every part of this earth is sacred to my people,” Seattle supposedly told his listeners. “Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people.” Later, the aged sage assaulted the insensitive ways of the new arrivals. “There is no quiet place in the white man’s cities,” he lamented. “The clatter only seems to insult the ears…I’ve seen a thousand rotting buffaloes on the prairie, left by the white man who shot them from a train.”

Actually, it’s unlikely that Chief Seattle ever saw even a single buffalo, either rotting or otherwise, or ever looked at a train for that matter, since buffalo never lived in his verdant corner of the Pacific Northwest, and railroads (along with “the clatter” of white the man’s cities) only arrived several decades after the alleged speech. His poetic remarks (immortalized in a bestselling children’s book, “Brother Eagle, Sister Sky”) represent an internationally influential hoax– a more or less whole-cloth invention by a screenwriter named Ted Perry for a now-forgotten 1972 TV documentary, based very, very loosely on an account in a Seattle newspaper (twenty years after the kindly chief’s death) of a real talk he may (or may not) have delivered in his largely indecipherable native language to the drenched but respectful pioneers. …

Jim Taranto notes another global warming hoax.

Remember Alan Sokal? He’s the physicist who, in 1996, submitted an article to the postmodernist journal Social Text in which he claimed that “physical ‘reality,’ ” including gravity, “is at bottom a social and linguistic construct.” The whole thing was a hoax aimed at exposing postmodernism as fundamentally nonsensical.

It appears global warmism has found its Alan Sokal, a man named Tom Chalko. Our friends at NewsBusters.org note a story that appeared on both the CBS News Web site and MSNBC claiming that global warming causes the earth to move: …

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We’re very long today so as to include Weekly Standard comparative biographies of Frederick Douglass and one of Pickings favorites - Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Sorry, but at least the weekend is upon us.

Manchester Guardian columnist with praise for things Bush got right.

Jimmy Carter was cheered when he visited Newcastle with Jim Callaghan. Bill Clinton was lauded in Northern Ireland. But it is more usual, at least with more consequential holders of the office, for American presidents to be told by European demonstrators to go home.

The postwar history of our continent would be different and less benign if the United States had heeded that message. His office, and the system of collective security from which we benefit, would be justification enough to welcome President Bush’s visit to London this week. But there is an additional reason peculiar to the Bush presidency. For all Bush’s verbal infelicity, diplomatic brusqueness, negligence in planning for post-Saddam Iraq, and insouciance regarding standards of due process when prosecuting the war on terror, the world is a safer place for the influence he has exercised.

When Bush ran for president in 2000 he was an isolationist advocate of scaling back America’s overseas commitments. But after 9/11, he was right in not interpreting the attack as confirmation that America was stirring up trouble for itself. The theocratic barbarism responsible for the attack on the Twin Towers was driven not by what America and its allies had done, but by what we represented. In the words of Osama bin Laden, illegitimately appropriating for himself the mantel of Islam, “every Muslim, the minute he can start differentiating, carries hate toward Americans, Jew, and Christians”. …

Ann Coulter comments on Supreme interference in war-making.

After reading Justice Anthony Kennedy’s recent majority opinion in Boumediene v. Bush, I feel like I need to install a “1984″-style Big Brother camera in my home so Justice Kennedy can keep an eye on everything I do.

Until last week, the law had been that there were some places in the world where American courts had no jurisdiction. For example, U.S. courts had no jurisdiction over non-citizens who have never set foot in the United States.

But now, even aliens get special constitutional privileges merely for being caught on a battlefield trying to kill Americans. I think I prefer Canada’s system of giving preference to non-citizens who have skills and assets.

If Justice Kennedy can review the procedures for detaining enemy combatants trying to kill Americans in the middle of a war, no place is safe. It’s only a matter of time before the Supreme Court steps in to overrule Randy, Paula and Simon. … (For the uninitiated, they would be American Idol judges)

David Warren writes on the EU view of the election.

People abroad, who do not like the United States, and do not wish her well, overwhelmingly support Barack Obama for president. This is clear enough from the polls in Europe, and the desultory remarks of unfriendly statesmen around the world. Alas, anti-Americanism is so rife that Obama enjoys overwhelming support in almost every country. His opponent, John McCain, would only stand a chance in the U.S., Afghanistan, and Iraq. And maybe Poland.

The issue is important, for practical reasons, quite beyond the pleasure it would give Bush-haters to watch an Obama inauguration. From the disordered way he has run his campaign, from the list of key supporters he has had to abandon, from his remarkably ignorant statements on foreign policy, and much else besides when away from his teleprompter, it does not follow that Obama would make a bad president. Miracles have happened in history, weak characters turned out to be strong when it counted, and many frightening challenges (one thinks of the 13th-century Mongol threat to Europe) suddenly evaporated. It is unwise to bank on miracles, however.

What does follow is that, should he become president, Barack Obama, and by extension the United States, will be severely tested. The tyrants of this world are not governed by gooey, feel-good notions about “change we can believe in.” A president who strikes them as naive, indecisive, and poorly briefed, will soon be given the opportunity to prove otherwise. Leaders of Iran and North Korea — of China, for that matter, even Russia — will be eager to learn just how far they can get with the new guy, and his unimpressive advisers. They will try things on that they would not think of trying on John McCain. …

Jonah Goldberg covers the Steyn trial in Canada.

Mark Steyn, my friend, colleague, and arguably the most talented political writer working today, is on trial for thought crimes.

Steyn — a one-man media empire based in New Hampshire — was published a few years ago in Maclean’s. Now the magazine and its editors are in the dock before the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal on the charge that they violated a provincial hate-speech law by running the work of a hate-monger, namely Mark Steyn. A similar prosecution is pending before the national version of this kangaroo court, the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

Not that the facts are relevant to the charges, but here’s what happened. Maclean’s ran an excerpt from Steyn’s bestseller, America Alone.

The Canadian Islamic Congress took offense. It charged in its complaint that the magazine was “flagrantly Islamophobic” and “subjects Canadian Muslims to hatred and contempt.” It was particularly scandalized by Steyn’s argument that rising birthrates among Muslims in Europe will force non-Muslims there to come to “an accommodation with their radicalized Islamic compatriots.” …

Corner Post by Michael Novak on the media’s role trashing the economy.

Why has so much of the media accepted the deep recession story when the data is so mixed? The most plausible explanation is that many are motivated by political bias.

Economist John Lott and I studied thousands of economic news stories written over the past 30 years or so, and found that coverage tended to be far more negative when there was a Republican in the White House as there is now.

The bias has an easy explanation. Yale University economist Ray Fair has shown that a weak economy hurts the incumbent party. If a Democratic-leaning press can convince everyone that the economy is in recession, then it can influence the election.

Our analysis indicates that the treatment of the economy would be much different if there were a Democrat in the White House today. If so, then the headline of each bad piece of news would be, more accurately, “Economy Hovering Above Recession.”

But instead of that, we get doom and gloom.

Pickerhead has been surprised at the stunning ignorance Obama has displayed at times. For example, the story of an uncle who liberated Auschwitz, which of course, is in Poland, a country never visited by American troops. Now Power Line posts on additional Obama errors.

Speaking in unscripted environments on important issues, Barack Obama betrays a troubling lack of knowledge. He does not appear to know what he’s talking about. In his interview with ABC’s Jake Tapper earlier this week, for example, Obama advocated an approach to combating terrorism that is supposedly more attuned to legal issues than the Bush administration’s:

It is my firm belief that we can track terrorists, we can crack down on threats against the United States. But we can do so within the constraints of our Constitution. Let’s take the example of Guantanamo. What we know is that in previous terrorist attacks, for example, the first attack against the World Trade Center, we were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial. They are currently in U.S. prisons, incapacitated.

Andrew McCarthy (the lead prosecutor of the perpetrators of the 1993 WTC attack) comments:

This is a remarkably ignorant account of the American experience with jihadism. In point of fact, while the government managed to prosecute many people responsible for the 1993 WTC bombing, many also escaped prosecution because of the limits on civilian criminal prosecution. Some who contributed to the attack, like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, continued to operate freely because they were beyond the system’s capacity to apprehend. Abdul Rahman Yasin was released prematurely because there was not sufficient evidence to hold him — he fled to Iraq, where he was harbored for a decade (and has never been apprehended).

McCarthy discusses the subsequent terrorist attacks on Americans and American assets during the Clinton administration culminating in the 9/11 attack at the outset of the Bush administration. He notes the futility of the law enforcement approach to combating terrorism. But Obama’s comments fall short on additional factual grounds as well. …

The Weekly Standard compares the lives of two freedom fighters, Fredrick Douglass and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Seeing Europe for the first time, a young Somali woman was dazzled by its order and cleanliness and its ingenious efficiency. It was “like a movie.” Düsseldorf “looked like geometry class, or physics, where everything was in straight lines and had to be perfect and precise.”

The buses in Holland were “sleek and clean; their doors opened by themselves.” She was spooked by their “eerie punctuality.” Policemen were courteous and helpful, not ominous. Garbage collection was an elaborate minuet performed by citizens–”you had to put the garbage containers out at the proper time, in the proper way. Brown was for organic waste; green was for plastic; and newspapers were something else entirely, some other time”–and government, which, if you did your part, “came the next morning and whisked it all away for recycling.”

Her first weekend in the Netherlands, this newcomer, who had lived in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and Kenya, stayed with the cousin of a friend. Her hostess walked her around the neighborhood.

All the houses were alike, and all the same color, laid out in rows like neat little cakes warm from the oven. They were all new homes with flouncy white lace curtains, and the grass in front was all green and mown evenly, to the same height, like a neat haircut. In Nairobi, except in the rich estates, colors were garish and houses were completely anarchic–a mansion, a half-built shanty hut, a vacant lot all jumbled together–so this, too, was new to me.

It was 1992, and this young woman, transiting Europe en route to Canada and a forced marriage to a distant cousin, had bolted to Holland almost on the spur of the moment after hearing of its lenient policies toward asylum seekers. Her wide-eyed wonder at her surroundings calls to mind a passage from a much earlier memoir in which a young man recounted his own experience of stepping into a new world.

In September 1838, a newly escaped slave walked the streets of New Bedford, Massachusetts. A product of the plantations of Talbot County, Maryland, and the shipyards of Baltimore, this young man marveled at the display of wealth and industry, at the mighty ships and granite warehouses. He noticed, too, that

almost every body seemed to be at work, but noiselessly so, compared with what I had been accustomed to in Baltimore. There were no loud songs heard from those engaged in loading and unloading ships. I heard no deep oaths or horrid curses on the laborer. I saw no whipping of men; but all seemed to go smoothly on. Every man appeared to understand his work, and went at it with a sober, yet cheerful earnestness, which betokened the deep interest which he felt in what he was doing, as well as a sense of his own dignity as a man. To me this looked exceedingly strange.

Proceeding from the wharves to explore the town, he would remember,

Every thing looked clean, new, and beautiful. I saw few or no dilapidated houses, with poverty-stricken inmates; no half-naked children and bare-footed women, such as I had been accustomed to see in Hillsborough, Easton, St. Michael’s, and Baltimore. The people looked more able, stronger, healthier, and happier, than those of Maryland. I was for once made glad by a view of extreme wealth, without being saddened by seeing extreme poverty. But the most astonishing as well as the most interesting thing to me was the condition of the colored people, a great many of whom, like myself, had escaped thither as a refuge from the hunters of men. I found many, who had not been seven years out of their chains, living in finer houses, and evidently enjoying more of the comforts of life, than the average of slaveholders in Maryland.

Born a little over 150 years apart, Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) and Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) both had the experience, on the threshold of adulthood–he was 20, she 22–of fleeing the culture they’d grown up in and entering another. For both, it was a run toward freedom. In each case, a short train ride and a name change to foil pursuers were the fateful turning points in a remarkable life they would recount in bestselling memoirs. …

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Christopher Hitchens says Hillary’s defeat can’t be blamed on sexism.

Posterity may well remember the Hillary Clinton campaign as the nearest that a member of the female gender had thus far gotten to the nomination of a major political party. But the episode will be recalled for many other salient features as well. The first time that the wife of an ex-president had leveraged her first-lady status into a senatorial seat and then a bid for the presidency. The first time that the candidate’s spouse (and campaigner in chief) was a person who had been disbarred for perjury and impeached for—among other things—obstruction of justice. The first time since the 1960s that a Democrat seeking the nomination had implicitly relied on a “Southern strategy” of appealing to the rancor of the “white working class.” The first time since the lachrymose Ed Muskie that a candidate’s eyes had welled up with tears in New Hampshire. The first time that a woman candidate was married to a man who had been believably accused of rape and sexual harassment (see my book No One Left To Lie To). The first time that a candidate had said of her half-African-American rival that he was not a member of the Muslim faith “as far as I know.” The first time that the loser in the delegate count had failed to congratulate or even acknowledge the winner on the night of his historic victory.

These are quite a lot of firsts to have accumulated. But now Sen. Clinton’s partisans are crying foul and saying that the Democratic primary voters, incited by the media, only rejected her for something known as sexism. This indistinct and vague offense, portentously invoked in many recent articles and “news analyses,” is supposed to be revealed (as a New York Times report on its own reporting so masochistically phrased it) in such outrageous ways as the following: “The New York Times wrote about Mrs. Clinton’s ‘cackle.’ “…

… Her whole self-pitying campaign, I mean to say, has retarded and infantilized the political process and has used the increasingly empty term sexism to mask the defeat of one of the nastiest and most bigoted candidacies in modern history.

And David Harsanyi says her loss is tragic for her, but not for women.

… Though her tone suggests otherwise, Hillary isn’t entitled to anything for losing — even if the race was lost by a narrow margin.

In fact, a Clinton being deprived of another run at the White House isn’t a national tragedy at all.

It’s not a tragedy for women. It’s not a tragedy for feminists. It’s not a tragedy for Democrats.

It’s only a tragedy for the Clintons.

The Economist writes on improvements in Iraq.

THOUGH still lacerated by the tragedy of the past five years, Iraq is at last getting better all round. The violence, albeit still ferocious in parts of the country, has subsided dramatically. The American military “surge” that began a year ago has worked better than even the optimists had hoped, helped by ceasefires with Shia militias, by accords with Sunni tribal leaders and by the fact that sectarian cleansing in many areas is sadly complete.

Politics is also beginning to stutter towards something approaching normality, with signs of an accommodation between the three main communities—Shia Arabs, Sunni Arabs and Kurds—and the prospect of a series of vital laws, on such matters as sharing the revenue from oil, being passed, though they are still subject to endless last-minute hiccups. Some key laws, for instance on pensions and the budget, have recently been enacted. A set of provincial elections towards the end of this year has a chance of empowering the aggrieved Sunni Arabs. Various Sunni ministers who walked out of the government a year ago in a huff may soon be back in.

The economy has begun to grow fast too, though its ripples have yet to be felt across the country. The soaring price of oil, along with a mild improvement in production to just above its pre-war peak, mean that the government has more cash to spend than it is has had since the first Gulf war of 1991. …

Tony Blankley on the reaction to the Irish vote.

… I find it melancholy to consider that perhaps people aspire to self-government not because it is the natural and dignified condition of man to be free and self-governing – but merely only if it is likely to turn a quick economic profit.

Which brings me to the Irish vote. After a similar vote was lost in 2005 in France by 55 percent and in Holland by 64 percent, the decision of the European elite was to re-decide the matter by going around the people and decide through parliaments (where the fix was in) rather than by plebiscite. Only the Irish insisted on a vote of the people before turning over sovereign power to Brussels bureaucrats. And they voted it down 53 percent-47 percent against the loud voices of all the political parties and national leaders – God Bless the Irish people.

Almost the entire business, political and cultural elite of Europe argue for centralizing EU power in Brussels because it will be good for business (and give Europe a more coherent voice and action in the world). The price for that is to reduce the role of democratically elected government officials – and to give more power to unelected governing forces.

Is that why partisans risked their lives sniping at Nazi soldiers and throwing homemade bombs at German Panzer tanks a mere half-century ago? Is the world getting ready to give up its birth-right to self-government for a mess of pottage?

NY Post Editors on Sharpton’s shakedowns.

Hey, that Al Sharpton is a regular Warren Buffett, isn’t he?

Fortune 500 companies can’t wait to hear what he has to tell them. And they’re falling all over themselves for the privilege of paying for his sage advice.

That’s Sharpton’s story, anyway.

But could there be another reason?

As The Post’s Isabel Vincent and Susan Edelman reported Sunday, nearly 50 of the nation’s biggest corporate names have been paying Sharpton and/or his National Action Network for years – some into the serious six figures.

Now, maybe some of those corporate giants actually agree with New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein that Sharpton is a major “civil-rights champion.”

But a lot of those payments seem to follow right on the heels of Sharpton’s threats to boycott the companies in question over allegations of “racism.” …

Bernard Goldberg says Russert was concerned about media bias.

… Knowing politics as well as he did was part of it, for sure. But a lot of people in Washington know politics. Asking probing questions was part of it, too. But again, Tim didn’t have a patent on tough questions. And it wasn’t just that (unlike too many others) he was fair to both sides. No, what made Tim Russert different, and better, I think was his willingness to listen to — and take seriously — criticism about his own profession. He was willing, for example, to keep an open mind about a hot-button issue like media bias — an issue that so many of his colleagues dismiss as the delusions of right-wing media haters. (Trust me on this one, I worked at CBS News for 28 years and know Dan Rather personally.)

In 2001, my first book, “Bias,” came out. It was an insider’s look at bias in the media. Not one network news correspondent would have anything to do with me. I couldn’t get on any of their morning news shows to talk about the book (which was a national best seller), or their evening shows or their weekend shows or even their middle-of-the-night news shows. No one in network television wanted to discuss the issue, no matter how many Middle Americans thought it was important.

Russert was the lone exception. …

Thomas Sowell liked Russert too.

… A small personal note: A few months ago, an old friend said that he would like to get a videotape of my interview on Meet the Press back in 1981. I dug up an old videotape in my garage but, after several summers in a hot garage, it was not in very good shape.

As a long shot, I decided to write to Meet the Press, to see if they would sell me another copy of the interview, if it was still available.

This interview took place back in the days when Bill Monroe was the program’s moderator. But, since the only name I knew of at Meet the Press was Tim Russert, I addressed a note to him, figuring that one of his secretaries might get back to me with the information.

Instead, I received a DVD of that interview and a brief, handwritten note from Tim Russert, with a transcript of the interview thrown in.

How people treat those who cannot do them any good or any harm reveals a lot about their character. For me, Tim Russert scored high in that department as well.

Nose on Your Face is back with more adventures of Obamessiah.

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Mugabe has sealed his doom with one sentence. He has mocked the world’s scribes with, ”How can a ballpoint fight [against] a gun?”  How is that for one of Jimmy Carter’s guys?

Robert Mugabe gave warning yesterday that he would not cede power if he loses next week’s election to the Opposition in his most explicit statement yet of his refusal to respect the result.

State-controlled media reported his comments to supporters at an election rally, the latest in a series of increasingly menacing threats as Zimbabwe counts down to the June 27 presidential run-off poll. Mr Mugabe’s military-backed regime has been carrying out a campaign of violence aimed at wiping out the opposition vote.

“We fought for this country, and a lot of blood was shed,” Mr Mugabe told his supporters. “We are not going to give up our country because of a mere X. How can a ballpoint fight with a gun?” …

David Warren with good advice; “Beware the Experts.”

… “Scientists” (i.e. of the species mentioned above), who cannot predict the weather the day after tomorrow with any certainty, are nevertheless certain that they understand what it will be like over the next hundred years, and remain untroubled that all their previous long-term predictions failed, including those which might have been got right by flipping a coin. (For instance, the world has been getting cooler, not warmer, for the last few years.)

But their message to ABC News is unambiguous: “The world will end unless you do as we say!”

This is not an actual quote from any of them, but rather, a fair summation of them all. It is also, by coincidence, the standard message to earth from space aliens in all the classic science fiction movies. I would myself be inclined to take the space aliens more seriously.

We turn now to Europe, where the little electorate of Ireland found itself voting in a referendum this week on the future of the Lisbon Treaty. …

Shorts from John Fund.

Barack Obama has sent a clear but unmistakable response to the pressure he’s been getting to put Hillary Clinton on his ticket as the vice presidential nominee. Yesterday, his campaign named Patti Solis Doyle, the former Clinton campaign manager who was fired in February and has not spoken to Mrs. Clinton since, as the chief of staff who will help guide whomever he picks as his running mate.

A major Clinton fundraiser told the New York Observer he considered the move “the biggest f— you I have ever seen in politics.” According to the unnamed Clinton donor, “Clinton loyalists view [Ms. Doyle] with deep suspicion and believe that she is shopping around a book deal and acted as a background source for an extremely harsh Vanity Fair piece about Bill Clinton.” …

John Yoo in WSJ writes on the Supreme decision on GITMO.

Last week’s Supreme Court decision in Boumediene v. Bush has been painted as a stinging rebuke of the administration’s antiterrorism policies. From the celebrations on most U.S. editorial pages, one might think that the court had stopped a dictator from trampling civil liberties. Boumediene did anything but. The 5-4 ruling is judicial imperialism of the highest order.

Boumediene should finally put to rest the popular myth that right-wing conservatives dominate the Supreme Court. Academics used to complain about the Rehnquist Court’s “activism” for striking down minor federal laws on issues such as whether states are immune from damage lawsuits, or if Congress could ban handguns in school. Justice Anthony Kennedy — joined by the liberal bloc of Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer — saves his claims of judicial supremacy for the truly momentous: striking down a wartime statute, agreed upon by the president and large majorities of Congress, while hostilities are ongoing, no less.

First out the window went precedent. Under the writ of habeas corpus, Americans (and aliens on our territory) can challenge the legality of their detentions before a federal judge. Until Boumediene, the Supreme Court had never allowed an alien who was captured fighting against the U.S. to use our courts to challenge his detention. …

Christopher Hitchens is after folks like Pat Buchanan who want to revise WWII history.

Is there any one shared principle or assumption on which our political consensus rests, any value judgment on which we are all essentially agreed? Apart from abstractions such as a general belief in democracy, one would probably get the widest measure of agreement for the proposition that the second world war was a “good war” and one well worth fighting. And if we possess one indelible image of political immorality and cowardice, it is surely the dismal tap-tap-tap of Neville Chamberlain’s umbrella as he turned from signing the Czechs away to Adolf Hitler at Munich. He hoped by this humiliation to avert war, but he was fated to bring his countrymen war on top of humiliation. To the conventional wisdom add the titanic figure of Winston Churchill as the emblem of oratorical defiance and the Horatius who, until American power could be mobilized and deployed, alone barred the bridge to the forces of unalloyed evil. When those forces lay finally defeated, their ghastly handiwork was uncovered to a world that mistakenly thought it had already “supped full of horrors.” The stark evidence of the Final Solution has ever since been enough to dispel most doubts about, say, the wisdom or morality of carpet-bombing German cities.

Historical scholarship has nevertheless offered various sorts of revisionist interpretation of all this. Niall Ferguson, for one, has proposed looking at the two world wars as a single conflict, punctuated only by a long and ominous armistice. British conservative historians like Alan Clark and John Charmley have criticized Churchill for building his career on war, for ignoring openings to peace and for eventually allowing the British Empire to be squandered and broken up. But Pat Buchanan, twice a candidate for the Republican nomination and in 2000 the standard-bearer for the Reform Party who ignited a memorable “chad” row in Florida, has now condensed all the antiwar arguments into one. His case, made in his recently released “Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War,” is as follows:

That Germany was faced with encirclement and injustice in both 1914 and 1939.

Britain in both years ought to have stayed out of quarrels on the European mainland.

That Winston Churchill was the principal British warmonger on both occasions.

The United States was needlessly dragged into war on both occasions.

That the principal beneficiaries of this were Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong.

That the Holocaust of European Jewry was as much the consequence of an avoidable war as it was of Nazi racism.

Buchanan does not need to close his book with an invocation of a dying West, as if to summarize this long recital of Spenglerian doomsaying. He’s already opened with the statement, “All about us we can see clearly now that the West is passing away.” …

David Harsanyi on Mark Steyn’s “hate speech” trial in Canada.

Canada has a lot to answer for: Rush, Celine Dion, Barenaked Ladies, Tom Green and Howie Mandel, to name a few. But its latest transgression is serious.

In certain parts of Europe, “hate speech” already is a criminal act. When the late journalist and author Oriana Fallaci wrote books critical of Islam in 2002, she was sued in France. Later, Swiss and Italian judges ordered her to stand trial for “defaming Islam.”

In France, Brigitte Bardot — the former film starlet turned animal rights activist — has been convicted five times of “inciting racial hatred.” In one instance, her crime was writing a letter to French officials, objecting to the ritual slaughter of sheep by Muslims.

Sheep to the slaughter, sadly, is a perfect analogy for European states that allow Muslim activist groups — which rarely object to the near-complete lack of freedom of expression in the Islamic world — to dictate what is and isn’t tolerable speech.

But Canada?

The Mark Steyn affair is the most disturbing demonstration of the creeping authoritarianism of political correctness — not only because of Canada’s geographical proximity but also its moral proximity. …

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Daniel Henninger has thoughts on the country that won’t drill for oil.

Charles de Gaulle once wrote off the nation of Brazil in six words: “Brazil is not a serious country.” How much time is left before someone says the same of the United States?
…

At this point in time, is there another country on the face of the earth that would possess the oil and gas reserves held by the United States and refuse to exploit them? Only technical incompetence, as in Mexico, would hold anyone back.

But not us. We won’t drill.
…

We live in a world in which Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez use their vast oil and gas reserves as instruments of state power. Here, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid use their control of Congress to spend a week debating a “climate-change” bill. This they did fresh off their subsidized (and bipartisan) ethanol fiasco.

One may assume that Mr. Putin and the Chinese have noticed the policy obsessions of our political class. While other nations use their oil reserves to attain world status, we give ours up. Why shouldn’t they conclude that, long term, these people can be taken? Nikita Khrushchev said, “We will bury you.” Forget that. We’ll do it ourselves.

Fred Barnes too.

For years now, John McCain has warned of the peril to America in sending $400 billion a year to foreign countries in return for oil. He’s been loud and relentless on the subject–and wise. “It’s a national security issue,” he declared last week at a town hall meeting in New York City. Much of the money goes to countries that “do not like us very much,” he noted. That was McCain’s understated way of saying the beneficiaries include Iran, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia, countries in which anti-American forces find aid and comfort.

So you’d think McCain would favor an unbridled effort to reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil. But he doesn’t. There’s an intellectual and political hole in McCain’s position, a lack of coherence that hurts both his presidential campaign and that of Republican congressional candidates.

Republicans have seized on public anger over $4 per gallon gasoline and are calling for domestic oil production in federal lands and offshore areas now closed to exploration and drilling. Since polls show the public agrees with them, Republicans believe “drilling”–the one-word capsulation of the issue–is their strongest political talking point in 2008. Indeed, it may be their only good domestic issue.

But they desperately need a champion to carry their message, someone whom the national media cannot ignore. And that should be McCain, the Republican presidential candidate. Except for one thing: He doesn’t go along with their approach in important ways. He sounds, sometimes anyway, like a liberal Democrat or a lobbyist for the environmental movement. …

Corner post on oil from VDH.

More advice for McCain. This from Charles Krauthammer.

In his St. Paul victory speech, Barack Obama pledged again to pull out of Iraq. Rather than “continue a policy in Iraq that asks everything of our brave men and women in uniform and nothing of Iraqi politicians, . . . [i]t’s time for Iraqis to take responsibility for their future.”

We know Obama hasn’t been to Iraq in more than two years, but does he not read the papers? Does he not know anything about developments on the ground? Here is the “nothing” that Iraqis have been doing in the past few months:

1. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki sent the Iraqi army into Basra. It achieved in a few weeks what the British had failed to do in four years: take the city, drive out the Mahdi Army and seize the ports from Iranian-backed militias.

2. When Mahdi fighters rose up in support of their Basra brethren, the Iraqi army at Maliki’s direction confronted them and prevailed in every town — Najaf, Karbala, Hilla, Kut, Nasiriyah and Diwaniyah — from Basra to Baghdad.

3. Without any American ground forces, the Iraqi army entered and occupied Sadr City, the Mahdi Army stronghold.

4. Maliki flew to Mosul, directing a joint Iraqi-U.S. offensive against the last redoubt of al-Qaeda, which had already been driven out of Anbar, Baghdad and Diyala provinces.

5. The Iraqi parliament enacted a de-Baathification law, a major Democratic benchmark for political reconciliation.

6. Parliament also passed the other reconciliation benchmarks — a pension law, an amnesty law, and a provincial elections and powers law. Oil revenue is being distributed to the provinces through the annual budget.

7. With Maliki having demonstrated that he would fight not just Sunni insurgents (e.g., in Mosul) but Shiite militias (e.g., the Mahdi Army), the Sunni parliamentary bloc began negotiations to join the Shiite-led government. (The final sticking point is a squabble over a sixth cabinet position.) …

Daily Telegraph, UK on Ireland’s defeat of the EU Treaty.

In the Irish language, there is no word for “no”. The Irish way of getting round this is to say instead: “It isn’t.” Yesterday we learnt that the Irish people, confronted with the Lisbon Treaty in a referendum, have said: “It isn’t.”

And that, exactly, is now the constitutional position of the treaty throughout the European Union. It isn’t. To become law, the treaty has to be approved by all 27 member states. This has not happened: the treaty is dead.

Unfortunately, most European leaders regard EU treaties as a chance to parody the principle of monarchy: “The treaty is dead. Long live the treaty.” Veterans of these disputes will remember that, when the Danes voted No to Maastricht in 1992, the then (Tory) Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, rushed to the House of Commons to explain that the Danish people had given the wrong answer: they would have to vote again until they gave the right one. In 2001, the Irish rejected the Nice Treaty. They, too, were made to vote again.

In 2005, when the French and the Dutch people killed the European Constitution in their referendums, the corpse was carried off to the Lisbon summit. By a bureaucratic miracle, it was born again as the Lisbon Treaty.

The trick almost worked: Ireland is the only member state that has had the chance to vote. In a community of more than 300 million voters, only three million have been permitted to express an opinion at the ballot box. Bravely, they have chosen what their rulers did not want.

It is being said already that this impertinent Irish behaviour should not be allowed to hold up the destiny of an entire continent. At the European Council at the end of next week, some version of life-support, resurrection or cloning will be applied to the Lisbon corpse. …

Contentions too.

Ireland has rejected the Lisbon Treaty (as Emanuele thought it might), by a decisive margin of 54 percent to 46 percent. The Treaty has had a long and entirely disreputable history. It was drawn up to replace the draft European Constitution, which was rejected by voters in France and the Netherlands in 2005. The European mandarins were wiser the second time round: they claimed the Treaty was only a modestly significant revision of existing practices made necessary by the EU’s expansion into Eastern Europe, instead of a radical power-grab by Brussels.

This claim fooled only those who wanted to believe it, but it offered some very necessary anti-democratic cover. Instead of exposing this monstrosity to the scrutiny of the voters, 26 of the 27 EU member states sought to hustle it through their parliaments. That includes Britain, where Labour, having campaigned in the 2005 general election on the promise of a referendum on the Constitutions, used its replacement by the Treaty as an excuse for dumping their promise. The reason Labour did this was obvious: there was no chance the British public would have approved the Treaty.

Only Ireland’s constitution made this impossible: the Irish, therefore, were voting not for themselves, but in the referendum denied to the rest of Europe. …

Bill Kristol with his Russert send-off.

… Tim was serious about serious things, but he wasn’t solemn.

Early in Moynihan’s first term, the senator placed a call to an upstate county chairman. The guy answered the phone, and Pat started to talk to him about some issue of the day.

“Tim — I don’t have time for this,” the politician interrupted the startled senator. “What … what … this is Senator Moynihan!” — Pat tried to explain. “Oh, [expletive] Tim, I’ve had enough of this [expletive],” said the local, hanging up on the esteemed solon.

This is how Pat Moynihan discovered that his press aide was accustomed to entertaining both his own staff in D.C. and politicians and friends around the country with hilarious, impromptu performances featuring dead-on mimicry of Moynihan’s distinctive speaking style.

I last heard Russert do his Moynihan imitation about a year ago. We were having lunch, and for some reason got to discussing Pat’s almost-Russert-career-ending phone call. Tim launched into a boisterous imitation of his beloved mentor. I cracked up, heads turned, and a few people at neighboring tables even joined in the laughter. …

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Dick Cheney had some Russert thoughts.

Peter Wehner “unpacks” a recent Joe Klein piece on Iraq. It’s long (2,100 words), but a perfect metaphor for the problems W faced trying to steer a consistent course while facing unrelenting criticism from Dems and the media.

On his June 11 Swampland blog, Joe Klein once again comments on Iraq. On the effects of the so-called surge, Klein admits to progress. In his words:

the military situation in Iraq has improved so much that normally sober and pessimistic military and intelligence sorts are simply stunned.

… the successful operations in Basra, Sadr City and Mosul have had a completely unexpected effect on the stature of the formerly hapless Nouri Al-Maliki: At a recent cabinet meeting after the Sadr City operation, the entire room stood when Maliki entered, a sign of newfound respect for a leader who was regarded as little more than a place-holder only months ago. [italics in original]

… the tide of good news is unmistakable.

Klein offers several caveats in his posting, and they are good ones. But elsewhere he veers badly off track and gets sloppy in the process. And because his views so often reflect conventional, if flawed, wisdom at the time, they are worth examining with some care. …

Jennifer Rubin follows with a report of a O’Hanlon and Pollack Brookings briefing on Iraq.

Senior Brookings Fellows Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack gave a report Friday and entertained questions at a Brookings briefing on Iraq. It was the single most illuminating presentation I have witnessed on the status of Iraq and the potential way forward. Neither man can be accused of shilling for either the administration or John McCain for numerous reasons: both have been strong critics of the war and O’Hanlon opposed the war at the onset and still believes on balance it has not made us safer. I understand from Brookings that the entire transcript will be posted, but I offer some highlights below.

O’Hanlon explained that the last three months has been the “spring of the blossoming of Iraqi security forces” and Iraq is on an “impressive trajectory” although we have not yet “reached a stable end point.” He stressed that the 80% reduction in civilian violence was much better than he thought possible. He went through a detailed review of Basra, conceding that Maliki’s actions took the Americans by surprise and that in the first week things went poorly. However, by the second week two brigades were deployed from Al Anbar ( a testimony to massive improvements in Iraq security force logistics) and the mission was successful, allowing the Iraqi army and national police force to now control the streets of Basra. …

Gerard Baker of the London Times says Europe will miss W.

If there is one small, niggling, horribly ungrateful-sounding complaint about traveling on Air Force One, it is the complete lack of decent swag to carry home.

From the moment that I had received word that we were to interview President Bush on the big blue plane this week, my family made it clear that I was to return home laden with Air Force One keepsakes. The last time that I interviewed George W. Bush, in the Oval Office, he reached into a drawer filled with presidential-seal- embossed gewgaws and presented them as offerings for my five daughters.

So I figured that Air Force One would be no different. Even if there were no proffered take-homes, there would surely be some surreptitious carry-offs. Stories abound of first-time travelers on the presidential aircraft kitted out in extra large pairs of boots so that they could waddle off with every bit of plane that wasn’t nailed to the floor or the walls.

But I have to report that my house will never become a shrine of presidential hot towels, cutlery with the Great Seal of the United States engraved on it or specially embossed disposable lavatory seats.

In fact, by the time that my colleague, Tom Baldwin, and I were into our final descent and a presidential-themed dinner of country-fried chicken and Texas toast (a bit like French toast, only bigger, brasher and with a dash of petroleum in it), all we had to show for the eight-hour ride were a few paper napkins, with a picture of a rather nondescript aircraft on them, the sort that I’m sure you can buy from those vendors who set up stall outside the White House. You would think that someone with a sense of humour would at least have had a batch made that said: “My Dad Flew On Air Force One And All I Got Was This Lousy Napkin.” …

Rich Lowry says if McCain wasn’t such a green-eyed jerk he could tag the Dems with $4.00 gas.

The price of everything, not just driving, is going up in the era of $130-a-barrel oil, but our presidential candidates have a hopelessly thumbless grasp of pocketbook politics.

Their mutual slogan could be “Let them eat abstractions.” Barack Obama famously couldn’t connect with working-class voters in the primaries, offering them an airy diet of hope and change. John McCain rose on his personal honor, which is why on energy he’s fumbling away the GOP’s best domestic political opening in years.

For a politician whose forte has never been domestic policy, McCain has a peculiar taste for complex, verging on unworkable, regulatory schemes — from campaign-finance reform, to comprehensive immigration reform, to a cap-and-trade system limiting carbon emissions.

The attraction for McCain of these plans isn’t their intricacies, but their symbolism. Campaign-finance reform demonstrated his incorruptibility; comprehensive immigration reform his belief in an America open to all comers; cap-and-trade his commitment to fight global warming. …

Gregg Easterbrook revisits his theme of, “If life is so good, why do we feel so bad?” Hint; the media have a role here.

The Democratic National Committee recently ran an ad blasting John McCain for saying the country is “better off” than in 2000. Yet, arguably, except as regards the Iraq war, Mr. McCain’s statement is true. In turn, Mr. McCain is blasting Barack Obama for suggesting that international tensions are not as bad as they’ve been made to seem. Yet, arguably, Mr. Obama is right.

Democratic attacks on Mr. McCain and Republican attacks on Mr. Obama both seek to punish impermissibly positive thoughts. At a time when there exists a sense of crisis over the economy, fuel prices and many other issues, this reinforces the odd, two realities of life in the United States today: The way we are, and the way we think we are. The way we are could use some work, but overall, is pretty good. The way we think we are is terrible, horrible, awful. Possibly worse.

The case that things are basically pretty good? Unemployment is 5.5%, low by historical standards; income is rising slightly ahead of inflation; housing prices are down, but the typical house is still worth a third more than in 2000; 94% of Americans do not have threatened mortgages, and of those who do, most will keep their homes.

Inflation was up in 2007, but this stands out because the 16 previous years were close to inflation-free; living standards are the highest they have ever been, including living standards for the middle class and for the poor.

All forms of pollution other than greenhouse gases are in decline; cancer, heart disease and stroke incidence are declining; crime is in a long-term cycle of significant decline; education levels are at all-time highs. …

Cafe Hayek with good follow-on to Easterbrook.

Michael Barone defends lobbyists.

Barack Obama has long said that his campaign will not accept contributions from lobbyists, and now that he is the presumptive nominee, the Democratic National Committee won’t accept them, either. John McCain says that his campaign won’t employ lobbyists, and volunteers are now queried about possible lobbying activity in the past. It’s only a matter of time until someone calls for a law requiring every lobbyist to paint a big, red “L” on his forehead.

Behind this stigmatization of lobbyists is the notion that the failure to produce legislation in the public interest stems from the existence of lobbyists. Which is obviously nonsense. We couldn’t abolish lobbying without repealing the First Amendment, which gives all of us, even those who are paid to do it, the right to “petition the government for a redress of grievances.” And the government could not sensibly do business without lobbyists. …

John Fund notes the amazing list of folks getting VIP treatment from Countrywide Financial.

… Both Chris Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, and Kent Conrad, chairman of the Senate Budget committee, also got special below-market mortgages from Countrywide Financial, all arranged by Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo. Other recipients of a “Friends of Angelo” program that waived points, lender fees and company borrowing rules were former Bush HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson, and former Clinton cabinet officers Donna Shalala and Richard Holbrooke. …

In honor of Father’s Day, we include Kathryn Lopez’s interview of Kathleen Parker, author of the newly published Save the Males: Why Men Matter. Why Women Should Care.

It’s Father’s Day this weekend, in a land where men are underappreciated, disrespected, and under attack. Kathleen Parker is here to save them, with her cultural wakeup call, Save the Males: Why Men Matter. Why Women Should Care. She recently took questions on her new book from NRO editor Kathryn Jean Lopez.

Kathryn Jean Lopez: Well count me among those who think men matter. Why do they need saving though? Don’t they usually do the rescue missions?

Kathleen Parker: Men are, indeed, excellent rescuers. We like that about men. In fact, Western men rescued women once upon a time from their status as pack mules. As my friend Matt Labash might say, I like to call that Western Civilization. Men also created the big-idea documents that ultimately resulted in women’s suffrage and equality under the law. Women have demonstrated their gratitude by reaching the summit and basically pulling the ladder up behind them. “See ya, guys. You’re on your own now. Oh, and we’re taking the kids.” …