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James Lileks will make you remember.

Norman Podhoretz honors the anniversary.

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks on us that took place on this very day six years ago, several younger commentators proclaimed the birth of an entirely new era in American history. What Dec. 7, 1941, had done to the old isolationism, they announced, Sept. 11, 2001, had done to the Vietnam syndrome. It was politically dead, and the cultural fallout of that war–all the damaging changes wrought by the 1960s and ’70s–would now follow it into the grave.

 

I could easily understand why they thought so. After all, never in their lives had they witnessed so powerful an explosion of patriotic sentiment–and not only in the expected precincts of the right. In fact, on the left, where not so long ago the American flag had been thought fit only for burning, the sight of it–and it was now on display everywhere–had been driving a few prominent personalities to wrench their unaccustomed arms into something vaguely resembling a salute. One of these personalities, Todd Gitlin, a leading figure in the New Left of the ’60s and now a professor at Columbia, even went so far as to question the inveterately “negative faith in America the ugly” that he and his comrades had tenaciously held onto for the past 40 years and more.

 

Having broken ranks with the left in the late ’60s precisely because I was repelled by the “negative faith in America the ugly” that had come to pervade it, I naturally welcomed this new patriotic mood with open arms. It seemed to me a sign of greater intellectual sanity and moral health, and I fervently hoped that it would last.

 

But I could not fully share the heady confidence of my younger political friends that the change was permanent, and that nothing in American politics and American culture would ever be the same again. …

Jack Kelly with more bin Laden comment.

There was something odd about the Osama bin Laden video made public last week, noticed Web logger George Maschke (Booman Tribune).

“The video freezes at about 1 minute and 58 seconds, and motion only resumes again at 12:30,” Mr. Maschke said. “The video then freezes at 14:02 and remains frozen until the end. All references to current events occur when the video is frozen.”

Could the current events references have been added to an older tape? Osama is dressed just as he was in his last video, released in 2004. But that may be simply because there isn’t much of a selection at the mall near his cave.

Bin Laden sounds more like Keith Olbermann, MSNBC’s nutty talk show host, than like an Islamic terrorist leader.

Osama’s earlier addresses had an elegance and a consistency to them. Professor James Robbins, who heads the Intelligence Center at Trinity Washington University, described this one as “an interesting fusion of pseudo-Marxism and standard Islamism, sprinkled with political sound bites that rob the address of whatever seriousness it might aspire to.” …

John O’Sullivan, author of The President, The Pope, and The Prime Minister was in country for the Polish edition.

My Polish visit is only half over. But I have a sense that its grand climax occurred on Thursday at a British-embassy party launching the Polish publication of my book, The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister. Not only was it attended by many veterans of the Solidarity movement who, in a reversal of the proper order of things, wanted my autograph; not only did Poland’s foreign minister, Anna Fotyga, deliver a graceful speech (of which more later) in which she described the book as “as exciting as a political thriller;” but the British and American ambassadors read out letters from Margaret Thatcher and Nancy Reagan welcoming the book’s publication in Polish.

Even I am not vain enough to imagine that this was all about me. After a week in Warsaw I realize that the book is significant in Poland because it celebrates the greatest Pole who ever lived, John Paul II, and the moment in modern history when Poland changed the entire world for the better. …

John Tierney spends time with Bjorn Lomborg and we get a column.

After looking at one too many projections of global-warming disasters — computer graphics of coasts swamped by rising seas, mounting death tolls from heat waves — I was ready for a reality check. Instead of imagining a warmer planet, I traveled to a place that has already felt the heat, accompanied by Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish political scientist and scourge of environmentalist orthodoxy.

It was not an arduous expedition. We went to an old wooden building near the Brooklyn Bridge that is home to the Bridge Cafe, which bills itself as “New York’s Oldest Drinking Establishment.” There’s been drinking in the building since the late 18th century, when it was erected on Water Street along the shore of Lower Manhattan.

Since record-keeping began in the 19th century, the sea level in New York has been rising about a foot per century, which happens to be about the same increase estimated to occur over the next century by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The temperature has also risen as New York has been covered with asphalt and concrete, creating an “urban heat island” that’s estimated to have raised nighttime temperatures by 7 degrees Fahrenheit. The warming that has already occurred locally is on the same scale as what’s expected globally in the next century.

The impact of these changes on Lower Manhattan isn’t quite as striking as the computer graphics. We couldn’t see any evidence of the higher sea level near the Bridge Cafe, mainly because Water Street isn’t next to the water anymore. Dr. Lomborg and I had to walk over two-and-a-half blocks of landfill to reach the current shoreline. …

International Herald Tribune on the first Starbucks in Russia. The store is in Khimki, 15 northwest of the city and near Moscow’s international airport. There is a memorial in the town at the point of the furthest German advance towards Moscow. In the About section of our website there is a picture of yours truly at that memorial. The picture was taken Dec. 5, 1991; exactly 50 years from the day the Russians launched their great counter-offensive that would result in the first major defeat for the Germans in WWII.

The most interesting thing about the Russian Starbucks story is a Russian had claimed first dibs on the name. He was willing to give it up for $600,000. Starbucks said no and sued. And won!

Maybe something will come of Russia.

Newsweek, speaking of the Russo/German war, published a piece about the battle for Moscow.

… The battle for Moscow, which officially lasted from Sept. 30, 1941, to April 20, 1942, pitted two gargantuan armies against each other in what was the greatest clash of arms in human history. Seven million men were involved in some stage of this struggle—twice the number who would later fight at Stalingrad, which most people erroneously believe was the bloodiest battle of World War II. The losses were more than twice that of Stalingrad; during the battle for Moscow, 2.5 million were killed, missing, taken prisoner or severely wounded, with 1.9 million of those losses on the Soviet side.

For the first time a Hitler blitzkrieg was stopped, shattering his dream of a swift victory over the Soviet Union. The defeat was also the first signal that Germany would lose the war. As Fabian von Schlabrendorff, a German officer who later joined the conspiracy against Hitler, explained, it destroyed “the myth of the invincibility of the German soldier.” And yet the battle for Moscow is now largely forgotten. …

WaPo has an amazing story about a Maryland college student trapped in a car for 8 days one mile from home. He was near the Baltimore-Washington Parkway when his car left the road and flipped pinning him.

As Julian McCormick recalls it, he lay in and out of consciousness for eight days and seven nights, hot, sticky and bloody with not a clue as to what day it was or how he ended up trapped in his overturned car at the bottom of a steep embankment in Prince George’s County. …

 

… Police categorized McCormick as a “non-critical missing person” because there were no signs of foul play.

They conducted an aerial search for him Friday night from 9 to 10:30 — well after dark, according to the helicopter squad’s aviation log. He was discovered by a motorist Saturday evening.

“I don’t think it was a priority,” Peggy McCormick said.

Added James McCormick: “He’s been there the whole time, less than one mile from home.” …

Dilbert comments on the wisdom of neo-nazis in Israel.

In the news, a gang of neo-Nazis was arrested………………..in Israel.

The gang recorded their violent crimes on video. This is a good idea in case you’re not doing enough to get caught and prosecuted. One of the gang members says, “Heil Hitler” on the video. His lawyer will have to ask to move the trial to Iran so his client can get a fair trial. …

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Some of the crazy left have come down hard on Gen. Petraeus. John Fund leads the way.

General David Petraeus was unanimously confirmed to lead U.S. forces in Iraq just last year, but it apparently it wasn’t unanimously hoped that he would be successful in his new job. Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid has little use for the general now that he might report measured optimism in his forthcoming update. “He’s made a number of statements over the years that have not proved to be factual,” Mr. Reid now says. …

Ed Morrissey is next.

Using a schoolyard manipulation of General David Petraeus’ last name, MoveOn asked in a full-page advertisement whether this honorable commander would betray his nation for the sake of a temporary political advantage. Calling the MNF-I commander “Betray-Us”, the Democratic activist organization accused the general of deliberately misreporting the results of the war effort to boost the Bush administration: …

Byron York comments for the National Review.

With its full-page “General Betray Us?” ad in the New York Times, MoveOn.org has once again put itself at the forefront of the antiwar movement. And if past patterns are any guide, a number of Democrats are embarrassed, and even angered, by MoveOn’s actions but are afraid to reveal the true extent of their feelings. MoveOn simply has too much fundraising clout — and a fear-inducing inclination to attack Democrats who stray from the MoveOn line — for many in the party to take it on.

Democratic leaders might be further embarrassed by a new email, headlined “Your dog can help end the war,” sent out by the leadership of MoveOn’s political team. The email asks members to attend a protest on Capitol Hill this morning preceding the testimony of Gen. David Petraeus. “Congress was fooled before by the White House’s ‘dog and pony show,” the appeal says. “We need to make sure they’re not fooled again. That’s why we’re hosting our own ‘Dog and Pony Show’ outside the Capitol Building right before Petraeus takes the stage for his testimony. We want to show Congress and the cameras that the American people aren’t buying the White House spin.” …

 

… Now, with the “General Betray Us” campaign, those Democrats again face the question: Do they dare to cross MoveOn? Not long after the 2004 elections, Pariser famously said of Democrats, “Now it’s our party. We bought it, we own it, and we’re going to take it back.” The next few days could be crucial in determining whether he was right or not.

Ralph Peters rounds this out in the NY Post.

ONE of the many disgraceful things about Washington is that it really doesn’t matter what Gen. David Petraeus says in his testimony this week.

Minds are already made up. Senators and activists will listen only for a “Gotcha!” opportunity. Staffers have already formulated the sound bites and written the statements denouncing any progress in Iraq as meaningless.

Politically terrified by positive developments in Iraq, Democrats are trying to explain them away preemptively. Premature Iraqulator Sen. Charles Schumer even resorted to outright lies last week.

We’ve reached a grotesque low point when scoring political points means more to our legislators than winning a war. …

The Captain provided three great posts. First on a WSJ op-ed by Fouad Ajami on Iraq. Then on the non-event of Al Gore’s possible endorsement. He closes posting on a WaPo story on the surge.

The Washington Post tells the story of the surge from inside the Bush administration in a lengthy and intriguing article. Headlined as “Among Top Officials, ‘Surge’ Has Sparked Dissent, Infighting,” the compendium from the Post’s reporters actually tells quite a different story. While the surge initially produced dissent — even within the military command — the results have united the administration and the military more than at any time over the last eight months.

In the beginning, Republicans outside the administration objected to the new initiative and the Pentagon’s new chief, Robert Gates, wanted to start drawing down troops. Having just lost an election with Iraq as a significantly contributing factor, the GOP wanted to see an exit strategy by 2008. George Bush wanted to take one final shot for victory, and he pressed for the surge to give the Iraqis enough time to start creating the political environment where it could take root.

And in the end, it turned out that Bush may have been right (via Memorandum): …

Vargas Llosa writes for Tech Central on documentary film – “Mine Your Own Business.”

One would think only a crazy couple would declare war on environmentalists by presenting them on film as snobs, hypocrites and enemies of the poor. Luckily for those of us who think one-sided debates are boring, Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney are just crazy enough to question the environmentalists’ opposition to mining projects in poor countries in a documentary — “Mine Your Own Business” — that is gaining attention.

McAleer, an Irish journalist who covered Romania for the Financial Times, and McElhinney, his wife and co-producer, look at three mining investments: a gold project by Gabriel Resources in Rosia Montana, in Romania’s Transylvania region; Rio Tinto’s ilmenite project in Fort Dauphin, in Madagascar; and a vast Andean operation undertaken by Barrick Gold in Chile’s Huasco Valley.

In the movie, many of the critics who claim to live in the affected areas are less than honest. One, a Swiss environmentalist who leads the opposition to mining in Romania, actually lives in the sort of town to which many of the impoverished peasants of Rosia Montana want to move. …

Yale Daily News reports Yale profs donate on a ratio of 45 to 1. Do Pickings readers know which way they swing?

When it comes to the “money primary,” Yale employees favor Democratic presidential candidates over their Republican rivals — by a margin of 45 to one.

Federal Election Commission filings from the first two quarters of the year show that University faculty and staff have given $44,500 to Democratic presidential candidates — most often to Sen. Barack Obama — and just $1,000 to Republicans.

Division of Labour says Hong Kong wins the economic freedom index. Dead last is Zimbabwe.

Interesting series of Corner posts on the natures of men and women. The last post is by Yuval Levin.

… But the basic civilizing forces in a civilized society are the preferences of women. For reasons both low and high, men try to do what women want, so societies try to educate women to want the right things. Think of the Victorian education of women, or the medieval code of chivalry, or Plutarch’s Spartan women. Tocqueville’s reflections on the American woman are full of wisdom on this too (Democracy in America, Vol. 2, Part 3), and the passage on the ideal man and woman in Rousseau’s Emile is not bad either. “Women make mores,” as Tocqueville puts it.

And it’s not just a matter of education. Women generally (all of this is awfully general of course, there are many exceptions) don’t seem to need quite so much coaxing and civilizing to stay with the family and live responsibly as men do. And when civilization breaks down (due to war, say, or some moral collapse) women tend to end up with awful responsibilities and men tend to up awfully irresponsible. That’s why the coming woman shortage in China is cause for great concern, and why the wild west was wild. It wasn’t the federal marshals who calmed it down, it was wives. …

Beltway Blogroll with a round-up of the Norman Hsu puns. Here’s a sample.

…

– Tusk & Talon: “Deja Hsu”
– TigerHawk: “Stomach Hsu”
– Grammaticus: “Hsu Two”
– Small Dead Animals: “Hillary Hears A Hsu“

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Mark marks the sixth anniversary.

… Have you seen that bumper sticker “9/11 WAS AN INSIDE JOB”? If you haven’t, go to a college town and cruise Main Street for a couple of minutes. It seems odd that a fascist regime that thinks nothing of killing thousands of people in a big landmark building in the center of the city hasn’t quietly offed some of these dissident professors – or at least the guy with the sticker-printing contract. Fearlessly, Robert Fisk of Britain’s Independent, the alleged dean of Middle East correspondents, has now crossed over to the truther side and written a piece headlined, “Even I Question The ‘Truth’ About 9/11.” According to a poll in May, 35 percent of Democrats believe that Bush knew about 9/11 in advance. Did Rumsfeld also know? Almost certainly. That’s why he went to his office as normal that today, because he knew in advance that the plane would slice through the Pentagon but come to a halt on the far side of the photocopier. That’s how well-planned it was, unlike Iraq. …

 

… And what of those for whom the events of six years ago were more than just conspiracy fodder? Last week the New York Times carried a story about the current state of the 9/11 lawsuits. Relatives of 42 of the dead are suing various parties for compensation, on the grounds that what happened that Tuesday morning should have been anticipated. The law firm Motley Rice, diversifying from its traditional lucrative class-action hunting grounds of tobacco, asbestos and lead paint, is promising to put on the witness stand everybody who “allowed the events of 9/11 to happen.” And they mean everybody – American Airlines, United, Boeing, the airport authorities, the security firms – everybody, that is, except the guys who did it.

According to the Times, many of the bereaved are angry and determined that their loved one’s death should have meaning. Yet the meaning they’re after surely strikes our enemies not just as extremely odd but as one more reason why they’ll win. You launch an act of war, and the victims respond with a lawsuit against their own countrymen.

But that’s the American way: Almost every news story boils down to somebody standing in front of a microphone and announcing that he’s retained counsel. …

… In his pugnacious new book, Norman Podhoretz calls for redesignating this conflict as World War IV. Certainly, it would have been easier politically to frame the Iraq campaign as being a front in a fourth world war than as a necessary measure in an anti-terrorist campaign. Yet who knows? Perhaps we would still have mired ourselves in legalists and conspiracies and the dismal curdled relativism of the Flight 93 memorial’s “crescent of embrace.” In the end, as Podhoretz says, if the war is to be fought at all, it will “have to be fought by the kind of people Americans now are.” On this sixth anniversary, as 9/11 retreats into history, many Americans see no war at all. …

Gerard Baker, chief U. S. scribe of the London Times, says the lame duck Prez shows signs of healing.

At this late stage in an American presidency, even in the most favourable circumstances, even for the most popular incumbents, lame duck is definitely on the menu.

These are hardly the best of circumstances and this is hardly one of the most popular incumbents. With little more than a year to go to the end of George Bush’s presidency, his approval ratings stand near historic lows at just above 30 per cent. Last November his party lost control of both houses of Congress.

The death march of senior officials out of the Administration, routine around this stage of a second presidential term, has become a stampede. Karl Rove, the top White House aide, the Cardinal Richelieu of the Bush presidency, has gone. Alberto Gonzales, the Attorney-General, the Harpo Marx of the Bush presidency, will be gone in a few weeks.

By now Mr Bush should be a governing irrelevance, a liability to his party, the object of scorn and derision. Every Republican candidate with an ounce of instinct for self-preservation in his blood should be running away from the President as though he were a burning building.

But what is this? Next week Mr Bush seems certain to score one of the most important political victories of his presidency. General David Petraeus, the commander of US forces in Iraq, will testify before Congress, along with Ryan Crocker, the US Ambassador to Iraq, on the progress of the “surge” Mr Bush ordered earlier this year to much domestic political opposition. …

Taylor and Johnson, authors of the Duke rape fraud book, with an op-ed in WaPo.

One night in jail: So concludes the Duke lacrosse rape case — rape fraud, as it turned out. The legacy of this incident should include hard thinking about the deep pathologies underlying the media sensationalism and the perversion of academic ideals that this fraud inspired.

The 24-hour sentence was imposed on Mike Nifong, the disbarred former district attorney of Durham, after a contempt-of-court trial last week for repeatedly lying to hide DNA evidence of innocence. His prosecution of three demonstrably innocent defendants, based on an emotionally disturbed stripper’s ever-changing account, may be the worst prosecutorial misconduct ever exposed while it was happening. Durham police officers and other officials aided Nifong, and the city and county face the threat of a massive lawsuit by the falsely accused former students seeking criminal justice reforms and compensation.

All this shows how the criminal justice process can oppress the innocent — usually poor people lacking the resources to fight back — and illustrates the need for reforms to restrain rogue prosecutors. But the case was also a major cultural event exposing habits of mind among academics and journalists that contradict what should be their lodestar: the pursuit of truth. …

Thomas Lifson, in American Thinker, suggests the dénouement for the lawsuit against the voters in Durham, NC.

… Not just the pols and the employees, however, deserve accountability. The voters of Durham elected Nifong as DA because he pandered to their desire for race and class vengeance on the wealthy white Duke students. Cutting city services and/or raising taxes on them to finance a settlement or judgment strikes me as perfectly appropriate. …

Contentions provides a series of post on Middle East events.

Max Boot on Madeline Albright – fabulist. You will read in disbelief her comments today compared to when she was in office.

Gabriel Schoenfeld posts on Mearsheimer and Walt and then Osama’s favorite pundit.

… Scheuer, who ran the CIA’s al-Qaeda unit from 1996 to 1999, has been making a great name for himself as a counterterrorism expert since leaving the agency in 2004. Among other high-visibility perches, he serves as a “consultant” to both CBS and ABC News and is cited frequently by leading journalists.

The question is: is bin Laden’s endorsement of Scheuer’s books good for this pundit’s career? Although one should never underestimate the media’s lack of curiosity, my own guess is that it is going to hurt, and hurt badly.

Bin Laden’s endorsement is not the direct reason. Rather, the increasing attention it will bring him will also bring him increasing scrutiny. And scrutiny is not something Scheuer will easily withstand. …

Emanuele Ottolenghi demonstrates the power of the Israel lobby. Reacting to statements by Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell’s chief of staff that Israel tried to wave us off Iraq he says;

… And all this time, I thought the war in Iraq was launched at the behest of the Lobby, to serve Israel’s interests.

Victor Davis Hanson leads our bin Laden items.

… As for the Chomsky, Scheuer, and all the left-wing talking points echoed by bin Laden, what to make of that fallout?

What do you do when a mass-murderer not only finds you a fellow-traveler, but somehow manages to confirm everything that you deny—that radical Islam hates the West for what it is — capitalist, powerful, free, secular—rather than the particulars of what it does? …

Power Line’s post is titled “Osama bin Chomsky.”

… Bin Laden sounds for all the world like a Marxist. He praises Noam Chomsky as one of the “most capable” of American war opponents. Over and over, he attributes American foreign policy to “the owners of the major corporations.” In bin Laden’s view, “[t]hose with real power and influence are those with the most capital,” and “the essence of man-made positive laws is that they serve the interests of those with capital and thus make the rich richer and the poor poorer.”

Third, bin Laden’s disappointment in the Democrats is palpable: …

The Captain is next.

… And just to show that Osama’s not all jihad and mass murder, he offers to solve our domestic problems as well:

He also speaks to recent issues grabbing headlines in the United States, referring to “the reeling of many of you under the burden of interest-related debts, insane taxes and real estate mortgages; global warming and its woes…”

“To conclude,” bin Laden says, “I invite you to embrace Islam.” He goes on to say: “There are no taxes in Islam, but rather there is a limited Zakaat [alms] totaling 2.5 percent.”

Isn’t that sweet? If we just agree to live as slaves under our new Taliban masters, we can finance our homes at a flat 2.5% fee. Think of how liberating that will be! Well, except for the burqas, the barbers, the end of music, dancing, Judaism, Christianity, voting, the press, the 13th-21st centuries, science …

James Robbins in NRO is last.

The new bin Laden videotape is a great disappointment. No new threats, no new deals, just a new beard, if it is even real. Apart from being dyed, the shape is a departure from previous styles, and it looks a bit too full on the sides. Losing his beard would of course be counter to the Islamist orthodoxy, but the requirements of the life of the fugitive will out. Hasn’t al Qaeda instructed its operatives to shave, wear Western clothes, and hang out at strip clubs to allay suspicion?

His speech, such as it is, is an interesting fusion of pseudo-Marxism and standard Islamism, sprinkled with political sound bites that rob the address of whatever seriousness it might aspire to. The real terrorism is global warming and the failure to observe Kyoto! Please. And the bit about how Americans are suffering under credit card-debt and mortgage payments — it’s like his speech team is cribbing from the presidential debates. I really expect more from a terrorist mastermind. …

WSJ op-ed with realistic parenting advice.

… As it turns out, this tension between realists and utopians has existed for at least as long as people have been making a buck dispensing wisdom about how other folks should raise their kids. Ann Hulbert’s “Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice about America” reveals successive generations of disciplinarians pitted against “gentler Rousseauian” proponents of the inherent goodness of a child’s nature. Ms. Hulbert quotes the president of the National Congress of Mothers proclaiming in 1897 that science-based parenting innovations would so change civilization that “those of us who live to see the year 1925 will behold a new world and a new people.” Fast forward past two world wars and the global ravages of utopian totalitarianism to 2006, when education expert Stephanie Marshall writes exuberantly that “the fundamental purpose of schooling is to liberate the goodness and genius of children.”

Perhaps the fundamental purpose of schooling should be to liberate parents from the necessity of supporting our kids well past our retirement years. But regardless, this notion that humans are inherently angelic, and that it is society that corrupts them, is at the heart of much bad parenting, as well as inept schooling. Rather than help our children develop internal constraints that channel their energy and passion into productive enterprises, we end up teaching them that limits and discipline are for chumps. Ms. Hulbert notes that even Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose advice in his book “Baby and Child Care” was so often blamed for parental permissiveness, had seen enough of the consequences: “I can hardly bear to be around rude children,” he wrote. “I have the impulse to spank them, and to give a lecture to their parents.”

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• September 6 Word

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Abigail Thernstrom reviewed the Stuart Taylor/KC Johnson Duke story -”Until Proven Innocent.”

Privileged, rowdy white jocks at an elite, Southern college, a poor, young black stripper, and an alleged rape: It was a juicy, made-for-the-media story of race, class and sex, and it was told and retold for months with a ferocious, moralistic intensity. Reporters and pundits ripped into Duke University, the white race and the young lacrosse players at the center of the episode, and the local justice system quickly handed up indictments. But as Stuart Taylor Jr. and KC Johnson show in “Until Proven Innocent”–and as the facts themselves would show when they finally came to light–it was a false story, a toxic controversy built on lies and bad faith.

There was plenty of wrongdoing, of course, but it had very little to do with Duke’s lacrosse players. It was perpetrated instead by a rogue district attorney determined to win re-election in a racially divided, town-gown city; ideologically driven reporters and their pseudo-expert sources; censorious faculty members driven by the imperatives of political correctness; a craven university president; and black community leaders seemingly ready to believe any charge of black victimization.

“Until Proven Innocent” is a stunning book. It recounts the Duke lacrosse case in fascinating detail and offers, along the way, a damning portrait of the institutions–legal, educational and journalistic–that do so much to shape contemporary American culture. Messrs. Taylor and Johnson make it clear that the Duke affair–the rabid prosecution, the skewed commentary, the distorted media storyline–was not some odd, outlier incident but the product of an elite culture’s most treasured assumptions about American life, not least about America’s supposed racial divide. …

… Richard Brodhead, the president of Duke, condemned the lacrosse players as if they had already been found guilty, demanded the resignation of their coach and studiously ignored the mounting evidence that Ms. Mangum’s charge was false. He was clearly terrified of the racial and gender activists on his own faculty. Houston Baker, a noted professor of English, called the lacrosse players “white, violent, drunken men veritably given license to rape,” men who could “claim innocence . . . safe under the cover of silent whiteness.” Protesters on campus and in the city itself waved “castrate” banners, put up “wanted” posters and threatened the physical safety of the lacrosse players.

The vitriolic rhetoric of the faculty and Durham’s “progressive” community–including the local chapter of the NAACP–helped to intensify the scandal and stoke the media fires. The New York Times’ coverage was particularly egregious, as Messrs. Taylor and Johnson vividly show. It ran dozens of prominent stories and “analysis” articles trying to plumb the pathologies of the lacrosse players and of a campus culture that allowed swaggering white males to prey on poor, defenseless young black women. As one shrewd Times alumnus later wrote: “You couldn’t invent a story so precisely tuned to the outrage frequency of the modern, metropolitan, bien pensant journalist.” Such Nifong allies–unlike the district attorney himself–paid no price for their shocking indifference to the truth.

Evan Thomas reviews the book for Newsweek.

On March 28, 2006, the four co-captains of the Duke lacrosse team accused of gang-raping an exotic dancer met with university president Richard Brodhead. One of the captains, David Evans, emotionally protested that the team was innocent and apologized for the misbegotten stripper party. “Brodhead’s eyes filled with tears,” write Stuart Taylor Jr. and KC Johnson in their new book on the case, “Until Proven Innocent” (420 pages. Thomas Dunne Books. $26.95). Brodhead “said that the captains should think of how difficult it had been for him.” The misbehavior of the players, said Duke’s president, “had put him in a terrible position.” Listening to Brodhead, Robert Ekstrand, a lawyer representing the captains and many of their teammates, “felt his blood starting to boil,” write Taylor and Johnson. “Here, he thought, is a comfortable university president wallowing in self-pity in front of four students who are in grave danger of being falsely indicted on charges of gang rape, punishable by decades in prison.”

It is possible to feel sympathy for Brodhead (who in an interview with Taylor denied he was tearful or self-pitying at the meeting). The president of a modern, elite university must be careful not to cross his politically correct faculty. Brodhead had already lost face with some professors (who dislike the admissions break given to athletes) by appearing to kowtow before Duke’s iconic basketball coach, Mike Krzyzewski, to stop him from jumping to the pros. Brodhead had to worry about potential riots if he were seen as an apologist for the lacrosse players. They were white and the alleged victim was black; Duke is seen as a bastion of white privilege in its racially mixed hometown of Durham, N.C.

Still, as unforgivingly portrayed in “Until Proven Innocent,” Brodhead appears weak-kneed. In their vivid, at times chilling account, the authors are contemptuous of prosecutor Mike Nifong, whom the North Carolina legal establishment disbarred for his by now well-documented misconduct. (Nifong’s lawyer, David Freedman, says “there are a number of people who testified at the state bar proceeding that [Nifong] was a very caring career prosecutor.”) But their most biting scorn is aimed at the “academic McCarthyism” that they say has infected top-rated American universities like Duke. …

… The authors make the Duke faculty look at once ridiculous and craven. For months, not one of the university’s nearly 500-member faculty of arts and sciences stood up to question the rush to judgment against the lacrosse team. So much for the ideal of the liberal-arts university where scholars debate openly and seek the truth. (“This book provides one interpretation,” says Duke spokesman John Burness.) The only group that shows any common sense in “Until Proven Innocent” is the student body. Aside from a few noisy activists who assumed the players were guilty, Duke undergrads mostly overlooked the political correctness of their professors.

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit keeps the book reviews going with his post on The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration.

Excerpt:

It is unimaginable that Francis Biddle or Robert Jackson would have written Franklin Roosevelt a memorandum about how to avoid prosecution for his wartime decisions designed to maintain flexibility against a new and deadly foe. . . . Many people think the Bush administration has been indifferent to wartime legal constraints. But the opposite is true: the administration has been strangled by law, and since September 11, 2001 this war has been lawyered to death.

As I’ve said before, this war has been overlawyered, which is not to say it has been well-lawyered. Goldsmith notes that the Defense Department alone has over 10,000 lawyers, not including reservists. …

John Fund with a couple of shorts.

William Buckley reviews the new book by Norman Podhoretz.

… He quotes in his book Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum. Pipes is off to a rollicking and reassuring start in what becomes the deadliest paragraph in town. Begin with our military superiority, which would appear to make victory inevitable. “Islamists have nothing like the military machine the Axis deployed in World War II, nor the Soviet Union during the Cold War. What do the Islamists have to compare with the Wehrmacht or the Red Army? The SS or Spetznaz? The Gestapo or the KGB? Or, for that matter, to Auschwitz or the Gulag?”

A thoughtful answer to that question is sobering. The Islamists have:

A potential access to weapons of mass destruction that could devastate Western life.

A religious appeal that provides deeper resonance and greater staying power than the artificial ideologies of fascism or communism.

An impressively conceptualized, funded and organized institutional machinery that successfully builds credibility, goodwill and electoral success.

An ideology capable of appealing to Muslims of every size and shape, from Lumpenproletariat to privileged, from illiterates to Ph.D.s, from the well-adjusted to psychopaths, from Yemenis to Canadians.” …

The Captain posts on how you can get to be a scoundrel in eight months.

If anyone wants a lesson in how to lose a reputation for diligence, honor, and honesty, all they need to do is get confirmed by Congress for a vital role in American security. Eight months after the Senate confirmed David Petraeus as commander of American forces in Iraq, the same Senators who voted for his confirmation have now begun a character-assassination campaign to discredit him: …

Agriculture is no longer the leading occupation of the human race – for the first time in 10,000 years.

… In recent years agriculture has lost its place as the main sector of employment and has been replaced by the services sector, which in 2006 constituted 42.0 per cent of world employment compared to 36.1 per cent for agriculture. As for the industry sector, it represented 21.9 per cent of total employment, which is almost unchanged from ten years ago. Although textbook theory suggests that economic development entails a structural transformation with a shift away from agriculture to the industry sector, this no longer seems to be reflected in reality. Instead of moving into high-productivity jobs in the industry sector, people are moving directly into the services sector, which consists of both high- and low-productivity jobs.

Therefore, it is unclear if the sectoral shift goes hand in hand with productivity increases and thereby a better utilization of the workforce. Agriculture is still the main sector of employment in the world’s poorest regions. Two-thirds of workers in sub-Saharan Africa and almost half of workers in South Asia and South-East Asia & the Pacific are in agriculture. …

Speaking of farming, can you guess what ethanol is screwing up now?

… Everywhere farmers grow corn, water is becoming a major concern as ethanol plants ramp up production at a startling rate and the threat of drought is ever-present. Rushing to help meet President Bush’s call to cut gasoline use by 20% over the next 10 years, the ethanol industry has projects under way that would nearly double capacity from the current 6.8 billion gallons of ethanol a year.

A 50-million gallon ethanol plant might use about 150 million gallons of water to make fuel. That’s more water than some small towns use, raising some local battles over placement of the plants. But farmers in Mr. Clements’s district alone pumped 62.6 billion gallons of water from underground in 2005. That’s why many water experts are more concerned about farmers growing more thirsty corn to meet the extra demand from ethanol than they are about the water used by the distilleries themselves. …

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Mark Steyn reviews Norman Podhoretz’s new book for The New Criterion. This is long, but worthwhile.

… But the people who got World War III wrong (That would be the Cold War) *Pickerhead (and, in its darkest hours, potentially fatally wrong) were given a pass: they got to skate. Moral equivalists, looking-at-the-world-through-Red-colored-glasses sentimentalists, hardcore anti-Americans, all were as entrenched as ever in the institutions of the West when the new struggle began—and with an even freer hand to get it wrong one mo’ time. In a particularly sharp chapter, “From World War III to World War IV,” Podhoretz traces the links between the two: the forces of defeatism in the Cold War’s bleakest decade—the Seventies—that also emboldened new enemies. He quotes Jimmy Carter’s mockery of the old assumptions, the “belief that Soviet expansionism was almost inevitable and that it must be contained. Being confident of our own future, we are now free of that inordinate fear of Communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear.”

No fear of that anymore. And so the Shah fell to the Ayatollah Khomeini. “Just how blind the Carter administration was to this portentous development,” writes Podhoretz, “can be gauged by the fact that Andrew Young, Carter’s own ambassador to the UN, hailed the radical Islamist despot now ruling Iran as a saint and a great believer in human rights.”

The seizure of the U.S. Embassy disabused even Carter of Carterian delusions. He loosed Zbigniew Brzezinski to deal with the Soviets in Afghanistan. In post-Watergate post-Vietnam Washington, the “covert mission” barely existed, so Zbig outsourced the Afghan operation to Pakistan’s ISI and Saudi Arabia’s Prince Turki, and they in turn signed up Osama bin Laden and other excitable types. Thirty years on, the idealist buffoon Carter and the wily “realist” Brzezinski are not laughingstocks but prominent and reasonably respected and indeed bestselling analysts of our present woes.

Carter got it exactly wrong. It was precisely because we were not “confident of our own future” that we were so tentative in response to provocations. There were two forces at play in the late twentieth century: in the east, the collapse of Communism; in the west, the collapse of confidence. And, with the end of the Soviet existential threat, the enervation at home only accelerated. …

NY Observer comments on the deflating Harry Reid.

Harry Reid left Washington last month a frustrated but optimistic man. He is returning, it seems, a humbled one—at least as far as the Iraq debate goes.

It was at the end of July that just about every Republican in the Senate—plus Joe Lieberman—stood together to block a vote on a troop withdrawal plan, dealing a blow to Mr. Reid and his antiwar allies, who had championed the proposal. But Mr. Reid was also confident that the August Congressional recess would change the math, with irate constituents giving the holdout Republicans a piece of their mind about their unwillingness to end the war.

But recess is almost over now, and with the Senate reconvening on Sept. 4, Mr. Reid doesn’t seem nearly as sure of his hand. Of the Iraq debate that will soon resume, the majority leader told The Washington Post late last week that “I don’t think we have to think that our way is the only way.” …

The Captain posts on Hillary’s depraved privatization thoughts.

Hillary Clinton has an interesting view of the American economy, if her remarks to the AARP serve as any sort of guide. She told its legislative conference that Social Security is the “most successful domestic program” in American history, and that only government can make the necessary decisions for its beneficiaries (via reader Online Analyst):

“This is the most successful domestic program in the history of the United States,” Clinton said to applause from seniors gathered in Washington to push their policy agenda. “When I’m president, privatization is off the table because it’s not the answer to anything.” …

Kathleen Parker’s cartoon column is sneaky good. She starts out writing about the Swedish cartoons showing Mohammed’s head on a dog. Then she flips to American editors who cave preemptively.

… Outrage, never far from the front burner where the date palms grow, was swift. Egypt complained, Jordan condemned, Afghanistan protested, and Iran — that arbiter of taste and protocol — suggested ways Sweden could become a better country. In Pakistan, where effigies are a cottage industry, “Muslim youth” burned a straw likeness of Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, who bravely and beautifully articulated why Westerners allow cartoonists to be offensive: …

… These lessons of freedom and tolerance, which we can’t seem to export with much success, are also apparently lost on some American newspaper editors who declined recently to run two of Berkeley Breathed’s “Opus” comic strips out of concern — or was it fear? — that they were potentially offensive to Muslims. …

… The first “Opus” strip, which can be viewed on Salon.com and at comics.com, shows Lola Granola dressed in a Muslim headscarf and veil. “A Muslim fundamentalist?” asks her boyfriend, Steve. “No. Radical Islamist. Hot new fad on the planet.” The final panel suggests that, given Lola’s new identity, Steve will be denied her affections. The second strip continues the plotline and shows Lola and Steve preparing for the beach. Steve urges Lola to wear that “smokin’ hot yellow polka dot bikini” and reminds her, “You love freedom. You love hotness. And you love that I’m so darned smart about what’s best for you.” Lola emerges from the dressing room covered head-to-toe in a “burqini.”

OK, who gets the joke?

Interpreting cartoons is risky business, as they’re not intended to be taken literally. And, reading letters posted at Salon.com, it’s clear that everyone has his own interpretation of what the strips are saying. Breathed himself prefers to stay strictly out of it. What seems clear, however, is that strip is making fun of a certain shallowness on our side of the pond. Breathed is often hard on males and no one looks more foolish in these strips than the character Steve, who is oblivious to all but his own needs and desires.

If anyone is offended, it should be American males.

What is also clear is that the editors who killed these strips surrendered in advance of controversy. Thanks to previous acts of protest and intimidation, radical Muslims have succeeded in directing editorial content of America’s free, and formerly courageous, press.

The joke really is on us. And it’s not funny.

Mark Steyn with a surprising Corner post that grew out of an Orwellian Sunday Telegraph item.

A pregnant woman has been told that her baby will be taken from her at birth because she is deemed capable of “emotional abuse”, even though psychiatrists treating her say there is no evidence to suggest that she will harm her child in any way. …

 

… The case adds to growing concern, highlighted in a series of articles in The Sunday Telegraph, over a huge rise in the number of babies under a year old being taken from parents. The figure was 2,000 last year, three times the number 10 years ago.

Critics say councils are taking more babies from parents to help them meet adoption “targets”. …

John Stossel gets a return engagement with “toilet man.”

I didn’t recognize him until he reminded me I’d interviewed him a decade ago. Then I remembered he was “toilet man.” That’s what I called him privately when he was the energy department bureaucrat under President Clinton who defended the government’s demand that all of us buy “low-flow” showerheads and “water-saving” toilets.

I did a “Give Me a Break” segment on that for “20/20″ mocking the endless rule-making process, which somehow concluded that exactly 1.6 gallons is all that every toilet needs. I interviewed people who were so unhappy with their new toilets that they were combing junkyards for old ones, or going to Canada to buy them, because 1.6 gallons doesn’t always get the job done. Homeowners and apartment managers kept telling meme, “The toilets don’t work!”

“They do now,” Romm said to me last week. Manufacturers eventually made 1.6 gallons flush successfully, proving, he suggested, that my “Give Me a Break” was misguided and that government rules spur improvements. Now, he says, we need to save the earth by passing rules that restrict carbon use.

The fact that it took years for manufacturers to solve the flushing problem, at great expense to consumers, and that during that period many people had to flush several times, wasting lots of water, and that the one-size-fits-all rule applied to all of America, forcing flushing embarrassment and lousy showers on people in Vermont and other places that have plenty of water and don’t need to conserve, and the water savings were less than 6 percent of what farms use every day for irrigation — none of that bothers Romm.

He now works at the Center for American Progress, a lefty think tank where policy wonks seem to think that government telling us what to do is the solution to many problems.

Nice Samizdata post.

… There’s a special sort of piece that appears only in The Guardian (or The New York Times) that deserves to be recognised as a journalistic genre in its own right. They masquerade as balanced and judicious profiles of individuals. But in fact they are vigorous defences, or at least pleas in mitigation, for people who cannot be allowed to be seen as guilty of any great sin because they’re On The Left. …

Reason’s Hit & Run tries to take the NY Times where an intelligent policy might lead.

… Surely one of the chief reasons the DC school system is so wasteful and unproductive is because it’s in nobody’s interest to save taxpayer money or provide a quality education. Generally public schools are not run for the benefit of students. Instead they are run for the benefit of teachers and the educrats in the central office. So why not make it someone’s interest to save money and turn out a quality education? Take the $11,000 per pupil the DC public schools spend and give it to parents as a voucher. Then let parents make the decision about which schools are actually educating their children. Or at the very least adopt the successful school choice program that San Francisco has.

Paul Greenberg sips from the cup that keeps on flowing – John Edwards’ hypocrisy.

… Hypocrisy, said La Rochefoucauld, is the tribute vice pays virtue, and let it be said John Edwards never stops paying tribute to virtue.

It hasn’t been too long since he was urging his Democratic rivals for the presidency to return any money they’d received from press tycoon Rupert Murdoch, the publisher the left loves to hate, and refuse to appear on Murdoch’s Fox News network. Mr. Edwards himself had appeared on Fox News 33 times at last count. And he’s collected $800,000 for a book published by a subsidiary of a Murdoch corporation, HarperCollins. (The candidate says much of the money went to charities. One of them, College for Everyone, turns out to be one he founded.)

Presidential campaigns have a way of attracting gold-plated phonies and, before this one is over, no doubt the inconsistencies of other candidates will be laid bare, too. But for now, when it comes to deciding who’s the phoniest of them all, John Edwards leads the pack — and his lead may be unbeatable.

Carpe Diem posts on globalization’s benefits.

Hit & Run posts on progress in the Venezuelan economy. NOT!

Gay Patriot with a wonderful story.

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Mark Steyn makes a good point in “There were two creeps in the men’s room.”

… The human comedy is not to be disdained. Nonetheless, after listening to the post-arrest audio tape of Craig’s interview with police Sgt. Dave Karsnia, I find myself inclining toward Henry Kissinger’s pronouncement on the Iran/Iraq war: It’s a shame they both can’t lose. As it happens, I passed by the very same men’s room at the Lindbergh Terminal only a couple of months ago. I didn’t go in, however. My general philosophy on public restrooms was summed up by the late Derek Jackson, the Oxford professor and jockey, in his advice to a Frenchman about to visit Britain. “Never go to a public lavatory in London,” warned Professor Jackson. “I always pee in the street. You may be fined a few pounds for committing a nuisance, but in a public lavatory you risk two years in prison because a policeman in plain clothes says you smiled at him.”

Just so. Sgt. Karsnia is paid by the police Department to sit in a stall in the men’s room all day, like a spider waiting for the flies. The Baron von Richthoven of the Minneapolis Bathroom Patrol has notched up a phenomenal number of kills and knows what to look for – the tapping foot in the adjoining stall, a hand signal under the divider. Did you know that tapping your foot in a bathroom was a recognized indicator that a criminal act is about to occur? …

Jonah Goldberg has a winner reviewing the Katrina conduct of the media.

… there was one thing missing from the coverage of this natural, social, economic and political disaster: the fact that Katrina represented an unmitigated media disaster as well.

Few of us can forget the reports from two years ago. CNN warned that there were “bands of rapists, going block to block.” Snipers were reportedly shooting at medical personnel. Bodies at the Superdome, we were told, were stacked like cordwood. The Washington Post proclaimed in a banner headline that New Orleans was a “A City of Despair and Lawlessness,” insisting in an editorial that “looters and carjackers, some of them armed, have run rampant.” Fox News anchor John Gibson said there were “all kinds of reports of looting, fires and violence. Thugs shooting at rescue crews.”

TV reporters raced to the bottom to see who could moralistically preen the most. Interviewers transformed into outright scolds of administration officials. Meanwhile, the distortions, exaggerations and flat-out fictions being offered by New Orleans officials were accelerated and amplified by the media echo chamber. Glib predictions of 10,000 dead, and the chief of police’s insistence that there were “little babies getting raped,” swirled around the media like so much free-flowing sewage.

It was as though journalistic skepticism of government officials was reserved for the White House, and everyone else got a free pass.

Of course the Bush administration made serious mistakes — politically, logistically and otherwise — in a difficult situation. But Katrina unleashed a virus of sanctimony and credulity for urban legends almost without precedent. …

It’s decades late, but Teddy Kennedy is finally getting some critical comment from the left.

… The source of unhappiness is Kennedy’s efforts to kill an offshore wind farm on Nantucket Sound. Cape Wind was to be the first such project in the United States and a source of pride to environmentally minded New Englanders. Polls show 84 percent of Massachusetts residents in favor. But now it appears that America’s first offshore wind farm will be near Galveston, Texas.

Proposed the month before Sept. 11, 2001, Cape Wind remains in limbo. It’s been frustrated at every turn by a handful of yachtsmen, Kennedy included, who don’t want to see windmills from their verandas. Many millions have been spent spreading disinformation and smearing the wind farm’s supporters.

The towers would be at least five miles out and barely visible from shore on the clearest day, but the summer plutocrats resent any intrusion on their waterfront vistas — and, equally, any challenge to the notion that they control everything.

“But don’t you realize — that’s where I sail!” may stand as Kennedy’s most self-incriminating quote. …

Jack Kelly writes on how the media lets the Dems slide.

… But media bias is not the main reason why Republicans suffer more from scandals. Democratic voters expect Democrats to steal on their behalf. Lawmakers are judged on the basis of how many goodies from the federal treasury they can shower on their constituents. The typical Democratic voter doesn’t mind terribly if their senator or congressman takes something for himself along the way. (Time Magazine’s story on Rep. Mollohan’s re-election was headlined, “Pork Trumps Scandal.”)

The typical Republican voter wants his senator or congressman to keep his taxes low, his government honest. He is furious when GOP lawmakers stick their fingers in the cookie jar, or give lip service to values they do not practice.

Republicans must be squeaky clean to win elections because their voters will crucify them for behavior Democratic voters wink at so long as the pork keeps flowing. This is why his GOP colleagues already have stripped Sen. Craig of his committee assignments, and many have called for his resignation, while Democratic senators are comfortable having among them a man who left to drown in his automobile a young woman with whom he was having an extramarital affair.

Corner posts on the African proverbs that won’t go away.

… On what conceivable grounds is it warranted to say, “What would the Africans do?” Even on the wishy-washy proverbial terrain Clinton is usually dealing with — “children,” “villages,” etc — is there any empirical basis for arguing that the African Way is superior to our own? Maybe there are studies that show “Africans” are happier than Americans — when the former aren’t dying of malnutrition or medieval health care, or desperately trying to emigrate to the West, no doubt. …

Adam Smith.org reminds what we owe to Milton Friedman.

NY Sun says Pete Seeger is facing up to his Stalin worship.

… “I’m singing about old Joe, cruel Joe,” the lyrics read. “He ruled with an iron hand / He put an end to the dreams / Of so many in every land / He had a chance to make / A brand new start for the human race / Instead he set it back / Right in the same nasty place / I got the Big Joe Blues / (Keep your mouth shut or you will die fast) / I got the Big Joe Blues / (Do this job, no questions asked) / I got the Big Joe Blues.”

Mr. Seeger continued in his letter to me: “the basic mistake was Lenin’s faith in [Party] DISCIPLINE!” He often tells his left-wing audiences, he said, to read Rosa Luxemburg’s famous letter to Lenin about the necessity of freedom of speech. And despite all of my criticisms of Mr. Seeger over the years, he ended warmly, saying: “You stay well. Keep on.” …

John Tierney keeps us up with the war on drugs.

I recommend a couple of articles chronicling the unintended consequences of the war on drugs. One, by Ethan Nadelmann, is a global look at the damage done by prohibitionist policies. The other, by Radley Balko, is a look at a doctor convicted for prescribing opioids — and this case is in some ways more troubling than the Hurwitz case that I’ve been writing about. …

Thomas Sowell on health care.

Anne Applebaum is just what the doctor ordered if you’re tired of the Diana thing.

… In fairness, I should note that the grumblers don’t deny the tragedy of the princess’s death—of course it’s sad when a young mother dies suddenly. But they do rightly cast skepticism on the notion, prevalent outside Britain, that Diana’s death somehow “changed” the country forever. Though this latter idea is often repeated—among other places on the cover of Time International last week—as time goes on, it looks ever more absurd.

In fact, the genuinely bizarre aspect of the all-consuming Dianamania that gripped Britain a decade ago this week is how slight a trace it has left behind. Actually, the royal family is pretty much the same, only quieter. From Diana, they learned that there is such a thing as too much publicity. Prince Charles and his children are more rarely seen in public; the prince’s current consort, Camilla Parker Bowles, is admired for holding her tongue. When the queen mother died in 2002—at age 101, the quintessence of old-style British manners—more people showed up to mourn than had appeared for the funeral of the people’s princess. …

James Taranto picks up on the foolish health care plans of John Edwards. It is increasingly obvious this candidate was a gift from the gods for our comic relief.

Who does John Edwards think he is, our mother? The Associated Press reports from Tipton, Iowa, on the lovely and talented one’s latest brainstorm:

Edwards said on Sunday that his universal health care proposal would require that Americans go to the doctor for preventive care.

“It requires that everybody be covered. It requires that everybody get preventive care,” he told a crowd sitting in lawn chairs in front of the Cedar County Courthouse. “If you are going to be in the system, you can’t choose not to go to the doctor for 20 years. You have to go in and be checked and make sure that you are OK.”

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Marty Peretz posting in the Spine introduces a WSJ op-ed.

Josef Joffe is the editor-publisher of Die Zeit who knows the United States very well, and he knows the world well, too. That is, without sentimentality or hyperbole. His eyes are among the most incisive lenses on international affairs that I know, and they look out for the destiny of just societies. Real ones, not imagined ones.

He and I knew each other at Harvard, and have seen each other off and on over the decades. I think I’ve read all his books, and his last one, Ãœberpower: The Imperial Temptation of America had much to say about the distress of the United States in its relations to friends, adversaries and enemies.

Being conscious of this strain, Joffe knows the cost of faltering in the Middle East, of faltering in Iraq. Maybe there are few options left in Iraq. But then we should know the costs, the terrible costs. He lays these out in a piece, actually a dazzling piece, in the Wall Street Journal. …

Here’s that piece by Josef Joffe.

In contrast to President Bush’s dark comparison between Iraq and the bloody aftermath of the Vietnam War last week, there is another, comforting version of the Vietnam analogy that’s gained currency among policy makers and pundits. It goes something like this:

After that last helicopter took off from the U.S. embassy in Saigon 32 years ago, the nasty strategic consequences then predicted did not in fact materialize. The “dominoes” did not fall, the Russians and Chinese did not take over, and America remained No. 1 in Southeast Asia and in the world.

But alas, cut-and-run from Iraq will not have the same serendipitous aftermath, because Iraq is not at all like Vietnam.

Unlike Iraq, Vietnam was a peripheral arena of the Cold War. Strategic resources like oil were not at stake, and neither were bases (OK, Moscow obtained access to Da Nang and Cam Ranh Bay for a while). In the global hierarchy of power, Vietnam was a pawn, not a pillar, and the decisive battle lines at the time were drawn in Europe, not in Southeast Asia.

The Middle East, by contrast, was always the “elephant path of history,” as Israel’s fabled defense minister, Moshe Dayan, put it. Legions of conquerors have marched up and down the Levant, and from Alexander’s Macedonia all the way to India. Other prominent visitors were Julius Caesar, Napoleon and the German Wehrmacht.

This is not just ancient history. Today, the Greater Middle East is a cauldron even Macbeth’s witches would be terrified to touch. The world’s worst political and religious pathologies combine with oil and gas, terrorism and nuclear ambitions.

In short, unlike yesterday’s Vietnam, the Greater Middle East (including Turkey) is the central strategic arena of the 21st century, as Europe was in the 20th. This is where three continents — Europe, Asia, and Africa — are joined. So let’s take a moment to think about what would happen once that last Blackhawk took off from Baghdad International. …

John Fund with a couple of posts.

The Captain posts on Harry Reid, Mugabe, Fred Thompson, and the general uselessness of the debates.

In WSJ we learn the CEO of Cypress Semiconductors went back to college as a trustee. A salutorian who graduated from Dartmouth with degrees in chemistry and physics ran for a seat reserved for alums. How’s that working out?

… Mr. Rodgers founded Cypress in 1982, and now, a lifetime later in the hypercompetitive semiconductor business, it is an industry leader. Mr. Rodgers, for his part, has reached that phase where success purchases new opportunities.

Some men of his means and achievement buy a yacht, or turn to philanthropic work, or join other corporate boards. Mr. Rodgers went back to school: He became a trustee of his alma mater, Dartmouth College–and not a recumbent one. He has now served for three years; and though he notes some positives, overall, Mr. Rodgers says, “It’s been a horrible experience. I’m a respected person here in Silicon Valley. Nobody calls me names. Nobody demeans me in board meetings. That’s not the way I’m treated at Dartmouth. The behavior has been pretty shabby.” …

… “They attack things that don’t matter because they can’t attack you for what you stand for–quality of education. . . . The attacks become ad hominem. . . . We get called the problem. The fact is that we’re a response to the problem.”

In Mr. Rodgers’s judgment, the increasingly political denigration–the “rancor,” he calls it–has seriously impinged on his effectiveness as a trustee, and on the effectiveness of the board in general. “Before I ever went to my first board meeting,” he says, “I did what any decent manager in Silicon Valley does–management by walking around. You actually go and talk to people and ask how they’re doing and what they need to get their jobs done.”

He noted trends: over-enrollment, wait lists and an increased percentage of classes taught by visiting or non-tenure-track faculty. He concluded that many departments–economics, government, psychology and brain sciences, in particular–were “suffering from a shortage of teaching.”

“It’s a simple problem,” Mr. Rodgers says. “You hire more professors.” His effort to get an objective grip on the problem would be comic were it not so unfathomable. “I’ve had to scrounge to get data,” he says, the administration not being forthcoming. “My best sources of data come from faculty members and students.” …

WSJ with an editorial on college governance issues.

… In 1891, Dartmouth agreed to a pact that instituted a novel scheme of democratic governance. Alumni–the school’s financial underwriters–won the right to elect half of its non-administrative or ex officio trustees, who oversee the school and hire and fire its president. (The remaining seats are filled by appointment and typically go to big donors.)

The candidates for elected trusteeships have traditionally been vetted by a small committee, ensuring quiescence. Over the last four years, however, no fewer than four reform-minded candidates won seats on the board using a provision allowing nomination by petition. They include Silicon Valley CEO T.J. Rodgers and Virginia law professor Stephen Smith, who have raised the profile of such issues as academic standards, bureaucratic bloat and free speech.

Their presence has proven to be a tremendous offense to Dartmouth’s inner circles. Like administrators at most universities, these academic elites expect only money–not opinion and oversight–from their alumni donors. A year ago, the administration worked with a small committee of alumni to alter the petition process to make it less likely that outsiders could win. They lost in a rout in an alumni referendum.

But rather than accept that rebuke and seek some common ground, the school’s president, James Wright, and his trustee allies now seem prepared to overhaul the school’s governance more or less by fiat. …

The Economist with interesting obit of a Stalin era survivor.

HAD he been born in Iowa, Tikhon Khrennikov might have enjoyed a modest fame. Early discovery as a talented pianist; studies in composition, perhaps at the Juilliard School; schmoozing with Hollywood actors and directors, who would have appreciated his amiable character and his ear for a good tune. Irving Berlin and George Gershwin might have been his friends; he might have been remembered, like them, for hummable classics.

But Mr Khrennikov was born, one of ten children, into a horse-trading family in provincial Yelets, four years before the Russian revolution; and he died 16 years after the Soviet Union became Russia again. Over this period he was presented with moral choices and political demands which, as a musician, he should have been spared. He was not—like Sergei Prokofiev or Dmitri Shostakovich—a great composer. But he was the chief composer.

As secretary of the composers’ union, a title he received from Joseph Stalin in 1948 and kept until the USSR disintegrated, in 1991, Mr Khrennikov had enormous powers. But he had never sought them. He had come to Moscow to be a musician, and seemed likely to succeed: not so much with classical pieces, though his first symphony was conducted by the flamboyant and popularising Leopold Stokowski, but with scores for theatre and film.

Concurring Opinions is wondering when the NY Times will issue a correction acknowledging its problem understanding what are constitutional rights.

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Victor Davis Hanson writes on the enemies of George Bush.

George Bush is not a very popular fellow.

Witness the enraged reaction last week from critics to his suggestion that leaving Iraq now could have the same dire consequences as our withdrawal from Vietnam did. “It just boggles my mind, the distortions I feel are perpetrated here by the president,” cried historian Robert Dallek. “Misleading rhetoric,” chimed in Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa.

What is it about Bush that evokes such furor?

Let’s start with the hard left, whether in Hollywood or the blogosphere, or among the academic elite. They hate George Bush. To them, his tax cuts, alliance with the religious right, opposition to abortion and gay marriage, and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq foster the image of an illiberal imperial America. His strut and mangling of words are more salt in their wounds.

The mainstream Democratic Party has been pretty vocal in its dislike, too. Al Gore’s veins bulge when he speaks of George Bush. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s lips curl. …

Adam Smith posts on the large number of hospital infections and steps taken to fight them.

The Bush Administration recently announced that it will not reimburse hospitals for services that left patients with damage caused by poor performance, for instance by falls on hospital wards or nasty hospital acquired infections. Every year 1.7 million people in the US contract infections during their stay in a hospital resulting in as much as $473 million extra costs. …

Ann Coulter has a good idea. Liberals go into overdrive trashing Ashcroft and Gonzales, so Ann reminds us of Janet Reno.

This week, congressional Democrats vowed to investigate Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ firing of himself. Gonzales has said he was not involved in the discussions about his firing and that it was “performance-based,” but he couldn’t recall the specifics.

Right-wingers like me never trusted Gonzales. But watching Hillary Rodham Clinton literally applaud the announcement of Gonzales’ resignation on Monday was more than any human being should have to bear. Liberals’ hysteria about Gonzales was surpassed only by their hysteria about his predecessor, John Ashcroft. (Also their hysteria about Bush, Rove, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Libby, Rice, Barney and so on. They’re very excitable, these Democrats.)

Liberals want to return the office to the glory years of Attorney General Janet Reno! …

… From the phony child abuse cases of the ’80s to the military assault on Americans at Waco, Janet Reno presided over the most egregious attacks on Americans’ basic liberties since the Salem witch trials. These outrageous deprivations of life and liberty were not the work of fanatical right-wing prosecutors, but liberals like Janet Reno.

Reno is the sort of wild-eyed zealot trampling on real civil rights that Hillary views as an ideal attorney general, unlike that brute Alberto Gonzales. At least Reno didn’t fire any U.S. attorneys!

Oh wait –

Number of U.S. attorneys fired by Ashcroft: 0

Number of U.S. attorneys fired by Gonzales: 8

Number of U.S. attorneys fired by Reno: 93

The Captain posts on Japan’s national health care.

The lack of facilities in a national health-care system has resulted in the death of a newborn. Japan, whose system has been cited as a model for the United States to consider, has few medical facilities in their rural areas, and the lack of obstetricians led one couple to be turned away from eight hospitals when the mother-to-be went into labor:

Japan’s health minister has pledged to address the shortage of doctors in the country after a woman in labour was turned away by eight hospitals.

A ninth hospital refused to admit her even after she miscarried in an ambulance and her baby died. …

The Captain also reminds us of the terrible treatment of Richard Jewell mentioned above in Ann Coulter’s piece.

Richard Jewell died yesterday at 44, the victim of diabetes and kidney failure. Richard Jewell’s public reputation died eleven years ago, the victim of a mistake by law enforcement and a media blitz that did its best to paint him as a psychopathic bomber with absolutely no evidence — when all Richard Jewell had done was save lives. …

Neal Boortz on the ag subsidies sent to people in New York.

Judging by the amount of people in Manhattan who receive agricultural subsidies you would think there would be hundreds of acres of farm land on the island. But as you’ve probably guessed, that isn’t the case.

But that doesn’t stop your tax dollars from providing these subsidies to Manhattanites who, judging by the fact that they can afford to live in Manhattan, don’t need a government subsidy to begin with. …

The Gainesville Sun (FL) with a good example of how useless statistics can be.

College students driving luxury cars down W. University Avenue may not seem impoverished, but they likely are being counted as part of Gainesville’s poverty rate, which is more than triple the national average, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures released Tuesday. …

 

… In 2005, the Alachua County Commission paid the Census Bureau to recalculate the poverty rate by excluding students. The report presented to county commissioners indicated that without students – 26,085 of whom met federal poverty guidelines – the poverty rate dropped from 22.8 percent to 13.9 percent. …

Wired.com with an important article on new oil fields in the Gulf of Mexico.

Even better, a recent discovery by Chevron has signaled that soon there may be vastly more oil gushing out of the ultradeep seabeds — more than even the optimists were predicting four years ago. In 2004, the company penetrated a 60 million-year-old geological stratum known as the “lower tertiary trend” containing a monster oil patch that holds between 3 billion and 15 billion barrels of crude. Dubbed Jack, the field lies beneath waters nearly twice as deep as those covering Tahiti, and many in the industry dismissed the discovery as too remote to exploit. But last September, Chevron used the Cajun Express to probe the Jack field, proving that petroleum could flow from the lower tertiary at hearty commercial rates — fast enough to bring billions of dollars of crude to market. It was hailed as the largest publicly reported discovery in the past decade, opening up a region that is perhaps big enough to boost national oil reserves by 50 percent. A mad rush followed, and oil companies plowed more than $5 billion into this part of the Gulf. …

 

… As consensus grows that the world needs to shift away from fossil fuels, extracting oil from the most extreme and costly locations can seem foolishly myopic. If Chevron is going to throw billions of dollars into something untested and possibly doomed to failure, wouldn’t it make more sense to invest in an inexhaustible, greener technology that’s going to have political support a decade from now?

Siegele doesn’t think so. He does know that geological limitations will prevent him from drilling much deeper: It’s a pretty safe bet that below 40,000 feet, the extreme heat has baked off much of the deep-sea troves of crude. And there are financial limits to this frontier, too. Even as Chevron and other oil giants earn record profits, they also face record expenses. For example, the company has commissioned two new deep water rigs that will be able to drill 40,000-foot wells. But at more than $600 million each, they can’t exactly be snapped up on boats.com. “The costs of developing a new oil or gas project are about 65 percent higher today than 30 months ago, and the greatest escalation of costs has been offshore,” says Daniel Yergin, chair of the consulting firm Cambridge Energy Research Associates. At today’s oil prices of $70 a barrel, the current exploration makes sense. But if oil drops below $40 a barrel, Yergin says, the cost of exploring this high-risk frontier will become prohibitive.

But Siegele is hardly worried. Technological breakthroughs have, decade after decade, revived the perpetually doomed oil industry. “Predicting peak oil,” Siegele tells me as we tour the drilling floor of the Cajun Express, “is almost like predicting peak technology” — an exercise, in other words, that to him seems inherently small-minded. Even absurd.

Siegele takes me to the “crown” of the Cajun Express, a harrowing widow’s walk suspended at the top of the drill’s 200-foot derrick. The rig below looks like the loneliest place on Earth — a tiny, solitary board floating in a boundless blue sea. Then, out in the distance, I spot fleets of trawlers the size of thumbnails setting off seismic guns in search of the next big deep-sea prospect. “A decade ago, I never even dreamed we’d get here,” Siegele marvels. “And a decade from now, this moonscape could be populated with rigs as far as the eye can see.”

Instapundit posts on the oil field.

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WSJ Editorial celebrates Sarkozy’s brand of French foreign policy. Not bad results from the moron in the White House.

Nicolas Sarkozy made headlines this week by telling his diplomatic corps that “an Iran with nuclear weapons is for me unacceptable.” But the French President did more in his speech than name the gravest current threat to global security, itself a feat of clear thinking. He also signaled that France means to be something more on the international scene than an anti-American nuisance player.

That’s worth applauding at a time when the conventional wisdom says the next U.S. President will have to burnish America’s supposedly tarnished reputation by making various policy amends. In Germany, under the conservative leadership of Angela Merkel, foreign policy views have been moving closer to the Bush Administration’s, not further away, while new British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has made clear he will not depart significantly from the pro-American course set by Tony Blair.

Michael Barone blogs on the unintended consequences of law school affirmative action. Mr. Barone is fair enough to include a ringing defense of the program by Walter Dellinger.

… I’ve long opposed racial preferences not because of the harm they do to those who are discriminated against (a nonblack student who loses a place at Harvard to a lower-scoring black will get admitted to a slightly less selective school and will probably do just fine) but because of the harm they do to the intended beneficiaries (creating a stigma of inferiority, which is just the thing that those of us who have long been against racial discrimination don’t want to see).

But I have to admit that some of these administrators may have worthier motives. I’m prompted to do so by a Slate piece by Walter Dellinger on the Supreme Court’s recent decision barring (or mostly barring) racial discrimination in public school assignment. …

John Stossel writes again about the rankings of the World Health Organization.

… So the verdict is in. The vaunted U.S. medical system is one of the worst.

But there’s less to these studies than meets the eye. They measure something other than quality of medical care. So saying that the U.S. finished behind those other countries is misleading.

First let’s acknowledge that the U.S. medical system has serious problems. But the problems stem from departures from free-market principles. The system is riddled with tax manipulation, costly insurance mandates and bureaucratic interference. Most important, six out of seven health-care dollars are spent by third parties, which means that most consumers exercise no cost-consciousness. As Milton Friedman always pointed out, no one spends other people’s money as carefully as he spends his own.

Even with all that, it strains credulity to hear that the U.S. ranks far from the top. Sick people come to the United States for treatment. When was the last time you heard of someone leaving this country to get medical care? …

The never-ending decline of America is the subject of this tongue-in-cheek article from Real Clear Politics. Never ending to the extent the country has been in decline for more than three hundred years. This is another long item.

… By the mid-eighteenth century, the University of Virginia’s James Ceaser has written, it was widely accepted in Europe that “due chiefly to atmospheric conditions, in particular excessive humidity, all living things in the Americas were not only inferior to those found in Europe but also in a condition of decline.” …

 

… Two generations later, the Civil War would decapitate the national government and deform the nation. As Jay Winik’s April 1865 (HarperCollins, 2001) reminds us, the war not only called into question almost a hundred years of independent self-government, but also embodied decline in its purest sense. Winik recounts savage episodes of murder, mayhem, guerilla warfare, terrorism, vigilantism, and state-sanctioned brutality on a par with anything we condemn today — innocent civilians rounded up and summarily executed; cities burned to the ground; entire counties depopulated; mutilations and beheadings; all manner of torture. After Lincoln’s murder, General Sherman openly feared America’s slipping into anarchy. …

 

… The U.S. failed to respond to the threats posed by the rise of power-projecting dictatorships in Europe and the Pacific — threats punctuated by Japan’s attack on the USS Panay in December 1937 and numerous German attacks in the Atlantic and the Red Sea. As if to underscore American weakness, President Franklin Roosevelt famously sent word to Hitler in 1938 that “the United States has no political involvements in Europe.” The German dictator got the message. Washington’s diplomatic deference and military meekness, says Gerhard Weinberg in A World At Arms (Cambridge, 1994), confirmed Hitler’s “assessment that this was a weak country, incapable, because of its racial mixture and feeble democratic government, of organizing and maintaining strong military forces.” …

 

… U.S. political power and prestige suffered yet another blow when Sputnik rocketed into orbit in 1957 and Moscow took the high ground in the space race. Senator Henry Jackson called it “a national week of shame and danger.” Senator Lyndon Johnson warned that “control of space means control of the world.”

Of course, the U.S. faced terrestrial problems as well. “The Soviet Union increasingly appeared to be a triumphal industrial giant,” Leebaert says. The New York Times, he notes, predicted that Soviet industrial output would exceed America’s by the end of the twentieth century, and the CIA surmised that the Soviet economy would be three times larger than America’s by 2000. “The overwhelming question,” Leebaert writes of the 1950s, “was whether an apparently soft, even hedonistic American consumer society had the stamina for a long, inconclusive contest with communism.” …

 

… To be sure, the U.S. faces challenges, competitors and threats that could erode its global position: China and India are ascending economically; the world abounds with asymmetrical threats that have the capacity to undermine the liberal order that Washington has sought to spread for generations; and Americans find themselves in the midst of yet another “great ideological conflict,” in the words of the president’s most recent security strategy document.

Today as in the past, U.S. primacy is neither inevitable nor a birthright. It is a burden that must be justified and shouldered anew by each generation in its own way. Even so, and notwithstanding Iraq, this is an unusual moment to diagnose the United States as a nation in decline. Just as the past is littered with unfulfilled predictions by the declinists, the present is teeming with evidence of unprecedented U.S. power.

From peace-keeping to war-fighting, deterrence to disaster relief, it is the U.S. military that the world turns to when in need. Johns Hopkins professor Fouad Ajami has noted, “The world rails against the United States, yet embraces its protection, its gossip and its hipness.”12 Especially its protection: More than half the globe enjoys overt defense and security treaties with the United States. The U.S. military is the last (and first) line of defense for most of the rest.

Of course, the U.S. military does more than protect and defend: In the span of about 23 months, it overthrew two enemy regimes located on the other side of the planet and replaced them with popularly supported governments. Even as American forces deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, they kept watch on the Korean peninsula and kept the sea-lanes open for the oil and goods that feed a truly global economy; did the dirty work of counterterrorism from Tora Bora to Timbuktu; and responded to disasters of biblical proportion in places as disparate as Louisiana and Sumatra.

This does not seem to be the handiwork of a faltering empire. Indeed, no other military could attempt such a feat of global multitasking. “The British empire,” writes Niall Ferguson in Colossus (Allen Lane, 2004), “never enjoyed this kind of military lead over the competition . . . [and] never dominated the full spectrum of military capabilities the way the United States does today.” …

Dilbert blogs on the Chinese coal miners who survived underground for six days. If this catches you in the right mood, you will laugh until it hurts.

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Paul Greenberg is glad George Bush is not as smart as the NY Times.

What’s wrong with George W. Bush? Doesn’t he know America has already been defeated in Iraq? Doesn’t he realize that as a lame-duck president he’s just conducting a holding operation? Doesn’t the man keep up with the opinion polls? Hasn’t he noticed the growing tide — the tidal wave, really — of anti-war sentiment? Shouldn’t it have dawned on him even in his snug presidential cocoon that, at this low point in his presidency, there’s no hope he’ll regain the country’s confidence? Doesn’t he read The New York Times? Doesn’t he listen to NPR? …

… Those who believe we can simply pack up and leave Iraq, perhaps declaring peace with honor as Richard Nixon did in Vietnam, may reap much the same result that president did: defeat with dishonor. This president warned that the carnage and suffering that followed America’s defeat in Vietnam might be duplicated on an even larger and more disastrous scale if the United States gave up in Iraq.

Even if this country could withdraw its forces from Iraq at once (a logistical impossibility) the threat from al-Qaida and its various allies would not cease. Indeed, it would be intensified, for Osama bin Laden and far-flung company could again use a failed state as a base of operations, as they once did Afghanistan. The result: Terrorism would be even more of a clear and present danger to our security.

Al-Qaida, and its associates and sympathizers throughout the Islamic world and beyond, understand very well what is at stake in Iraq and Afghanistan — and what a glorious opportunity an American defeat there would give them. Do we?

As the president noted Wednesday in Kansas City, we aren’t engaged today in what one expert called a clash of civilizations; it’s a struggle for civilization.

Evan Thomas in Newsweek with a long (7,000 words) article on the search for bin Laden. It is rare to devote such length (a normal column is 750 words) to one item in Pickings. However, a lot of ordinary people left for work on Sept. 11th and never returned home because of this man. We do this to keep faith with those who rode those buildings and planes to the ground. We look forward to Osama’s dirt nap.

The Americans were getting close. It was early in the winter of 2004-05, and Osama bin Laden and his entourage were holed up in a mountain hideaway along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Suddenly, a sentry, posted several kilometers away, spotted a patrol of U.S. soldiers who seemed to be heading straight for bin Laden’s redoubt. The sentry radioed an alert, and word quickly passed among the Qaeda leader’s 40-odd bodyguards to prepare to remove “the Sheik,” as bin Laden is known to his followers, to a fallback position. As Sheik Said, a senior Egyptian Qaeda operative, later told the story, the anxiety level was so high that the bodyguards were close to using the code word to kill bin Laden and commit suicide. …

 

… And so it has gone for six years. …

 

… In Pakistan, President Musharraf was wary of his American allies in the War on Terror. In 2002, he told a high-ranking British official: “My great concern is that one day the United States is going to desert me. They always desert their friends.” According to this official, who declined to be identified sharing a confidence, Musharraf cited the U.S. pullouts from Vietnam in the 1970s, Lebanon in the 1980s and Somalia in the 1990s. Still, he quickly gave the Americans considerable leeway to operate inside Pakistan. He did not demand prior approval of Predator attacks, and he allowed “hot pursuit” for American forces five kilometers or more inside the border. (With a grim laugh, one U.S. officer interviewed by NEWSWEEK recalled watching on Predator video as insurgents fled across the border and stopped on what they thought was safe terrain—until a U.S. Special Ops helo reared up and blasted them.) Musharraf told the Americans he understood that they would do what they had to do to attack high-value targets, although he indicated the Pakistanis might have to issue pro forma denunciations. His one request, said a U.S. official who dealt directly with the Pakistani leader, was that bin Laden not be captured alive and be brought to trial in Pakistan. …

 

… The American military, understandably, puts a high priority on “force protection,” but as a practical matter that means staying behind armor and barricades. Rice, the A-Team sergeant stuck in his safe house near Kandahar, recalls that his team’s frustration peaked when a memo came down from the brass at Baghram, ordering men not to initiate fire fights and even not to use words like “death” and “destruction” in their CONOPS. Among Rice’s men, it became known as the “limp dick memo.” (The Defense Department declined to comment specifically on Rice’s memories.)

The American military is forever caught in a dilemma. During the early days of the cold war, the old boys who ran the CIA began to reason that when it came to fighting against an underhanded foe in a battle for global survival, the rules of fair play they had learned as schoolboys no longer applied. If the communists fight dirty, we must, too, they rationalized—or freedom would perish. This ends-justifying-the-means rationale led to foolish and ultimately unsuccessful assassination plots and other dirty tricks that disgraced and demoralized the CIA when the agency’s so-called Crown Jewels were revealed during Watergate. After 9/11, Bush administration officials, particularly Vice President Cheney, vowed to take the gloves off against Al Qaeda. But in the aftermath of allegations of torture in secret prisons, there has been a strong push back, particularly among administration lawyers disturbed by the abuse of constitutional rights. According to knowledgeable sources, Rumsfeld’s deputy for intelligence, Steve Cambone, engaged in an angry debate with the Pentagon’s top lawyer, William Haynes, over the activities of U.S. Special Forces—who in the minds of some government lawyers and lawmakers have been given too much, not too little, license to roam. …

Bret Stephens was in the WSJ with a grown-ups view of climate change.

The recent discovery by a retired businessman and climate kibitzer named Stephen McIntyre that 1934–and not 1998 or 2006–was the hottest year on record in the U.S. could not have been better timed. August is the month when temperatures are high and the news cycle is slow, leading, inevitably, to profound meditations on global warming. Newsweek performed its journalistic duty two weeks ago with an exposé on what it calls the global warming “denial machine.” I hereby perform mine with a denier’s confession

I confess: I am prepared to acknowledge that Mr. McIntyre’s discovery amounts to what a New York Times reporter calls a “statistically meaningless” rearrangement of data. …

… I confess: Though it may surprise those who use the term “denier” so as to put me on a moral plane with Holocaust deniers, I have children for whom I would not wish an environmental apocalypse.

Yet neither do I wish the civilizational bounties built up over two centuries by an industrial, inventive, adaptive, globalized and energy-hungry society to be squandered chasing comparatively small environmental benefits at gigantic economic costs. One needn’t deny global warming as a problem to deny it as the only or greatest problem. The great virtue of Mr. Lomborg’s book is its insistence on trying to measure the good done per dollar spent. Do we save a few lives, at huge cost, as a byproduct of curbing global warming? Or do we save many, for less, by acting on problems directly?

Some might argue it is immoral to think this way. Maybe they are the ones living in denial.

See what 92 years of smoking can do for you.