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Bureaucrats at the Dept. of State continue to try to frustrate the Bush aims in Iraq. NY Post OpEd shows how they do this stiffing Iraqi’s who have helped our forces.

AS a Marine, I was taught never to leave a comrade-in-arms behind on the battlefield. But that’s exactly what the State Department is doing to men and women who’ve sacrificed everything to help our troops – our Iraqi interpreters.

When I last left Iraq 12 months ago, I promised to save two “terps” marked for assassination. Last month, I received a desperate e-mail from one of them: “Sir my situatione is so bad naw please save my life. Please help me sir.”

A year after making my promise, I’m deeply ashamed that I haven’t completed the mission. And I’m not alone: To help “their” terps, Marines and soldiers across the country are battling a bureaucracy that is at times more maddening than the Iraqi insurgency.

Shunning those who risk death to help us deliver freedom is un-American. …

Jeff Greenfield says the Dem race is easy to understand. Bugs Bunny always wins.

How did we reach the point at which Sen. Clinton, the clear Democratic front-runner six months ago, needs clear wins in Texas and Ohio to mute the calls for her to end her campaign?

There’s no unified field theory that answers this question: You can give more or less weight to Obama’s political magnetism, the tactical and strategic miscalculations of the Clinton campaign, the delegate-allocation rules that weakened the punch of Clinton’s big-state wins, the crucial difficulty of a former first lady who embodies Restoration competing in an election in which change is the watchword. And here’s another explanation for this remarkable reversal of fortune, one that represents for me one of the few really reliable rules of presidential political warfare: Bugs Bunny always beats Daffy Duck. …

Byron York reviews Obama’s NAFTAGate problems.

For the last several months, the tone of the Democratic presidential debate on the issue of trade has worried government officials in Canada and Mexico. Would a President Barack Obama or a President Hillary Clinton actually pull the U.S. out of the North American Free Trade Agreement? It’s a nightmare scenario in Ottawa and Mexico City — not to mention Washington — and Canadian and Mexican officials have tried as best they can to gauge just how sincere the criticisms of NAFTA coming from Obama and Clinton really are.

Those criticisms have been particularly intense in the run-up to today’s primary in economically struggling Ohio. At last week’s debate in Cleveland, Obama and Clinton dueled to see who could be more anti-NAFTA; Obama won, at least rhetorically, by promising to “use the hammer of a potential opt-out as leverage” to renegotiate NAFTA on his own terms.

Did he mean it? Or was he just telling steelworkers in Ohio what they wanted to hear? That is the question behind the first real scandal of the Obama campaign. And while the campaign has made several statements on the issue, there are growing indications that officials there are not telling the whole story. …

Dana Milbank nicely captures the mood just before Tuesday’s voting.

It took many months and the mockery of “Saturday Night Live” to make it happen, but the lumbering beast that is the press corps finally roused itself from its slumber Monday and greeted Barack Obama with a menacing growl.

The day before primaries in Ohio and Texas that could effectively seal the Democratic presidential nomination for him, a smiling Obama strode out to a news conference at a veterans facility here. But the grin was quickly replaced by the surprised look of a man bitten by his own dog.

Reporters from the Associated Press and Reuters went after him for his false denial that a campaign aide had held a secret meeting with Canadian officials over Obama’s trade policy. A trio of Chicago reporters pummeled him with questions about the corruption trial this week of a friend and supporter. The New York Post piled on with a question about him losing the Jewish vote.

Obama responded with the classic phrases of a politician in trouble. “That was the information that I had at the time. . . . Those charges are completely unrelated to me. . . . I have said that that was a mistake. . . . The fact pattern remains unchanged.”

When those failed, Obama tried another approach. “We’re running late,” the candidate said, and then he disappeared behind a curtain. …

More of the mood of the day, with Corner posts from some of our favorites. Jonah Goldberg felt the need to explain his description of Mark Steyn as a “weird cat.”

… As for me calling Steyn a “weird cat” I hope Mark understands I meant it in the best possible way. But a guy with an accent that is part James Bond villain, part Thurston Howell III and Part William F. Buckley, who dresses like Beau Brummel except when he’s in his New Hampshire lair — where he dresses like one of the Darryls from the Newhart show — who seems like an immortal from the Highlander series in that he’s been everywhere and met everyone over the last three centuries and yet always looks like he’s 34, and who seems to know everything about everything when he’s writing for every English language publication in Christendom is, in my book, something of a weird cat. Would that I could be remotely as weird as he.

Power Line posts on yesterday’s vote.

The Captain, now at Hot Air posts on the results.

… Her triumph last night had little to do with numbers and everything to do with appearances, however. Obama has begun looking invincible, but Hillary managed to stop him, even after she slid out of the lead in Texas. Thanks to the twin gifts of the Rezko trial and the NAFTA dance, Obama not only started facing a few tough questions from the media, he blew up when they asked them of him. Hillary went negative to keep the pressure on him, and Obama displayed a glass jaw.

That will have the superdelegates — the party establishment — wondering whether Obama is ready for prime time. And now that question will occur not in the context of an overwhelming, unstoppable movement, but in the context of Hillary victories that indicate the party wants this race to continue. Hillary’s team will sell this as a vote of non-confidence; Texas and Ohio had the opportunity to climb on the Obama bandwagon and rejected it. …

John Stossel says of course we have influence peddling.

… “Good government” types rightly abhor this influence-peddling, but they propose pointless reforms like bans on lobbyist-sponsored gifts, junkets and rides on corporate jets. They also back a vicious assault on free speech: campaign-finance restrictions designed to reduce the influence of lobbyists in political campaigns. Despite all these “reforms,” influence-peddling goes on.

For good reason. None of the reforms gets near root of the problem.

The root is government power. When government is free to meddle in every corner of our lives and regulate the economy through taxes, regulation and subsidies, then “special interests” have every incentive to work on the politicians to preserve their turf or gain an advantage.

A tax, regulation or subsidy can make the difference between an industry’s success and failure. If the government were not giving preferential tax treatment to ethanol, the corn farmers and ethanol processors would have to find something else to do because their product can’t compete against regular gasoline on a level playing field.

In a real free market, a company succeeds only by making things consumers want to buy and keeping costs low enough that the market price yields a profit. Sadly, in our mixed economy, success can be achieved another way: by lobbying the government for advantages over one’s competitors. The prospect of favorable government intervention creates incentives for producers and their lobbyists to strive to satisfy legislators and bureaucrats instead of consumers. The resulting competition for privileges sets the stage for the improper relationships that reformers fret about. …

NY Sun editors note more Pinch Sulzberger hypocrisy

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Abby and Stephen Thernstrom, authors of America in Black and White, point out one of the blessings of this campaign. They claim Obama’s success shows we have made great strides in our country. Their book is filled with illustrative stories like a rural Georgia county, which at the advent of the automobile, discussed the desirability of having two, separate (but presumably equal) road systems.

One of the most notable — yet unremarked-on — lessons of this year’s Democratic presidential nominating contest is the demolition of the long-held belief that whites simply won’t vote for black candidates for higher office. Before the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 3, who could have predicted the remarkable outpouring of white support for Sen. Barack Obama?

As recently as 2006, when Congress held hearings on the renewal of the expiring parts of the Voting Rights Act, civil rights advocates delivered a united message, echoed by the House Judiciary Committee. “It is rare that white voters will cross over to elect minority preferred candidates,” the committee’s report concluded — a statement from which there was no congressional dissent.

The 43 members of the Congressional Black Caucus, it seemed, were living proof of this. Overwhelmingly, they had been elected in “majority-minority” districts drawn specifically for African American candidates; only a handful had been elected in districts in which most voters were not black or some combination of black and Latino.

So it’s not surprising that, as the 2008 prePDFsidential race got underway, many observers — white and African American alike — thought Obama’s chances of winning the Democratic nomination were very poor. …

… After nearly two dozen primaries, we now know beyond dispute that the pessimists were wrong. Obama won the majority of white votes in Virginia, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Illinois and Utah, and he received extremely high vote totals among whites in the other states he’s run in as well. …

Alan Dershowitz points out our problems confronting enemies who wish to die.

Zahra Maladan is an educated woman who edits a women’s magazine in Lebanon. She is also a mother, who undoubtedly loves her son. She has ambitions for him, but they are different from those of most mothers in the West. She wants her son to become a suicide bomber.

At the recent funeral for the assassinated Hezbollah terrorist Imad Moughnaya — the mass murderer responsible for killing 241 marines in 1983 and more than 100 women, children and men in Buenos Aires in 1992 and 1994 — Ms. Maladan was quoted in the New York Times giving the following warning to her son: “if you’re not going to follow the steps of the Islamic resistance martyrs, then I don’t want you.”

Zahra Maladan represents a dramatic shift in the way we must fight to protect our citizens against enemies who are sworn to kill them by killing themselves. …

John Fund says some of the vanity prez candidates are facing tough primaries.

Congressmen Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich had a great time running for president over the past year, allowing both men to showcase their non-mainstream views in a slew of nationally-televised debates. But now both are haunted by the political ghost of former GOP Congressman Bob Dornan, who similarly enjoyed his 1996 run for president, then found he had alienated the folks back home by neglecting his day job. He failed to be reelected to Congress.

Both Messrs. Paul and Kucinich face serious primary opponents tomorrow. Mr. Paul appears to have the easier time. …

Thomas Sowell on how the “rust-belt” drove away jobs.

It is fascinating watching politicians say how they are going to rescue the “rust belt” regions where jobs are disappearing and companies are either shutting down or moving elsewhere. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is being blamed for the jobs going elsewhere. Barack Obama blames the Clinton administration for NAFTA, and that includes Hillary Clinton. Senator Obama says that he is for free trade, provided it is “fair trade.” That is election year rhetoric at its cleverest.

Since “fair” is one of those words that can mean virtually anything to anybody, what this amounts to is that politicians can pile on whatever restrictions they want, in the name of fairness, and still claim to be for “free trade.” Clever. We will all have to pay a cost for political restrictions and political cleverness, since there is no free lunch. In fact, free lunches are a big part of the reason for once-prosperous regions declining into rust belts. …

Charles Krauthammer defends lobbyists.

… To hear the candidates in this presidential campaign, you’d think lobbying is just one notch below waterboarding, a black art practiced by the great malefactors of wealth to keep the middle class in a vise and loose upon the nation every manner of scourge: oil dependency, greenhouse gases, unpayable mortgages and those tiny entrees you get at French restaurants.

Lobbying is constitutionally protected, but that doesn’t mean we have to like it all. Let’s agree to frown upon bad lobbying, such as getting a tax break for a particular industry. Let’s agree to welcome good lobbying — the actual redress of a legitimate grievance — such as protecting your home from being turned to dust to make way for some urban development project.

There is a defense of even bad lobbying. It goes like this: You wouldn’t need to be seeking advantage if the federal government had not appropriated for itself in the 20th century all kinds of powers, regulations, intrusions and manipulations (often through the tax code) that had never been presumed in the 19th century and certainly were never imagined by the Founders. What appears to be rent-seeking is thus redress of a larger grievance — insufferable government meddling in what had traditionally been considered an area of free enterprise. …

Regular Pickings readers know Pickerhead is a sucker for studies of animals that are social predators like humans. NY Times reports on folks studying hyenas.

… Brain imaging studies have revealed that when people think about other people, parts of the frontal cortex become active. Advocates of the social brain hypothesis say the frontal cortex expanded in our ancestors because natural selection favored social intelligence.

Most of the research on the social brain hypothesis has focused on primates. One reason for that bias, Dr. Holekamp said, is many scientists thought that no other animals were worth studying. “Primatologists have argued for years,” she said, “that primates are unique in terms of the complexity of their social lives.”

From her experience with hyenas, Dr. Holekamp had her doubts. So she began to run experiments on spotted hyenas similar to the ones run on primates. She would play recordings of hyenas, for example, to see if other hyenas recognized them individually. They did. She soon came to see the primates-only view of the social brain as deeply flawed.

“I would argue that’s not true at all: spotted hyenas live in a society just as large and just as complex as a baboon,” Dr. Holekamp said, noting that spotted hyenas live in the largest social groups of any carnivore. “We’re talking about 60 to 80 individuals who all know each other individually.” …

Burlington, VT TV station says winter carnival activities cancelled because there’s too much snow. Where’s Owl Gore? Did anybody tell him?

OK, what is the protocol for waking the prez at 3 am? Slate has the answers.

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Pickerhead with his favorite Buckley story.

Bill Kristol with his Buckley send off.

Here’s one measure of the man and the scope of his achievement: No serious historian will be able to write about 20th-century America without discussing Bill Buckley. Before Buckley, there was no conservative movement. After Buckley, there was Ronald Reagan. Reagan was the most important American political figure of the latter half of the 20th century. No one was more central to his emergence and success than Bill Buckley.

It was not just a happy coincidence that Buckley, in the course of promoting conservatism, also helped his country. It’s true that he saw in conservatism a set of doctrines that transcended any one nation, or any one time, and that approached the status of political, even metaphysical, truths. But Buckley wasn’t embarrassed to view his conservatism as being in the service of his patriotism, and to see in the conservative movement a means of defending our country and of defending freedom. Indeed, because of the debilities of postwar liberalism, conservatism had to take as its task the defense of Western civilization itself. And so it did.

A few years ago, Charles Kesler called attention in these pages to Buckley’s explanation of the “basic assumption” behind his bestselling Blackford Oakes spy novels:

that the survival of everything we cherish depends on the survival of the culture of liberty; and that this hangs on our willingness to defend this extraordinary country of ours, so awfully mixed up, so much of the time; so schizophrenic in its understanding of itself and its purposes; so crazily indulgent of its legion of wildly ungovernable miscreants–to defend it at all costs. With it all, this idealistic republic is the finest bloom of nationhood in all recorded time, and save only that God may decide that the land of the free and the home of the brave has outrun its license on history, we Americans must contend, struggle, and if necessary fight for America’s survival. …

Christopher Hitchens.

“At his desk,” wrote Christopher Buckley in his email to friends, “in Stanford this morning.” Well, one had somehow known that it would have to be at his desk. The late William F. Buckley Jr. was a man of incessant labor and productivity, with a slight allowance made for that saving capacity for making it appear easy. But he was driven, all right, and restless, and never allowed himself much ease on his own account. There was never a moment, after taping some session at Firing Line, where mere recourse to some local joint was in prospect. He was always just about to be late for the next plane, or column, or speech, or debate. Except that he never was late, until last Wednesday.

Ahh, Firing Line! If I leave a TV studio these days with what Diderot termed l’esprit de l’escalier, I don’t always blame myself. If I wish that I had remembered to make a telling point, or wish that I had phrased something better than I actually did, it’s very often because a “break” was just coming up, or the “segment” had been shortened at the last minute, or because the host was obnoxious, or because the panel had been over-booked in case of cancellations but at the last minute every egomaniac invited had managed to say “yes” and make himself available. But on Buckley’s imperishable show, if you failed to make your best case it was your own damn fault. Once the signature Bach chords had died away, and once he’d opened with that curiously seductive intro (“I should like to begin .  .  . “), you were given every opportunity to develop and pursue your argument. And if you misspoke or said anything fatuous, it was unlikely to escape comment. In my leftist days, if I knew I was going on the box with Buckley, I would make sure to do some homework (and attempt to emulate him by trying to make sure it didn’t show). …

Mark Steyn says you’ll be sorry you were wondering what’s going on with Canada’s Human Rights Commissions.

What does Maclean’s have in common with a labiaplasty and blood-drinking space lizards from the star system Alpha Draconis?

Well, they’re all part of the wacky world of Canadian “human rights.”

First things first: what is a labiaplasty? Well, it’s a cosmetic procedure performed on the female genitalia for those who are dissatisfied with them. I think I speak for many sad male losers living on ever more distant memories when I say that I find it hard to imagine being dissatisfied with female genita . . .

What’s that? Oh, it’s the women who are dissatisfied are they? Ah, right. Well, there’s the rub. The Ontario Human Rights Commission is currently weighing whether or not to become the (at last count) third “human rights” commission in Canada to prosecute Maclean’s for the crime of running an excerpt from my book. The Globe And Mail’s Margaret Wente was interested to know what Canada’s vast “human rights” machinery does when it isn’t sticking it to privately owned magazines, so she swung by the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal to check out the action. And it seems the reason they haven’t yet dragged Maclean’s into court is because they’re tied up hearing the case of two women who claim they were denied their human right to a labiaplasty by a Toronto plastic surgeon who specializes in that particular area. The women proved to be post-operative transsexuals who were unhappy with some of the aesthetic results of their transformation, and Dr. Stubbs declined to perform the procedure on the grounds that he usually operates on biological females and is generally up to speed on what goes where and, when it comes to transsexuals, he had no idea what he was, so to speak, getting into. Had he done it and it had all gone horribly wrong, the plaintiffs would have sued his pants off. So, as a private practitioner, he chose to decline the business, and as a result now finds himself in Human Rights Commission hell. …

Power Line notes Wesley Clark’s latest.

John Fund details some of Obama’s heritage in Chicago politics.

On Tuesday, Barack Obama may well wrap up the Democratic nomination. Yet how he rose so quickly in Chicago’s famously suspect politics — and who his associates were there — has received little scrutiny.

That may change today as the trial of Antoin “Tony” Rezko, Mr. Obama’s friend of two decades and his campaign fund-raiser, gets under way in federal court in Chicago. Mr. Rezko, a master fixer in Illinois politics, is charged with money laundering, attempted extortion, fraud and aiding bribery in an alleged multimillion dollar scheme shaking down companies seeking state contracts.

John McCain’s dealings with lobbyists have properly come under a microscope; why not Mr. Obama’s? Partly, says Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass, because the national media establishment has decided that Chicago’s grubby politics interferes with the story line of hope they’ve set out for Mr. Obama. Former Washington Post reporter Tom Edsall, who now teaches journalism at Columbia University, told Canada’s Globe & Mail that “reporters have sometimes allowed themselves to get too much caught up in [Obama] excitement.” Then there are Chicago Republicans, loath to encourage the national party to pounce because some of their own leaders are caught in the Rezko mess.

For its part, the Democratic Party may once again nominate a first-time candidate they haven’t fully vetted politically. Democrats flocked to Michael Dukakis in 1988, ignoring Al Gore’s warnings about Willie Horton; later they were blindsided by revelations about Bill Clinton after he was elected president. …

David Ignatius points out Obama’s thin résumé.

Hillary Clinton has been trying to make a point about Barack Obama that deserves one last careful look before Tuesday’s probably decisive Democratic primaries: If Obama truly intends to unite America across party lines and break the Washington logjam, then why has he shown so little interest or aptitude for the hard work of bipartisan government?

This is the real “Where’s the beef?” about Obama, and it still doesn’t have a good answer. He gives a great speech, and he promises that he can heal the terrible partisan divisions that have enfeebled American politics over the past decade. This is a message of hope that the country clearly wants to hear.

But can he do it? The record is mixed, but it’s fair to say that Obama has not shown much willingness to take risks or make enemies to try to restore a working center in Washington. Clinton, for all her reputation as a divisive figure, has a much stronger record of bipartisan achievement. And the likely Republican nominee, John McCain, has a better record still. …

Sun-Times reporter Lynn Sweet asks when Obama’s going to answer Rezko questions.

… Obama has never agreed to an interview about Rezko with the reporters from the Chicago papers who know the story the best, and it has not been for lack of trying. My Sun-Times colleagues who are investigating Rezko have pressed for a chance to talk to Obama about Rezko.

At issue is trying to put together the whole story about Obama and Rezko — all of which speaks to Obama’s judgment, his main selling point as he seeks the presidency and seems positioned to win the Democratic nomination.

The Obama campaign’s response to the conference call was to put out a statement reminding people that Clinton did not release her tax returns and Obama did, and that her first lady records are still under wraps. After I asked if that diversionary tactic was their response, I was given a sheet with excerpts of news stories that concluded Obama has done nothing wrong. …

Melanie Phillips says the world has been saved from global warming.

The Economist on what forensic experts can now learn from hair.

Ever wonder about the sacrifices made by university administrators? University Business.com has answers.

A comprehensive spending review, conducted by Vanderbilt University (Tenn.) and the media, revealed some interesting facts: renowned Chancellor Gordon Gee, 62, earns close to $1.4 million annually; he has spent as much as $700,000 more on parties and a personal chef at his university mansion; the aforementioned mansion, Braeburn, has been renovated to the tune of $6 million since he was hired in 2000; …

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Awesome picture of Buckley and Reagan.

Obituary writing is an art form in England. The Times shows how with this for Buckley.

… America lacked any journal of right-wing opinion, comparable to The Nation and The New Republic on the left. In 1955 was launched National Review, a weekly — afterwards fortnightly — magazine of political comment and opinion, with arts and review sections, rather like The Spectator or Time and Tide, to be both a platform and a debating ground for sophisticated conservatives.

Although only a third of the money came from family sources, it was agreed that Buckley should have absolute control of the voting shares, a provision allowing him to prevent the ideological schisms which had destroyed similar journals in the past. Rallying to this new masthead came such theoreticians of the Right as Russell Kirk, Frank S. Meyer, Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham. They shared a strong anti-communism — several of them had once been communists themselves — but in their domestic policy they formed two recognisably distinct, and to some extent incompatible, schools. On one hand were the traditionalists, whose Burkean doctrine emphasised continuity, order and Christian morals. On the other were libertarians who believed in a minimum of state interference and control.

These schools complemented each other but could never quite merge. As a group American conservatives were formulating their position almost from scratch. Despite some indigenous elements (a strict interpretation of the Constitution, for example), there was no historic party line for them to follow, so they drew heavily on British and European ideas. Their economics, derived from such Austrian liberals (very different from American liberals) as Hayek and von Mises, had much in common with what would afterwards be called “Thatcherism” in Britain.

Buckley himself was neither the best writer nor the most original thinker, but he conducted the group brilliantly. In ferocious clashes he separated National Review conservatism from two, at that time influential, factions — the “objectivists”, led by Ayn Rand who preached a doctrine of atheistic selfishness, and the John Birch Society, led by Robert Welch, which was obsessed by the notion of communist conspiracy. Ayn Rand would never afterwards stay in a room with Buckley, and the John Birchers bombarded National Review with hate mail.

The liberal establishment had responded to the appearance of National Review with a degree of venom which seems incredible now. Buckley was compared to Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and the Ku Klux Klan. As he wrote in an early issue of the magazine: “Liberals do a great deal of talking about hearing other points of view, but it sometimes shocks them to learn that there are other points of view.” However, as he became fashionable, he became acceptable, the pet conservative of highbrow liberals, on friendly terms with such as John Kenneth Galbraith and Norman Mailer. …

Good Corner post on WFB.

David Brooks with his memoir.

When I was in college, William F. Buckley Jr. wrote a book called “Overdrive” in which he described his glamorous lifestyle. Since I was young and a smart-aleck, I wrote a parody of it for the school paper.

“Buckley spent most of his infancy working on his memoirs,” I wrote in my faux-biography. “By the time he had learned to talk, he had finished three volumes: ‘The World Before Buckley,’ which traced the history of the world prior to his conception; ‘The Seeds of Utopia,’ which outlined his effect on world events during the nine months of his gestation; and ‘The Glorious Dawn,’ which described the profound ramifications of his birth on the social order.”

The piece went on in this way. I noted that his ability to turn water into wine added to his popularity at prep school. I described his college memoirs: “God and Me at Yale,” “God and Me at Home” and “God and Me at the Movies.” I recounted that after college he had founded two magazines, one called The National Buckley and the other called The Buckley Review, which merged to form The Buckley Buckley.

I wrote that his hobbies included extended bouts of name-dropping and going into rooms to make everyone else feel inferior.

Buckley came to the University of Chicago, delivered a lecture and said: “David Brooks, if you’re in the audience, I’d like to offer you a job.”

That was the big break of my professional life. A few years later, I went to National Review and joined the hundreds of others who have been Buckley protégés. …

Roger Simon wants to make sure we don’t miss Power Line’s smackdown of CBS lies.

Here’s the Power Line post. It examines last week’s 60 minutes segment retailing one Jill Simpson who claims she was performing opposition research for Karl Rove with the intent to destroy Alabama’s Dem governor.

… Jill Simpson is a sad case, but she’s not the only one. The world is full of mildly deranged people who are convinced that they alone have stumbled onto the great conspiracy of their time, or that they themselves have played a key role in events, unaccountably unacknowledged by anyone else. There once was a time when journalists tried, at least, to avoid being led down blind alleys by such sad cases.

What is surprising is not that Jill Simpson exists, but that CBS chose to put her forward on 60 Minutes as a credible witness, without disclosing the many facts that would have enabled the network’s viewers to draw their own conclusions about Simpson’s story. It seems fair to wonder whether, at some level, the people who run CBS and 60 Minutes are as deranged as Jill Simpson when it comes to Karl Rove and the Republican Party.

Let’s turn our attention to the campaign. Gerard Baker of the Times continues explaining the race to his readers in the old country.

… It’s hard to escape the feeling that all this excitement is going to be repaid in the devalued currency of disappointment. Mr Obama’s ego is certainly writing cheques his body can’t cash. There’s an expectation that a President Obama will change everything in America’s relations with the world. But my guess is that, for all his campaign rhetoric and for all his genuine intent, the facts on the ground won’t change much. …

… The problem is that there’s a danger that the presidential contest between Mr Obama and Mr McCain will become not a debate but a silly battle of conflicting icons. You can be sure that, in the eyes of the rest of the world, and much of America, if Mr McCain wins it will be not because of his superior experience or the quality of his ideas, but because America is irredeemably racist.

Instead of being the welcome break with America’s recent past that he truly is, he will be painted as a continuation of it. Worse, than that, he will have won by vanquishing Hope and Peace. He will be for ever The Man Who Shot Bambi.

The Economist still has Obama reservations.

… The sad thing is that one might reasonably have expected better from Mr Obama. He wants to improve America’s international reputation yet campaigns against NAFTA. He trumpets “the audacity of hope” yet proposes more government intervention. He might have chosen to use his silver tongue to address America’s problems in imaginative ways—for example, by making the case for reforming the distorting tax code. Instead, he wants to throw money at social problems and slap more taxes on the rich, and he is using his oratorical powers to prey on people’s fears.

Mr Obama advertises himself as something fresh, hopeful and new. But on economic matters at least he, like Mrs Clinton, has begun to look a rather ordinary old-style Democrat.

WaPo editors look askance at Obama and Clinton’s NAFTA talk.

… Whole U.S. industries have grown up to take advantage of NAFTA. Meanwhile, none of the U.S. jobs that left for Mexico would come back; they’d simply go to China, India or elsewhere.

The Democratic candidates understand that trade with the developing world has both costs and benefits, which are not evenly distributed across the United States. Two days before this week’s debate, Mr. Obama said, “I don’t think it’s realistic for us to repeal NAFTA,” because that “would actually result in more job loss . . . than job gains.” Ms. Clinton awkwardly pleaded that NAFTA has benefited some parts of the country — such as Texas. Yet the urge to win Ohio trumped, and both Democrats made a threat that, if taken seriously, can be described only as reckless. In other words, we have to hope that they were only pandering.

American Thinker tips a hat to Angelina Jolie.

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We’ll devote a lot of our time to Bill Buckley. National Review editors first.

… When Buckley started National Review — in 1955, at the age of 29 — it was not at all obvious that anti-Communists, traditionalists, constitutionalists, and enthusiasts for free markets would all be able to take shelter under the same tent. Nor was it obvious that all of these groups, even gathered together, would be able to prevail over what seemed at the time to be an inexorable collectivist tide. When Buckley wrote that the magazine would “stand athwart history yelling, ‘Stop!’” his point was to challenge the idea that history, with a capital H, pointed left. Mounting that challenge was the first step toward changing history’s direction. Which would come in due course. …

John Fund.

William F. Buckley Jr. struggled with the pain and inconvenience of emphysema for years, but it was only when he broke a bone in his right hand — the hand he wrote with — earlier this month that the physical decline of a man who very much lived by words quickly accelerated. He sent out a note to a few close friends essentially saying that he knew the end was near.

That end came at the desk in his study yesterday morning, perhaps as Buckley was struggling to put the finishing touches on his latest project — a book on the president he helped bring to office that he planned to call “The Reagan I Knew.” That project was far enough along that it will no doubt be published posthumously. …

WSJ with a bunch of good quotes.

John Podhoretz.

Mark Steyn Corner post.

Hugh Hewitt.

Let’s cover some other items with the Captain. First, he posts on the NY Times smear and how it might have backfired.

The New York Times marks another milestone on its journey to National Enquirer status. The Gray Lady’s smear piece on John McCain got 66% of Rasmussen respondents believing that the paper deliberately trying to kneecap the Republican frontrunner. Only 22% think that the paper had clean motives in publishing the unsubstantiated gossip: …

Then the Times has decided to raise another McCain issue. This time whether he can run for president.

The staff at the New York Times has burned the midnight oil trying to find ways to derail John McCain’s campaign. After endorsing him in the primary, the paper then ran an unsubstantiated smear against him as a philanderer. Now they ask whether he is eligible for the office, given his birth in the Panama Canal zone while his father served the country: …

The Captain has also discovered Obama tipped the Canadians to his NAFTA bashing saying he wasn’t serious. Wink, wink. “It’s just for the rubes.”

Barack Obama has joined Hillary Clinton in trashing one of her husband’s major economic and diplomatic achievements on the stump. He has told Americans that he rejects NAFTA, the program that created a free-trade zone out of North America, hoping to ride protectionist fever to the White House. However, the man who runs as a different kind of politician has a different kind of message to Canadians about NAFTA:

Barack Obama has ratcheted up his attacks on NAFTA, but a senior member of his campaign team told a Canadian official not to take his criticisms seriously, CTV News has learned. …

Tony Blankley on how Obama might be beaten.

Republicans owe Hillary our gratitude. She has road-tested several versions of attacks on Obama that don’t work. Obviously, and first, don’t come out against change and hope — the perennial themes of successful election campaigns. In 1984, even my old boss Ronald Reagan campaigned for re-election in response to the claim that America needed to change, on the words: “We ARE the change,” as well as on the hopeful theme of “morning in America.”

If a candidate is not for change, he is not for us. It has been almost two centuries since Prince von Metternich gained the first ministry of the Hapsburg’s Austrian empire by assuring the emperor that his administration consciously would avoid any “innovation.”

Nor will Americans ever vote for presidential candidates based on what the candidates have done for us already. In American politics, gratitude is always the lively expectation of benefits yet to come. The question is always, What will you do for us tomorrow? Americans will not give Sen. McCain the White House because we are grateful for his heroism 40 years ago at the Hanoi Hilton. We are grateful, and he was heroic. Americans might gladly vote for him to receive a medal, or even an opulent retirement home, but not the presidency.

Beyond these obvious points, Republicans should learn from Hillary’s campaign that Obama is remarkably adept at ridiculing the old style of campaigning. …

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The Corner of National Review Online William F. Buckley Jr. (1925-2008)

[Kathryn Jean Lopez]
I’m devastated to report that our dear friend, mentor, leader, and founder William F. Buckley Jr., died this morning in his study in Stamford, Connecticut.

He died while at work; if he had been given a choice on how to depart this world, I suspect that would have been exactly it. At home, still devoted to the war of ideas.

As you might expect, we’ll have much more to say here and in NR in the coming days and weeks and months. For now: Thank you, Bill. God bless you, now with your dear Pat. Our deepest condolences to Christopher and the rest of the Buckley family. And our fervent prayer that we continue to do WFB’s life’s work justice.

Daily Tech with an article on global cooling. Now we have some numbers to go along with anecdotal evidence.

Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile — the list goes on and on.

No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA’s GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.

Meteorologist Anthony Watts compiled the results of all the sources. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C — a value large enough to erase nearly all the global warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year time. For all sources, it’s the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down. …

Mark Steyn wonders why the NOW nags can’t focus on the real problems for women.

… Yet there is something not just boring but grotesque in Western feminists’ inability to prioritize. They seem implicitly to have accepted a two-tier sisterhood, in which white, upscale, liberal women twitter about NR columnists’ appalling misogyny in criticizing a female Bush-administration official, while simultaneously the women of the fastest-growing population group in the Western world are forced into clitoridectomies, forced into burqas, forced into marriage, forced into psychiatric wards, forced into hiding — and, if all else fails, forced off the apartment balcony by their brothers and fathers to fall to their deaths, as has happened to at least seven Muslim girls in Sweden recently. This is the real “war against women” being waged across the Western world, but, like so much of the Left, a pampered and privileged sisterhood would rather fight pseudo-battles over long-vanquished enemies.

Denver Post’s David Harsanyi points to McCain’s big hurdle.

Political observers have questioned whether Americans are “ready” to elect a woman or an African-American to the presidency. A more pertinent question, actually, is whether Americans are ready to elect a grouchy old white guy.

According to a Gallup poll, only 5 percent of Americans would never vote for an African-American, while 11 percent claim they would never vote for a woman. Believe it or not, comparatively, those are optimistic numbers — if you believe in polls that solidify your world view, like I do.

Republican candidate John McCain is hamstrung by a more worrisome factor. He will be 72 by the time the November election rolls around. …

Roger Simon on Obama and NAFTA.

VodkaPundit takes a look at the electoral college numbers.

General Patton would not understand. France is about to send troops to Afghanistan. The Captain has details. He also posts on McCain and Clinton tactics.

… The Clintons never got the message this cycle. They won in 1992 with James Carville fist-in-face tactics, but in sixteen years, people have tired of it. They want candidates who focus on themselves, not on their opponents. Both Barack Obama and John McCain managed to figure this much out, as did Mike Huckabee to a certain extent. They talked about their own narratives, while their opponents floundered by talking about others.

Hillary should have stuck with her own narrative. When she did that, she controlled the race. Only after she panicked after that disastrous November 2nd debate, in which she flip-flopped on drivers licenses for illegal aliens, did she come out hard against Obama. That’s when her campaign started discussing his kindergarten essays as evidence of his supposedly overweening ambition. …

Eugene Volokh points out the problems coming from yet another stupid law. Compact fluorescents this time.

John Stossel on gun laws.

It’s all too predictable. A day after a gunman killed six people and wounded 18 others at Northern Illinois University, The New York Times criticized the U.S. Interior Department for preparing to rethink its ban on guns in national parks.

The editorial board wants “the 51 senators who like the thought of guns in the parks — and everywhere else, it seems — to realize that the innocence of Americans is better protected by carefully controlling guns than it is by arming everyone to the teeth.”

As usual, the Times editors seem unaware of how silly their argument is. To them, the choice is between “carefully controlling guns” and “arming everyone to the teeth.” But no one favors “arming everyone to the teeth” (whatever that means). Instead, gun advocates favor freedom, choice and self-responsibility. If someone wishes to be prepared to defend himself, he should be free to do so. No one has the right to deprive others of the means of effective self-defense, like a handgun.

As for the first option, “carefully controlling guns,” how many shootings at schools or malls will it take before we understand that people who intend to kill are not deterred by gun laws? Last I checked, murder is against the law everywhere. No one intent on murder will be stopped by the prospect of committing a lesser crime like illegal possession of a firearm. The intellectuals and politicians who make pious declarations about controlling guns should explain how their gunless utopia is to be realized.

While they search for — excuse me — their magic bullet, innocent people are dying defenseless. …

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Thomas Sowell comments on the NY Times McCain hit.

The front page of the New York Times has increasingly become the home of editorials disguised as “news” stories. Too often it has become the home of hoaxes.

Going back some years, it was the Tawana Brawley hoax that she had been gang-raped by a bunch of white men. Just a couple of years ago, it was the Duke University “rape” hoax that they fell for.

In between there were the various hoaxes of New York Times reporter Jayson Blair, who was kept on and promoted until too many people found out what he had been doing and the paper had to let him go.

Last month the New York Times created its own hoax with a long front page article about how war veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan were killing people back in the United States because of the stress they had gone through in combat.

That hoax was shot down two days later by the New York Post, which showed that the murder rate among returning war veterans was only one-fifth the murder rate among civilians in the same age brackets.

Undaunted, the New York Times has come up with its latest front-page sensation, the claim that some anonymous people either suspected an affair between Senator John McCain and a female lobbyist or tried to forestall an affair.

But apparently no one actually claimed that they knew there was an affair. …

Michael Kinsley with hilarious NY Times satire.

… What I wrote was that some people had expressed concern that the Times article might have created the appearance of charging that McCain had had an affair. My critics have charged that I was charging the Times with charging McCain with having had an affair. Such a charge would be unfair to the New York Times, since the Times article, if you read it carefully (very carefully), does not make any charge against McCain except that people in a meeting eight years ago had suggested that other people eight years ago might reach a conclusion—about which the Times expressed no view whatsoever—that McCain was having an affair. …

David Brooks – The Real McCain.

… Over the course of his career, McCain has tried to do the impossible. He has challenged the winds of the money gale. He has sometimes failed and fallen short. And there have always been critics who cherry-pick his compromises, ignore his larger efforts and accuse him of being a hypocrite.

This is, of course, the gospel of the mediocre man: to ridicule somebody who tries something difficult on the grounds that the effort was not a total success. But any decent person who looks at the McCain record sees that while he has certainly faltered at times, he has also battled concentrated power more doggedly than any other legislator. If this is the record of a candidate with lobbyists on his campaign bus, then every candidate should have lobbyists on the bus.

And here’s the larger point: We’re going to have two extraordinary nominees for president this year. This could be one of the great general election campaigns in American history. The only thing that could ruin it is if the candidates become demagogues and hurl accusations at each other that are an insult to reality and common sense.

Maybe Obama can start this campaign over.

Debra Saunders on the latest Clinton tactics.

… I have to figure that Clintonia is rolling the dice. Her campaign is flailing. Being nice didn’t bump Clinton’s numbers. Along comes a photo that is just a photo of Obama visiting Africa and dressing like the locals, as both tourists and politicians are wont to do. And also a reminder that Obama might seem too exotic to some voters. It’s the wordless way of whispering: Is America ready for a black president?

The real question is: Does America want four years of a shameless victim in chief?

Jack Kelly thinks Obama’s work is cut out for him.

… Barack Obama, noted National Review’s David Frum, has the thinnest resume of any candidate for president since William Jennings Bryan in 1896. Then 36 (the youngest man ever nominated for president), Bryan had been a congressman for only six undistinguished years when he electrified the Democratic convention with his “Cross of Gold” speech.

Bryan got creamed in the general election, which suggests there is a limit to how high a populist with little on his resume besides a charismatic personality and a silver tongue can rise.

“Barack Obama is no Muhammad Ali,” said Tom Buffenbarger, president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, who is supporting Sen. Hillary Clinton. “He took a walk every time there was a tough vote in the Illinois state senate. He took a walk more than 130 times. That’s what a shadow boxer does. All the right moves. All the right combinations. All the right footwork. But he never steps into the ring.”

“Don’t be deceived by an eloquent but empty call for change that promises no more than a holiday from history,” said Sen. John McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee. Eloquent but empty calls for change seem to be working well enough for Sen. Obama in the battle for the Democratic nomination. But that may be due more to the weaknesses of Hillary Clinton than to his strengths. …

American.com writes on “one acre capitalism” in Kenya.

… Its work is easy to explain and difficult to implement. First, it groups farmers, mostly women, together and educates them on agricultural techniques. It then provides them with “inputs” like seeds and fertilizer. During the growing season, staff members monitor the crops’ progress; most of the farmers will grow staples like maize, which are more forgiving than passion fruit, though they are less lucrative. Once the harvest is in, One Acre acts as a bulk seller, enabling the crops to reach larger markets and command higher prices than they would if each farmer hauled his own crop to market. In return for this service, One Acre collects a small portion of the profits to help with costs, though it says the returns for farmers, after reimbursement, are still double what they were making before. “We’re adding value to these farmers’ lives and they’re paying for it,” Youn explains. One Acre reports that 97 percent of farmers have made their payments back to the fund.

More conventional microfinance involves lending money to people who then use it to cover the overhead costs of a small business. Because One Acre takes a risk on the farmers’ harvest, Matthew Forti, the organization’s board chair, who works in Boston, describes it as a “microequity organization.” This reflects the confidence that One Acre has in its farmers and its business model. Farmers will return because their previous yields would qualify as “crop failure” in the United States, Youn says. …

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Roger Simon has a good take on the NY Times flap.

… No matter what your politics, for too many years The New York Times has had far too much power over our national discourse for one outlet. No media source should have that much authority in a democracy. We need, pardon the expression, a thousand flowers to bloom. I know Bill Keller agrees with that, because I have heard him acknowledge it. He was clearly under considerable pressure from his reporters and editors to publish this unprofessional nonsense. …

Gerard Baker of the London Times wonders if the country is ready for the left-wing Obama.

For most ordinary Americans, those not encumbered with an expensive education or infected by prolonged exposure to cosmopolitan heterodoxy, patriotism is a consequence of birth.

Their chests swell with pride every time they hear the national anthem at sporting events. They fill up with understandable emotion whenever they see a report on television about the tragic heroics of some soldier or Marine who gave his life in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Foreigners don’t have to like America – and they’ve certainly exercised that freedom in the past few years. But most Americans can distinguish between the transience of policy failure and the permanence of the national ideal.

And surely even critics of the US could scarcely deny that there have been real causes for American pride in the past 25 years: the fall of the Berlin Wall; the victory in the first Gulf War in 1991; the nation’s unity in grief and resolve after September 11. Heck, I suspect most Americans got a small buzz of patriotic pride this week when they heard that one of their multimillion-dollar missiles had shot a dead but dangerous satellite traveling at 17,000 miles per hour out of the sky so that it fell harmlessly to Earth.

But not, apparently, Michelle Obama, wife of the man who is now the putative Democratic candidate for US president, and at this point favourite to succeed to that job. In what might be the most revealing statement made by any political figure so far in this campaign season, Mrs Obama caused a stir this week. She said that the success of her husband Barack’s campaign had marked the first time in her adult life that she had felt pride in her country.

This, even by the astonishingly self-absorbed standards of politicians and their families, is a remarkably narrow view of what makes a country great. And though she later half-heartedly tried to retract the remark it was a statement pregnant with meaning for the presidential election campaign. …

And Bill Kristol wonders if we are ready for another narcissist.

… Obama likes to say, “we are the change that we seek” and “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” Obama’s rhetorical skill makes his candidacy appear almost collective rather than individual. That’s a democratic courtesy on his part, and one flattering to his followers. But the effectual truth of what Obama is saying is that he is the one we’ve been waiting for.

Barack Obama is an awfully talented politician. But could the American people, by November, decide that for all his impressive qualities, Obama tends too much toward the preening self-regard of Bill Clinton, the patronizing elitism of Al Gore and the haughty liberalism of John Kerry?

It’s fitting that the alternative to Obama will be John McCain. He makes no grand claim to fix our souls. He doesn’t think he’s the one everyone has been waiting for. He’s more proud of his country than of himself. And his patriotism has consisted of deeds more challenging than “speaking out on issues.”

Barack Obama went off the reservation on the subject of vouchers. New York Sun editors recount how he then paid obeisance to the teacher’s unions, the “nomenklatura” of the Dem party.

No sooner had we issued Elizabeth Green‘s dispatch under the headline “Obama Open to Private School Vouchers” than his campaign was scrambling to undo the potential damage with the Democratic primary electorate. On February 20, his campaign issued a statement headlined, “Response to Misleading Reports Concerning Senator Obama‘s Position on Vouchers” that said, “Senator Obama has always been a critic of vouchers.” The statement went on, “Throughout his career, he has voted against voucher proposals and voiced concern for siphoning off resources from our public schools.” It noted that Mr. Obama’s education agenda “does not include vouchers, in any shape or form.” …

WaPo has a list of the top Obama and Clinton flip-flops.

Couple of our favorites look forward to the VP pick. George Will first.

… McCain needs someone who will help him win and be a plausible president during the next four years. He has been in Washington more years than Clinton and Barack Obama combined, and today, as usual, but even more so, Washington is considered iniquitous, partly because McCain, our national scold, incessantly tells the country that its capital is awash in “corruption.” …

Will looked at many with a scatter gun. Byron York concentrates on Pawlenty and Sanford.

John McCain faces a dilemma when it comes to choosing a vice president. He needs a running mate who will be a contrast to him in a few key ways — younger, more knowledgeable about economic issues, and, especially, more conservative. But if McCain selects a running mate whose conservative credentials are beyond dispute, he’ll be choosing a candidate who likely disagrees with him on some issues of great importance to the Republican base.

On Sunday, I spoke with two leading contenders for the McCain ticket, Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty and South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, both in Washington for the annual meeting of the National Governors’ Association. While each expressed strong support for McCain, neither would deny differences with the candidate on two of the issues that have caused McCain the greatest trouble with the conservative base: immigration and campaign-finance reform. …

John Fund says there will be a meeting in NY next week that attempts to add common sense to the global warming debate.

… Let’s hope Mr. Lomborg is wrong in his fear that the media are uninterested in showcasing a real debate on climate change. The proof may be found next week, when hundreds of scientists, economists and policy experts who dissent from the “consensus” that climate change requires radical measures will meet in New York to discuss the latest scientific, economic and political research on climate change. Five tracks of panels will address paleoclimatology, climatology, global warming impacts, the economics of global warming and political factors. It will be keynoted by Czech President Vaclav Klaus, who has argued that economic growth is most likely to create the innovations and know-how to combat any challenges climate change could present in the future. (Information on the conference is here1.)

The conference is being organized by the free-market Heartland Institute and 49 other co-sponsors, including a dozen from overseas. Heartland president Joseph Bast says its politically incorrect purpose is to “explain the often-neglected ‘other side’ of the climate change debate. This will be their chance to speak out. It will be hard for journalists and policy makers to ignore us.”

I wonder. …

Canada’s National Post on the coming global cooling.

Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.

The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January “was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average.”

China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.

There have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past two months that the real estate market has felt the pinch as home buyers have stayed home rather than venturing out looking for new houses.

In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, smashing the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950.

And remember the Arctic Sea ice? The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its “lowest levels on record? Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.

The ice is back. …

Don Surber reports on AP reporter who tells us the crook’s party affiliation only when GOP. Follow the link if you wish to read the full stories. But, you’ll get the picture.

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Want to ride on a vintage DC-3 in England? Hurry because Samizdata says the EU is about to shut them down.

… There are no exceptions for classic aircraft and thus after July 16th the soulless gray men will make the European world that much more like themselves. …

British blogger posts on the folks leaving his country.

… If things don’t change Britain will continue to lose far too many of its best and brightest.

Mark Steyn on the Clinton dénouement. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.

On the day that Margaret Thatcher was toppled by her own party, I ran into an old friend, a hard-core leftist playwright, Marxist to the core, who wasn’t as happy as he should have been. He jabbed me in the chest. “You bastards on the right!” he fumed. “You wouldn’t even let us be the ones to drive the stake through her heart.”

I’m sure in America’s Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy there are similar mixed feelings. The Clintons have met their Waterloo but it’s not some doughty conservative warrior who gets to play Duke of Wellington, only some freshman pap peddler of liberal boilerplate whom no one had heard of the day before yesterday. …

Charles Krauthammer examines the Dem desire for defeat in Iraq.

… Despite all the progress, military and political, the Democrats remain unwavering in their commitment to withdrawal on an artificial timetable that inherently jeopardizes our “very real chance that Iraq will emerge as a secure and stable state.”

Why? Imagine the transformative effects in the region, and indeed in the entire Muslim world, of achieving a secure and stable Iraq, friendly to the United States and victorious over al-Qaeda. Are the Democrats so intent on denying George Bush retroactive vindication for a war they insist is his that they would deny their own country a now-achievable victory?

There’s been a lot of reaction to the NY Times McCain hit piece. We’ll start out with reaction from the left. Seattle Post-Intelligencer editor first.

I chose not to run the New York Times story on John McCain in Thursday’s P-I, even though it was available to us on the New York Times News Service. I thought I’d take a shot at explaining why.

To me, the story had serious flaws. It did not convincingly make the case that McCain either had an affair with a lobbyist, or was improperly influenced by her. It used a raft of unnamed sources to assert that members of McCain’s campaign staff — not this campaign but his campaign eight years ago — were concerned about the amount of time McCain was spending with the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman. They were worried about the appearance of a close bond between the two of them.

Then it went even further back, re-establishing the difficulties McCain had with his close association to savings-and-loan criminal Charles Keating. It didn’t get back to the thing that (of course) the rest of the media immediately pounced on — McCain, Iseman and the nature of their relationship — until very deep in the story. And when the story did get back there, it didn’t do so with anything approaching convincing material. …

LA Times blog posts on the pass taken by the Boston Globe.

… The Boston Globe, which is wholly owned by the New York Times, chose not to publish the article produced by its parent company’s reporters.

Instead, the Globe published a version of the same story written by the competing Washington Post staff. That version focused almost exclusively on the pervasive presence of lobbyists in McCain’s campaign and did not mention the sexual relationship that the Times article hinted at but did not describe or document and which the senator and lobbyist have denied.

On Thursday the Globe’s website, Boston.com, did provide a link to the Times story on the Times’ website. But such a stark editorial decision by a major newspaper raises suspicions that even the Globe’s editors, New York Times Co. employees all, had their own concerns about the content of their parent company’s story. …

Editors of SF Chronicle.

Sen. John McCain has a legitimate gripe. A New York Times story that highlighted his relationship with lobbyist Vicki Iseman was unfair. It implied more than it delivered.

The implication, if true, would be devastating to any politician – but especially to McCain, an Arizona Republican who has styled himself as a Mr. Clean reformer.

The fact that some of McCain’s advisers were “convinced the relationship had become romantic” in 2000 is not the same as them having evidence of infidelity. It is a suspicion, otherwise known as gossip. If these anonymous sources did have persuasive evidence of such misconduct, they either failed to provide it to the newspaper – or the newspaper declined to offer it to its readers. …

… Regrettably, the Times left itself and our profession open to … allegations of bias by publishing soft-focus evidence of what would be an outrageous breach of public trust.

Enough with the libs, now some of our favorites post on the Times. American Thinker first.

The decline and fall of the New York Times accelerates, with Thursday’s anonymously-sourced hit piece on John McCain. I will leave to others like Rick Moran and Ed Morrissey the debunking of the story itself. What concerns me is the manner in which the CEO of the organization has jettisoned standards that once would have ruled out publication of such material.

“A fish rots from the head” goes an old Chinese saying. If it is true, as reported, that the story was controversial within the Times, and only ran because the paper feared that The New Republic would publicize the office politics at the Times over publication of the story, the Sulzberger’s responsibility is all the greater. His inability to set clear guidelines, hire capable editors, and maintain newsroom harmony and discipline was about to be exposed to the public. To protect his hind quarters, he went with a disastrously bad story. …

Two posts from Power Line.

The New York Times’ story about John McCain’s alleged involvement with a female lobbyist brings to mind its infamous coverage of the alleged rape by members of the Duke lacrosse team. As Stuart Taylor recounted in his book on that sorry affair, Until Proven Innocent, the Times reporter who initially covered the story, Joe Drape, quickly learned facts that strongly tended to exonerate the accused players. The Times, however, refused to print his material and soon replaced him with Duff Wilson who took a pro-prosecution slant, thereby enabling the Times to peddle its preferred narrative of white privilege and racial oppression.

In McCain’s case, the Times received “exculpatory” material from his campaign which documented instances in which McCain did not take positions congenial to the female lobbyist in question. The Times refused to use or acknowledge that material, selecting only instances that enabled it to pursue its preferred narrative that McCain was unduly influenced by that lobbyist. …

Abe Greenwald from Contentions.

… The boomerang effect of this non-scandal and the way it has redistributed sympathies recalls another recent phenomenon that unfolded this primary season: the Clintons’ failed exploitation of identity Democrats. Hillary decided that winning the Democratic nomination was a crude matter of mathematics. Getting all of the white vote and most of the Hispanic vote would do the trick, and playing on those groups’ prejudices would secure their support. She and Bill intentionally isolated the white vote, pandering to a section of the electorate they thought would somehow fear Obama’s nomination. Not only did she begin to lose support amongst blacks (which presumably, she thought she could survive), but whites and Hispanics saw the effort for what it was and were repelled. In two months time, the Clintons gave Obama heaping chunks of every demographic group. …

And, of course, the Captain.

… So what do we have? We have salacious but completely unsubstantiated gossip, combined with a rehash of at least one old Times smear, placed on the front page of what used to be the premiere newspaper in America. And what exactly does that do for the Times’ credibility for the rest of this electoral cycle? They can’t run anything on McCain now without it being seen in the context of what the Times itself calls a “war” between the Times and McCain. Keller and company declared war on McCain yesterday, and it fired a bazooka of effluvium as its opening salvo. They’ve marginalized themselves for the next nine months.

American Spectator looks at smoking bans in “Serfdom by a Thousand Cuts.”

… smokers are not without hope. Less than a year after Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich signed the smoking ban, and gushed, “This law will save lives. The realities are that smoking kills people…My only regret is that this took so long,” the news out of Springfield is that the owners of taverns, casinos and strip clubs may soon be able to buy a “special license” that will allow their patrons to smoke inside.

So all of that talk about saving lives from second-hand smoke was all just a bunch of…second-hand smoke. Or was it just another Chicago-style scam so the state could sell expensive smoking licenses to bowling alley operators? The fact is officeholders thought the smoking ban was a terrific idea — or at least an efficient way to get those annoying single-issue pressure groupees out of their offices and off their backs — until they discovered that Illinois would have a budget shortfall of $750 million next year, and learned how much tax revenue the state made off its smokers, boozers, gamblers and stripshow devotees.

Illinois bar owners report that revenue is down in some cases by 50 percent. Casinos report that the ban has caused a 17 percent drop in gaming. I haven’t spoken to any strippers recently, but I bet they are feeling the pinch too. …

Neal Boortz on all the climate bureaucrats in San Francisco.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom has decided that his city is not doing enough to combat climate change. So what is his solution? More government! Not only more government, but a new government bureaucrat will be added to the payroll in San Francisco. Looking for a job? San Francisco’s Director of Climate Protection Initiatives will make a generous $160,000 a year. Not bad for a government bureaucrat dedicated to hack science and a phony cause.

Wait .. there’s more. Newsom could, perhaps, get away with this new position … if he didn’t already have 25 employees on the city’s roster that are dedicated to “climate issues.” …

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Corner post with a link to video of the satellite shoot ‘em up.

David Warren notices witchcraft trials in one of the lands of “the religion of peace.”

… Shariah, as the learned (Anglican) Archbishop of Canterbury was instructing us recently, in the course of advocating the formal introduction of some form of it into Britain, is not a fixed system of law. There is no written code. It is something that is interpreted by Islamic scholars, in light of any one of five schools of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence, alone. Yet all descend from the Koran, and from commonly accepted Hadiths, so there is a family resemblance between Shariah as practised in Saudi Arabia and in, say, Indonesia.

Still, there is no guessing what form may be introduced into a modern western country. Many Islamic scholars agree that Shariah should recognize the customs of the locality; others insist the whole point of Shariah is to change those customs until they are made to resemble those of desert Arabia in the 7th century AD.

Perhaps it will be another decade or two before we have witchcraft trials in Canada. And who knows whether they will be conducted under the supervision of wise Islamic scholars? For the concept of witchcraft is hardly unnatural to the mindset that has brought us “political correctness,” and for all we know the trials will be conducted by human rights commissioners.

For centuries, through the “dark” and “middle” ages, the Catholic Church struggled to eradicate the pagan belief in witches from pre-Christian Europe, only to have witchcraft proceedings explode again, at the time of the Reformation. We no longer appreciate what comes out on the table when free, rational thought is pushed under it.

Two days after Pickings remarked on the missing Mark Steyn, he showed up in Macleans. He answers critics who say he’s alarmist.

… Sharia in Britain? Taxpayer-subsidized polygamy in Toronto? Yawn. Nothing to see here. True, if you’d suggested such things on Sept. 10, 2001, most Britons and Canadians would have said you were nuts. But a few years on and it doesn’t seem such a big deal, and nor will the next concession, and the one after that. It’s hard to deliver a wake-up call for a civilization so determined to smother the alarm clock in the soft fluffy pillow of multiculturalism and sleep in for another 10 years. The folks who call my book “alarmist” accept that the Western world is growing more Muslim (Canada’s Muslim population has doubled in the last 10 years), but they deny that this population trend has any significant societal consequences. Sharia mortgages? Sure. Polygamy? Whatever. Honour killings? Well, okay, but only a few. The assumption that you can hop on the Sharia Express and just ride a couple of stops is one almighty leap of faith. More to the point, who are you relying on to “hold the line”? Influential figures like the Archbishop of Canterbury? The bureaucrats at Ontario Social Services? The Western world is not run by fellows noted for their line-holding: look at what they’re conceding now and then try to figure out what they’ll be conceding in five years’ time. …

Amir Taheri says elections in Arab countries are throwing out the Islamists.

Pakistan’s election has been portrayed by the Western media as a defeat for President Pervez Musharraf. The real losers were the Islamist parties.

The latest analysis of the results shows that the parties linked, or at least sympathetic, to the Taliban and al Qaeda saw their share of the votes slashed to about 3% from almost 11% in the last general election a few years ago. The largest coalition of the Islamist parties, the United Assembly for Action (MMA), lost control of the Northwest Frontier Province — the only one of Pakistan’s four provinces it governed. The winner in the province is the avowedly secularist National Awami Party.

Despite vast sums of money spent by the Islamic Republic in Tehran and wealthy Arabs from the Persian Gulf states, the MMA failed to achieve the “approaching victory” (fatah al-qarib) that Islamist candidates, both Shiite and Sunni, had boasted was coming.

The Islamist defeat in Pakistani confirms a trend that’s been under way for years. Conventional wisdom had it that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the lack of progress in the Israel-Palestine conflict, would provide radical Islamists with a springboard from which to seize power through elections.

Analysts in the West used that prospect to argue against the Bush Doctrine of spreading democracy in the Middle East. These analysts argued that Muslims were not ready for democracy, and that elections would only translate into victory for hard-line Islamists.

The facts tell a different story. So far, no Islamist party has managed to win a majority of the popular vote in any of the Muslim countries where reasonably clean elections are held. If anything, the Islamist share of the vote has been declining across the board. …

Karl Rove says a new twist in Obama’s speeches give McCain an opportunity.

… Perhaps in response to criticisms that have been building in recent days, Mr. Obama pivoted Tuesday from his usual incantations. He dropped the pretense of being a candidate of inspiring but undescribed “post-partisan” change. Until now, Mr. Obama has been making appeals to the center, saying, for example, that we are not red or blue states, but the United States. But in his Houston speech, he used the opportunity of 45 (long) minutes on national TV to advocate a distinctly non-centrist, even proudly left-wing, agenda. By doing so, he opened himself to new and damaging contrasts and lines of criticism.

Mr. McCain can now question Mr. Obama’s promise to change Washington by working across party lines. Mr. Obama hasn’t worked across party lines since coming to town. Was he a member of the “Gang of 14″ that tried to find common ground between the parties on judicial nominations? Was Mr. Obama part of the bipartisan leadership that tackled other thorny issues like energy, immigration or terrorist surveillance legislation? No. Mr. Obama has been one of the most dependably partisan votes in the Senate. …

Shorts from John Fund.

Michael Barone says there’s no chance anymore for Clinton.

In a recent post, I took a look at Hillary Clinton’s chances for a comeback in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. Yesterday, the voters of Wisconsin made it plain they weren’t having any of it: They gave Barack Obama an impressive 58-41 percent victory over Clinton. So much for any Clinton best-case analysis. The Clinton campaign continues to look to the Ohio and Texas contests of March 4. But her numbers there seem to be eroding. CNN showed her lead in Texas disappearing, to a statistically insignificant 50-48 percent, while SurveyUSA put it at 50-45 percent, with all of the Clinton lead coming in south and west Texas. …

Jennifer Rubin in Contentions previews a strategy for Clinton in tonight’s debate.

VDH on ivy league populism.

The rhetoric of Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton about the sad state of America is reminiscent of the suspect populism of John Edwards, the millionaire lawyer who recently dropped out of the Democratic presidential race.

Barack Obama may have gone to exclusive private schools. He and his wife may both be lawyers who between them have earned four expensive Ivy League degrees. They may make about a million dollars a year, live in an expensive home and send their kids to prep school. But they are still apparently first-hand witnesses to how the American dream has gone sour. Two other Ivy League lawyers, Hillary and Bill, are multimillionaires who have found America to be a land of riches beyond most people’s imaginations. But Hillary also talks of the tragic lost dream of America.

In these gloom-and-doom narratives by the well off, we less fortunate Americans are doing almost everything right, but still are not living as well as we deserve to be. And the common culprit is a government that is not doing enough good for us, and corporations that do too much bad to us. …

Samizdata posts a short review of P J O’Rourke’s book on Adam Smith.

… O’Rourke’s book – a New York Times best seller, according to the dust jacket – is a terrifically well-written, concise look at Smith, who wrote not just WoN but also on moral philosophy, jurisprudence and many other things. What O’Rourke does is tease out some of the contradictions as well as the great insights of Scotland’s most famous thinker apart from David Hume (the men were both great friends). What is particularly good is that although Smith was considered – not always accurately – to be the great-grandaddy of laissez-faire economics (he did not invent that term), he was much more than that. He was no ardent minimal statist although he would certainly have been horrified by the extent of state power in our own time. He supported state-backed funding of education for the poor, for example. …