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Mark Steyn has a Monica week. He starts us off with something he wrote ten years ago for The Spectator, UK.

… Clinton’s presidency now resembles a deranged version of La Ronde, in which he staggers from one girl to the next without ever managing to shake off any of their predecessors: if his aides hadn’t stupidly revealed her identity, Paula Jones wouldn’t have sued; if she hadn’t sued, he wouldn’t have had to give a sworn deposition admitting to the affair with Gennifer Flowers; if he’d settled the suit, her lawyers wouldn’t have taken testimony from Kathleen Willey, the woman who says he groped and fondled her on the day her husband committed suicide; if his lawyer hadn’t trashed the reputation of Mrs Willey’s corroborating witness Linda Tripp, Miss Tripp wouldn’t have set about getting her revenge; if the President had only managed to keep his hands off Monica Lewinsky, they wouldn’t have had to move her to the Pentagon, where she became friends with Miss Tripp; if he’d been able to steer clear of Shelia Lawrence, Miss Lewinsky wouldn’t have become jealous….

 

The more worldly commentators bemoan the fact that America isn’t like France, where M. Mitterrand was buried with both his wife and mistress in attendance. But, if Mr Clinton’s funeral applies the same admission criteria, it’ll be the biggest windfall for the nation’s charter buses since the Million Man March. Mrs Clinton has done her best to surround her husband with only the most fearsome specimens of the fairer sex, from Madeleine Albright to Janet Reno. But you could nail a government health warning to the White House door – `Abandon hope all ye who intern here’ – and some impressionable young coed would always break through. …

Kathryn Jean Lopez with a Corner post on what Rush is up to lately.

Rush issued a warning about Huckabee and McCain: “I’m here to tell you, if either of these two guys get the nomination, it’s going to destroy the Republican Party, it’s going to change it forever, be the end of it. A lot of people aren’t going to vote. You watch.” …

According to Peter Wehner, things are getting personal in the Dem race.

… It’ll be interesting to see how Obama’s “politics of hope” responds to those who have perfected the Politics of Personal Destruction. Will he be able to respond persuasively and aggressively without getting himself filthy in the process? Will he be able to turn the chapter on the divisive politics of the past–or will he merely add to what we have seen before?

Regardless of the results, after this nomination process it may be a lot harder for either Clinton or Obama to put forward the argument that they are figures who can bring America together, especially if they succeed in driving various constituencies within the Democratic Party apart. The politics of unity aren’t, apparently, as easy as people think.

Captain comments on Clinton and the current baby boomlet.

IBD editors remind the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1967 because of the GOP.

Hillary Clinton gives credit for the 1964 Civil Rights Act to President Lyndon Johnson, while Barack Obama accuses the wife of the “first black president” of rewriting history. Actually, they both are. …

The Times hiring of Bill Kristol has the paper roiled. Gabriel Schoenfeld comments for Real Clear Politics.

Was it wrong for the New York Times to install William Kristol as an op-ed columnist? The move to put an outspoken neoconservative in such a visible position is roiling the newspaper, inside and out. First, a hailstorm of hate mail arrived at the paper for hiring a “war criminal”–one of the milder epithets hurled in Kristol’s direction by some 700 letter-writers, all of whom but one were venting against the appointment. Then, taking note of this groundswell of reader opinion under the headline, “He May Be Unwelcome, But We’ll Survive,” the newspaper’s own ombudsman, Clark Hoyt, called the decision a serious mistake: not because Kristol is an “aggressive unapologetic champion” of the war in Iraq–but for something else.

That something else is remarks uttered by Kristol on Fox News Sunday in June 2006. “I think the attorney general has an absolute obligation to consider prosecution” of the New York Times is what Kristol told a television audience shortly after the newspaper splashed details of the highly classified Terrorist Finance Tracking Program on its front page. …

John Stossel writes on the folks who hate free markets.

Why are so many people so hostile to free markets?

Markets provide miracles that we take for granted. Clean, well-lighted supermarkets sell 30,000 products. Starvation has largely vanished from countries where private property and economic freedom are permitted. Free markets have rescued more people from poverty than government ever has.

And yet, when innovators propose extending this benign power, people shriek in fear.

This was clear reading The Wall Street Journal not long ago.

The “Letters” section led with complaints about Bob Poole’s column on well-maintained private highways that keep traffic moving. One writer complained that such highways exist for “the privileged … who can afford surprisingly large … fees … to drive a very boring 45 minutes around metropolitan Toronto. Highway 407 is certainly a great success — for its bondholders.”

Surprisingly large fees? Only if you are clueless about what you pay for “free” roads. And why is success for the bondholders a bad thing? Is the writer envious? If the ride is boring, he doesn’t need to take it. No one forces anyone to use a private highway. Why do so many begrudge the successes that voluntary private exchanges bring? …

Walter Williams caught up to light bulbs and thermostats.

Last December, President Bush signed an energy bill that will ban the sale of Edison’s incandescent bulb, starting with the 100-watt bulb in 2012 and ending with the 40-watt bulb by 2014. You say, “Hey, Williams, what’s wrong with saving energy, reducing our carbon footprint and stopping global warming?” Before you get too enthused over governmental energy-saving efforts, you might ponder what’s down the road.

The California Energy Commission has recently proposed amendments to its standards for energy efficiency (www.energy.ca.gov/2007publications/CEC-400-2007-017/CEC-400-2007-017-45DAY.PDF). These standards include a requirement that any new or modified heating or air conditioning system must include a programmable communicating thermostat (PCT) whose settings can be remotely controlled by government authorities. A thermostat czar, sitting in Sacramento, would be empowered to remotely reduce the heating or cooling of your house during what he deems as an “emergency event.” …

Amity Shlaes visits the Panama Canal.

… One glimpse of the light as I arrived at the Miraflores Locks, and I forgot all of that dark­ness. Visitors coming to inspect the canal expect to see a generous stretch of blue through which ships move majestically. They are imagining the way liners navigate New York Harbor. And there are parts of the canal that look like that. Here, however, you find a narrow line of green-blue water through which a ship is pulled forward, like a sedated whale through a tight tank. Only a foot or two of water stands between the ship and the lock chamber’s wall. The ship moves into the holding area and the gate shuts; when the water level is high enough, toy-like locomotives pull the ship out the other side.

The best news of the day came in a press brief­ing after the Miraflores inspection: the new locks that can accommodate larger container ships will be opening in 2014. Just before my visit, the Canal Authority had celebrated the ground­breaking of the locks. If the U.S. Congress approves the FTA, the canal will be better able to serve the superstores of the East Coast.

One of the best parts of infra-tourism is the lexicon. “Panamax” is the designation for the biggest ship that can fit through Panama’s locks. I learn that the new locks that will serve a larger class might be called “Maxipan.” A guide gave us the figures for the Panamax class and I wrote them down in my notebook: 965 x 105 feet.

Around these proportions, the world once configured itself. Within a decade of the canal’s opening in 1914, 5,000 ships a year were passing through Panama. Annual toll revenues soon ran in the millions. …

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Everyone’s for change, but Mark Steyn knows the only real agent of change is capitalism.

… If you’re like me, you’re reminded yet again why you love capitalism. It’s dynamic. And the more capitalist your economy, the more dynamic it is. Every great success story is vulnerable to the next great success story – which is why teenagers aren’t picking their CDs from the Sears-Roebuck catalog. There’s a word for this. Now let me see. What was it again?

Oh, yeah: “change.” Innovation drives change, the market drives change. Government “change” just drives things away: You could ask many of the New Hampshire primary voters who formerly resided in Massachusetts.

Nevertheless, between Iowa and New Hampshire, almost every presidential contender found himself lapsing into boilerplate assertions that he was the “candidate of change” – or even, as both McCain and Hillary put it, an “agent of change,” which sounds far more exotic, as if they’re James Bond and Pussy Galore covertly driving the Aston Martin across some international frontier, pressing the ejector button and dropping a ton of government regulation on some hapless foreigners.

But it’s capitalism that’s the real “agent of change.” Politicians, on the whole, prefer stasis, at least on everything for which they already have responsibility. That’s the lesson King Canute was trying to teach his courtiers when he took them down to the beach and let the tide roll in: Government has its limits. In most of the Western world, the tide is rolling in on demographically and economically unsustainable entitlements, but that doesn’t stop politicians getting out their beach chairs and promising to create even more. That’s government “change”. …

Christopher Hitchens wonders why we would want those people back.

Seeing the name Hillary in a headline last week—a headline about a life that had involved real achievement—I felt a mouse stirring in the attic of my memory. Eventually, I was able to recall how the two Hillarys had once been mentionable in the same breath. On a first-lady goodwill tour of Asia in April 1995—the kind of banal trip that she now claims as part of her foreign-policy “experience”—Mrs. Clinton had been in Nepal and been briefly introduced to the late Sir Edmund Hillary, conqueror of Mount Everest. Ever ready to milk the moment, she announced that her mother had actually named her for this famous and intrepid explorer. The claim “worked” well enough to be repeated at other stops and even showed up in Bill Clinton’s memoirs almost a decade later, as one more instance of the gutsy tradition that undergirds the junior senator from New York.

Sen. Clinton was born in 1947, and Sir Edmund Hillary and his partner Tenzing Norgay did not ascend Mount Everest until 1953, so the story was self-evidently untrue and eventually yielded to fact-checking. Indeed, a spokeswoman for Sen. Clinton named Jennifer Hanley phrased it like this in a statement in October 2006, conceding that the tale was untrue but nonetheless charming: “It was a sweet family story her mother shared to inspire greatness in her daughter, to great results I might add.”

Perfect. It worked, in other words, having been coined long after Sir Edmund became a bankable celebrity, but now its usefulness is exhausted and its untruth can safely be blamed on Mummy. Yet isn’t it all—all of it, every single episode and detail of the Clinton saga—exactly like that? And isn’t some of it a little bit more serious? For Sen. Clinton, something is true if it validates the myth of her striving and her “greatness” (her overweening ambition in other words) and only ceases to be true when it no longer serves that limitless purpose. And we are all supposed to applaud the skill and the bare-faced bravado with which this is done. …

… Indifferent to truth, willing to use police-state tactics and vulgar libels against inconvenient witnesses, hopeless on health care, and flippant and fast and loose with national security: The case against Hillary Clinton for president is open-and-shut. Of course, against all these considerations you might prefer the newly fashionable and more media-weighty notion that if you don’t show her enough appreciation, and after all she’s done for us, she may cry.

David Brooks on Dems identity politics.

… Both Clinton and Obama have eagerly donned the mantle of identity politics. A Clinton victory wouldn’t just be a victory for one woman, it would be a victory for little girls everywhere. An Obama victory would be about completing the dream, keeping the dream alive, and so on.

Fair enough. The problem is that both the feminist movement Clinton rides and the civil rights rhetoric Obama uses were constructed at a time when the enemy was the reactionary white male establishment. Today, they are not facing the white male establishment. They are facing each other.

All the rhetorical devices that have been a staple of identity politics are now being exploited by the Clinton and Obama campaigns against each other. They are competing to play the victim. They are both accusing each other of insensitivity. They are both deliberately misinterpreting each other’s comments in order to somehow imply that the other is morally retrograde.

All the habits of verbal thuggery that have long been used against critics of affirmative action, like Ward Connerly and Thomas Sowell, and critics of the radical feminism, like Christina Hoff Summers, are now being turned inward by the Democratic front-runners. …

Mary Anastasia O’Grady tells what helps countries grow.

Are the world’s impoverished masses destined to live lives of permanent misery unless rich countries transfer wealth for spending on education and infrastructure?

You might think so if your gurus on development economics earn their bread and butter “lending” at the World Bank. Education and infrastructure “investment” are two of the Bank’s favorite development themes.

Yet the evidence is piling up that neither government nor multilateral spending on education and infrastructure are key to development. To move out of poverty, countries instead need fast growth; and to get that they need to unleash the animal spirits of entrepreneurs.

Empirical support for this view is presented again this year in The Heritage Foundation/The Wall Street Journal Index of Economic Freedom, released today. In its 14th edition, the annual survey grades countries on a combination of factors including property rights protection, tax rates, government intervention in the economy, monetary, fiscal and trade policy, and business freedom. …

Thomas Sowell explains how environmentalists drive blacks out of their communities.

… runaway housing prices in California did not just happen for no reason.

Prior to 1970, California housing prices were very similar to housing prices in the rest of the country. In more recent times, it has not been uncommon for California homes to cost three times what homes cost nationwide.

What happened in the 1970s was that severe government restrictions on building became common in coastal California. With supply restricted and demand not restricted, it was inevitable that prices would soar beyond many people’s ability to pay.

The main impetus behind severe restrictions on building is environmentalist zealots who demand that vast amounts of land be set aside as “open space” on which nothing can be built.

It is not uncommon for substantial proportions of all the land in an entire county — sometimes more than half — to be set aside as “open space.”

Environmentalists often talk as if they are trying to save the last few patches of greenery from being paved over, when in fact 90 percent of the land in the United States is undeveloped and forests alone cover more area than all the cities and towns in the country combined. …

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Bill Kristol’s second Times column is on the Dems’ surge opinions.

… When President Bush announced the surge of troops in support of a new counterinsurgency strategy a year ago, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Democratic Congressional leaders predicted failure. Obama, for example, told Larry King that he didn’t believe additional U.S. troops would “make a significant dent in the sectarian violence that’s taking place there.” Then in April, the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, asserted that “this war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything.” In September, Clinton told Gen. David Petraeus that his claims of progress in Iraq required a “willing suspension of disbelief.”

The Democrats were wrong in their assessments of the surge. Attacks per week on American troops are now down about 60 percent from June. Civilian deaths are down approximately 75 percent from a year ago. December 2007 saw the second-lowest number of U.S. troops killed in action since March 2003. And according to Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, commander of day-to-day military operations in Iraq, last month’s overall number of deaths, which includes Iraqi security forces and civilian casualties as well as U.S. and coalition losses, may well have been the lowest since the war began.

Do Obama and Clinton and Reid now acknowledge that they were wrong? Are they willing to say the surge worked?

No. It’s apparently impermissible for leading Democrats to acknowledge — let alone celebrate — progress in Iraq. When asked recently whether she stood behind her “willing suspension of disbelief” insult to General Petraeus, Clinton said, “That’s right.” …

Financial Times interviews Christopher Hitchens.

I never thought I would say this but Christopher Hitchens has been good for my health. When we were negotiating which restaurant to choose, the famously nicotine-bitten enfant terrible of Anglo-American letters inquired whether I smoked. “I’m sorry to say that I’m almost as bad as you,” I replied and we both chuckled throatily.

And thus we meet on a sunny afternoon at the Bombay Club – a popular restaurant across Lafayette Square from the White House. We chose it not because we especially like Indian food – although Hitchens is as fond of it as I – but because we can sit outside and so sidestep Washington’s blanket ban on indoor smoking.

Plus, the staff there recognise and like Hitchens, whose bestselling books (most recently God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything) bring frequent television appearances. “I’ll have my usual,” says Hitchens, meaning a Johnnie Walker. On two further occasions during the two-hour meal he holds up his empty tumbler and says: “Xerox”. The staff understand him. Not wanting to appear wimpish I order a Kingfisher beer and nurse it parsimoniously until the end.

After the drinks arrive I offer Hitchens one of my Marlboro Lights. Then something life-changing happens. Cool as a cucumber – and with no hint of remorse – Hitchens announces that he has given up smoking. “I got up yesterday morning in Madison, Wisconsin, and I just threw my pack away,” he says.

That’s wonderful I reply, without betraying a hint of my inner turmoil. But other thoughts race through my mind: “This is the writer who smokes on television,” I tell myself. “Hitchens is the last of the Mohicans.” It doesn’t take long for it to dawn on me that the Mick Jagger of modern letters is now in a healthier category than me. He is officially a non-smoker and I am not.

“I’ve tried many different methods over the last few months – everything, absolutely everything; therapy sessions, various classes and groups – none of them worked at all,” Hitchens continues, oblivious to what he has unleashed. “Then I woke up yesterday and said: ‘Enough.’ By the way, don’t let me stop you from smoking,” he adds airily. “Doesn’t bother me. I feel no temptation at all.” …

Jeff Jacoby has more on the fraud from The Lancet.

… Few journalists questioned the integrity of the study or its authors, Gilbert Burnham and Les Roberts of Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Iraqi scientist Riyadh Lafta. NPR’s Richard Harris reported asking Burnham, “Right before the election you’re making this announcement. Is this politically motivated? And he said, no, it’s not politically motivated.” Burnham told Newsweek the same thing: “There’s no political motivation in this. I feel very confident in the numbers.”

But the truth, it turns out, is that the report was drenched with politics, and its jaw-dropping conclusions should have inspired anything but confidence.

In an extensively researched cover story last week, National Journal took a close look under the hood of the Lancet/Johns Hopkins study. Reporters Neil Munro and Carl M. Cannon found that it was marred by grave flaws, such as unsupervised Iraqi survey teams, and survey samples that were too small to be statistically valid. The study’s authors refused to release most of their underlying data so other researchers could double-check it. The single disk they finally, grudgingly, supplied contained suspicious evidence of “data-heaping” — that is, fabricated numbers. Researchers failed to gather basic demographic data from those they interviewed, a key safeguard against fraud. …

American.com reports on India’s $2,500 car.

The automotive world is abuzz about what might be the next Model T Ford or Volkswagen Beetle—an entry-level sedan to be built in India by Tata Motors Ltd. for about $2,500.

That would be about half the cost of the low­est-priced car now available in India—the bare-bones Maruti 800, which is essentially unchanged from its introduction in 1983. If Tata pulls this off, it would be one of the cheapest cars ever built, and it could have a huge impact not only on India’s growing car market but also all over the semideveloped world.

Tata hopes to begin selling the car by this fall, almost exactly 100 years after Henry Ford intro­duced the vehicle that defined “people’s car”—the world-changing Model T. And there are interest­ing parallels and lessons in what was happening in the automotive world one century ago and what might be happening in India right now.

Many have said Tata’s goal is impossible. The so-called “One Lakh” (equaling 100,000 rupees) car is a four-door compact sedan with a small luggage compartment under the front hood and a rear engine producing 33 horsepower. It will be a base model by all means, but it will not be one of those go-kart or jitney-like vehicles so com­mon throughout India and Southeast Asia. “It is not a car with plastic curtains or no roof—it’s a real car,” Ratan Tata, chairman of Tata Motors and the dreamer behind the One Lakh, assured Forbes magazine. …

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Two Steyn Corner posts and a post from Contentions bring you up to date on the chilling speech actions by the state in Canada.

“The tyranny of the administrative state”

…That’s how Powerline’s Scott Johnson characterizes Ezra Levant’s inquisition for the crime of publishing the Danish cartoons in Canada. Ezra has posted another sharp exchange with Alberta “human rights agent” Shirlene McGovern. He explains the wasted time and money (not to mention the broader “chilling effect”) these “human rights” pseudo-courts impose on editors and publishers. There’s then a short pause before Agent McGovern, licensed to chill, responds blandly, “You’re entitled to your opinions, that’s for sure.”

The accused replies that he wishes that were the case. But in Canada today you’re only entitled to your opinions if Agent McGovern says you are. That’s the issue – “for sure”. …

Charles Krauthammer’s glad the Obama drama is over.

… It is fitting that New Hampshire should have turned on a tear or an aside. The Democratic primary campaign has been breathtakingly empty. What passes for substance is an absurd contest of hopeful change (Obama) vs. experienced change (Clinton) vs. angry change (John Edwards playing Hugo Chavez in English).

One does not have to be sympathetic to the Clintons to understand their bewilderment at Obama’s pre-New Hampshire canonization. The man comes from nowhere with a track record as thin as Chauncey Gardiner’s. Yet, as Bill Clinton correctly, if clumsily, complained, Obama gets a free pass from the press. …

Similar observations from Mort Kondracke.

A door-to-door canvasser here for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) told me all during the weekend before Tuesday’s primary that his team was encountering independent voters torn between Clinton and Republican Sen. John McCain (Ariz.).

Surely an anomaly, I thought. Then I ran into such a voter, a teacher taking her young daughter to campaign events. I asked her, “What about Barack Obama?”

“I’ve seen him five times,” she said. “What he says sounds great, but it’s all fluff. There’s no meat there.”

And that, I think, is one reason Clinton pulled out a campaign-saving victory over the Illinois Democrat here.

Welling tears may have helped “humanize” Clinton, especially with women voters, but I think she also made a dent with her updated version of Walter Mondale’s 1984 taunt of his “new ideas” challenger, Sen. Gary Hart (D-Colo.): “Where’s the beef?” …

The Captain says Bill’s campaigning is creating discord in South Carolina.

Bill Clinton has gotten a lot of mileage out of the notion that he was somehow the nation’s first black president, but that may be coming to an end. The tone he and Hillary have taken when criticizing Barack Obama has begun to generate a reaction among black politicians, and the New York Times reports that the first salvo in return may come soon. Rep. James Clyburn may reverse himself and endorse Obama before the South Carolina primaries after listening to the Clintons in New Hampshire: …

Mike Allen of Politico reports on Bill’s damage control.

On the GOP side, Mark Levin looks at the McCain record.

There’s a reason some of John McCain’s conservative supporters avoid discussing his record. They want to talk about his personal story, his position on the surge, his supposed electability. But whenever the rest of his career comes up, the knee-jerk reply is to characterize the inquiries as attacks.

The McCain domestic record is a disaster. To say he fought spending, most particularly earmarks, is to nibble around the edges and miss the heart of the matter. For starters, consider:

McCain-Feingold — the most brazen frontal assault on political speech since Buckley v. Valeo.

McCain-Kennedy — the most far-reaching amnesty program in American history.

McCain-Lieberman — the most onerous and intrusive attack on American industry — through reporting, regulating, and taxing authority of greenhouse gases — in American history.

McCain-Kennedy-Edwards — the biggest boon to the trial bar since the tobacco settlement, under the rubric of a patients’ bill of rights.

McCain-Reimportantion of Drugs — a significant blow to pharmaceutical research and development, not to mention consumer safety

Pickings of Jan. 6 had a BizzyBlog post on the fraud committed by The Lancet, a Brit medical journal. WSJ Editors weigh in too.

Three weeks before the 2006 elections, the British medical journal Lancet published a bombshell report estimating that casualties in Iraq had exceeded 650,000 since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003. We know that number was wildly exaggerated. The news is that now we know why.

It turns out the Lancet study was funded by anti-Bush partisans and conducted by antiwar activists posing as objective researchers. It also turns out the timing was no accident. You can find the fascinating details in the current issue of National Journal magazine, thanks to reporters Neil Munro and Carl Cannon. And sadly, that may be the only place you’ll find them. While the media were quick to hype the original Lancet report — within a week of its release it had been featured on 25 news shows and in 188 newspaper and magazine articles — something tells us this debunking won’t get the same play. …

Paul Greenberg takes a grown-up look at the water-boarding debate.

It’s been eclipsed in the news for just a moment by all the hubbub over the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire presidential primary, but earlier you may have noticed the latest suggestion in Congress and Medialand over how to conduct the war on terror: Go after the good guys. Honest. Not the enemy. But the CIA. Not its chief but the lower-downs. Maybe even the grunts. The foot soldiers who do the real work, take the real risks, and who get their hands and maybe even their consciences dirty. Because they’ve got a real war for fight, not another Power Point presentation to prepare or computer projection to analyze. Besides, you can be sure the higher-ups long ago took every precaution to assure what used to be called Plausible Deniability. You see their names and pictures in the paper from time to time — the well-tailored bureaucrats with clean fingernails who sit in air-conditioned offices at Langley issuing memos designed to cover their precious backsides. Just in case, as they say, Questions Arise. …

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Samizata blogs on the attempt to control thermostats in CA.

Hillary has had the bad luck to attract the attention of Camille Paglia again.

… Hillary’s willingness to tolerate Bill’s compulsive philandering is a function of her general contempt for men. She distrusts them and feels morally superior to them. Following the pattern of her long-suffering mother, she thinks it is her mission to endure every insult and personal degradation for a higher cause — which, unlike her self-sacrificing mother, she identifies with her near-messianic personal ambition.

It’s no coincidence that Hillary’s staff has always consisted mostly of adoring women, with nerdy or geeky guys forming an adjunct brain trust. Hillary’s rumored hostility to uniformed military men and some Secret Service agents early in the first Clinton presidency probably belongs to this pattern. And let’s not forget Hillary, the governor’s wife, pulling out a book and rudely reading in the bleachers during University of Arkansas football games back in Little Rock. …

…

… The Clintons live to campaign. It’s what holds them together and gives them a glowing sense of meaning and value. Their actual political accomplishments are fairly slight. The obsessive need to keep campaigning may mean a president Hillary would go right on spewing the bitterly partisan rhetoric that has already paralyzed Washington. Even if Hillary could be elected (which I’m skeptical about), how in tarnation could she ever govern?…

…

… Hillary herself, with her thin, spotty record, tangled psychological baggage, and maundering blowhard of a husband, is also a mighty big roll of the dice. She is a brittle, relentless manipulator with few stable core values who shuffles through useful personalities like a card shark (“Cue the tears!”). Forget all her little gold crosses: Hillary’s real god is political expediency. Do Americans truly want this hard-bitten Machiavellian back in the White House? Day one will just be more of the same.

The Captain says Kerry announced for Obama.

…This seems strange on a couple of different levels. Kerry hardly ran as the insurgent candidate in 2004; that was Howard Dean. Kerry represents the Establishment in the Democratic Party, a quasi-Brahmin who has remained in the Senate largely through the offices of Ted Kennedy instead of any legislative accomplishments of his own. The man who authored six whole bills in twenty years hardly qualifies to speak about transformational change. What has he ever done to affect it himself? …

Karl Rove’s New Hampshire analysis was in the WSJ.

What would Shakespeare’s Jack Cade say after the New Hampshire Democratic primary? Maybe the demagogue in “Henry VI” would call for the pollsters to be killed first, not the lawyers.

The opinion researchers find themselves in a difficult place after most predicted a big Obama sweep. It’s not their fault. The dirty secret is it is hard to accurately poll a primary. The unpredictability of who will turn out and what the mix of voters will be makes polling a primary election like reading chicken entrails — ugly, smelly and not very enlightening. Our media culture endows polls — especially exit polls — with scientific precision they simply don’t have.

But more interesting than dissecting the pollsters is dissecting the election returns, precinct by precinct. Sen. Hillary Clinton won working-class neighborhoods and less-affluent rural areas. Sen. Barack Obama won the college towns and the gentrified neighborhoods of more affluent communities. Put another way, Mrs. Clinton won the beer drinkers, Mr. Obama the white wine crowd. And there are more beer drinkers than wine swillers in the Democratic Party.

Mrs. Clinton won a narrow victory in New Hampshire for four reasons. …

Gail Collins gets in for just one line.

Whatever your politics, people, you have to admit this is one great presidential race. What next? Fred Thompson takes Florida on a sympathy vote from retirees? (They like a leader who’s really, really rested.) John Edwards finds a new emotion for South Carolina? (Anger is so cold weather.) I don’t think anyone can top Mike Gravel’s speech to the New Hampshire high school students when he told them to avoid alcohol and stick with marijuana. But really, we’re ready for anything.

If you’re a fan of democracy, Hillary Clinton’s primary victory this week has to be a good thing. You don’t want the whole election decided on the basis of a strange ritual in Iowa that resembles Red Rover with votes, along with the considered opinion of a small state full of idiosyncratic New Englanders. We want a turn! South Dakota wants a turn!

George Will on the campaign so far.

Like the Roman god Janus, from which this godforsaken month takes its name, the two parties’ voters in two states have looked in different directions. After six months of intense campaigning, in just six transformative days Iowa spoke and contrarian New Hampshire said: On the other hand …

These states perhaps started a marathon — it might not reach a decisive crescendo on Feb. 5 when 22 states choose — between two formidable Democratic candidates with ardent constituencies. Meanwhile, Republicans, illustrating this year’s elemental asymmetry, may be contemplating a choice among John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani. …

John Fund notes nothing says Bush has to spend the earmark money.

This week President Bush will make one of the most important decisions of his remaining time in office. It won’t get headlines or lead the news, but it could play a major role in deciding whether this country ever gets any kind of grip on the constantly growing federal budget.

Just before Christmas, Congress sent Mr. Bush a $516 billion omnibus spending bill stuffed with 8,993 special-interest earmarks. To make matters worse, most of the earmarks aren’t even in the language of the law itself. They were slipped into a 900-page “committee report” that represented the wish-lists of the Senate and House appropriations committees. Almost no one got a chance to read that report before the budget was passed late at night and with barely a day for members to review it.

Mr. Bush agreed to sign the budget but said he was disappointed at Congress’s failure to overcome its earmark addiction. He announced he was asking his budget director, Jim Nussle, “to review options for dealing with the wasteful spending in the omnibus bill.”

What Mr. Bush knows, and Congress doesn’t want the taxpayers to know, is that the vast majority of the offending earmarks–the ones that aren’t part of the actual budget law and were instead “air-dropped” into the committee report–aren’t legally binding. A Dec. 18 legal analysis by the Congressional Research Service found that most of the committee reports have not been formally passed by both houses and “presented” to the President for signing, and thus have not become law. “President Bush could ignore the 90% of earmarks that never make it to the floor of the House or Senate for a vote,” says Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, who has read the CRS report. “He doesn’t need a line-item veto.” …

So how do they count tigers in the wild?

Wild tigers in India are under increasing threats from poachers, and seven of the country’s 28 reserves can barely sustain a breeding population, according to a Sunday article in the Miami Herald. The article went on to note that “no one is sure how many wild tigers remain in India, but most estimates put the total at only 3,000 to 3,500. Some believe it’s closer to 1,500.” How do wildlife researchers count tigers? …

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Couple of Slate columnists explain last night. Mickey Kaus first.

I’m as flummoxed as everyone else, having gone along with the near-universal consensus that Obama would win. Mystery Pollster has his work cut out for him. But I’m confident that soon enough there will be so many powerful explanations for what feels like an out-of-the-blue event that it will seem overdetermined. It’s important to memorialize this moment of utter stupefaction.

That said, here are four possible factors: …

Then John Dickerson.

Democrats like a fighter. Maybe that’s the simplest reason Hillary Clinton pulled out a surprise victory in New Hampshire. Before her campaign even arrived here, her aides were promising they’d take the fight to Obama. In the five days between the two contests, the Clinton campaign worked hard to bring Obama down to earth. Direct mail and phone calls attacked Obama on issues from abortion to taxes. Hillary Clinton upped her criticisms considerably at Saturday’s Democratic debate, in her stump speeches, and in heavy rounds of press appearances. Her central charge was that Obama was all talk. Voters who elected him would make the same know-nothing mistake they made in 2000 when they picked George Bush because they thought they’d rather have a beer with him than the other guy.

No one thought the strategy was working, including the Clinton staff. …

Maureen Dowd wonders if Hillary can cry her way back to the White House.

When I walked into the office Monday, people were clustering around a computer to watch what they thought they would never see: Hillary Clinton with the unmistakable look of tears in her eyes.

A woman gazing at the screen was grimacing, saying it was bad. Three guys watched it over and over, drawn to the “humanized” Hillary. One reporter who covers security issues cringed. “We are at war,” he said. “Is this how she’ll talk to Kim Jong-il?”

Another reporter joked: “That crying really seemed genuine. I’ll bet she spent hours thinking about it beforehand.” He added dryly: “Crying doesn’t usually work in campaigns. Only in relationships.”

Bill Clinton was known for biting his lip, but here was Hillary doing the Muskie. Certainly it was impressive that she could choke up and stay on message. …

For WSJ, Fouad Ajami writes on George W. and his effect on the Mid-East.

It was fated, or “written,” as the Arabs would say, that George W. Bush, reared in Midland, Texas, so far away from the complications of the foreign world, would be the leader to take America so deep into Arab and Islamic affairs.

This is not a victory lap that President Bush is embarking upon this week, a journey set to take him to Egypt, Israel, the Palestinian territories, the Saudi Kingdom, Kuwait, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. Mr. Bush by now knows the heartbreak and guile of that region. After seven years and two big wars in that “Greater Middle East,” after a campaign against the terror and the malignancies of the Arab world, there will be no American swagger or stridency.

But Mr. Bush is traveling into the landscape and setting of his own legacy. He is arguably the most consequential leader in the long history of America’s encounter with those lands.

Baghdad isn’t on Mr. Bush’s itinerary, but it hangs over, and propels, his passage. A year ago, this kind of journey would have been unthinkable. The American project in Iraq was reeling, and there was talk of America casting the Iraqis adrift. It was then that Mr. Bush doubled down–and, by all appearances, his brave wager has been vindicated. …

 

…

As is their habit, the holders of Arab power will speak behind closed doors to their American guest about the menace of the Persian power next door. But the Arabs have the demography, and the wealth, to balance the power of the Persians. If their world is now a battleground between Pax Americana and Iran, that is a stark statement on their weakness, and on the defects of the social contract between the Sunnis and the Shiites of the Arab world. America can provide the order that underpins the security of the Arabs, but there are questions of political and cultural reform which are tasks for the Arabs themselves.

Suffice it for them that George W. Bush was at the helm of the dominant imperial power when the world of Islam and of the Arabs was in the wind, played upon by ruinous temptations, and when the regimes in the saddle were ducking for cover, and the broad middle classes in the Arab world were in the grip of historical denial of what their radical children had wrought. His was the gift of moral and political clarity.

In America and elsewhere, those given reprieve by that clarity, and single-mindedness, have been taking this protection while complaining all the same of his zeal and solitude. In his stoic acceptance of the burdens after 9/11, we were offered a reminder of how nations shelter behind leaders willing to take on great challenges.

We scoffed, in polite, jaded company when George W. Bush spoke of the “axis of evil” several years back. The people he now journeys amidst didn’t: It is precisely through those categories of good and evil that they describe their world, and their condition. Mr. Bush could not redeem the modern culture of the Arabs, and of Islam, but he held the line when it truly mattered. He gave them a chance to reclaim their world from zealots and enemies of order who would have otherwise run away with it.

John Fund alerts us to today’s important Supreme Court argument on voter ID.

Supporters and critics of Indiana’s law requiring voters to show a photo ID at the polls square off in oral arguments before the Supreme Court today. The heated rhetoric surrounding the case lays bare the ideological conflict of visions raging over efforts to improve election integrity.

Supporters say photo ID laws simply extend rules that require everyone to show such ID to travel, enter federal office buildings or pick up a government check. An honor system for voting, in their view, invites potential fraud. That’s because many voting rolls are stuffed with the names of dead people and duplicate registrations–as recent scandals in Washington state and Missouri involving the activist group ACORN attest.

Opponents say photo ID laws block poor, minority and elderly voters who lack ID from voting, and all in the name of combating a largely mythical problem of voter fraud.

Some key facts will determine the outcome, as the court weighs the potential the law has to combat fraud versus the barriers it erects to voting. The liberal Brennan Center at NYU Law School reports that a nationwide telephone survey it conducted found that 11% of the voting-age public lacks government-issued photo ID, including an implausible 25% of African-Americans. …

Rob Bluey too.

All eyes will be on New Hampshire Wednesday morning for the first true primary in the 2008 elections. But even as hardy New Englanders trudge to the polls, something at least as consequential will happening in Washington, D.C., where the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in a major case on election law.

In Crawford v. Marion County Election Board and Indiana Democratic Party v. Rokita, the court will tackle the issue of vote fraud. The arguments will revive the debate over voter disenfranchisement that raged after the contested presidential election of 2000.

This time the controversy surrounds Indiana’s requirement that voters show photo identification when they cast their ballot. At a time when Americans are asked to show photo ID for routine things such as buying alcohol or getting on an airplane, it hardly seems unreasonable to do the same before voting. There’s also overwhelming public support for voter ID requirements; Rasmussen puts the number at 77 percent approval nationally.

In Indiana, however, a coalition of left-leaning groups — led by the state Democratic Party and ACLU — has brought suit against the state, claiming that requiring photo ID at polling places disenfranchises low-income citizens, minorities and seniors — constituencies considered key to Democratic electoral success. …

Thomas Sowell on the myths of 1968.

This 40th anniversary of the turbulent year 1968 is already starting to spawn nostalgic accounts of that year. We can look for more during this year in articles, books, and TV specials, featuring aging 1960s radicals seeking to relive their youth.

The events of 1968 have continuing implications for our times but not the implications drawn by those with romantic myths about 1968 and about themselves.

The first of the shocks of 1968 was the sudden eruption of violent attacks by Communist guerillas in the cities of South Vietnam, known as the “Tet offensive,” after a local holiday.

That this sort of widespread urban guerilla warfare was still possible after the rosy claims made by American officials in Washington and Vietnam sent shock waves through the United States.

The conclusion that might have been drawn was that politicians and military commanders should not make rosy predictions. The conclusion that was in fact drawn was that the Vietnam war was unwinnable.

In reality, the Tet offensive was one in which the Communist guerilla movement was not only defeated in battle but was virtually annihilated as a major military force. From there on, the job of attacking South Vietnam was a job for the North Vietnam army.

Politically, however, the Tet offensive was an enormous victory for the Communists — not in Vietnam, but in the United States.

The American media, led by Walter Cronkite, pictured the Tet offensive as a defeat for the United States and a sign that the Vietnam war was unwinnable. …

Detroit Free Press says crime drops when more folks carry guns.

Six years after new rules made it much easier to get a license to carry concealed weapons, the number of Michiganders legally packing heat has increased more than six-fold. But dire predictions about increased violence and bloodshed have largely gone unfulfilled, according to law enforcement officials and, to the extent they can be measured, crime statistics. The incidence of violent crime in Michigan in the six years since the law went into effect has been, on average, below the rate of the previous six years. The overall incidence of death from firearms, including suicide and accidents, also has declined. …

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We start with a few items related to globaloney. First a scary item from Protein Wisdom about California’s efforts to control thermostats in homes. “First they came for the thermostats ……. “

Jeff Jacoby has a welcome column. He writes about an article in the Russian news service Novosti that Pickerhead has been wanting to include but was put off by a poor translation. How’s this? “Stock up on fur coats and felt boots! This is my paradoxical advice to the warm world.” That’s a literal translation of typical Russian bombast, but it’s not what we want to offer here. Jacoby does better.

… “Stock up on fur coats and felt boots!” advises Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and senior scientist at Moscow’s Shirshov Institute of Oceanography. “The latest data . . . say that earth has passed the peak of its warmer period, and a fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012.”

Sorokhtin dismisses the conventional global warming theory that greenhouse gases, especially human-emitted carbon dioxide, is causing the earth to grow hotter. Like a number of other scientists, he points to solar activity – sunspots and solar flares, which wax and wane over time – as having the greatest effect on climate.

“Carbon dioxide is not to blame for global climate change,” Sorokhtin writes in an essay for Novosti. “Solar activity is many times more powerful than the energy produced by the whole of humankind.” …

According to Country Store, NASA has noticed the same changes to the sun as the Novosti article.

Today, the Space and Science Research Center, (SSRC) in Orlando, Florida announces that it has confirmed the recent web announcement of NASA solar physicists that there are substantial changes occurring in the sun’s surface. The SSRC has further researched these changes and has concluded they will bring about the next climate change to one of a long lasting cold era.

Today, Director of the SSRC, John Casey has reaffirmed earlier research he led that independently discovered the sun’s changes are the result of a family of cycles that bring about climate shifts from cold climate to warm and back again. …

OK, back to the contest over who’s going to be in charge of stealing from us.

Since he’s close to the action, Howie Carr’s might be a voice to heed about the vote in New Hampshire today.

John McCain is old – very old.

Which may explain his abject confusion about whether he supports amnesty for 20 million illegal aliens. When you’re 71 years old, short-term memory loss can be part of the package, along with the delusion that Wilfred Brimley’s endorsement is big with the iPod generation.

Last spring McCain and the hero of Chappaquiddick, with the help of La Raza, put together a grandiose scheme to grant amnesty to millions upon millions of foreign invaders. It was so outrageous they refused to hold hearings on it. The bill went down in flames, twice, and so did McCain’s campaign for almost a year.

Now McCain is back, sort of. But his “amnesty” bill is still political poison. So when he’s called on it, as he was by Mitt Romney Saturday night at Saint Anselm College, he speaks with forked tongue: …

Which might be a reason to listen to a Corner post. This begins a series of Corner posts suggesting McCain’s not doing so well. Pickerhead’s theory is McCain does poorly because many independents he counted on have been attracted to the Obama drama. Serves him right. He can only win a GOP primary that is thoroughly polluted by independents.

I’ve just gotten off the phone with Professor David Paleologos, who conducts the Suffolk University/WHDH poll in New Hampshire. I asked him why his poll is the only one showing Romney ahead. Here is what he said, hastily transcribed by me:

We all have different methodologies. I think the difference will be measured in the independents. We believe that this most accurately reflects where New Hampshire is going…I think the difference is there have been broad-brush gifts of independents to McCain. …

Dick Armey, one of the GOP’s grown-ups has Huckabee cautions.

… Of course, his genial demeanor and willingness to overlook both principle and fact is indicative of a distinct and disturbing trend in American politics. Huckabee seemed to come from nowhere in the race, but he is not just a lonely, surprise candidate, but a symbol of the new wave of feel-good conservatism, which seeks not to deal in policy that works so much as policy and rhetoric that provide emotional gratification.

Huckabee comes off as the self-esteem candidate, in which merely feeling good is the core of the message. He’s not the only Republican making a practice of peddling cotton-candy bromides. As FreedomWorks president Matt Kibbe recently pointed out, former Bush speechwriter and Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson has been pushing a similarly foolish agenda: inspiring, heartfelt–and utterly ineffective.

More than ever, we need to remember that freedom, prosperity, and opportunity are at the center of the limited government vision for America. Ours is an inherently compassionate and positive agenda, and it would be better if more candidates adopted Huckabee’s accessible, upbeat tone. But sunshine rhetoric in the service of liberal fantasies is a political and policy dead end. Allowing Mike Huckabee to become the face of conservatism would trade unity and principle for an ill-advised romance with a flighty, flaky new brand of politics.

Thomas Sowell gives all the candidates a glancing blow.

It was not that long ago that the big political question was how Rudolph Giuliani would do against Hillary Clinton in the November election. The Iowa caucus votes have made that question sound like ancient history, if not science fiction. The results of the Iowa caucus are only a small part of the story of this election year but their implications are significant. One implication that reaches well beyond politics is that a state that is 95 percent white gave its biggest vote total to a black man. More Iowa women voted for Obama than for Hillary. So much for the “race, class and gender” mantra among the intelligentsia. So much also for the “inevitable” or “invincible” candidacy of Hillary Clinton. Perhaps the biggest story out of Iowa is that 71 percent of Democrats voted against Hillary.

The next biggest story is that no one in either party won a majority. It is still a wide-open race in both parties. …

John Fund comments on the blame Bill Clinton is spreading around.

… Despite fawning media coverage of the “Comeback Kid” in the 1992 campaign and the media’s almost complete failure to cover the fundraising scandals that led to 24 guilty pleas after the 1996 campaign, Bill and Hillary still labor under the delusion that most reporters are biased against them. Their sense of victimization has intensified as they’ve seethed over the favorable coverage Barack Obama has gotten in recent days. Team Clinton is convinced reporters want to write premature obituaries of Hillary Clinton: “Give me a break. This whole [Obama] thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen,” a frustrated President Clinton told reporters in New Hampshire yesterday. …

Christopher Hitchens is tired of hearing about Obama’s race.

… The Iowa caucuses of 2008 were not the end of our long national nightmare about race, but another stage in our protracted national nightmare of piety, “uplift,” and deceptive optimistic windbaggery.

IBD Editors show what’s coming for Obama.

… Obama, whose foreign policy includes talking to our enemies while invading our allies, told the assembled veterans at the VFW Convention in Kansas City, “All our top military commanders recognize that there is no military solution in Iraq.” Except, of course for Gen. Petraeus.

Of the current surge, Obama says “our troops have helped reduce violence, but even those reductions do not get us below the unsustainable levels of violence of mid-2006.” The New York Times reported late last month that “violent attacks in the country had fallen by 60% since June.”

Obama’s idea of change is to spend “at least $2 billion to expand services to Iraqi refugees in neighboring countries.” Wrong again. As we have reported, Iraqi refugees are returning in droves to enjoy the peace and democracy we have established thus far.

Obama is a hard-core liberal whose voting record in the Senate is virtually indistinguishable from Ted Kennedy’s. Half the Democrats in the Senate voted for Supreme Court nominee John Roberts — even Pat Leahy and Russ Feingold. But not Barack Obama. It is doubtful as well his plans for change include less domestic spending and smaller government.

Obama to this point has been a stealth candidate, not hiding but not emphasizing his deep liberal beliefs, content to ride the wave of adulation that has carried him to this point. But is he the next John F. Kennedy, or merely the next Jimmy Carter?

Former Clinton guru Dick Morris thinks he’s the latter — “a Jimmy Carter, running for president on his personal moral outlook, his background and making a virtue out of his limited knowledge of how American government works.” We all know how the Carter administration turned out.

The Captain notes WaPo and WSJ editors are on the Dem scent too, and comments on Clinton crybabies.

How often do the editorial boards of the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal not only agree, but coincide on foreign policy? Rarely enough so that today’s twin broadsides on the Democratic presidential contenders is worthy of special notice. Both editorial boards scold the Democrats for not only getting Iraq wrong, but also for seriously misrepresenting the progress achieved through the surge.

The Post’s criticisms get tart indeed: …

… What Ms. Clinton, Mr. Obama, John Edwards and Bill Richardson instead offered was an exclusive focus on the Iraqi political failures — coupled with a blizzard of assertions about the war that were at best unfounded and in several cases simply false. Mr. Obama led the way, claiming that Sunni tribes in Anbar province joined forces with U.S. troops against al-Qaeda in response to the Democratic victory in the 2006 elections — a far-fetched assertion for which he offered no evidence. …

…

… Yesterday, Hillary let us know how hard it is to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune on a campaign trail. She has to eat fast food, she doesn’t get her exercise, and we should all care about how much she’s sacrificing for all of us! Today, we should pity Mark Penn because he had a bad day, which of course is because of all of us and the media.

Hey, didn’t these people sign up for this voluntarily? Don’t they get to lead the Free World if they win? Will the White House host regular pity parties, or only occasionally?

Bill seems to be the party coordinator. He’s complaining about underhanded tactics from Barack Obama? Perhaps Bill might want to review which campaign dug up kindergarten essays for a basis of criticism, and whose campaign second talked about how much more black Bill was from Barack. …

A stunning photo of a great white shark tailing a kayak showed up a few years ago. We came across the photographer’s story. How’s that for a change of pace?

… To capture this image I tied myself to the tower of the research boat Lamnidae and leaned into the void, precariously hanging over the ocean while waiting patiently for a white shark to come along. I wanted to shot a photograph that would tell the story of our research efforts to track white sharks using kayaks. When the first shark of the day came across our sea kayak it dove to the seabed and inspected it from below. I quickly trained my camera on the dark shadow which slowly transformed from diffuse shape into the sleek outline of a large great white. When the shark’s dorsal fin broke the surface I thought I had the shot, but hesitated a fraction of a second and was rewarded with marine biologist Trey Snow in the kayak turning around to look behind him. I pressed the shutter and the rest was history. Throughout the day I shot many more images, most showing the kayak following the shark, but all lacked the power of that first image of the great white tracking the kayak. …

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THE BIG STORY of the campaign so far has been the apparent end of Hillary’s hopes. Today is all Clinton collapse day, humor section and all. Borowitz, Scrappleface, and all the ‘toons. Borowitz says Hillary has repackaged herself as a black man.

Peter Wehner sets the tone.

… There are many things to say about the deeper meaning of this moment and what its passing will signify. Suffice it to say that it will be good, very good, for us to say farewell to the couple that brought you Carville, Begala, Blumenthal, and Ickes; the “war room,” the use of private investigators, and attacks on women like Dolly Kyle Browning, Paula Jones, Gennifer Flowers, and Kathleen Willey; impeachment for perjurious, false and misleading testimony to a grand jury; contempt of court findings; the promiscuous smearing of those whom they viewed as threat to their power; the charges of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” and assurances that “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”; and so much more.

On the eve of the New Hampshire vote and all it will mean, it’s worth recalling the words of the late, great Michael Kelly:

The lie at the heart of the vast and varied lie that is Bill Clinton’s defense is that lying is a victimless crime – and something that properly exists as a moral concern only between the liar and his maker and a few people immediately affected. But this is not so. Lying corrupts, and an absolute liar corrupts absolutely, and the corruption spread by the lies of the absolutely mendacious Clinton is becoming frightening to behold.

After she loses, Hillary Clinton will remain in the Senate, of course, and Bill Clinton will continue to make millions through his public speeches. They will not completely disappear from the national scene. But their days as a Democratic dynasty, and their center-stage role in American politics, are about to end.

John Fund is next.

Then Noemie Emery. She reviews Sally Bedell Smith’s recent book on the Clintons.

Between January 20, 1993, and January 20, 2001, the Clinton White House was home to three boomers of boundless ambition, high expectations, and vast self-regard, all three of whom thought that they ought to be president. Of these, only one–Bill Clinton–really was president. But the other two–his wife Hillary and his vice president, Albert Gore Jr.–firmly believed that they should be and viewed Bill’s terms in office as the jumping-off place to their own.

Unfortunately, only one–Bill, again–was a born, or even a good, politician, making the two others dependent upon him, first to lift them to within striking distance of power, and then to help them campaign. But Bill, too, had his problems, and so needed them: to keep him focused and disciplined, to impose some sense of order, to reassure voters disturbed by his fast-and-loose manners, and at least in the case of Hillary Clinton, to help him suppress and/or cope with his bimbo eruptions, if and when worst came to worst.

Sensing his needs, Bill picked his running mates carefully, but the resulting arrangements were not without stress. Bill needed both Gore and Hillary, but often resented attempts to restrain him. Gore and Hillary needed Bill, and resented each other. Hillary was in a state of continuous rage over Bill’s chronic adulteries. And Gore, a senator’s son who had been pointed from birth at the White House, and was seen by his friends and possibly by himself as being “more presidential” than Clinton, was in a state of anxiety about his own run.

How this played out is laid out in hair-raising detail in Sally Bedell Smith’s account of an administration and marriage like none other in history, and one that bred the highest level of dysfunctional angst ever seen in the White House–except for those moments when Richard Nixon dined alone. …

… Bill, it was clear, had an array of gifts that most power-seekers would kill for, but even these were frequently undermined by the stunning array of his faults. He was wholly unfocused, completely disorganized, and prey to a set of adolescent compulsions that even he could not start to explain. In his first two years as president (or before the Republican Congress forced focus upon him), his White House was described as resembling a college dormitory, a kindergarten, a free-for-all, or a claque of small children engaged in a soccer game, in a tumultuous scramble to fall on the ball. For no good reason, he would stay up all night, and be so exhausted the following morning he would doze off the next day. (“He can barely stay awake at today’s meeting,” Robert Reich noted, of one early session. “His eyelids droop and his pupils move up under them, leaving nothing but a narrow sliver of white.”)

“Bill’s lifelong inability to set boundaries threw policy making into turmoil,” Smith informs us. “Meetings scheduled for ten minutes routinely stretched to two hours as Bill pursued his favorite digressions. One session on Bosnia lasted seven hours without coming to a resolution. Rather than following a crisp checklist, Bill delayed decisions as long as possible,” endlessly seeking new facts. Every day, said an aide, was “a long road with quite a few detours” as Bill veered off course and off schedule. Everything was delayed, and everyone was kept waiting, from world leaders such as Helmut Kohl and John Major to a group of elderly Holocaust survivors, who were left standing under a tent in a rainstorm for hours while Bill loitered elsewhere. …

… With all of this chaos, Bill was in need of someone to restrain him in order to function, which led to his reliance on Hillary, and to a lesser extent on Al Gore. Bill needed a wife who would allow him to stray and not leave him, but would instead turn her anger against their joint enemies. This Hillary was; but she was also his opposite–disciplined, focused, intense, and pedantic–the essence of order, the Super Ego to his lively and rampaging Id. In Hillary, a woman who shared his intense love of politics but brought an entirely opposing set of skills (and deficiencies) to their joint quest for power, Bill found his corrective, his balance wheel, his apologist, and his true mate.

While they shared the same goals, she was his opposite in mind and in temperament: wholly controlled and rigidly disciplined, with a stolid, linear intelligence as opposed to his free-range, intuitive mind. At the same time, she had poor people skills, disliked campaigning, and found it grinding hard work.

“She is always on, like an assembly line,” Smith quotes a fundraiser. “Every interaction we have had has been identical. .  .  . She is the most controlled and disciplined person I ever met.” Her control slipped only in the case of his scandals, which, as part of their bargain, she was expected both to suppress and excuse. She usually finessed this by redirecting her fury toward Clinton’s accusers, but she remained in a perpetual state of resentment and anger, which spilled over to Bill and his aides.

“Her dissatisfaction could curdle the atmosphere when she directed her ire at his subordinates,” Smith informs us. “Washington advisers found it ‘demoralizing.’ .  .  . The most unnerving aspect .  .  . was their use of profanity, especially ‘f–k’ and ‘s–t.’ ” …

… With a keen sense of self-preservation, Bill Clinton picked his two most important political partners to help himself function, to compensate for his frailties, to atone for his sins. Intuitive, seductive, empathetic, and sometimes inspired, but wholly deficient in focus and discipline, he sought out partners with focus and discipline, and orderly, literal, minds. They served his needs, in that they helped him to function; but as he had his failings, they too had theirs.

With their rigor and discipline went a lack of intuition and nuance–the je ne sais quoi that makes a political talent, and that no amount of effort and diligence can ever supply. Bill loved campaigning; Gore found it a struggle, and his torment was obvious. Hillary is an unhappy warrior–at best, a grim one–and her description of the anticipated evisceration of Barack Obama as the “fun” part was a chilling moment that surprised no one who has looked into For Love of Politics.

Unlike Bill, Gore and Hillary have no sense of how they appear to others, and seldom fail to make the wrong gesture–Hillary’s cackle, the grating “caw” she unleashes in efforts at levity, is on a par with the sighs, eye-rolling, and other strange efforts at intimidation that helped Gore lose the election in the 2000 debates. With their conspicuous lack of political talents, neither Gore nor Hillary would ever have reached the top tier of candidates if they had not been elevated by being chosen by Clinton. But if they had been more graceful, and less pedantic and heavy-handed, they would not have been chosen, as they would not have supplied what Bill lacked.

It was a bargain that worked well for Bill, but ended in heartbreak for Gore, and may do the same thing for Hillary Clinton. This story is not over yet.

NY Times reports on the Clinton campaign.

Is this what it would have been like had Elvis been reduced to playing Reno?

Former President Bill Clinton has been drawing sleepy and sometimes smallish crowds at big venues in the state that revived his presidential campaign in 1992. He entered to polite applause and rows of empty seats at the University of New Hampshire on Friday. Several people filed out midspeech, and the room was largely quiet as he spoke, with few interruptions for laughter or applause. He talked about his administration, his foundation work and some about his wife.

“Hillary’s got good plans,” Mr. Clinton kept saying as he worked through a hoarse-voiced litany of why his wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, is a “world-class change agent.” He urged his audience to “caucus” on Tuesday for Mrs. Clinton, before correcting himself (“vote”). He took questions, quickly worked a rope line and left. …

The Captain comments on the Times story.

Karen Tumulty of Time adds more.

The scope of Barack Obama’s victory in Iowa has shaken the Clinton machine down to its bolts. Donors are panicking. The campaign has been making a round of calls to reassure notoriously fickle “superdelegates” — elected officials and party regulars who are awarded convention spots by virtue of their titles and positions — who might be reconsidering their decisions to back the candidate who formerly looked like a sure winner. And internally, a round of recriminations is being aimed at her chief strategist, Mark Penn, as the representative of everything about her pseudo-incumbent campaign that has been too cautious, too arrogant, too conventional and too clueless as to how much the political landscape has shifted since the last Clinton reign. One adviser summed up the biggest challenge that faces the campaign in two words: “Fresh thinking.”

Specifically, those inside the campaign and outside advisers fault Penn for failing to see the Iowa defeat coming. They say he was assuring Clinton and her allies right up until the caucuses that they would win it. Says one: “He did not predict in any way, shape or form the tidal wave we saw.” In particular, he had assured them that Clinton’s support among women would carry her through. Yet she managed to win only 30% of the women’s vote, while 35% of them went for Obama. …

Back to the Weekly Standard as Dean Barnett looks at the Clinton camp with skepticism.

… On Thursday night, Iowans acknowledged the patent hollowness of Senator Clinton’s campaign by rebuking her with an embarrassing third-place finish. Nonetheless, the senator, like a true political warhorse, greeted the setback with a strange “victory” speech. It went on and on, and was filled with empty, awkwardly worded platitudes:

What is most important now is that, as we go on with this contest, that we keep focused on the two big issues, that we answer correctly the questions that each of us has posed. How will we win in November 2008? By nominating a candidate who will be able to go the distance and who will be the best president on Day One.

The emptiness of her campaign was never more apparent. As she delivered these meaningless comments, assorted relics from the 1990s hovered like ghostly apparitions. To her right stood a beaming but ashen Wes Clark. Madeleine Albright mourned immediately behind her. And to her left stood the former president. As the New York Times’s Adam Nagourney aptly put it, President Clinton’s “face [was] frozen in a smile.” It was never more obvious that the House of Clinton’s hour had passed. …

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John Tierney starts us off with the expected doom and gloom climate predictions for 2008.

I’d like to wish you a happy New Year, but I’m afraid I have a different sort of prediction.

You’re in for very bad weather. In 2008, your television will bring you image after frightening image of natural havoc linked to global warming. You will be told that such bizarre weather must be a sign of dangerous climate change — and that these images are a mere preview of what’s in store unless we act quickly to cool the planet.

Unfortunately, I can’t be more specific. I don’t know if disaster will come by flood or drought, hurricane or blizzard, fire or ice. Nor do I have any idea how much the planet will warm this year or what that means for your local forecast. Long-term climate models cannot explain short-term weather.

But there’s bound to be some weird weather somewhere, and we will react like the sailors in the Book of Jonah. When a storm hit their ship, they didn’t ascribe it to a seasonal weather pattern. They quickly identified the cause (Jonah’s sinfulness) and agreed to an appropriate policy response (throw Jonah overboard).

Today’s interpreters of the weather are what social scientists call availability entrepreneurs: the activists, journalists and publicity-savvy scientists who selectively monitor the globe looking for newsworthy evidence of a new form of sinfulness, burning fossil fuels. …

Peace in the Mid-East after three generations? Max Boot says ask the Scots and the English.

… The accession of a Scottish monarch to the throne of England in 1603 as King James I might have been expected to end the strife. Yet the two realms clashed again during the English Civil War in the 1640s. The conflict did not truly end until 1745, when a revolt by mainly Scottish supporters of the Stuarts (descendants of James I), was put down–449 years after the start of Anglo-Scottish hostilities. …

A few great blog posts on the BS we get from the mainstream media. NewsBusters catches the NY Times with their phony GOP letter writer.

The quickest way to get the liberal media to pay attention to you is to claim to be a Republican who hates Republicans. It’s an almost infallible public relations strategy that of late has worked well for “Republican” Monica Green.

It’s also done wonders for “lifelong Republican” Henry A. Lowenstein, who has managed to get 20 different letters published in the New York Times since 2003, a remarkable feat when you consider that the Times (by its own admission) receives around 1,000 letters a day and prints only 15 on its letters page. …

A blog named NewsMeat.com tracks down Henry Lowenstein’s contributions – all to Dems.

Bizzy Blog with the last of the MSM BS. Remember just before the 2006 elections when the Lancet published a study that showed deaths in Iraq were 10 times the previous totals. National Journal found out it was all lies. Lies funded by George Soros.

….. Over the past several months, National Journal has examined the 2006 Lancet article, and another [PDF] that some of the same authors published in 2004; probed the problems of estimating wartime mortality rates; and interviewed the authors and their critics. NJ has identified potential problems with the research that fall under three broad headings: 1) possible flaws in the design and execution of the study; 2) a lack of transparency in the data, which has raised suspicions of fraud; and 3) political preferences held by the authors and the funders, which include George Soros’s Open Society Institute. …..

Mark Steyn comments on Iowa.

… Way back a gazillion years ago, when Mrs. Clinton was first exploring the exploration of exploring the possibility of an exploratory committee, some wily Gompers were suggesting the Republicans trump her history-making first-woman-president card by drafting Condi Rice. It turns out we dead white males on the right wing were worrying unnecessarily: The Democrats trumped themselves. Liberal voters want desperately to cast a history-making vote and, if that’s your priority, Barack Obama is a much more appealing way to cast it than Hillary. Don’t worry about this “Change You Can Believe In” shtick. Obama doesn’t believe in it, and neither should you. He’s a fresh face on the same-old-same-old – which is the only change Democrats are looking for.

As for Huckabee, the thinking on the right is that the mainstream media are boosting him up because he’s the Republican who’ll be easiest to beat. It’s undoubtedly true that they see him as the designated pushover, but in that they’re wrong. If Iowa’s choice becomes the nation’s, and it’s Huckabee vs. Obama this November, I’d bet on Huck. …

… Where I part company with Huck’s supporters is in believing he’s any kind of solution. He’s friendlier to the teachers’ unions than any other so-called “cultural conservative” – which is why in New Hampshire he’s the first Republican to be endorsed by the NEA. His health care pitch is Attack Of The Fifty Foot Nanny, beginning with his nationwide smoking ban. This is, as Jonah Goldberg put it, compassionate conservatism on steroids – big paternalistic government that can only enervate even further “our culture.”

So, Iowa chose to reward, on the Democrat side, a proponent of the conventional secular left, and, on the Republican side, a proponent of a new Christian left. If that’s the choice, this is going to be a long election year.

The Narcissist says Hillary had to go negative because the media weren’t doing their job. The Captain knows better.

Bill Clinton wants people to know that Hillary doesn’t do divisiveness — it’s thrust upon her. In a truly bizarre statement coming from the Clintons, they claim that the media forces Hillary to go negative against her opponents. She had to attack Barack Obama’s kindergarten essays, the former president informs us, because the media wouldn’t do it (via Memeorandum): …

Charles Hurt, NY Post DC bureau chief with Clinton analysis.

Awaiting her coronation here last night, Hillary Rodham Clinton instead faced a seething revolt within her own party. More than 70 percent of Iowa Democrats rejected her bid to get back into the White House. And so, after 15 years of domination, the Clinton dynasty has finally lost its grip on the Democratic Party.

More than anything else, Clinton’s campaign was built upon the aura of inevitability. That’s now shattered and left in Iowa’s frozen cornfields. What’s devastating to her is that she lost so badly to such a political novice. …

Andrew Ferguson says the banning of incandescent bulbs was not a bright idea, and no shining moment in the history of our struggle against the state.

On December 19, President Bush signed an energy bill that will, among many, many other things, force you to buy a new kind of light bulb. He did this because environmental enthusiasts don’t like the light bulbs you’re using now. He and they reason, therefore, that you shouldn’t be allowed to have them. So now you can’t. …

 

… The mind reels at the joke-like possibilities: How many Bush administration officials does it take to screw in a CFL (compact fluorescent)? As many as it takes to screw American consumers! But the Bushies aren’t the half of it. In creating the ban, Bush and his environmentalist allies were joined by Philips Lighting, which is–you should probably sit down–the world’s foremost manufacturer of CFLs. The phased-in ban will position Philips to crowd from the market any troublesome competitors. It’s a perfect confluence of interests: the Big Environmental Lobby, Big Business, and Big Government Conservatives.

But back to the screwees–those American consumers, also known, not so long ago, as the citizens of the United States, a free people, rulers of the world’s proudest self-governing nation. Will there be protests of some kind, expressions of disgust at least? And what if there aren’t? What if, as the ban slowly tightens, we hear nothing, not a howl, not a peep, just a long mellow moo? Then maybe it really will be time to turn out the lights.

Tim Carney in the Examiner says in Missouri ethanol comes from corn, corruption, and capitalism. Tim needs an econ course so he can understand when government picks winners and losers it’s called mercantilism, not capitalism. Big government conservatism has nothing to do with free markets.

Missouri drivers, starting this week, no longer have any choice in the matter — they must put ethanol in their gas tanks. Republican Gov. Matt Blunt says the state’s ethanol mandate that went into effect New Year’s Day will be good “for our farmers, consumers, [and] the environment.”

Time will tell if Blunt’s claims are correct for everybody else, but for his family, the benefit is clear: His brother’s significant investments in ethanol will appreciate.

The story of Matt and Andy Blunt and Missouri’s ethanol subsidies is not a case of criminal corruption, but it is certainly an illustrative case. It highlights the conflicts of interest, ulterior motives and opportunities for corruption inherent whenever government picks winners and losers in the marketplace.

London Times with news of significant flu vaccine developments.

A vaccine that could help to control a flu pandemic has shown encouraging results in its first human trials.

The vaccine, made by Acambis, based in Cambridge, should protect against all strains of influenza A, the type responsible for pandemics. Unlike existing vaccines it does not have to be reformulated each year to match the prevalent strains of flu, so it could be stockpiled and used as soon as a pandemic strain emerges. Nor does it need to be grown on fertilised chicken eggs, as the existing vaccines do, but can be produced by cell culture. …

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Jim Taranto with a good take on the campaign.

If it seems as if the presidential campaign has gone on forever, that’s because the presidential campaign has gone on forever. If we conservatively estimate that it began the morning after the Democrats’ victory in the 2006 midterm elections, we’re already 14 months into the campaign, with only 10 months to go (assuming no 2000-style overtime). So you can breathe a sigh of relief that this thing is more than half over. Just try not to think about 2012.

As we said, that is a conservative estimate. We can remember writing about Hillary Clinton’s presidential prospects as early as February 2005: “Only 1,348 days until the presidential election . . .” It’s now a scant 306 days. We also have a dim recollection–and if you do too, you’re a political obsessive–that George Allen and Rick Santorum were once discussed as serious contenders for the Republican nomination. (In case you’ve forgotten, they were U.S. senators from Virginia and Pennsylvania, respectively.) That part of the “campaign” must have predated Nov. 7, 2006. …

Mark Steyn introduces David Warren. Our two favorite Canadians.

Here, from my great compatriot David Warren, is the best Bhutto column of all. …

Here’s Mr. Warren’s column.

… Those who thought Ms Bhutto the agent of democracy and progress, because she was young and a woman and told them in fluent English exactly what they wanted to hear, should know that she, like every other woman who has risen to power in the region, including a prime minister of India, two in Bangladesh, and now two in Sri Lanka — inherited dynasties founded by powerful men. The (murderous) “Good Queen Bess” did not rise to the throne in 1558 on a wave of democracy and feminism in late mediaeval England. She rose as the daughter of the (murderous) Henry VIII. It is the failure to grasp such simple facts that makes so much Western journalism ridiculous.

I have been reading much rubbish in celebration of Ms Bhutto’s life. A number of my fellow pundits have further provided personal memoirs: it seems dozens of them were her next door neighbour when she was studying at Harvard or Oxford or both.

She was my exact contemporary, and I met her as a child in Pakistan, so let me jump on this bandwagon. I remember her at age eight, arriving in a Mercedes-Benz with daddy’s driver, and whisking me off for a ride in the private aeroplane of then-President Ayub Khan (Bhutto père was the rising star in his cabinet). This girl was the most spoiled brat I ever met.

I met her again in London, when she was studying at Oxford. She was the same, only now the 22-year-old version, and too gorgeous for anybody’s good. One of my memories is a glimpse inside a two-door fridge: one door entirely filled with packages of chocolate rum balls from Harrod’s. Benazir was crashing, in West Kensington, with another girl I knew in passing — the daughter of a former prime minister of Iraq. They were having a party. It would be hard to imagine two girls, of any cultural background, so glibly hedonistic. …

WaPo Op-Ed provides needed perspective.

The country is in a funk. Oil prices are at record highs, and the dollar is plummeting. Foreigners are buying out leading U.S. business assets. Environmentalists say the world is headed toward an ecological crackup of biblical proportions.

Today’s headlines? Well, yes. But for those of us old enough to remember, they could just as easily be bulletins from one of the grimmest decades in recent U.S. history: the ’70s.

That decade, when all the promise of the 1960s fizzled into disappointment, holds up a mirror to our contemporary pessimism. Then as now, Americans felt uncertain about the present and insecure about the future. But we found a way out of the gloom — and if that decade is our guide, we’re likely to do it again. …

Adam Smith posts on the energy war futility.

London Times columnist goes ballistic on the ArchDude of Canterbury.

The Archbishop of Canterbury told the faithful on Christmas Day that unless human beings abandon our greed, we will be responsible for the death of the planet.

Hmm. I’m not sure that I can take a lecture on greed from a man who heads one of the western world’s richest institutions. As we huddle under a patio heater to stay warm while having a cigarette in the rain, his bishops are living in palatial splendour with banqueting halls, wondering where to invest the next billion.

And are the churches open at night as shelter for the homeless and the weak? No, they are locked lest someone should decide to redress the inequalities of western society by half-inching a candelabra and fencing it to buy Christmas presents for his kiddies. …

… I would like Rowan Williams to come out from behind his eyebrows and tell us how many people have been killed by greed-induced global warming. Because even the most swivel-eyed lunatic would be hard pressed to claim it’s more than a few dozen.

Meanwhile, I reckon the number of people killed over the years by religious wars is around 809m. I tell you this, beardie. Many, many more people have died in the name of God than were killed in the name of Hitler. …

… This is a man who was arrested in the antinuclear protests of the 1980s. Who refused to call the 9/11 terrorists evil and said they had serious moral goals. Who thinks that every single thing bought and sold is “an act of aggression” on the developing world. Who campaigns for gay rights but wouldn’t actually appoint a homosexual as a bishop. And who recently said in an interview that America was the bad guy and that Muslims in Britain were like the good Samaritans.

In other words, he’s a full-on, five-star, paid-up member of the loony left, so anything that prevents the middle classes from having a Range Rover and a patio heater is bound to get his vote. …