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The Wall Street Journal eulogizes Norman Borlaug.

On the day Norman Borlaug was awarded its Peace Prize for 1970, the Nobel Committee observed of the Iowa-born plant scientist that “more than any other single person of this age, he has helped provide bread for a hungry world.” The committee might have added that more than any other single person Borlaug showed that nature is no match for human ingenuity in setting the real limits to growth.

Borlaug, who died last Saturday at 95, came of age in the Great Depression, the last period of widespread hunger in U.S. history. The Depression was over by the time Borlaug began his famous experiments, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, with wheat varieties in Mexico in the 1940s. But the specter of global starvation loomed even larger, as advances in medicine and hygiene contributed to population growth without corresponding increases in the means of feeding so many.

Borlaug solved that challenge by developing genetically unique strains of “semidwarf” wheat, and later rice, that raised food yields as much as sixfold. The result was that a country like India was able to feed its own people as its population grew from 500 million in the mid-1960s, when Borlaug’s “Green Revolution” began to take effect, to the current 1.16 billion. Today, famines—whether in Zimbabwe, Darfur or North Korea—are politically induced events, not true natural disasters. …

Ronald Bailey in Forbes also has praise for Norman Borlaug.

Norman Borlaug, the man whose work saved more human lives than anyone else in history, died at age 95 this past Saturday, Sept. 12, 2009. Borlaug was the father of the Green Revolution, the dramatic improvement in agricultural productivity that swept the globe in the 1960s. For spearheading this achievement, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2007….

…Unfortunately, in recent years, a gaggle of left-wing environmentalist critics have attacked the Green Revolution, arguing that intensive modern agriculture is ecologically damaging. These environmentalist gadflies oddly overlook the huge ecological benefit of saving billions of acres of forests and mountain terrain from being plowed under that tripling crop yields is chiefly responsible for. Had crop yields been frozen at 1961 levels, growing as much food produced today would require more than a doubling cropland, from 3.7 to 8 billion acres. This is an area nearly equal to the size of South America. In other words, the entire Amazon rain forest would now be gone.

Borlaug was a man who understood trade-offs, arguing that the Green Revolution has been “a change in the right direction, but it has not transformed the world into a Utopia.” Borlaug properly dismissed many of his soi-disant “green” critics as ignorant elitists. “They’ve never experienced the physical sensation of hunger,” he told the Atlantic Monthly in 1997. “They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.”

Borlaug never stopped working. He remained very active up until quite recently, working as a consultant to the International Maize and Wheat Center in Mexico and as president of the Sasakawa Africa Association, a private Japanese foundation working to spread the Green Revolution to sub-Saharan Africa.

Let us pause a moment to mourn the death of a truly great man.

Rick Richman posts in Contentions on the State Department’s latest move to force ousted President Zelaya back on Honduras.

The Associated Press reports that the Honduran government disclosed yesterday the identity of the officials whose visas have been revoked by the United States as part of Washington’s continuing pressure to reinstate former president Manuel Zelaya, namely, the successor president and 17 other officials:

Interim President Roberto Micheletti said losing his diplomatic and tourist visas would not weaken his rejection of the return of Zelaya. . . .

The move “changes nothing because I am not willing to take back what has happened in Honduras,” he said on Radio station HRN.

Washington on Friday revoked the diplomatic and tourist visas for 14 Supreme Court judges, the armed forces chief, the foreign relations secretary and Honduras’ attorney general, presidential spokeswoman Marcia de Villeda said Saturday.

The revocation of the visas for the 14 Supreme Court judges is a nice touch. In the future, even a unanimous Supreme Court faced with a violation of the country’s constitution will think twice before engaging in a “judicial coup.”

On The Corner, Jay Nordlinger posts on the irony of the Honduran response when compared with a statement Obama made during the campaign.

Yesterday, I commented on a statement made by Micheletti. Asked what he would do about Washington’s cut-off of aid, he said, “We will not back down. Dignity does not have a price in our country.”

Fascinatingly, that word “dignity” rang familiar with a reader of ours. He remembered something that Obama and his people said during the presidential campaign. You will find it in The American Prospect, here. They hated Bush’s democracy thrust — hated it. (Probably not so much because they hated democracy as because they hated Bush. If they liked chocolate ice cream, and Bush embraced it, chocolate ice cream would probably taste sour in their mouths.) Here is the relevant bit from The American Prospect:

I [the author of the piece] spoke at length with Obama’s foreign-policy brain trust, the advisers who will craft and implement a new global strategy if he wins the nomination and the general election. They envision a doctrine that first ends the politics of fear and then moves beyond a hollow, sloganeering “democracy promotion” agenda in favor of “dignity promotion” . . .

Dignity, huh? Now think of Micheletti’s statement. Amazing — almost a poetic twist of history.

By the way, what does “the politics of fear” mean, at least in the above context? Warning against terrorism and Islamofascism? Are terrorism and Islamofascism any less of a problem now that our government says “man-caused disaster,” not terrorism, or “overseas contingency operations” instead of War on Terror?

P. S. The above-mentioned reader, who remembered “dignity” is Jeff Dobbs, and he has blogged about this matter here.

Last Friday we had responses from Jonah Goldberg and Kenneth Anderson to Thomas Friedman’s article lamenting the ineffectiveness of democracy. Today Michael Barone, in RealClearPolitics, compares the current global warming hysteria to the overpopulation hysteria of the 1970′s.

…Back in the 1970s, when the elites were convinced that overpopulation would destroy the Earth, the Chinese acted as only a one-party autocracy or totalitarian state could: It limited women to one child. The result was that millions of female fetuses were aborted so that China now has about 120 males to every 100 females — a potentially destabilizing imbalance — and a slow-growing population that means China will get old before most of its people grow rich.

Meanwhile, the population bomb has turned out to be a dud worldwide, as birth rates declined, and the real demographic problem, as Ben Wattenberg and Phillip Longman have pointed out, is population decline. …

…The verdict isn’t in on global warming yet, but some alarmist predictions have proved false. The world has been getting a little colder in the last decade, and climate models have been failing to predict the recent past. Moreover, as global warming believer Bjorn Lomborg points out, it’s economically much more sensible to spend money on pending problems (like lack of safe drinking water) and on mitigating possible future effects of climate change than it is to reduce carbon emissions, which choke off the near-term economic growth needed to address environmental needs.

China’s one-party autocracy can ignore such arguments. Our two-party democracy can’t. Thomas Friedman may lament what Barack Obama on Wednesday night called “bickering.” But in a democracy, citizens don’t always take the advice of their betters …

…The lesson I take from the overpopulation scare is to be wary when media, university and corporate elites warn that we must change our ways or face disaster 50 years hence, and when they insist, as Al Gore does and as Tom Friedman seems to, that the time for argument is over.

In our two-party democracy, it never is. And shouldn’t be.

Jennifer Rubin comments on David Brooks listing several celebrities who have recently demonstrated a lack of humility.

…But oddly, there is one very famous figure missing from that lineup who personifies Brooks’s point: Obama. Obama ran an egomaniacal campaign, complete with creepy iconography, Greek Temple stage setting, and promises to lower oceans and heal the planet. Its central “idea” was him—the leader of a New Politics, a transformational figure. Now as president, he, like the athletes Brooks chastises, is a chest beater (”I won”). He too claims to know all (from racial profiling to red/blue pills to the inner workings of the “Muslim world”) and to know it better than others. Unlike the 1945 movie stars whom Brooks praises, there is nothing about Obama that is “understated, self-abnegating, modest and spare.” (We’re not talking about Obama’s views of the country he leads—which is forever required to apologize and atone for sins—but his views of himself and his relationship to his fellow citizens.) Many have remarked on his hubris in the current health-care debate—he alone will permanently fix the health-care system, and he alone is truth-telling….

David Warren discusses political correctness, and at its core a lack of humility.

…My reader will now guess I am about to raise again the issue of “political correctness.” I have written about it twice in the last eight days, in relation to so-called “human rights” commissions, and to the larger process of indoctrination and censorship by which the contemporary Left advances an essentially totalitarian agenda.

The purpose of political correction is to delegitimate opposition; to make the most basic facts of life undiscussable, and thereby eliminate debate. It is a device for seizing power. …

…The Left are human — it is perhaps the worst thing that can be said against them. They want what they want for themselves, but they also want praise and “validation.” The Al Gore phenomenon — in which a man lives in a house that burns enough electricity to power an African town, but also wants to be the poster boy for green — is hardly beyond fellow-human comprehension. The phenomenon becomes more complex, however, and harder for us to follow, as more elaborate ideological poses become the cover for lives more elaborately selfish. …

…It was the wisdom of our ancestors to realize that sanctity excludes posing as a saint. In the Christian West we once realized that the real battle was not between political forces, or ideological agendas, but between Christ and Satan. Note well: both of them outside ourselves, both appealing for our allegiance. The argument of Satan was presented in its simplest form, from the opening of our foundational document (i.e. the Bible). It was the message of the serpent with the apple: “eat thereof, and you shall be as gods.”

The argument of Christ was, conversely, “Give up all you have and follow me.”

To my mind, behind all questions of political correctness, is the same old background issue: the temptation to think that we can be as gods, that we can write the rules, and force the universe to obey us. To my mind, it begins with the denial of God, and ends in the inversion of every moral law, and the replacement of reasonable politics with murderous tyranny.

In The New York Times, Tyler Cowen, advocates less government and more market forces in business.

For years now, many businesses and individuals in the United States have been relying on the power of government, rather than competition in the marketplace, to increase their wealth. This is politicization of the economy. It made the financial crisis much worse, and the trend is accelerating.

Well before the financial crisis erupted, policy makers treated homeowners as a protected political class and gave mortgage-backed securities privileged regulatory treatment. Furthermore, they allowed and encouraged high leverage and the expectation of bailouts for creditors, which had been practiced numerous times, including the precedent of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998. Without these mistakes, the economy would not have been so invested in leverage and real estate and the financial crisis would have been much milder.

But we are now injecting politics ever more deeply into the American economy, whether it be in finance or in sectors like health care. Not only have we failed to learn from our mistakes, but also we’re repeating them on an ever-larger scale.

Lately the surviving major banks have reported brisk profits, yet in large part this reflects astute politicking and lobbying rather than commercial skill. Much of the competition was cleaned out by bank failures and consolidation, so giants like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan had an easier time getting back to profits. The Federal Reserve has been lending to banks at near-zero interest rates while paying higher interest on the reserves the banks hold at the Fed. “Too big to fail” policies mean that the large banks can raise money more cheaply because everyone knows they are safe counterparties. …

In The Wall Street Journal, Scott Harrington examines some of the President’s assertions in his address to Congress.

In his speech to Congress last week, President Barack Obama attempted to sell a reform agenda by demonizing the private health-insurance industry, which many people love to hate. He opened the attack by asserting: “More and more Americans pay their premiums, only to discover that their insurance company has dropped their coverage when they get sick, or won’t pay the full cost of care. It happens every day.” …

…To highlight abusive practices, Mr. Obama referred to an Illinois man who “lost his coverage in the middle of chemotherapy because his insurer found he hadn’t reported gallstones that he didn’t even know about.” The president continued: “They delayed his treatment, and he died because of it.”

Although the president has used this example previously, his conclusion is contradicted by the transcript of a June 16 hearing on industry practices before the Subcommittee of Oversight and Investigation of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. The deceased’s sister testified that the insurer reinstated her brother’s coverage following intervention by the Illinois Attorney General’s Office. She testified that her brother received a prescribed stem-cell transplant within the desired three- to four-week “window of opportunity” from “one of the most renowned doctors in the whole world on the specific routine,” that the procedure “was extremely successful,” and that “it extended his life nearly three and a half years.” …

…Responsible reform requires careful analysis of the underlying causes of problems in health insurance and informed debate over the benefits and costs of targeted remedies. The president’s continued demonization of private health insurance in pursuit of his broad agenda of government expansion is inconsistent with that objective.

Robert Samuelson tells us that with Obamacare there is no free lunch.

…Americans generally want three things from their health-care system. First, they think that everyone has a moral right to needed care; that suggests universal insurance. Second, they want choice; they want to select their doctors — and want doctors to determine treatment. Finally, people want costs controlled; health care shouldn’t consume all private compensation or taxes.

Appealing to these expectations, Obama told Americans what they want to hear. People with insurance won’t be required to change plans or doctors; they’ll enjoy more security because insurance companies won’t be permitted to deny coverage based on “pre-existing conditions” or cancel policies when people get sick. All Americans will be required to have insurance, but those who can’t afford it will get subsidies.

As for costs, not to worry. “Reducing the waste and inefficiency in Medicare and Medicaid will pay for most of this plan,” Obama said. He pledged to “not sign a plan that adds one dime to our [budget] deficits — either now or in the future.” If you believe Obama, what’s not to like? Universal insurance. Continued choice. Lower costs.

The problem is that you can’t entirely believe Obama. If he were candid — if we were candid — we’d all acknowledge that the goals of our ideal health-care system collide. Perhaps we can have any two, but not all three. …

In Forbes, Shikha Dalmia comments on the President’s determination to give us more government.

For several months now, the American people–as if exhorted by the ghost of William F. Buckley (no particular hero of mine)–have been standing athwart the Democratic agenda of socialized medicine, yelling, “Stop!” But President Barack Obama showed them the policy equivalent of the middle finger Wednesday night. …

…In other words, Obama would encourage unlimited health care consumption by patients while eliminating the last vestige of price consciousness. But the reason America is facing unsustainable health care cost increases is precisely because its third-party system of insurance doesn’t encourage prudent consumption by patients. Indeed, if Obama really can tame health care costs by making patients even less cost-conscious, I have an even better idea for him: Simply pass a law banning anyone from falling sick and mandate good health for all. If he can suspend the laws of economics, perhaps he can also transcend the laws of physiology. …

…The one Republican idea that Obama did endorse–caps on medical malpractice awards or tort reform–will actually hurt rather than help patient choice. Big medicine has long blamed the unnecessary tests and procedures these awards encourage for rising health care costs. But several studies have shown that this so-called practice of defensive medicine is a smaller driver of costs than excess physician salaries. By capping these awards, Obama will leave patients even less recourse against physician negligence–hardly the American way.

Obama lambasted the critics who claim his reform plan amounts to a government takeover of the health care system. But the plan he laid out Wednesday night will control every aspect of the medical transaction. It will tell patients when, what and how much coverage they must buy; it will tell sellers when, what and how much coverage they must sell. This is not a government takeover of health care? Then Tony Soprano is just a decent, hard-working businessman.

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Stuart Taylor has a follow-up article on the Holder torture review in the National Journal. Last Tuesday we posted his article in Pickings about why he didn’t think that there would be any CIA or Bush administration officials prosecuted.  In his latest article, Taylor discusses the Justice Department lawyers and the memos involved.

…But many still hope to drive from the legal profession the Bush administration lawyers who advised that waterboarding and other brutal interrogation methods were legal.

And Attorney General Eric Holder is endlessly mulling a 200-plus-page draft report recommending (according to news leaks) referral of former Justice Department lawyers Jay Bybee and John Yoo to state bar authorities for disciplinary proceedings.

The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility presented the draft to Holder’s predecessor, Michael Mukasey, in December after a five-year investigation. It focuses on two lengthy, August 1, 2002, memos that Bybee and Yoo, then his deputy, co-authored. They helped open the door for the CIA to use brutal interrogation techniques by construing very narrowly the 1994 law that makes “torture” a federal crime.

Holder should unambiguously reject this recommendation, as Mukasey reportedly did in a still-unreleased memo before leaving office. Even if these “torture memos” were wrong, the relevant rules clearly provide that the only grounds for the OPR or state bar officials to discipline Bybee or Yoo would be proof that they acted in bad faith by knowingly misstating the law, or were incompetent.

There is nothing remotely like such proof. Nobody who knows Bybee, now a federal Appeals Court judge, or Yoo, a leading scholarly advocate of sweeping presidential war powers who teaches law at the University of California (Berkeley), doubts that they believed in their own interpretation of the anti-torture law.

Nor does the sometimes sloppy reasoning in the two memos prove incompetence. These were highly capable lawyers working under severe time pressure with little guidance from case law, amid pervasive fears that another mass-murder attack might be imminent unless the CIA could force captured terrorists to talk. …

Fouad Ajami looks at the political and foreign policy realities surrounding the war in Afghanistan.

…But it will not do to offer up 9/11 as a casus belli in Afghanistan while holding out the threat of legal retribution against the men and women in our intelligence services who carried out our wishes in that time of concern and peril. To begin with, a policy that falls back on 9/11 must proceed from a correct reading of the wellsprings of Islamist radicalism. The impulse that took America from Kabul to Baghdad had been on the mark. Those were not Afghans who had struck American soil on 9/11. They were Arabs. Their terrorism came out of the pathologies of Arab political life. Their financiers were Arabs, and so were those crowds in Cairo and Nablus and Amman that had winked at the terror and had seen those attacks as America getting its comeuppance on that terrible day. Kabul had not sufficed as a return address in that twilight war; it was important to take the war into the Arab world itself, and the despot in Baghdad had drawn the short straw. He had been brazen and defiant at a time of genuine American concern, and a lesson was made of him.

No Arabs had been emotionally invested in Mullah Omar and the Taliban, but the ruler in Baghdad was a favored son of that Arab nation. The decapitation of his regime was a cautionary tale for his Arab brethren. Grant George W. Bush his due. He drew a line when the world of the Arabs was truly in the wind and played upon by powerful temptations. Mr. Obama and his advisers need not pay heroic tribute to the men and women who labored before them. But they have so maligned their predecessors and their motives that the appeal to 9/11 rings hollow and contrived. In those years behind us, American liberalism distanced itself from American patriotism, and the damage is there to see. …

…Eight years ago, we were visited by the furies of Arab lands. We were rudely awakened from a decade whose gurus and pundits had announced the end of ideology, of politics itself, and the triumph of the world-wide Web and the “electronic herd.” We had discovered that on the other side of the world masterminds of terror, and preachers, and their foot-soldiers were telling of America the most sordid of tales. We had become, without knowing it, a party to a civil war in the Arab-Islamic world between the autocrats and their disaffected children, between those who wanted to live a normal life and warriors of the faith bent on imposing their will on that troubled arc of geography.

Our country answered that call, not always brilliantly, for we are fated to be strangers in that world and thus fated to improvise and make our way through unfamiliar alleyways. We met chameleons and hustlers of every shade and had to learn, in a hurry, incomprehensible atavisms and pathologies. We fared best when we trusted our sense of things. We certainly haven’t been kept safe by the crowds in Paris and Berlin, or by those in Ankara and Cairo who feign desire for our friendship while they yearn for our undoing.

On The Corner,  Jonah Goldberg posts his thoughts on Glenn Beck.

From the Washington Post:

“Beck Strikes Again; Yosi Sargent Reassigned at NEA
By Michael A. Fletcher
The National Endowment for the Arts has reassigned former communications director Yosi Sergant, who had become the latest target of FOX News talk show host Glenn Beck.

Acting NEA communications director Victoria Hutter said Thursday that Sergant had left the communications post. The move came after he had come under attack from Beck, a conservative commentator who accused Sergant of attempting to use taxpayer money to fund art to support the president’s initiatives.”

Yes, I know some of my friends on the Right wring their hands about Glenn Beck. I don’t so much. Not only am I grateful for his support of my book, I like the guy personally. Moreover, while he can be bombastic and over the top rhetorically (and we don’t always see eye-to-eye), what makes his populism palatable to me (I’m not a big fan of populism) is that he’s fundamentally a libertarian populist. He’s not clamoring for the government to do more, he’s clamoring for the government to do less. And that’s the safest kind of populism there is. Meanwhile, he’s been absolutely fearless in going after stories and trends that even the rest of the conservative media have ignored. But we can have that conversation another time.

What I find striking is that if Beck were of the Left, taking down (or helping to take down) Bush appointees — with the same bombast and success — he would be hailed as the living reincarnation of the great Muckrakers of yore. He’d be the working man’s I. F. Stone, the TV heir to Michael Moore (which is a good thing to the Left). If he explored the roots and idea animating conservatism the way he has with progressivism, he would be a vital service to the education of the nation. And because a left-wing Beck would have to be working at MSNBC, you could be sure that the gang over there would be foursquare behind him.

Mark Steyn posts on Kyle Smith’s article in the New York Post on The New York Times’ latest excuse for its slow reporting of the Van Jones scandal.

The New York Post’s Kyle Smith has a peach of a column on The New York Times’ explanation that it missed the Van Jones story because “our Washington bureau was somewhat short-staffed during the height of the pre-Labor Day vacation period”:

Here’s how long-staffed The New York Times actually is. Long after Glenn Beck reported — back in July — that Jones was history’s first communist czar, and even after Gateway Pundit reported, on Sept. 3, that Jones had signed a wackadoodle 9/11 “truther” petition, The Times sent two reporters to Boston (in a story published Friday, Sept. 4) to pre-report the non-story of Joseph P. Kennedy II’s run for Ted Kennedy’s seat. (He later said he wasn’t interested. Also, the picture of Joseph the Times ran was actually of his brother Max.)

…Jill Abramson, the managing editor, admitted only to being “a beat behind” the story but added that the paper had caught up — after the saga was over. The EMS equivalent of this statement would be, “Sorry I didn’t take your 911 call for four days. At least I was in time for the funeral.”

There are two possibilities:

(a) the Times is as dopey as Ms Abramson seems eager to paint herself as;

or (b), they decided to ignore what was very obviously a real story and thus (vastly overrating their waning powers as gatekeepers to “all the news that’s fit”) bury it.

And here’s Kyle Smith’s piece.

…Jill Abramson, the managing editor, admitted only to being “a beat behind” the story but added that the paper had caught up — after the saga was over. The EMS equivalent of this statement would be, “Sorry I didn’t take your 911 call for four days. At least I was in time for the funeral.”

Although Abramson’s excuse was not an excuse, she proceeded to offer another one: “Mr. Jones was not a high-ranking official.”

Oh. And here I was, thinking that he was “one of Mr. Obama’s top advisers,” as I was told by, well, The Times, on its Caucus blog on Sept. 5. Confusing, confusing. …

…The Times was aware of the story, knew it was bigger than most of the stuff it puts in the paper every day, and had plenty of resources to cover it.

But The Times purposely ignored it because it was hoping that the story would go away, because it likes people like Comrade Jones and was hoping he wouldn’t be forced out. The Times doesn’t like people like Glenn Beck and didn’t want him to be able to claim Jones’s scalp. The Times’ prejudice blinded it to the fact that Jones’ fall became obvious on Friday, when a White House spokesman refused to defend him.

Newspaper of record? The Times isn’t so much a newspaper as a clique of high school girls sending IMs to like-minded friends about their feuds and faves and raves and rants. OMFG you guys! It’s no more objective than Beck is. …

Tim Novak, Art Golab and Chris Fusco, in the Chicago Sun-Times, examine one of the causes of Illinois’ fiscal crisis, fat pensions.

Want to retire with a fat pension? Get a government job in Illinois.

Nearly 4,000 retired government workers have pensions that pay them at least $100,000 a year. They include politicians, judges, doctors and school administrators, as well as top cops, firefighters and park officials.

And these numbers are soaring faster than taxpayers can afford. …

…It’s a frightening picture. It costs more than $800 million a month for state and local governments to cover their pension burden, according to a first-of-its-kind Sun-Times analysis of data obtained from the 17 largest retirement plans for government workers in Chicago, Cook County and the state of Illinois. Those plans cover 374,041 retired government workers or their survivors.

Even as the economy has forced governments to cut services and jobs, they’ve had to borrow money or raise taxes to meet their soaring pension costs.

And the problem has lingered for decades, as elected officials continually postpone dealing with it, much like a homeowner putting off needed repairs. In fact, they’ve kept sweetening retirement benefits for themselves and others, even as they shortchanged the pension funds, diverting money to other programs and services. And early retirement programs have made things worse.

“It’s both illogical and extraordinarily expensive for the governments, and the taxpayers pay the burden,” said Laurence J. Msall, president of the Civic Federation, a 115-year-old watchdog organization that has studied retirement benefits for government workers.

“We’re facing increased taxes and lower services to pay for these extremely generous pensions. It’s the unintended consequence of providing six-figure pensions to people who will live 20 years or more. People are drawing pension benefits far richer than they would in the private sector.” …

The Economist reviews a new biography of Charles Dickens, written by Michael Slater.

Over dinner once an American friend quizzed Charles Dickens about the workings of his imagination. Where on earth did those wonderful characters come from? “What an unfathomable mystery there is in it all!” replied the creator of Little Nell, Oliver Twist, Ebenezer Scrooge, Uriah Heep, Miss Havisham, Pip, Pickwick and the rest. Raising a wine glass, he continued: “Suppose I choose to call this a character, fancy it a man, endue it with certain qualities; and soon the fine filmy webs of thought, coming from every direction, we know not whence, spin and weave about it, until it assumes form and beauty, and becomes instinct with life.”

Scholars have pondered this mystery for well over a century. Michael Slater’s biography begins with two key events in Dickens’s childhood: the imprisonment of his father for debt and the boy’s own humiliating experience working in a boot-polish factory. More than 600 pages later the ageing Dickens, by now rich, famous and almost universally revered, is to be found hobnobbing with the queen, making genteel small talk about servants and “the cost of butchers’ meat and bread”. …

…Two things stand out. He is good at relating events in Dickens’s life to his books. This is especially useful in his discussion of “David Copperfield”, the most autobiographical of Dickens’s novels (and his “favourite child”). He is good, too, on the composition of the major works. He reproduces snippets from Dickens’s “mems”, the terse notes that he used to keep track of his large casts of characters and multiple storylines. “Esther’s love must be kept in view, to make the coming trial the greater and the victory the more meritorious”; “Jo? Yes. Kill him.” That such jottings were all Dickens needed to keep the spaghetti-tangle of “Bleak House” straight in his head is astonishing. Still more astonishing is the fact that with some of his later novels, such as “Great Expectations”, he saw the plot so clearly from the outset that he did not bother with notes of any kind. …

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David Warren columns on the 9/11 anniversary with a call for visiting upon our enemies a catharsis of defeat. Because if they don’t know they’ve lost, we’ll have to do it again. With our present president, we risk starting this century like we started the last – letting an enemy think they didn’t really lose. Regarding WW I, Mr. Warren says;

…The mistake we actually made was not pursuing that war to its conclusion, with a full invasion of Germany, to obtain an unconditional surrender. Such an invasion would have visited reciprocally on the people of Germany the experience of the people of France: the total violation of their security and dignity by German invaders; the humiliation that contributed to the pusillanimity of France in the next generation.

Germans were left with the possibility of believing that they hadn’t really lost the war, that they had been somehow cheated at Versailles, that in the upshot of their military aggression they were somehow victims not perpetrators; that scores remained to be settled.

This is precisely what made the Hitler phenomenon possible in Germany. And it was the bitter experience of 1945 — the unconditional surrender of Germany, in the ruins of Berlin — that ultimately cleansed the German nation of militarist ambitions.

The Second World War was the unfinished business of the First World War; just as in our own time the second Iraq War was the unfinished business of the first. …

Mark Steyn remarks on the welfare state in Great Britain.

…The bloke on the pavement demanding “Brother, can you spare a quid?” of me every afternoon can’t boast that kind of résumé. Never worked on the railroad, never worked in construction, never served in the army, never frothed up a decaf caramel macchiato. Never worked, because he never had to. One day those hardworking Poles will figure it out, too. A lot of immigrants already have. Two-thirds of French imams are on the dole. In the heavily immigrant Stockholm suburb of Tensta, one-fifth of women in their late 40s collect “disability” checks. Abu Qatada, a leading al-Qaeda recruiter, had £150,000 (a quarter million bucks, give or take) in his bank account courtesy of the British taxpayer before the drolly misnamed Department for Work and Pensions decided to cut back his benefits.

I confess a sneaking admiration for Mr. Qatada, who was at least using his welfare payments actively to fund the destruction of Western civilization, as opposed to just undermining it through sloth and inertia. When William Beveridge laid out his blueprint for the modern British welfare state in 1942, his goal was the “abolition of want,” to be accomplished by “cooperation between the State and the individual.”

In attempting to insulate the citizenry from the vicissitudes of fate, Sir William has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams: Want has been all but abolished. Today, fewer and fewer Britons and Europeans want to work, want to marry, want to raise children, want to lead a life of any purpose or dignity. “Cooperation” between the State and the individual has resulted in a huge expansion of the former and the remorseless shriveling of the latter. …

Thomas Sowell warns against drinking the Cool-Aid that the President is offering.

…Obama can deny it in words but what matters are deeds — and no one’s words have been more repeatedly the direct opposite of his deeds — whether talking about how his election campaign would be financed, how he would not rush legislation through Congress, or how his administration was not going to go after CIA agents for their past efforts to extract information from captured terrorists.

President Obama has also declared emphatically that he will not interfere in the internal affairs of other nations — while telling the Israelis where they can and cannot build settlements and telling the Hondurans whom they should and should not choose to be their president.

One of the secrets of being a glib talker is not getting hung up over whether what you are saying is true, and instead giving your full attention to what is required by the audience and the circumstances of the moment, without letting facts get in your way and cramp your style. Obama has mastered that art.

Con men understand that their job is not to use facts to convince skeptics but to use words to help the gullible to believe what they want to believe. No message has been more welcomed by the gullible, in countries around the world, than the promise of something for nothing. That is the core of Barack Obama’s medical care plan. …

Victor Davis Hanson reminds us of all the left’s Bush hatred.

… The Guardian published a sick column by one Charles Brooker, who asked out loud, “John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr. — where are you now that we need you?” Howard Dean, head of the Democratic party, raged, “I hate the Republicans and everything they stand for.” I think it was The New Republic that published Jonathan Chait’s infamous “Why I Hate George W. Bush” article — imagine the outcry should anyone now do the same reprehensible thing with Obama substituted for Bush (e.g., “Why I Hate Barack H. Obama”). A play ran in New York called “I’m Gonna Kill the President.”

Michael Moore was not censured by Democratic grandees for his horrendous comments (such as describing the insurgents in Iraq as modern-day Minutemen), but was instead rewarded with invitations from top Democrats, presumably because he was deemed useful. So far, unhinged Republican senators have not blasted Obama and suggested that our troops are akin to Nazis, terrorists, Khmer Rouge killers, and Baathists (in the manner of Senator Durbin or the late Senator Kennedy).

When an Iraqi threw shoes at President Bush, there was plenty of undisguised delight among liberal columnists and bloggers. …

Theodore B. Olson, the attorney who argued for Citizens United in the recent Supreme Court case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, wrote an article featured in The Wall Street Journal. He explains why McCain-Feingold, by prohibiting discourse funded by corporations and unions, violates the First Amendment.

…Hard-charging campaign rhetoric is something that the First Amendment’s authors had experienced firsthand. In making the choice between government-approved, polite discourse and boisterous debate, the Founders chose freedom. They did not say Congress could enact finely reticulated restrictions on speech. They said plainly that there could be “no law” abridging the freedom of speech.

The idea that corporate and union speech is somehow inherently corrupting is nonsense. Most corporations are small businesses, and they have every right to speak out when a candidate threatens the welfare of their employees or shareholders.

Time after time the Supreme Court has recognized that corporations enjoy full First Amendment protections. One of the most revered First Amendment precedents is New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), which afforded publishers important constitutional safeguards in libel cases. Any decision that determines that corporations have less protection than individuals under the First Amendment would threaten the very institutions we depend upon to keep us informed. This may be why Citizens United is supported by such diverse allies as the ACLU, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the AFL-CIO, the National Rifle Association and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

Persons of modest means often band together to speak through ideological corporations. That speech may not be silenced because of speculation that a few large entities might speak too loudly, or because some corporations may earn large profits. The First Amendment does not permit the government to handicap speakers based on their wealth, or ration speech in order somehow to equalize participation in public debate.

The case is not about Citizens United. It is about the rights of all persons—individuals, associations, corporations and unions—to speak freely. And it is about our right to hear those voices and to judge for ourselves who has the soundest message.

The Economist gives a basic breakdown of the arguments and how McCain-Feingold has led to abuses.

…The case for campaign-finance curbs goes something like this. Corporations have a lot of money, which could give them a lot of influence. So they should be barred not only from giving large amounts to candidates but also from paying to disseminate views that might affect an election. If they wish to raise money to express political views around election time, they must form a “political action committee” (PAC), jump through regulatory hoops and raise only limited amounts of money from each donor. The counter-argument is that this system (which is much more complicated than described) does not work. It has not kept money out of politics: the amount spent on presidential elections has grown relentlessly. And the complexity of campaign-finance law makes it hard even for well-meaning candidates to be sure they are not breaking it. John McCain, who ought to know better, was accused of an arcane but serious violation last year.

Big companies can hire lawyers to help their PACs find their way through the maze, but the little guys get lost. And some states have tried to use campaign-finance laws to stifle debate. In Washington state, prosecutors claimed that a friendly discussion of an anti-tax campaign on a radio show was a political donation that the campaigners should have declared. In Colorado, a group of homeowners protesting a plan to incorporate their neighbourhood into a nearby town were sued for displaying yard signs without registering as a PAC. Free-speech advocates won these cases, but they needed lawyers to do so.

Another effect of campaign-finance laws is to protect incumbents. That, suggested Justice Antonin Scalia on September 9th, may well have been their purpose. Incumbents have no trouble getting on the evening news. Their challengers are often unknown, and making it harder for them to raise money increases the odds they will stay that way. Outsiders can sometimes break in, as Barack Obama spectacularly showed. But the big donations that jump-started the insurgency of Eugene McCarthy, the anti-war candidate who prompted Lyndon Johnson not to seek re-election in 1968, would be illegal today.

Newspapers and television stations are exempt from the strictures of McCain-Feingold, so they can spend vast sums supporting or hounding political candidates without fear of reprisal. Some media firms, such as the New York Times, see no problem with denying other corporations the same right. But five of the nine Supreme Court justices seem to find it troubling. If a politician promises to ban tobacco, asked Chief Justice John Roberts this week, is it fair to ban tobacco firms from responding? …

The Institute for Justice, in keeping with their mission to protect our civil and economic liberties from government overreach, wrote an amicus curiae brief supporting Citizens United. The Institute released these statements regarding Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. You can read the brief at www.ij.org/citizensunited.

…“Based on today’s argument, free speech advocates can be optimistic for a broad vindication of First Amendment rights,” said IJ Senior Attorney Steve Simpson.  “Several justices recognized that a piecemeal approach to free speech is insufficient to protect vital constitutional rights.  As Chief Justice Roberts said, ‘We don’t put our First Amendment rights in the hands of FEC bureaucrats.’”

Simpson said, “Corporate speech bans are nothing more than government censorship of selected speakers.  The simple fact is it takes money, including corporate money, to speak up and be heard.  Under the First Amendment, the government has no businesses deciding which speakers gain admittance to the marketplace of ideas.”

“Freeing corporate speech will lead to what more speech always leads to—a debate,” said Simpson.  “Wal-Mart will support President Obama’s health care reform, as it has done, but the National Retail Federation will oppose it, as it has done.  Chrysler may well speak out in support of candidates who won it favorable bankruptcy treatment, but Chrysler’s institutional investors will also be able to criticize those same politicians for destroying the value of their bonds.  Corporations do not speak with one voice any more than individuals do.”

“It’s not the government’s job to protect us from ideas, even those backed by people and groups with great resources, good ideas or other tools of persuasion,” concluded Simpson.  “People either agree with speech or they do not, but they are able to make up their own minds.  The Court should open the floodgates to speech and let the people decide.” …

Andrew Sullivan has not appeared in Pickings for five years because he lives in Washington and has gone native. Summers, he’s on Cape Cod where this year he was pot-busted. Richard Fernandez of Belmont Club posts on what came next.

The Watergate scandal which brought down Richard Nixon originated in a “third rate burglary”.  The burglary itself was of no consequence to Nixon. It was the steps he took to protect the burglars that ultimately proved his undoing.  Similarly, the recent news stories about Andrew Sullivan’s citation for pot possession on Cape Cod revolve less around the possession of a small amount of marijuana in a national park then what happened afterward. Jacob Sullum at Reason describes the incident in a matter-of-fact way.

“Gawker, citing a report on the blog of Massachusetts Lawyer’s Weekly, notes that blogger/journalist Andrew Sullivan was cited for pot possession in July at the the Cape Cod National Seashore. The U.S. Attorney’s Office later sought to drop the charge, arousing objections from a judge who suspected Sullivan was receiving special treatment. …”

… One of former attractions of journalism was to be intimate with the brick thrown into your window, the gun shoved into your face, the sap applied to the back of your head; to know the smell of sawdust on a gym floor, to be familiar with groping for a dime amid the lint in your pocket for that phone call to the city desk; and to know the sour taste of bad coffee served at the cut-rate greasepit. This was the price of admission into a brotherhood, or so we were told. If today that’s changed to the point where a US Attorney will act to keep you from getting busted, then life has gotten easier for journalists, the question is, has it gotten better? In the Andrew Sullivan incident, the citation for pot possession is in itself trivial; it’s a third-rate bust. What is potentially serious is the burden that it places on Sullivan himself. Who can blame others if they believe he now acquired a debt of gratitude towards the US Attorney and his bosses? Who can blame the bosses of the US Attorney for thinking they now have a marker on Sullivan they can call in some day? …

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Roger Simon comments on the Wall Street Journal’s article about Iran’s threats to Israel.

Lost in healthcare, travel, etc., I was a couple of days late reading the WSJ report Iran Lawmakers Close Ranks, Endorse Ahmadinejad Cabinet: Iran’s parliament endorsed most of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s cabinet nominees, a political victory for the embattled leader and a signal his fractured conservative base will close ranks to keep the regime afloat.

The legislature approved all but three of his 21 choices, including the controversial appointments of the first female minister in the 30-year history of the Islamic Republic and a defense minister wanted by Interpol for a terrorist attack on a Jewish center in Argentina in 1994. Lawmakers broke into cheers of “Death to Israel” and “God is Great” when the approval of the defense minister was announced.

“Death to Israel” right in the parliament itself? Sounds pretty medieval, doesn’t it? Of course, no surprise there. But as per the headline, what would you do if Prime Minister of Israel? When a lot men, including the head of state, say they want to kill, indeed have killed you in this instance, do you take them at their words – or do you just,as some do, dismiss it as an exaggeration, a façon de parler, as they say? Would you act or would you wait until the international community holds some meetings?

Martin Peretz notices some good sense on the Middle East for WaPo editors, and none from the administration.

… Still, the real rogue in this drama is Iran itself and its macabre president, Dr. Ahmadinejad. The government is now making war on its own people. And, soon, perhaps, it may–as Berthold Brecht suggested to his own German Democratic Republic–dissolve its people. But its response to Washington’s nine-month limp diplomacy is just what that diplomacy deserves. In the meantime, we are still talking deadlines while the building of the bombs and the missiles goes on apace.

The Washington Post this morning has dissected the situation. It is nothing less than grim. And the administration looks just plain silly and very very weak.

Charles Krauthammer says that Van Jones had a number of radical views and quotes, but was forced to resign for one reason.

…Why? He’s gone for one reason and one reason only. You can’t sign a petition demanding not one but four investigations of the charge that the Bush administration deliberately allowed Sept. 11, 2001 — i.e., collaborated in the worst massacre ever perpetrated on American soil — and be permitted in polite society, let alone have a high-level job in the White House.

Unlike the other stuff (see above), this is no trivial matter. It’s beyond radicalism, beyond partisanship. It takes us into the realm of political psychosis, a malignant paranoia that, unlike the Marxist posturing, is not amusing. It’s dangerous. In America, movements and parties are required to police their extremes. Bill Buckley did that with Birchers. Liberals need to do that with “truthers.”

You can no more have a truther in the White House than you can have a Holocaust denier — a person who creates a hallucinatory alternative reality in the service of a fathomless malice.  …

…But on the eighth anniversary of 9/11 — a day when there were no truthers among us, just Americans struck dumb by the savagery of what had been perpetrated on their innocent fellow citizens — a decent respect for the memory of that day requires that truthers, who derangedly desecrate it, be asked politely to leave. By everyone.

The Nose on Your Face has a hilarious motivational poster featuring Van Jones at his new job asking to have the title of Fry Czar.

Obamacare is solely about increasing government power over the lives of US citizens, explains Mark Steyn.

…But, for the sake of argument, let us concede the president’s current number of 30 million uninsured. In order to do something for the 10 percent of the population outside the current system, why is it necessary to destabilize the arrangements of the 90 percent within it?

Well, says the president, not so fast. Lots of people with insurance run into problems when they change jobs or move to another state. OK, In that case, why not ease the obstacles to health care portability?

Well, says the president, shuffling his cups and moving the pea under another shell, we’re spending too much on health care. By “we’re,” he means you and you and you and you and millions of other Americans making individual choices over which he casually claims collective jurisdiction.

And that, ultimately, gets closer than anything else he says to giving the game away. For most of the previous presidency, the Left accused George W. Bush of using 9/11 as a pretext to attack Iraq. Since January, his successor has used the economic slump as a pretext to “reform” health care. Most voters don’t buy it: They see it as Obama’s “war of choice,” and the more frantically he talks about it as a matter of urgency the weirder it seems. If he’s having difficulty selling it, that’s because it’s not about “health.” As I’ve written before, the appeal of this issue to him and to Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank et al is that governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture – one in which elections are always fought on the Left’s issues and on the Left’s terms, and in which “conservative” parties no longer talk about small government and individual liberty but find themselves retreating to one last pitiful rationale: that they can run the left-wing state more effectively than the Left can. Listen to your average British Tory or French Gaullist on the campaign trail, pledging to “deliver” government services more “efficiently.” …

David Harsanyi responds to Obama’s lies with sarcasm.

…The president says that the public option is small potatoes because it would only cover 5 percent of Americans, pay for itself and run like a private not-for-profit. If such an option can change the dynamics of competition in health insurance, why not open a new private not-for-profit organization that pays for itself?

Silly question. As we all know, if any organization has demonstrated an uncanny ability to control costs, drive innovation and foster competition, it’s been government. …

…You may wonder how President Obama can logically sell a public option while at the same time claim that reform will be paid for by waste found in another “public” option. You may also be wondering how mandates, price controls, regulations and added costs will save us any money and preserve level of care. Don’t. Just bask in the radiance of barren rhetoric.

Because when the president tells us that this is “the season for action” and we can no longer waste time debating, he means that legislation won’t be initiated until 2013…

Timothy Garton Ash, in the Toronto Globe and Mail, is left-leaning, but does make a good point. Obama used a special address to Congress merely to advance his political agenda as compared to previous presidents.

…Just 71/2 months into his term, Mr. Obama has reached for the American legislative equivalent of a nuclear weapon. A special address to both houses of Congress – over and above the inaugural and State of the Union addresses – is an exceptional step, last taken by George W. Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. According to veteran political commentator Mark Shields, Lyndon B. Johnson delivered only two such addresses, one after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the other on civil rights. Franklin D. Roosevelt gave only one, to ask Congress to declare war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

And Mr. Obama used it for this …

In the National Review, Ramesh Ponnuru dissects more Obamacare lies.

…Obama insists that health-care reform will not result in “government funding of abortions.” Those who claim that it will, he told a group of religious leaders, are ignoring the biblical injunction against “bearing false witness.” (He did not mention them by name, but the country’s Catholic bishops are among those who have borne that witness.) In his radio address he said, “When it comes to the current ban on using tax dollars for abortions, nothing will change under reform.” The current ban applies only to programs, such as Medicaid, that are funded in the annual spending bill for the Health and Human Services Department; the bills before Congress create new, separate funding streams for both the public option and for subsidies to help tens of millions of people buy insurance. Under all of the major bills moving through Congress, taxpayers will subsidize the purchase of insurance policies that cover abortion. The House version of the bill explicitly authorizes the secretary of health and human services to decree that the public option will cover abortion using funds from a Treasury account. The Senate bill has provisions that could easily be read by courts to require that private insurance plans cover abortion, too.

The president’s insistence that his party’s version of health-care reform will not provide coverage to illegal immigrants is, at best, disingenuous. The House health-care bill says that they are ineligible to receive tax credits to buy insurance. But the bills do not require that the legal status of beneficiaries be verified, and in committee deliberations most Democrats have voted against amendments to add that requirement. If the president does not know these facts, surely people around him do. Maybe there is an argument for providing health coverage to illegal immigrants, but the Democrats are not making it openly.

The president is, in fact, a font of misinformation about his administration’s signature initiative. …

…And in some cases, notably those of immigration, abortion, Medicare, and the loss of private coverage, Obama has been misleading in a way that is hard to credit as innocent. On these issues, the liberal accusation that conservatives are lying seems pretty close to a lie itself — perhaps a case of projection.

Americans have increasing doubts about President Obama’s agenda but generally like him as a person. They consider him honest and trustworthy, and give him the benefit of the doubt. As the health-care debate continues, it becomes less and less clear that Obama deserves that trust.

WSJ Editors inform us on the political play in Massachusetts, and sets up a good punchline as well.

John Kerry, the former junior Senator from Massachusetts, was back in Boston Wednesday, urging the state legislature to change the law governing U.S. Senate vacancies. The seat held by Edward Kennedy from 1962 until his death last month is to be filled in a January special election. Mr. Kerry, echoing a letter Kennedy wrote not long before he died, asked lawmakers to enact legislation allowing Governor Deval Patrick to appoint a Senator to serve in the interim.

“What Ted proposed is a plan that is hardly radical,” Mr. Kerry declared in his prepared testimony. “It’s hardly even unprecedented, even in Massachusetts.” That’s for sure. The law in the Bay State provided for interim appointment by the Governor as recently as 2004. That, of course, was the year that Mr. Kerry won the Democratic nomination for President. Just in case he won, the state legislature changed the law to strip the Governor of this power. That change also came at Senator Kennedy’s urging.

What changed in the ensuing five years? In 2004, the Governor, Mitt Romney, was a Republican. Mr. Patrick is a Democrat. So are the overwhelming number of state lawmakers, who overrode Mr. Romney’s veto. Raw partisan advantage explains why Mr. Kerry, like his departed colleague, was for the 2004 change before he was against it.

The Economist reviews two new books on the Credsis, A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers, by Lawrence G. McDonald and Patrick Robinson, and This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, by Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff.

…Many blame the sycophantic “court of King Richard” for Lehman’s undoing. To feed his desire for ever bigger bonuses, Mr Fuld encouraged the use of borrowed money to take big bets on rising property prices. He did not help matters by riling Hank Paulson, the former boss of Goldman Sachs turned treasury secretary, at a private dinner in early 2008. Though Mr Paulson encouraged Lehman’s boss to sell the firm, Mr Fuld came away with a different message. “[W]e have huge brand with [T]reasury,” he swiftly wrote in a now famous memo. This smug disregard of what was more an order than advice perhaps strengthened Mr Paulson’s resolve to let Lehman go bust—a decision that was to prove catastrophic within days as the entire financial system panicked.

That, at least, is how Lawrence McDonald tells it. The former Lehman trader’s inside account of the investment bank’s collapse, published earlier this summer (and newly in paperback in Britain), has been branded by Mr Fuld as “absolutely slanderous”, not least for its description of him bunkered in his huge office on the 31st floor of Lehman’s headquarters (“Well, I left my office, I left my office plenty,” he has countered). It would come as no surprise to learn that Mr McDonald (who wrote his account with Patrick Robinson) has taken some liberties in his highly readable yarn, which hits its stride a few chapters in. He provides no sources for scenes that take place after he was fired in early 2008, many of which show Mr Fuld in a particularly bad light. Yet “A Colossal Failure of Common Sense” largely rings true. It expresses the anger that many former Lehman employees still feel toward Mr Fuld. And it convincingly characterises the investment bank as a house divided against itself, between the bears who had foreseen bubbles and the bulls who wrongly believed that this time would be different.

The silly notion that history and precedent have no bearing on contemporary finance is at the root of what Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff call “eight centuries of financial folly”. The two economists’ book is no page-turner (though it is much more readable than the academic research it draws from). But it is essential reading nonetheless, and is certain to have a longer shelf-life than the Lehman book, both for its originality and for the sobering patterns of financial behaviour it reveals.

The authors identify several red flags that indicate a looming financial crisis (such as house prices rising in tandem with increased debt-to-income ratios), many of which were visible in the run up to Lehman’s demise and the panic that followed. Even more worrying is their evidence of just how damaging banking crises tend to be, and how long it takes to recover from them. In the aftermath of the average crisis, asset prices fall sharply. Real housing prices fall on average by 36% over six years, equity prices by 56% over three-and-a-half years. Unemployment tends to rise by seven percentage points during the down phase of the cycle, which on average lasts four years. Government debt increases by 86%; GDP falls by over 9% on average, and typically takes ten years to return to what it was before the crisis. (When only post-war crises are considered, this changes to just over four years, though the current crisis is worse than any of them.) …

And The Economist also reviews In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic, by David Wessel.

Central bankers are not typically associated with high drama. But a year ago America’s top economic policymakers faced a momentous decision: whether or not to let Lehman Brothers fail (see article).

Ever since, debate has raged about the effect of these decisions. Could Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Hank Paulson, then treasury secretary, have saved Lehman? Was their failure to do so a colossal mistake, or would the financial crisis have deteriorated anyway? Analysts will debate these questions for years. As they do, this book should be at their side. David Wessel has written a gripping blow-by-blow account of how the top brass at the Federal Reserve and Treasury flailed against financial collapse. …

…This book is not a comprehensive account of the crisis: that would have required more time, more research and the inclusion of people other than the officials involved. Nor is it wholly impartial. Mr Wessel’s assessment of Mr Geithner is a bit rose-tinted, while he overdoes the criticism of Mr Paulson as bungling and erratic. Nor does the book stand out analytically. Mr Wessel is broadly sympathetic to the officials’ response. When he faults them for being slow to realise the gravity of the crisis, or for failing to prepare for the collapse of another big financial institution after the Bear Stearns bail-out, his criticisms are conventional and underdeveloped.

Mr Wessel spends little time teasing out lessons for crisis-management or for the future of central banking. But he has written a cracking story, the best chronicle so far of what officials were doing in the great financial bust of 2007-08.

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SHE’s Baaaack!   SHE, as in Camille Paglia, who blasts ObamaCare and it’s presumptions. You’d never know she voted for the amateur.

… By foolishly trying to reduce all objections to healthcare reform to the malevolence of obstructionist Republicans, Democrats have managed to destroy the national coalition that elected Obama and that is unlikely to be repaired. If Obama fails to win reelection, let the blame be first laid at the door of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who at a pivotal point threw gasoline on the flames by comparing angry American citizens to Nazis. It is theoretically possible that Obama could turn the situation around with a strong speech on healthcare to Congress this week, but after a summer of grisly hemorrhaging, too much damage has been done. At this point, Democrats’ main hope for the 2012 presidential election is that Republicans nominate another hopelessly feeble candidate. Given the GOP’s facility for shooting itself in the foot, that may well happen.

This column has been calling for heads to roll at the White House from the get-go. Thankfully, they do seem to be falling faster — as witness the middle-of-the-night bum’s rush given to “green jobs” czar Van Jones last week — but there’s a long way to go. An example of the provincial amateurism of current White House operations was the way the president’s innocuous back-to-school pep talk got sandbagged by imbecilic support materials soliciting students to write fantasy letters to “help” the president (a coercive directive quickly withdrawn under pressure). Even worse, the entire project was stupidly scheduled to conflict with the busy opening days of class this week, when harried teachers already have their hands full. Comically, some major school districts, including New York City, were not even open yet. And this is the gang who wants to revamp national healthcare?

Why did it take so long for Democrats to realize that this year’s tea party and town hall uprisings were a genuine barometer of widespread public discontent and not simply a staged scenario by kooks and conspirators? First of all, too many political analysts still think that network and cable TV chat shows are the central forums of national debate. But the truly transformative political energy is coming from talk radio and the Web — both of which Democrat-sponsored proposals have threatened to stifle, in defiance of freedom of speech guarantees in the Bill of Rights. I rarely watch TV anymore except for cooking shows, history and science documentaries, old movies and football. Hence I was blissfully free from the retching overkill that followed the deaths of Michael Jackson and Ted Kennedy — I never saw a single minute of any of it. It was on talk radio, which I have resumed monitoring around the clock because of the healthcare fiasco, that I heard the passionate voices of callers coming directly from the town hall meetings. Hence I was alerted to the depth and intensity of national sentiment long before others who were simply watching staged, manipulated TV shows. …

Roger Simon responds to Camille Paglia’s article.

In an otherwise trenchant and amusing column, Camille Paglia evinces surprise that the Democrats, liberals, progressives, call them what you will, have made such a hash of things under Obama and have become, mirabile dictu, an elite.

‘How has “liberty” become the inspirational code word of conservatives rather than liberals? (A prominent example is radio host Mark Levin’s book “Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto,” which was No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list for nearly three months without receiving major reviews, including in the Times.) I always thought that the Democratic Party is the freedom party — but I must be living in the nostalgic past. Remember Bob Dylan’s 1964 song “Chimes of Freedom,” made famous by the Byrds? And here’s Richie Havens electrifying the audience at Woodstock with “Freedom! Freedom!” Even Linda Ronstadt, in the 1967 song “A Different Drum,” with the Stone Ponys, provided a soaring motto for that decade: “All I’m saying is I’m not ready/ For any person, place or thing/ To try and pull the reins in on me.”’

Well, sure. But where were you, Camille? We’ve been living in a world-upside-down for over a decade now, even before 9-11 (when people like me started to wake up.) I know they would probably boot you out of Salon, even though you are the only thing worth reading over there, if you moved any further to the right, but c’mon, girl. Bob Dylan is less liberal than I am. Reification has set in on the Left. Don’t you be a part of it. Not to put to fine a point on it “Le gauche n’existe pas.” It’s over. It doesn’t exist. There’s no there there. We live in a world where Keith Olbermann is a “gauchiste.” What could be more square than that? Enough. …

Abby Thernstrom has interesting back story to the site of Obama’s student lecture yesterday. She thinks he missed an opportunity. It wasn’t the first he missed. His presidency is one long missed opportunity.

…The racial gap in academic achievement was closing, she said. It wasn’t true then; it isn’t true now. The College Board has just released its report on the 2009 SAT scores of college-bound high school seniors. In the six years since O’Connor’s opinion, the racial gap has widened slightly, and is substantially wider than it was two decades ago. We’re peddling backward on this front.

That gap reflects real deficiencies in skills and knowledge that cripple the life chances of too many black and Hispanic youngsters — deficiencies that were very apparent in the New Haven firefighters promotion test that the Supreme Court upheld 5–4 in this past term — much to the consternation of civil-rights groups. The result: Test designers are reportedly scrambling to come up with assessments that do not measure cognitive skills and thus have no racially disparate impact.

Obama’s innocuous speech was actually a missed opportunity. Instead of platitudes about the importance of working hard, he could have taken on the anti-testing crowd. Standards-based tests, he might have said, are an essential tool in assessing the skills of those applying to law schools — but also in deciding who is qualified to be lieutenant in a fire department. Hostility to such assessments in the K–12 years is not a civil-rights position. It betrays a callousness and indifference to the future of disadvantaged kids. …

Ralph Peters, in the New York Post, comments on the Obama administration’s illogical and irresponsible response to the situation in Honduras.  He gives us a quick recap of the events.

…Our thug-worshipping diplomats figured they’d slip it by us. With the nation focused on barbecues and the beach, they announced that, if Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez’s client, Manuel Zelaya, isn’t returned to power in Honduras, the United States won’t recognize the results of that country’s upcoming free elections.

Why was former president Zelaya driven from his would-be throne in Tegucigalpa? He tried to subvert Honduras’ Constitution and set himself up as president-for-life.

In June, the elected legislators and the Honduran Supreme Court had enough. As Zelaya aligned with Chavez, the Castro regime, Nicaraguan caudillo Daniel Ortega and other extreme leftists, the Honduran government gave the would-be dictator the boot.

Acting under legal orders, the army peacefully arrested Zelaya and shipped him out of the country. No murders, no Chavez-style imprisonments.

It was not a military coup. An elected congress and interim president, not a general, run the country today.

But the Obama administration has decided that this “violation” is so dreadful that we won’t even recognize future free elections in Honduras. …

…if Obama thinks that handing over a “little” country he couldn’t find on a map is going to win him enduring applause and cooperative friends in Latin America, he’s crazy. What he’s actually doing is frightening our friends. If democratic governments south of the border can’t rely on US support, to whom can they turn? …

Sarah Palin blasted AP for printing photos of a dying marine. David Harsanyi begs to differ.

… When looking at the photo series, “The Death of a Marine,” I felt a heightened respect for the gravity of war. The pictures unquestionably added humanity and context to Bernard’s death.

Now, if I could recall a wanton penchant of the press to run photos of dead Marines, my reaction might have been very different.

It is also conceivable, of course, that I’m a callous journalist, willing to set aside all decency to quench my baser voyeuristic instincts. There is an undeniable emotional component to these pictures that can’t be disregarded. It is unfathomable to imagine the anguish the Bernard family must feel. …

… But on the debate over the substance of these pictures, the press has one overriding question to ask: Do the photos help citizens better understand the story of the war in Afghanistan?

Obviously, they do.

Jennifer Rubin comments on Elliott Abrams reply to Jimmy Carter’s latest “peace” proposal.

The Washington Post’s editors afford Elliott Abrams space to dismantle Jimmy Carter’s vile op-ed (which appeared in the Post over the weekend) accusing Israel of maintaining a “ghetto” for Palestinians and single-handedly preventing an outbreak of peace in the Middle East. Abrams explains that Carter’s anti-Israel rant ignored polling data that showed an uptick in Palestinians’ sense of personal security and also overlooked the 7 percent growth in GDP (”a rate of growth that would be far in excess of ours — or Israel’s”). In painting Israel as somehow holding Gaza hostage, Carter also ignored geography (Gaza is not an “enclave” of Israel) and all the relevant recent history, including the Israelis’ withdrawal from Gaza, which earned them only a shower of missiles and a war.

Abrams concludes:

Most inaccurate of all, and most bizarre, is Carter’s claim that “a total freeze of settlement expansion is the key” to a peace agreement. Not a halt to terrorism, not the building of Palestinian institutions, not the rule of law in the West Bank, not the end of Hamas rule in Gaza — no, the sole “key” is Israeli settlements. Such a conclusion fits with Carter’s general approach, in which there are no real Palestinians, just victims of Israel. . . . Carter fantasizes about a “nonviolent civil rights struggle” that bears no relationship to the terrorist violence that has plagued Palestinian society, and killed Israelis, for decades. Carter’s portrait demonizes Israelis and, not coincidentally, it infantilizes Palestinians, who are accorded no real responsibility for their fate or future. If this is “the Elders’ view of the Middle East,” we and our friends in that region are fortunate that this group of former officials is no longer in power.

So the question remains: can Carter be this ignorant? Well, it would be hard to miss so much recent history and avoid so many facts unless you were trying. …

Jennifer Rubin also gives us the blow-by-blow on Round 2 of Carter v. Abrams.

Unbelievably, Jimmy Carter returns for round two in his debate in the Washington Post with Elliott Abrams. Having already been eviscerated in round one, Carter can’t resist the urge to go back for more. He pleads that Abrams is arguing that Palestinians enjoy “halcyon days.” (He did? No, but Carter isn’t a stickler for facts.) And Carter again argues that those settlements are really Israel’s “worst mistake.” Not much of a retort, is it?

Certainly Carter should have quit while he was behind. Abrams responds that “Jimmy Carter continues his practice of assuming that his travelogues constitute evidence and dismissing data that contradict his claims. This will persuade few people. I did not suggest that life was wonderful in the West Bank, only that it is not getting worse.” Abrams then rather bluntly makes the key argument, one consistently overlooked not only by Carter but also by the J Street crowd, and at least for now by the Obama administration:

What puts Carter’s goal of a two-state solution at risk is not settlements, but terrorism. It is terrorism that prevents Israel from leaving the West Bank entirely in Palestinian hands today, for Israelis learned a lesson after leaving Gaza and South Lebanon. A negotiated settlement is still possible, and it does not require a settlement freeze; instead it requires that Palestinian terrorists stop trying to kill Israelis, or that a Palestinian government be in place that is ready, willing, and able to prevent them from succeeding. …

The Wall Street Journal reports on a surprising addition to the Russian high school curriculum.

MOSCOW — Russia has made a once-banned book recounting the brutality and despair of the Soviet Gulag required reading in the country’s schools, the Education Ministry said in a statement Wednesday.

The ministry said excerpts of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s 1973 epic “The Gulag Archipelago” have been added to the curriculum for high-school students. The book was banned by Soviet censors, sparking Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s retreat into exile.

The decision announced Wednesday was taken due to “the vital historical and cultural heritage on the course of 20th-century domestic history” contained in Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s work, the ministry said.

The move comes despite Russian moves over the past decade to restore some Soviet symbols and, liberals say, glorify Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. …

The NRO staff posted Charles Krauthammer’s Take on the consequences we are seeing from Obama’s disastrous foreign policy.

…Well, I think this marks the complete collapse of Obama’s Iran policy. Let’s remember the premise was you be nice to our adversaries, you extend a hand, and you go around the world on an apology tour.

And the administration said behind the scenes, you can’t see the results now, but in time the fruits will be there. Well, let’s look at the harvest.

You get Obama saying he wants to meet unconditionally with the Iranians. He holds his tongue when demonstrators are being shot in the street as a way to keep open channels with the regime, even though it sullies America’s reputation of supporting democrats, especially oppressed democrats, around the world. …

…He does all of that, and what is his reward? The president of Iran announces oh, yes, I will speak with Obama, but it has to be in front of the world media, and it will be a debate. And incidentally, the nuclear issue is closed. It is not an issue.

So what does Obama get for that sweet handshake and exchange of books with Chavez at the summit? Chavez arrives in Iran, he makes an alliance, and he promises to supply gasoline. Why is that important? Because the one area where Iran is really weak is in refined petroleum. It has got a lot of crude.

But that’s where we would be applying our sanctions if they don’t stop their nuclear program. So what Chavez is doing is undermining in advance the only remaining economic sanction.

All of this for what the Obama administration calls “smart power.” It’s dumb diplomacy.

Jonah Goldberg posts on the writings of green fascist Thomas Friedman.

Mark beat me to it, but I must put in my two cents. Thomas Friedman writes:

“Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power. China’s leaders understand that in a world of exploding populations and rising emerging-market middle classes, demand for clean power and energy efficiency is going to soar. Beijing wants to make sure that it owns that industry and is ordering the policies to do that, including boosting gasoline prices, from the top down.”

Our one-party democracy is worse….

So there you have it. If only America could drop its inefficient and antiquated system, designed in the age before globalization and modernity and, most damning of all, before the lantern of Thomas Friedman’s intellect illuminated the land. If only enlightened experts could do the hard and necessary things that the new age requires, if only we could rely on these planners to set the ship of state right. Now, of course, there are “drawbacks” to such a system: crushing of dissidents with tanks, state control of reproduction, government control of the press and the internet. Omelets and broken eggs, as they say. More to the point, Friedman insists, these “drawbacks” pale in comparison to the system we have today here in America. …

Kenneth Anderson, at the Volokh Conspiracy, also comments on the Friedman article.

…There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today … Our one-party democracy is worse.

It is characteristic of Thomas Friedman’s thought to move from particular issues of policy to sweeping conclusions about the Nature of Man and God and the Universe, typically based around some attractively packaged metaphor – flat earth, hot earth, etc. Rarely, however, has he been quite so clear about the directness of the connections he sees between his preferred set of substantive outcomes; his contempt for American democratic processes that have, despite all, managed to hang in there for, I don’t know, a few times the length of time between the Cultural Revolution and today; and his schoolgirl crush on autocratic elites because they are able to impose from above. …

Jack Fowler, National Review publisher, links to a Sarah Palin WSJ Op-Ed blasting ObamaCare.

Here’s Sarah! Pickerhead admits to disappointment when she resigned, but if it means she can engage like this, then maybe it was a good idea.

… President Obama argues in his op-ed that Democrats’ proposals “will provide every American with some basic consumer protections that will finally hold insurance companies accountable.” Of course consumer protection sounds like a good idea. And it’s true that insurance companies can be unaccountable and unresponsive institutions—much like the federal government. That similarity makes this shift in focus seem like nothing more than an attempt to deflect attention away from the details of the Democrats’ proposals—proposals that will increase our deficit, decrease our paychecks, and increase the power of unaccountable government technocrats.

Instead of poll-driven “solutions,” let’s talk about real health-care reform: market-oriented, patient-centered, and result-driven. As the Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon and others have argued, such policies include giving all individuals the same tax benefits received by those who get coverage through their employers; providing Medicare recipients with vouchers that allow them to purchase their own coverage; reforming tort laws to potentially save billions each year in wasteful spending; and changing costly state regulations to allow people to buy insurance across state lines. Rather than another top-down government plan, let’s give Americans control over their own health care.

Democrats have never seriously considered such ideas, instead rushing through their own controversial proposals. After all, they don’t need Republicans to sign on: Democrats control the House, the Senate and the presidency. But if passed, the Democrats’ proposals will significantly alter a large sector of our economy. They will not improve our health care. They will not save us money. And, despite what the president says, they will not “provide more stability and security to every American.”

We often hear such overblown promises from Washington. With first principles in mind and with the facts in hand, tell them that this time we’re not buying it.

Chris Edwards at Cato-at-Liberty.org compares federal government and private sector salaries.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis has released its annual data on compensation levels by industry (Tables 6.2D, 6.3D, and 6.6D here). The data show that the pay advantage enjoyed by federal civilian workers over private-sector workers continues to expand.

The George W. Bush years were very lucrative for federal workers. In 2000, the average compensation (wages and benefits) of federal workers was 66 percent higher than the average compensation in the U.S. private sector. The new data show that average federal compensation is now more than double the average in the private sector.

…In 2008, the average wage for 1.9 million federal civilian workers was $79,197, which compared to an average $49,935 for the nation’s 108 million private sector workers (measured in full-time equivalents). The figure shows that the federal pay advantage (the gap between the lines) is steadily increasing.

…the federal advantage is even more pronounced when worker benefits are included. In 2008, federal worker compensation averaged a remarkable $119,982, which was more than double the private sector average of $59,909.

What is going on here? Members of Congress who have large numbers of federal workers in their districts relentlessly push for expanding federal worker compensation. Also, the Bush administration had little interest in fiscal restraint, and it usually got rolled by the federal unions. The result has been an increasingly overpaid elite of government workers, who are insulated from the economic reality of recessions and from the tough competitive climate of the private sector.

It’s time to put a stop to this. Federal wages should be frozen for a period of years, at least until the private-sector economy has recovered and average workers start seeing some wage gains of their own. At the same time, gold-plated federal benefit packages should be scaled back as unaffordable given today’s massive budget deficits. There are many qualitative benefits of government work—such as extremely high job security—so taxpayers should not have to pay for such lavish government pay packages.

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Thomas Sowell reaches a reasonable conclusion to the question of why Obamacare will not be enacted until 2013.

…One plain fact should outweigh all the words of Barack Obama and all the impressive trappings of the setting in which he says them: He tried to rush Congress into passing a massive government takeover of the nation’s medical care before the August recess– for a program that would not take effect until 2013!

Whatever President Obama is, he is not stupid. If the urgency to pass the medical care legislation was to deal with a problem immediately, then why postpone the date when the legislation goes into effect for years– more specifically, until the year after the next Presidential election?

If this is such an urgently needed program, why wait for years to put it into effect? And if the public is going to benefit from this, why not let them experience those benefits before the next Presidential election?

If it is not urgent that the legislation goes into effect immediately, then why don’t we have time to go through the normal process of holding Congressional hearings on the pros and cons, accompanied by public discussions of its innumerable provisions? What sense does it make to “hurry up and wait” on something that is literally a matter of life and death?

If we do not believe that the President is stupid, then what do we believe? The only reasonable alternative seems to be that he wanted to get this massive government takeover of medical care passed into law before the public understood what was in it. …

Robert Samuelson reports that indications are for a slow recovery from the recession, but there is still much that is uncertain.

…”The 1982 recession was largely caused by the desire to break the back of inflation,” says economist Nigel Gault of IHS. “Once the [Federal Reserve] was comfortable it had broken inflation, it lowered interest rates, and economic growth took off.” Interest-sensitive sectors—autos and housing—propelled recovery. By contrast, today’s slump results from the financial crisis, Gault says. The Fed has already cut interest rates, which will probably go up. As overborrowed households repay debt, their spending will be sluggish. The weak recovery then retards new jobs. …

…Of course, today’s bleak economic forecasts could be wrong—just as upbeat forecasts before the financial crisis were wrong. Some economists are warming to this view. “Global manufacturers cut output too deeply,” says David Hensley of JPMorgan Chase. “People thought we might be headed into another depression.” Here and abroad, he says, companies are reversing previous cutbacks. “Businesses overshot. They’ll snap back [in hiring]; that will fuel consumer spending.” One good omen: in August the number of job openings online rose 5 percent, reports the Conference Board.

Job creation has been a historic strength of the American economy. Its capacity to remain so will increasingly frame the economic debate: between those who want more government and those who want less; between those who fear budget deficits and those who favor more economic “stimulus”; between those who see meager wage gains as impeding recovery and those who see them as encouraging hiring. On Labor Day 2009, future jobs are the gigantic question mark hanging over the American economy.

Victor Davis Hanson comments that the cries of racism by successful people demonstrates that Obama is not the post-racial president that many were expecting.

Van Jones in his final communiqué says, “On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me. They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide.” I have not watched the now supposedly infamous Beck exposures, but I am curious what exactly constitutes a “vicious smear campaign.” Did Jones or did not Jones in public and in interviews compare the president of the United States to a crack-cocaine addict, assert that white people are polluting the ghetto, that only white students commit mass murders in the public schools, that Republicans are a**holes, and sign a petition calling for an investigation of the Bush administration’s purported role in causing 9/11?

The Jones mess brings up a larger issue. Americans were assured that with the ascendance of Barack Obama we would evolve beyond race. Yet in the last ninth months it is almost as if precisely the opposite has occurred — but with a strange twist. The country has been serially lectured about race from some of the most privileged Americans in the country. Columbia law grad elite Eric Holder accused the country of cowardice for its reluctance to speak about race. Harvard-law alum Barack Obama accused the Cambridge police of profiling and acting stupidly in taking elite Harvard professor Skip Gates down to the station after his screaming invective episode. Harvard-law educated Michelle Obama explained Justice Sotomayor’s unease at Princeton by comparing her own ordeal there. Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee Charles Rangel who had serially dodged his tax obligations claims that white angst explains his IRS problems. New York governor David Paterson blames his sinking polls on white racism, more prominent than ever in the age of Obama. Now Yale law graduate Van Jones claims smears did him in. The list could be easily expanded.

What we are seeing is a very unfortunate turn of events in which racism is now the guaranteed retreat position once many prominent African-American elites find themselves in controversy. The problem is that the rest of the population of all races and classes looks at this privileged cohort and does not really detect bias or ill-treatment in their past or present circumstances, but rather remarkable tolerance and race-blind attitudes, as exemplified by their career successes. …

Stephen Spruiell posts in The Corner that the “green jobs czar” position should go.

To buy into the “green jobs” scam, you must have an unshakeable faith in the ability of the government to create a viable industry from whole cloth, because there is no commercial demand for the services these green-collar workers would provide. We don’t have to guess about the future of green jobs; we can look to the ethanol industry.

In 2005, after decades of subsidization, the government finally mandated the consumption of ethanol. It upped the mandate in 2007. This, plus high gas prices, was the boost the industry was looking for. Ethanol plants started springing up all over the Midwest.

Corn prices went up to meet the government-mandated demand for ethanol. Then oil prices fell, bringing the price of ethanol down with it. The industry’s profit-margins disappeared. VeraSun, one of the largest ethanol makers, is in Chapter 11. Last December, the industry asked Congress for a bailout.

Again, this is an industry whose customers are required by law to buy their product, yet it couldn’t survive in the commercial marketplace. Those green jobs are now disappearing. Before he was hoisted with his own petard, Van Jones was in the business of selling illusions — costly ones, too. It’s good that he’s gone, but it would be better if the position of green jobs czar went with him.

Ed Morrissey posts on the lack of reporting on the Van Jones scandal by the MSM, until the story could not be ignored.

If people relied on the mainstream media, especially print media, to keep up to date on the government, then they must have quite a shock this morning with the resignation of Van Jones.  For instance, the New York Times makes its first mention of the Jones controversy this morning — by reporting his resignation…

…When did the 9/11 Truther connection come to light?  Jim Hoft reported it Thursday, and it flew through the blogosphere.  Even more Truther connections came out the next day.  When did the New York Times — and to be fair, most other newspapers in the country — get around to reporting in print that a paranoid conspiracy theorist had a job as a White House czar?  Today, after he quit.

Byron York gives us the round-up:

Coverage of the Jones controversy was a case study of some of the deep divisions within the media. Fox News’ Glenn Beck devoted program after program to Jones’ past, and a number of conservative blogs were responsible for finding some of Jones’ most inflammatory statements. Yet even as the controversy grew — and even after Jones himself apologized for some of his words — several of the nation’s top media outlets failed to report the story. As late as Friday, as the Jones matter began to boil over, it had not been reported at all in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the evening newscasts of ABC, CBS, and NBC. Although the Post and CBS went on to report the Jones story on Saturday, the Times did not inform its readers about the Jones matter until after Jones resigned.

So much for speaking truth to power, eh? …

Roger Simon posts that one of the New York Times articles was fixated on Glenn Beck.

…There’s some reference to Beck’s advertising woes (a subject with which the Times should be familiar) due to Beck’s having called Obama a “racist.” But the substance is that Beck got the scoop. His numbers are going up and NYT’s continue to go down as the Newspaper of Record searches for a new economic model.

Part of the reason for this is pretty obvious. People trust Beck and they don’t trust the NYT. Beck may be biased, but he’s honest about it. The NYT persists in the illusion of even-handed reporting, even when, in a case like the Van Jones scandal, they clearly decided not to run the story for political reasons, but don’t have the cojones to admit it. Or is there another reason? We’re waiting.

Victor Davis Hanson makes a good point about America’s left-wing radicals.

As Hugo Chavez continues to shut down the media and silence critics, Oliver Stone—who would never be allowed, if he were a Venezuelan filmmaker, to direct as he does in the states—praises Chavez’s coerced socialism.

Michael Moore, known for hard-nosed distribution and profit-making, announces, again like Stone in conjunction with hyping a profit-making movie, that capitalism (for others) is dead.

Van Jones, solidly middle class and Yale-educated, among other things, pontificated about revolution, an apartheid America, redistributing wealth, a–hole Republicans and George Bush’s involvement in 9/11, in between jetting between conferences, espousing his green jobs promotion that hyped book sales and his own career.

What is strange about all this chic-radicalism is how would-be revolutionaries that wish to dismantle America as we know it and/or emulate failed systems abroad, always do so from comfort, security, affluence, and freedom of choice unique to America and Europe, suggesting that radical politics and those who agitate for them are sort of a fashion statement, aimed to resonate among particular elite leftist audiences and to bring dividends from them, but not to be taken too seriously as guides in their own lives.

Even though it pre-dated the Jones resignation, The American Spectator’s questions about whom in the White House overrode suspected Secret Service objections to Mr. Jones. are still germane.

Here are the questions Glenn Beck and others should be asking, based on my own personal experience:

• Who on the White House staff cleared Van Jones?

• What was that person’s connection to Van Jones or Mr. Jones’s political sponsor?

• Who, exactly, was Mr. Jones’ sponsor for this job? How much money did he/she contribute to the Obama campaign?

• Did the Secret Service notify anyone on the White House staff — or the President or First Lady or Vice President Biden — that Mr. Jones had an arrest record on file with police in two cities?

• Did the Secret Service protest any of this, objecting to Mr. Jones’ clearance?

• If the Secret Service did object, who overruled them? The President? The Chief of Staff? Someone else?

• If the answer to this last question is yes, and the Secret Service was overruled by the President or someone else, why did this happen? …

And we have National Review Shorts. Here are two:

Holder’s Justice Department also quietly killed an ongoing pay-for-play corruption investigation of New Mexico governor Bill Richardson — a key Obama ally whose nomination to be commerce secretary the probe derailed. Though the Richardson investigation was being conducted by the U.S. attorney in New Mexico and a grand jury, the Associated Press reported that top DOJ officials in Washington pulled the plug. That would reverse Justice Department protocols, which call for local control of public-corruption cases in order to avoid the appearance of politicized law enforcement. The dropping of the investigation comes on the heels of Holder’s dismissal of a voter-intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party (one defendant was an official Democratic-party poll-watcher). During the Bush years, congressional Democrats worked themselves into a frenzy over the mere, never-substantiated possibility that politics would compromise justice. What will they do now that it’s actually happening?

Taro Aso, the outgoing Japanese prime minister, has done something remarkable. In a ceremony marking the end of World War II, he said, “Our country inflicted tremendous damage and suffering on many countries, particularly people in Asia. As a representative of the Japanese people, I humbly express my remorse for the victims, along with deep regret.” And he vowed that Japan would never again behave as it had. There are times for national apologies, and times when such apologies are stupid or cheap, meant only to flatter the apologizers — President Obama’s recent utterances in Europe and elsewhere come to mind. At that World War II ceremony, Aso performed well.

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In the London Times, Sheera Frenkel recounts the story of a homeless Holocaust survivor in Israel. There is government ineptness involved, but the story has a happy ending for Yevgeny Bistrizky.

More than 50,000 Holocaust survivors live below the poverty line in Israel. Mr Bistrizky’s is the only known case of a survivor who became homeless.

The Latet organisation, which provides aid to the needy, discovered him after concerned residents contacted the group. They were astonished to learn that he had been living in the dog park for eight months, cleaning himself with a garden hose inside the rubbish room of a building, and hoping that the faeces-littered park would deter people from trying to attack him in his sleep.

Latet was unable to find him a suitable flat and contacted a newspaper to publish his story. Since then it has received hundreds of calls from people offering food, clothing and rooms in their homes.

One company offered a flat in a building for the elderly. The room is sparse but clean. The only homely touch is two Ukrainian calendars with photographs of kittens above his single bed.

Mr Bistrizky said: “Sometimes I’m afraid I’ll wake up and it will all be gone. That I’ll be back on the park bench and this will all be a dream”.

Small but wiry, he moves gingerly around the room. His blue eyes light up as he points out the items people have donated: a microwave, stereo, gas burner and refrigerator.

His hands linger over the objects, stopping at an armchair that he placed by the window. In the afternoon a breeze wafts in: “It’s my favourite thing, my favourite time — this wind,” he says, using the Hebrew word for breeze with a brief, but proud smile. “I am so happy, so thankful to be given all this.”

Michael Potemra, in The Corner, comments on an interesting new book.

When you pick up a book titled The Genesis Enigma: Why the Bible Is Scientifically Accurate, you expect a fundamentalist attack on the theory of evolution, or at least a plea for Intelligent Design theory. In fact, the author, Andrew Parker, believes in evolution. A scientist based at Oxford University and the Natural History Museum in London, Parker is not a Bible literalist, and he dismisses Intelligent Design as a “concocted theory” characterized by “flawed logic” and “forced” theorizing. The book describes the remarkable similarity between the order of events described in the first chapter of Genesis and the scientifically known series of macro-evolutionary steps in the history of life on earth. Parker asks how a text written some 2,500 years before the development of modern science could have captured this order of events, and says it was either a lucky guess or a matter of inspiration.

The book is an interesting attempt to make sense of this ancient text: the creation account of Genesis 1 as a combination of divine inspiration with the limited thought- and language-forms of a particular (in this case, scientifically backward) culture. It makes a persuasive case for a deep wisdom behind the words.

David Warren listed some of Obama’s “shadow cabinet” of czars in an article for the Ottawa Citizen that Pickings posted on August 16th. He gave a quick rundown of some of the more colorful characters that are pulling government salaries without clear oversight or accountability.

…Tell you the candid truth, I don’t like “nice” people. Conversely, I have a sneaking regard for real political enemies who are prepared to state candidly what they are about. Which is why I mentioned Obama’s long list of policy czars, above — people like John Holdren (1970s advocate of forced abortions and mass sterilization) the new science czar, Van Jones (declared Communist) the new green jobs czar, Vivek Kundra (convicted shoplifter) the new infotech czar, Adolfo Carrion (pay-for-play scandals) the new urban subsidies czar, Nancy DePerle (lobbyist-to-regulator) the new health czar, Cass Sunstein (behaviourist and animal rights wacko) the new regulatory czar, and so on.

There are dozens of these, altogether. They are Obama’s “shadow cabinet,” with the advantage over his more presentable official cabinet that they can avoid congressional scrutiny in almost everything they do. They didn’t need to face the Senate confirmation revelations that lost Obama so many of his earliest cabinet appointments. A mere Internet search for quotes reveals that many of them are capable of great candour, at least in the radical leftist environments from which most of them came.

The mainstream media focus is nevertheless not on them — rich and easy pickings had they been Republican appointments…

Warren gave us the prologue, and now the first chapter of czar-gate has been written.

Roger Simon wonders if there are constitutional issues that need to be addressed.

…Barack Obama’s Czar System – which has recently come under scrutiny for some repellent, even paranoid, statements by his “Green Czar” Van Jones, a onetime “9-11 truther” who calls Republicans “assholes” on television – is an entirely different matter. This is directly an affair of state and seemingly an end run around the Separation of Powers. According to an article recently published at Examiner.com by Patrick McMahon, there are now thirty-one of these czars, covering areas from terrorism to domestic violence. Congress has not vetted a single one of them, as far as I know. Indeed, with only a couple of exceptions (Dennis Ross, etc.), we know who few of them are. Are others as extreme as Mr. Jones? Who knows? All we know is that they are there and that Obama (or someone) approved them. We don’t know exactly what their authority is and what they are supposed to do ultimately. They are a completely new part of our Executive Branch, invented by the President and/or his advisors. Was this what the Framers intended when they created the three branches of our government with all the checks and balances?

Unlike Mr. Jones, I am no lawyer, and obviously not a Constitutional one, but it strikes me there is a problem here. And it could be very embarrassing to Mr. Obama. No doubt this is why, as Byron York points out, the mainstream media has been so reluctant to cover this story, only the WaPo and CBS chiming in at this point, although they were late to the party and relatively perfunctory. The former Newspaper of Record has yet to log in. Had Bush appointed thirty-one czars outside the normal Congressional approval system the MSM would have been all over it like the proverbial wet suit, declaring a coup d’etat in the making. But, as of now, the MSM has imposed omerta. It is Labor Day weekend. We shall see what happens next week.

Eugene Volokh ponders the word choice of “czar”.

Others have pointed out that having offices called “czars” is an odd naming choice for a democracy. But czars weren’t just authoritarians. They were ultimately authoritarians who left their country far poorer than their more democratic counterparts, lost a world war, and of course paved the way for an even worse system of government. The label “czar” thus doesn’t historically connect to a model of strongman effectiveness — it connects to a model of strongman failure.

(Of course, I recognize that czars in the federal government don’t have even a fraction of the truly dictatorial power of their namesakes. But the label was used for a reason, presumably to evoke the positive connotation of strong authority that Gets The Job Done. Yet the specific strong authority that the label evokes proved to be unable to get the job done, at least under anything approaching modern conditions — under any sensible definition of “job,” possibly with the significant but narrow exception of the job of defeating Napoleon — and unable in a way that culminated with a disaster of historic proportions.)

Ilya Somin comments on the resignation of Van Jones in Volokh Conspiracy.

The Obama Administration has appointed more czars than Romanov dynasty ever had. Now, however, one of those czars has been forced to resign. “Green jobs” czar Van Jones has resigned as a result of the controversy that arose after the discovery that he signed a 9/11 “Truther” petition back in 2004. Jones’ dubious excuse that he had not read the petition carefully before signing and that it didn’t reflect his real views failed to mollify the critics, especially given other inflammatory statements he has made.

Jones’ ridiculous beliefs probably aren’t typical of those of the administration’s many other czars. However, the fact that a person like him could be appointed to an important czar position does highlight one of the weaknesses of the czar system: by circumventing the normal appointment and confirmation process, it makes it more likely that a poorly qualified person or one with ridiculous policy views will be put in charge of important issues. Unfortunately, not all such dubious czars can be as easily exposed as Jones was. And that is just one of several flaws of the czar system. …

Jennifer Rubin explains that there are several stories here.

Not since Bob Irsay packed up the Baltimore Colts in the dead of night has a high-profile retreat in darkness gotten so much attention. Van Jones was shoved under the Obama bus, as everyone knew would occur, with an announcement coming at midnight. The Wall Street Journal enumerates his baggage, enough to fill a small commuter plane:

Mr. Jones has been in the center of a maelstrom on conservative radio and television talk shows since a video surfaced last week showing him calling Republicans a vulgar epithet. Since then, other controversies have emerged, such as Mr. Jones saying black students would have never committed a massacre such as the one at Colorado’s Columbine High School. His name also appeared on a 2004 petition calling for the government to investigate its own culpability in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. None of those issues happened after Mr. Jones joined the administration.

There are a number of story lines percolating here: the mainstream media’s refusal to report on the incident until he left; the mystery as to how such a figure wound up in the White House; the ham-fisted performance of late by an administration that allowed a story to build and its critics to claim victory; and the substantive issue concerning the proliferation of czars who evade congressional confirmation and oversight – and apparently get a lesser level of vetting. And then there is the familiar White House reaction — no apology, no explanation, and no remorse.

Some of the punditocracy — Juan Williams, for example – are peeved we are spending any time on this. And true enough, if the White House had a near perfect vetting record, or if the president did not have a reputation for hanging out with the likes of Bill Ayers and Reverend Wright, whose worldview bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Jones, this might be a nonstory. …

Charles Krauthammer recounts the hole that Obama has dug for himself, and ends with these thoughts.

…After a disastrous summer — mistaking his mandate, believing his press, centralizing power, governing left, disdaining citizens for (of all things) organizing — Obama is in trouble.

Let’s be clear: This is a fall, not a collapse. He’s not been repudiated or even defeated. He will likely regroup and pass some version of health insurance reform that will restore some of his clout and popularity.

But what has occurred — irreversibly — is this: He’s become ordinary. The spell is broken. The charismatic conjurer of 2008 has shed his magic. He’s regressed to the mean, tellingly expressed in poll numbers hovering at 50 percent.

For a man who only recently bred a cult, ordinariness is a great burden, and for his acolytes, a crushing disappointment. Obama has become a politician like others. And like other flailing presidents, he will try to salvage a cherished reform — and his own standing — with yet another prime-time speech.

But for the first time since election night in Grant Park, he will appear in the most unfamiliar of guises — mere mortal, a treacherous transformation to which a man of Obama’s supreme self-regard may never adapt.

In this article, David Warren writes “nature notes” about trees, environmentalists, natural history, and field guides.

…Trees, as I am just reminded, occupy three entire divisions of the plant kingdom: the Pinophyta (conifers, roughly), the Magnoliophyta (the broadleafs), and the Ginkgophyta.

This last has only one surviving member, the Ginkgo tree, seemingly related more closely to ferns and mosses and algae and cycads than to other trees, especially in their means of reproduction.

According to the fossil record, our Ginkgo went extinct two million years ago. (Ha!) There were other Ginkgo species, farther back in the planet’s history, all long gone. Yet the tree we have is as old as dragonflies and paddlefish: hundreds of millions of years. It was not found wild, but only as a relic of ancient Chinese scholars’ gardens. Where they found it, we don’t know.

The Ginkgo is a tree that positively flourishes in highly polluted, inner urban environments, and seems to benefit from irradiation (four of them famously survived Hiroshima). It stands, as Sibley’s guide somehow does, at the very intersection of the utterly alien, and the utterly familiar. One could almost hug it.

In Slate, Daniel Gross gives us a preview of the coming crisis in commercial real estate investment.

For most of its 34-year life, the Hancock Tower, which looms above its brick neighbors in Boston’s Back Bay, has been the sort of place where money comes to be managed and protected. Its tenants include Ernst & Young and the investment firm Highfields Capital. The I.M. Pei-designed sliver of glass doesn’t seem like a place where several hundred million dollars can vanish in a few months.

But that’s exactly what happened at the 62-story building, now under its fourth owner in six years. In January, an aggressive young wheeler-dealer defaulted on a portion of the building’s $1.3 billion mortgage just 24 months after buying it. In March, two firms that had purchased chunks of the tower’s second mortgage for pennies on the dollar assumed control, essentially rendering up to $400 million of debt worthless. The Hancock’s market value is now about $700 million—half what it appraised for less than two years ago.

Scott Lawlor, the entrepreneur who was forced to concede control of the Hancock Tower, could be called a “poster boy for everything that went wrong,” as one well-placed real estate expert put it. But the trim, straightforward executive is more like a whipping boy. For the tale of the Hancock Tower isn’t a morality play or an example of a bubble-era rise and fall. Rather, it’s an omen. During the credit boom, the same forces that led to $600,000 subprime loans on tract houses in Modesto, Calif., spurred billions of dollars of reckless lending on urban office towers and suburban strip malls. As a result, the nation’s offices, hotels, and malls now carry about $3.5 trillion in debt. Three years after the housing market peaked, falling rents and rising defaults—no surprise given the economy has lost 7 million jobs since December 2007—are posing a new threat to the still-fragile banking system and could inflict billions of dollars in fresh losses. The Hancock Tower was one of the first high-profile deals to go sour—but it won’t be the last. The Blackstone Group, one of the nation’s leading private-equity firms, has written down the value of its mammoth real estate portfolio by an average of 45 percent from the original cost. General Growth Properties, a pioneer of the shopping mall that carried $27 billion in debt, filed for Chapter 11 in April. …

J. Hoberman reviews Mike Judge’s new movie, Extract, for the Village Voice.

Here for Labor Day—a comedy about the hilarity and heartbreak of running a small business. A decade after his succès d’estime Office Space (and a few months following the termination of his long-running animated series King of the Hill), Mike Judge returns with a complementary social satire: Extract.

Where Office Space was a comedy of employee disaffection, Extract looks at the struggle between labor and capital from the other side of the desk. Named for flavorings produced by protagonist Joel Reynold (Jason Bateman) in his small factory, Extract is sweeter than Judge’s scabrous and, in most markets unreleased, Idiocracy. It’s hardly less concerned with putting a frame around stupidity—opening with an apparently ditzy babe (Mila Kunis) fleecing two music-store dudes for a pricey electric guitar—but where Idiocracy held up a grotesque mirror to American mass culture and politics, Extract seems to be designed to give capitalism a human face. …

Dana Stevens reviews the movie for Slate.

The tag line for Extract (Miramax), the fourth feature film from Mike Judge, promises “a comedy with a flavor of its own.” That’s certainly true. Judge cultists will recognize the Beavis and Butt-Head auteur’s signature blend of social satire, broad physical comedy, and lovingly observed middle-American stupidity. But Extract’s particular flavor profile may strike some Judge-heads as overly sweet—it’s the sunniest and least angry of his films—while viewers less disposed to love his work may find it simply bland. Personally, I found Extract to be Judge’s best nonanimated work yet. For all of Office Space‘s comic invention, that movie had a hole at its center: Ron Livingston’s protagonist was an uninteresting guy played by (sorry, Ron) an uninteresting actor. And though Idiocracy was brilliant at extrapolating current trends into a dystopic American future (one day, we will water our crops with sports drinks!), it ultimately fell victim to its own high concept.

Extract is more modest in its ambitions, a 98-minute goof with little more on its mind than cracking us up. After the past few years of comedies in the Apatow mold, it’s refreshing to find a movie that doesn’t combine that simple goal with a secondary agenda to gross us out (babies crowning! naked fat guys with flaccid penises!), or to make us cry, or to teach us life lessons. For all of Judge’s comic absurdity, his universe is as familiar as an Arby’s drive-through—I grew up in the suburb of a Southern city much like the unnamed town where Extract is set. The hotel-chain sports bars and pretentiously named subdivisions where the action unfolds are both cartoonish versions of American alienation and sociologically precise portraits of places we’ve all been. …

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In the Wall Street Journal, Dan Senor and Peter Wehner urge Republicans to back Obama on Afghanistan.

…The president deserves credit for his commitment earlier this year to order an additional 17,000 troops for Afghanistan, as well as his decision to act on the recommendation of Gen. David Petraeus and Defense Secretary Robert Gates to replace the U.S. commander in Afghanistan with Gen. Stanley McChrystal.

These were tough and courageous decisions. The president’s actions have clearly unsettled some members of his own party, who hoped he would begin to unwind America’s commitment in Afghanistan. Mr. Obama not only ignored their counsel; he doubled down his commitment. There should therefore be no stronger advocates for Mr. Obama’s Afghanistan strategy than the GOP.

The war in Afghanistan is a crucial part of America’s broader struggle against militant Islam. If we were to fail in Afghanistan, it would have calamitous consequences for both Pakistan and American credibility. It would consign the people of Afghanistan to misery and hopelessness. And Afghanistan would once again become home to a lethal mix of terrorists and insurgents and a launching point for attacks against Western and U.S. interests. Neighboring governments—especially Pakistan’s with its nuclear weapons—could quickly be destabilized and collapse.

Progress and eventual success in Afghanistan—which is difficult but doable—would, when combined with a similar outcome in Iraq, constitute a devastating blow against jihadists and help stabilize a vital and volatile region.

…In addition, indifference or outright opposition to the war would smack of hypocrisy, given the Republican Party’s strong (and we believe admirable) support for President Bush’s post-9/11 policies, its robust support for America’s democratic allies, and its opposition to rogue regimes that threaten American interests. Republicans should stand for engagement with, rather than isolation from, the world. Strongly supporting the president on Afghanistan would also be a sign of grace on the part of Republicans. We know all too well how damaging it was to American foreign policy to face an opposition that was driven by partisan fury against our commander in chief. Republicans should never do to President Obama what many Democrats did to President Bush. …

Jennifer Rubin comments on Fred Kagan’s article in the Wall Street Journal about the importance of the war in Afghanistan.

Fred Kagan sets out the strategic case for the war in Afghanistan in a must-read piece in the Wall Street Journal. He makes clear that the task at hand ”will be difficult” but is “no fool’s errand.” He does not shy away from examining the errors of the past, but his focus is on why we must persist in waging an increasingly unpopular war.

He explains:

Critics of the war have suggested we should draw down our troops and force Pakistan to play a larger role in eliminating radical extremists. American concerns about al Qaeda and Taliban operating from Pakistani bases have led to the conventional wisdom that Pakistan matters to the U.S. because of what it could do to help—or hurt—in Afghanistan. The conventional wisdom is wrong as usual.

Pakistan is important because it is a country of 180 million Muslims with nuclear weapons and multiple terrorist groups engaged in a mini-arms race and periodic military encounters with India—the world’s most populous state and one of America’s most important economic and strategic partners. Pakistan has made remarkable progress over the last year in its efforts against Islamist insurgent groups that threatened to destroy it. But the fight against those groups takes place on both sides of the border. The debate over whether to commit the resources necessary to succeed in Afghanistan must recognize the extreme danger that a withdrawal or failure in Afghanistan would pose to the stability of Pakistan. …

Jennifer Rubin also comments on the Carter trip to the Middle East.

Jimmy Carter brings us his report, fresh from his Middle East visit with his fellow ”Elders,” including the Medal of Freedom prize-winning duo of Desmond Tutu and Mary Robinson. Carter and crew go to the Middle East and see “despair.”

Not the despair of Jews in Israel who would like to live in peace with their neighbors and have tried repeatedly to give the Palestinians their own state. Not the despair of victims of Hamas violence or of honor killings. Not the despair of the Palestinian people who would like a government free from corruption. Not the despair of Jews who find it incomprehensible that teaching the Holocaust is considered to be a human-rights violation by Hamas. Not the despair of Israel and its neighbors who are contemplating a nuclear-armed Iran and a timid U.S. response. And certainly not the despair that Israelis must feel as a U.S. administration renounces past obligations and delights in picking a fight with its ally.

No, all Carter sees and all he writes about (I know, you’ll be shocked) is the “despair that settlement expansion is continuing apace.” And he divines that Israel is bent on a one-state solution, aiming to “colonize” East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Using unmistakable Holocaust terminology, he terms Gaza a “ghetto.” How perfectly Carter-esque. And Robinson-esque. (Anyone in the White House still think that Medal of Freedom thing was a grand idea?) …

Also in Contentions, Rick Richman fills us in on another mind-blowing foreign policy decision, this time concerning Honduras.

…The State Department announced today it has formally determined that what happened on June 28 in Honduras was a “coup d’etat” requiring the termination under U.S. law of a broad range of assistance to the poverty-stricken country. The announcement cites “the continued resistance to the adoption of the San Jose Accord by the de facto regime and continuing failure to restore democratic, constitutional rule to Honduras.”

The San Jose Accord would require Honduras to ignore multiple rulings by its Supreme Court that the removal of former President Zelaya was constitutional (and done pursuant to its order, not by military action taken without prior legal authorization). It would require Honduras to act contrary to the consensus of all organs of the Honduran government, including its Congress and representatives of the church and civil society—a consensus communicated to the foreign ministers of the Organization of American States when they visited Honduras on August 24-25 and heard from them all.

It is a strange definition of coup d’etat that includes action authorized by the Honduran Supreme Court, ratified by its Congress, and supported by a consensus of its political parties and civil society. As for the “continuing failure to restore democratic, constitutional rule,” there is an election scheduled for November. A vote of the people is not generally considered characteristic of a coup d’etat, and returning Zelaya to serve a few more months (since even he now concedes he cannot hold a “referendum” to allow him to serve longer) would not seem necessary to “restore democratic, constitutional rule.” …

Abe Greenwald has choice words for the State Department’s inappropriate response to Honduras.

Hillary Clinton has given a lovely gift to Honduran strongman Manuel Zelaya: “the State Department has announced it will cut aid to Honduras, contingent upon the return to office of ousted President Manuel Zelaya, with whom Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met Thursday.”

So we’ll cut off aid to a democratic country in order to punish it for defending its democracy. How many ways, big and small, does this shame the United States?

It vitiates what little enthusiasm President Obama has shown for the promotion of democracy around the globe. Who cares if he said in Ghana that “governments that respect the will of their own people are more prosperous, more stable, and more successful than governments that do not.” He respects the will of the ruler who creates his own self-sustaining rules. …

…We’re no longer merely apologizing to the bad guys; we’re encouraging them.

In the Wall Street Journal, John Fund interviews David Walker, the GAO head under Clinton and Bush. Mr. Walker says the deficits are coming.

…Mr. Walker’s own speeches are vivid and clear. “We have four deficits: a budget deficit, a savings deficit, a value-of-the-dollar deficit and a leadership deficit,” he tells one group. “We are treating the symptoms of those deficits, but not the disease.”

Mr. Walker identifies the disease as having a basic cause: “Washington is totally out of touch and out of control,” he sighs. “There is political courage there, but there is far more political careerism and people dodging real solutions.” He identifies entrenched incumbency as a real obstacle to change. “Members of Congress ensure they have gerrymandered seats where they pick the voters rather than the voters picking them and then they pass out money to special interests who then make sure they have so much money that no one can easily challenge them,” he laments. He believes gerrymandering should be curbed and term limits imposed if for no other reason than to inject some new blood into the system. On campaign finance, he supports a narrow constitutional amendment that would bar congressional candidates from accepting contributions from people who can’t vote for them: “If people can’t vote in a district not their own, should we allow them to spend unlimited money on behalf of someone across the country?” …

…He suggests giving presidents the power to make line-item cuts in budgets that would then require a majority vote in Congress to override. He would also want private-sector accounting standards extended to pensions, health programs and environmental costs. “Social Security reform is a layup, much easier than Medicare,” he told me. He believes gradual increases in the retirement age, a modest change in cost-of-living payments and raising the cap on income subject to payroll taxes would solve its long-term problems. …

Stuart Taylor, in the National Journal, thinks that the Justice Department’s review of terrorist interrogations will not lead to prosecutions.

…The bottom line is that it would be exceedingly difficult for Holder and Obama to justify going after low-level CIA officials for abusing detainees in ways no more brutal than the methods approved by the high-level officials who will apparently be given a pass as long as they heeded Justice’s legal guidance.

And it would be impossible for Holder and Obama to go after the Bush team — an unprecedented criminalization by one administration of its predecessor’s national security policies — without antagonizing most of the 75 percent of voters who call themselves conservative or moderate.

Such a move would tear the country apart, doom Obama’s ambitious legislative agenda, and possibly make him a one-term president. All for the sake of bringing prosecutions with virtually no chance of convictions.

Surely Holder and Obama understand this. And neither seems inclined to commit political suicide.

In Contentions, Peter Wehner comments on the Obamacare re-launch.

…the president will give a speech to a joint session of Congress next Wednesday, in an effort to “re-launch” ObamaCare. His words will soothe our fears and heal the wounds caused by what Politico rightly calls a “brutal August recess.” So the idea, it appears, is to have Obama continue to say what he’s been saying—but to say it more often and more “prescriptively.” The underlying assumption is the public just hasn’t heard enough from Barack Obama on health care.

If Obama really believes this is the reason his health-care effort is in critical condition, then he has lost touch with reality. Obama’s health-care ambitions are being shattered because what he wants to do would make things worse rather than better, and costlier rather than cheaper. President Obama is attempting to sell a product that is fundamentally defective and increasingly radioactive. Even if Team Obama were doing everything right—and it is not—it would find itself in a precarious position. It is reality, including numerous CBO analyses, that is doing the damage. Public relations has very little to do with it. …

John Carney in the blog Business Insider says the prez made the typical leftist mistake of economic determinism when he expected the GOP to line up behind big pharma and the insurance industry as they sold out.

… The Obama administration “expended great effort to line up the support of health-care insurers, pharmaceutical makers and care providers, believing that by keeping them around the table, they could win over Republicans and stop the kind of industry-led attacks that helped sink the Clinton plan,” writes the Journal team.

It was supposed to be a simple formula. Win over the health care industry shepherd, and the Republican will follow like sheep. But it didn’t work.

What seems to have gone wrong can be described as a failure of the imagination: Obama’s administration just never believed Republicans would stand up for their limited government principles if that meant opposing business interests. They were apparently assuming that Republicans and conservatives could be won over by winning over “business interests,” as if free market and anti-government positions were just rhetorical cover for policy making at the behest of business. …

Dorothy Rabinowitz reviews a couple of things we might want to watch on TV.

The first soundheralding the arrival of the brand new “Melrose Place” (Tuesday, 9-10 p.m. EDT, on the CW)—the noise of an incessantly ringing cellphone— brings us up to date nicely. So does the frantic text-messaging of the premiere episode’s opening moments— dispatches sent by the diabolical Sydney Andrews (Laura Leighton), well known to followers of the old “Melrose Place” as the landlady intimately ensnarled in the lives of the 20-something tenants there. In the old series, which ran from 1992 to 1999, land-line phones were still essential. Life and all vital connections managed to proceed, furthermore, without text-messaging. Nothing, though, can bring home the difference between that ’90s culture and today’s more starkly than those original episodes, where characters utter lines like “he wrote me a letter every single week.” Wrote a letter? In the “Melrose Place” of today, such a reference would have the quaintness of something from the Civil War era, whenever that was. …

David Harsanyi has fun with the upcoming Presidential address to schoolchildren.

…Moreover, if your child is incapable of handling a 20-minute haranguing from a self-important public servant, they will be tragically unprepared for the new world. (Who do you think they will be dealing with when they need that hip replacement in 60 years?) …

…Why should we deny that he can elevate our schoolchildren from the abyss so they can finally, after decades of neglect, learn again? And who better to dictate the lesson plan than the president’s secretary of education, Arne Duncan, a man who left a Chicago school district with a meager 40 percent dropout rate?

Honestly, if I’m going to be badgered and browbeat by the president every day, kids should suffer a bit as well. The president has been treating the American people like schoolchildren for more than seven months — with another “major address” on health care coming right after he talks to the kids.

When my own brood comes home next week, I’ll explain that in this remarkable nation, anyone can become president — though, hopefully, they’ll choose something more constructive…

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Thomas Sowell comments on the Justice Department investigating the CIA. No hope here. Just audacity.

…Those who are pushing for legal action against CIA agents may talk about “upholding the law” but they are doing no such thing. Neither the Constitution of the United States nor the Geneva Convention gives rights to terrorists who operate outside the law.

There was a time when everybody understood this. German soldiers who put on American military uniforms, in order to infiltrate American lines during the Battle of the Bulge were simply lined up against a wall and shot — and nobody wrung their hands over it. Nor did the U.S. Army try to conceal what they had done. The executions were filmed and the film has been shown on the History Channel.

So many “rights” have been conjured up out of thin air that many people seem unaware that rights and obligations derive from explicit laws, not from politically correct pieties. If you don’t meet the terms of the Geneva Convention, then the Geneva Convention doesn’t protect you. If you are not an American citizen, then the rights guaranteed to American citizens do not apply to you.

That should be especially obvious if you are part of an international network bent on killing Americans. But bending over backward to be nice to our enemies is one of the many self-indulgences of those who engage in moral preening.

But getting other people killed so that you can feel puffed up about yourself is profoundly immoral. So is betraying the country you took an oath to protect.

Jennifer Rubin reaches a compelling conclusion about Obama’s spineless responses to outrageous actions.

…The Obama administration’s blasé attitude has raised speculation that we were in on the “deal” or that we share suspicions long held by former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and others that maybe the wrong terrorist was convicted. But I think the explanation is simpler. Obama never gets very outraged about outrageous things, because that would require he do something.  And, yes, there is a double standard about who gets the tongue-lashings. (Peretz again: “It is not as if Obama is usually shy with emotional oratory, although he is rather shy in admonishing Muslims, a difficulty he seems not to have with the Israelis.”)

If we were full-throated in our condemnation of Iranian show trials, or the continued Syrian facilitation of terrorists who kill our troops in Iraq, or human rights in China (or anywhere), Obama might be expected to address the source of the outrage and confront the miscreants. This he does not do. So he looks down, shuffles his feet, offers only the most tepid words, and moves on. But others, primarily our adversaries, are watching. They see an irresolute and unconcerned American president. And they will act accordingly.

Since the new administration tries to blame everything on W, Karl Rove has fun pointing out the real cause of their troubles.

… The administration’s problems have been compounded by tactical mistakes. Allowing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to push for a Democrat-only bill shatters any claim Mr. Obama can make to bipartisanship, a core theme of his candidacy. Leaving the legislation’s drafting to Congress has tied the president’s fortunes to Mrs. Pelosi, who has a 25% approval rating nationwide, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, whose approval rating is 37% in Nevada.

Sen. Jim DeMint (R., S.C.) was inartful but basically correct when he said if Mr. Obama loses on health care, “it will be his Waterloo.” It would destroy confidence in the ability of Democrats to govern. Mr. Obama knows this, which is why he will stop at nothing to get a bill, any bill, on which the label “health-care reform” can be stuck.

Given the Democratic congressional margins, Mr. Obama has the votes to do it, but at huge costs to him and his party. Legislation that looks anything like the bill moving through the House will contain deeply unpopular provisions—including massive deficit spending, tax hikes and Medicare cuts—and create enormous ill will on Capitol Hill. This will be especially true if Democrats rely on parliamentary tricks to pass a bill in the Senate with 51 votes. The public’s reaction in August showed that the president is creating the conditions for a revolt against his party in the 2010 elections.

On the other hand, if Mr. Obama jettisons the public option, he may spark a revolt within his party. The Democratic base is already grumbling and could block a bill if it doesn’t include a public option.

Presidents always encounter rough patches. What is unusual is how soon Mr. Obama has hit his. He has used up almost all his goodwill in less than nine months, with the hardest work still ahead. At the year’s start, Democrats were cocky. At summer’s end, concern is giving way to despair. A perfect political storm is amassing, and heading straight for Democrats.

Ed Morrissey posts on Jake Tapper’s reporting of Obama’s “precipitous slide.”

How bad has Barack Obama’s slide in the polls become? So bad, Jake Tapper reports for ABC News, that the White House has abandoned the talk of mandates and now cast Obama as a courageous statesman willing to do the unpopular. Why, the world would look much different if Obama was concerned about mandates: …

Howard Kurtz recounts how a lot of the left-media are falling out of ObamaLove.

It is as inevitable in Washington as sweltering summers and steamy sex scandals.

A president is going to be smacked around from the moment he takes office and the uplifting rhetoric of campaign rallies meets the gritty reality of governing.

But the criticism of Barack Obama has turned strikingly personal as some of his liberal media allies have gone wobbly on him. After playing a cheerleading role during the campaign, some are bluntly questioning whether he’s up to the job.

If Obama is losing Paul Krugman, can the rest of the left be far behind?

“I’m concerned as to whether, in trying to reach out to the middle, he is selling out his base,” says Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page. “I find myself saying, ‘Where’s that well-oiled Obama machine we saw last year?’ . . . Maybe he’s being a little too cool at this point.”  …

From abroad, Roger Simon looks at the current political landscape here and has some sage advice for the GOP.

… If I were the Republicans, I’d be worrying about peaking too early.

In Slate, Anne Applebaum explains some of the reasons for the continuing World War II commemorations.

…The answer cannot lie in the personal experiences of any of the statesmen involved, since none was alive at the time. It lies, rather, in the way that memories of the war have come to be central to the national memory, and therefore to the contemporary politics, of so many of the countries that fought in it.

Everything about modern Germany, for instance, is the way it is because of the war, from its pacifism and its devotion to the European Union to the architecture of its capital city. War guilt is built into the political system and becomes controversial only when it seems some Germans want to abandon it: The new wave of interest in the fate of Germans who fled or were expelled from Central Europe after the war, or the popularity of books about Allied bombings of German cities, worries many in the region. Hence Angela Merkel’s presence at Westerplatte. (She was the first to confirm she would attend.) No German chancellor wants any of Germany’s neighbors to doubt that Germany is still very sorry about 1939 (even if some are rather indifferent). And none wants Germany’s neighbors to fear German aggression today.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin will attend for slightly different reasons, or so it would seem. Last weekend, Russian state television ran a long documentary essentially arguing that Stalin was justified in ordering the 1939 invasion of Poland and the Baltic states—and in doing a secret deal with Hitler—on the grounds that Poland itself was in a secret alliance with the Nazis. Putin himself probably will not defend this startling and ahistorical thesis, although—judging from an article he has written for the Polish media—he may well try to “contextualize” the Hitler-Stalin pact by comparing it with other diplomatic decisions. Lately, other Russians have lately expressed similarly positive views of 1939 in a well-coordinated attempt to justify the Hitler-Stalin pact. (If they have any views: The majority of Russians, a recent poll shows, do not know that the USSR invaded Poland in 1939.)

But from the point of view of the Russian ruling elite, such interpretations make sense: By praising Stalin’s aggression toward the USSR’s neighbors 70 years ago, the current leaders help justify Russia’s aggression toward its neighbors today, at least in the eyes of the Russian public. …

David Harsanyi, one of our favorites, agrees with George Will.

… Judging from their harsh reaction to Will, it’s not clear when, if ever, some conservatives believe the U.S. should withdraw from Afghanistan. Even less clear is how the victory narrative is supposed to play out. Does this triumphant day arrive when every Islamic radical in the region has met his virgins? If so, after eight years of American lives lost, the goal seems further away than ever.

Or is victory achieved when we finally usher this primitive tribal culture, with its violent warlords and religious extremism, through the 8th century all the way to modernity? If so, we’re on course for a centuries-long enterprise of nation-building and babysitting, not a war. The war was won in 2002.

If the goal is to establish a stable government to fill the vacuum created by our ousting of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, we’ve done quite a job. Most Americans can accept a Marine risking life and limb to safeguard our freedoms. But when that Marine is protector of a corrupt and depraved foreign parliament — one that recently legalized marital rape and demands women ask permission from male relatives to leave their home — it is not a victory worth celebrating. …

Scott Johnson of Powerline recounts a shocking story from Peter Robinson.

…Former Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson recalls that Senator Kennedy was something more than a useful idiot. In the heyday of the Soviet Union’s peace offensive, Senator Kennedy appears to have offered his collaboration with Soviet leadership in opposing Reagan’s efforts. Robinson writes:

Picking his way through the Soviet archives that Boris Yeltsin had just thrown open, in 1991 Tim Sebastian, a reporter for the London Times, came across an arresting memorandum. Composed in 1983 by Victor Chebrikov, the top man at the KGB, the memorandum was addressed to Yuri Andropov, the top man in the entire USSR. The subject: Sen. Edward Kennedy.

“On 9-10 May of this year,” the May 14 memorandum explained, “Sen. Edward Kennedy’s close friend and trusted confidant [John] Tunney was in Moscow.” (Tunney was Kennedy’s law school roommate and a former Democratic senator from California.) “The senator charged Tunney to convey the following message, through confidential contacts, to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Y. Andropov.”

Kennedy’s message was simple. He proposed an unabashed quid pro quo. Kennedy would lend Andropov a hand in dealing with President Reagan. In return, the Soviet leader would lend the Democratic Party a hand in challenging Reagan in the 1984 presidential election. “The only real potential threats to Reagan are problems of war and peace and Soviet-American relations,” the memorandum stated. “These issues, according to the senator, will without a doubt become the most important of the election campaign.”

See Robinson’s column for the rest of the story. I add only that the soul of liberalism appears to be immortal. At any rate, it survives Senator Kennedy’s death.

The IBD Editorial board also comments on Kennedy’s KGB overtures and the egregious lack of coverage by the MSM.

…When we first heard of this, we thought it must be a mistake. Or a hoax. But it appears to be neither. Indeed, to our knowledge, the memo written by then-KGB chief Victor Chebrikov to Andropov has never been challenged as a fake….

…As we said, we’re not the first to report this. First came the London Times’ Sebastian, way back in 1992. And just three years ago, historian Paul Kengor repeated the story in his book “The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism.” …

…The whole shameful episode reflects poorly on the honesty and integrity of America’s major news outlets. It seems Kennedy read the media right — he was quite confident the Fourth Estate’s reflexive defenders of Camelot could be counted on to help. …

…Again, in the end, there’s no evidence Kennedy or Tunney ever actually helped the KGB. Just that they offered to. Yet this raises many troubling questions that, sadly, may never be answered.

Did Kennedy not understand that the Soviet Union was, indeed, a murderous evil empire? Did he really think that, between Reagan and Andropov, the Russian was the lesser of two evils?

Still more troubling, perhaps, is the question asked recently by James Kirchick at Commentary Magazine: Did a sitting senator violate the Logan Act, the 1799 law that prohibits “any citizen” of the U.S. from meddling in American foreign policy on behalf of a foreign power?

The mainstream media could have at least asked these questions. That they didn’t only adds to a long, shameful history of partisanship that has skewed the news for more than a generation — and left the nation worse off for it.

David Warren has been reluctant to write about Kennedy.

…Those who could not guess what I thought of Ted Kennedy, could not have been reading my columns. But to review, quickly, I classed him among the horrible freaks of electoral politics, an embodiment of almost everything I detest in public life, from open advocacy of “the culture of death,” and socialist tyranny, to great personal hypocrisy; sometimes nearly a traitor to his country; and certainly a traitor to his religion. …

…”But what do you really think?” I can hear my reader asking. That is what I really think, but it is not incompatible with something else I really think: that Kennedy was a great and interesting man, and not without some noble qualities; moreover, a man in some (small) degree excused by the overweening ambitions of the Kennedy family, inculcated by a rather monstrous father. His brother Robert would, had he survived, have set Ted a better example, for Robert retained a fairly stalwart Christian moral sense, and was thus less easily corrupted.

Ambition on behalf of the good should be encouraged; ambition as an end in itself should never be. But the worst kind of ambition was the sort Ted Kennedy had, in which self and cause become inextricably confused. …

John Stossel looks at the unintended, and negative, economic consequences of Cash for Clunkers.

…Let’s start at the beginning. The government paid car owners to trade in their old cars, which will be destroyed. But the government is running a deficit. So it doesn’t have $3 billion to hand out. It must borrow the money, which reduces the amount of money for other investments. Moreover, the government must raise taxes in the future to pay back the principal and interest — or the Federal Reserve will monetize the debt through inflation. Either way, we pay.

That isn’t all. Those car buyers were either going to trade in their used cars soon or they weren’t. If they were, Cash for Clunkers simply moved up the schedule. The stimulation of the auto industry occurred earlier. Big deal. But if buyers planned to keep their cars longer, the program imposed costs that are less visible. Without the government incentive to buy cars, consumers would have bought other things — computers, washing machines, televisions. The manufacturers and sellers of those products didn’t get to make those sales. Why should the auto industry get privileges at the expense of others?

Then there are the mechanics who would have serviced those used cars. They’ve lost business. Some will be laid off. Nor should we forget low-income people who depend on the used-car market for their transportation. The cheap cars they would have bought were destroyed. …

…Finally, there is something revolting about the government subsidizing the destruction of useful things. It reminds me of the New Deal policy of killing piglets and pouring milk down sewers to keep food prices from falling. …

Given the complaints of some of the left Luddites about bio-engineered crops, the fact there is plenty of diversity in available seeds is counter-intuitive. Jonathan Adler at Volokh Conspiracy has the story.

It is generally assumed that crop diversity declined dramatically during the 20th century. This trend is blamed upon market pressures and the rise of corporate agriculture, among other things. But is the underlying assumption accurate? Paul Heald and Susannah Chapman of the University of Georgia (law and anthropology, respectively) suggest we may need to rethink what we think we know about vegetable crop diversity. In a new paper, “Crop Diversity Report Card for the Twentieth Century: Diversity Bust or Diversity Boom?”, they present evidence that crop diversity has not declined meaningfully at all. …

The Wall Street Journal editorial board reports on the government-created drought in California.

…The state’s water emergency is unfolding thanks to the latest mishandling of the Endangered Species Act. Last December, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued what is known as a “biological opinion” imposing water reductions on the San Joaquin Valley and environs to safeguard the federally protected hypomesus transpacificus, a.k.a., the delta smelt. As a result, tens of billions of gallons of water from mountains east and north of Sacramento have been channelled away from farmers and into the ocean, leaving hundreds of thousands of acres of arable land fallow or scorched. …

…The result has already been devastating for the state’s farm economy. In the inland areas affected by the court-ordered water restrictions, the jobless rate has hit 14.3%, with some farming towns like Mendota seeing unemployment numbers near 40%. Statewide, the rate reached 11.6% in July, higher than it has been in 30 years. In August, 50 mayors from the San Joaquin Valley signed a letter asking President Obama to observe the impact of the draconian water rules firsthand. …

…The issue now turns to the Obama Administration and the courts, though the farmers have so far found scant hope for relief from the White House. In June, the Administration denied the governor’s request to designate California a federal disaster area as a result of the drought conditions, which U.S. Drought Monitor currently lists as a “severe drought” in 43% of the state. Doing so would force the Administration to acknowledge awkward questions about the role its own environmental policies have played in scorching the Earth. …

…The Pacific Legal Foundation has filed a lawsuit on behalf of three farmers in the valley, calling the federal regulations “immoral and unconstitutional.” Because the delta smelt is only found in California, the Foundation says, it does not fall under the regulatory powers provided by the Constitution’s Commerce Clause. On a statutory basis, the Fish and Wildlife Service also neglected to appropriately consider the economic devastation the pumping restrictions would bring. …

We close with a look at a time when we had a government that got a few things right. John Fund reviews Hayward’s The Age of Reagan.

You call this a crisis? Think back nearly 30 years ago. When Ronald Reagan took office the ­country’s economy was in a shambles—inflation was running into the double digits, growth had ­stagnated and the top marginal tax rate was 70%. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union, bristling with imperial designs and ­nuclear weapons, had recently invaded ­Afghanistan, installing a puppet regime, and Iran had ousted a pro-Western leader in favor of a ­fervently ­anti-American cleric. The White House tenure of Jimmy Carter, known for hand-wringing over ­”malaise” and a botched hostage-rescue mission, had led scholars to conclude that the American presidency, as an institution, was too weak to govern in the ­modern world.

And then came Reagan. He faced down the Soviets, cut taxes and revived the economy. Not least, he ­restored confidence in the presidency itself, providing a model for his successors. One of his legacies, visible in the outlook of every successful presidential candidate since, is an ­optimism about the ­nation, echoing his statement that “people who talk about an age of limits are ­really talking about their own limitations, not America’s.”

In “The Age of ­Reagan,” Steven F. ­Hayward offers a splendid narrative history of ­Reagan’s two terms in the White House—a period (1981-89) that amounted to what he calls a “counterrevolution,” reversing so much of what had spiraled downward in the late 1970s. Along the way, he supplies a keen analysis of just how much Reagan succeeded in changing America’s self-image, often by reasserting core principles. …

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In the New Statesman, George Friedman of Stratfor, uses a geopolitical paradigm for a fascinating review of the history of global powers and a look at the potential rise of new powers.

Japan and Turkey form an alliance to attack the US. Poland becomes America’s closest ally. Mexico makes a bid for global supremacy, and a third world war takes place in space. Sounds strange? It could all happen.

In 1492, Columbus sailed west. In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed. These two events bracketed the European age. Once, Mayans lived unaware that there were Mongols, who were unaware there were Zulus. From the 15th century onwards, European powers collectively overwhelmed the world, creating the first truly global geopolitical system in human history, to the point where the fate of Australian Aborigines was determined by British policy in Ireland and the price of bread in France turned on the weather in Minnesota.

Europe simultaneously waged a 500-year-long civil war of increasing savagery, until the continent tore itself apart in the 20th century and lost its hold on the world. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was no longer a single European nation that could be considered a global power of the first rank.

Another unprecedented event took place a decade or so earlier. For 500 years, whoever controlled the North Atlantic controlled Europe’s access to the world and, with it, global trade. By 1980, the geography of trade had shifted, so that the Atlantic and Pacific were equally important, and any power that had direct access to both oceans had profound advantages. North America became the pivot of the global system, and whatever power dominated North America became its centre of gravity. That power is, of course, the United States.

It is geography combined with the ability to exploit it that matters. …

…Geopolitics assumes two things: first, that human beings organise themselves into units larger than families and that they have a natural loyalty to the things they were born into, the people and the places; second, that the character of a nation is determined to a great extent by geography, as is the relationship between nations. We use the term “geography” broadly. It includes the physical characteristics of a location, but it goes beyond that to look at the effects of a place on individuals and communities. These are the foundation of geopolitical forecasting. …

…The world is Americentric. The US marshals the economic resources of North America, controls the world’s oceans and space, projects force where it wishes – wisely or not. The US is to the world what Britain once was to Europe. Both nations depended on control of the sea to secure their interests. Both nations understood that the best way to retain control of the sea was to prevent other nations from building navies. Both understood that the best way to do that was to maintain a balance of power in which potential challengers spent their resources fighting each other on land, rather than building fleets that could challenge their control of the sea. …

Before we get to the main event today, which is George Will’s Afghan bug-out column, we have some business with another of our apostates. So now David Brooks is falling deeply out of ObamaLove. Jonah Goldberg has the story in The Corner.

… According to Brooks, the reason why Obama is falling apart is that he’s married himself to the very liberal Democratic leadership. Brooks thinks this was a horrible tactical and strategic mistake and, he’s right! But why did he make it? Brooks ends his column with this partial explanation: “Events have pushed Barack Obama off to the left. Time to rebalance.”

Oh those horrible events! They make criminals rob liquor stores.  John Edwards cheated on his cancer-stricken wife even as he was using her as a campaign issue because of “events.” Larry Craig was driven to that bathroom stall by “events.” I am overserved at open bars because those pernicious events won’t leave me alone.

Maybe, just maybe, Barack Obama wasn’t driven to the left by events but, rather, he was driving them thataway?

Brooks, it seems to me, is still holding out hope for the possibility that if we “let Obama be Obama” he’ll tack to the center because he really is that bipartisan, moderate, Niebuhr-grocking 21st century man that caused so many otherwise sensible conservatives to go off their feed.

That seems highly implausible to me. Obama has been Obama, and that’s why he’s in the predicament he’s in. He is the author of these events, not a victim of them. …

George Will thinks that it’s time to withdraw troops from Afghanistan.

…The U.S. strategy is “clear, hold and build.” Clear? Taliban forces can evaporate and then return, confident that U.S. forces will forever be too few to hold gains. Hence nation-building would be impossible even if we knew how, and even if Afghanistan were not the second-worst place to try: The Brookings Institution ranks Somalia as the only nation with a weaker state.

Military historian Max Hastings says Kabul controls only about a third of the country — “control” is an elastic concept — and ” ‘our’ Afghans may prove no more viable than were ‘our’ Vietnamese, the Saigon regime.” Just 4,000 Marines are contesting control of Helmand province, which is the size of West Virginia. The New York Times reports a Helmand official saying he has only “police officers who steal and a small group of Afghan soldiers who say they are here for ‘vacation.’ ” Afghanistan’s $23 billion gross domestic product is the size of Boise’s. Counterinsurgency doctrine teaches, not very helpfully, that development depends on security, and that security depends on development. Three-quarters of Afghanistan’s poppy production for opium comes from Helmand. In what should be called Operation Sisyphus, U.S. officials are urging farmers to grow other crops. Endive, perhaps?

Even though violence exploded across Iraq after, and partly because of, three elections, Afghanistan’s recent elections were called “crucial.” To what? They came, they went, they altered no fundamentals, all of which militate against American “success,” whatever that might mean. Creation of an effective central government? Afghanistan has never had one. U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry hopes for a “renewal of trust” of the Afghan people in the government, but the Economist describes President Hamid Karzai’s government — his vice presidential running mate is a drug trafficker — as so “inept, corrupt and predatory” that people sometimes yearn for restoration of the warlords, “who were less venal and less brutal than Mr. Karzai’s lot.”  …

…U.S. forces are being increased by 21,000, to 68,000, bringing the coalition total to 110,000. About 9,000 are from Britain, where support for the war is waning. Counterinsurgency theory concerning the time and the ratio of forces required to protect the population indicates that, nationwide, Afghanistan would need hundreds of thousands of coalition troops, perhaps for a decade or more. That is inconceivable. …

Peter Wehner responds to George Will in Contentions.

…It appears to be Will’s principle that when he signs up and speaks out, when he marshals his eloquent and influential words on behalf of war, he will strongly support that war, but only for a season; only so long as it goes quickly, smoothly, and without complications. If, however, the conflict gets hard — if progress is slow and setbacks are incurred, if lives are lost and the war doesn’t end on his time line — Will is ready to declare, as he does in his column today, that “Genius . . . sometimes consists of knowing when to stop.” Translation: he’s ready to up and quit.

Here is a disturbing fact to ponder: If George Will were commander in chief, we would, under his leadership, have begun and lost two wars of enormous consequence. The damage to America — militarily, geopolitically, and morally — would be staggering. The boon to militant Islam — militarily, geopolitically, and in terms of morale — would be incalculable. Yet nowhere in his most recent column does Will even begin to grapple with what surrender in Afghanistan would mean — to that country, to Pakistan, to jihadists around the world, to confidence in America’s word and will, and to our national-security interests. And while Afghanistan, like Iraq, is a very difficult undertaking, declaring defeat at this stage is unwarranted and terribly unwise. If General David Petraeus thinks the task is hopeless, then I will take a hard second look at the war. But if George Will declares it hopeless, I will simply take a hard second look at his record.

Mr. Will has earned the reputation as one of the finest columnists alive, and one of the better ones our country has ever produced. I have admired him in the past, and I learn from him still. But on Iraq and Afghanistan, he has been wrong, unreliable, and unsteady.

In 1983 the French journalist and intellectual Jean-Francois Revel wrote How Democracies Perish. It was a withering critique of the West’s loss of nerve and will in the face of the totalitarian threat it faced. In his book, Revel wrote, “Democracy tends to ignore, even deny, threats to its existence because it loathes doing what is needed to counter them.” In a column praising Revel’s book, George Will wrote, “Defense of democracy depends on pessimists who are not defeatists. It depends on spirited realists such as Jean-Francois Revel.”

Now, like then, America needs spirited realists, not defeatists. We need individuals who believe a nation must be willing to fight for what is right even when it is hard. We need people who are going to resist the temptation to eagerly support war at the outset and then prematurely give up on it. …

Frederick W. Kagan has a sharply worded reply to some inaccuracies and characterizations in Will’s column.

In response to George Will’s column, “Why are we still in Afghanistan?,” it is worth noting some factual inaccuracies. There are considerably more than 4,000 counterinsurgents in Helmand Province. Will may find the British contribution “risible” — a rather offensive statement considering the number of soldiers Britain has lost in Afghanistan and the size of its military contributions to both Iraq and Afghanistan; others might make various more specific criticisms of the British performance from a technical perspective; but there are still 9,000 British military personnel in Afghanistan — most of them in Helmand, and most of them fighting hard. This misstatement is part of a larger problem summed up in the following two sentences:

Counterinsurgency theory concerning the time and the ratio of forces required to protect the population indicates that, nationwide, Afghanistan would need hundreds of thousands of coalition troops, perhaps for a decade or more. That is inconceivable.

If we are quoting counterinsurgency theory, then we might do well to be specific about it. COIN theory calls for one counterinsurgent for every 50 people in a conflict area (although this is hardly a hard-and-fast law, it turns out to be a reasonably good rule of thumb). There are perhaps 16 million people in the Pashtun belt — the area in which almost all insurgent activity occurs in Afghanistan. The one-to-50 ratio would call for about 320,000 counterinsurgents in that area. But that group would include indigenous forces. Granting Will’s anecdotal observations that the Afghan police are at best ineffective (which is far too sweeping a statement), the Afghan National Army is at least as good as many of the organizations that have functioned as counterinsurgents in Iraq. The ANA numbers about 90,000 right now, and it can be expanded to 134,000 next year, and perhaps 240,000 within a couple of years after that. There are around 100,000 U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan now. So: How inconceivable is it? And for how long?

The surge of forces that some (including me) are proposing is intended to bridge the gap between current Afghan capacity and their future capacity, while simultaneously reducing the insurgency’s capabilities. Whatever may happen in Afghanistan, counterinsurgency theory does not call for the deployment of hundreds of thousands of coalition forces for decades. Lastly, neither waving the bloody shirt nor rudely disparaging the efforts of allies who have shed their own blood alongside our troops is appropriate to this discussion. But doing both in the same column is simply reprehensible.

Also in The Corner, Rich Lowry states that a troop withdrawal will negatively impact Pakistan’s counter-insurgency efforts.

…Will says “Pakistan actually matters.” That’s a very important reason to care about Afghanistan too. For the first time, Pakistan has been undertaking serious counter-insurgency operations in the border areas. And we have been supporting them with counter-insurgency operations in adjacent areas in Afghanistan. Just as Pakistan begins to get serious are we going to pull the rug out from under them? The Durand Line obviously works both ways. Just as Pakistani under-performance over the years has created a haven for fighters to infiltrate into Afghanistan, our under-performance would create a haven in Afghanistan for fighters to infiltrate Pakistan. And there’s no such thing as simply guarding the border since there’s no border to speak of. If you want to control the border you have to control the population near it, which means you can’t just rely on special operations forces and have to undertake counter-insurgency operations that require boots on the ground and, ultimately, a functioning indigenous army and government.

In other words, if you think Afghanistan matters at all, something on the order of what we are attempting there now is necessary. If you think Afghanistan doesn’t matter and should be allowed to fall to hell, that’s another thing. But the problem is that it abuts another country that inarguably matters and whose border regions are a haven to al Qaeda. That’s why there’s no easy escape …

Mark Steyn also responds wondering what our objectives are in Afghanistan.

Rich, Kathryn et al, I’m less hostile to the George Will column. It seems to me we have no very clear war aims in Afghanistan, which is never a good position to be in.

Are we “nation-building”? With US commanders talking about ending Afghanistan’s “culture of poverty”, it sounds like it. Yet, even assuming you could build a nation in any meaningful sense of the word on Afghan soil, such a nation would be profoundly uncongenial to us. …

…The much misunderstood British strategy in Afghanistan was, by contrast, admirably clear-sighted, and worked (for them) for over a century. They took a conscious decision not to incorporate the country formally within the Indian Empire because they didn’t want a direct British land border with Russia. So instead they were content with a highly decentralized semi-client state and a useful buffer between the British Empire and the Tsars, a set-up that worked well (from London’s point of view) for over a century until it all fell apart in the Sixties when Moscow started outbidding the Brits for the loyalty of various factions – or what passes for loyalty in that part of the world.

The British strategy was cold and calculated and, if you care about Afghan child mortality rates and women’s rights, very unprogressive. But it was less deluded than asking western troops to die in pursuit of the chimera of ending a “culture of poverty” while in reality providing multilateral window-dressing for the country’s slippage back to warlordism and Sharia.