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David Warren asks can Israel survive?
… But I insist that Israel’s survival is tied to that of the West. She is our front line, an embodiment of unambiguously western values. The enemies we have are common enemies – left-fascist ideology (formerly expressed as Communism), and Islamofascist ideology (now called “Islamism,” to distinguish political from religious Islam, on the assumption that this can be done).
These are the two great contemporary Sirens, and each calls upon constituencies lodged deep in the West itself. The appeal of simplistic ideological movements spreads in the spiritual vacuum left by the recession of Christianity.
But whatever dark forces answer to the command of these two great Sirens, there is agreement between the left and the Islamists that Israel is the front line of the West, and that she is sufficiently isolated to be worth destroying first. There is moreover agreement between them that the ultimate target is “Amerika” and the whole “bourgeois, Judeo-Christian” order that has sustained our freedom and prosperity. …
In the Financial Times, Robert Kagan makes the case for a league of democracies.
With tensions between Russia and Georgia rising, Chinese nationalism growing in response to condemnation of Beijing’s crackdown on Tibet, the dictators of cyclone-ravaged Burma resisting international aid , the crisis in Darfur still raging, the Iranian nuclear programme still burgeoning and Robert Mugabe still clinging violently to rule in Zimbabwe – what do you suppose keeps some foreign policy columnists up at night? It is the idea of a new international organisation, a league or concert of democratic nations.
“Dangerous,” warns a columnist on this page, fretting about a new cold war. Nor is he alone. On both sides of the Atlantic the idea – set forth most prominently by Senator John McCain a year ago – has been treated as impractical and incendiary. Perhaps a few observations can still this rising chorus of alarm.
The idea of a concert of democracies originated not with Republicans but with US Democrats and liberal internationalists. …
Karl Rove says the GOP has to stand for something.
Tuesday’s election results highlighted challenges for both Democrats and Republicans.
Republicans received a hard shot in Mississippi. Greg Davis (for whom I campaigned and who was a well-qualified candidate) narrowly lost a special congressional election in a district President George W. Bush carried four years ago with 62% of the vote. Democrats pulled off the win by smartly nominating a conservative, Travis Childers, from a rural swing part of the district who disavowed Barack Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and hit Mr. Davis from the right.
This blow to the GOP came after two other special congressional election losses in recent months. Republicans lost former House Speaker Denny Hastert’s Illinois seat and Rep. Richard Baker’s Louisiana seat.
Both of those losses can be attributed to bad candidates. But that only shows the GOP can’t take “safe” seats for granted when Democrats run conservatives who distance themselves from their national party leaders. The string of defeats should cure Republicans of the habit of simply shouting “liberal! liberal! liberal!” in hopes of winning an election. They need to press a reform agenda full of sharp contrasts with the Democrats. …
American Spectator says Obama’s running for Carter’s second term.
You have to admit it takes guts. Audacity, even.
Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive nominee of the Democrats, has in essence just defeated the heiress of the Clinton era by campaigning as the heir-apparent of the Carter era.
The question for the rest of the year is this: Are there enough voting Americans who survived the disastrous odyssey through the late 1970s that was led by blessedly now ex-president Jimmy Carter? While Ronald Reagan is rated in poll after poll by Americans as a great president, (most recently he rated second only to Lincoln), are there enough people who recall that Reagan’s election came about because of Carter’s…ahhh…”performance” in the Oval Office? And will they be able to make the Obama-Carter connection for younger voters hearing terms like “windfall profits tax” for the first time? More to the point, can Senator John McCain do this?
The greatest charade of the year thus far is the idea that something “new” is being said in this campaign. By anybody. To be bluntly accurate, the only thing new is that one of the final two candidates is black. It seems to escape some that in a country even as young as America, 55 presidential elections (2008 is the 56th) covers just about all the ground there is to cover in debating any given next four years in the life of the United States. Consider.
Since the 1788 election that produced (unopposed) George Washington as the first president, the agenda for presidential elections has been narrowed to one underlying issue: the role of government. Understood in that fashion, the following 220 years of American history can be read as if with Superman’s X-ray vision. From slavery to abortion, the War of 1812 to the War in Iraq, from Lincoln’s support for “internal improvements” to John McCain’s disdain for congressional earmarks, the question at issue was the role of government. Whether dealing with the isolationism of Washington or Robert Taft or Ron Paul instead of the internationalism of Jefferson’s chase after the Barbary pirates, Wilson’s League of Nations or Ronald Reagan’s determination to win the Cold War, the underlying question every time was the role of government. …
Roy Spencer in National Review reacts to yesterday’s polar bear decision.
The decision on Wednesday by the U.S. Interior Department to declare the polar bear a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act is a major victory for environmentalists who have been looking for a back-door legal mechanism to limit carbon-dioxide emissions.
The decision was made after nine U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) studies looked into the possibility that the polar bear might be faced with extinction late in this century. Polar bears need a sea ice environment for most of the year to thrive. But summer sea extent has been receding for the last 30 years that we have been monitoring it with satellites, and as a result, two of the 13 subpopulations of polar bear have seen population declines. The other eleven subpopulations have been stable or growing. In all, the total polar-bear population is believed to be at or near a record high — 20,000 to 25,000.
So how is it that the eventual extinction of the polar bear has been forecast in the face of record-high numbers? Well, as in the case of global-warming projections, experts relied on computer models that predict continued global warming and continued melting of summer Arctic sea ice. …
Jeff Jacoby looks at Levy’s and Mellor’s book on the Supremes.
… In a lucid new book – “The Dirty Dozen: How Twelve Supreme Court Cases Radically Expanded Government and Eroded Freedom” – legal scholars Robert Levy and William Mellor offer a mournful litany of high-court blunders in the modern era. The cases involve subjects as diverse as campaign finance, gun control, and the right to pursue an occupation; each, the authors write, had a “destructive effect on law and public policy” – either by enlarging government powers beyond their constitutional bounds or by undermining individual liberties that the Constitution protects. As often as not, the court failed not by being too activist, but by not being activist enough: by allowing the legislative and executive branches to do as they wished, instead of compelling them to stay within constitutional constraints.
The most notorious of the Dirty Dozen is Korematsu v. United States (1944), in which the court gave its sanction to the Roosevelt administration’s World War II internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans, none of whom had been accused of disloyalty or sabotage.
In Wickard v. Filburn (1942), the court upheld the government’s power to impose quotas for wheat even on a small farmer who used what he grew right on his farm and sold none of it across state lines. The court should have struck the law down as a blatant violation of the Commerce Clause, which limits Congress to the regulation of interstate commerce – something Farmer Filburn clearly wasn’t engaged in. Instead the court allowed it, throwing open the door to a vast expansion of federal control. …
Dilbert’s here. Along with Borowitz, Scrappleface and News Biscuit.