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Paul at Power Line posts on Obama’s foreign affairs mishaps in the Middle East and Eastern Europe.

…A recent survey sponsored by the Jerusalem Post showed that only 4 percent of Israelis believe that President Obama’s policies are more pro-Israel than pro-Palestinian. Considering that the margin of error in the poll was 4.5 percent, one might wonder whether any Israeli, or at least any Israeli Jew, believes Obama is on the side of America’s long-time ally. …

…When Netanyahu formed a largely “right-wing” coalition government earlier this year, his regime was considered fragile even by Israeli standards. But then the Obama administration insisted that Israel halt all new construction in West Bank settlements, including construction of new homes within large settlements to accommodate natural population. Then it protested plans to build a new apartments in East Jerusalem.

When Netanyahu rejected these demands, his popularity soared. Obama had transformed the least lovable of all Israeli politicians into a leader around whom a strong majority of Israelis could rally.

In foreign affairs, many actions set in motion an equal and opposite reaction. Obama probably hoped that any Israeli reaction against his policies would coincide with an equally strong reaction in his favor in the Arab world.

But while Israelis judged Obama by his words, the Arabs judged him by his results. Thus, when the Netanyahu government refused to halt construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the Arab world was not amused.

Now, the administration is trying desperately to cobble together a compromise on settlement construction. But no face-saving compromise will obscure the fact that Obama has squandered America’s credibility on both sides of the Middle East divide …

Jennifer Rubin reports on the return of Zelaya to Honduras and his support from Obama.

The return of ousted leader Manuel Zelaya to Honduras has upped the ante for the Obama administration—and revealed just how counterproductive its approach is there. This report explains:

It was unclear what Mr. Zelaya would do next. He has the support of the international community as well as the U.S., which canceled the visas of many officials in the interim government, and cut some aid to Honduras, one of the hemisphere’s poorest countries. However, Mr. Zelaya’s return is vehemently opposed by the country’s institutions, including the congress, the courts, the armed forces and the powerful Catholic Church.

The interim government had hoped elections scheduled for Nov. 29 would produce a new president as a way out of the country’s political impasse. But this option dimmed when the U.S. and other governments suggested they would not recognize the winner. Analysts say the U.S.’s stand strengthened Mr. Zelaya and might have encouraged him to try this last gambit.

So the Obama team is insisting on the return of the man no institution in this democratic country supports–and that position only emboldened that same unpopular figure to return. Nice work. And now that he has returned, will the Obama administration give up its bizarrely stubborn position that no new election can be recognized because that same unpopular figure isn’t back in power? And he isn’t in power, you will recall, because the supreme court and legislature, with the backing of the military, acted in defense of their constitution.

This is Alice-in-Wonderland “diplomacy”–making things worse and more difficult for a U.S. ally while bolstering Hugo Chavez’s ally. Actually, it’s just gross incompetence, which is becoming pretty much par for the course for the Obama foreign-policy wrecking crew.

David Warren with some shorts on Honduras and neoconservatives Bernard Lewis and Irving Kristol.

According to Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis, in a letter correcting the Wall Street Journal, it was a Turkish general, speaking shortly after Turkey joined NATO, who said:

“The problem with having the Americans as your allies is that you never know when they’ll turn around and stab themselves in the back.” Lewis has merely dined out on this quotation, for more than half his life. (He is now 93.)

The remark itself is better than a column in describing the horrible night that is descending upon Honduras, where a totalitarian maniac — Manuel Zelaya — is being manoeuvred back into power by the international Left.

Zelaya was deposed under the Honduran constitution, by the army on direct instruction from the Honduran Supreme Court, before he could stack that court and overturn the constitution.

That Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega, and Raul Castro are plotting, occasions no surprise. That president “Lula” of Brazil is now in with them, occasions a little. But that the whole operation is being done with the support of the U.S. State Department, beggars belief. The Americans are once again stabbing themselves in the back and cutting their allies’ throats, while appeasing their enemies. What more can be said? …

Mark Helprin showed up in WSJ with a piece on the Obama’s appeasement of Iran and Russia.

…With both a collapsing economy and natural gas reserves sufficient to produce 270 years of electricity, the surplus of which it exports, Iran does not need nuclear electrical generation at a cost many times that of its gas-fired plants. It does, however, have every reason, according to its own lights, to seek nuclear weapons—to deter American intervention; to insure against a resurgent Iraq; to provide some offset to nearby nuclear powers Pakistan, Russia and Israel; to move toward hegemony in the Persian Gulf and address the embarrassment of a more militarily capable Saudi Arabia; to rid the Islamic world of Western domination; to neutralize Israel’s nuclear capacity while simultaneously creating the opportunity to destroy it with one shot; and, pertinent to last week’s events, by nuclear intimidation to turn Europe entirely against American interests in the Middle East.

Some security analysts may comfort themselves with the illusion that soon-to-be nuclear Iran is a rational actor, but no country gripped so intensely by a cult of martyrdom and death that to clear minefields it marched its own children across them can be deemed rational. …

…When Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich at least he thought he had obtained something in return for his appeasement. The new American diplomacy is nothing more than a sentimental flood of unilateral concessions—not least, after some minor Putinesque sabre rattling, to Russia. Canceling the missile deployment within NATO, which Dmitry Rogozin, the Russian ambassador to that body, characterizes as “the Americans . . . simply correcting their own mistake, and we are not duty bound to pay someone for putting their own mistakes right,” is to grant Russia a veto over sovereign defensive measures—exactly the opposite of American resolve during the Euro Missile Crisis of 1983, the last and definitive battle of the Cold War.

Stalin tested Truman with the Berlin Blockade, and Truman held fast. Khrushchev tested Kennedy, and in the Cuban Missile Crisis Kennedy refused to blink. In 1983, Andropov took the measure of Reagan, and, defying millions in the street (who are now the Obama base), Reagan did not blink. Last week, the Iranian president and the Russian prime minister put Mr. Obama to the test, and he blinked not once but twice. The price of such infirmity has always proven immensely high, even if, as is the custom these days, the bill has yet to come.

In The Daily Telegraph, UK, Nile Gardiner explains why Obama is liked at the UN.

…The president scores highly at the UN for refusing to project American values and military might on the world stage, with rare exceptions like the war against the Taliban. His appeasement of Iran, his bullying of Israel, his surrender to Moscow, his call for a nuclear free world, his siding with Marxists in Honduras, his talk of a climate change deal, have all won him plaudits in the large number of UN member states where US foreign policy has traditionally been viewed with contempt.

Simply put, Barack Obama is loved at the UN because he largely fails to advance real American leadership. This is a dangerous strategy of decline that will weaken US power and make her far more vulnerable to attack.

As we saw last week with his shameful surrender to Moscow over missile defence, the president is perfectly happy to undermine America’s allies and gut its strategic defences while currying favour with enemies and strategic competitors. The missile defence debacle is rightly viewed as a betrayal by the Poles and the Czechs, and Washington has clearly given the impression that it cares little about those who have bravely stood shoulder to shoulder with their US allies in Iraq, Afghanistan and the wider war on terror.

The Obama administration is now overseeing and implementing the biggest decline in American global power since Jimmy Carter. Unfortunately it may well take another generation for the United States to recover.

Peter Wehner comments on the president’s UN speech.

… No one believes America’s history is pristine; we are all familiar with the catalogue of our own sins, beginning with slavery. Other presidents have recognized them, and a few have given voice to them. But it was done in the context of a reverence for America—for what it has been and stands for, for what it is and can be. Think of the words of George Washington, who said of America, “I was summoned by my Country, whose voice I can never hear but with veneration and love.” That is a noble sentiment from a man whose love of country knew no bounds. They are also words that I cannot imagine President Obama saying, at least with conviction. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t like his country or admire things about it; it means that he has yet to really speak out for it. And it means that he has shown, so far at least, that he is more interested in advancing his interests than in speaking on behalf of the nation that elected him. There are enough critics of America in the world; we don’t need to add America’s president to that list.

Perhaps Mr. Obama will come to understand that there is a problem when the president of the United States—an “inestimable jewel,” Lincoln called her—has harsher things to say about his own country than he does about many of the worst regimes on Earth.

It is all quite disturbing, and to have to say this about an American president almost makes me sick.

Krauthammer’s Take on the speech from The Corner.

… This speech hovered somewhere between embarrassing and dangerous. You had a president of the United States actually saying: “No [one] nation can or should try to dominate another.”

I will buy the “should try to” as kind of adolescent wishful thinking. But “no [one] nation can dominate another”? What planet is he living on? It is the story of man. What does he think Russia is doing to Georgia?

But the alarming part is what he said in the same paragraph where he said that it makes no sense anymore “the alignments of nations that are rooted in the cleavages of the Cold War.”

Well, NATO is rooted in the cleavage of the Cold War. The European Union is rooted in the cleavage of the Cold War. Our alliances with Japan and Korea and the Philippines, our guarantees to Taiwan and Eastern Europe are all rooted in the cleavage of the Cold War. (Interesting noun, incidentally.)

So he is saying that is all now irrelevant. What does he think our allies are going to think who hear this?

Obama’s speech is alarming because it says the United States has no more moral right to act or to influence world history than Bangladesh or Sierra Leone. …

Michael Barone says that Obama relies too much on formulaic Marxist interpretations of history that he learned at college.

…On the Sunday talk shows a day before Woodward’s story appeared, Obama said he had not yet decided on a strategy in Afghanistan. “I’m certainly not one who believes in indefinite occupations of other countries,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” as if the United States were occupying a country against the wishes of most of its inhabitants to the detriment of “the people.” Shades of those early 1980s Marxist Latin America tracts.

The reaction to the most recent moves has been harsh, and from unexpected quarters. Leslie Gelb, former head of the Council on Foreign Relations, and the editorial writers of The Washington Post have expressed astonishment at Obama’s apparent switch on Afghanistan. Edward Lucas, former Eastern European correspondent for the Economist, wrote in the Telegraph of London, “The picture emerging from the White House is a disturbing one, of timidity, clumsiness and short-term calculation. Some say he is the weakest president since Jimmy Carter.” …

…But on foreign policy as his record emerges — as he reverses himself on missile defense and perhaps on Afghanistan — his motivating principle seems rooted in an analysis, common in his formative university years, that America has too often been on the side of the bad guys. The response has been to disrespect those who have been our friends and to bow to our enemies.

George Will looks at the economic costs we will be facing due to Obama giving in to unions and protectionism.

While in Pittsburgh, a sense of seemliness should prevent President Obama from again exhorting the Group of 20, as he did April 2 in London, to be strong in resisting domestic pressures for protectionism. This month, invertebrate as he invariably is when organized labor barks, he imposed a 35 percent tariff on imports of tires that China makes for the low-price end of the market. This antic nonsense matters not only because of trade disruptions it may cause but also because it is evidence of his willowy weakness under pressure from his political patrons. …

…The president smote China because a single union, the United Steelworkers, asked him to. It represents rubber workers, but only those responsible for 47 percent of U.S. tiremaking. The president’s action will not create more than a negligible number of jobs, if any. It will not restore a significant number, if any, of the almost 5,200 jobs that were lost in the tire industry from 2004 to 2008. Rather, the president will create jobs in other nations (e.g., Mexico, Indonesia) that make low-end tires. They make them partly because some U.S. firms have outsourced the manufacturing of such tires to low-wage countries so the U.S. firms can make a small profit, while making high-end and higher-profit tires here in high-wage America.

The 215 percent increase in tire imports from China is largely the fault, so to speak, of lower-income Americans, many of whom will respond to the presidential increase in the cost of low-end tires by driving longer on their worn tires. How many injuries and deaths will this cause? How many jobs will it cost in tire replacement businesses or among longshoremen who handle imports? We will find out. The costs of the president’s sacrifice of the national interest to the economic illiteracy of a single labor union may also include injuries China might inflict by imposing retaliatory protectionism or reducing its purchases of U.S. government debt, purchases that enable Americans to consume more government services than they are willing to pay for. …

Roger Simon has an interesting post on The NY Times versus Glenn Beck.

…You could almost feel sympathy for Times editor Jill Abramson, when she laughably excused the paper’s lack of coverage of ACORN as under-staffing on a holiday weekend, were she not so fundamentally meretricious – dishonest, I strongly suspect, even to herself. The level of reification among Times people is extraordinary. Few of them have altered their worldview even a jot for decades. The revelation of ACORN as rotten to the core and a near-perfect illustration of a fundamental flaw in the welfare state is a challenge to their weltanschauung so extreme it would engender personality disintegration.

So the flaying of John Edwards is, for them, something of a cover. It is a way to show even-handedness in a harmless situation when no even-handedness is evident on more serious matters (not just ACORN, but the CIA, water-boarding, global warming, healthcare, the economy, etc., etc.). …

…For the moment the Right is winning and there is no greater reason for this than Glenn Beck. To be honest, Beck makes me feel uneasy. He embarrasses me. He often seems like a man on the verge of an ataque de nervios, as Pedro Almodovar once had it. I don’t know if he is going to fly off the handle, blow up or what.

But he also very often seems to be right (small r). Beck has been the first and, for quite a while, the only one to be assiduously connecting the dots between Obama, Ayers, the two Joneses and the rest of the post-sixties crew that seems to have never gotten over the Port Huron Statement, with the Chicago School of neo-Boss Tweed politics. These are dots that should have been connected by the mainstream media long ago, but, as we all know, they didn’t want to look at them. New Media hasn’t done a great job of connecting these dots either because, frankly, we don’t yet have the skills or manpower. But Beck is doing it. More power to him. Let’s help…

John Tierney, in The New York Times, discusses health and longevity in the US and separates fact from fiction.

…But there are many more differences between Europe and the United States than just the health care system. Americans are more ethnically diverse. They eat different food. They are fatter. Perhaps most important, they used to be exceptionally heavy smokers. For four decades, until the mid-1980s, per-capita cigarette consumption was higher in the United States (particularly among women) than anywhere else in the developed world. Dr. Preston and other researchers have calculated that if deaths due to smoking were excluded, the United States would rise to the top half of the longevity rankings for developed countries.

As it is, the longevity gap starts at birth and persists through middle age, but then it eventually disappears. If you reach 80 in the United States, your life expectancy is longer than in most other developed countries. The United States is apparently doing something right for its aging population, but what?

One frequent answer has been Medicare. Its universal coverage for people over 65 has often been credited with shrinking the longevity gap between the United States and other developed countries.

But when Dr. Preston and a Penn colleague, Jessica Y. Ho, looked at mortality rates in 1965, before Medicare went into effect, they found an even more pronounced version of today’s pattern: middle-aged people died much more often in the United States than in other developed countries, but the longevity gap shrunk with age even faster than today. In that pre-Medicare era, an American who reached 75 could expect to live longer than most people elsewhere. …

David Harsanyi introduces us to Science Czar, Dr. Steven Chu.

…This week, prepping for the upcoming Copenhagen climate change talks, Dr. Steven Chu, our erstwhile Energy secretary, crystallized the administration’s underling thinking by claiming that the “American public . . . just like your teenage kids, aren’t acting in a way that they should act. The American public has to really understand in their core how important this issue is.” …

…Chu will deploy bureaucrats to more than 6,000 public schools to, um, teach children about “climate change” and efficiency. They probably won’t mention that the Energy Department was found to have wasted millions on inefficient use of energy by an independent auditor this year. …

And yes, Chu the adult likes to say that coal — which, as we speak, is likely powering your computer, your office, your house and allows your kids to sit in their schoolhouse without freezing their little toes off in early fall — is his “worst nightmare.”

Coal. Not an energy that is running its course nor one that the market will replace. This energy source accounts for more than half of electricity production in the entire nation.

Chu, a physicist and Nobel Prize winner — and, unlike me, a deadly serious person — believes that “all the world’s roofs should be painted white as part of efforts to slow global warming.” …

Bjorn Lomborg continues to believe in global warming, and continues to believe it is, in part, human-caused. However, he does not think that reducing carbon emissions is the most logical, effective, or practical solution.

…A global deal based around carbon cuts is expected to include a lot of spending from rich countries to help poor nations to prepare for global warming. There is a great danger that this will actually be diverted away from saving lives that are at risk from today’s problems. Developed countries seem set to spend much money to save few lives in the distant future, instead of combating malnutrition, malaria, or communicable diseases today. It is amoral to build a dam to avoid flooding in 100 years, when the people living beside that dam are starving today. We should be helping communities become stronger today and better able to prepare for global warming in 50 years.

Little wonder that five of the world’s top economists–including three Nobel laureates–who gathered this month for the Copenhagen Consensus on Climate to evaluate policy responses to climate change found that global carbon taxes are a “very poor” option.

Yet, carbon cuts have become the mantra of the political elite. We need another way that is politically feasible, economically responsible and morally right. World leaders should focus on the investments that the economists for the Copenhagen Consensus project found most promising.

Imagine we could fix climate for the next hundred years for less than what the U.S. spends on climate research in a year. Research from Eric Bickel of the University of Texas highlights the potential of climate engineering to do just that. …

Jonathan Tobin in Contentions says even the NY Times is publishing items globalony skeptics will love.

In an article that might well have deserved publication in the Onion, the New York Times introduced a heretical notion to its readership today. Despite the fact that any skepticism about global warming and the responsibility of humanity for this rise in temperatures is now considered proof of insanity, the Times reported that it appears more than likely that “global temperatures have been relatively stable for a decade and may even drop in the next few years.”

This must come as quite a shock to an American public that has been relentlessly propagandized on this issue and convinced that the end of civilization as we know it is just around the corner. But facts are stubborn things, and for all the hoopla about “saving the planet,” now even the Times is prepared to admit that far from heating up at the exponential rates Al Gore has discussed to near universal applause, it appears that the story is a bit more complicated than he may have let on. …

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Charles Krauthammer gives his thoughts on the President’s indecision regarding an Afghanistan strategy.

On Obama’s lack of response to the McChrystal memo on Afghanistan:

‘Well, I think what’s really important here are two dates. The first is August 30. That’s when the McChrystal report was sent to Washington. That is three weeks ago. Obama has  had a single meeting [on that report] since then.

He says he hasn’t reached a conclusion — I suppose because he is spending all his time preparing for Letterman and speeches to schoolchildren — to focus on a war in which our soldiers are in the field getting shot at and, as the president himself is saying, without a strategy.

Now, the other date is the 27th of March, when Obama gave a speech in the White House flanked by his Secretaries of Defense and State, in which he said, and I will read you this, because it is as if it never happened, “Today I’m announcing a comprehensive new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

So we for six months have been living under the new Obama strategy, of which he says today we have none. And his next sentence is, again in March, “This marks the conclusion of a careful policy review” — not the beginning, the end of the policy review.

So it has been his policy, and now he tells us we don’t have a cart and we don’t have a horse”.  …

Jennifer Rubin also comments on the Obama’s delay in committing to a strategy in Afghanistan.

President Obama took to the airwaves to bob and weave on Afghanistan. When will he make a decision? Why hasn’t he already? He won’t say and gives every indication that a massive stall is underway. He goes as far as to suggest that he’s still lacking a strategy from his military.

One problem: that explanation is apparently false. The Washington Post gets its leak:

The top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan warns in an urgent, confidential assessment of the war that he needs more forces within the next year and bluntly states that without them, the eight-year conflict “will likely result in failure,” according to a copy of the 66-page document obtained by The Washington Post.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal says emphatically: “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) — while Afghan security capacity matures — risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.”

His assessment was sent to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Aug. 30 and is now being reviewed by President Obama and his national security team.

August 30? Yup. So what’s holding up a decision? One can’t help but conclude that the president lacks the will to make the tough call in a timely fashion to start on that 12-month effort to gain back the initiative. It’s daunting to make a tough national-security call in the face of domestic opposition from your own party. But at this point it seems that it’s only domestic politics—not a lack of facts or a failure to receive a recommendation—that’s holding back the president. …

In The Politico, Ben Smith discusses the leaked Afghanistan report, and lays out the possible reasons why the report was leaked.

Bob Woodward’s Monday-morning exclusive on a 66-page report from Gen. Stanley McChrystal to President Barack Obama about Afghanistan policy was a rite of passage for the new administration: the first major national security leak and a sure sign that the celebrated Washington Post reporter has penetrated yet another administration.

White House officials greeted the leak with a grimace, but none suggested they’d begin a witch hunt for the leaker. Woodward is famous for his access to the principals themselves — he recently traveled to Afghanistan with National Security Adviser James Jones — and leak hunters couldn’t expect with confidence that they’d find themselves disciplining just an undisciplined junior staffer.

But inside the White House and out, the leak touched off another familiar Washington ritual: speculation about the leaker’s identity and motives.

This is a capital parlor game that, for the Obama administration, has some dire implications. Unless the West Wing somehow orchestrated an elaborate head fake — authorizing what looks at first blush like an intolerable breach of Obama’s internal deliberations — the Woodward story suggests deeper problems for a new president than a bad news cycle.

Woodward — like other reporters, only more so — tends to shake loose information when he can exploit policy conflicts within an administration. There is now a big one over a critical national security decision, along with evidence that some people who ostensibly work for Obama feel they can pressure him with impunity. It took several years within former President George W. Bush’s administration before deep personal and policy fissures became visible. …

Victor Davis Hanson presents theories on why the war in Afghanistan has intensified.

Something is not quite right about the conventional wisdom about the Afghanistan war. For nearly eight years, yearly casualties in Afghanistan sometimes were less than a month’s losses in the dire days in Iraq (e.g., 98 Americans killed in 2006 in Afghanistan, 112 killed in Iraq during December 2006). …

…Just as likely are two other developments never mentioned:

1) Just as Iraq was our second theater in the war on terror, so it was for al-Qaeda and generic jihadists as well. They diverted thousands into Anbar Province and Baghdad proper rather than into Afghanistan; and while for a period they gained traction, ultimately they lost thousands in combat or through defection. That fact may have weakened their efforts in Afghanistan rather than strengthened them; and after their material and psychological defeat in Iraq they have returned their attention to the single front in Afghanistan. In other words, they took their eye off the ball in Afghanistan and focused on Iraq, but lost both materially and psychologically, and now, like us, are refocusing on the single front.

2) We were far more able to inflict casualties (given the terrain, geopolitics, and nature of the fighting) in Iraq than in Afghanistan, and that resulted in both more damage to terrorism in general, and a greater sense of deterrence than was true of the fighting alone in Afghanistan/Pakistan. When bin Laden and Zawahiri announced that Iraq was the major front in the terrorist war on the U.S., they raised the stakes, and were in essence inviting terrorists to go there rather than to Waziristan. …

…it may well be that the Islamists are now increasingly unpopular, down to one front, and waging their all on a last big effort to demoralize us. Both in conventional wars and in insurgencies (as we saw in 2007 in Iraq) sometimes the fiercest fighting is near the end rather than the beginning of the war, as a final offensive is seen as a last gambit. All this means that we should meet the challenge, support the president, and deal with the Taliban and its al-Qaeda allies as we did in 2007 to the terrorists in Iraq, despite the wide differences in culture and conditions on the ground in the respective countries.

Edward Lucas, writing for The Daily Telegraph, UK, gives a European perspective on Obama’s performance.

…Admittedly, the presidential to-do list is terrifying. The economy requires his full-time attention. So does health-care reform. And climate change. Indeed, he deserves praise for spending so much time on thankless foreign policy issues. He is tackling all the big problems: restarting Middle East peace talks, defanging Iran and North Korea and a “reset” of relations with Russia. But none of them are working. …

…Even good moves are ruined by bad presentation. Changing Mr Bush’s costly and untried missile-defence scheme for something workable was sensible. But offensively casual treatment of east European allies such as Poland made it easy for his critics to portray it as naïve appeasement of the regime in Moscow.

Mr Obama’s public image rests increasingly heavily on his extraordinary speechifying abilities. His call in Cairo for a new start in relations with the Muslim world was pitch-perfect. So was his speech in Ghana, decrying Africa’s culture of bad government. His appeal to both houses of Congress to support health care was masterly – though the oratory was far more impressive than the mish-mash plan behind it. This morning he is blitzing the airwaves, giving interviews to all America’s main television stations.

But for what? Mr Obama has tactics a plenty – calm and patient engagement with unpleasant regimes, finding common interests, appealing to shared values – but where is the strategy? What, exactly, did “Change you can believe in” – the hallmark slogan of his campaign – actually mean?

The President’s domestic critics who accuse him of being the sinister wielder of a socialist master-plan are wide of the mark. The man who has run nothing more demanding than the Harvard Law Review is beginning to look out of his depth in the world’s top job. His credibility is seeping away, and it will require concrete achievements rather than more soaring oratory to recover it.

In the New York Daily News, Elizabeth Benjamin reports on the aftermath of the Obama administration getting involved in state politics.

…New York Democrats were stunned by the Obama administration’s heavy-handedness, noting it’s the third time the President meddled in local politics. …

…A source involved with the administration’s deliberations over how to handle Paterson admitted the way this played out was not ideal, but insisted the short-term mess is worth the long-term gain. …

…Now that it has sowed seeds of doubt against Paterson by expressing a “preference” he take a pass on 2010, the White House plans to sit back and let time – and nervous New York Democrats – push the governor the rest of the way out the door.

Few were stepping up yesterday to wholeheartedly endorse the idea that he should run, not even Rep. Serrano.

“The governor will make his own decision,” the congressman said. “The governor is a Democrat, and I don’t know at what point the White House gets involved in these things.”

Hats off to Mark Steyn for his article on the Tea Party movement.

…But a lot of the protesters don’t have the same comfortably padded margin for error on the unprecedented Obama scale. What the Democrats are doing means that millions of the hardest-working Americans will have to put their business expansion and their roomier house and their vacation camp and music lessons for the kid on hold. And “on hold” presupposes that one day the retrenchment, the hunkering down, will end. But why would it? In many Continental countries, a smaller home and a smaller car are the norm. It’s not just about the money — DON’T TAX ME, BRO! — but about the web of regulations that ensnare you at every turn: As Mason Weaver told the 9/12 rally, “Ropes and chains, not hope and change.” Cute line. It went entirely unreported in the mainstream media, presumably because he’s another one of those “angry white males,” although he happens to be black. (“I thought you’d like to hear a black man speak without a TelePrompTer,” he told the crowd. Another cute line.)

What does he mean, “ropes and chains”? The other day I was talking to a stonemason and a roofer who were asked to do a job for a certain large institution in New Hampshire. They were obliged to attend “ladder school,” even though both have been working at the tops of high ladders for over 40 years. The gentleman from OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration) cautioned them against mocking his transparent waste of their time: Under the new administration, he explained, his bureaucracy would be adopting a more enforcement-oriented approach to private business. So they rolled their eyes merely metaphorically and consented to give up a working day because the federal government has taken to itself the right to credentialize ladder-climbing from Maine to Hawaii.

At a certain point, why bother? As fast as you climb the ladder, you’ll be taxed and regulated down the chute back to the bottom rung. You’ll be frantically pedaling the treadmill seven days a week so that the statist succubus squatting on your head can sluice the fruits of your labors to Barney Frank and the new “green jobs” czar and whichever less hooker-friendly “community organizer” racket picks up the slack from ACORN, as well as to untold millions of bureaucrats micro-regulating you till your pips squeak while they enjoy vacations and benefits you’ll never get. Who needs it? If you have to work, work for the government: You can’t be fired and you can retire in your early 50s. Running your own business is for chumps. …

…I’m a foreigner. In the wake of the economic meltdown last fall, there were protests from Iceland to Bulgaria, with mobs all demanding the same thing of their rulers: Why didn’t you, the government, do more for me? This is the only country in the developed world where hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets to tell the state: I could do just fine if only you’d get the hell out of my life — or at least confine yourself to constitutional responsibilities. I find that heartening and hopeful. …

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In The Wall Street Journal, Mary Anastasia O’Grady reviews the Honduran situation and the inexplicable stand that the Obama administration has taken.

…Thousands of readers have written to me asking how all this can happen in the U.S., where democratic principles have been recognized since the nation’s founding. Many readers have written that they are “ashamed” of the U.S. and have asked, in effect, “How can I help Honduras?” A more pertinent question may turn out to be, how can they help their own country?

In its actions toward Honduras, the Obama administration is demonstrating contempt for the fundamentals of democracy. Legal scholars are clear on this. “Judicial independence is a central component of any democracy and is crucial to separation of powers, the rule of law and human rights,” writes Ahron Barak, the former president of the Supreme Court of Israel and a prominent legal scholar, in his compelling 2006 book, “The Judge in a Democracy.”

“The purpose of the separation of powers is to strengthen freedom and prevent the concentration of power in the hands of one government actor in a manner likely to harm the freedom of the individual,” Mr. Barak explains—almost as if he is writing about Honduras.

He also warns prophetically about the Chávez style of democracy that has destroyed Venezuela and that Hondurans say they were trying to avoid in their own country. “Democracy is entitled to defend itself from those who seek to use it in order to destroy its very existence,” he writes. Americans ought to ask themselves why the Obama administration doesn’t seem to agree.

Michael Barone, in The Washington Examiner, comments on liberals’ difficulty in respecting other points of view.

…”Mainstream media” try to help. In the past few weeks, we have seen textbook examples of how MSM have ignored news stories that reflected badly on the administration for which it has such warm feelings. It ignored the videos in which the White House “green jobs czar” proclaimed himself a “communist” and the “truther” petition he signed charging that George W. Bush may have allowed the Sept. 11 attacks.

It ignored the videos released on Andrew Breitbart’s biggovernment.com showing ACORN employees offering to help a supposed pimp and prostitute evade taxes and employ 13- to 15-year-old prostitutes. It downplayed last spring’s Tea Parties — locally organized demonstrations against big government that attracted about a million people nationwide — and downplayed the Tea Party throng at the Capitol and on the Mall Sept. 12.

Actually, “mainstream media” are doing their friends in the Obama administration and the Democratic Party no favors, at least in the long run. Obama comes from one-party Chicago, and the House Democrats’ nine top leadership members and committee chairmen come from districts that voted on average 73 percent for Obama last fall. They need help in understanding the larger country they are seeking to govern, where nearly half voted the other way. Instead, they get the impression they can dismiss critics as racist or “Nazis” or as indulging in (as Sen. Harry Reid said) “evil-mongering.”

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has warned us that there’s a danger that intense rhetoric can provoke violence, and no decent person wants to see harm come to our president or other leaders. But it’s interesting that the two most violent incidents at this summer’s town hall meetings came when a union thug beat up a 65-year-old black conservative in Missouri and when a liberal protester bit off part of a man’s finger in California.

These incidents don’t justify a conclusion that all liberals are violent. But they are more evidence that American liberals, unused to hearing dissent, have an impulse to shut it down.

Jennifer Rubin reports on the cover story the President is using for his witch hunt at the CIA.

The president on Sunday was asked about the letter by seven former CIA directors imploring him to annul Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to re-investigate CIA agents who used enhanced interrogation techniques:

“I appreciate the former CIA directors wanting to look after an institution that they helped to build, but I continue to believe that nobody’s above the law,” Obama told CBS’s “Face The Nation.” “I want to make sure that as President of the United States that I’m not asserting in some way that my decisions overrule the decisions of prosecutors who are there to uphold the law.”

This is jaw-dropping even for Obama. The entire reinvestigation of the CIA is a giant exercise in second-guessing the “decisions of prosecutors who are there to uphold the law.” Holder and Obama are doing precisely what Obama deplores—throwing out the decision of expert career prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia who already investigated these matters and determined that there could be no successful prosecution of the CIA operatives. And that is what the CIA directors in their letter took Obama and Holder to task for doing.

Instances like these suggest that when the going gets tough, the president’s modus operandi is to resort to the most disingenuous rhetoric he can get away with. He simply operates on the presupposition that no one is paying close enough attention to the hypocrisy and half-truths. But there are plenty of people who do—the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community, our enemies, and many informed voters who cringe at the unseemly sight of a war against those who protected us. They all understand the political gamesmanship at work here and the lack of real concern by the president for our intelligence community.

Roger Simon reports that the lies keep coming.

But Obama has always been a liar. We have known that since he claimed he didn’t know anything about the extreme views of Jeremiah Wright – after having spent twenty years in Rev. Wright’s church (the same church Oprah Winfrey had left eight years before because she was uncomfortable with the views of the bigoted minister). The MSM gave him a pass on this whopper, enabling his election, because he was their candidate. They were evidently unfazed by the ancient Roman legal principal: Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.

Well, there have been plenty of omnibuses since, but few so risible as Obama’s answers this Sunday to George Stephanopoulos concerning the ACORN scandal:

STEPHANOPOULOS: How about the funding for ACORN?
OBAMA: You know, if — frankly, it’s not really something I’ve followed closely. I didn’t even know that ACORN was getting a whole lot of federal money.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Both the Senate and the House have voted to cut it off.
OBAMA: You know, what I know is, is that what I saw on that video was certainly inappropriate and deserves to be investigated.
STEPHANOPOULOS: So you’re not committing to — to cut off the federal funding?
OBAMA: George, this is not the biggest issue facing the country. It’s not something I’m paying a lot of attention to.

These ludicrous statements almost Fisk themselves, but allow me to do it briefly. …

In The National Review, Richard Vedder explains how the lack of market forces in higher education results in an inferior product with a continually increasing price tag.

In a typical year over the past generation, the cost of attending college has risen at about double the rate of inflation. Family incomes have not kept pace. And despite huge increases in federal financial assistance, the proportion of lower-income Americans in the college population has actually declined over the past 30 years.

The other sector that has seen comparable inflation over the past generation is health care, and this is no accident. In both sectors, government intervention largely neuters the ability of markets to allocate resources efficiently, by establishing third parties (neither consumers nor producers) that pay many of the bills. When that happens, the consumer is not very sensitive to prices, and consumes wastefully. For these and other reasons, a good argument can made that we are overinvested, or at least mal-invested, in higher education. …

…Universities do little to measure what students learn, and it is hard to assess the value of their research, so good estimates of academic productivity are hard to come by. Nonetheless, under almost any reasonable assumptions, it is lower than it was 40 years ago — and it is certainly not higher. Yet over the past 30 years or so, the number of non-instructional university employees, adjusted for changing enrollment, has roughly doubled. My university has a sustainability coordinator, a recycling coordinator, and umpteen diversity and public-relations specialists — almost none of whose posts existed when I began teaching. How much do they improve the instructional and research programs? Not at all.

Speaking of research, much of it achieves only trivial refinements of insignificant issues, and is produced for a nearly nonexistent audience. Jeff Sandefer of the Acton School of Business estimates that an academic-journal article costs on average $50,000 — and is read by 200 people. That’s $250 per reader. Mark Bauerlein of Emory University notes that over 22,000 articles about the works of Shakespeare have appeared since 1980. Are there that many new and insightful thoughts to be had about the Bard? Have not diminishing returns set in — for this topic and many others? …

We have NRO shorts. Here is the first:

President Obama has agreed to talks with Iran on the understanding that the Iranian nuclear project is the real issue to be negotiated between the two countries. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has agreed to talks with the United States on the understanding that the nuclear project is an afterthought to the discussion. On behalf of the administration, officials and diplomats are pitching expectations at a level hardly higher than a shrug. On behalf of Iran, officials and diplomats speak as though they have victory over the United States already in their pocket. They want everyone to be as afraid of them as their own population already is. Tehran, they like to emphasize, will never give up its right to produce nuclear fuel, and is ready to defend itself against international pressure and any military strike. As in the fruitless past, talks are to include Russia, China, Britain, France, and Germany, and the U.S. has even engaged Javier Solana, the man in charge of foreign policy for the European Union, to be the intermediary. Should the talks fail to materialize, or to provide any meaningful outcome, the next option is sanctions. But Russia will not go along with that, as its foreign minister has made clear. The course of events looks set to move from slow motion to stalemate.

Anjana Ahuja writes in The Times, UK regarding the anthropologist Richard Wrangham’s new book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. Pickings carried another review for this book on July 30th of this year. The topic was first posted here in August 2008, when the discussion was about the evolutionary effects of eating cooked food. Wrangham’s new book postulates that marriage evolved from cooking as well.

…“I believe the transformative moment that gave rise to the genus Homo, one of the great transitions in the history of life, stemmed from the control of fire and the advent of cooked meals,” Wrangham explains in his new book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. “Cooking increased the (calorific) value of our food. It changed our bodies, our brains, our use of time and our social lives.” He argues, as no one else has done before, that cooking was pivotal in our evolution. “If you feed a chimp cooked food for tens of thousands of years, I find it hard to believe that it would end up looking like the same animal.” …

…Cooking would have made a radical difference to the creatures who mastered it: it made plants and meat more calorie-dense; it spared our ancestors from the marathons of mastication required with raw foods (wild chimps spend up to five hours a day gathering food and chewing it); it was easier on the gut. It is utterly within the bounds of belief that the first hominid to put a flame to his food started an extraordinary chain of evolutionary events that culminated in us, the ape in the kitchen.

But Wrangham, who co-wrote Demonic Males, a groundbreaking book on ape violence and its relevance to human violence, strides farther: the advent of cooking led to a restructuring of society and, in particular, liberated men from the chore of chewing but chained women to the stove.

Early human marriages, he suggests, were “primitive protection rackets”, in which men protected women from hungry marauders (attracted by the smoke of the fire) in return for a hot meal at the end of the day and, almost as an afterthought, babies. This is a radical notion — that domestic unions are mainly about food, not sex — but it’s not ridiculous. Anthropologists have noted that many primitive societies will tolerate a married woman sleeping around, but will ostracise her if she feeds any man other than her husband. In the ancestral struggle for survival, it seems, sustenance was more important than sex. …

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It is fitting that one editor of Commentary, John Podhoretz, would see off another. His obit of Irving Kristol starts us off today.

The intellectual and political life of the United States over the past 60 years was affected in so many important and enduring ways by Irving Kristol that it is difficult to capture in words the extent of his powerful and positive influence. Irving, who died today at the age of 89, was the rarest of creatures—a thoroughgoing intellectual who was also a man of action. He was a maker of things, a builder of institutions, a harvester and disseminator and progenitor of ideas and the means whereby those ideas were made flesh.

The clarity of his thinking and the surety of his purpose were one and the same; they were immeasurably enhanced by a powerful curiosity for the way things worked and the ways in which things could be made to work better. His was a restless intelligence, always on the move; there was not an idea he didn’t want to play with, and there wasn’t a new idea for a think tank or a magazine or a center for the study of something-or-other that didn’t excite him. He was a conservative by temperament and conviction, but he was an innovator to the depths of his being.

The number of institutions with which he was affiliated, or started, or helped grow into major centers of learning and thinking is hard to count. There is this institution, COMMENTARY, where he began working after his release from the Army following the conclusion of the Second World War. There were two other magazines in the 1950s, the Reporter and Encounter, which he helped found and whose influence on civil discourse was profound and enduring, even legendary. There was the Public Interest, the quarterly he co-founded in 1965 with Daniel Bell and then ran with Nathan Glazer for more than 30 years, which was the wellspring of neoconservative thinking on domestic-policy issues. He helped bring a sleepy Washington think tank called the American Enterprise Institute into the forefront. And he made Basic Books into a publishing powerhouse that was, for more than 20 years, at the red-hot center of every major debate in American life.

It was through his encouragement and lobbying efforts that several foundations began providing the kind of support to thinkers and academics on the Right that other foundations and most universities afforded thinkers and academics on the Left. Through his columns in the Wall Street Journal, he instructed American businessmen on the relation between what they did and the foundational ideas of capitalism as explicated by Adam Smith, and changed many of them from sideline players in the battle over the direction of the American economy into front-line advocates. …

…We at COMMENTARY will be opening the entirety of his 45-article oeuvre in our archives (from his first contribution, a short story called “Adam and I,” published in November 1946, to his last, a 1994 essay entitled “Countercultures“) for free perusal by all readers. It is a treasure trove, as he was himself an incomparable treasure of a man, an intellectual, and an American. May Bea, Bill, Liz, and Irving’s five grandchildren be comforted among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.

David Harsanyi says f*%# civility. No seriously, he tells us that politicians don’t want civility, they want everyone to say yes to them, or even better, say nothing at all.

If you’ve been paying attention lately, you may be under the impression that the United States was spiraling into mass incivility.

The evidence keeps mounting: Congressman Joe Wilson yelling. Serena Williams yelling. Kanye West . . . whatever. All of these uncouth characters have been strung together by critics to establish, indisputably, that there is a societal explosion of boorish and coarse behavior.

On the political front, columnist Kathleen Parker calls this “a political era of uninhibited belligerence.” House speaker Nancy Pelosi, lamenting an imaginary climate of violence, wishes “we would all, again, curb our enthusiasm in some of the statements that are made.”

Such a preposterous statement should be actionable. Pelosi, who only recently compared her political opponents to Nazis, isn’t exactly a paragon of civil discourse. …

Didn’t want the moment to pass without another slap at our worst president and worst ex-president. We have something from Christopher Hitchens from May 2007.

… “Worst in history,” as the great statesman from Georgia has to know, has been the title for which he has himself been actively contending since 1976. I once had quite an argument with the late Sen. Eugene McCarthy, who maintained adamantly that it had been right for him to vote for Ronald Reagan in 1980 for no other reason. “Mr. Carter,” he said, “quite simply abdicated the whole responsibility of the presidency while in office. He left the nation at the mercy of its enemies at home and abroad. He was the worst president we ever had.” …

… In the Carter years, the United States was an international laughingstock. This was not just because of the prevalence of his ghastly kin: the beer-sodden brother Billy, doing deals with Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi, and the grisly matriarch, Miz Lillian. It was not just because of the president’s dire lectures on morality and salvation and his weird encounters with lethal rabbits and UFOs. It was not just because of the risible White House “Bible study” sessions run by Bert Lance and his other open-palmed Elmer Gantry pals from Georgia. It was because, whether in Afghanistan, Iran, or Iraq—still the source of so many of our woes—the Carter administration could not tell a friend from an enemy. His combination of naivete and cynicism—from open-mouthed shock at Leonid Brezhnev’s occupation of Afghanistan to underhanded support for Saddam in his unsleeping campaign of megalomania—had terrible consequences that are with us still. It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that every administration since has had to deal with the chaotic legacy of Carter’s mind-boggling cowardice and incompetence. …

George Will discusses art and the government – and several ways that government has had a corrupting influence.

“This is just the beginning,” Yosi Sergant told participants in an Aug. 10 conference call that seems to have been organized by the National Endowment for the Arts and certainly was joined by a functionary from the White House Office of Public Engagement. The call was the beginning of the end of Sergant’s short tenure as NEA flack — he has been reassigned. The call also was the beginning of a small scandal that illuminates something gargantuan — the Obama administration’s incontinent lust to politicize everything.

Sergant’s comments, made to many individuals and organizations from what is vaguely and cloyingly called “the arts community,” continued: “This is the first telephone call of a brand-new conversation. We are just now learning how to really bring this community together to speak with the government.” Wrong preposition. Not “with” the government, but for the government. …

…They were exhorted to participate in a conference call “to help lay a new foundation for growth, focusing on core areas of the recovery agenda.” The first core area mentioned was “health care.”

The NEA is the nation’s largest single source of financial support for the arts, and its grants often prompt supplemental private donations. He who pays the piper does indeed call the tune, and in the four months before the conference call, 16 of the participating organizations received a total of nearly $2 million from the NEA. Two days after the call, the 16 and five other organizations issued a plea for the president’s health-care plan. …

We have National Review Online shorts. Here are two:

The raw pit has been spruced up a bit: It looks like a building site, not a wound. But eight years after 9/11 and counting, nothing has been put in place of the Twin Towers. Postmodern New York is a notoriously difficult city for getting anything done, and the local political class simply could not make new buildings happen: George Pataki, governor through 2006, was a limp nonentity, and his successors, Eliot Spitzer and David Paterson, have been, in their different ways, even worse. Probably the best course would have been to let the owner of the former towers, Larry Silverstein, take his insurance payout and build whatever he liked. The hole in New York’s skyline bespeaks a hole in America’s competence and resolve. It is a disgrace.

ACORN stands for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, and the organization has a long history with Barack Obama. James O’Keefe, a conservative filmmaker, visited ACORN offices in four cities, posing as a pimp accompanied by his prostitute (Hannah Giles, an assistant). The two asked how to secure a mortgage for a brothel, which they proposed to stock with underage Salvadoran girls. It sounds like a comedy sketch, but in each office ACORN workers tried to help, giving sage counsel on dodging taxes and the police while collecting maximum welfare benefits (by, among other things, claiming underage victims as dependents). In Baltimore, Giles was told to list her occupation as “performing artist.” In D.C., the faux prostitute was told to call herself an “independent consultant.” “Honesty is not going to get you the house,” said ACORN in Brooklyn. In California, an ACORN staffer reminisced about shooting her husband dead and her own career in prostitution. Once O’Keefe revealed his findings, the Census Bureau dropped ACORN as a partner in next year’s census. Counseling fake pimps is lurid, but small potatoes. Pimping out the census to a sleazy outfit like this is an act of civic sabotage.

Steven Malanga, in Real Clear Markets, explains how the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 helped cause the finance and housing crisis. In an astounding move, Congress is now looking to expand the businesses covered by CRA.

The Acorn scandal, in which amateur journalists posing as a prostitute and a pimp went seeking a mortgage for a house of prostitution and received advice on how to evade the law, is a fitting new chapter in the controversial history of the advocacy group.

Acorn found its way into the mortgage business through the Community Reinvestment Act, the 1977 legislation that community groups have used as a cudgel to force lenders to lower their mortgage underwriting standards in order to make more loans in low-income communities. Often the groups, after making protests under CRA, were then rewarded by banks with contracts to act as mortgage counselors in low-income areas in return for dropping their protests against the banks. In one particularly lucrative deal, 14 major banks eager to put CRA protests behind them in 1993 signed an agreement to have Acorn administer a $55 million, 11-city lending program. It was precisely such agreements that helped turn Acorn from a network of small local groups into a national player. And Acorn hasn’t been alone. A U.S. senate subcommittee once estimated that CRA-related deals between banks and community groups have pumped nearly $10 billion into the nonprofit sector.

Given the economic fallout from the long efforts by advocacy groups to water down mortgage lending standards, as well as the controversy surrounding Acorn’s mortgage counseling methods, you would imagine that politicians in Washington would be eager to narrow the scope of the CRA and reduce the leverage that community groups wield under it. But to the contrary, Washington is actually looking to expand the CRA once again.

On Capitol Hill today the House Committee on Financial Services under Chairman Barney Frank is holding hearings on legislation supported by the Obama administration that would bring insurance companies and credit unions under the umbrella of CRA, placing new lending demands on these groups and opening them up to protests and pressure tactics by organizations like Acorn. As proof that Washington is a looking-glass world where basic values and logic get perverted, proponents of the new legislation claim we need more CRA to rein in the bad practices of the housing bubble, which is sort of like arguing that the cure for alcoholism is another martini. Any review of the history of the affordable mortgage movement in America demonstrates the power that CRA had in helping to shred mortgage underwriting standards throughout the industry and exposing us to the kind of market meltdown we’ve experienced. …

In The Wall Street Journal, Rob Long tells us the story of the Weather Channel.

…That’s what television entrepreneur Frank Batten Sr.—who died last week at age 82—did 30 years ago when he created perhaps the most vanilla of all cable offerings, the Weather Channel. Talk about your lousy branding! The Weather Channel? Where’s the pizazz? Where’s the sizzle? Other channels have snappy, trippy names like Bravo and Discover and Syfy and Fuel. Some are classy, like Turner Classic Movies, and some are a little down and dirty, like Cinemax. But they’re all the products, it’s pretty clear, of some extensive—and expensive—marketing and branding and “identity-crafting” consultants, who gather in chic-looking clumps in conference rooms everywhere, with their posters and PowerPoints and interesting eyeglasses.

Mr. Batten took a different approach. Despite an almost universally held belief in the television industry that a channel devoted entirely to the weather would not and could not work, he started one. And he called it, with refreshing and diabolical directness, the Weather Channel.

It was a pretty instant sensation. People, it turns out, absolutely love the weather. They’re riveted by temperature, captivated by precipitation, and entertained by hearing about the exterior conditions of towns and places they’ve never heard of and can’t even spell. …

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OK, Pickerhead knows he’s supposed to heap opprobrium upon Obama for his missile defense decision. Mark Steyn does so in his weekly column as he surveys some of the people in charge of countries today.

…Some of them very strange. Kim Jong-il wouldn’t really let fly at South Korea or Japan, would he? Even if some quasi-Talibanny types wound up sitting on Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, they wouldn’t really do anything with them, would they? OK, Putin can be a bit heavy-handed when dealing with Eastern Europe, and his definition of “Eastern” seems to stretch ever further west, but he’s not going to be sending the tanks back into Prague and Budapest, is he? I mean, c’mon …

Vladimir Putin is no longer president but he is de facto czar. And he thinks it’s past time to reconstitute the old empire – not formally (yet), but certainly as a sphere of influence from which the Yanks keep their distance. President Obama has just handed the Russians their biggest win since the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Indeed, in some ways it marks the restitching of the Iron Curtain. When the Czechs signed their end of the missile-defense deal in July, they found themselves afflicted by a sudden “technical difficulty” that halved their gas supply from Russia. The Europe Putin foresees will be one not only ever more energy-dependent on Moscow but security-dependent, too – in which every city is within range of missiles from Tehran and other crazies, and is, in effect, under the security umbrella of the new czar. As to whether such a Continent will be amicable to American interests, well, good luck with that, hopeychangers.

In a sense, the health care debate and the foreign policy debacle are two sides of the same coin: For Britain and other great powers, the decision to build a hugely expensive welfare state at home entailed inevitably a long retreat from responsibilities abroad, with a thousand small betrayals of peripheral allies along the way. A few years ago, the great scholar Bernard Lewis warned, during the debate on withdrawal from Iraq, that America risked being seen as “harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend.” In Moscow and Tehran, on the one hand, and Warsaw and Prague, on the other, they’re drawing their own conclusions.

Mark confesses to getting his Mid East geography wrong.

I had a columnar senior moment today:

“Aside from a tiny strip of land on the east bank of the Jordan, every other advanced society on earth is content to depend for its security on the kindness of strangers.”

Er, I was referring to Israel, which isn’t on the east bank, or on much of the west these days. No one to blame but myself: I’ve been back and forth across the Allenby Bridge enough times to know which end leads where. I think I meant to say “the eastern shore of the Mediterranean”, but who knows?  It’s Ahmadinejad who’s in favor of “relocating” the Zionist Entity, not me. Mea culpa.

In his First Things blog, Spengler has a more relaxed view of the decision.

… The one side of Obama’s foreign policy that made sense from the outset was to trade items that Russia considers of fundamental interest, e.g., its influence in former Soviet republics, for Russian cooperation in suppressing nuclear weapons development in Iran. That may be the positive outcome of the present switch in American policy on anti-missile systems in Eastern Europe. The Israeli spook site Debka reports today that “Barack Obama’s decision prompted Russian president Dmitry Medvedev’s surprise comment Monday, Sept. 14, that his government no longer rules out further sanctions against Iran – although the Kremlin has always denied its cooperation with the US on the Iranian nuclear issue was contingent on the removal of the US missile shield plan.”

The reflex reaction among American conservatives is to denounce Obama for selling out American interests to the Russians. That seems misguided to me. There are cases where appeasement is precisely the right policy, and it may be that Obama will obtain something of great value to the US — Russian cooperation in containing Iran — by forfeiting something of little value. I’ll do that trade all day.

Charles Krauthammer asks if we believe Congressman Wilson.

You lie? No. Barack Obama doesn’t lie. He’s too subtle for that. He . . . well, you judge.

Here with three examples within a single speech — the now-famous Obama-Wilson “you lie” address to Congress on health care — of Obama’s relationship with truth.

(1) “I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits — either now or in the future,” he solemnly pledged. “I will not sign it if it adds one dime to the deficit, now or in the future. Period.”

Wonderful. The president seems serious, veto-ready, determined to hold the line. Until, notes Harvard economist Greg Mankiw, you get to Obama’s very next sentence: “And to prove that I’m serious, there will be a provision in this plan that requires us to come forward with more spending cuts if the savings we promised don’t materialize.”

This apparent strengthening of the pledge brilliantly and deceptively undermines it. What Obama suggests is that his plan will require mandatory spending cuts if the current rosy projections prove false. But there’s absolutely nothing automatic about such cuts. Every Congress is sovereign. Nothing enacted today will force a future Congress or a future president to make any cuts in any spending, mandatory or not.

Just look at the supposedly automatic Medicare cuts contained in the Sustainable Growth Rate formula enacted to constrain out-of-control Medicare spending. Every year since 2003, Congress has waived the cuts.

Mankiw puts the Obama bait-and-switch in plain language. “Translation: I promise to fix the problem. And if I do not fix the problem now, I will fix it later, or some future president will, after I am long gone. I promise he will. Absolutely, positively, I am committed to that future president fixing the problem. You can count on it. Would I lie to you?”  …

Walter Williams addresses the abysmal performance of the DC school system.

Instead of President Obama addressing school students across the nation, he might have accomplished more by focusing his attention on the educational rot in schools in the nation’s capital. The American Legislative Exchange Council recently came out with their 15th edition of “Report Card on American Education: A State-by-State Analysis.” Academic achievement in no state is much to write home about but in Washington, D.C., by any measure, it approaches criminal fraud. Let’s look at the numbers.

Only 14 percent of Washington’s fourth-graders score at or above proficiency in the reading and math portions of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test. Their national rank of 51 makes them the nation’s worst. Eighth-graders are even further behind with only 12 percent scoring at or above proficiency in reading and 8 percent in math and again the worst performance in the nation. One shouldn’t be surprised by Washington student performance on college admissions tests. … In terms of national ranking, their SAT and ACT rankings are identical to their fourth- and eighth-grade rankings — dead last.

Washington’s political and education establishment might excuse these outcomes by arguing that because most students are black, the schools are underfunded and overcrowded. Let’s look at such a claim. During the 2006-07 academic year, expenditures per pupil averaged $13,848 compared to a national average of $9,389. That made Washington’s per pupil expenditures the third highest in the nation coming in behind New Jersey ($14,998) and New York ($14,747). Washington’s teacher-student ratio is 13.9 compared with the national average of 15.3 students per teacher, ranking 18th in the nation. What about teacher salaries? Washington’s teachers are the highest paid in the nation, having an average annual salary of $61,195 compared with the nation’s average $46,593. Despite the academic performance of Washington’s students, they have a graduation rate of 61 percent compared to the national average of 70 percent. …

…The staunchest opponents of school choice are hypocrites. They want, demand and can afford school choice for themselves but for others not so affluent school choice it is a different matter. President and Mrs. Barack Obama enrolled their two daughters in Washington’s most prestigious Sidwell Friends School, forking over $28,000 a year for each girl. Whilst senator from Illinois, the Obama’s enrolled their girls in the University of Chicago’s Laboratory School, a private school in Chicago charging almost $20,000 for each girl. A Heritage Foundation survey found that 37 percent of the members of the House of Representatives and 45 percent of senators in the 110th Congress sent their children to private schools. Public school teachers enroll their own children in nonpublic schools to a much greater extent than the general public, in some cases four and five times greater. In Cincinnati, about 41 percent of public school teachers send their children to nonpublic schools. In Chicago it is 38 percent, Los Angeles 24 percent, New York 32 percent, and Philadelphia 44 percent. The behavior of public school teachers is quite suggestive. It’s like my offering to take you to a restaurant and you find out that neither the chef nor the waiters eat there. That suggests they have some inside information from which you might benefit. …

We open a discussion of the racism charges thrown about lately with a Corner post by Abby Thernstrom. Abby points out this is getting seriously ugly. Pickerhead thinks one of our proudest moments as a nation is about to be hijacked in a way that will guarantee it will never happen again.

… It’s a sad and dangerous moment in American politics. As Stanford law professor Richard Thompson Ford has written, “self-serving individuals, rabble-rousers, and political hacks use accusations of racism . . . to advance their own ends.” Those accusations provoke “resentment rather than thoughtful reaction.”

Is that what Democrats want? The American public did not and would not have elected a Jesse Jackson figure. And yet the Jackson voice in the Congressional Black Caucus and some MSM circles is alive and well. Surely the president has to be thinking, with such friends, who needs enemies?

Disown them, Barack.

The editors at the National Review tear Jimmy Carter to shreds for his disrespectful attitude towards Americans who disagree with Carter’s views.

Jimmy Carter now has done to his ex-presidency what he did to his presidency, which is to say that he has, through his incessant moral preening, converted mere incompetence into something more unseemly. Mr. Carter thunders that those who oppose President Obama’s plans to nationalize the health-care industry, and those who oppose other elements of the president’s agenda, are doing so for reasons of racism. …

…“That racism inclination still exists,” Carter says, “And I think it’s bubbled up to the surface because of the belief among many white people, not just in the South but around the country, that African-Americans are not qualified to lead this great country. It’s an abominable circumstance, and it grieves me and concerns me very deeply.” We suspect it would grieve him more if he had no such abominable tactics of which to avail himself. And Carter of all people knows that racism does not explain Americans’ distaste for overweening liberalism: He’s the white guy who lost 44 states to Reagan. …

…The inescapable conclusion is that Mr. Carter has defective judgment. We already knew that: We’ve known it since he clenched his fist and proclaimed energy conservation the “moral equivalent of war” while clad in a sweater. We’ve known it since his disastrous economic policies further impoverished the poor while he smugly posed as their champion. And he has gone from hammering nails into Habitat for Humanity houses to hammering what remains of his reputation to smithereens. The nation was poorer for his presidency and is poorer still for his emeritus shenanigans

Peter Wehner describes what lies beneath the angry liberal mindset.

According to Jimmy Carter’s libel against opponents of Barack Obama, “an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is black man.” This reminds us once again of what a pathetic and mean-spirited figure Mr. Carter has become. But it is also evidence of how unhinged and desperate many liberals and some within the Democratic party are becoming. The hatred and fury that consumed them during the Bush years is returning with a vengeance. It turns out that the cause of their derangement during the Bush years may not have been Bush after all; he may simply have been the object of their crazed attacks. …

…They see support for Obama’s effort to nationalize our health-care system collapsing. They see the American people rising up against his brand of liberalism. They see Republicans with all the intensity on their side. They see GOP candidates leading in the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races. They see the popularity of their majority leader, Harry Reid, cratering. They see the Republican party drawing almost even with Democrats on issues like health care—and surging ahead of Democrats on many other issues. They see a dangerous loss of support for Obama among independents and the elderly. They see, in short, what the respected political analyst Charlie Cook sees:

The president’s ratings plummet; his party loses its advantage on the generic congressional ballot test; the intensity of opposition-party voters skyrockets; his own party’s voters become complacent or even depressed; and independent voters move lopsidedly away. These were the early-warning signs of past wave elections. Seeing them now should terrify Democrats.

Many liberals simply cannot process this new data, this horrible turn of events. What we are seeing is the equivalent of a computer crash. As a result, they are returning to what has become for some liberals an emotional and psychological norm: anger and fury, overheated and reckless charges, bitterness and pettiness. …

Peter Wehner also posted a number of examples of disrespectful comments directed at Bush, and ends with these thoughts:

…There is a huge, glaring double standard that is at play here. It was open season on Bush when he was president—and the press uttered hardly a word of concern about incivility and, especially, about venomous charges directed against a sitting American president. Back then it was just the routine stuff of politics. And to the degree that anyone was responsible for the incivility, it was said to be Bush (who never, in my recollection, called his critics liars, as Obama has). Yet now that Barack Obama is in office, the press—many of whom have a deep, emotional attachment to Obama and his success—are outraged by incivility directed against a sitting American president.

Presidents should hardly be above criticism, and our public debate should be passionate, vigorous, rigorous, and engaged. It’s fine, and it can even be enlightening, to challenge the facts, interpretations, and premises of those with whom you disagree. But there are lines we ought not to cross, especially when it comes to the office of the presidency. It is an institution we Americans should treat with respect and not undermine. I believe that Representative Joe Wilson crossed that line and that what he did was wrong, and I’m glad he apologized. But many Democrats—far more prominent and influential than Joe Wilson—repeatedly crossed that line during the Bush years and went beyond what Wilson said, often in premeditated ways, and in almost every instance no apology was issued afterward. Yet the press did not much care about decorum during the pre-Obama presidency. It does now. I suspect most people understand why. For many, though certainly not all, journalists and commentators, it has little to do with the etiquette of democracy and a lot to do with political preferences and ideological predispositions. The fact that the media was so silent before makes their howls of protest now sound contrived. It is little wonder that the media as an institution is so deeply mistrusted.

Victor Davis Hanson predicts that using cries of racism to deflect reasonable opposition will have negative consequences for liberals.

In the wake of Joe Wilson’s crude outburst, many network commentators (and Jimmy Carter, of course) are weighing in on the new racism that supposedly explains 1) rising opposition to Obamacare and 2) the president’s sinking polls. I think this is a disastrous political move to save a health-care plan that simply has not appealed to a majority of Americans. I suspect it will result in another 5-point poll slide. …

How does this look to the left in England? Janet Daley posts in her blog at the Daily Telegraph site.

Jimmy Carter has made an outrageous, unfounded and potentially inflammatory remark about race. He has claimed that a great proportion of the vitriolic opposition to President Obama’s health reforms and spending plans are actually motivated by racial hatred: that this president is being attacked not for his policies but for his colour. He offers no evidence for this extraordinary assertion presumably because there is none. …

…George Bush was reviled in the most blood-curdling terms by large sections of the American population: did anyone ever claim that this was because he was a Texan? …Americans have profound fears about central government taking power away from individual citizens and those fears are legitimised by the Constitution. They have every right to express them without being smeared as “racists”.

Frank Fleming of Pajamas Media tries to understand why liberals are still so crazy angry.

The liberals were crazy angry while George W. Bush was president. Part of it was that for a time after 9/11, they were made completely irrelevant — when people are dying, who is going to listen to a liberal?

But another part of it is that it’s much easier to hate a person than to hate a concept — like conservatism. So they were able to channel all their hate into President Bush. And they were jumping-around-pooh-flinging-biting-each-other angry. I think a number of conservatives were secretly looking forward to the Obama presidency in hopes that liberals might just calm down a little. Maybe they’d even consider supporting the troops in their war efforts for a change. At least, maybe they would be a bit less angry.

Big miscalculation.

Now conservatives have more reason to be angry these days, with liberals in charge and all the spending and government takeovers. But with Democrats having complete control of the government, you’d think liberals could be dismissive of conservatives and be calm themselves. But no, they’re still crazy angry. Maybe even angrier than before. Biting-fingers-off angry. They’re screeching about how all the people opposed to Obama are racists and neo-Nazis and stupid, and they’re using sexual slurs against protesters and boycotting everyone who disagrees with them. They’re still nuts, but why? …

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WSJ Editors advise the President to advocate for free trade, as presidents have done for the past 80 years, and to veto the protectionist tendencies of Congress.

…Following America’s lead, countries that were once largely closed economically—especially China and India—have in turn opened up to foreign goods and services. The result has been an explosion in world trade, especially since the 1980s, as the nearby chart makes clear. This boom has coincided with rising incomes in countries connected by trade and the free flow of capital, especially in the developing world but also in America. While some U.S. jobs have vanished, new industries have emerged, and the U.S. has maintained its lead in manufacturing productivity.

This 80-year history of free-trade progress is now under threat from the global recession and Mr. Obama’s abdication of U.S. leadership. Labor’s antitrade views now dominate in the Democratic Congress and liberal think tanks. As ominous, protectionism is increasingly justified by Democratic economists on political grounds.

…The reality is that without the U.S. leading by example, the world trading order is likely to deteriorate into every country for itself. This is especially dangerous amid a global recession in which world merchandise trade volume fell by roughly 33% from the second quarter of 2008 to June 2009. Reviving trade flows is crucial to restoring global growth. …

Simon Parry, in the Daily Mail, UK, tells us about the ghost fleet taking shape in the Far East. He reports on shipping and shipbuilding; markets hit hard by the recession, that have not yet seen the bottom. Regarding shipping:

‘This is the time of year when everyone is doing all the Christmas stuff,’ he points out.

‘A couple of years ago those ships would have been steaming back and forth, going at full speed. But now you’ve got something like 12 per cent of the world’s container ships doing nothing.’

…But the slump is industry-wide. The cost of sending a 40ft steel container of merchandise from China to the UK has fallen from £850 plus fuel charges last year to £180 this year. The cost of chartering an entire bulk freighter suitable for carrying raw materials has plunged even further, from close to £185,000 ($300,000) last summer to an incredible £6,100 ($10,000) earlier this year.

…Some experts believe the ratio of container ships sitting idle could rise to 25 per cent within two years in an extraordinary downturn that shipping giant Maersk has called a ‘crisis of historic dimensions’. Last month the company reported its first half-year loss in its 105-year history.

Martin Stopford, managing director of Clarksons, London’s biggest ship broker, says container shipping has been hit particularly hard: ‘In 2006 and 2007 trade was growing at 11 per cent. In 2008 it slowed down by 4.7 per cent. This year we think it might go down by as much as eight per cent. If it costs £7,000 a day to put the ship to sea and if you only get £6,000 a day, than you have got a decision to make. …

And looking at shipbuilding:

…But shipbuilding is a horrendously hard market to plan. There is a three-year lag between the placing of an order and the delivery of a ship. With contracts signed, down-payments made and work under way, stopping work on a new ship is the economic equivalent of trying to change direction in an ocean liner travelling at full speed towards an iceberg.

Thus the labours of today’s Korean shipbuilders merely represent the completion of contracts ordered in the fat years of 2006 and 2007. Those ships will now sail out into a global economy that no longer wants them.

Maersk announced last week that it was renegotiating terms and prices with Asian shipyards for 39 ordered tankers and gas carriers. One of the company’s executives, Kristian Morch, said the shipping industry was in uncharted waters.

As he told the global shipping newspaper Lloyd’s List only last week: ‘You have a contraction of oil demand, you have a falling world economy and you have a contraction of financing capabilities – and at the same time as a lot of new ships are being delivered.’ …

In The Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens updates us on the foreign policy issues surrounding Iran’s nuclear weapons development.

…At July’s G-8 summit in Italy, Iran was given a September deadline to start negotiations over its nuclear programs. Last week, Iran gave its answer: No.

Instead, what Tehran offered was a five-page document that was the diplomatic equivalent of a giant kiss-off. It begins by lamenting the “ungodly ways of thinking prevailing in global relations” and proceeds to offer comprehensive talks on a variety of subjects: democracy, human rights, disarmament, terrorism, “respect for the rights of nations,” and other areas where Iran is a paragon. Conspicuously absent from the document is any mention of Iran’s nuclear program, now at the so-called breakout point, which both Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his boss Ali Khamenei insist is not up for discussion.

What’s an American president to do in the face of this nonstarter of a document? What else, but pretend it isn’t a nonstarter. Talks begin Oct. 1.

All this only helps persuade Israel’s skittish leadership that when President Obama calls a nuclear-armed Iran “unacceptable,” he means it approximately in the same way a parent does when fecklessly reprimanding his misbehaving teenager. …

…In sum, the conclusion among Israelis is that the Obama administration won’t lift a finger to stop Iran, much less will the “international community.” So Israel has pursued a different strategy, in effect seeking to goad the U.S. into stopping, or at least delaying, an Israeli attack by imposing stiff sanctions and perhaps even launching military strikes of its own. …

Thomas Sowell brings up an interesting line of discussion in the health care debate.

…There was a time, within living memory, when most Americans did not have health insurance — and it was not the end of the world, as so many in politics and the media seem to be depicting it today.

As someone who lived through that era, and who spent decades without medical insurance, I find it hard to be panicked and stampeded into bigger and worse problems because some people do not have medical insurance, including many who could afford it if they chose to.

What did we do, back during the years when most Americans had no medical insurance? I did what most people did. I depended on a “single payer” — myself. When I didn’t have the money, I paid off my medical bills in installments.

The birth of my first child was not covered by medical insurance. I paid off the bill, month by month, until the time finally came when I could tell my wife that the baby was now ours, free and clear.

In a country where everything imaginable is bought and paid for on credit, why is it suddenly a national crisis if some people cannot pay cash up front for medical treatment? …

John Fund reports that Acorn may finally be reaping what it has sown.

On Monday, the U.S. Senate voted 83-7 to strip Acorn, the premier community organizing group on the left, of more than $1.6 million in federal housing money meant to assist low-income people obtain loans and prepare tax forms. This dramatic step followed last Friday’s decision by the U.S. Census Bureau to sever its ties with the organization, one of several community groups it was partnering with to conduct the nation’s head count.

Both of these actions came after secretly recorded videos involving employees in Acorn’s Brooklyn, N.Y., Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Md. and San Bernardino, Calif. offices were televised on Fox News. The videos were recorded by two independent filmmakers who posed as a prostitute and a pimp and said they were planning to import underage women from El Salvador for the sex trade. They asked for and received advice on getting a housing loan and evading federal taxes.

In response, Acorn has so far fired four of the employees seen on the videos. But it claimed the videos were “doctored” and accused critics of a smear campaign and “racist coverage” of the incidents.

Such rhetoric in the past has deflected scrutiny of Acorn tactics, such as street demonstrations and boycotts against banks to force lower credit standards for home loans, which a congressional report found contributed to the subprime loan mess. But now Acorn may be finally running off the rails.

Last week, 11 of its workers were accused by Florida prosecutors of falsifying information on 888 voter registration forms. Last month, Acorn’s former Las Vegas, Nev., field director, Christopher Edwards, agreed to testify against the group in a case in which Las Vegas election officials say 48% of the voter registration forms the group turned in were “clearly fraudulent.” Acorn itself is charged with 13 counts of illegally using a quota system to compensate workers in an effort to boost the number of registrations. (Acorn has denied wrongdoing in all of these cases.) …

David Harsanyi dishes out sarcasm to the liberal media and liberal politicians who cry racism.

C’mon, everyone knows the hullabaloo surrounding President Barack Obama is bigotry in action. The administration’s policy initiatives couldn’t possibly provoke any authentic anger or protest. …

…”Surrounded by middle-aged white guys — a sepia snapshot of the days when such pols ran Washington like their own men’s club — Joe Wilson yelled ‘You lie!’ at a president who didn’t,” declared Maureen Dowd in her Saturday New York Times column. “But, fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy! ”

Of course, it’s fair. If inserting a racial epithet into a quote is wrong, I don’t wanna know what’s right. It is, moreover, common knowledge that middle-aged white men are bigots. If there’s a problem with Dowd’s premise, it’s that Wilson likely lacks the intellect to string together more than two words per sentence. He is from South Carolina, after all. …

George Will comments that the Obamacare campaign fiasco has been good for Republicans.

…On the 233rd day of his presidency, Barack Obama grabbed the country’s lapels for the 263rd time—that was, as of last Wednesday, the count of his speeches, press conferences, town halls, interviews, and other public remarks. His speech to Congress was the 122nd time he had publicly discussed health care. Just 14 hours would pass before the 123rd, on Thursday morning. His incessant talking cannot combat what it has caused: An increasing number of Americans do not believe that he believes what he says. …

…He deplores “scare tactics” but says that unless he gets his way, people will die. He praises temperate discourse but says many of his opponents are liars. He says Medicare is an exemplary program that validates government’s prowess at running health systems. But he also says Medicare is unsustainable and going broke, and that he will pay for much of his reforms by eliminating the hundreds of billions of dollars of waste and fraud in this paragon of a program, and in Medicaid. He says Congress will cut Medicare (it will not) by $500 billion—without affecting benefits. …

…McConnell notes, however, that never in his 25 Senate years have Republicans polled close to Democrats when the question is: Which party do you trust most to deal with health care? Until now. Last week’s polling: Democratic Party, 41; Republican Party, 39—a statistical dead heat. …

Speculating on Maine’s Sen. Snowe’s reasons for nixing the Baucus plan, a Corner Post by Mark Hemingway perfectly illustrates the trail of bad regulations that have created the health care mess.

The Maine Heritage Policy Center, which has tracked the plan closely, points out that largely because of these insurance rules, a healthy male in Maine who is 30 and single pays a monthly premium of $762 in the individual market; next door in New Hampshire he pays $222 a month. The Granite State doesn’t have community rating and guaranteed issue.

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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.