Stromata Blog

The Message

Had it not been for what can only be termed “beginner’s luck”, Gordon Brown’s first two full days in office would have been marked by at least three terrorist atrocities and several hundred British deaths. While terrorism deniers Keith Olbermann and Larry Johnson instantly decided that the London bombs were nothing more than a non-threat from “yuppie terrorists”, ABC News had this to say:

Donning an approximately 90-pound Kevlar suit , one technician took “the long walk” from his armored response van to the Mercedes E 300 sedan and found a carefully constructed, large vehicle bomb with a complicated fuse. The bomb technician defused the device by hand, officials in London said.

ABC News has learned the bomb was composed of tanks of propane, butane and 125 liters of gasoline (33 U.S. gallons), roofing nails and a fuse that initial reports indicated was constructed of simple light bulb or flashbulb filaments and designed to be triggered by a mobile telephone. . . .

London authorities investigating the case and U.S. authorities monitoring it say the Mercedes car bomb, if correctly made, could have sent a shrapnel-filled fireball into the air, maiming and killing people in a several hundred yard radius that included a popular nightclub.

The authorities so far haven’t released more than sketchy information about the four men arrested in connection with the attempted murders. I’m going to guess wildly that they were not Anglicans aggrieved by the policies of the Archbishop of Canterbury. They were clearly aimed to send a message to Britain’s just-installed Prime Minister.

And what might that message be?

Was it, Congratulations on having gotten rid of warmonger Tony Blair?

Was it, Thanks for your repeated shows of sympathy for Islamic concerns?

Or was it more along these lines? We’ve seen that you infidels are soft and easily intimidated. Bow down and be good dhimmis, or we will keep killing your women and children until you submit.

And where would Islamofascists get the notion that such a message would be effective? Think about it, and a few answers may spring to mind.

[Michael Ramirez, Investor’s Business Daily (click to enlarge)]

The (Surrealistic) Week That Was

If I understood the past week in Washington, I’d have the key to abnormal psychology and would probably walk off with a Nobel Prize. What were all those people thinking? The American political class, in which I include commentators and chatterers as well as office holders and their minions, is composed of intelligent folks who have devoted a lot of cogitation time to the issues of the day. Many of them are wrong much of the time, but how often are they irrational and self-defeating? How often do their words and actions slip into the realm of the bizarre?

Number one in the list of surrealistic incidents was the Senate vote on ending debate on the immigration bill. Every expert observer foresaw cloture passing or failing by one or two votes. It lost by fourteen, garnering not even a bare majority for a measure that was tipped as certain to pass if it ever reached a final vote.

The nonce explanation is that many “ayes” deserted the cause as soon as the decisive 40th “nay” was cast. (Senator Brownback, who is fortunate that poll numbers can’t go below zero, did so in an especially conspicuous fashion.) The implication is that the switchers, knowing that the bill had almost no public support, believed that it was so good and valuable that they were willing, so long as it had a chance, to ram it down an unwilling Nation’s throat.

There are times and seasons when voting for an unpopular law is the right thing to do. “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.” But was the Kyl-Kennedy Bill a cause demanding Burkean fortitude?

What was most glaringly obvious about the bill’s “reforms” was that they would have altered the status quo by scarcely a hemi-inch in any direction. The cumbersome, expensive “Z visa” was the least attractive imaginable form of “amnesty”, the “Y visa” a “guest worker” program that would entice no guests. Some of the enforcement provisions might have wrought changes, chiefly by burdening small businesses with paperwork and fines, though they would probably have proven as unworkable as their Simpson-Mazzoli counterparts.

In short, Kyl-Kennedy was a thrown-together mess that needed, at the very least, the kind of time consuming craftsmanship that used to go into major tax legislation. Given that the illegal immigration problem has festered for decades and wasn’t going to grow measurably worse by next Saturday, the rush job was nonsensical. It reached its nadir of rationality when the Senate leadership decided to plow through 374 pages of freshly drafted amendments in a couple of legislative days.

Yet if the proponents’ strategy was peculiar, the other side’s was unfathomable. Scroll through the last several days of the NRO Corner, where the overwhelming and strident consensus was that the enactment of Kyl-Kennedy would doom Western civilization. David Frum and Mark Steyn, who were comparatively level-headed, spoke in terms of “cloture votes on the future of American civilization” and “a vast transformative bill”. Mark Krikorian, whose head has never been level in his life, hailed the cloture vote as “a self-organizing public’s defeat of combined force of Big Business, (some of) Big Labor, Big Media, Big Religion, Big Philanthropy, Big Academia, and Big Government”. Never before has NRO concentrated on an issue so intensely, with such shrill invective. The bill’s hundreds of pages were reduced to the single word “amnesty”, repeated as if it were “communism”, “treason” or “terrorism”. Overall, while the words were different, the tune was the Krazy Kos Kids hyperventilating over Dick Cheney or Valerie Plame.

Utterly absent was any effort to evaluate what the real impact would be. Once or twice, Mark Steyn pointed out that administering the Y and Z visas was beyond the capabilities of the Bureau of Immigration and Citizenship Services, so that, even had they been a brilliant design, their implementation was impossible. No one else picked up on that argument. The unanimous premise was that every illegal alien would have a Z visa within weeks, after which the United States would ineluctably turn into a colony of Mexico. The 12 million amnestied aliens would, once they achieved legal recognition, dominate the culture of the other 288 million inhabitants of our section of the continent. As a believable scenario, that ranks with Robert Welch’s conviction that the Eisenhower Administration was 60 percent communist-controlled.

Most striking and depressing were the rampant symptoms of Bush Derangement Syndrome, hitherto a malady of the Left. Conservatives have disagreed with the President before, on issues like “No Child Left Behind”, domestic spending and the Harriet Miers nomination, but this deviation from rightish orthodoxy was treated as the Unforgivable Sin. Suddenly, George W. Bush was the Enemy, and more than one Cornerite said or implied that he no longer cared much about backing the White House in the War on Terror or even spending fights. That is a suicidal attitude, at least if one thinks that America faces threats more serious than dishwashers without green cards. If a big chunk of the Right sullenly declares, “A plague on both your houses!” – well, the plague will be a sure thing, and they’ll be stuck inside the houses, too.

Still and all, “a week is a long time in politics”. Sanity may return as swiftly as it departed. On the other hand, it’s ominous that John O’Sullivan, at least, wants to turn the week that shouldn’t have been into the norm. He urges a fight over “the entire ‘National Question’”. How about we neuter Islamofascism first, then agonize over a “question” that Americans have managed to leave unasked and unanswered since George Washington’s Administration?

Incidentally, June 28th, the day of this famous restrictionist victory, was the 618th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo.

Free Speech Survives – With No Help from Liberals

As George Santayana wrote, the only bond that a modern liberal wants to loosen is the marriage bond. Certainly, liberals’ enthusiasm for freedom of speech and the press has diminished greatly since the days when they incessantly repeated the (made-up) Voltairean maxim about “defending to the death your right to say it”. Nowadays, unregulated speech, unless liberals agree with what it says, is portrayed as a menace.

Today all four of the Supreme Court’s “liberals” voted, in Federal Election Commission v. Wisconsin Right to Life Inc., in favor of the government’s power to prohibit organizations from urging individuals to contact their Senators about particular issues during the 60 days before an election. Thus they regarded three of the five First Amendment liberties (speech, press, petition) as subordinate to the need to restrict what Justice Souter calls “corrosive spending”. Fortunately, the “liberals” are still a minority on the Court. (Unfortunately, only a minority of the “conservatives” were bold enough to vote for striking down the McCain-Feingold monster.)

What the “living Constitution” will accommodate, should the minority gain another vote, is foreshadowed by the policies that progressive think tanks and Left-controlled governments advocate or try to enact today.

The Center for American Progress, for instance, urges changes in the rules governing broadcasting, with the explicit aim of shutting up right-wing talk radio. The CAP wants the government to establish “clear public interest requirements for broadcasting” and levy penalty taxes on stations that don’t measure up. It also toys with reviving the “Fairness Doctrine”, though an implication of its “findings” is that that form of censorship didn’t go far enough.

In Oakland, California, as George Will reports, the local government, with the backing of the Loony Left 9th Circuit Court of Appeals (Good News Employee Association v. Hicks), has made agreement with its policy preferences the sine qua non for Free Speech rights:

Some African American Christian women working for Oakland’s government organized the Good News Employee Association (GNEA), which they announced with a flier describing their group as “a forum for people of Faith to express their views on the contemporary issues of the day. With respect for the Natural Family, Marriage and Family Values.”

The flier was distributed after other employees’ groups, including those advocating gay rights, had advertised their political views and activities on the city’s e-mail system and bulletin board. When the GNEA asked for equal opportunity to communicate by that system and that board, it was denied. Furthermore, the flier they posted was taken down and destroyed by city officials, who declared it “homophobic” and disruptive.

The city government said the flier was “determined” to promote harassment based on sexual orientation. The city warned that the flier and communications like it could result in disciplinary action “up to and including termination.”

Effectively, the city has proscribed any speech that even one person might say questioned the gay rights agenda and therefore created what that person felt was a “hostile” environment. This, even though gay rights advocates used the city’s communication system to advertise “Happy Coming Out Day.” Yet the terms “natural family,” “marriage” and “family values” are considered intolerably inflammatory.

The treatment of the GNEA illustrates one technique by which America’s growing ranks of self-appointed speech police expand their reach: They wait until groups they disagree with, such as the GNEA, are provoked to respond to them in public debates, then they persecute them for annoying those to whom they are responding. . . .

The flier supposedly violated the city regulation prohibiting “discrimination and/or harassment based on sexual orientation.” The only cited disruption was one lesbian’s complaint that the flier made her feel “targeted” and “excluded.” So anyone has the power to be a censor just by saying someone’s speech has hurt his or her feelings.

Unless the speech is “progressive.” If the GNEA claimed it felt “excluded” by advocacy of the gay rights agenda, would that advocacy have been suppressed? Of course not – although the GNEA’s members could plausibly argue that the city’s speech police have created a “hostile” environment against them.

To be fair, let me note that the Left remains devoted to shriveled relics of First Amendment piety. Also today, in Morse v. Frederick, three of the four Supreme Court “liberals” declared that, while it’s fine for the government to censor debate on public issues during an election campaign, a school principal has no right to suspend a student for unfurling a banner proclaiming “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” at a school-sanctioned event.

One can argue, of course, that the Court’s “conservatives”, who favored the principal’s position, were inconsistent, too, and perhaps they were. Almost no one achieves inarguable doctrinal purity on First Amendment questions. The two sets of inconsistencies are not, however, comparable. The “conservatives” allow an advertisement criticizing a particular legislative proposal and urging citizens to call or write their Senators about it, and ban the display of a nonsensical slogan with no intellectual or argumentative content. The “liberals” take the opposite stance. One view sees the First Amendment as protecting vigorous political debate; the other trivializes it into a license for uninhibited self-expression. It isn’t hard to figure out which is more in line with sound constitutional government.

Let me call attention once more to the Left’s free speech hierarchy. It shows no sign of changing.

Who Pays Dr. Piper. . . .

The NRO Corner has several recent posts about a consequence of governmental monopolization of health care that might once have sounded like wild speculation: Britain’s National Health Service now denies treatment to some people who haven’t taken proper care of themselves, and the government justifies neo-prohibitionist intrusion into personal conduct on the grounds that unhealthy habits lead to higher costs for the NHS.

Regulating individual actions is a natural step for a single payer health care system, which faces the daunting task of increasing the supply of medical care while reducing its price and maintaining its quality. The only way to square that circle is to improve relative supply by decreasing demand. I suppose that many advocates of setting up an NHS for our country are at least vaguely aware of that fact, but they mostly don’t care, so long as the targets are people who smoke or overeat. But what would they think if a rational healthocrat reasoned that AIDS is a very expensive disease, so nothing should be done for those who caught it through their own risky sexual practices? Or perhaps he would decide that banning deviancy has at least as good a cost-benefit ratio as prohibitions against smoking.

It’s truly odd that the Paranoid Left, convinced that America’s elected leaders routinely plot to destroy civil liberties for the most casual of reasons, doesn’t fear what might happen if Dick Cheney got to decide who would and wouldn’t have access to doctors, hospitals and medication. Are governmental conspiracies confined to Iraq, or are left-wing denunciations of it exaggerated and insincere, or does the Left hope for a perpetual political monopoly after 2008? Far be it from me to choose among those alternatives. The only other possibility is that many leftists are muddle-headed, which surely could not be the case.

One successful election has convinced many liberals that the happy days of Big Government are here again, when taxes will rise, businessmen will be cowed, labor unions will revive and, best of all, everybody’s health will become the government’s problem. It will be ironic if, having gotten their way, the same people mutter a decade from now, First they came for the smokers. . . .

The Anti-Science Party

Democrats like to denounce the “Republican War on Science”, but anyone who looks beyond the single issue of embryonic stem cell research quickly sees that they, not the GOP, are the naysayers on space exploration, biotechnology and pharmaceutical research, among other areas. Today it became clearer that even their infatuation with stem cells reflects nothing more than short-term political calculation.

President Bush accompanied his veto of the latest bill to relax restrictions on the destruction of embryos for research purposes with an executive order directing the Secretary of Health and Human Services to establish, within 90 days, a program for pluripotent stem cell research, including provisions for evaluating grant proposals.

The Democratic Congressional response was, as Ramesh Ponnuru points out, to misrepresent what the executive order provides:

The Democrats’ response begins: “Fact: Most scientists agree: adult stem cells do not have the same potential as embryonic stem cells.” It continues in that vein.

But Bush wasn’t talking about adult stem cells. People who want to knock the potential of adult stem cell research say that adult stem cells aren’t pluripotent – that they don’t have the mutability of embryonic stem cells. But [the White House’s favored legislative proposal, introduced by Senator Norm Coleman] specifically concerns pluripotent stem cells, not adult stem cells.

In fact, the Senate has passed a bill “to appropriate new dollars for the emerging ethical pluripotent stem cell techniques”. But a majority of Democratic Senators voted “nay”, and the Democratic House leadership has refused to bring the measure to a vote.

The idea of obtaining pluripotent stem cells from sources other than cloned embryos is no pipe dream.

Only a few days ago an article in the leading journal Nature brought amazing news. A Japanese team at Kyoto University has discovered how to reprogram skin cells so that they “dedifferentiate” into the equivalent of an embryonic stem cell. From this they can be morphed, theoretically, into any cell in the body, a property called pluripotency. It could be the Holy Grail of stem cell science: a technique that is both feasible and unambiguously ethical.

“Neither eggs nor embryos are necessary. I’ve never worked with either,” says Shinya Yamanaka. . . . .

This is mainstream research, not an eccentric theory from a Romanian naturopathy journal. Yamanaka’s work has been confirmed by two other teams affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University and the University of California, Los Angeles – both of them headed by ardent supporters of embryonic stem cell research.

They say that the reprogrammed cells meet all the tests of pluripotent cells – they form colonies, propagate continuously and form cancerous growths called teratomas, as well as producing chimaeras. “It’s unbelievable, just amazing,” says Hans Schöler, a German stem cell expert. “For me, it's like Dolly. It’s that type of an accomplishment.” [Michael Cook, “Will a Disruptive Technology Mothball Therapeutic Cloning?”]

Leaving aside the ethics of creating human organisms in order to kill them in the course of experimentation, a technique that starts with skin cells has the obvious advantage of cutting out one step from the process, the extremely difficult task of creating an embryo. Yet the ostensibly pro-science Democrats haven’t bothered to inform themselves about work like Dr. Yamanaka’s and so far scoff at funding it.

If they don’t soon change their minds, it will be hard to avoid the inference that their interest in stem cell research lasts only so long as it can be used to score points against pro-lifers. When it loses that virtue, it goes back to being just another product of “Big Pharma”, of no interest to the progressive-reactionary mind.

A Rationale for Feeding Fatah

Take it as given that any Palestinian “government” will be anti-American, antisemitic and pro-terrorist, imbued with a burning zeal to deliver aid and comfort to our enemies. A Palestinian who openly takes different stances will be dead long before he can become a cabinet minister. Doesn’t it then make sense to do what we can to ensure that this perpetual adversary is run by men who are corrupt, incompetent and unpopular? And how better to ensure that than by rewarding the incompetent, unpopular Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah kleptocrats? As Ronald Reagan said, If you want more of a thing, subsidize it.

If that’s the thought behind resuming the flow of Western cash into Fatah’s coffers, at least our leaders are thinking strategically. Also strategic, though not fully baked, would be embracing Fatah as “the enemy of my enemy”. The trouble there is that we remain Fatah’s preferred enemy, and it is too feeble, as its rapid defeat in Gaza reveals, to be of much use as a proxy friend.

But the notion that Abbas and his faction are “moderates” who want to make peace with Israel requires faith that passeth all understanding. If he is a secret peacemaker, the secret is closely guarded. Andrew Bostum has a cento of quotes:

• October 2006: “It is not required of Hamas, or of Fatah, or of the Popular Front to recognize Israel.”
• December 2006: “Saddam Hussein has entered history as a symbol of Pan-Arab nationalism.”
• January 2007: “The sons of Israel are corrupting humanity on earth.”
• January 2007: “We have a legitimate right to direct our guns against Israeli occupation ... Our rifles, all our rifles are aimed at The Occupation.
• February 2007: “We must unite the Hamas and Fatah blood in the struggle against Israel as we did at the beginning of the intifada. We want a political partnership with Hamas.

Hamas, however, decided that it could get along without such a “partner”.

The best that one can say for “President” Abbas is that he doesn’t appear to be as personally corrupt as his predecessor, Yasser Arafat. On the other hand, he is patently ineffectual, which makes his touted “moderation”, even if it were real, inconsequential. He hasn’t been able to clamp down on his associates’ thievery, couldn’t bring law and order to his domain and, finally, was unable to put up more than token resistance to Hamas.

The Bush Administration’s decision to try to prop up this Great and Mighty Oz would be incomprehensible if it didn’t reflect the State Department’s long-held roseate view of the Palestinian “leadership”. Fantasizing that the Palestinians, who declared their solidarity with Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War and danced in the streets at the news of 9/11, are only a concession away from peaceful co-existence with their Israeli neighbors is more pleasant than the tough work of keeping savagery within bounds.

Further reading: David Frum, “Even This Won’t Change Fatah”
Caroline B. Glick, “Grounded in Fantasy”
Fouad Ajami, “Brothers to the Bitter End”

Quote of the Day: Juneteenth!

Rarely do I agree with Mark Krikorian, a conspicuously strident advocate of keeping everybody who isn’t already here out of the country, but there is an occasional exception:

Today is Juneteenth, marking the day [in 1865] when the slaves of Texas finally learned of the Emancipation Proclamation. Commemoration of the day has spread far beyond Texas, and I wish we’d replace Martin Luther King’s birthday on the holiday calendar with Juneteenth. The objection that making MLK Day a national holiday puts him up with Jesus Christ and George Washington is legitimate, even if it was disingenuous on the part of some. But there obviously is a need in our national holidays for a day to celebrate the emancipation (from both slavery and Jim Crow) of black fellow-countrymen, not just as a black thing, but as an American thing. A celebration with roots in history, that has developed and spread spontaneously, is infinitely preferable to picking the birthday (in January, no less) of a single man.

One of my longstanding gripes is that official holidays bunch up between Thanksgiving and Washington’s Birthday. A step that both improves that situation and fits better with history is an unalloyed good.

BTW, there is a Juneteenth Web site, which is more than one can say for most holidays.

The New “Cut and Run”

Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter is worried that Democrats will sound like “surrender monkeys” if they continue to demand withdrawal from Iraq without putting forward any alternative strategy for fighting terrorism. So he has an idea for a Dem “bumper sticker” to compete with the GOP’s “War on Terror”: “Pull and Strike”.

All right, the meaning isn’t instantly clear. In full, but too long for most bumpers, it is “Pull out of Iraq and strike al-Qa’eda from the air.” It is presented as a replay of the course that Bill Clinton chose in Kosovo. There the U.S. committed no ground troops. Instead, by bombing Belgrade and harassing Serbian troop convoys, we compelled the Milosevich regime to relinquish its hold on the province. Mr. Alter thinks we can be equally successful in the same way against al-Qa’eda in Iraq, and he has found a freshman Congressman and war veteran, Patrick Murphy (D–Pa.), to endorse the concept.

In just how many ways is it ridiculous?

First, Serbia is a nation-state and fielded an army in Kosovo. It had readily identifiable targets to attack. Al-Qa’eda doesn’t have a capital that can be devastated, and its soldiers don’t travel in columns along roads or engage in conventional battles. Mr. Alter and Rep. Murphy are confident that, once the “irritation” of an American presence is gone, intelligence about the enemy’s whereabouts will flow in from now-friendly Iraqis, more than offsetting the absence of eyes in the theater. How this will work isn’t explained. Will we set up a call center in Kuwait and advertise its 800 number on late night Baghdad TV?

Second, what made it possible for the Kosovo operation to succeed without the insertion of ground forces was the shaky standing of President Milosevich and his communist cadre, which had already lost most of the former Yugoslavia to breakaway republics. It couldn’t ask a demoralized populace to endure unending disruption of its daily life. Again, there is no al-Qa’eda parallel. The group has no real population base and is, in any case, indifferent to civilian suffering.

Third, the aftermath in Kosovo wasn’t especially admirable. Once the Serbian army left and the American didn’t appear on the scence, there was no force at hand to restrain ethnic strife. As a result, the Serbian minority was forced to flee after suffering a vast amount of death and destruction. The parallel to Iraq is obvious.

As a thought experiment, one might try to imagine how “Pull and Strike” would have worked in Anbar province, where American invincibility encouraged local leaders to throw in with the Marines rather than the mufsidun. How could air strikes have had the same effect?

If unassisted air power could carry the day in Iraq, that would be wonderful. Unfortunately, the problems with locating targets, the inability of bombs to hold ground and the high risk of collateral damage make the Kosovo approach unworkable. I doubt, indeed, that the inventors of “Pull and Strike” actually care whether it could succeed. They are searching for a slogan to shield them during the 2008 election campaign. Once their faction has control of both Congress and the White House, the surrender monkeys can party like it’s 1938.

Whose Side Is Mynheer Melkert On?

Adrianus Petrus Wilhelmus Melkert, affectionately known as “Ad”, is a left-wing Dutch politician, noteworthy in his homeland for having, five years ago, led the Labor Party to its worst-ever election showing. After that fiasco, he landed cushy jobs as an international bureaucrat, first as a director of the World Bank, then as the number two man at the United Nations Development Program. In the former post, he played a key role in driving Paul Wolfowitz from the Bank’s presidency on trumped-up ethics charges. His conduct regarding Mr. Wolfowitz was duplicitous and sinister, possibly including perjury. As the Wall Street Journal observed at the time,

One of the main “witnesses” against Mr. Wolfowitz is Ad Melkert, another Dutch politician who had previously run the bank board’s ethics committee that advised Mr. Wolfowitz to give the raise to his girlfriend that is now the basis for the accusations against him. . . .

Mr. Melkert has played an especially craven role by running from his own responsibility in the case. As head of the ethics committee in 2005, he refused to let Mr. Wolfowitz recuse himself from dealings with Shaha Riza [Mr. Wolfowitz’s inamorata], who had been long employed at the bank. Then Mr. Melkert advised him to ensure that Ms. Riza got a new job that included some kind of raise or promotion to compensate for the disruption to her career. Now, however, Mr. Melkert claims he was an innocent bystander who knew nothing about Ms. Riza’s raise.

How very European. This is the same Ad Melkert, who on October 24, 2005, after Ms. Riza had been told of her new job and salary, wrote in a letter to Mr. Wolfowitz that “Because the outcome is consistent with the [Ethics] Committee’s findings and advice above, the Committee concurs with your view that this matter can be treated as closed.”

And it is the same Ad Melkert who absolved Mr. Wolfowitz after inspecting two whistleblower emails from an anonymous “John Smith” that circulated around the bank in early 2006 and charged malfeasance. A January 21 whistleblower email included a reference to Ms. Riza’s “salary increase of around US$50,000” and was sent to the entire bank board.

On February 28, 2006, Mr. Melkert wrote to Mr. Wolfowitz, saying that he and the ethics committee had “reviewed two emails from ‘John Smith’” as well as relevant “background documents.” He went on to write that “On the basis of a careful review of the above-mentioned documents . . . the allegations relating to a matter which had been previously considered by the Committee did not contain new information warranting any further review by the Committee.”

Either Mr. Melkert is lying now, or he was negligent when he wrote that letter. But there’s no excuse for his current Sgt. Schultz routine from “Hogan’s Heroes” that “I know nothing. Nothing!”

Myheer Melkert’s fondness for knowing nothing is now hampering inquiries into a more serious question, whether the UNDP gave North Korea the hard currency it needed to keep its nuclear weapons program on course. As reported by Fox News,

New specific concerns were added last week in . . . two closed door meetings between the U.S. and . . . top UNDP officials. . . . According to leaked reports of the information, which was first given in congressional briefings, [U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Zalmay] Khalilzad himself and [Mark] Wallace [another member of the U.S. delegation] asked [UNDP head Kemal] Dervis and Melkert about specific payments funneled through UNDP of $2.7 million in “goods and equipment” to a vendor with ties to Tanchon Commercial Bank, a North Korean organization that has been on U.S. Treasury sanctions lists since 2005 as helping to finance North Korean sales of ballistic missiles. The U.S. also said that UNDP had given some $7 million to North Korea's National Coordination Committee for UNDP (NCC) . Another $8 million of different U.N. agencies’ money also had gone to the North Korean regime — and about $2.8 million of that had in turn been used to buy houses in France, Britain and Canada.

At the meetings, the U.S. representatives asked for access to UNDP records, so that they could determine the accuracy of these disturbing allegations. Given that the U.S. is the UNDP’s biggest donor, its right to review what is done with our money seems pretty obvious. But not to Mynheer Melkert. According to an indignant letter of protest written by Ambassador Khalizad after the meetings,

Mr. Melkert suggested to Ambassador Wallace that UNDP viewed United States inquiry relating to such new information as justifying some kind of “retaliation” against the Government of the United States.

He also refused the request for access to the records, insisting that we should first turn all of the documents on which the allegations are based over to him. Since the U.S. is presumably relying on intelligence sources for its information, Mynheer Melkert in effect asked that those sources be exposed to the U.N., after which there can be no assurance that their names will not be passed on to Kim Jong-Il.

The UNDP position that it would only respond to U.S. queries once documented evidence was turned over to it was termed “irresponsible” yesterday by a foreign diplomat at the U.N. who has followed the issue. The U.S. has asked only that UNDP turn over its own records on the transactions, and “this is the first time that an agency that is voluntarily funded by countries that are its members has said it will not look at its own records,” he said. The U.S. contributes some $100 million to UNDP’s budget.

The issue of what is in UNDP records has been the crux of the dispute with the U.S. since questions about UNDP’s role in helping Kim out of his cash squeeze were first raised by Ambassador Wallace last June. At that time, Wallace based most of his concerns on secret UNDP audits that are even kept confidential from countries like the U.S. that pay large amounts of UNDP funding and sit on the organization’s executive board. Wallace’s questions led to a preliminary investigation by a three-member team from UNDP’s external board of auditors, which reported two weeks ago that Wallace’s initial concerns were well grounded.

According to the auditors, UNDP had in fact made unauthorized hard currency payments to the North Korean government, not only for its own work in North Korea but for a variety of other U.N. agencies — at least $72 million in the period from 2002 to 2006.

UNDP also had hired 22 of its 31 staffers locally, in some cases in crucial oversight roles. The local employees were not only nominated by Kim’s dictatorship, but remained North Korean government employees while the UNDP paid them. The auditors also declared that many inspections of UNDP development projects in North Korea were only carried out under North Korean escort, and in some cases by the same local employees North Korea had provided. A substantial number of UNDP projects in North Korea in any given year were not inspected.

And how did the UNDP respond?

The UNDP’s position, strongly articulated by Melkert, is that UNDP did nothing wrong, and that the audit supports that contention, no matter what the actual language of the report seems to indicate. . . .

That drew an immediate rebuttal from U.S. Ambassador Richard Miller, the American diplomat who sits on the Executive Board. Miller declared himself “astounded and dismayed” by Melkert’s characterization of the audit report. He termed UNDP’s “glossy review” of the audit to be “disappointing” and declared that Melkert’s statement that he and his boss would take action when allegations were “substantiated” was “not good enough.” Miller added: “We look for them to be as offended by these audit report findings as we are.”

A little joke, Mr. Ambassador?

There is one small clue, inserted in parentheses, as to which side is right in this controversy:

(In January 2007, however, UNDP ended both its hiring and hard currency payment practices in North Korea, and withdrew all its international employees last March when the Kim regime refused to accept the revised arrangement.)

So everything was just fine in the past, and the UNDP altered its practices for no particular reason. That, at least, is Mynheer Melkert’s story. He also denies having threatened to “retaliate” against the U.S. We’ve already seen, in connection with the Wolfowitz affair, how much his memory is to be relied upon.

C.M.O.T. Dibbler’s Immigration Bill

As a supporter of what restrictionists would call an “open borders” policy, I was relieved when the Kyl-Kennedy bill seemingly died and am correspondingly displeased by its resurrection. In a broad sense, it may reflect sensible thinking about immigration, but the details undermine its principles. The proposed “Z Visa” for current illegal immigrants will be too expensive and the process of obtaining it too cumbersome to attract more than a small percentage of illegals to documented status. The guest worker (“Y Visa”) program will likewise be unattractive. Its policy goal is to ease entry for skilled workers, but it will impose on them the crippling requirement of leaving the country for one year out of every three, and prohibitions against less-skilled laborers will remain in place. Besides, even were these placebos better designed, the sclerotic Bureau of Immigration and Citizenship Services couldn’t administer them.

In short, after all the hubbub, the bill will do little more than rearrange the status quo. The huge “industry” of document fraud, identity theft and gray market finance that makes life as an illegal alien possible – and is readily available for would-be terrorists – will continue to function, because the demand for its services will be unabated.

It puzzles me that anybody wants to rush toward enactment of this hastily prepared legislative sausage. President Bush’s support of the bill is like ordering steak, then accepting in its stead a meat pie from Cut Me Own Throat Dibbler.

At the same time, I can’t sympathize with the restrictionists, because their utopia is just as unworkable as Kyl-Kennedy. On the one hand, “enforcement first” would compel Americans to do a job that they really don’t want to do, namely, turning yard workers and waiters and chambermaids and meat packers into the authorities so that they can be deported to countries where they couldn’t find decent jobs before and in many cases will have to live under incompetent or outrightly malign governments. The inevitable sequel to a successful deportation effort would be a stream of news stories about men and women (and, naturally, their children) who had carved out modest livelihoods for themselves in America and were now starving, disease-ridden, quasi-enslaved or dead in Mexico, Haiti, Belize, Somalia or Bangladesh. Sure, the plethora of these accounts would be due to media bias, but they would be true nonetheless and would tar restrictionism as a cruel and barbarous policy.

Worse yet, the goal of restrictionism – to rid the labor force of its illegal component – is as impracticable as the means. We don’t know for sure how many illegals are in the work force. Accepting the restrictionists’ favorite number for the total illegal population, about 12 million, and making the plausible assumption that a large proportion don’t bring children or nonworking spouses with them, the total number of workers should be around eight million. The delusion underlying the economic case for restrictionism is that, if those eight million disappear, their jobs will be filled by Americans who are at present out of work or marginally employed.

A glance at labor market statistics dispels that hopeful idea. As of May 2007, the United States had 6.8 million unemployed individuals, 4.5 million who worked part-time but desired full-time unemployment and 1.4 million who were marginally attached to the labor force (either willing to work but not actively seeking jobs or “discouraged” from doing so by a perceived lack of openings). That pool is not big enough to fill eight million vacancies, because –

• The unemployment figure includes frictional unemployment, the fraction of workers that is, at a given moment, moving between jobs. Because jobs and job seekers can’t be matched instantaneously and perfectly, frictional unemployment is inevitable. For that and other reasons, few economists believe that the unemployment rate can go below about four percent. The current rate is an historically very low 4.5 percent, meaning that the present pool of unemployed translates into no more than, optimistically, a million people available to fill the jobs left behind by exiting illegals.

• The 4.5 million involuntary part-timers cannot fill 4.5 million full-time slots. Again optimistically, there might be 2.5 million replacement workers in this pool.

• Finally, many of the 1.4 million in the “marginally attached” pool are unemployable for lack of the minimally necessary habits or skills for productive labor. Still, we might find a million usable workers here.

These rough calculations yield a total of five million people to do eight million jobs. To fill the rest, labor force participation would have to increase substantially, which it won’t ceteris paribus unless wages rise. Restrictionists often seize on this prospective increase in the cost of labor as a boon to low-skilled native-born workers, but that hope is a phantom. Low-priced jobs are low-value jobs. If the cost of filling them goes up, they will remain empty. A small number of workers will doubtless get larger paychecks, but the improvement in their condition will be balanced by the loss to the economy of the goods and services currently produced by several million illegal workers. A few of our countrymen will be richer, but the country as a whole will be poorer. The consequences are identical to those of protective tariffs: small gains narrowly distributed and a larger overall loss.

At this point, the immigration “debate” boils down to a clash between two unfeasible positions, each backed by increasingly strident rhetoric. The fiercest emotion seems confined, however, to the right side of the arena. Liberals are paying little attention. By staying away from the contretemps, they avoid aggravating a natural fissure in their own ranks, between “multicultural” racists and labor union reactionaries. It’s clear in any case that the Left regards the sacred cause of losing the war in Iraq as far more important than addressing a border control problem that has persisted for decades without doing a great deal of harm. Would that conservatives could assign the same priority to the War on Terror!

The Fish Fight Back

Maybe this – fishy? – tale from the Daily Telegraph shows that the piscine masses are gathering to resist mammalian domination:

Its waters are already infested by man-eating alligators and razor-toothed sharks, but now Florida residents are being warned of another peril – flying fish.

A prehistoric fish has literally leapt its way to the top of the Sunshine State’s wildlife danger list after a series of incidents that have left dozens of river users injured. Officials at Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Commission (FFWC) have launched a campaign to warn people that a brush with an “armour plated” sturgeon – an endangered species that dates back 225 million years and can grow to 8ft and weigh 200lb – could send them to the surgeon.

Some of the victims have been knocked overboard, rendered unconscious and even left in a coma after giant Gulf sturgeon jumped out of the Suwannee River and slapped them with their rock-hard scales. Other injuries have included a fractured spine, a collapsed lung, ruptured spleen, slit throat, broken ribs and wounds that have required plastic surgery. . . .

It is not clear what prompts the sturgeons’ acrobatics, although their leaping season appears to run from June to August. Some scientists believe the fish use it as a form of communication, others think it is aimed at flushing the gills. Some theorise that sturgeon leap simply because they can.

A Map of American Wealth

One of the virtues of the Internet is that it brings odd facts to one’s e-doorstep. An example is the map reproduced below, in which each State has been “renamed” after a foreign country with approximately the same economic output.

There are surprises in the State rankings. I would never have guessed that Illinois (=Mexico) is in fourth place in GDP, behind only the Big Three of California (=France), Texas (=Canada) and Florida (=South Korea). Incidentally, our top four States combined come very close to the GDP of Japan, which places second internationally to the U.S.

It’s also a surprise that New York (=Brazil) isn’t merely out of the top five but behind New Jersey (=Russia) and Ohio (=Australia).

Just perusing the map gives a striking picture of how rich America is relative to the rest of the world. Less positively, it reveals the extent to which we have hamstrung ourselves in the conduct of foreign affairs. Something is badly awry when Iran (=Alabama) and Venezuela (=Iowa) are unafraid to declare themselves our enemies.

[Source: Strange Maps. Click to enlarge.]

N.B.: An alert, albeit tactless, commenter objects that the state data in Strange Maps’ commentary are odd and, in particular, that the National Association of Manufacturers puts New York’s GDP at a much higher figure than whatever source Strange Maps used. As Strange Maps notes, however, its numbers “are not necessarily the same as those used in compiling the original map”. The map, for example, accurately equates the New York economy to Brazil’s. Some of the other comparisons look dicey. The next time I run short of things to do, I may try my hand at a corrected version, though the overall point, that the U.S. economy is massive when placed beside the rest of the world, is obviously true.

What If They Gave a War and Only One Side Came?

In the course of a long, balanced post on the Al-Marri case, Orin Kerr, who has often criticized the Bush Administration’s use of executive power in the War on Terror, makes an elementary point that is too often overlooked. Explaining the reasons why he thinks the defendant should have been regarded as an enemy combatant rather than a civilian criminal, he writes,

The first and most important is that members of a terrorist cell see themselves at war; they see themselves as soldiers in a holy war against the United States, and are acting accordingly. When a group sees themselves as soldiers at war trying to kill you, it seems fair that you should want to return the favor. [emphasis in original]

A majority of the 4th Circuit panel thought otherwise. To the judges’ rarified perception, an individual who, according to uncontradicted evidence, was a member of al-Qa’eda and entered the United States for the purpose of killing Americans was just an ordinary criminal defendant who couldn’t be restrained by the government until after he committed a crime.

Well, that’s what one expects of a brace of Clinton appointees. But before we sneer and blame the First Husband-to-be, it’s only fair to note that the same view prevails in surprising quarters. For example, from the Washington Post:

The insurgents who kill our young soldiers are ruthless, but we have sometimes been cautious in our response. Take the question of targeting bomb makers: There may be an unlimited supply of explosives in Iraq, but there is not an unlimited supply of people who know how to wire the detonators. In 2004, CIA operatives in Iraq believed that they had identified the signatures of 11 bomb makers. They proposed a diabolical — but potentially effective — sabotage program that would have flooded Iraq with booby-trapped detonators designed to explode in the bomb makers’ hands. But the CIA general counsel’s office said no. The lawyers claimed that the agency lacked authority for such an operation, one source recalled.

There are technologies that would allow us to detonate every roadside bomb in Iraq by heating the wires in the detonators to the point that they triggered an explosion. But these systems could severely harm civilians nearby, so we’re not using them, either. “In our system, we often are not given credit for the fact that we are very concerned about collateral damage,” [Gen. Montgomery] Meigs [who headed a Pentagon task force on how to neutralize the IED threat] said.

(Maybe civilians could be warned when bomb sweeping teams come through and get away from the area. Or would that disrupt life in Baghdad too severely? And don’t bombs likewise “severely harm civilians” when they explode on the terrorists’ timetable rather than ours?)

And then there is this from an Army squad leader recently back from the front lines:

A perfect example of problems arising from [Rules of Engagement] was when a buddy of mine was guarding a section of the exterior of one of the forward operating bases in Iraq from which we were operating.

While he was on duty, he was getting shot at. But rules of engagement say, you can’t engage without permission. So he radioed the sergeant-of-the-guard and said, “Hey, I’m getting shot at. May I return fire?”

The sergeant asked, “Are you in any immediate danger?”

My buddy responded, “No, not as long as I’m ducking behind the concrete [barrier].”

The sergeant said, “OK, don’t return fire until you are in immediate danger.”

The sergeant, adhering to his understanding of the ROE, was saying, Fight only if you can’t hide. Is that how we fought World War II?

The rationale for this legalism is, no doubt, the avoidance of atrocities. I agree with the goal, but the means are misguided. Historically, almost all battlefield excesses by American troops have resulted from panic, low morale or poor situational awareness. Rigid rules of engagement don’t have much influence over a guy in one of those states. I’d be surprised if the ROE have saved any lives in Iraq, except for the lives of terrorists.

Whether or not one approves of this particular war, restrictions that serve only to make life easier for men who “see themselves as soldiers in a holy war against the United States, and are acting accordingly” are bizarrely misguided. Except for the Michael Moore types, not many critics of the Iraqi campaign openly root for defeat. Many declare that they want to wage war vigorously on other fronts. But won’t the shackles that hamper our soldiers in Iraq be just as detrimental in Afghanistan? Or New York?

Further reading: Andrew C. McCarthy, “Lawfare Strikes Again”

Lawyerly Egoboo

Beck v. PACE International Union, handed down by the Supreme Court yesterday, isn’t Marbury v. Madison. It isn’t even Hughes Aircraft Co. v. Jacobson. All that the Court did was reverse (unanimously, ho hum) yet another 9th Circuit frolic and detour. The reason why I mention it is that it is the first Supreme Court case to cite Veal & Mackiewicz, Pension Plan Terminations (on-line updates here).

For anyone who is curious, here is a precis, omitting immaterial details: A bankrupt employer terminated its overfunded pension plan, recovering $5 million in surplus assets for the benefit of its creditors. Before doing so, it rejected a proposal from its employees’ union to merge the plan into a multiemployer pension plan covering union members. The union brought suit, alleging that the company’s failure to consider the proposal adequately was a breach of fiduciary duty.

The claim was too absurd to find favor anywhere outside the Loony Circuit. It is well established that the decision to terminate or continue a plan, like the decision to establish one in the first place, is the employer’s to make on the basis of its own self-interest, without reference to ERISA’s fiduciary standards. To sidestep that principle, the plaintiffs and the 9th Circuit qadis argued that the way in which a termination is implemented is subject to the fiduciary standards (which is true) and that deciding between merger and termination was simply a step in the termination process, like the choice of an insurance company from which to buy close-out annuities. The remedy that the court devised for the employer’s refusal to contemplate that choice was forfeiture of the surplus assets, which it directed be distributed to the plan participants.

Justice Scalia’s opinion punctured this bubble by reciting the many ways in which continuing a plan by merging it into another differs from bringing its existence to an end by terminating it. The effect of upholding the 9th Circuit would have been to impose a constraint on the decision to terminate that Congress never saw fit to enact.

Aside from the citations to my book, I’d like to note a couple of other points about this case.

First, it furnishes an illustration of how difficult it is to read the Justices’ minds during oral argument. Workplace Prof Blog posted a report on the argument that predicted a 5–4 split, with Justices Ginsburg, Souter, Breyer and Stevens siding with the union, and Kennedy and Alito casting the decisive votes. In actuality, the vote was 9–0 for the employer.

Second, despite reaching an irrefragible result, the opinion is one of the too frequent examples of the Court’s amateurish handling of ERISA. Footnote 3, in particular, should be an embarrassment to its author. I know that I can’t reasonably demand that the Their Honors become experts in my particular nook of the law, but it’s nonetheless regrettable that they aren’t.

A Kinder, Gentler Islam?

That is the title of David Warren’s review (not available on-line), in the June 2007 issue of Commentary, of a new biography of Mohammed, In the Footsteps of the Prophet by Tariq Ramadan. The volume is far from the first to airbrush the traditional portrait of the founder of Islam. What’s noteworthy is that its author is not a Western “multiculturalist” like Karen Armstrong but a grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. The U.S. has denied him entry because of his support for terrorist groups, and he has a long record of ill-disguised antisemitic animus. (For a thorough examination of M. Ramadan’s background and ideology, vide Paul Berman’s novella-length “Who’s Afraid of Tariq Ramandan?”.)

Yet the Prophet of Footsteps is like “gentle Jesus, meek and mild”, a man who would never have associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, much less its offspring al-Qa’eda.

[Ramadan] does everything he can to avoid controversy, delivering an apologetic for Islam’s messenger that is designed to appeal to those, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, who are of a modern and “Enlightenment” cast of mind. . . . Indeed, the Muhammad of Footsteps often reminds me of childhood encounters with Protestant Sunday school, and particularly of the Jesus who said, “suffer the little children to come unto me.” . . .

In fifteen short, sermon-like chapters, Ramadan retells the prophet’s life with an emphasis not on events themselves but on the “teachings” that are said to emerge from them. Beginning with an “Encounter with the Sacred” that smoothly elides Islamic monotheism with the Judeo-Christian tradition descending from Abraham, he ends with “In History, for Eternity”, a gauzy vision of a loving and forgiving messenger from the heavens, calling us upward toward justice and equity, toward peace, faith, ethics, and hope.

Muhammad, it turns out, was also a pioneering environmentalist, and indeed almost an animal-rights activist . . . . Similarly, Ramadan shows [Muhammad’s lieutenants] observing the strictest principles of the Geneva Convention, fighting only against enemy combatants and taking great care to avoid harm to women, children, and slaves. . . . Ramadan is loath to dwell on the merely military aspect. Instead, rather as the British were said to have captured India in a fit of gentlemanly absent-mindedness, and after long and patient hesitation, Arabia appears to have been taken by the Muslims in one continuous, purely defensive action. . . .

And yet, Ramadan assures us, none of these unavoidable actions [such as “the elimination of three Jewish tribes settled around Medina”] altered in any way the pacific principles behind Muslim rule: the recognition of a common God, complete religious toleration, and the need to settle all inter-communal disputes peacefully, “according to the principles of the justice and honor codes”. There may have been no Jews left in Arabia at the end, but in principle they enjoyed perfect toleration. . . .

Delving directly into Islamic tradition, Ramadan is seeking common or universal religious themes, and doing so with a sensibility that is ultimately more Western than Eastern, emphasizing the need to distinguish between a religion and a culture, and between the duties of religious affiliation and the duties of citizenship.

All this stands in contradiction to the teaching of most other Muslim spokesmen. Ramadan expressly rejects the traditional “binary” opposition between dar al-Islam and dar al-harb (the abodes of Islam and of war, respectively), claiming it is not Qur’anic. He imagines the emergence of a distinctive European Islam, just as there are already distinctive Asian and African variations of Islam. In principle, if not always in practice, he is allergic to the binary opposition of “us and them”.

As the alert reader will have gathered, the reviewer has doubts about both the author’s sincerity and the possibility that his “universalizing project” can succeed. About the former, one can say nothing definitive, although M. Ramadan has a long history of double-speak. Will he, I wonder, publish this work in Arabic and other Islamic languages, taking its enlightened message to where it is most urgently needed?

It doesn’t really matter, though, whether In the Footsteps of the Prophet was intended to turn Moslems away from Islamofascism rather than gull Westerners into thinking that there is no extremism in Islam (as the openly pro-fascist Miss Armstrong tries to do). The book’s significance is that it does present an alternative Islam purged of violence and bigotry, one that conceivably could be embraced by Moslems who cannot reconcile their humane impulses with the foul deeds carried out under the cloak of jihad.

Looking in from the outside, it seems to me that there are two keys to any such Islamic “reformation” (not a very good analogy but serviceable for the moment).

The first is hinted at in M. Ramadan’s book: a separation of the text of the Koran, which Moslems believe abides eternally in heaven, from the human traditions that have hitherto informed the text’s interpretation.

Contrary to Ernest Renan’s famous but ignorant dictum, Islam was not “born in the full light of history”. The Koran was assembled within a few years after Mohammed’s death and may be an accurate source of his sayings, but it is almost barren of historical information. The incidents that fill biographies of the religion’s founder were set down two or three generations later. The author of the earliest known life of Mohammed, Ibn Ishaq, was born about 704 A.D. and died in the 760’s. Hence, he wrote a century or more after his subject’s death. Moreover, what he actually wrote is lost. Modern scholars reconstruct it from later writers.

The Ibn Ishaq tradition apparently had almost no written sources. It may preserve the essence of one authentic document, a treaty between Mohammed and the city of Yathrib. Beyond that, everything is drawn from oral tradition, that is, from reports of what old men are reported to have said about events in which their fathers or grandfathers took part.

Not surprisingly, the “life of Mohammed” fashioned from this evidence was, as Robert Spencer’s The Truth About Muhammad details, congruent with 8th and 9th Century Islam: militant, aggressive, intolerant, contemptuous of women and infidels, and confident of its universalist destiny. That picture was convenient for the early Caliphs. Attacking infidels and reducing them to dhimmi status was “what Mohammed would do”. But did he? If modernist Christians are skeptical of the historicity of the Christ of the Gospels, all or most of which were composed within living memory of Our Lord’s earthly ministry, how much more scope is there for doubting the third or fourth-hand traditions about Mohammed?

Why would a pious Moslem entertain doubts? The key to that development is his recognition of the gulf between the fundamental moral precepts that every sane man knows in his heart and the actions of the mufsidun. The murders and tortures committed by al-Qa’eda, Hezbollah, Hamas, Fatah et al. may comport with an 8th Century mentalité, but do they please the creator of the universe? Is it possible that the historical Mohammed prevailed largely through peaceful means and that the warlike passages in the Koran have been misunderstood through the loss of their context?

Considerations like those could blossom into a genuine “religion of peace”, one that sees Mohammed as the enlightener rather than the conqueror of Arabia. Or they could fall onto stony soil. How the Islamic world reacts to Tariq Ramadan’s new Mohammed will tell us a lot about what the future holds.

Further reading: Daniel Pipes, “Who Was the Prophet Muhammad?”
Patricia Crone, “What Do We Actually Know About Mohammed?”

Hugo Movie Nominees: A Year for No Award

For the sake of being an informed Hugo voter, I have watched all five nominees for Best Dramatic Production (Long Form), i. e., Best Movie. Some of them weren’t wretched; I didn’t feel an impulse to hurl rotten vegetables at the screen, though I will never voluntarily see them again. A couple had no redeeming aesthetic value. Overall, 2006 was not a good year for stfnal or fantastic film. I have a slight suspicion as to why, though a reason may not be needed. There are tides in the affairs of Hollywood, and this one was taken at its ebb. Just a few years ago, after all, voters could choose among Galaxy Quest, The Sixth Sense, The Matrix and Being John Malkovich.

Partisan Justice: Compare and Contrast

The Scooter Libby–Sandy Berger comparison is easy to draw. The media remind us incessantly of Mr. Libby’s misdeeds. As they tend to be less vocal about Mr. Berger, here is a recap:

According to reports from the Inspector General of the National Archives and the staff of the House of Representatives’ Government Operations Committee, Mr. Berger, while acting as former President Clinton’s designated representative to the commission investigating the attacks of September 11, 2001, illegally took confidential documents from the Archives on more than one occasion. He folded documents in his clothes, snuck them out of the Archives building, and stashed them under a construction trailer nearby until he could return, retrieve them, and later cut them up. After he was caught, he lied to the investigators and tried to shift blame to Archive employees.

Contrary to his initial denials and later excuses, Berger clearly intended from the outset to remove sensitive material from the Archives. He used the pretext of making and receiving private phone calls to get time alone with confidential material, although rules governing access dictated that someone from the Archives staff must be present. He took bathroom breaks every half-hour to provide further opportunity to remove and conceal documents.

No one knows with any assurance what materials were destroyed. The culprit voluntarily resigned from the D.C. Bar rather than face questions about them in an ethics probe.

The Justice Department concluded that this conduct deserved a misdemeanor charge, a $10,000 fine and a temporary security clearance revocation. The judge to whom this plea bargain was presented raised the fine to a slightly less risible $50,000.

While it certainly looks like Mr. Berger was treated far more leniently than Mr. Libby, there is a better side-by-side. Conrad, Lord Black, formerly head of the Hollinger newspaper chain, is currently on trial in Chicago for alleged financial wrongdoing. One count of the indictment is for obstruction of justice.

After being ousted from Hollinger, Lord Black removed a number of boxes from his former office, despite a court order forbidding him to do so. That is the basis for the obstruction charge. One of his lawyers has testified, without contradiction, that copies of the documents in the boxes had previously been disclosed to the Securities and Exchange Commission. It would be astonishing if, by that point in the investigation, they had not all been inventoried. The government does not allege that any were actually purloined or destroyed. Nonetheless, it seeks a felony conviction. It may be legally entitled to one. By the Sandy Berger standard, however, Lord Black’s actions were on a par with jaywalking.

A recurring worry about democratic government is how equal justice can be administered in politically sensitive cases. The Berger–Libby and Berger–Black contrasts are fodder for that concern. Except that Scooter Libby worked for the incumbent administration and Lord Black is an outspoken supporter of its policies. So much for simple assumptions about how partisanship works in modern America.

Adaptation vs. Alarmism

If Global Warming will have catastrophic consequences, we should be looking for effective ways to stave them off, right? Apparently not:

Politicians in New Jersey are currently bidding to join several other states in passing anti-global warming legislation. There is a bill making its way through the legislature that would commit the state to California-type emissions reductions of 80% by 2050.

The Environment New Jersey Research & Policy Center has just produced a widely-noticed report in support of this bill predicting apocalyptic impacts – Inundated boardwalks! Heat deaths! Floods! – across New Jersey if we don’t head off global warming at the pass. . . .

The proposed solution for New Jersey: reduce emissions. This is ludicrous. New Jersey could drive its emissions to literally zero tomorrow morning, and it would not measurably impact any of these projected problems. On the other hand, there is not one single recommendation about changes to seaside zoning or building codes, constructing jetties, reservoir engineering or anything else that would ameliorate potential impacts. You know, anything practical. Unlike, say, passing a law that simply mandates a complete restructuring of the state’s economy in order not to solve a potential problem decades from now.

Now and then one suspects that the Warmists prefer making the world – at least the developed world – take its medicine to curing its disease.

Further reading: Indur M. Goklany, “Living with Global Warming”

Exit Hillary?

Maybe John Podhoretz will rest easier tomorrow morning, after this report from the Daily Telegraph, the most startling preview yet of Carl Bernstein’s warts-and-little-else biography of Hillary Rodham Clinton, has percolated through the political intelligentsia:

Hillary Clinton, the frontrunner to become the next US president, has suffered serious bouts of depression, according to a new book by one of the journalists who broke the Watergate scandal.

Carl Bernstein’s A Woman in Charge details how she showed “persistent signs of melancholy” when she was a student and quotes a White House adviser saying she was “deeply depressed” in 1994, a year after her husband, Bill, became president. . . .

The book says Mrs Clinton’s “emotional state” was “as fragile as it had ever been” in late 1994 after her close friend Vince Foster had committed suicide, her father had died and her healthcare proposals had been rejected.

It quotes David Gergen, then a senior Clinton aide, as saying: “I don’t know whether she was seeing a doctor or not but she was depressed.”

Bernstein suggests that this was not a one-off. He says she experienced recurring “February depression” as a college student. The future Mrs Clinton confided in Don Jones, a Methodist minister, who became a “confessor, partner in Socratic dialogue, and spiritual adviser”, according to Bernstein.

“When depression struck, she turned to him, as she would for the next three decades, including the year of her husband’s impeachment.”

I have known fine people, people whom I would trust with my life and fortune, who have suffered from depression, sometimes severe. But none of them is trying to obtain the most stressful job in the world at an extraordinarily delicate moment in history. Entrusting a fragile psyche with the lives and fortunes of 300 million of my countrymen may lie beyond prudence.

Mr. Bernstein could, I realize, be motivated by Angry Left loathing for a politician who isn’t soft enough on Islamofascism, and his story could be more fiction than fact. If he cited the customary “sources who asked not to be identified”, I’d regard that as not at all unlikely. Here, however, the sources are named. It will be interesting to see whether they repudiate the quotes attributed to them – and whether anybody believes their denials. (And let me go on record as saying that I consider random fortune cookies as reliable as David Gergen.)

Senator Clinton’s campaign has never taken the commanding lead that I had expected. That the best known and best funded candidate could not break away from a pair of one-term Senators and a gaggle of vanity candidates was an ominous sign for her prospects. The question now is not John Podhoretz’s “Can She Be Stopped?” but “Will She Get Out of the Starting Gate?”

BTW, if this were a photo of Dan Quayle. . . .