Stromata Blog

When Good News Is “A Real Big Problem”

Is it unfair to say the, for many Congressional Democrats, an American defeat in Iraq is an important objective? The standard liberal line is that the Dems’ eagerness to abandon that country merely recognizes that the U.S. has been defeated – so thoroughly and irrevocably defeated that all we can do is throw in the towel. If the consequence is a tremendous propaganda harvest for al-Qa’eda and a genocidal civil war in Iraq – who cares?

If our circumstances were like those of the Confederacy in April 1865 or Germany in November 1918, accepting defeat might indeed be the only realistic course. But what if matters are not quite so dire? A paragraph in today’s Washington Post gives an insight into how Rep. James Clyburn (D–S.C.), the number three man among House Democrats, views that possibility:

Many Democrats have anticipated that, at best, Petraeus and U.S. ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker would present a mixed analysis of the success of the current troop surge strategy, given continued violence in Baghdad. But of late there have been signs that the commander of U.S. forces might be preparing something more generally positive. Clyburn said that would be “a real big problem for us.”

So good news about the fight against terrorists is “a real big problem” for the Democratic Party?

The other development on the good news front was in today’s New York Times, an op-ed by two Brookings Institution fellows, both hitherto pessimistic about the prospects for Iraq, titled “A War We Just Might Win”:

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with. [Sounds like a good approximation of “victory” to me.] . . .

Everywhere, Army and Marine units were focused on securing the Iraqi population, working with Iraqi security units, creating new political and economic arrangements at the local level and providing basic services — electricity, fuel, clean water and sanitation — to the people. Yet in each place, operations had been appropriately tailored to the specific needs of the community. As a result, civilian fatality rates are down roughly a third since the surge began — though they remain very high, underscoring how much more still needs to be done. . . .

We traveled to the northern cities of Tal Afar and Mosul. This is an ethnically rich area, with large numbers of Sunni Arabs, Kurds and Turkmens. American troop levels in both cities now number only in the hundreds because the Iraqis have stepped up to the plate. Reliable police officers man the checkpoints in the cities, while Iraqi Army troops cover the countryside. A local mayor told us his greatest fear was an overly rapid American departure from Iraq. All across the country, the dependability of Iraqi security forces over the long term remains a major question mark.

But for now, things look much better than before. American advisers told us that many of the corrupt and sectarian Iraqi commanders who once infested the force have been removed. The American high command assesses that more than three-quarters of the Iraqi Army battalion commanders in Baghdad are now reliable partners (at least for as long as American forces remain in Iraq). . . .

How much longer should American troops keep fighting and dying to build a new Iraq while Iraqi leaders fail to do their part? And how much longer can we wear down our forces in this mission? These haunting questions underscore the reality that the surge cannot go on forever. But there is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008.

Left-winger Joe Klein has a “see no good” response ready:

It could be argued that what the U.S. military is now accomplishing is clearing the field of foreigners – i.e. the Al Qaeda in Iraq foreign fighters – so that the indigenous Sunnis and Shi’ites can go at each other in a full-blown civil war, complete with Srebrenica style massacres.

Ponder that: Mr. Klein doesn’t think it important for us to defeat al-Qa’eda. If we don’t leave behind a peaceful, stable Iraq, we will have failed. And since peace and stability will be hard to achieve, we should pull out and let the “Srebrenica style massacres” commence instanter.

Not long ago, the Left was sneering at President Bush’s desire to bring democracy to Iraq. Now it complains that he is only defeating our enemies, not building a utopia in Mesopotamia.

The constant for leftists is, George W. Bush must lose, no matter what the cost. Put another way, they would destroy America in order to save it.

How Long Will the Medical Profession Ignore BDS?

Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent each year on searching for a cure for Alzheimer’s Disease, an illness particularly feared because it saps the mental faculties. Yet what of the mind-destroying Bush Derangement Syndrome? So far, there’s not so much as a line item in the HHS budget.

Yet the effects of this plague are obvious and frightening. Keith Olbermann is a highly visible sufferer, but far from the only one.

Sometimes, though, one can’t help laughing. Yes, it’s repugnant to mock the afflicted, but (verbatim from the Bush-loathing Guardian) –

The report criticises the Bush administration’s approval of practices which would be illegal if carried out by British agents. It shows that in 1998, the year Bin Laden was indicted in the US, Britain insisted that the policy of treating prisoners humanely should include him. But the CIA never gave the assurances.

Islamic Establishmentarianism

The arrest of a Pace University student for two felony-level “hate crimes”, namely, flushing two copies of the Koran down toilets, calls for one obvious comment: When was the last time that anybody was prosecuted in the United States for desecrating a Bible? And if a hick town in Arkansas did bring such charges, how long would it be before it, quite rightly, became a laughing stock? To the bien-pensants, it is barely acceptable to object to taxpayer subsidies for anti-Christian blasphemy; criminalizing it stands not within the prospect of belief.

But blaspheming Islam is different. According to news reports, the arrest came after college authorities were “accused by Muslim students of not taking the incident seriously enough”. That isn’t, of course, the way that non-Moslem Americans are expected to react to outrages considerably worse than waterlogged paper. We are supposed to ask, “Why do they hate us?” and to ponder seriously every indignity that “we” – meaning all of Western civilization – have inflicted on the dar al-Islām. But if a Brooklynite with a Slavic surname acts boorishly, who suggests that Moslems consider whether the conduct of some of their coreligionists played a part in stoking his feelings? If Stanislav Shmulevich committed a hate crime, why did he hate?

Any civilized man recoils from crude behavior toward the symbols of any religion, but our legal system long ago decided that enduring crudity is better than giving the police a mandate to punish intrinsically religious offenses. The principal effect of this stance is to protect small religious minorities, such a Moslems, from persecution for offending adherents of more numerous faiths. It is only reasonable that the beneficiaries of that policy abide by it themselves.

That is particularly the case here. While the accounts that I’ve seen haven’t been specific, it is very likely that the maltreated volumes were not Korans in the proper sense, but English translations of the Koran. It is an elementary point of Islamic theology that the Koran exists only in Arabic, the language in which, according to Moslem belief, it resides in Heaven. Translations are just ordinary books. The Moslems who browbeat Pace University into having Mr. Shmulevich arrested were therefore seeking to punish him not even for actual blasphemy but for acting in a way that showed disapproval of Islam. In a practical sense, what they demanded is that Islam be given the status of an established church, dissent from which is a crime.

In many Moslem-ruled domains, it is illegal to criticize the teachings of Mohammed. Is America headed in the same direction? If soaking the Koran in water is illegal today, will disagreeing with it be a felony next year?

A Roomful of Sadats

One question asked in last week’s “YouTube Debate” has become famous, at least for the metaphorical 15 minutes. It’s famous mostly for Barack Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s mildly divergent answers, but I’d like to look more closely at what was asked and what no one said in reply:

QUESTION: In 1982, Anwar Sadat traveled to Israel, a trip that resulted in a peace agreement that has lasted ever since.

In the spirit of that type of bold leadership, would you be willing to meet separately, without precondition, during the first year of your administration, in Washington or anywhere else, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea, in order to bridge the gap that divides our countries?

The date is wrong: by 1982 Anwar Sadat was dead. His diplomatic demarche came five years earlier. The mistake is superficially trivial, but it’s odd that it slipped by the questioner, the CNN staff and every candidate who answered, for the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel was the proudest foreign policy achievement of Jimmy Carter’s otherwise bleak Presidency, and he was defeated for reelection in 1980, to be succeeded by the thoroughly opposite Ronald Reagan. That a roomful of Democratic liberals would forget that is as strange as a Daughter of the American Revolution putting Valley Forge in 1876. It suggests either amnesia or indifference; history is just all those dull facts about the past, trivial next to lovely visions of Universal Health Care and Peace Through Endless Talk.

More significant than when Sadat visited Israel is the other piece of forgotten context: why his peacemaking effort succeeded. It was because he yielded to Israel’s fundamental demand: recognition of the Jewish state and renunciation of war against it. Without that concession, no amount of “diplomacy” would have made any difference. With it, details about boundary lines and troop withdrawal schedules fell into place.

The YouTube questioner, by casting a Democratic President in the role of Anwar Sadat, implicitly calls for a similar path to peace: giving in to “the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea” on the issues that they regard as creating “the gap that divides our countries”. From the questioner’s tone and phrasing, it isn’t hard to infer that, in his opinion, “bold leadership” means acquiescence in their key demands.

If any of the Democrats disagreed, he (and she) didn’t say so. None made what ought to have been the obvious retort: “If Mahmoud Ahmadinejad travels to Washington to offer to halt his nuclear weapons program, release his hostages and stop arming terrorists, I will drop everything to negotiate with him. But I have no concessions to offer to the Iranian quest for regional dominance and the destruction of Israel.”

In our conflict with the tyrants of the world, the President of the United States should be in the position of Menachem Begin, not Anwar Sadat. I doubt there was a Begin on the platform last Monday night.

A Dagger in the Wind

(Regular readers of James Taranto will understand the title of this post.)

Senator Charles Schumer (D–N.Y.) told the left-wing American Constitution Society yesterday that he doesn’t see eye to eye with Justices Roberts and Alito. Since he voted against both of their confirmations, that falls into the mosquito-bites-man category. His complaint was also what one expects in these days when the Left increasingly sees the wisdom of Plessy v. Ferguson: The Roberts Court isn’t sufficiently respectful of precedent, particularly precedents upholding various forms of racial discrimination.

That’s an argument for another day. What was interesting in the speech was the Senator’s declaration that the Senate should refuse to confirm any further Bush appointees to the Supreme Court “except in extraordinary circumstances. . . . We cannot afford to see Justice Stevens replaced by another Roberts, or Justice Ginsburg by another Alito.”

That sort of bluntness is odd, a seemingly unnecessary provocation that can do nothing but rally and unify Republicans – particularly those who have forgotten that there are policy issues beyond immigration.

If, say, John Kerry had spoken thus, I would dismiss it as blather, but Senator Schumer has a reputation as a keen political strategist. Hence, I can’t help but think that he expects President Bush to have one or two more opportunities to make appointments before he leaves office, and that expectation may be founded on more than just the age and health of the two Justices whom he named. We may be hearing the first trumpet blast of a leftist campaign to keep as many vacancies open as possible for another President Clinton.

YouTube, Hillary and the Dow

Monday night the Democratic Presidential candidates held their “YouTube debate”. Tuesday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by over 200 points. Through Friday, it had lost 678, nearly a five percent decline in just four trading days.

Somebody actually suggested on Larry Kudlow’s show that the debate had a connection with the plunge. My, and I gather Mr. Kudlow’s, first thought was, post hoc, ergo propter hoc on stilts with a pogo stick. On second thought, I wonder. . . .

It’s not as if the economic news has been outstandingly bad. The Kudlow case for optimism runs thus:

Corporate profits are the mother’s milk of stocks and the economy. They are also the ultimate backstop and guarantor of the quality of credit.

Amidst this panicked obsession about market downgrades of corporate and housing debt, the fact is that with 50 percent of the S&P 500 companies reporting (as of the close of business last evening), market cap-weighted profits are up 15.3 percent.

That is roughly three times the consensus expectation for the second quarter. [italics in original]

Meanwhile, positive earnings surprises are virtually identical to those in the first quarter, while negative surprises are almost 6 full percentage points less than the first quarter. . . .

Not only are stocks relatively cheap in relation to stronger-than-expected profits, but the decline in the Treasury bond rate that is used to discount the present value of future earnings makes stocks even cheaper still.

More Kudlow.

Okay, he tends to be a cheerleader, but the less excitable Vanguard Economic Week in Review painted far from a grim picture in today’s report:

Stocks sink despite signs of favorable economic growth

A bifurcated economy was on display last week. On one hand, a first look at second-quarter real gross domestic product (GDP) showed solid growth despite a housing-market slump, durable-goods orders were up, and a Federal Reserve survey painted a picture of modest expansion. On the other hand, the financial markets were under severe strain.

The “severe strain” is the miserable performance of the bond market: not a great development, but not a frightening one either. One skill that the Fed has learned over the years is how to do is head off a credit crisis.

Now let’s look at politics.

The journalistic consensus is that Hillary Rodham Clinton towered above her opponents on Monday. Certainly John Edwards continued to float on a cushion of hot air, only his massive coiffure preventing him from floating to the ceiling, while Barack Obama had what may prove to be a “Poland is free” moment. How many Americans this side of the Krazy Kos Kids think it’s the job of the leader to Free World to beg for summit meetings with all the world’s unappetizing tyrants? (A pity he wasn’t asked about whether he’d like to schmooze with Robert Mugabe.) Senator Clinton’s answer wasn’t substantively a lot better – her childlike faith in the magic of diplomacy is on a par with belief in Santa Claus – but it looked wise and states(wo)manlike next to her chief rival’s.

So let’s suppose you’re an investor, come Tuesday morning, pondering where in the world to put your money. If Hillary Clinton looks more firmly like the Democratic nominee, and if nothing has recently happened to make her party less of a favorite to win the White House and Congress next year, how does that affect your evaluation of the United States?

And does it help that the Democrats in Congress seem too sunk in the quagmire of Bush Derangement Syndrome to pay attention to elementary matters of national security? The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is in urgent need of revamping so that intelligence agencies can, among other things, eavesdrop on foreign terrorists talking to other foreign terrorists.

A wiretap today doesn’t mean the FBI must install a bug on Abdul Terrorist’s phone in Peshawar. Information now follows the path of least resistance, wherever that may lead. And because the U.S. has among the world’s most efficient networks, hundreds of millions of foreign calls are routed through the U.S.

That’s right: If an al Qaeda operative in Quetta calls a fellow jihadi in Peshawar, that call may well travel through a U.S. network. This ought to be a big U.S. advantage in our “asymmetrical” conflict with terrorists. But it also means that, for the purposes of FISA, a foreign call that is routed through U.S. networks becomes a domestic call. So thanks to the obligation to abide by an outdated FISA statute, U.S. intelligence is now struggling even to tap the communications of foreign-based terrorists. If this makes you furious, it gets worse.

Our understanding is that some FISA judges have been open to expediting warrants, as well as granting retroactive approval. But there are 11 judges in the FISA rotation, and some of them have been demanding that intelligence officials get permission in advance for wiretaps. This means missed opportunities and less effective intelligence. And it shows once again why the decisions of unaccountable judges shouldn’t be allowed to supplant those of an elected Commander in Chief.

When the program began, certain U.S. telecom companies also cooperated with the National Security Agency. But they were sued once the program was exposed [by the Al-Qa’eda Espionage Network, a/k/a the New York Times], and so some have ceased cooperating for fear of damaging liability claims. We found all of this hard to believe when we first heard it, but we’ve since confirmed the details with other high-level sources.

Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell more or less admitted the problem last week, albeit obliquely, when he told the Senate that “we’re actually missing a significant portion of what we should be getting.” That’s understating things. Our sources say the surveillance program is now at most one-third as effective as it once was.

In the face of this deterioration in our intelligence gathering capabilities, which could well lead to the murder of thousands of Americans, Senate Democrats spent the week winkling perjury accusations out of the attorney-general’s testimony about internal Administration deliberations on how anti-terrorism programs ought to be structured. Meanwhile, after long stalling, they devote minimal energy to FISA reform.

If our investor thinks that Senator Clinton has any qualification for the White House beyond having been the spouse of a lazy, self-indulgent Chief Executive who had the good luck to hold office during an American vacation from history, or that Congressional Democrats will attend to business seriously once George W. Bush is out of the White House and Iraq is just a faraway rumor of genocide, he had an incentive last week to buy U.S. stocks. If he thinks otherwise – well, we don’t have to speculate.

Update (8/5/07): After stalling for months, the Democratic leadership allowed a temporary restoration of surveillance authority to come to a vote. It passed both Houses. The Democratic vote in the Senate was 22–16 against and in the House an overwhelming 181 nays to 41 yeas.

The Restrictionists’ Harvest

During the debate on immigration reform, restrictionists sneered at the idea that imported labor plays any positive role in the American economy. “Jobs Americans Won’t Do” became a mocking by-word.

Well, they won the political debate. The Wall Street Journal [link probably for subscribers only] reports some of the results:

Peak harvest season is approaching in much of the country, and the biggest issue on the minds of many growers isn’t the weather but how in the world they’ll get their crops from the vine or off the tree. Thanks to Congress's immigration failure, farmers nationwide are facing their most serious labor shortage in years.

The problem was bad enough last year that some 20% of American agricultural products were stranded at the farm gate. And it’s looking even worse this year, with estimates of crop losses in California, America’s largest agricultural producer, estimated to hit 30%. This spring, labor shortages forced Michigan growers to leave asparagus rotting in the fields, while farmers in North Carolina lost nearly a third of their cucumber crop last year. They’re growing fewer cukes this summer. In Washington state, the apple harvest begins in mid-August, but growers can’t find the workers they need now to thin the crop so trees don’t set more fruit than they can support; the cherry harvest is taking all the available hands.

The labor shortage is especially acute in “specialty crops” like fruits, nuts and vegetables. They constitute about half of the nation's overall crop value but require about three-quarters of all farm labor. . . .

Migrant workers, often illegal, have picked American crops for decades, crossing the U.S. border during the harvest season and returning home when the work was done. This farm labor system operated almost as its own informal guest-worker program.

But a more heavily fortified southern border and government immigration raids have busted up this efficient North American labor market. . . .

By the way, this turns out to be a good test of the Lou Dobbs theory of labor economics, or the proposition that illegals are “stealing” jobs that Americans would otherwise do. Immigration restrictionists claim that if only illegal labor vanished, U.S. employers would raise wages and Americans would flock to Yuma to pick lettuce.

In the real world, Americans are already employed at other jobs, and growers can only afford to pay so much and stay competitive. So instead the labor shortage is increasing pressure on U.S. growers to move production offshore. According to Tim Chelling of the Western Growers Association, whose 3,000 members in California and Arizona generate half of the nation’s fresh produce, “there’s a quiet exodus going on already, tens of thousands of acres and millions of dollars in economic activity.”

A number of large-scale growers have moved chunks of their operations south of the border to places like Mexicali Valley, Ensenada, Caborca, Guanajuato and Baja. That means the U.S. will be importing more artichokes and other high-value products. If the U.S. can’t import foreign workers to help harvest American farm products, the U.S. will have to import more foreign farm products harvested by foreign workers. Either that, or Americans will pay a lot more for fruits and vegetables as their supply shrinks.

But perhaps Mr. Dobbs and Rep. Tancredo and Mark Krikorian will volunteer to pick artichokes themselves.

Further reading: John Tabin, “Enforcement Is Not Enough”:

The problem is that beefed up enforcement by itself, to the extent that it’s effective, threatens to hamstring an economy with a demonstrably growing demand for labor. From 2002 to 2006, a period of consistently low unemployment, the Migration Policy Institute estimates that 1.8 million new permanent immigrants entered the U.S. annually – about a half million of them illegally. As cases of crops that have gone unpicked following crack-downs on illegal farm workers vividly illustrate, America has a shortage of legal labor. Raising immigration quotas by forty to fifty percent would make enforcement a much easier job; as legal immigrants fill the jobs currently being filled by their illegal counterparts, many of the latter will simply leave on their own.

One Small Step – And None After It

Yuval Levin observes that July 20th is not merely the last day before Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows officially goes on sale:

Today is the 38th anniversary of the American landing on the moon. It is a good day to reflect on the appalling failure of the American space program to build on its successes—or even just to hang on to them. We couldn’t go to the moon today even if we wanted to. To make it possible for us to go to the moon again would require an immense and expensive undertaking, because we have completely lost the chance to build on the immense and expensive undertaking that got us there last time. In fact, President Bush laid out a vision for NASA in 2004 that included plans to return to the moon, and last year NASA announced these plans could come to fruition…by 2020, at a cost of over $100 billion. It is hard to imagine any other example of such technological backsliding.

For future historians (assuming hopefully that they write in languages other than Arabic), this will, I think, be one of the greatest puzzles of Western civilization. Many will undoubtedly see this “backsliding” as symptomatic of a civilization that gained unprecedented wealth and freedom, but lost its character.

There is the consolation that we may serve as a lesson to our descendants. I hope that they’re grateful.

Some Secrets Are Crucial – But Not Our Country’s

An NRO Media Blog reader on the New York Times review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows:

[T]here is more uproar over the Times’ review of this book before its “official” release than over the Times’ constant leaking of US government classified information. Moreover, it is ironic that the Times opted not to “spoil” plot aspects of the book, when they ignore how their leaking of classified information might “spoil” legitimate and valuable programs designed to protect their readership.

Of course, if the NYT readership, such as remains these days, is in accord with the Democratic Party’s views on protecting terrorists from snitches, it doesn’t want to be protected.

Did Michael Moore Get This on Film?

From Great Britain, land of the single payer health care system that so many liberals see as the key to curing all our medical woes comes this report:

A high-flying television producer died from a suspected epileptic fit while waiting for vital brain scans on the NHS [National Health Service]. . . .

The evening before she died, Miss Price, from Notting Hill, west London, had begged a junior A&E doctor for anti-seizure drugs but had been told they could only be prescribed by a neurologist.

Two days earlier she had visited a specialist at Charing Cross hospital and was told she would have to wait six weeks for a brain scan. She had felt “concerned and afraid” at having to wait that length of time for a test before being treated for a recurrence of childhood epilepsy, Westminster coroner’s court heard.

She had not had a seizure for more than 10 years, but after a series of “strange episodes”, including a numb face and flashing lights in her vision, she had visited her GP and was referred to the specialist.

On the night before she died Miss Price entered her flatmate Sarah Jackson’s room in a confused state. . . .

At lunchtime the next day Miss Price was found lying on the floor and an ambulance pronounced her dead at the scene. A post mortem examination concluded it was a sudden unexpected death in epilepsy.

Patients die unexpectedly and unnecessarily here, too, but not because they have to wait for brain scans and anti-seizure medication.

It’s possible to have universal medical care, economical medical care and high quality medical care. What isn’t possible – certainly not from the benevolent hand of a government-run monopoly – is all three at once.

Life Imitates Protest Music

That’s the heading of the lead item of Best of the Web Today, where James Taranto juxtaposes two quotes in a way that ought to be seared into the conscience of every decent American.

Here is the one from the protest song, a 1967 Phil Ochs ballad:

Look outside the window, there's a woman being grabbed
They've dragged her to the bushes and now she's being stabbed
Maybe we should call the cops and try to stop the pain
But Monopoly is so much fun, I'd hate to blow the game
And I'm sure it wouldn't interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends.

And here is the one from life, in today’s Baltimore Sun:

Many acknowledged that Iraq could first plunge into vicious sectarian fighting. . . . Yet they flatly rejected the use of U.S. troops to stop the killing. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s horrendous,” said House Appropriations Committee Chairman David R. Obey, a Wisconsin Democrat who has helped lead the drive against the war. “The only hope for the Iraqis is their own damned government, and there’s slim hope for that.”

And nobody will care what happens to Iraqis, outside of a small circle of friends.

America isn’t omnipotent and can’t stanch all the bloodletting in the world, just as the Monopoly players in the song couldn’t report every crime. But we have 150,000 soldiers in Iraq right now. They have done a great deal to reduce violence in Anbar and Diyala provinces, formerly epicenters of terrorist activity, and in Baghdad itself. Yet Rep. Obey and his fellow doves want to give up and let mass murder proceed.

Do they really hate George W. Bush that much? That they would punish him by executing the people of Iraq?

Addendum: Here is what John Burns, the lead New York Times reporter on the ground in Iraq, has to say about the role of the American military and the likely consequences of the Left’s strategy:

I find this to be very widely agreed amongst Iraqis that I know, of all ethnic and sectarian backgrounds – the United States armed forces are a very important inhibitor against violence. I know it’s argued by some people that they provoke the violence. I simply don’t believe that to be in the main true. I think it’s a much larger truth that where American forces are present, they are inhibiting sectarian violence, and they are going after the people, particularly al-Qaeda and the Shiite death squads, who are provoking that violence. Remove them or at least remove them quickly, and it seems to me . . . that you have to weigh the price. And the price would very likely be very, very high levels of violence, at least in the short run and perhaps, perhaps - perhaps for quite a considerable period of time. . . .

[I]t seems to me incontrovertible that the most likely outcome of an American withdrawal any time soon would be cataclysmic violence. And I find that to be widely agreed amongst Iraqis, including Iraqis who strongly opposed the invasion.

But the editors of the Times don’t listen to their reporters. Or perhaps they, like Rep. Obey, just don’t care.

How Harry Potter Ends: The ONE, TRUE Spoiler

Missing the latest Harry Potter foofooraw isn’t so hard. You just have to be blind, deaf and fluent only in Algonquin. It helps to be dead, too. Brain-dead, though, isn’t good enough: Keith Olbermann has a theory.

Speaking for myself, I’m not terribly interested in either pursuing or avoiding clues to “Who Lives?”, “Who Dies?”, “Who Gets Married?”, “Who’s the Horcrux?”. After all, I’ve read Hamlet dozens of times, knowing on every occasion after the first who are going to wind up stretched on the Elsinore banquet hall floor. It’s my firm conviction that knowing how a good book ends doesn’t “spoil” it all. [And that is why you should sedulously avoid Deathly Hallows spoilers. – Inner Snark] (Ignore the bit in brackets.)

I do have a friend who is desperate for spoilers, because they will shape her decision on when to start reading. Her plan:

• If Severus Snape survives and is a good guy, she plunges in the instant her copy arrives from Amazon.

• If Snape survives and is evil, she waits a week.

• If Snape is good but dies while saving Harry, she waits a year.

• If Lupin dies, she adds two months to any of the above.

• If Snape dies and is evil, she returns the book unopened and demands a refund.

To keep her and a few million others on tenterhooks, Scholastic Press has reportedly spent $20 million on security, which doesn’t seem to be working.

Or is it? I happen to have an unnamed source (the only reliable kind, as we all know) who has revealed the true answers to all of the most asked HP questions:

Does Harry die? Yes.

Does Harry live? Yes.

Is Snape good? Yes.

Is Snape evil? Yes.

Do Harry and Ginny get married? Yes.

Does Harry dump Ginny for Hermione? Yes.

But how can this be, you ask? Is JKR so rich she can buy her way out of the Law of Non-Contradiction?

Not yet. She still has to finish paying off the mortgage on Scotland. And Deathly Hallows will rake in the money to do it.

For the Never Before Disclosed Secret is –

There is more than one book. J. K. Rowling has written multiple versions of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, all of which will be released, without advance warning, Friday at midnight. They are mixed together in the shipments to booksellers. No buyer will know whether she is getting Harry Live or Harry Dead – or even that, Schrödiger’s Cat-like, Harry could be either – until she reads her copy through and starts exchanging IMs.

By about 3:00 a.m. on Saturday, the Evelyn Wood alumnae will have figured out what has happened. Then will ensue the most profitable phase of the Potter Cycle. Every hard core Potterian will be desperate to acquire every single version (except my friend, who will scour eBay for the Good Living Snape one). Debates will rage over which is the true ending. Public pressure will force Congress to put surrender on the back burner while it investigates literary hype. (I hope that we don’t wind up at war with Scotland.)

Having been the first to reveal this covert intelligence, I expect a modest reward in money or glory. Appreciative donations may be directed to my PayPal account, unstinted praise to the Comments.

Update (7/19/07): My Snapophilic friend sends this interesting personal news:

Because of the links you sent me (and links within those articles), I was the first person on the spoiler community to present what I would consider irrefutable proof that the version of Deathly Hallows that showed up on the internet, known as the Carpet Leaks, is genuine.

Included in your information was a link (to a link to a link to) the book review that was printed in the Baltimore Sun. Although the reviewer said she wasn’t going to give out any spoilers, she describes quite well what the Deathly Hallows actually are, and it matches precisely with what is in the Carpet Leaks. There are lots of other little things that sound like it, but that is hard evidence.

And as back-up to the review, the newspaper described how they had gotten a copy of the book, and it matched precisely what Scholastic said in their statement has happened regarding books being sent out early by DeepDiscount.com. [Described first-hand by the VodkaPundit himself in “I Was an eBay Voldemort”]

This means that all the ridiculous stuff I said was in the Epilogue was actually written by JKR as the end of the Harry Potter saga. I cannot say the name Albus Severus Potter without laughing out loud!

Me, too. Happily, young A. S. is present in only one of the Potter alternate universes.

Thrift for Democrats

Here is a government agency that sounds like a good investment of our tax money: “In the past six years, the Office of Labor Management Standards, or OLMS, has helped secure the convictions of 775 corrupt union officials and court-ordered restitution to union members of over $70 million in dues.”

Everybody’s in favor of exposing and rectifying corruption, right? Particularly when the victims are working class Americans? Er, maybe not everybody:

The House is set to vote Thursday on a proposal to chop 20% from the OLMS budget. Every other Labor Department enforcement agency is due for a budget increase, and overall the Congress has added $935 million to the Bush administration's budget request for Labor. The only office the Democrats want to cut back is the one engaged in union oversight.

The Democratic leadership’s proposal to eliminate secret ballots in union organizing elections failed, but this new exercise in pandering to a limited constituency of union bosses has much less visibility and is thus pretty likely to be enacted. Another proud achievement of The Most Ethical Congress Ever™!

Update (7/19/07): As anticipated, the Democrats successfully defended the OLMS budget cut on the floor of the House. As reported by OpinionJournal Political Diary (subscription only, but a mere $3.95/month):

[W]hen GOP Rep. John Kline of Minnesota offered an amendment to restore the $2 million to OLMS’s budget [still less than the Administration’s budget request], he ran into a buzz saw of criticism. After he began reading a list of union officials convicted of corruption, House Appropriations Chairman David Obey interrupted him: “Is that list longer than the number of members of Congress guilty of corruption?” he sneered, no doubt referring to recent GOP corruption scandals involving a handful of members.

In the end, the OLMS budget cuts were retained by a vote of 237 to 186, with only eight Democrats voting for greater oversight of unions. Sixteen Republicans, most of them from Northeastern districts where union retaliation could cost them their seats, sided with Democrats in weakening the one federal agency charged with making sure that the $22 billion in assets held by unions are spent properly on behalf of their members.

It’s quite a contest to see whether the AFL-CIO or CAIR has more clout with Congressional Dems. That ordinary taxpayers, workers and travelers have less has been amply demonstrated.

Europe’s Humane Economy

Vacationing in France, David Frum has penned a pair of interesting and amusing columns. The first is about being a tourist in Paris, where history is abundant but not always well tended. The second makes an important point about political attempts to eliminate “inhumane” liberty from labor markets. Some background:

The minimum wage in France is €8.50. Another €4.25 in payroll tax is applied on top of that wage, for a total minimum cost of hiring of €12.75, or more than [$17.50 an hour].

The law forbids employees to work more than 35 hours per week. Period. No overtime; it’s just flatly forbidden. French law guarantees generous mandatory holidays of up to six weeks. Firing employees is extraordinarily difficult, so you have to assume that anyone you hire will stay hired until he or she tires of the job.

An anecdotal example of the effect of this dirigiste paternalism:

It’s 2:15 on a French afternoon, and I am as usual at this time of day sitting in a café waiting to pay the bill for lunch. And waiting. And waiting. When you hear talk of the slowness of French meals, you may imagine haughty waiters languidly presenting an elegant repast. I am sure that happens too. But as it happens, I am not anywhere elegant. I am sitting in a very unremarkable seafood restaurant by the harbour in Dieppe.

There is nothing languid about the scene here. The patronne is racing about like a demon, taking orders, slapping down plates of fish, planting bottles of wine on the table with a thump.

She has to move fast. There are almost 30 tables in this place, and she has only one assistant. The two of them do everything that must be done in the front room. They clear tables, they bus dishes and, if you look at the mirror at the right angle, you can see them scraping plates and placing them in a dishwashing machine. At the moment when I decide I want a cheque, the assistant is at the back polishing newly washed glasses.

At $17.50 an hour, would you hire a second servitor? Actually, the “assistant” may well be a daughter or sister or daughter-in-law, helping out under a half-illegal arrangement so that the owner can afford to stay in business.

For the larger picture, some facts and figures:

Per hour worked, the French rank among the most productive people on Earth: 7% more productive than Americans, for example. But the devil lies in the phrase “per hour worked.”

Almost 10% of France's work force lacks jobs. France’s economy is not in recession; in fact, it is thriving. High unemployment has become normal here; not since the 1980s has France seen an unemployment rate south of 8%.

And remember, the unemployment concept counts only those persons who seek work. Those who retire early, or who qualify as disabled, or remain in school until age 30 do not count as “unemployed” in the job statistics. Only in life. The truest picture of French society comes from counting those in [the work force]: Altogether, 51% of French adults work, as opposed to 62% of American adults.

And those French who do work do not work very much: While working Americans work an average of more than 1,800 hours per year, working French people put in slightly more than 1,500. . . .

Can France afford to keep missing economic opportunities? The gross domestic product of the 60 million people of France now roughly equals that earned by the 35 million people of California (using purchasing power parity valuations for the dollar and the euro). Over time, little differences compound into big ones. The Democratic economist Robert Shapiro calculates that, if present trends persist, the average European will see his standard of living decline to about half that of the average American by 2025.

But perhaps other Democrats will save Europe’s face. Congress has already raised the minimum wage. Once it has secured American defeat in Iraq, it can turn its full attention to promoting economic stagnation.

The Aesthetics of the Best Fan Writer Hugo

Browsing responses (mostly on John Scalzi’s Whatever) to the two posts directly below, I’m struck by a few themes that pop up over and over in the negative ones (that is, in most of them). First is that it is insulting to the nominee and his nominators to state bluntly that I don’t think his fan writing is up to Hugo Award standards. Second, that my criticism must have an unstated motive: snobbery, sour grapes, belief that the nominee isn’t or ought not to be eligible, a desire to keep pros away from the “fan” categories, political animus, etc. Third, that, because the choice of Best Fan Writer is a “popularity contest”, there’s no point in arguing about the quality of the nominated bodies of work.

Aren’t those reactions a little odd? If the discussion turned to the Best Novel nominees, everybody would be talking about plot, characterization, style, imagination and the like. No one would suggest that preferring X to Y, or even asserting that Z is wretched, violated protocol. In fact, we’d all find it bland and unsatisfying if the interlocutors avoided ranking the candidates and incinerating those that they found badly wanting.

There must be a reason why so many people feel that the Best Fan Writer category is different. What that reason is, I can’t begin to fathom.

The Langford Streak, etc.

My post on John Scalzi’s Best Fan Writer Hugo nomination drew a number of comments on his blog. Several of the commenters’ points are worthy of counter-comment. For convenience, I’ll put them into the form of questions to myself.

Do you really think David Langford has deserved to win the Best Fan Writer Hugo umpteen years in a row?

In a narrow sense, obviously not. My first place vote has gone to one of the other candidates in most of those years. By that criterion, of course, I don’t think that most winners in most categories have been “deserving”, since I’ve voted for far more losers than winners.

In a broader sense, the victories have certainly been deserved, as Mr. Langford has kept up a very fast pace of very high quality fannish writing. By the same token, I’d say that Spin was a deserving Best Novel winner last year even though I put Learning the World and Old Man’s War above it on my ballot.

Okay, but doesn’t the Langford winning streak show that the Best Fan Writer category is in need of repair?

It may be evidence that generalized Best Something categories – not just Best Fan Writer but also its counterparts for artists, editors and zines – have their drawbacks. Best Fan Writer is hardly the only one that has seen long runs of the same winner. Think about Locus, Michael Whelan, Bob Eggleton, Gardner Dozois. Streaks are unsurprising in categories like these, because voters’ perceptions of the overall quality of a writer, artist or publication don’t change dramatically from year to year. Readers who thought David Langford was terrific in 1987, when he won the first of his consecutive Hugos (after one win in seven prior nominations), probably didn’t have a markedly different opinion of his talents in 1988 or 1998 or 2006.

But there isn’t any new blood in the Fan Writer category!

Looking at this year’s nominees other than Langford and Scalzi, Steven Silver could be taken as evidence of a lack of turnover; he’s been nominated every year [correction: except one] since 2000. On the other hand, John Hertz’s first nomination was in 2006, and this is Chris Garcia’s debut appearance.

Aren’t negative reactions to the Scalzi nomination a sign that fans like you haven’t come to grips with publishing on the Web?

Actually, David Langford was one of the first fan writers to take advantage of the new era. He started distributing Ansible electronically before John Scalzi was out of high school. Similarly, Cheryl Morgan, who came within a handful of votes of toppling Langford in 2004 and 2006, gained much of her following thanks to the Web version of Emerald City.

The question turns the facts on their head. The main reason why John Hertz waited so long to get a nomination was that he’s a traditional ink-and-paper faned who doesn’t have a Web presence. Such promotion as he gets in the e-world comes from people like me who enjoy his work.

The notion that Fan Writer nominators and voters have a bias in favor of purple fingers and twilltone is quite fantastical. If anything, writers who stick to old-fashioned fanzines are the ones who are handicapped.

But what about all the great blog writing that doesn’t get due recognition?

The charm of blogs is that they’re spontaneous, off-handed, unrevised – zeroth drafts of history. Those virtues impose natural limits on their literary quality. Writing is a craft. Encapsulating an idea in just the right way, using just the right words, saying neither too little nor too much requires labor. Except for a handful of crypto-essayists, nobody’s blog posts are as good as his worked-over product. Hence, it would be extremely surprising if the best blogs were as good as the best zines; only slightly less so for the best blog writer to be up to the level of the fifth best zine writer.

One last question: Isn’t your saying that, if you were John Scalzi (not a likely happenstance), you would decline the nomination an insult to him and all of his nominators?

No. I disagree with his and their judgement. If there’s anything wrong with saying so, reasoned discourse is at an end.

Hugo Kerfuffles

There’s nothing usual about controversies involving the Hugo Awards. Various past years have seen accusations of vote fraud, quarrels over nominees’ eligibility and outrage at administrators’ shifting (or declining to shift) works from one category to another. This year, though, we are especially “blessed”, with no fewer than three contretemps, described at length by Mike Glyer in the latest issue of File 770 (pp. 15ff.). Mike’s observations strike me as quite sensible, but of course I’d like to add a few comments of my own.

First, and least substantive, are laments that the Hugo ballot includes nothing from Japan, where this year’s Worldcon is being held.

Fans have braced for the unexpected – after all, a Worldcon takes on a whole different spin when it only goes as far as Glasgow, so who can predict the shape of things to come in Yokohama? As it’s happened, one thing nobody was prepared for was a 2007 Hugo ballot that looks exactly like what might have come out of Boston, Chicago or Los Angeles. The 2007 Hugo nomination results are so contrary to what people hoped for from a Japanese Worldcon, and so contradict their experience of non-U.S. Worldcons (see, for example, how the 2005 Hugo ballot was dominated by U.K. writers), people leap to the conclusion an injustice has been done to Japanese fans.

Well, I for one was not even mildly surprised that no Japanese works made the cut. Japan has its own, highly prestigious awards, the Seiun (which means “Nebula” but is conferred by popular vote, like the Hugo). What additional cachet would a local novel or story gain from a Hugo nomination, particularly when the chances of actually winning are nil? The potential electorate is weighted two-to-one in favor of Anglophones (2,211 Westerners against 1,104 Japanese as of June 24, 2007). The proportion would, under any likely circumstances, be even more heavily in favor of English speakers among actual voters, since there is a core of three or four hundred Western fans who take part every year, while Japanese participation must begin from scratch. It’s not too likely that the majority will vote for stories that they can’t read, so a Japanese candidate would have not much better a chance than Bill Richardson or Tommy Thompson. (I won’t risk another Pearl Harbor by making a comparison to Ron Paul.)

As Mike also notes, there’s not a sliver of evidence that Japanese fans are offended by being “shut out”. Indeed, it’s likely that they view the Hugo as an English language award – not implausibly in light of the fact that no non-English work has ever been nominated in a literary category.

Next come complaints from a group that does make its displeasure known, namely, feminists who decry with horror the fact that 19 of this year’s 20 fiction nominees were written by – gasp – males.

Given the number of Hugos garnered by Connie Willis and Lois McMaster Bujold, and the fact that one quarter of the fiction winners since 2000 have been women (about in line with the proportion of eligible works that women write), it’s far-fetched to see this year’s drought as evidence of anti-female prejudice among the nominators. But, of course, “feminist paranoia” is a redundancy.

The third controversy is the noisiest, and, given the way that the noise flows, I am perhaps jeopardizing my peace of mind by writing about it. Mike has plunged in bravely:

This year I have a complaint of my own. I confess I felt let down when I saw SFWA presidential candidate [John] Scalzi nominated for Best Fanwriter. Scalzi seems to have convinced enough voters that [David] Langford’s winning streak is a malady and he is the cure.

The day after the ballot came out, I looked online to see what other fans felt about this development. Poor Ulrika O’Brien had asked the question that dozens of others had on their minds: Regardless of Scalzi’s ability as a pro writer, what fanwriting had he been doing? Anyone might have answered, “He discusses sf on his website. That makes him eligible.” Instead, a firestorm poured down. Who are you, they flamed, to exclude him? She was attacked for the crime of asking the question. The response was so swift and terrible that Ulrika retracted her comment only three hours after posting it.

Much of this disputation, including a portion of Mike’s, has centered on whether it is fitting and proper for a professional writer to win the award for Best Fan Writer, with the subordinate question of whether it’s outrageous that David Langford has been winning since the Late Pleistocene.

Since the award is for Best Fan Writer, surely it doesn’t matter what else a nominee does when he isn’t writing fannishly. In David Langford’s case, he makes his living by writing professionally, mostly SF-related nonfiction (e. g., a book about Harry Potter, Discworld quiz books and magazine columns). Among this year’s other Fan Writer nominees, John Hertz is a lawyer, Steven Silver is a technical writer (and occasional SF editor), and I don’t know Chris Garcia’s occupation. All of which not only should make no difference but in the past hasn’t. Mr. Langford’s domination of the category patently isn’t due to his modest body of fiction, even if he did once win a Short Story Hugo.

By contrast, Mr. Scalzi’s nomination owes everything, so far as I can see, to his popularity as a novelist. He does indeed have a Web site, where he occasionally writes about science fiction other than his own, but, except for intense Scalzi fans, there’s nothing special about it. It offers the mix of day-to-day trivia, dogmatic opinionizing (largely Angry Left politics) and writerly self-promotion (an entirely legitimate use of the pixels) that one can find in plenty of other places on the Web. Read it side-by-side with Mr. Langford’s site, and – well, think of Mozart versus Madonna. To put it another way, if Old Man’s War were on a level with most of Mr. Scalzi’s posts, it would still be in the slush pile.

As to why there has been such a long string of Langford victories, reading what he writes will explain that, too, although, as Mike points out, the margins have often not been crushing – eight votes in 2006 and 11 in 2004, f’instance. There are plenty of first rate writers in fandom, more accessible than ever before thanks to sites like eFanzines. Eventually one of the up-and-comers will knock off the champ. If I were John Scalzi, I would acknowledge that this isn’t my territory and politely withdraw.

Further reading: Works by other Best Fan Writer nominees: Chris Garcia, John Hertz, Steven Silver

Addendum: John Scalzi has posted a response to Mike’s comments. It’s fine as far as it goes but rather misses the point. Neither Mike Glyer nor I nor anybody else thinks that (i) professional writers have no moral right to compete for the Best Fan Writer Hugo or (ii) blogs aren’t a proper medium for fan writing. What we both do think is that fan writing should be the only basis for a voter’s judgement and that, given the middling quality of Mr. Scalzi’s blog, it is hard not to suspect that extraneous factors led to his nomination, whether he personally wanted them to or not.

The debate continues. . . .

Quote of the Day

Found in the course of reading Richard Pipes’ Russian Conservatism and Its Critics: A Study in Political Culture (2006), this passage written in 1802 by Mikhail Speransky, Emperor Alexander I’s leading adviser during the monarch’s “liberal” phase:

What a contradiction: to desire sciences, commerce and industry and to thwart their most natural consequences; to wish the mind to be free and the will to be in shackles; to desire feelings to progress and change, and their object – the yearning for freedom – to stay put; for the nation to wax prosperous and yet not to enjoy the finest fruits of its wealth – liberty. History knows no instance of an enlightened and commercial nation remaining enslaved for long.

Two centuries later, it still doesn’t, which might be a lesson to the contemporary rulers of Russia and China who are repeating the Tsardom’s experiment.

Watch Your Back!

John J. Miller notes that the narrative of The Puppet Masters, Robert A. Heinlein’s nearest approach to a horror novel, begins on July 12, 2007. I read the book as a teenager, missing all its potential political implications but taking away a habit, with me to this day, of occasionally patting my back to make sure that no slugs are attached.

A small budget 1994 movie, reportedly even more dismal than the travesty of Starship Troopers, was made from the book, or at least swiped its title. I’m surprised that a big studio didn’t try to do it right years earlier. After all, how often does the plot provide a good reason to display dozens of starlets in halter tops?

But maybe a flick in which hidden enemies are opposed by a super-secret government agency that finds it essential to strip away (pun intended) civil liberties isn’t what Hollywood is looking for these days – especially not when it ends with mankind taking the war to the mufsidun aliens.

The “Sophisters and Calculators” Revisit Popular Rule

Bryan Caplan’s much noticed The Myth of the Rational Voter advances an argument that strikes me as being as self-evident as Original Sin:

This book has three themes. The first: Doubts about the rationality of voters are empirically justified. The second: Voter irrationality is precisely what economic theory implies once we adopt introspectively plausible assumptions about human motivation. The third: Voter irrationality is the key to a realistic picture of democracy. [p. 3]

Professor Caplan is, as he is quick to note, far from the first economist to present an hypothesis of this kind, though he is a pioneer in attempting to verify it empirically. The argument is pretty straightforward: Becoming well-informed about public affairs takes time, application and, to some extent, money. Yet an individual voter in a democracy receives a meager return on this investment, because his vote is lost among thousands or millions. “Why study the issues if you can’t change the outcome? I generalize this insight: Why control your knee-jerk emotional and ideological reactions if you can’t change the outcome?” [p. 2] One might say that voters are irrational (in politics) because they are rational (in the allocation of their limited resources).

We don’t need the book’s survey data to see the force of this proposition. The amount of public policy ignorance that one encounters among friends, neighbors, business associates and relatives is impressive. If the reader takes an informal poll among acquaintances whom he doesn’t know to be staunch conservatives or libertarians, he will be amazed at how many disbelieve the law of supply and demand and are utterly flummoxed by marginal analysis. In other words, their grasp of economics hasn’t gotten as far as the first two weeks of a college course. It’s no surprise that, as Professor Caplan documents, the doctrine of comparative advantage has no palpable influence on the general public’s opinions regarding tariffs and free trade.

Such considerations are the ancient core of the cases for monarchy and aristocracy as superior forms of government. If the polity has relatively few decision makers, and the culture instills in them the idea that public affairs are the true business of their lives, and wealth gives them a strong interest in good government, the return on investing in knowledge increases, while the relative psychological satisfaction from “knee-jerk emotional and ideological reactions” diminishes.

But, as John Adams observed, a country can have the advantages of aristocratic government without the disadvantages of a formal aristocracy. He contended, in fact, that aristocrats spring up naturally in a republic.

By aristocracy, I understand all those men who can command, influence, or procure more than an average of votes; by an aristocrat every man who can and will influence one man to vote besides himself. Few men will deny that there is a natural aristocracy of virtues and talents in every nation and in every party, in every city and village. . . .

Pick up the first hundred men you meet, and make a republic. Every man will have an equal vote; but when deliberations and discussions are opened, it will be found that twenty-five, by their talents, virtues being equal, will be able to carry fifty votes. Every one of these twenty-five is an aristocrat in my sense of the word; whether he obtains one vote in addition to his own, by his birth, fortune, figure, science, learning, craft, cunning, or even his character for good fellowship, and a bon vivant. . . .

You seem to think aristocracy consists altogether in artificial titles, tinsel decorations of stars, garters, ribbons, golden eagles and golden fleeces, crosses and roses and lilies, exclusive privileges, hereditary descents, established by kings or by positive laws of society. No such thing! [quoted in Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind from Burke to Santayana, p. 83 (1953)]

Instead of assigning a ruling position to one or a few men, our republic lets those who most care about their country’s fate form what is best termed a “political class”. The Constitution of the United States, with its checks, balances and many forms of indirect democracy, is well suited to giving this class the commanding role that kings or hereditary nobles enjoyed in Ancien Regime Europe.

The proof that the political class mediates between the “irrational” electorate and governmental decisions is that the latter do not closely follow the prejudices of the former. A reviewer in the Wall Street Journal raises these points:

Survey data do indeed show that Americans hold some irrational views. But nowhere in The Myth of the Rational Voter does Mr. Caplan demonstrate that dumb voter bias triggers bad public policy.

Take free trade. Mr. Caplan reports that support for free trade hit bottom in 1977, when only 18% of Americans favored eliminating tariffs. Yet three years later, Ronald Reagan campaigned on a platform of free trade and proceeded to sign historic free-trade agreements with Canada and laid the groundwork for free trade with Mexico. Later administrations have fought to grant China most-favored nation trading status. True, there has been a lot of populist noise against free trade, but for decades not a single presidential nominee from either party has run for office while waving the protectionist flag.

Mr. Caplan also claims that voters revile a corporation that downsizes at home and sends jobs abroad, a business decision that most economists view as socially productive. Yet to the chagrin of Lou Dobbs, CNN’s ultra-populist, there has been no serious proposal to stop such downsizing or to punish the companies who outsource their labor. Voter bias has fueled some foolish national debate in recent years but imposed very little foolish national policy.

Hashing out issues within a diffuse, fuzzily bounded, self-selected elite can be messy, but it has its benefits. An important one is that influence within the political class is largely the reward of merit. Ideologues and cranks tend to drift to the margins, and would-be demagogues get little purchase. As Fisher Ames, one of John Adams’ intellectual heirs, foresaw in 1795,

A monarchy is a merchantman which sails well, but will sometimes strike on a rock, and go to the bottom; a republic is a raft which will never sink, but then your feet are always in the water.

So far, the American raft has sunk only once. In the years before the Civil War, the political class of the Southern States became irrationally certain that Yankee politicians could and would abolish slavery if the South remained part of the Union. In retrospect, that belief was so misguided as to be comical, had the upshot not been our country’s greatest tragedy. “Emotional and ideological reactions” blinded the region’s natural aristocrats to the fact that anti-slavery sentiment would have to multiply many-fold before it could pose even a mild threat to the “peculiar institution”. Perhaps the strain of reconciling Christian faith with a particularly brutal form of human bondage unsettled the slaveholders’ intellects (cf. Eugene Genovese, A Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South (1998)). Perhaps there is some other explanation.

The crisis of the Civil War was the one great exception to the normal course of American history. The exception proves, however, that an Adams-style aristocracy is not immune to fatal passions. It also proves that irrationality need not be universal among the politocrats before it leads to dire consequences. In 1860, the political class had plenty of moderates in both the North and the South: A change of not too many votes in a few secession conventions would have rendered the Confederate enterprise obviously unworkable, and many in the North shared the sentiment of Horace Greeley (a long-time crusader against slavery but at first oblivious to President Lincoln’s reasons for preserving the Union), “Let the erring sisters depart in peace.” Moderation proved to be helpless.

And having said that, I leave you all to contemplate the spread of Bush Derangement Syndrome and its epiphenomena. I doubt that the First Confederate Congress hated Abraham Lincoln as purely and fervently as the consensus of left-of-center opinion makers hates George W. Bush. We shall see whether the raft founders a second time.

Who Are the Imperialists Now?

One of the accusations against neoconservatives, you may recall, is that they “imperialistically” try to impose their own ideas of proper governance on other countries, trampling on the rich cultural heritages of despotism. It was thus a crime and a blunder to “force” Iraqis to practice democratic politics instead of leaving Uncle Saddam, with his mass murders, gulags and gang-raping sons, in charge.

Well, now Saddam has swung unlamented from the end of a rope. (Don’t the predictions that he would be hailed as martyr throughout the dar al-Islām have a quaint ring?) Iraq has held three democratic elections. Al-Qa’eda, ever alert to the menace of what its former Iraqi honcho called “the evil principle of democracy”, has declared the country to be the “central front” in its war against Western civilization. The American military, after back-and-forthing on how to deal with an unfamiliar conflict, has learned how to drive the mufsidun from what used to be their strongest enclaves. Murders of civilians appear to be on a downward trend, despite the occasional spectacular atrocity. Anti-American blowhard Muqtada al-Sadr has scrammed back to the safety of Iran.

All this makes the old “we’ve lost the war” shibboleth less persuasive, however loudly and mindlessly the Left keeps repeating. So what is the new excuse for an American withdrawal, a course of action that even the New York Times has a high likelihood of leading to “further ethnic cleansing, even genocide”? The answer, as brought to us by the Associated Press: The Iraqi government isn’t moving rapidly enough to meet American “benchmarks” for what it ought to do. It hasn’t yet, for instance, agreed to the plan written in Washington for divvying up oil reserves among the Shiites, Sunni and Kurds.

Might I suggest that we take a non-imperialistic deep breath? Instituting good government into a region where it has scarcely ever existed is bound to be a slow task, and damping political violence – the reason behind the surge – will make it easier. Railing that the wogs aren’t good enough to deserve our beneficence, because they won’t instantly fall in line behind our ideas, is a good way to bring about an otherwise evitable disaster.

Colin Powell on the Plame Kerfuffle

OpinionJournal Political Diary (only $3.95 a month cheap) reports on what I believe is the former Secretary of State’s first public statement about the inquisition into the “outing” of glamorous super-spy Valerie Plame Wilson. It came after Karl Rove gave a talk about the pseudo-scandal to a mostly leftish crowd at an event called the “Aspen Ideas Festival”. (My idea for Aspen: hot rum toddy stands at the bottom of the slopes.)

At that point, Colin Powell, who was in the audience, stood up to provide his own version of the Plame affair. He agreed that no crime had been committed in revealing Ms. Plame’s name and that Mr. Libby “got in trouble for an entirely different set of circumstances.” Mr. Powell also expressed frustration with how the government’s investigation had dragged on. “The FBI knew on Day 1 of Mr. Armitage’s involvement, yet for two months after that the FBI kept investigating,” he told the Aspen audience. “They kept investigating to see who else might be involved and when they finished their investigation – they couldn’t finish it. Therefore, a special counsel was brought in, Mr. Patrick Fitzgerald, who spent another two years on it.... I think this [would have better] ended early on and not dragged out the way it has been.” [ellipses and brackets OpinionJournal’s]

No doubt the Krazy Kos Kids will now start thinking that General Powell is just another minion of the Demonic Cheney Conspiracy.

Mother Moonbat for Congress!

It’s only comic relief, of course, but Cindy Sheehan, a charter member of the Jew-hating Left, has announced that she is eyeing Nancy Pelosi’s seat in Congress:

Sheehan said she will run against the San Francisco Democrat in 2008 as an independent if Pelosi does not seek by July 23 to impeach Bush. . . .

Sheehan announced in late May that she was leaving the anti-war movement. She said that she felt her efforts had been in vain and that she had endured smear tactics and hatred from the left, as well as the right. She said she wanted to change course. . . .

Sheehan, who has never held political office, recently said that she was leaving the Democratic Party because it “caved” in to the president. Last week, she announced her caravan to Washington, an undertaking she calls the “people’s accountability movement.”

“I didn’t expect to be back so soon, but the focus is different than it was before,” Sheehan said Sunday. “Instead of talking and making accusations, we’re going into communities and talking to the people who’ve been hurt by the Bush regime. We’re finding out how we can help people.”

Sheehan, who will turn 50 on Tuesday, said Bush should be impeached because she believes he misled the public about the reasons for going to war, violated the Geneva Convention by torturing detainees, and crossed the line by commuting the prison sentence of former vice presidential aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. She said other grounds for impeachment are the domestic spying program and the “inadequate and tragic” response to Hurricane Katrina. [So much for not “talking and making accusations”.]

Speaker Pelosi, being a fool but not an idiot, won’t be introducing any articles of impeachment, so the Sheehan challenge will go forward. I trust that the Speaker will find this close encounter with her party’s hard core base of support enlightening. She probably won’t learn as much as Joe Lieberman did, but one can always hope.

Further reading: Jules Crittenden, “Sometimes Life Can Look So Bleak”

When Ents Go Bad

The Manchester Union-Leader reports that a tree held up a New Hampshire bank and “escaped with an undisclosed amount of cash”. The “police say there is no undue cause for alarm”, which means, by inference, that there is due cause for alarm.

Chicago is thick with trees. Gaze toward the city center from one of the suburban hotels, and the scene is skyscrapers poking above the roof of a forest. I certainly hope that the Mayor Daley’s finest are on the alert for arboreal crime.

What Robert Heinlein Got Wrong

Today the blogosphere will resound with praises of Robert A. Heinlein on the 100th anniversary of his birth (7/7/07 – did he plan it that way?). Though I adore Mr. Heinlein’s writings this side of idolatry, my additions to the general acclaim could only be otiose. For those who want to read a great deal more about the Master, let me recommend Heinlein’s Children by Joseph T. Major, a study of his “juvenile” novels. “Juvenile” belongs in quotes; the books fall into that category only because their heroes and heroines are young and stay out of each other’s beds. The pejorative connotations of the label – simplistic, naive, superficial – don’t fit at all. In his introduction to Mr. Major’s book, Alexei Panshin, himself a formidable Heinlein critic, writes thus about his own teenage reading:

Heinlein addressed serious subjects that the other SF books I read did not – economics, revolution, overpopulation – and introduced me to concepts I hadn’t previously encountered, even in the adult books I’d begun to read. I first ran into the word “ecology” in Farmer in the Sky and had to look it up. It would be years before I saw it anywhere else. . . .

There was a moral dimension in his work, too, that I valued and tried to apply – a sense that in the future as much as now life would present us with hard choices and what we chose to do would matter.

These brisk, finely crafted tales would be enough to secure any writer’s reputation, and a number of them – Citizen of the Galaxy, The Rolling Stones, Farmer in the Sky, Have Spacesuit, Will Travel – are among my favorites. Citizen regularly appears on lists of the greatest SF of all time. The rest of the Heinlein oeuvre falls into two camps, between which preferences tend to be sharply and radically divided. On one side are the novels and stories prior to Stranger in a Strange Land. They fall into the same tradition as the juveniles: scientific extrapolation, strong plots, economical storytelling and heroes who exemplify competence, courage and curiosity.

Set against these are Stranger and its successors. (The dividing line isn’t razor sharp. Work on Stranger was interrupted by the writing of Starship Troopers, the epitome of his first phase, and a few novels – Podkayne of Mars, Farnham’s Freehold, Glory Road – straddle the periods.) When I read this departure from the Heinlein I knew, I disliked it so much that I stopped ten pages from the end, saying to myself that I never wanted to have to admit to having finished the thing. It looked to me like my favorite author had taken up with the hippies: free love, smacking the bourgeoisie and “if it feels good, do it”.

That’s still the perception of many fans of Heinlein’s “second phase” and the reason why leftists and libertarians don’t unanimously excoriate him, but I now think that I was, and they are, guilty of misreading. The radical change was not in Heinlein’s opinions but in the context in which he placed his characters. Looking closely, one sees that they remain competent, courageous and curious. Now, however, they dwell in societies where those qualities are neither widespread nor admired. They are unconventional, because convention has rotted away, not merely because they want to “do their own thing”.

But I wasn’t going to run on and on about Heinlein’s literary merits. Instead, as adumbrated in this post’s heading, I want to call attention to a place where he was, sad to say, wrong, wrong and wrong.

The conquest of space was a subject about which the early Heinlein, at least, was an incorrigible optimist. In Space Cadet (1948), the first lunar landing is placed in 1955! The commemorative plaque at the Interplanetary Patrol’s academy bears this inscription:

USAF Rocket Ship Kilroy Was Here
FIRST TRUE SPACESHIP
1955 A.D.
From Terra to Luna and return – Lieut. Colonel Robert deFries Sims, Commanding; Captain Saul S. Abrams; Master Sergeant Malcolm MacGregor. None survived the return landing. Rest in Peace.

The fate of the Kilroy Was Here may seem like a dark touch, but it is integral to the optimistic perspective. Heinlein foresaw that men would die in space – but didn’t believe that the casualties would impede the journey. In “The Green Hills of Earth” (1947), he summed up what he imagined would be the character of the first generation of space travelers:

The crew signed releases for everything in those days; a Lloyd’s associate would have laughed in your face at the notion of insuring a spaceman. The Space Precautionary Act had never been heard of, and the Company was responsible only for wages, if and when. Half the ships that went further than Luna City never came back. Spacemen did not care; by preference they signed for shares, and any one of them would have bet you that he could jump from the 200th floor of the Harriman Tower and ground safely, if you offered him three to two and allowed him rubber heels for the landing.

Not quite prophecy. Oh, if you offered that wager to some of our astronauts, they’d probably take it, but then NASA would insist that they drop with parachutes into piles of feathers – and would call it all off as soon as a jumper sprained his foot.

This change in society, from “The impossible takes a little longer” to “Safety first”, started, or became visible, in the early 1960’s. That was also when Robert Heinlein’s heroes turned into outsiders. Perhaps it was not a coincidence.

Further reading: SF Signal has a big collection of Robert A. Heinlein links.