Stromata Blog

An Old Oligarch Passes On

If it is true, as an admiring friend told The Diane Rehm Show, that the late Senator Edward Kennedy was fond of Chappaquiddick jokes, there’s not any point in further discussion of his character.

So I won’t discuss it. I will wonder in passing whether his eulogists are ignorant of his taste in humor, refuse to believe it or simply don’t care.

A less distasteful topic is Kennedy’s record in public life. For all practical purposes, the only job he ever held was United States Senator. The conventional wisdom is that he will go down in history as one of the all-time great members of that body. He was, we are told, the Lion of the Senate, “the greatest legislator of our time” according to President Obama.

It is undoubtedly accurate to say that Senator Kennedy played a large role in the passage of many laws, that he was well liked by his colleagues of both political parties, and that he had a reputation as a superb “deal maker” who could smooth away Republican opposition to Democratic initiatives. Yet, with a handful of exceptions, the bills that he helped steer through the Senate represented the less controversial or less significant side of the liberal agenda. While they were not all as benign as represented, such measures as expanding the federal government’s role in cancer research and AIDS treatment, imposing sanctions on apartheid-era South Africa, establishing the Teachers’ Corps and Americorps, raising the minimum wage, and outlawing discrimination against the handicapped are widely popular, and all but the hyper-libertarian fringe of the Right finds them endurable. Of the Kennedy successes embodying a more robust liberalism, the worst – HIPPAA, S-CHIP, NCLB – were midwived by George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism”. For them, the Senator was less a “liberal lion” than a front man to lull left-wing suspicions.

When did Edward Kennedy really make a difference, helping steer the country in a direction that it probably would not otherwise have taken? I can think of a very few occasions: During the Carter Administration, his advocacy of deregulating the trucking and airline industries may have been decisive in softening rank-and-file Democrats’ instinctive opposition to economic liberalization. Under Bill Clinton, he helped win approval of the North American Free Trade Agreement. In all of those cases, he was, of course, on the conservative side of the issue. Oddly, none featured prominently in obituaries.

Finally, there was his one single-handed, indisputable victory for the Left: his rallying of opposition to Robert Bork’s nomination for the Supreme Court. Had Senator Kennedy not delivered his slanderous jeremiad denouncing “Robert Bork’s America”, it is doubtful that Democratic Senators would have stood solidly against one of the most outstanding and respected figures in the American legal community. Not only would our jurisprudence have taken a different path in Kennedy’s absence, but the judicial nomination process might have retained its historical civility, to the advantage of Americans of all political persuasions.

When one looks more broadly at his career, the most striking fact about it is that, despite the number of laws for which he could take credit (or blame) to a greater of lesser degree, Senator Kennedy failed to advance the causes nearest to his heart. He maneuvered without success to undermine Ronald Reagan’s Cold War policies, couldn’t stop tax cuts or defense spending increases, secured only marginal extensions of the welfare state, couldn’t block the Republican welfare reform that President Clinton reluctantly signed, had no influence on foreign policy after doing his bit to ensure the fall of South Vietnam in 1975, and, as we’ve been repeatedly reminded, strove for decades without success to nationalize health care. He may have been a legislative lion, but he was a lion of remarkably little consequence.

When the funeral oratory fades away, and the day comes for nil nisi verum in place of nil nisi bonum, I anticipate that history will see Edward Moore Kennedy as a man who squandered his golden opportunities, partly owing to egregious faults of character but more because he espoused no coherent ideas. Having effectively inherited his title, he followed a career more like an 18th Century earl than a citizen politician of a democratic republic. He charmed, cajoled, flattered and made deals with his fellow oligarchs. At that he was effective. Did he ever argue effectively for liberalism? Not that I remember. The hollowness of his philosophy was caught on tape in 1980. Asked why he wanted to run for President, he stammered a vacuous reply. The party faithful admired him, like tenants doffing hats to their feudal lord, but I am very confident that no one else ever found his words persuasive.

It is odd that so much of the Left is enthralled by this quintessentially non-democratic, non-populist figure, but it is not inexplicable. The clue lies in his anti-Bork tirade. The essence of the case against Judge Bork was that Bork favored letting the American people decide many issues that the judiciary had taken out of their hands, and that the people could not be trusted with such authority.

The Right, which is willing to let people be their potty little selves, can make peace with democracy. The Left, whose essence is the yearning to reshape human nature, cannot. And that is all that needs be said about Ted Kennedy’s philosophy and accomplishments.

Addendum: The gravest scandal of Senator Kennedy’s career wasn’t Chappaquiddick. It was his attempt, revealed when the Soviet archives were opened in 1991, to collude with Yuri Andropov against President Reagan’s foreign policy. The sordid story is recounted by Peter Robinson in “Ted Kennedy’s Soviet Gambit”. For further commentary, vide the Investor’s Business Daily editorial “Kennedy, the KGB and the Media”:

Again, in the end, there’s no evidence Kennedy or [Senator John] Tunney [who carried Kennedy’s message to Andropov] ever actually helped the KGB. Just that they offered to. Yet this raises many troubling questions that, sadly, may never be answered.

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

Rhetorical questions, of course.

Dances with Werewolves

A delight in attending semi-professional theaters is the chance to see plays that aren’t likely to make it even to off-off-Broadway but are more entertaining than the detritus that covers the New York stage. Last night, in Olympia, Washington, I took in a performance of Mating Dance of the Werewolf, written by one of the world’s innumerable Mark Steins (not Mark Steyn) and presented by Harlequin Productions, which I like despite the fact that it was a recipient of “stimulus” money.

The play had its first run four years ago in Winnipeg and Los Angeles. Hopes for a New York production never went anywhere, so the playwright began shopping it around and grabbed the attention of Harlequin’s producer-in-chief, Scot Whitney, with the opening line, “Have they found Allen’s head yet?” What follows is an urban fantasy with undertones of comedy and horror. Ken, a policeman in Duluth, Minnesota, falls for a girl with rather strange habits, like sniffing new acquaintances. Soon-to-be-headless Allen, his former partner and husband of his ex-fiancée, finds her attractive, too, and wants to get to the bottom of her obscure past. Pam, the ex-fiancée, is tired of her marriage. A police lieutenant, Ken’s and Allen’s superior, perhaps Pam’s lover, completes the cast.

Novel touches are a female werewolf and consideration of the romantic complications that membership in two species might entail. Touches that probably make the work unplayable in the Big Apple are cigarette smoking on stage and the treatment of a certain one of Allen’s less conventional character traits – no need to go into what it is – as a problem and flaw rather than a liberating virtue. The ending has a degree of ambivalence – did things really happen as Ken thinks they did? – that I thought was fine and my companion didn’t.

The production that I saw had a couple of faults that will probably shake out as the run progresses: A few cues were missed, one very conspicuously, and the actors didn’t always project as well as those of us with failing hearing would like. On the positive side, Helen Harvester, who played the werewolf girl, was more than impressive. She seems to specialize in “crazies”: “the homicidal Irene St Claire in The Crucifer of Blood with CenterStage, schizophrenic Genny in tempOdyssey with Theater Schmeater and skilled assassin Christine in the short film The Queen of Wands”. She told an interviewer that she prepared for the performance by watching YouTube videos of wolves. She learned well.

Mating Dance of the Werewolf runs on Thursdays through Sundays until September 12th. For those who live within driving distance of Olympia, it would definitely not be a waste of money.

Brave Sir Barack

George W. Bush said that his role was to be “the decider”. His successor, trying to be as little like Bush as possible (except for continuing his wars, keeping on his Fed chairman, etc.), has apparently decided to let the decisions be made elsewhere. His entourage in Martha’s Vineyard assured us yesterday that the idea of dredging up and reinvestigating old allegations against CIA interrogators was Eric Holder’s alone; the President, the attorney-general’s nominal superior, had nothing to do with it.

If that account were true (and does anyone believe it?), it would hardly be creditable to the President. He casually let a subordinate convulse a major government agency? Or holds the reins so loosely that an upheaval can occur without his advance knowledge? If there are compelling reasons to subject CIA officers to the financial and psychological agony of a special counsel’s attentions, the President himself should be taking the lead in explaining what the are. As matters stand, unelected officials act and a chorus of left-wing columnists and bloggers explains.

A few years from now, after the suspects have exhausted their savings on lawyers, the investigations will peter out. The worst of the accusations in the resurrected inspector-general’s report, if true, might be misdemeanors. Many are far from matters for the criminal courts. As an experiment, see how interested the nearest cop on the beat is in your complaint that so-and-so blew cigar smoke in your face. I doubt that the special counsel will ever reach the point of specifying actual criminal statutes that have been violated, much less seeking indictments (which would by then very likely be barred by statutes of limitations; the events recounted by the IG are already half a decade or more in the past).

As a corollary to the pleasure of hounding intelligence agencies and the hope of finding a way to indict Dick Cheney, the Obama Administration has assured terrorists that their secrets are safe even if individual operatives are captured. Training mufsidun to resist questioning carried out in accordance with the Army Field Manual will be a breeze. The manual’s techniques were devised to elicit information from rank-and-file enemy soldiers and deserters, men who often have little ideological commitment and are willing to cooperate under mild pressure or in return for small favors. As guidelines for getting useful intelligence from fanatics, they are risible.

As a small consolation, there is the prospect that vilifying CIA agents may be the Administration’s way of mollifying the nutroots before it retreats from the central tenets of Obamacare. A very small consolation: Socialized medicine really isn’t as bad as terrorism. If we must have one or the other, the President attorney-general has made the wrong choice.

Meanwhile, I wonder whether Mr. Holder, so sensitive to the possibility that threats to his family might upset a hardened terrorist, will be looking into the seizure of an accused embezzler in Afghanistan and his less than gentle transport to the U.S. If the defendant is to be believed, he was denied food for 30 hours, held in a freezing room, kept bound, gagged and blindfolded throughout an 18-hour flight, and told that, if he did not confess to the charges against him, he would never see his wife and children again. He may be lying, just as many captured mufsidun have lied about how they were treated at Guantanamo. If he is telling a semblance of the truth, this incident is quite a bit more shocking than the abuses alleged by the CIA inspector-general. Using harsh methods to obtain information needed to save lives is a world apart from making threats in order to extract a confession from someone accused of a white collar crime. Reassurance that the Justice Department grasps that distinction would be welcome.

Further reading: The Wall Street Journal, “The Real CIA News”:

As for examples of “unauthorized techniques,” the IG explains that the most “significant”—an accusation that an interrogator threatened a detainee with a gun and a power drill—was the subject of a separate investigation. As for the rest—“the making of threats, blowing cigar smoke, employing certain stress positions, the use of a stiff brush on a detainee, and stepping on a detainee’s ankle shackles”—the IG report says the “allegations were disputed or too ambiguous to reach any authoritative determination” and “did not warrant separate investigations or administrative actions.”

The most revealing portion of the IG report documents the program’s results. The CIA’s “detention and interrogation of terrorists has provided intelligence that has enabled the identification and apprehension of other terrorists and warned of terrorist plots planned for the United States and around the world.” That included the identification of Jose Padilla and Binyam Muhammed, who planned to detonate a dirty bomb, and the arrest of previously unknown members of an al Qaeda cell in Karachi, Pakistan, designated to pilot an aircraft attack in the U.S. The information also made the CIA aware of plots to attack the U.S. consulate in Karachi, hijack aircraft to fly into Heathrow, loosen track spikes to derail a U.S. train, blow up U.S. gas stations, fly an airplane into a California building, and cut the lines of suspension bridges in New York.

Ivy League Amusement

As an alumnus of one of the seven Ivy League universities that is not located in New Hampshire, I am ROFL at the curriculum vitae of the newly appointed Acting Dean of Dartmouth College. Here is how it was summarized on a former employer’s Web site:

Sylvia Spears graduated from the University of Rhode Island with a bachelor’s degree in speech communication and a minor in theatre in 1978. Afterwards she spent roughly ten years working in administration and management in New Jersey. In 1989, Spears moved back in Rhode Island.

Spears, whose tribal name is Wild Dancer, next worked as an Assistant Tribal Administrator for her Narragansett tribe. In 1992 she returned to the University of Rhode Island for her master’s degree in speech communication. After working at Bryant University, she served as affirmative action officer from 1998-2000. She completed her Ph.D degree at URI in Human Science and Services during 2006. She now teaches movement and voices at the Campus. She has also written plays for inner-city theatre groups.

Spears is an experienced trainer and presenter, specializing in cultural competence and diversity training. She has served as Assistant Director of Multicultural Students Services and Affirmative Action Officer. At present she is on the faculty in the URI Department of Human Development and Family Studies. Sylvia Spears is a certified facilitator for the Franklin-Covey Leadership Studies.

From that lofty perch, Dartmouth hired her to run its Office of Pluralism and Leadership (which is itself an hilarious concept) and now has elevated her to its top administrative post. I believe that seismic tremors have been reported at Daniel Webster’s grave.

Obamacare’s Fatal Flaw

. . . isn’t the public option or the individual mandate or employer play-or-pay or the conversion of private insurance companies into public utilities or government funding of abortion or end-of-life counseling or any other detail of the so far rather nebulous plan. Regardless of the specifics, Obamacare won’t work, because the President has set incompatible objectives, each of which stultifies the rest.

On the one hand, the President believes that a large number of Americans currently receive too little medical care. He has repeatedly cited the 40-plus million who aren’t covered by health insurance, using “no insurance” as a proxy for “no care”. Objective number one, then, is to bring more medical services to this portion of the population.

On the other hand, the President thinks that medical care is too costly. Accompanying his statistics on the uninsured is the plaint that the U.S. spends a considerably larger fraction of its GDP on the health sector than any other country. So the second objective is to cut the cost of doctor visits, hospital stays, medication, etc.

Translated into the terms of an economic textbook, Obamacare aims to raise the demand curve and lower the point of intersection of supply and demand. By implication, the supply curve must shift, too. At the current price level, the amount of medical care demanded post-reform will be greater than it is now. Only if providers are willing to supply more care without any economic incentive will prices go down rather than up.

To look at how this contradiction might be resolved – or, rather, to see why it can’t be – let’s consider a simplified country with two doctors, ten hospital beds and 1,000 people. Right now, 800 of the people have health insurance, which pays all their medical costs. The other 200 don’t and have to fend for themselves. The doctors charge 10 ducats for a visit; hospital beds go for 100 ducats a night. At these prices, the doctors are as busy as they want to be, and the hospital beds are kept in steady use.

Appalled by the problem of the uncared-for, the government enacts measures that give them insurance coverage. The demand for medical care immediately jumps. The providers’ first reaction is to raise their prices. The doctors aren’t willing to give up leisure unless they get more income in return. The hospital beds are limited in number. To create more requires new capital for the hospital sector, which won’t be attracted there unless the profitability of beds increases.

The government, however, doesn’t like the idea of higher prices. In fact, it thinks they are already too high. What can be done?

• Idea 1: Cut out waste. Maybe the doctors spend 20 minutes per patient when 15 will do. Maybe the hospital keeps patients more nights than necessary. Improvements in efficiency would make it possible to treat more patients with the existing resources. The gains could be so great that competitive pressures will lead the providers to reduce their prices.

• Questions about Idea 1: If the current system has gross inefficiencies, what factors caused them? Will the reform eliminate or exacerbate those factors? If it doesn’t correct them, how will the inefficiencies be identified and removed?

• Idea 2: Prevent illness. If a smaller proportion of the population gets sick, expanding the number with access to medical care won’t result in a greater work load for health care providers. A really healthy population will use less care, and, again, prices will decline.

• Questions about Idea 2: Prevention costs money, too. How do we know that preventive care costs won’t equal or exceed health care savings? If there are net savings, why hasn’t the prevention strategy already been adopted? Does the reform remove the impediments?

• Idea 3: Impose price controls: If there is only one insurance company (presumably controlled by or beholden to the government), it can tell providers what their prices will be. Henceforth, doctors will get 9 ducats per visit, and hospital beds 90 ducats a night.

• Questions about Idea 3: Since the price is now below the market clearing level, the doctors’ offices will fill up with more patients than the doctors want to treat, and the nightly demand for hospital beds will exceed the number available. Meanwhile, the sub-market prices will attract no new doctors or hospital bed investors. How will the providers’ resources be allocated in these circumstances? And what can be done to ensure that there will be new doctors and hospital beds when the present ones retire or wear out?

While the real world is more complicated than our imaginary country, the options available for squaring the supply-demand circle are the same. The President has put forward all three ideas – and has conspicuously failed to address the questions about them.

Everyone knows, or at least believes, that American medicine is rife with inefficiency. Conventional wisdom suggests two reasons: Insurance covers so much that patients have little incentive to pay attention to costs, and the world’s most plaintiff-friendly malpractice laws encourage doctors to practice expensive “defensive medicine”. The President obviously doesn’t believe either of those is to blame. Obamacare would further attenuate the connection between consumers and prices, and it contains not a smidgeon of malpractice reform (nor will it, given that plaintiffs’ lawyers are one of the main economic bulwarks of the Democratic Party).

So, instead of dealing with the causes of wasteful medical practices, Obamacare will try to treat the symptoms. A board of experts will figure out, on the basis of “the evidence”, how best to treat each ailment. As the President has put it, these wise men will inform their ignorant colleagues that the blue pill works just as well as the red pill and costs half as much.

It sounds to me like a better idea for auto repair than for the care and treatment of human beings. There is, however, a way to find out whether it is feasible. The federal government operates the world’s largest health insurer, Medicare. Why not test the President’s money-saving ideas there, before inflicting them on the entire population? Why is the Administration’s only proposal for making Medicare more affordable the tired old nostrum of paring reimbursements to physicians and hospitals?

The President is also a great believer in the proposition that preventive care will save money. Earlier this month, the head of the Congressional Budget Office pointed out that, according to empirical studies, while preventive measures may often be the best treatment, they are usually not the cheapest.

Researchers who have examined the effects of preventive care generallyfind that the added costs of widespread use of preventive services tend to exceed the savings from averted illness. An article published last year in the New England Journal of Medicine provides a good summary of the available evidence on how preventive care affects costs. After reviewing hundreds of previous studies of preventive care, the authors report that slightly fewer than 20 percent of the services that were examined save money, while the rest add to costs. Providing a specific example of the benefits and costs of preventive care, another recent study conducted by researchers from the American Diabetes Association, the American Heart Association, and the American Cancer Society estimated the effects of achieving widespread use of several highly recommended preventive measures aimed at cardiovascular disease – such as monitoring blood pressure levels for diabetics and cholesterol levels for individuals at high risk of heart disease and using medications to reduce those levels. The researchers found that those steps would substantially reduce the projected number of heart attacks and strokes that occurred but would also increase total spending on medical care because the ultimate savings would offset only about 10 percent of the costs of the preventive services, on average. Of particular note, that study sought to capture both the costs and benefits of providing preventive care over a 30-year period. [footnotes omitted]

That leaves us with price controls, a panacea that fails whenever it is tried. In the short run, the insidious effects may be cushioned, because medical care providers have a lot of sunk capital and can’t readily switch to other occupations. Over time, though, doctors and nurses will retire and not be replaced; hospitals will deteriorate owing to underinvestment; pharmaceutical firms will find it hard to attract capital. In theory, everyone will, as the Left desires, have a “right” to health care. But who will have the duty to provide it? Will we conscript men and women into the medical profession?

Of all the sectors of the American economy, medical care is already the one with the highest level of government intervention. Perceiving the results of that intervention to be unsatisfactory, President Obama proposes to intervene further, with a scheme that can achieve its declared goals only if the laws of economics are repealed. Is it excessively “right wing”, “obstructionist” or “racist” to think that Obamacare is fatally deficient, a disease rather than a cure?

An Historical Note

Before 2004, Massachusetts law provided that vacancies in the Senate would be filled by a gubernatorial appointment. That year, there was a chance that a Massachusetts senator (French-looking, served in Vietnam) might be elected President. If that happened, his successor would be picked by Republican governor Mitt Romney. The Massachusetts legislature, overwhelmingly Democratic, wasn’t inclined to do anything to change that until Senator Ted Kennedy (D–Chappaquiddick) lobbied heavily for bypassing the governor and holding a special election. The legislators duly fell into line and passed a revised procedure over Governor Romney’s veto. The effort turned out, of course, to be useless.

In 2009, Senator Kennedy is contemplating his own mortality – and urging the legislature to go back to the old law, lest his seat be empty at a moment when his party needs a 60th vote to shut down a filibuster.

On what Massachusetts should do I have no comment, but I’m reminded of an episode of similar political realpolitik from our country’s early history.

The Presidential election of 1800 was the first with anything like a modern, vigorously (in fact, viciously) partisan campaign. It was obvious that the contest between incumbent John Adams and his principal challenger, Vice President Thomas Jefferson, would be very close, and the rival parties – active for the first time – sought every advantage they could muster.

In 11 of the 16 states, legislatures chose the Presidential electors. Two of the others were Virginia, a Jefferson stronghold, and neighboring Maryland, where the pro-Adams Federalists held sway. In both, electors had been chosen in 1796 by Congressional district in a popular vote. Each had a few districts in which the statewide minority could be expected to win.

The Virginia legislature voted to change from district-by-district to statewide balloting, thereby guaranteeing that Jefferson would get all of its electoral votes. The Maryland Federalists proposed a counter-move: to have their state’s electors selected by the legislature. To their surprise, the abolition of a popular vote was extremely unpopular. They lost their legislative majority, and the district system remained in place.

In the Presidential election, Virginia went for Jefferson. In Maryland, the electors split five to five. John Adams finished five votes short of a majority in the Electoral College.

What if the Maryland Federalists had simply imitated their Virginia neighbors? There surely would have been no popular backlash against a statewide ballot, and it’s highly likely that Adams would have won all of the state’s ten votes, thereby gaining a second term as President. His running mate, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina, would have been short of a majority, since one Federalist elector dropped him in order to ensure that the candidates would finish in the proper order, but would have been elected Vice President by the Federalist-dominated Senate. (This was a pre-Twelfth Amendment election. Jefferson’s failure to similarly arrange for finishing ahead of Aaron Burr was the first sign of the ineptitude that was to mark his term of office.)

Why did Maryland blunder away the election, when the way to win was so obvious? I fall back on Bismarck’s maxim that “God has a special Providence for fools, drunks and the United States of America”. The Federalists had the right ideas about how to run the new nation. To the Southern states those ideas were unacceptable, because they were put forward by Yankees. The solution was Republican men and Federalist measures, which is what we got (contrary to all his previous rhetoric) from President Jefferson.

During the drawn-out post-election fight between Jefferson and Burr, Alexander Hamilton urged the Federalists to make a deal with Jefferson: the Presidency in exchange for a commitment not to repudiate the national debt, to remain neutral in the war between England and France, to maintain the Navy and not to discharge Federalist officeholders without cause. No deal was ever struck, so far as history knows. Yet the Jefferson Administration did what Hamilton had asked. Life is full of inexplicable coincidences.

The President’s Theologian

When I read that President Obama had told an assemblage of rabbis that “We are God’s partners in matters of life and death” and that the immediate business of the partnership was to enact health care insurance reform, there returned to my mind the long forgotten (and not just by me) tome of liberal theologian Harvey Cox, The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective (1965).

One of Dr. Cox’s themes was that God and man should be viewed as “partners” in bringing about a man-centered utopia. In fact, God was the “junior partner”, since the things of this world were of the foremost importance and He, as an abstract ground of all being, was in no position to appreciate them fully.

Whatever its philosophical merits, Dr. Cox’s theology obviously has no connection with historical Christianity. Our Lord instructed us to pray, “Thy will be done”, not “Be a nice god, and help me to do my will”. Nonetheless, The Secular City was popular in modernist Christian circles, until they moved on to the next demi-prophet

I don’t know whether Barack Obama has ever read a word of The Secular City, but the coincidence of sentiment is fascinating. If the President is sincere – and I believe and hope that he is not – America could become the site of history’s first secular theocracy.

A Mary in a Coal Mine

Puzzlement continues over the award of the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Mary Robinson. The citation accompanying the award was extraordinarily vaporous. She was once president of Ireland, a position of negligible weight in a parliamentary system. (Quick – name the president of Germany.) Then she became the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, served one term and was denied reelection. Since then, she has wafted through the rarified air of the global bien-pensants, intoning fashionable left-wing, anti-American opinions to audiences who hear that sort of thing five times a day.

The Washington Post’s Charles Lane aptly labeled her “sort of an empty suit”. Yet she once in her undistinguished career had 15 minutes in the spotlight, when she presided over the notorious “anti-racism” conference in Durban, which evolved into an anti-Jewish hatefest. Miss Robinson makes no apologies for her role and insists that “there’s a wonderful story about Durban waiting to be told”, meanwhile complaining that objections to honoring her are “bullying” by “certain elements of the Jewish community”.

In brief, the only “something” about this Mary is her association with antisemitism. There are no offsetting accomplishments. If she had, like fellow honoree Desmond Tutu, taken a leading part in overthrowing apartheid, it would make sense to say that the White House vetters were dazzled by good deeds and failed to notice dubious words. Given the facts of the case, that’s not very plausible. Strange as it may sound, the Administration seems to have gone out of its way to take a symbolic slap at Israel. Why would it do that?

Now, one can never rule out sheer incompetence where Barack Obama is concerned. After all, here is a President who took the offensive on health care reform without a plan. Still, incompetence doesn’t explain everything. It seems highly likely to me that there was a purpose behind the Robinson gesture.

Showing favor to an unapologetic, yet fairly frivolous, enemy of Israel is a test of whether the well-being of the Jewish state is a line-in-the-sand issue for pro-Israeli liberals (including, but not limited to, Jewish liberals). From their reactions, the President can judge whether more meaningful anti-Israel measures will be toxic to his political health.

Jennifer Rubin thinks that the canary died: “The inhibition has been broken with the recognition now dawning on Jewish Democrats that this is a president lacking in affection and respect for Israel and for the sensibilities of pro-Israel voters. The aversion to conflict with the administration has been overcome, and I suspect the administration won’t face as pliant a Jewish community in the future.” I’m not so sure. The statements on the controversy by mainstream Jewish organizations impressed me as perfunctory, issued because that’s the kind of thing that mainstream Jewish organizations are expected to say. To turn an infamous James Baker quote around, Rahm Emanuel can sneer, “F— the Jews; they’ll vote for us anyway.” (Not my original thought, but I can’t find the link to which credit it due.)

It doesn’t matter, though, what Jen Rubin or Tom Veal thinks. What does matter is President Obama’s perception of the success or failure of his experiment. There’s no real doubt at this point that he holds the Hyde Park view of Israel: The world would be a better place had it been aborted in the womb. The only question is how far he’ll go toward retroactive infanticide. What the country thinks about Mary Robinson may turn out to be unexpectedly consequential.

Time for Her to Go

At times during 2008, I said that, while I expected Barack Obama to be, at best, a mediocre President, the country would be better off with him in the White House than Hillary Rodham Clinton. At times during 2009, I’ve wavered in that judgement. Now the Secretary of State has convinced me that it was correct and, indeed, that she is unfit for any high office.

The breaking point is a statement she made in Nigeria, a country awash in corruption, nepotism and electoral fraud. After noting those problems, she added,

Our democracy is still evolving. You know we've had all kinds of problems in some of our past elections, as you might remember. In 2000, our presidential election came down to one state where the brother of the man running for president was the governor of the state, so we have our problems, too.

For an audience in a place where stealing an election for one’s brother would be widely regarded as routine, if not commendable, the implication was obvious. If Secretary Clinton didn’t realize that, she is too stupid to hold our nation’s most important diplomatic post. If she did know what she is saying, she is a LaRouchian fantasist.

Either way, the President should fire her now.

Ian McDonald, Non-Fiction Writer

Brasyl, Ian McDonald’s 2008 Hugo nominee, opens with a scene from a rather deranged “reality TV” show . I’d assumed that it was all fiction set in an alternative universe’s Brazil. Looks like I was wrong:

SAO PAULO, Brazil — In one murder after another, the Canal Livre TV show had an uncanny knack for being first on the scene, gathering graphic footage of the victim.

Too uncanny, say police, who are investigating the show’s host, state legislator Wallace Souza, on suspicion of commissioning at least five of the murders to boost his ratings and prove his claim that Brazil’s Amazon region is awash in violent crime.

“The order to execute always came from the legislator and his son, who then alerted the TV crews to get to the scene before the police,” state police intelligence chief Thomaz Vasconcelos charged in an interview with The Associated Press.

The killings, he said, “appear to have been committed to get rid of his rivals and increase the audience of the TV show.” . . .

Souza’s son, Rafael, has been jailed on charges of homicide, drug trafficking and illegal gun possession. Police said the father faces charges of drug trafficking, gang formation and weapons possession, but remains free because of legislative immunity. No charges have been brought against him in the killings.

Vasconcelos said the crimes appear to have served the Souzas in two ways: They eliminated drug-trafficking rivals, and they boosted ratings.

“We believe that they organized a kind of death squad to execute rivals who disputed with them the drug trafficking business,” he said. Souza, he charged, “would eliminate his rival and use the killing as a news story for his program.”

In Brasyl’s show, Canal Quatro merely set up car thefts. Of course, poor McDonald suffered from the disadvantage of having to keep the reader’s disbelief suspended. Reality has no such constraints.

Worldcon Facts and Factoids

■ Anticipation’s “warm body count” (number of members, of any kind, on-site at any point during the con) was 3,503 as of Sunday evening. No doubt a few stragglers showed up on Monday. Roughly comparable numbers for other Worldcons held in Canada (taken from the more-authoritative-than-anything-else Long List) are –

Torcon 3 (Toronto, 2003): 3,834
ConAdian (Winnipeg, 1994): 3,570
Torcon II (Toronto, 1973): 2,900
Torcon I (Toronto, 1948): 200

■ The intensely curious can download the complete Hugo Award nomination and voting details from the official Hugo Web site. Miscellaneous observations:

• Some years, the winners are just what one would expect; this was not one of those years. That The Graveyard Book took Best Novel honors wasn’t shocking. It’s a good book (once you’re past the all-too-cute first couple of chapters) and is by the very popular Neil Gaiman. On the other hand, much stronger fantasy novels by very popular authors have in the past done poorly in the balloting. Tim Powers and Terry Pratchett, to take just two examples, have never come close.

• That Weird Tales won Best Semiprozine, after years of being neglected, was a genuine surprise. Were the voters just restless? In any case, it suggests that the category isn’t quite so moribund as many fans, including some who voted at this year’s business meeting against discontinuing it, believe.

• I don’t begrudge Electric Velocipede its Best Fanzine Hugo; vox populi and all that. Nonetheless, it is exactly the sort of thing I’m thinking of when I say “semiprozine”. Had it been up to me (and had I been brave enough to defy the vox), I would have moved its nominations to that category.

• The newest category, Best Graphic Story, didn’t make an impressive debut: 212 nominations, with a mere 13 needed to get onto the final ballot. By comparison, Best Fanzine, a category of somewhat specialized interest (alas), drew 288 nominators, and 30 were needed for the final ballot. It’s true that Best Fan Artist was a bit weaker (187 nominators, 25 for the final ballot). This year’s WSFS business meeting voted to ratify the amendment adding Best Graphic Story to the list of Hugo categories, but with the proviso that it will sunset if not approved again in 2012.

• Showing that an era has indeed ended, David Langford barely scraped onto the Best Fan Writer ballot (fourth highest number of nominations, only two ahead of sixth place), though, once nominated, he ran a fairly close second to Cheryl Morgan.

• Steven H Silver received enough nominations for a place on the John W. Campbell Award ballot. The administrators tossed him off on the technicality that he hadn’t, as of the end of 2008, published any fiction in a publication with sufficient circulation to be recognized for Campbell purposes.

• Except for Best Graphic Story, where I outsourced my ballot to a knowledgeable nephew, I didn’t vote for the winner in any category. I’m pretty sure that has never happened before. Obviously, this year’s electorate had no taste.

■ I was told (but had no way to verify) that attendance at the Hugo Awards ceremony was 1,600 and topped the Masquerade by two-to-one. If true, that must be the highest ratio of Hugo attendees to convention members, and the first time that the Hugos have outdrawn the Masquerade, in many, many years. I do wish that the acoustics in the hall had been as record setting as the audience. The French emcee, in particular, was inaudible. (I’m sure I wouldn’t have been able to comprendre him, but I would have liked to have the chance to try.)

■ The Hugo Award now has an official logo, selected from 390 contest entries. Next up, I understand, is the contest for an official Hugo slogan. (“I go, you go, we all go for Hugo”, perhaps?)

■ Steven Silver “accepted” the Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form) Hugo “on behalf of” Disney/Pixar (that is, he was conscripted to go up on stage to fill what would otherwise have been a gap in the proceedings). He then wandered through the parties offering to let people hold the award in return for a five dollar donation to TAFF or DUFF. He collected $217. To account for the odd two bucks, I presume that someone carefully balanced the award on two fingers, which, given the massiveness of this year’s (very attractive) Hugo base, probably needed medical attention afterward.

■ Many members, I suspect, ignored the free book in their registration packets, Crossing the Boundaries: French Fantasy from Bragelonne. They shouldn’t. I particularly recommend “To Chloe” by Magali Ségura.

■ The convention newsletter, called Voyageur for varying reasons and edited by the Plokta Cabal, published 13 issues. Three hoaxzines appeared – a record, I believe – but none was titled Voyeur.

Raleigh in ’10; Reno in ’11

No doubt the news has already been tweeted all around the SF world, but, for the benefit of anyone who hasn’t heard, site selection voting at the Worldcon went as anticipated: The unopposed Raleigh and Reno bids were chosen for the 2010 NASFiC and the 2011 World Science Fiction Convention, respectively. Actually, Raleigh had nominal competition, a properly filed write-in bid from Pasadena, which proposed to combine the NASFiC with the Westercon. Very nominal: The count was 241 to 19, with 16 votes for “No Preference”, “None of the Above” or the usual stragglers. Reno meanwhile got 650 out of 763 votes cast. The largest recipient of (unofficial and ineligible) write-ins was the Aberdeen Proving Ground, with 11.

The NASFiC, named “ReConStruction” (very irenic for a Southern con), will be held August 5–8, 2010, early enough to make it feasible to attend both it and the Worldcon in Australia. Guests of Honor are Eric Flint (author), Brad Foster (artist), Juanita Coulson (fan) and Toni Weisskopf (toastmaster).

The dates for the 2011 Worldcon, “Renovation”, are August 17–21, 2011. Guests of Honor (not specified by title, but you can guess who’s what) are Tim Powers, Boris Vallejo, Ellen Asher and the late Charles N. Brown (chosen before his untimely death).

A psychologist could draw inferences from the names that the cons have selected. I won’t.

Bearing Witness, Obama-Style

The most that President Obama could bring himself to say in condemnation of the Iranian mullarchy’s electoral fraud was –

Martin Luther King once said - “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I believe that. The international community believes that. And right now, we are bearing witness to the Iranian peoples’ [sic] belief in that truth, and we will continue to bear witness.

In progress today are show trials of dissidents and alleged outside agitators. I wondered how the Obama Administration was continuing to “bear witness” to “the arc of the moral universe”. So I logged into the State Department’s Web site. On the home page, as of this moment, there is nary a word about Iran. There is an “Iran” link buried far down the page. Click on it, and you find these “highlights”:

U.S. Seeks Confirmation from Iran about Detention of Three Americans

U.S. Concerned About Detained Iranian American Scholar

U.S. Interested in Engagement With Iran

I guess the witness is exercising his right to remain silent.

Connecting Dots

I’m more inclined to see coincidence than conspiracy, but what would everybody on the Left be saying if –

• a Republican administration dropped voter intimidation charges against a racist extremist group, and

• pro-GOP thugs beat up a peaceful protester at a Congressman’s “town hall”, and

• Republicans were urged by the White House to report “fishy” comments about Presidential initiatives to a White House e-mail address, and

• a Republican President declared that he didn’t want Democrats “to do a lot of talking”?

The question is, of course, rhetorical.

Further reading: National Review, “Insult and Injury”:

The entire intellectual infrastructure behind the stimulus, the bailouts, the auto-industry takeover, and the proposed health-care takeover rests on the assumption that the people who staff the Obama administration are smarter, better, more caring, and more decent than you yahoos out there in the general public, who simply cannot be trusted to make your own decisions about important matters, such as what sort of health insurance to purchase or whether to buy a car that gets 20 miles per gallon or 22 miles per gallon. Given that line of thinking, it’s easy to understand why Obama’s partisans would dismiss those citizens who dare to criticize his proposal as “the mob.”

Mark Steyn, “The Community Is Restless”:

Decrying the snarling, angry protesters, liberal talk-show host Bill Press (no relation to the Corby Trouser Press) says that “Americans want serious discussion” on health care. If only we’d stuck to the president’s August timetable and passed a gazillion-page health-care reform entirely unread by the House of Representatives or the Senate (the world’s greatest deliberative body) in nothing flat, we’d now have all the time in the world to sit around having a “serious discussion” and “real debate” on whatever it was we just did to one-sixth of the economy.

But a sick, deranged, un-American mob has put an end to all that moderate and reasonable steamrollering by showing up and yelling insane, out-of-control questions like, “Awfully sorry to bother you, your Most Excellent Senatorial Eminence, but I was wondering if you could tell me why you don’t read any of the laws you make before you make them into law?”

The community is restless. The firm hand of greater organization is needed.

Rich Lowry, “In Pursuit of a Silent Majority”:

Like Richard Nixon, Barack Obama wants to govern on the strength of a silent majority, although with a twist. Obama wants the majority that opposes or questions his policies to stay silent.

Obama’s White House and its allies have unleashed a barrage of criticism and condescension at people daring to show up at town-hall meetings and ask their elected representatives pointed questions. “Fired up and ready to go!” apparently works only one way. If engaged citizens shower Obama with adoration at stage-managed rallies, they are the very stuff of American democracy. If they boo their congressman, they are a scandalous eruption of fake or hateful sentiment. . . .

In politics, every action prompts a reaction. If Obama had had his way, health-care reform would have passed both houses of Congress a week ago in a pure power play. If Obama gets his maximalist version of reform through, he will depend less on persuasion than on sheer political muscle in Washington. Only a public quiescent to the point of obedience would meekly accept a rush to reorder one-sixth of the economy. And only a conservative opposition that had curled up and died wouldn’t raise holy hell.

The ultimate point of the attacks on the town-hall protesters is to define that opposition as illegitimate. Which is also why liberal opinion-makers are so obsessed with the “birther” conspiracy theorists who believe Obama was born in Kenya. The birthers have been denounced by every reputable conservative. But the Left still wants to use them to tar all Republicans as extreme in what it hopes will be a self-fulfilling narrative of conservative obsolescence.

You’ll Still Have the Semiprozines to Kick Around Any More

Sensing that sentiment at the WSFS business meeting might be running against them (from the dearth of speeches in the affirmative by anyone but themselves), the sponsors of the amendment to abolish the Best Semiprozine Hugo Award category tried to make their proposal more attractive by postponing the effective date: The category would not expire until 2013, and then only upon ratification of the amendment again at the 2012 business meeting. A similar ploy (expiration after 2012 unless re-ratified) helped the new Best Graphic Story category gain majorities in its favor last year and this.

The reprise of the tactic didn’t work. The effective date proviso was added to the amendment, but the whole package then went down to defeat by a solid 73–32 tally. As a follow-up, a committee was established to propose revisions to “Best Semiprozine and related categories”. Some modification is obviously necessary in light of the ratification of a separate amendment explicitly making Web publications eligible for awards in the fiction, related work, semiprozine and fanzine categories. The old semiprozine criteria, designed to distinguish Locus from Analog don’t fit the Internet age very well.

Around and About the Worldcon

Since I got an invitation to the Fan Editors’ Luncheon (why, I don’t really know), I now have an obligation, I believe, to say a few words about this year’s World Science Fiction Convention, currently under weigh in Montreal.

We’ll get the bad part off my chest right away. The Montreal airport is not warm and friendly. Being that it is named after Pierre Elliott Trudeau, I ought not to have expected it to be warm and friendly. In fact, I’m not sure that I wanted it to be. For the benefit of future travelers, let me warn you that, if you enter a huge, empty room with not a soul in sight and see an Attendre ici sign, attendez ici sans mouvement, no matter how long it takes. The instant that you proceed past the sign, an ill-tempered gendarme will materialize, full of Gallic wrath. I did have the good sense to learn from Professor Gates’ errors and keep my denunciations of his anti-American racism under my breath.

Otherwise, Montreal is a wonderful tourist city. It isn’t clear, in fact, that it is anything else. The most common billboard is Espaces à Louer, suggesting that there may be too few inhabitants in relation to the available structures. That, however, is not a problem for visitors. There is, in particular, a delightfully low ratio of patrons to restaurants, and the cuisine that I’ve had has been excellent.

I’d been told that practically everybody in the city speaks English but that they’re touchy about languages and want to be addressed in French. So far as I can tell, that is a myth. I haven’t been given the opportunity to use more than half a dozen words of my amateurish Français. Maybe I just look like an American imperialist and the locals are afraid not to converse with me in the language of hyperpower hegemony.

Turning to the Worldcon itself, the concomm seems to have put too much off to the last minute (hardly the first to do that), but, when the last minute arrived, the work got done. The most serious problem is the program grid, which has a tendency to put panels in the right room at the wrong time. Otherwise, the convention center (oops, Palais de Congrés, though all the actual Montrealers I’ve spoken to say, “convention center”) is attractive and well laid-out, with a mall on its ground floor hosting beaucoup shops and eateries. The aforesaid Fan Editors’ Luncheon took place in one of them, the Fourquet Fourchette (forky fork?), where I consumed an admirably cooked whitefish.

The HQ and party hotel, the Delta Centre-Ville, is a couple of very long blocks from the convention center, but that’s cozy compared to some recent Worldcons, and the weather has been blissfully free of Global Warming. The parties have not. While the 28th floor suites, where most of them take place, have two-story interiors, which is nice, their square footage is on the low side, which is less so. Crowding wasn’t too bad Thursday night, but Friday has been jammed. That is not, let me hasten to add, a wholly bad thing.

The elevator crunch was handled in a way that I haven’t often seen before. Half of the elevators were dedicated to express runs to the party floors; the rest would go only to non-party floors, with some reserved for convention members only and others for non-conventioneering hotel guests. To make this work, elevator operators were needed. They were mostly young British fans. Naturally, some people assumed that these kids were Quebeçois and tried to ask questions or ask for floors in French. That didn’t work very well.

My own room is in the Embassy Suites, across the street from the convention center, albeit at the far end of the block from the entrance. Apparently, if I may return briefly to languages, hotels are divided between Francophone and Anglophone. In the former, such as the Delta, the monitors in the elevators display news headlines in French. At the latter, of which the Embassy Suites is one, they carry television feeds close-captioned in English and pretty obviously aimed at Americans.

A freebie for convention members was a trade paperback from the Parisian publisher Bragelonne, consisting of translations of stories from the “new French school of fantasy”. What I’ve read of it so far doesn’t yield many clues as to how la nouvelle fantaisie française differs from la vieille anglaise. This could be a complicated inquiry. After all, one of the primordial English fantasies, William Beckford’s Vathek, was composed in French. I noticed that a Bragelonne story takes it for granted that readers will be familiar with J. R. R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard, yet alludes to no French work or author.

There is no surprising news about future Worldcon bids. The long awaited Texas in 2013 bid made itself official, announcing that its site will be San Antonio, as in 1997. The facilities will consist of the convention center and the two face-to-face Marriotts, all familiar from LoneStarCon, plus a newly built Hyatt. A Japanese bid for 2017, without many details, also appeared. Somewhere-in-Britain-in-2014 threw a large, crowded party but isn’t yet ready to name a location. We still don’t know whether San Diego in 2015 will become a reality. Meanwhile, after interminable fumbles by the D.C. city government, construction of a Marriott Marquis next to the new (well, no longer all that new) Washington convention center is supposed to start in October. The hotel will have 1,100 sleeping rooms and 100,000 square feet of function space. All that a Washington in 20?? bid needs now is someone to launch it.

No future year yet has competing bids, and none of those announced to date is likely to attract opposition. There is thus an excellent chance of at least a five year run (2010 through 2014) without a Worldcon contest. I’m fairly sure that would be unprecedented.

For those who pay attention to such matters, the first day of the WSFS business meeting passed a couple of innocuous “sense of the house” resolutions and sent to oblivion a proposed constitutional amendment that would have mandated at least one female nominee in every Hugo Award category. Appallingly, ten people voted in favor. Saturday’s session will consider the abolition of the Best Semiprozine category, a measure that won preliminary approval last year but whose dynamics may have altered dramatically with the death of Locus publisher Charles N. Brown. We shall see in a few hours.

A convention highlight that I somehow managed to miss was an hour-and-a-half dialogue between former economist Paul Krugman and Scottish SF writer Charles Stross. To see Professor Krugman on the program startled me at first, but it’s entirely appropriate. His recent writings furnish overwhelming evidence that he lives in an alternative universe.

Hors de congrès, I saw that a cinema only two miles away was showing Moon, which has been highly recommended to me but has a very limited release. So I strolled over to see it. My quick verdict: Beautiful lunar photography, an intriguing concept, and a plot so full of holes I had trouble detecting any cheese. Sadly, I must consign this one to the “Wait for Netflix” category, even if the small screen will diminish the imagery.

The Incredible Shrinking Geithner, Continued

Remember when Timothy Geithner was the American economy’s Indispensable Man – so much so that his carelessness about filing accurate tax returns had to be put to one side. His reputation has shrunk since then. Tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal has a story that will diminish it further: “Geithner Vents as Overhaul Stumbles”. Last Friday, Mr. Geithner and the heads of the major financial regulatory agencies met to talk about the Administration’s proposals for tightening government control of the securities and credit markets.

Among those gathered in the Treasury conference room were Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Schapiro and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair.

Who were treated to “an expletive-laced critique”.

Friday’s roughly hourlong meeting was described as unusual, not only because of Mr. Geithner’s repeated use of obscenities, but because of the aggressive posture he took with officials from federal agencies generally considered independent of the White House. Mr. Geithner reminded attendees that the administration and Congress set policy, not the regulatory agencies.

True enough, but what was the impetus for the Secretary’s fury?

Government officials said Mr. Geithner had expected regulators to object to parts of the plan that threatened their power or authority, but Treasury officials appeared caught off guard at how much the criticism resonated with lawmakers. [emphasis added]

In other words, the trouble with the criticism is that members of Congress think that it’s well-founded. We can’t have that, you know. If too much thought goes into altering a regulatory scheme that affects every nook and cranny of economic life, the crisis might “go to waste”.

That Mr. Geithner goes along with the Administration’s demand for pell-mell action, instead of pointing out the need for close consideration of what went wrong last year and how (also, whether) the panic could have been headed off or ameliorated, is bad enough. That he can’t argue for his position without resorting to barnyard epithets strengthens the impression that he is much too little for his job, and growing smaller by the day.

Why Not a Birth Certificate?

Nirthers, near-nirthers and nirth travelers are fond of the reasonable sounding plea, “If Barack Obama has nothing to hide about his birthplace, why doesn’t he end the controversy by releasing his original birth certificate?”

I can answer that with a counter-question: Why would he want the controversy to end? It makes some of his critics looks foolish and draws attention away from his increasingly feckless record on domestic and foreign affairs. What’s more, even if a few people believe the nirther tale, it does him no real harm. There’d be no moral turpitude on his part if his mother and grandparents had lied about where he was born. Baby Boy Obama certainly didn’t participate in the deception; indeed, there would have been no reason for anyone to tell him about it.

An instructively contrasting nutcase theory is the notion that George W. Bush planned or deliberately allowed the 9/11 attacks. Complicity in mass murder is a trifle worse than forging a birth certificate. Naturally, most Democrats rejected this vile accusation against a Republican President. Er, to be precise, Democratic nonbelievers edge out believers by four percentage points (35% yes, 39% no, 26% undecided). A poll commissioned by the Krazy Kos Kidz (and therefore not likely to give any breaks to the GOP) found that Republicans with an opinion reject the nirther position by a three-to-two margin (42% no, 28% yes, 30% undecided).

It’s important for the Left’s propaganda arms to nurture that 28%, just as it was important to keep the Democrats’ large truther wing out of the public eye. And I’m afraid that some folks who ought to know better are helping the Left out. As a small push in the other direction, let me summarize why the nirthers’ demand for “the real birth certificate” is frivolous.

In 2001, Hawaii switched to a “paperless” birth records system. All of the data on extant birth certificates were keypunched into an electronic database. At that time, nobody outside of Hyde Park had heard of Barack Obama. Did a data entry clerk type in imaginary information about him? From whatever motive? Maybe she was a clairvoyant who foresaw that The One would need this small assist from a worshiper seven years hence?

Ergo, Barack Obama’s birth certificate existed in 2001 and contained the same facts as the Certification of Live Birth that the President has produced in response to nirther lawsuits (and that has satisfied every court that has reviewed it). Seeing the 1961 document will add nothing to what we already know.

In order to believe that Barack Obama was born somewhere other than Hawaii, one must believe, without a shred of evidence, that either (i) someone has tampered with Hawaii’s electronic records or (ii) the baby’s mother and grandparents concocted a fraud in 1961. That only the latter hypothesis is tenable is proven by the fact that there were contemporaneous announcements of his birth in the Honolulu newspapers.

For those inclined to believe that the Dunmores and their daughter lied about a birth that had actually taken place half a world away, running the risk that their fraud would be exposed by records maintained by the British administration in Kenya, let me suggest that this sort of conspiracy mongering can be taken further.

John S. McCain, III was supposedly born to U.S. citizen parents in Panama in 1936. How do we know that? From records no more inherently reliable than the State of Hawaii’s. Couldn’t John S. McCain, Jr. and his wife have secretly adopted a Panamanian child? Do you think it would have been hard for an admiral’s son to arrange matters with the proper local officials? Can you prove that he didn’t?

Rest assured, whoever your favorite Presidential candidate may turn out to be in 2012, just as convincing a case can be made against his citizenship as against Barack Obama’s. Or against hers – Where are Sarah Palin’s mother’s maternity records?

Somewhere, Rahm Emanuel is laughing.