Four months ago, while the Democrats were hatching their health care behemoths, only policy wonks noticed a report issued by the Social Security and Medicare trustees. It showed that the combined unfunded liability of the two programs has now reached $107 trillion. That's seven times the size of the U.S. economy, and it could go higher, as Medicare and Medicaid spending have consistently increased 2.5 percentage points faster than per capita GDP...]]> Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600 Attorney General Eric Holder adopted a tough guy pose when he announced that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others will be tried in federal court for the most heinous terror attack on Americans in history. "After eight years of delay," he intoned, "those allegedly responsible for the attacks of September 11 will finally face justice. It is past time to finally act."

Where to begin? The claim that the Bush administration was somehow dilatory sets a new standard for gall, particularly coming from Eric Holder. As former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy points out, "The principal reason there were so few military trials is the tireless campaign conducted by leftist lawyers...]]> Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600 President Obama, who nearly prostrated himself before the king of Saudi Arabia last April, has once again bowed low to a monarch -- this time to the emperor of Japan.

What to make of this obsequious body language?

After the presidential frame went perpendicular before the Saudi royal, the White House at first denied that the president had bowed. He was merely leaning over, Robert Gibbs explained, because the president was "taller than the king." That might make sense -- to anyone who had not seen the video. President Obama bent so far over that he was at eye level with the king's hips.

The president's defenders suggested that he was merely being polite, or simply...]]> Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600 Former President Bill Clinton visited Capitol Hill recently to deliver a pep talk to Senate Democrats. "It's not important to be perfect here. It's important to act, to move, to start the ball rolling," he reportedly told senators. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel sounded a similar theme in an interview with the New York Times. "I'm sure there are a lot of people sitting in the shade at the Aspen Institute ... who will tell you what the ideal plan is. Great, fascinating. You have the art of the possible measured against the ideal."

So the strategy on crafting sweeping legislation that will profoundly alter one-sixth of the U.S. economy in the midst of the worst recession in...]]> Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600 "U.S. Homeland Security officials are working with groups around the United States to head off any possible anti-Muslim backlash following the shootings at Fort Hood in Texas."

The Department of Homeland Security is in good company in its confusion. Gen. George Casey, the Army's top general, also worried that "this increased speculation could cause a backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers. And I've asked our Army leaders to be on the lookout for that." And President Obama cautioned against "jumping to conclusions."

The backlash trope is trotted out after every episode of terrorist violence. But it is as false as it is dangerous. This image of a nation on a hair...]]> Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600 President Obama likes to preen himself on his supposed moral superiority to his predecessor. He announced the closing of Guantanamo in his first week on the job (though 10 months on, it remains open) to advertise the new administration's disdain for George Bush's war-fighting tactics. And at every opportunity since, he has stressed that his policies -- on taxes, on the Middle East, on health care, on "man-caused disasters," and on "climate change" -- reflect a more refined and elevated morality than has ever before held sway in Washington, DC.

So you have to wonder how the president slept last Wednesday night.

He has known that critics in the United States regarded his...]]> Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600 I labeled it "Health Care Overhaul IV" for convenience. In fact, a new 2,000-page behemoth seems to emerge more than once a week from the maw of Congress, so it's becoming impossible to keep track.

Until now, my reasons for opposing this fright mask were entirely dispassionate and flowed from 1) common sense (how are they going to provide more care for less money, and can we afford another huge entitlement when existing ones are going bankrupt?); 2) experience (government entitlements always cost far more than projections and government is far less efficient at providing services than the private sector); and 3) philosophy (the way to reduce prices is to increase...]]> Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The war over the war in Gaza is heating up. Next week, the United Nations General Assembly will consider the tendentious Goldstone Report, the highest profile exercise in blaming the victim in the U.N.'s tawdry history. Simultaneously, lawyers in Britain, the Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, and Norway are drawing up criminal indictments against IDF officers who participated in the Gaza operation. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports that a number of names are on a police watch list for arrest and detention should they attempt to enter Britain.

Israel's enemies certainly seek to terrorize and demoralize Israel. But the more important campaign -- which is gaining traction -- is to...]]> Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 You've seen those commercials in which an airline pilot, or surgeon, or nuclear engineer is giving expert advice only to acknowledge eventually to his nonplussed listeners that while he is not actually a fill-in-the-blank, he did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night. Do you ever get the feeling that we are getting Holiday Inn Express government?

Does anything they say make basic economic sense? President Obama and the Democratic Party propose to save money (or what they call "bend the cost curve") on health care spending. They will spend less, they say, but also cover more people -- the 47 million or 30 million uninsured (Obama has used both numbers). This will be accomplished...]]> Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Maria Shriver's new report, "A Woman's Nation Changes Everything," has received a full dress media rollout. We are invited to examine the changes in women's lives over the past several decades and to deplore, as usual, the obstacles to full equality that women supposedly face. Published in cooperation with the Center for American Progress, "A Woman's Nation" claims to be reckoning with the new era but arguably fails to grapple with the most profound challenges to women (as well as children and men).

Some of what's in this report is a recycling of long-discredited data. Heather Boushey, for example, regurgitates the statistic that women only earn 77 cents on the dollar compared...]]> Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The world thinks better of the United States, we are told, because Barack Obama is in the White House. Maybe the world is wrong.

It's fanciful, of course, to speak of what "the world" thinks about anything. It's safe to say that among Norwegian prize givers and Canadian avant-garde filmmakers, Obama is extremely popular. And certainly among bien pensant Americans, the advent of Obama is viewed as the moral pinnacle of American history. It has always been a particular vanity of the left to believe itself morally superior to others. But the claims for this presidency have been beyond extravagant. Global human rights, morality, and justice took a "great leap forward" (as Anita Dunn's...]]> Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The world thinks better of the United States, we are told, because Barack Obama is in the White House. Maybe the world is wrong.

It's fanciful, of course, to speak of what "the world" thinks about anything. It's safe to say that among Norwegian prize givers and Canadian avant-garde filmmakers, Obama is extremely popular. And certainly among bien pensant Americans, the advent of Obama is viewed as the moral pinnacle of American history. It has always been a particular vanity of the left to believe itself morally superior to others. But the claims for this presidency have been beyond extravagant. Global human rights, morality, and justice took a "great leap forward" (as Anita Dunn's...]]> Fri, 16 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 "There is a tide in the affairs of men" -- Shakespeare

Yes, but undertows, too. As Obama, Pelosi, and Reid rush to transform America into a European-style social democratic state, they must be nervous; they must feel the sand sliding under their feet. The 2010 elections are just over the horizon and the omens are not encouraging for them. Thomas Jefferson warned that "Great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities." Maybe so. But the Democrats may be calculating that a slender majority is better than an anorexic majority, or no majority at all.

In 2006, it was Republicans who couldn't catch a break. The Iraq War was going very badly. The federal response to...]]> Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Picture this: It is midnight on Nov. 4, 2009. The previous day's elections in Virginia, New York's 23rd congressional district, and New Jersey have all been won by Republicans. Health reform is stalled. The latest employment numbers are still dismaying. President Obama cannot sleep. He paces the halls of the White House and comes upon a portrait of Warren Harding. Since President Obama is nothing if not a receptacle of received understanding, he would probably snort "Harding! What a disaster he was! Cronyism. Laissez-faire economics. Corruption. Incompetence."

Well, it's true that Teapot Dome and other scandals engulfed the Harding administration in 1923. And that's pretty much...]]> Fri, 09 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The air was thick with hypotheticals at the Supreme Court last week as the justices considered whether a law designed to outlaw videos depicting cruelty to animals was constitutional. Because there is no floor to human decadence, so-called "crush videos" depicting women in high heels crushing small animals to death enjoyed a certain popularity. Congress outlawed them. Most of the justices appeared to think that the law ran afoul of the First Amendment and they let fly with a quiver full of theoreticals. "What if I'm an aficionado of bullfighting who wants to promote his passion about the noble fight of man versus beast by selling videos?" Justice Scalia asked. Later, mocking the "bona...]]> Tue, 06 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Strangely, chatter about the "death of conservatism" is circulating this fall. I say "strangely" because we are in the midst of the greatest left/liberal moment in living memory. Liberal policies are careening out of Washington and mowing down innocent bystanders. This is the greatest opportunity since the Carter administration to illustrate to voters why conservatism is to be preferred. So it's downright weird that at this moment, we are being asked to ponder how far we have fallen from the glory days of William F. Buckley and Milton Friedman. "How awful for you," say those who never sympathized with conservatism, "that you have been reduced to Rush Limbaugh and Sean...]]> Fri, 02 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 There is nothing that makes some members of the chattering class more jumpy than the idea that women may be choosing to stay at home with their children. Still evidently shaken by a 2003 New York Times piece on female Princeton grads who elected to stay home and raise children, the Washington Post let out a nearly audible sigh of relief as it headlined a story on Census Bureau data "Most Stay-at-Home Moms Start That Way, Study
Finds: Many Are Younger, Less Educated, Hispanic."

Revealing the particular preoccupations of liberal land, reporter Donna St. George opens her story thus: "A first census snapshot of married women who stay at home to raise their children shows that the...]]> Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Well, that's one way to look at it. Writing in Haaretz, Orna Coussin praised Yom Kippur (the Jewish Day of Atonement that began Sunday night and ended Monday night) as the ultimate green holiday. Coussin is a secular Israeli and was expressing her appreciation for the fact that everyone is obliged to travel by foot on Yom Kippur. All traffic stops in Israel. No cars, busses, trains, or taxis clog the streets on that day. The shops and offices are closed and the city is given over to pedestrians.
"Last year, on Yom Kippur," she exults, "carbon monoxide levels fell from
205 parts per billion, on the day prior to the holiday, to just 2 parts per billion at its height -- a...]]> Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 President Obama's speech to the United Nations has been called naive and even "post-American." It was something else, as well: the most extravagant excursion into self-worship we have yet seen in an American leader.

Beware of politicians who claim to be "humbled by the responsibility the American people have placed upon me." It's a neon sign flashing the opposite. And sure enough, in almost the next sentence, the president allowed that "I am well aware of the expectations that accompany my presidency around the world." Really? The whole world pulses with hope and expectation because Obama is president? People in Amsterdam, Sao Paulo and Taipei have a spring in their step because...]]> Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Irving Kristol, who passed away last week at the age of 89, was like everyone's favorite uncle -- if the uncle were a transformative intellectual of empyrean stature. He was both a warm and approachable human being and a penetrating social critic. He was, in a very American way, a practical man, and his approach to ideas was always firmly and refreshingly reality-based.

Irving Kristol was born in New York in 1920, so it was inevitable that he would become, for a short time at least, a socialist. But even as a young socialist, Kristol was skeptical about the principal animating sentiment of the left: a belief in man's perfectibility. As early as 1944, Kristol wrote of his...]]> Fri, 18 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The United Nations Human Rights Council, a putrid perversion of every high ideal upon which it was founded, has issued a report calling the Israelis war criminals. The HRC has also, in obedience to the wishes of Chavez and Castro, ejected the representative from Honduras. In the very week it has committed these outrages, the Obama administration has announced that the United States, which quit the organization in 2006, will rejoin.
Brilliant.

The Human Rights Council is the successor to the thoroughly discredited U.N. Human Rights Commission, which boasted such members as China, Zimbabwe, Russia, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. In 2004, the commission unanimously accepted...]]> Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The Democrats have never seen a problem they didn't think could be fixed with a government program. And they sometimes discern crises crying out for government solutions where there are none.

Remember the "digital divide"? It was, we heard from Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., in 1998, "the next civil rights movement." The unconscionable gap in Internet access between whites and minorities required, of course, a new $2.25 billion annual tax (it was called the "E-rate") to be levied on telecommunications companies (who naturally passed it along to their customers). Congressman Bobby Rush, D-Ill., outlined the liberal understanding:

"There are millions of youngsters who are...]]> Fri, 11 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Let's stipulate that it was wrong of Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., to shout "You lie" during President Obama's health care speech. It was a violation of courtesy and etiquette. Wilson apologized -- which is more than the Democrats who booed President Bush's State of the Union address in 2005 ever did.

But I confess that watching at home, similar expostulations were heard. Some seemed to have burst, irrepressible, from my own lips.

There was, for starters, this misleading assertion: " ... If you are among the hundreds of millions of Americans who already have health insurance through your job, or Medicare, or Medicaid, or the VA, nothing in this plan will require you or your...]]> Wed, 09 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Arguably violating its embed agreement, the near universal press practice since 9/11, and the expressed wishes of the family, the Associated Press went ahead and published a photograph of mortally wounded Marine Lance Corporal Joshua "Bernie" Bernard, killed in action in Afghanistan. The AP also ignored the pleas of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who had implored the press agency as a "matter of judgment and common decency" not to publish the photo.

Bernard, 21, a devout Christian and Iraq War veteran from Maine, was described by his squad leader as "a true-heartedly very good guy ... probably one of the best guys I've known in my entire life." Bernard served as his unit's...]]> Fri, 04 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 As Democratic congressmen limp back to D.C. after bruising town hall meetings, and polls show Obama and the Democrats in Congress sinking fast in public opinion polls, the political team in the West Wing has surveyed the landscape and decided that what we need is another big Obama speech. "Under Fire" headlined The Politico, "Obama Shifts Strategy." Shifts? Obama has held four full-dress, primetime news conferences, granted God knows how many interviews, and delivered dozens and dozens of speeches on health care. A cartoonist featured an exasperated voter looking at the president on TV and asking, "Is he on again?"

Still, another speech could be helpful -- if President...]]> Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Well, thank Heaven George W. Bush is no longer president! Gosh, all of that mixing of religion and politics darn near subverted our Constitution -- which, as all good liberals know -- enshrines the "wall of separation" between church and state.

What? That phrase doesn't appear in the Constitution? No matter. Democrats know that conservative Republicans, particularly Christians, are dangerous religious fanatics.

When Democrats invoke the Almighty, though, it's altogether different. Religion in a Democrat is evidence of deep moral commitment, even greatness. Many of the eulogies to Teddy Kennedy mentioned his "quiet Catholic faith." His favorite parts of Scripture, we were...]]> Fri, 28 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The death of Sen. Edward Kennedy, we are being told, should strengthen our resolve to act in a bipartisan fashion. Many of the tributes, from former presidents and Republican colleagues, have stressed the late senator's willingness to find "common ground." Well, since ancient Rome we've been exhorted not to speak ill of the dead. But neither should we completely disfigure the truth.

Before offering some less than hagiographic reflections on the late Sen. Edward Kennedy (may he rest in peace), one pleasant memory: About a decade ago, I was late for a party in northwest Washington D.C. -- a neighborhood not known for abundant parking spaces. After circling the block several times, I...]]> Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The lights are going out in Venezuela. The Chavez-controlled legislature passed an education bill on Aug. 13 that will extinguish the last glimmers of free thought in the country's classrooms. The law is such a caricature of revolutionary legislation that it almost seems like a joke, like something out of Woody Allen's "Bananas." But it's not funny for Venezuelans. Schools will now be required to teach "Bolivarian doctrine," a vague catchall for Chavez's sloganeering. They will be supervised by "communal councils" (read commissars from the socialist party) and the central government will decide who can and who cannot enter universities and the teaching profession.

The new law...]]> Fri, 21 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 He was certainly brave, but was he crazy? That's what I wondered when I picked up Rory Stewart's "The Places in Between," an account of the Scotsman's 2002 solo walk across Afghanistan. That's right, he walked. Many Afghans doubted he would survive the journey. Just weeks after the fall of the Taliban, in the dead of winter, in some of the most remote and difficult terrain in the inhabited world, he went from village to village on foot. Relying on the tradition of hospitality, Stewart found welcome, sustenance, and shelter (mostly, but not always) graciously offered by people who had very little to share.

Stewart, a British Foreign Service officer, (he served in southern Iraq...]]> Tue, 18 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 A comedian once said that visiting Canada was like rummaging in your attic. "You go up there and say 'Wow, there's all this neat stuff up here! There are mountains and rivers and cities." And a parliament and a television network.

It is a fact of life -- sad or not I leave to readers -- that most Americans have no strong feelings about our northern neighbor because we often forget entirely that Canada exists.

Having just returned from a nine-day trip to "Beautiful British Columbia" (it's on their license plates) I can attest that there is much to admire in Canada. BC abundantly deserves its moniker. The mountains plunging down to the sea are a very spectacular effect,...]]> Tue, 04 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 A plucky teller foiled a robbery attempt at Key Bank in Seattle. But the story does not end happily. When a small man in a beanie cap, dark clothing, and sunglasses pushed a backpack across the counter and announced, "This is a ransom. Fill the bag with money," teller Jim Nicholson ignored his training and "instinct took over." He lunged across the counter and attempted to grab the thief by the throat or at least to pull his glasses off. The nonplussed would-be robber bolted for the door with Nicholson on his heels. A couple of blocks away, with the help of others, Nicholson tackled the guy and held him until police arrived.

Two days later, Key Bank got in touch with Nicholson. A...]]> Fri, 31 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Charles Murray, no slouch among public intellectuals, described him as the most underrated public intellectual in America today. Murray offered this assessment of George Gilder at a recent American Enterprise Institute colloquium to discuss Gilder's newest book, "The Israel Test." Murray explained: From Gilder's national debut with "Sexual Suicide" (later reissued as "Men and Marriage"), to his seminal "Wealth and Poverty," to his farsighted "Microcosm," Gilder makes being ahead of his times look easy. And, Murray noted with admiration, Gilder has always been right.

Is Gilder underrated? Yes, because his gifts and contributions deserve more or less full-time...]]> Tue, 28 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The last moments of President Obama's press conference last week have gotten the most attention, and some of the president's supporters have wondered whether his big-footed interference in the Cambridge professor's melodrama has overshadowed Obama's push for health care reform.

But the president's response to Gatesgate actually sheds a lot of light on his approach to health care and other issues, for this reason: Obama adopts his positions before knowing what he is talking about. To be fair, Obama admitted as much, at least as far as Gates was concerned. "I don't know all the facts," he acknowledged, before launching into a lecture (later retracted) about the "stupidity" of the...]]> Fri, 24 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 There were so many examples of presidential mendacity on view Wednesday night that I had planned to itemize a few in this column. But since even the New York Times is challenging a number of presidential whoppers -- for example, Obama's assertion that "If we had done nothing, if you had the same old budget as opposed to the changes we made, the deficit over the next 10 years would be $2.2 trillion greater" is pure deception.
OK, the Times didn't use that word, but reporters Peter Baker and Robert Pear did say, "In fact, $1.5 trillion of those 'savings' are mainly based on an assumption that the United States would have had as many troops in Iraq in 10 years as it did when Mr. Obama...]]> Tue, 14 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 That is, two of my children have. This piece of heaven is called Interlochen Center for the Arts, and having just visited, I fully comprehend the ecstasy they feel.

In a leveling world, Interlochen is all about two unfashionable concepts that we conservatives revere: tradition and excellence. None of this "everybody gets a trophy just for showing up." Not here (though arguably, just being able to be here -- only one in five are admitted -- amounts to a valuable trophy). Twenty-five hundred students in grades 3-12 from every state in the union and 40 countries converge on this breezy sylvan enclave between two sparkling lakes for several weeks of intensive training and performance...]]> Fri, 10 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Obama economic adviser Laura Tyson has suggested that the U.S. should consider a new economic stimulus package because the $787 billion bill enacted in February was "a bit too small." Right. That $787 billion came just months after the Bush stimulus of $150 billion (how quaint it seems in retrospect), the $700 billion TARP program, the $60 billion auto bailout, and a $3.6 trillion budget for the next fiscal year among other spending orgies. President Obama has declined to rule out another gargantuan transfer payment from the future to the present. Other Democrats, Roll Call suggests, are less enthusiastic. "Bailout fatigue has settled in -- and it would be very difficult to get such a...]]> Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The French Republic is not blessed or burdened with a First Amendment. So when President Nicolas Sarkozy recently suggested that France ban the wearing of the burqa in all public places, the Chamber of Deputies took it up.

Unlike the headscarf, which covers a woman's hair but leaves her face visible, the burqa is a head-to-toe covering that makes walking draperies of women. Some, like the chador worn in Afghanistan, feature a mesh covering for the face. The Saudi version usually sports a slit for the eyes. Here's an online catalogue's description of one: "Khimar and niqab set made of an all season, buttery soft georgette. Reaches to approximately knee level (depending upon your...]]> Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The news that Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was removed from his post and spirited out of the country by the Honduran military has elicited official condemnations from the governments of France, Ecuador, Chile, Spain, and Argentina; as well as protests from the Organization of American States and the United Nations. The U.S. State Department called the events an "attempted coup," and demanded that Mr. Zelaya be returned to power in order to facilitate the "restoration of democratic order."

Hold on. There was an attempted coup in Honduras, but it was Zelaya who initiated it, not his opponents. As the invaluable Mary Anastasia O'Grady reported in the Wall Street Journal, Zelaya,...]]> Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 "The author is ending her marriage. Isn't it time you did the same?" So the Atlantic Monthly provocatively introduces its July/August feature "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off." It comes at a propitious moment. This seems to be the week for TMI -- too much information. South Carolina's Gov. Mark Sanford has told more, much more, than we needed to know about his mistress (how he met her, how their relationship ripened), his views on God's laws, on the Appalachian Trail, and on forgiveness.

Why must wayward American public figures stage these auto autos da fe -- these self-immolations on TV? Dignity, which arises from a proper sense of keeping private matters private, is a lost...]]> Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 It's become almost a parlor game to watch Obamaphiles spin the president's response to events in Iran. Uninfatuated observers have noticed that the president displayed a tepid and unsatisfying neutrality to events in the streets of Iran following the sham election -- just as he had done last summer when the Russians staged an invasion of Georgia. His first instinct was to preserve his bona fides for negotiating with the mullahs -- bona fides that he has been at pains to demonstrate over the past several months. Starting last January, President Obama put doubts about the nature of the regime in Tehran to one side and offered blandishments to the leadership of what he was careful to call...]]> Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Someone few Americans had ever heard of one week ago now stands poised to alter history. His name is Mir Hossein Mousavi and his case utterly debunks the school of historians who insist that history is made by large impersonal forces rather than by key individuals. While it is certainly true that Iran's current crisis had many antecedents, it is equally true that the decisions of this one man will play a decisive role in the outcome.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has accepted the congratulations of Syria's Bashar Assad and Russia's Dmitri Medvedev on his wonderful victory. Many people find it wonderful, though not in the sense he or Supreme Leader Khamenei would prefer....]]> Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 In 1980, after Soviet tanks rumbled into Afghanistan, President Jimmy Carter experienced an epiphany. The former Georgia governor, who in 1977 liberated the U.S. from its "inordinate fear of communism" and pecked Brezhnev on both cheeks, declaring that he and the Soviet leader "shared similar dreams and aspirations," was shocked by this naked aggression. "...The action of the Soviets," he admitted, "made a more dramatic change in my opinion of what the Soviets' ultimate goals are than anything they've done the previous time I've been in office."

Some people are slow learners. Leave aside the 20 million dead under Stalin, the subjugation of Eastern Europe, the Gulag, and the show...]]> Fri, 12 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 "This Time, We Won't Scare" boasts New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, strapping on his armor for the coming joust. The health care debate will be cheapened, he warns us, by scaremongers, just like those who "spread rumors" during the campaign that Barack Obama was a "secret Muslim conspiring to impose Sharia law on us." It will be subsidized, he says, by "the same firm that orchestrated the 'Swift boat campaign' against Senator John Kerry in 2004."

It's difficult to have an honest debate if your first move is to attempt to delegitimize the other side. Many liberals seem to believe that they never lose debates over policy; they are instead undone by conspiracies, lies, and...]]> Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 You might suppose that President Obama has his hands full running two wars, administering General Motors, "rescuing" the banking system, attempting to empower unions over management, hushing up whispers about hypocrisy regarding Guantanamo detainees, managing the mortgage crisis, imposing "clean energy" on the nation, handling nuclear North Korea and nearly nuclear Iran, "stimulating" the economy, reviving the "peace process" between Palestinians and Israelis, inaugurating a new relationship with Russia and with the Muslim world, and reversing the rise of the world's oceans, but no, he has one more agenda item -- overhauling U.S. health care.

The administration is hoping that a...]]> Fri, 05 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 In Cairo, President Obama told (was it for the 100th time?) the story of his African father and American mother. This story has worked well for him in the American context, and he seems to believe that it will beguile the rest of the world as well. We shall see whether this experiment with autobiography as foreign policy has purchase.

But while some of his appeal to Muslims for common ground was certainly benign, there were aspects of the speech that may create more problems than they solve.

Obama has signaled to the Arab world that his administration is willing to pressure Israel about settlements in the West Bank. Asked before his Middle East trip about relations with...]]>