9/11 Remembered

I have told this story before, but I was in the Pentagon at the time of the attack. As it happens, I was far enough away from the site of the crash that I couldn't say for sure that I actually heard or felt anything at the moment of impact. A few minutes earlier, although there wasn't a television set or radio handy, rumors of the attack at the World Trade Center were already circulating throughout the building and we were trying to get more information through the internet.

What I did finally hear and pay attention to only moments later was the sound of other people rushing down the corridor, heading for the nearest exit. I still didn't know what had happened, but if they all thought leaving the building was a good idea, well, you know. I joined the crowd and literally less than two minutes I was out in the South Parking lot, walking rapidly away from the building.

The South Parking side of the Pentagon is to the south of the Heliport side where the airplane hit. I couldn't see anything over there except a huge and rapidly growing plume of jet black smoke. The most likely inference at that point was a helicopter crash causing a fire, which was what I assumed. As people continued to pour out of the Pentagon, however, it also became clear that it would probably take at least an hour or two before the "all clear" signal was given and the crowd of some 25,000 people could re-enter the building. My car was parked not far away, so I simply kept walking to it and then drove off.

It was only when I turned on the car radio as I pulled out of the parking lot that I discovered what had happened. In fact, as I took the ramp exit to I 395 South / Washington Blvd., I could finally see the burning crater in the side of the Pentagon where the airplane hit. I could hear sirens approaching from every direction as I drove away in the opposite direction.

Not that it would have done me any good, but I didn't have a cell phone on September 11, 2001. (I own one now, at my wife's insistence, and that is frankly one more thing I hold against the terrorists, trivial as that is.) I drove to my wife's office and we decided, since we had no idea how extensive the attacks were or whether there would be more, to pull our children from school and then determine from there whether to leave the immediate Washington, D.C. vicinity. As it happened, we remained at home glued to the television. I would do exactly the same thing if the same situation were to occur again.

Obviously, the situation at the World Trade Centers was vastly worse. Still, I went back to the Pentagon the next day and entered long enough to witness the incredible smoke damage even as far away from the point of attack as I had been the previous morning. While none of the victims were personal friends, a number were people with whom I had done business over the years.

Mine isn't, therefore, a particularly dramatic, let alone tragic story. More like a brush with history, actually. It's worth remembering, though, how much the U.S. has changed since and because of 9/11. Normal is whatever you grow up with or grow used to. America's continuing psychological sense of siege in what increasingly seems not only to be a long but a perpetual war against terrorism feels more and more "normal" all the time. Surely, that is a far greater harm than even the terrible death and destruction of seven years ago.

Suzanne Scholte Wins Seoul Peace Prize

I’m very pleased to report here that Suzanne Scholte, a friend, fellow William & Mary graduate and the wife of my college roommate, has been chosen as the ninth winner of the biennial Seoul Peace Prize. As the linked article notes, several former winners have subsequently been selected to receive the Nobel Peace Prize as well. My heartfelt congratulations to Suzanne and to her family.

Democratic ’08 Ticket: O.- B., But No GYN

Two or three semi-random thoughts on Obama’s selection of Joe Biden. First, my son’s intelligence (read: information, not I.Q.) from working this summer on a “Blue Dog” Democrat’s re-election campaign turned out to be entirely accurate. (Note to Self: Remember to listen to son occasionally in the future.)

Second, given Biden’s solidly liberal record, Obama has determined that he does not need to position himself to appear closer to the political middle in order to win. (Yes, I know there are even more liberal Democrats Obama might have chosen, but a quick perusal of the infallible, inerrant and entirely trustworthy Wikipedia entry leads me to the conclusion that a “moderate liberal” is someone who purports to oppose the Castro regime in Cuba.) It suggests, also, that Obama thinks (I think correctly) that he is vulnerable regarding foreign affairs and that Biden will provide additional credibility.

Most intriguingly, however, is that Obama chose a man. Hey, black men got the vote before white women did, too, so he’s just being traditional, right? Seriously, though, and aside from ensuring that Hillary Clinton will now work tirelessly, day and night, to see to it that Obama loses in November, does Obama believe that too much demographic “change we can believe in” is a loser in the general election? Does he believe (I suspect correctly) that liberal white women can be taken for granted come November just as black voters have historically been taken for granted by the Democratic Party? Does he believe that there really aren’t any sufficiently qualified women out there? (Hillary included?)

Finally, does he really believe Joe Biden is the best qualified man not merely to help him win the White House but to serve as Vice President? Nah, whatever else is going on, it sure as hell couldn’t be that. Could it?

New Corn Laws Adam Smith Would Also Dislike*

Diamonds are scarce like every other economic good. Their scarcity, however, is vastly exaggerated by those in the business of marketing them as a luxury. If the cure for cancer were discovered tomorrow, however, and if it somehow required natural, i.e., not man-made diamonds, the demand for diamonds would skyrocket and they would legitimately command an even higher price.

Food, by contrast, is not a luxury but a necessity, at least in its most elementary forms. Moreover, the poorer you are, the more you will spend of whatever your income may be on food and the more vulnerable you will be to any sudden and significant increase in its price. Four dollar a gallon gasoline inconveniences middle-class Americans but a 75% increase in global food prices is catastrophic for poor people around the world.

Which is precisely what an unpublished World Bank study is being reported as claiming.

In the rush to report such things (and, yes, the rush to report such reports), it more often than not occurs that sensational conclusions such as this are not only misleadingly taken out of context but, once the data is actually made available, subsequently shown to be unsubstantiated by that data. That needs to be said here, as well.

Still, whatever the figure may be, whether it is 75% or the laughably and unbelievably small 3% the U.S. government has claimed plant-derived fuels contribute to recent food price increases, it takes no more than common sense (never in large supply, I grant you) and a passing grade in intro economics to realize that a new and large demand for a commodity will at the very least temporarily raise its market price. Moreover, at some point, if that demand continues or, worse yet, continues to grow, suppliers will not be able to meet such increased demand at whatever the former market price may have been.

U.S. energy policy (not unlike U.S. health care policy) is criminally broken. I mean “criminal” in a moral, not a legal sense, and yet the fact that alternative bio-fuels like ethanol are being mandated by our elected weasels in Washington artificially skewing both the energy and the food markets and contributing no end to the misery of the world’s poor probably should be a crime of some sort. It is, in fact, simply a forced redistribution of wealth for nothing more than the ephemeral political advantage of those office holders who temporarily placate their constituencies as a result, never mind the unintended and sometimes tragic consequences others must suffer.

But that is the political reality. Starving people in third world nations don’t vote in U.S. elections, whereas Kansas and Nebraska corn farmers do.

(* Yes, I do in fact know that when Adam Smith first wrote about corn laws the word "corn" was a generic term for grains.)

Torture By Any Other Name

I strongly encourage you to read Christopher Hitchens' first-hand account of the experience of waterboarding in Vanity Fair.

When news first broke that U.S. personnel were using this "enhanced interrogation technique," the ensuing discussions broke into two separate questions: (1) are such techniques torture and (2) regardless, are such techniques ever morally justified.

Much to the dismay of my former co-blogger Thoreau, I have steadfastly remained agnostic on the second question, perhaps to the point where the casual reader might have inferred that I was implicitly sanctioning such behavior in our current, endless War On Terrorism™.

No. I was not. I do not.

Nor have I sanctioned or do I sanction the despicable practice of extraordinary rendition in which the U.S. delivers prisoners into the hands of our less punctilious "allies" to be tortured.

I do not, nonetheless, rule out the occasional, exceptional case where the utilitarian calculus is overwhelmingly in favor of taking the risk torture might work versus the more likely harm to come if it is not attempted. Such scenarios are, ex hypothesi, immune to criticisms that they may not or will not work. Sometimes long shots are all you have.

But, as Thoreau has also pointed out repeatedly, the greatest care must be taken to ensure that the exception does not become the rule, that we do not become beguiled by fear into condoning that which is both rationally and morally beneath us as a people.

Returning to the first point, however, I must confess that in my personal, experiential ignorance of such things I considered it at first an open question whether waterboarding did or should qualify as a torture technique. But whatever initial benefit of the doubt we might once have given officials who either denied waterboarding is torture or attempted to hide behind bureaucratic euphemisms has long since passed. (Such officials, it hardly needs to be added, long ago forfeited any entitlement whatsoever to credibility, anyway.)

I have what I think is, under the circumstances, a modest and reasonable recommendation. Anyone who continues to assert or argue that waterboarding does not constitute torture should immediately be afforded the opportunity to experience it first-hand it as Mr. Hitchens did. If, having done so, he continues to wish to assert that waterboarding is not torture, we should consider his opinion for whatever we believe it is worth.

Otherwise -- that is, should he not avail himself of that opportunity -- he should politely but firmly be told to shut the f*ck up.

The Ethics of Public Health and Safety Officials

Today’s (UK) Independent Online runs a story entitled "Threat of world Aids pandemic among heterosexuals is over, report admits." While noting that the now over 25 year old disease continues to kill “more than all wars and conflicts,” the far more newsworthy (in the sense of new and unusual) part of the story is as follows:

In the first official admission that the universal prevention strategy promoted by the major Aids organizations may have been misdirected, Kevin de Cock, the head of the WHO's department of HIV/Aids said there will be no generalized epidemic of Aids in the heterosexual population outside Africa.

This is, to be sure, not good news for homosexuals or Africans; but it is, that sad fact notwithstanding, well past time the epidemiological realities of HIV/Aids risk were acknowledged. Just in case there is an outbreak of candor going on among public officials (yes, I know), perhaps someone could say the same thing about resources misspent through the generalized screening for possible terrorist suspects to avoid profiling.

This is a delicate topic. When the “pink disease” was first detected among a handful of homosexual men in Los Angeles in the early 1980s, this originally named Gay Related Immune Deficiency began to attract serious general public attention in the U.S. only after cases of heterosexuals contracting the disease (e.g., female sexual partners of AIDS patients and blood transfusion recipients) were documented. I speak here purely anecdotally, but my impression in the early to mid 1980s was that the U.S. shifted rapidly from a state of almost complete indifference over the plight of homosexuals and IV drug users to a state of panic over their own risk.

Of course, the medical community was mostly ignorant of the nature of HIV/Aids, itself, in the 1980s. But a decade later we had a much better understanding of the retrovirus and, thankfully, much better available treatments. Most relevant here, however, we also had ample epidemiological evidence leading to an almost overwhelmingly obvious conclusion: white, heterosexual male, non-IV drug users -- in other words, the demographic group who wielded the most power in the U.S. and, indeed, in the world – faced just about the smallest real risk of contracting HIV/Aids possible.

Counter-factual arguments being what they are, there is no way of telling whether public support and, more to the point, public funding for HIV/Aids research would have been nearly as extensive in the past quarter century if the general public had known that claims of the universal risk of contracting HIV/Aids were, although true, highly misleading.

Certainly, however, it is at least not unreasonable to suspect that support and funding would not have been as extensive, and perhaps not nearly as extensive, which raises the following interesting ethical question: Is misinforming or misleading the public ever ethically justified on grounds of public health and safety?

By way of addressing this issue somewhat obliquely, let’s ignore for now concerns about giving undeserved ammunition to homophobes and drug warriors whose worldview continues to include the belief that HIV/Aids is God’s punishment for being gay or using drugs. (In passing, I have yet to hear from those who hold that view how it is that God is so piss-poor at punishing junkies and queers that all He can manage to do is put them in a higher risk category?!?) Let’s consider Africa, instead.

A month or so ago, the Onion ran an almost throw away one-liner in the crawl below one of their Onion News Network videos. It read:

ABC cancels new reality show Who Wants To Save Africa? after second episode.

Indeed. (And, yeah, it’s so painfully true that it is funny.)

Of course, you’d be hard pressed to come up with ways in which sub-Saharan Africa isn’t a basket case, and even if you could magically eliminate HIV/Aids from the continent, Africa’s public health record would still be abysmal. But, no doubt about it, HIV/Aids has been epidemic in Africa’s general population to an extent unlike everywhere else. Why?

Dr. de Cock (I know, I know!) says:

It is the question we are asked most often – why is the situation so bad in sub-Saharan Africa? It is a combination of factors – more commercial sex workers, more ulcerative sexually transmitted diseases, a young population and concurrent sexual partnerships.

Sexual behavior is obviously important but it doesn't seem to explain [all] the differences between populations. Even if the total number of sexual partners [in sub-Saharan Africa] is no greater than in the UK, there seems to be a higher frequency of overlapping sexual partnerships creating sexual networks that, from an epidemiological point of view, are more efficient at spreading infection.

Which is to say that there are not only political and economic differences but also social differences in much of African culture which make the spread of HIV/Aids that much more intractable.

Here is the reality, though. As terrible as HIV/Aids is, it is only one of the terrible ways people die needlessly in Africa or, for that matter, around the world. As reason’s Ronald Bailey recently wrote in a report on the 2008 Copenhagen Consensus Conference, “[T]he number 1 priority identified by the experts in the 2004 Copenhagen Consensus was combating HIV/AIDS. That dropped to number 19 in the 2008 ranking."

Ceteris paribus, the same must be said of the U.S., as well.

There are, to be sure, all sorts of objections that can be raised in good faith to that perspective. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if the medical research focusing on a cure for HIV/Aids didn’t yield important findings for other diseases and disorders. I suspect that the rise of HIV/Aids in the U.S. actually contributed positively to the struggle for gay civil and human rights, ironically enough. Whether disingenuous or not, suggesting that the entire population was similarly at risk for HIV/Aids diminished the stigma unfairly attached to those who, for whatever reason, contracted it. These are certainly collateral benefits to the emphasis in HIV/Aids research and public health policy in the past twenty-five or so years.

But every benefit has a cost, and every tradeoff is susceptible to the reasonable question, was that a good deal? Put differently, only progressives – and not very bright progressives, at that – whine at this point “Well, it shouldn’t be a case of ‘Either / Or.’ We should be able to support HIV/Aids research and treatment and address all those other health and safety problems, too. You’re arguing a false dilemma.”

It may be a false “dilemma,” but it is a very real tradeoff. A dollar spent on X is necessarily not a dollar spent on Y.

So, too, with our most recent insanity, the War On People Living In Caves Terrorism and its most strikingly absurd manifestation in commercial air travel. Randomly searching the luggage and persons of geriatric Lutheran women from Minnesota will not increase air safety any more than police All Points Bulletins advising to be on the lookout for suspects “of no particular demographic characteristics” will help apprehend the bad guys. To all intent and purposes, such women are the statistical equivalents of the white, heterosexual male, non-IV drug users in the case of HIV/Aids.

Yes, there’s a real and vitally important difference between describing someone who has actually committed a crime and targeting people simply because there is a statistically significant correlation between their demographic characteristics and the commission of a potential crime. (And, yes, police engage in the sort of racial profiling that no court can prohibit because, for better or worse, it’s the same sort Jesse Jackson and Chris Rock engage in. And, yes, it’s a bad thing and one of the reasons why, comparatively speaking, being black in America still sucks.)

And there’s “always the possibility,” the ever incompetently vigilant TSA will tell you, that Osama Bin Laden could recruit some Prairie Home Companion grandmother to pack some C-4 up her, well, you know to blow up that puddle jumper from Omaha to Ft. Worth, too. Absolutely true. Here are some other possible occurrences: invasion by space aliens, commercially viable cold fusion energy using ordinary household products, George W. Bush winning the Nobel Peace Prize, my wife finally unpacking and sorting the stuff in the garage (Ouch! Sorry, dear!), a Pauly Shore movie not sucking, and, well, you get the picture.

Exaggerating the risk from or to Group A while discounting the risk from or to Group B always has attendant costs, costs that could otherwise be used to address some of those other perhaps even more important health and safety issues. In some cases, those attendant costs have been unconsciously, obscenely high.

So I return to the original question. Is misinforming or misleading the public ever ethically justified on grounds of public health and safety? When public support for a policy objective, any policy objective depends on deliberately misinforming the public, part of the non-economic attendant costs of that lie must surely be harm to the very core of popular sovereignty.

It remains to be seen whether we will abandon the rewards and risks of genuine popular sovereignty for the promise of health, safety and happiness from our paternalistic nannies. Reality is always a mixed bag, but many recent trends suggest we are well down the road toward making a very bad tradeoff.

Gas Rationing ... (wait for it... ) In Iran?

I don’t know about the ‘Arab Street,’ but according to Azadeh Moaveni, the ‘Iranian Bus’ thinks a U.S. Invasion might not be such a bad thing. Of course, the woman on the bus doesn't really mean it, but what U.S. citizen these days hasn’t wistfully imagined some Deus Ex Machina could magically cure us of our incompetent leadership? (As opposed, let’s be clear, to merely replacing it with new lying weasels next January.) Why should Iran be any different?

Look, I’m no Sharon Stone or anything like that, but maybe it’s karma that we get not only the government we deserve but the enemies we deserve, as well. How else to explain, for example, that the Iranian government controls bread loaf prices but not loaf sizes? Now there’s brilliant economic policy for you. Then, too, how else to explain their President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, possibly the only foreign leader George Bush might actually beat fair and square in a game of Trivial Pursuit, even the International Edition.

Anyway, the Moaveni piece is well worth a read. We are more than a generation away now from the fall of the Shah. Most Iranians today have no memories of the Pahlavis on the Peacock Throne or their SAVAK enforcers, but plenty of bad memories of life under the Ayatollahs. Maybe if we just left these people alone ....

Pssst! Hey, Can You Keep A Secret?

What I am about to tell you is controlled unclassified information enhanced with specified dissemination:

1. George W. Bush is an idiot.

2. As controlled unclassified information goes, #1 isn't much of a secret. Still, try not to let it slip out beyond, oh, say, our solar system lest galactic embarrassment ensue.

3. "Controlled unclassified information enhanced with specified dissemination" sounds simultaneously pompous and stupid, like Dean Wormer's "double secret probation" except it's even more like how Otter would explain to Flounder where the emergency beer keg was hidden.

4. Reading any biography of the young George W. Bush makes points #1 through #3 not only obvious but unnecessary. That is all. Over and out.

... or would Jason vs. Freddie be more apt?

Let's take a break from consideration of Emperor George's sweeping new antepenultimate claim of Executive Privilege. (The penultimate claim will be that even if Bush were impeached and convicted, actual ouster from the White House would require executive branch personnel whom, as a matter of Executive Privilege, the President can order to disregard the impeachment. The ultimate claim will be indefinite suspension of elections, "lest the terrorists win.") Let's look instead at something slightly less trivial than fired U.S. Attorneys like, oh, say, the war in Iraq.

Admittedly, taking sides in a p*ssing contest between the Bush Administration and Hillary Rodham Clinton is a bit like taking sides in Alien vs. Predator. To quote the movie's tag line: Whoever wins... We lose. Still, the contratemp between the Department of Defense and Hillary in her occasional capacity as a U.S. senator is worth a quick look. The story thus far is that Clinton wrote to Defense Secretary Robert Gates requesting information regarding current DoD contingency plans for troop withdrawal from Iraq or, if such plans did not exist, an explanation why.

Now, let's not kid ourselves, boys and girls. The letter was almost certain a political ploy from the start. Clinton knows that the Defense Department has contingency plans tucked away somewhere for just about every scenario imaginable probably including invasion by Vatican City. (That's not to say such plans have been approved at any high level, but only that they exist.) She also knows full well how Congress goes about seeking and securing information from the Defense Department and therefore how to make a 'request' designed to be rebuked, however politely and respectfully.

Be that as it may, all hell broke loose when recess appointee Eric S. Edelman, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, sent Clinton a reply, the verbatim second page of which (as opposed to the snippets commonly excerpted by the press and blogosphere) is as follows:

Although we share our commanders' belief in ours and the Iraqi Security Forces' ability to establish security in Baghdad, this is only a precondition for further political and economic progress, not a guarantee of it. Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia. Such talk understandably unnerves the very same Iraqi allies we are asking to assume enormous personal risks in order to achieve compromises on national reconciliation, amending the Iraqi constitution, and other contentious issues. Fear of a precipitate U.S. withdrawal also exacerbates sectarian trends in Iraqi politics as sectarian factions become more concerned with achieving short-term tactical advantages rather than reaching the long-term agreements necessary for a stable and secure Iraq.

I assure you, however, that as with other plans, we are always evaluating and planning for possible contingencies. As you know, it is long-standing departmental policy that operational plans, including contingency plans, are not released outside of the department.

I appreciate your interest in our mission in Iraq and would be happy to answer any further questions.

Courtesy of TPM Cafe, here is Sen. Clinton's reply:

July 19, 2007

The Honorable Robert M. Gates
Secretary of Defense
The United States Department of Defense
The Pentagon
Suite 319
Washington, D.C. 20301

Dear Mr. Secretary:

On May 22, 2007, I wrote to you to request that you provide the appropriate oversight committees in Congress – including the Senate Armed Services Committee – with briefings on what current contingency plans exist for the future withdrawal of United States forces from Iraq. Alternatively, if no such plans exist, I asked for an explanation for the decision not to engage in such planning.

I am in receipt of a letter from Eric Edelman, the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy who wrote that he was responding on your behalf. Under Secretary Edelman's response did not address the issues raised in my letter and instead made spurious arguments to avoid addressing contingency planning for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq.

As I noted in my original letter, "the seeds of many problems that continue to plague our troops and mission in Iraq were planted in the failure to adequately plan for the conflict and properly equip our men and women in uniform. Congress must be sure that we are prepared to withdraw our forces without any unnecessary danger."

Rather than offer to brief the congressional oversight committees on this critical issue, Under Secretary Edelman – writing on your behalf – instead claims that congressional oversight emboldens our enemies. Under Secretary Edelman has his priorities backward. Open and honest debate and congressional oversight strengthens our nation and supports our military. His suggestion to the contrary is outrageous and dangerous. Indeed, you acknowledged the importance of Congress in our Iraq policy at a hearing before the House Armed Services Committee in March, when you stated, "I believe that the debate here on the Hill and the issues that have been raised have been helpful in bringing pressure to bear on the Maliki government and on the Iraqis in knowing that there is a very real limit to American patience in this entire enterprise."

Redeploying out of Iraq will be difficult and requires careful planning. I continue to call on the Bush Administration to immediately provide a redeployment strategy that will keep our brave men and women safe as they leave Iraq – instead of adhering to a political strategy to attack those who rightfully question their competence and preparedness after years of mistakes and misjudgments.

Other members of this Administration have not engaged in political attacks when the prospect of withdrawal planning has been raised. At the June 7 Armed Services Committee confirmation hearing on Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, I asked General Lute "what level of planning has taken place" and "whether the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs have been briefed about the level of planning." I also asked General Lute to determine "what kind of timeline would exist if a decision for either military or political reasons were taken to begin withdrawal" and if he considered this kind of planning to be part of his responsibilities.

General Lute replied, "Thank you Senator. I do think such an adaptation, if the conditions on the ground call for it, will be part of this position."

I renew my request for a briefing, classified if necessary, on current plans for the future withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq or an explanation for the decision not to engage in such planning. I also renew my concern that our troops will be placed in unnecessary danger if the Bush Administration fails to plan for the withdrawal of U.S. Forces. Finally, I request that you describe whether Under Secretary Edelman's letter accurately characterizes your views as Secretary of Defense.

I would appreciate the courtesy of a prompt response directly from you. Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely yours,
Hillary Rodham Clinton

Okay, it is a fair reading of Edelman's letter that all public discussion of troop withdrawal is harmful to what he blithely calls "our mission in Iraq," but it is at least equally fair to read the entire letter as the Department of Defense, itself, declining to engage in such public discussion for fear of the consequences. Moreover, only an idiot could deny any plausibility to the concerns Edelman raises. That's certainly not to say that the American people or Congress shouldn't discuss withdrawal; but a blanket denial or disregard for those concerns is, from a strategic and tactical point of view, simply insane.

I don't have access to Clinton's original request and it seems to me impossible to pick a side in this dust up without that verbatim request. Given the administration's track record to date, the outrageous conclusions Clinton reads from the letter can't be dismissed out of hand. Given Clinton's ambitions and known political ruthlessness, however, one cannot dismiss out of hand that her original request wasn't specifically designed to generate controversy for political mileage, either.

It does seem likely to me, however, that there is more spin than substance on both sides here and that Sen. Clinton's personal outrage should be taken with at least a grain or two of suspicion.

Kristol Finds Whole Herd of Ponies!

NeoCon extraordinaire and Editor-über-alles of the Weekly Standard, William Kristol whirls like a dervish in today's Washington Post to gin up support for his claim that "George W. Bush's presidency will probably be a successful one."

Those who neither debated in high school or college nor suffered the subsequent tortures of a legal education may be left agog at the brazen audacity of Kristol's argument, falling as it does into the category of destroying the village to save it or begging the court's mercy for the fellow who, having murdered his parents, is now an orphan.

His opening gambit here is breathtaking in its audacity. Let's simply pay no attention, he asserts, to that man behind the curtain, er, Bush's "unnecessary mistakes and ... self-inflicted wounds." And you have to admit it, if we willfully ignore his unnecessary mistakes, that is, the overwhelming majority of them, Bush doesn't end up looking nearly so bad after all. Also, focusing on Bush's self-inflicted wounds distracts attention from the more numerous and serious wounds he has inflicted elsewhere; so that's a nice piece of misdirection on Kristol's part, too.

So, what accomplishments do Kristol tout to support his claimed successful Bush presidency? Why, (1) the absence of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil since 9/11, (2) the strong economy and -- wait for it -- (3) the war in Iraq! Oh, and a couple of conservatives on the Supreme Court, an almost throw-away point for Kristol but probably the only thing I might agree was both Bush's doing and, on balance, a good thing.

Not that the absence of terrorist attacks here or a strong U.S. economy are bad things. Only there's precious little reason to believe that Bush can take much responsibility for the latter and little tangible evidence that he is responsible for the former. Tax cuts are presumptively good, though not nearly as good as tax cuts combined with cuts in government spending, and we all know the administration's record on that point. In any case, Kristol's blithe causal connection between tax cuts alone and the state of the economy over the past five years is tenuous at best. Then again, Kristol's claim that Bush's prescription drug benefit Medicare expansion has "gone ... smoothly ... under projected costs" studiously ignores the elephant in the living room that is the looming, long-term cost of my Baby Boomer generation as we only now start to reach Medicare eligibility age. I guess economics wasn't Leo Strauss's strong point.

Shrouded in greater paranoia secrecy than any other administration in my lifetime, the Bush Administration has consistently refused to offer any serious or credible evidence of its purported success in staving off post-9/11 attacks. Perhaps it has, perhaps it hasn't. Without such evidence, what neither Bush nor his fawning supporters can claim is that we should simply take the mere absence of such attacks as proof. The time has long since passed where Bush is entitled to even a presumption of honesty with the American people. While I do personally believe that the war in Iraq has drawn the attention of would-be U.S. attackers to more easily reached Middle Eastern and European targets, most of the plots discovered world-wide since 9/11 have shown far less grandiose ambition than 9/11. Meanwhile, America and Americans have lived as though under a constant state of siege with, if Bush and Kristol have their way, no end in sight.

Finally, amazingly, Kristol touts the war and hangs his hopes on General Petraeus, this year's -- let's be candid -- Great White Hope for the remaining supporters of this absurd and tragic misadventure. Of course, had we not attacked Iraq, Saddam Hussein would still be in power, doing, um, well, we really don't know what. Neither does Kristol, but he assumes the worst because at this point it is only such counter-factual speculation that could possibly support the claim that America, never mind Iraq, is better off for having ousted Hussein in 2003.

Kristol concludes with a bit more wishful thinking about how the prospect of Democratic control of both the White House and Congress is so frightening that one of the lackluster or worse Republican presidential candidates may actually win next year, thus somehow vindicating Bush. Yeah, sure. His bottom line?

"If Petraeus succeeds in Iraq, and a Republican wins in 2008, Bush will be viewed as a successful president."

And if we had some bacon, we could have bacon and eggs for breakfast.

If we had some eggs.

Iranians Arrest 14 Squirrels for Spying

"Islamic Republic's intelligence agents allege rodents were carrying advanced Western spy gear."



The picture isn't part of the story, but this is (so far) being reported as true. I can't make this stuff up, folks; but, yeah, I have a sneaking suspicion in this case that someone did.

How Not To Honor Our Honored Dead

Where's Jack Kevorkian when the nation really needs him? I sometimes think I'd rather see the 1st Amendment put out of its misery quickly than witness its lingering, painful death at the hands of contemporary politicians, regardless of their motives. In the case of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (McCain–Feingold), of course, the motive is entirely self-serving. "Bipartisan" is the tipoff here and the objective is simply to further entrench the two-party system and make it that much easier (read: cheaper) for current incumbents to retain office.

Not every attempted rape of the 1st Amendment is self-serving, however. Occasionally, benighted legislators act out of genuine, if misguided, concern for some competing interest other than their own. Several states have already passed (and other states are considering) legislation banning the sale of the t-shirt shown below, the fine print being a Vietnam Memorial style listing of U.S. personnel who have thus far died in Iraq. The other side of the shirt reads "BUSH LIED" with the same background.



In Congress, Rep. Dan Boren (D-Okla) introduced H.R. 269, the proposed Soldiers Targeted by Offensive Profiteering Act of 2007 (STOP Act), which includes the following language:

Except with the permission of the individual or individuals designated under subsection (d), no person may knowingly use the name or image of a protected individual in connection with any merchandise, retail product, impersonation, solicitation, or commercial activity in a manner reasonably calculated to connect the protected individual with that individual's service in the armed forces.

Let us acknowledge at the onset that many, perhaps most, perhaps even all of the U.S. casualties of the Iraq War believed in the cause they were fighting for and that many of their survivors continue to do so or, at the very least, are emotionally harmed by the use of their loved ones' names in this manner. The Defense Department made similar arguments about photographs of the caskets of such casualties and I freely acknowledge that at least part of the rationale for the objection was and is a legitimate concern for the feelings of the survivors and a moral, if not legal, right of privacy on the part of the deceased.

That said, let us also acknowledge that the primary rationale for the 1st Amendment is the protection of free political speech. (See, e.g., various commentaries here.) As such, whatever other dubious exceptions the Supreme Court has carved out to the amendment's apodictic prohibition against any federal "law ... abridging the freedom of speech," even the High Court has given special deference (except, alas, in the case of McCain-Feingold) to political speech.

Some state legislatures, at least dimly aware of this fact, have attempted to construe the t-shirt and its printing as "commercial speech." Ordinarily, commercial speech is understood by the Court to mean "expression related solely to the economic interests of the speaker and its audience," so I rather seriously doubt these state laws will withstand constitutional scrutiny if and when they are challenged in court. Here, in any case, is the current prevailing test under Central Hudson Gas & Elec. v. Public Serv. Comm'n for regulation of commercial speech. Commercial speech may be regulated if:

1. The regulated speech concerns an illegal activity,
2. The speech is misleading, or
3. The government's interest in restricting the speech is substantial, the regulation in question directly advances the government's interest, and the regulation is no more extensive than necessary to serve the government's interest.

I simply cannot imagine how any state legislatures have managed to convince themselves that their prohibitions can meet this test. Then again, one should never underestimate the capacity of legislators either to delude themselves or to engage in a bit of grandstanding when it comes to such emotionally sensitive issues as properly honoring our war dead. (A phrase I want to make completely clear I do not mean at all ironically. Those men and women unquestionably do deserve to be honored for their sacrifice.)

Similarly, I serious doubt that congressional attempts to justify such restrictions on both the allegedly commercial nature of the speech and creation of, in effect, new property rights for the deceased and their family members as "protected persons" can withstand both these and other constitutional concerns, e.g., the fairly glaring viewpoint discrimination involved.

I suspect Boren and others genuinely believe they are doing, or at least trying to do the right thing here. But they're not. If anything, and however unintentionally, these laws do a disservice to our war dead. If the American men and women who have died in Iraq did not give their lives to preserve the very freedoms some claim our enemies hate us for, why on earth did they die?

(Hat tip to Reason's Radley Balko.)

Live Earth D.O.A.

Ho-hum.

The predictable disease of stardom, whether of the Hollywood variety or among musicians, is egotism ranging from fragile narcissism to full blown monomania. Little wonder, then, that the Gore-Fest better known as Saturday's Live Earth concert was so much sound and fury punctuated by hot air. Or, as the (U.K.) Daily Mail reports, a foul-mouthed flop.

Gore now qualifies, of course, as one of the Hollywood crowd, having picked up his Oscar en route to becoming Bono with a better tailor. The concerts did nothing to raise public awareness of global warming, as the affluent segment of humanity has already heard all about it and the rest of humanity have more pressing concerns on their minds. The fate of the earth a century from now is of only modest interest to someone suffering from malaria or dysentery or trying to feed her children or find shelter or potable water. Only rock stars and their ilk could possibly convince themselves that jetting across the world to leave mountains of garbage in their wake could be a net contribution to stopping global warming.

Charity rock concerts, whether to raise money or public awareness, have a checkered history. George Harrison's 1971 Concert for Bangladesh was at best a mixed and controversial success. However noble Harrison's intentions or those of the many who (myself included) bought the subsequent album to support victims of the 1970 Bhola cyclone (think Katrina, only much worse), ineptitude and corruption both took their toll on the final results. At least, however, it was a humane attempt at responding to a genuine catastrophe.

Then again, as far as the motives of the attendees go, massive rock concerts "to change the world" have always been, to put it mildly, a mixed bag. Sure, some of the hundreds of thousands who went to Woodstock were bona fide "hippies." Most, however, were just there for the sex and drugs and rock & roll.

Ali

Forty years ago, back when Americans enjoyed due process of law even if they were Muslim Americans, in fact, even if they were Black Muslim Americans, Muhammad Ali was convicted on June 20, 1967 in federal court for refusing induction into the United States armed forces. America was, after all, at war, defending itself from encroaching world-wide communist domination and, we were told, if the North Vietnamese won it would have a Domino Effect throughout Asia.

Three years earlier, in the same year he first won the World Heavyweight Boxing championship from Sonny Liston and became a member of the Nation of Islam, Ali had failed to pass the Armed Forces qualifying examination. In 1966, however, the test was revised -- the laws of supply and demand being what they were even then -- and Ali was reclassified 1-A, draft eligible. Ali claimed but was denied conscientious objector status, famously declaring, “I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong. They never called me a nigger.” After refusing induction, Ali was tried and sentenced to five years in prison and a fine of $10,000. The conviction was upheld by the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals but in 1971, the Supreme Court unanimously reversed the conviction.

In the interim, however, Ali was stripped of his title and banned from boxing during what boxing experts believe would have been his prime boxing years. Also in his prime, George Carlin described the situation (roughly, and with apologies to Carlin because I couldn’t find the exact quote) as follows:

Muhammad Ali has a strange job - beating people up – but the government wanted to give him a new job – they wanted him to go to Viet Nam and kill people – but Ali said, “No... that’s where I draw the line. I’ll beat ‘em up but I don’t want to kill ‘em" – and the government said, “If you won’t kill ‘em, we won’t let you beat ‘em up!”

Boxing, it must be said, is a brutal, barbaric sport; the only sport still legal where the primary objective is to injure one’s opponent to unconsciousness. But for Muhammad Ali, I would never have become a fan of boxing at all. After Ali, I quickly lost interest. But Ali became, and remains, the only athlete who ever came close to being a hero to me. It was impossible, for me at least, not to be astonished and delighted by his athleticism, his great speed and agility; impossible also not to admire his uncompromising integrity.

That is, of course, not to say I agree with or approve of everything Ali has done in his life. I’m not about to argue the merits of the Nation of Islam (Ali converted to Sunni Islam in 1975) or whether, on legal or moral grounds, he was entitled to conscientious objector status, nor would I claim that his personal life – he has been married four times – is exemplary.

Most significantly, he fought too many times and took too many blows to the head especially in his later career, resulting in his chronic traumatic encephalopathy (or Parkinson’s Syndrome). Once, and perhaps still, the most famous and beloved man alive, Ali deprived both himself and his literally billions of fans the pleasure of each other’s company after his final fight in 1981, some six years after his last great fight against Joe Frazier in the Thrilla in Manila. Ironically, both that fight and his decision to continue boxing afterwards, whatever the reasons at the time, probably cost him tens of millions of dollars if not more, as the public demand for him remains largely unabated even after all these years and in his unfortunate condition today. Last month, for example, in one of his now rare public appearances Ali was given an honorary doctorate by Princeton.

Trite though it is to mention, no one who did not live through the 1960’s can fully appreciate what that decade was like. We speak too easily today about how polarized America has become in the last twenty years, but the truth is that America was far more polarized by both the Viet Nam War and the Civil Rights Movement than it is today. It is worth remembering that Muhammad Ali was reviled and despised by much of white America forty years ago, perhaps as much for his refusal to accept control by the white-dominated boxing establishment as for his refusal to serve in what he believed was the white establishment’s war in Southeast Asia. Undaunted, he stood his ground like a true champion and, more importantly, like a man.

Fourth of July Memories

Some twenty-five years ago my wife and I and a couple dozen friends, mostly from college, met every 4th of July down at the National Mall to make a day of the festivities. In those days glass bottles were prohibited but cans were permitted and one could still take coolers filled with beer (oh, and food) and stake out some territory by the Washington Monument for a perfect overhead view of the fireworks.

We were all in our 20's or early 30's at most, in the final days of the first stage of our adult lives, still mostly childless and still early in our careers, mostly as doctors or lawyers -- lots of lawyers! -- with an odd journalist or bureaucrat or two as well. After all, we are talking about Washington, D.C. here. People played Frisbee and shot off illegal bottle rockets and ate and drank and burned in the hot July sun. Even then, the most casual look at the tens of thousands of people who had gathered on the Mall made it obvious beyond question that we are both a nation of immigrants and a single people.

These were the early days of the Reagan Administration, and in 1981 and 1982 that most quintessentially American band, the Beach Boys, played their most quintessentially innocent and joyful music at the big concert stage down by the Monument. The National Symphony also played pop and light classical music at the Capitol steps, but that was at the other end of the Mall and, besides, even today I'd opt for "Fun, Fun, Fun" over Tchaikovsky in a heartbeat.

But 1983 was far and away my favorite year, for it was then that Interior Secretary James Watt decided the Beach Boys were, well, attracting the wrong element to the Mall and booked Wayne Newton instead. Perhaps Watt was a secret fan of Lenny Bruce, who once observed that there was no place in America more American than Las Vegas. In any case, Wayne brought all the trappings of his Vegas act with him, complete with dozens of feather-headdress wearing, scantily clad but sequin festooned showgirls. It doesn't get any more American than that, except perhaps at the Folies-Bergere in Paris.

Getting close to the stage was much harder than when the Beach Boys played because it was already heavily surrounded by a mosh pit of silver-blue haired women. Fortunately, their average height was only around 5'4", so I didn't have to elbow my way through little old ladies to see the stage clearly. It was, to put it mildly, quite a show. Newton sang his hits as the showgirls shook their, well, you know, and concluded appropriately enough with "America the Beautiful." But then he came back to do a Vegas style encore, probably "Danke Schoen" though I don't recall exactly, and it was at that exact moment that I grasped the genius of Watt's decision. Alas, Nancy Reagan liked the Beach Boys better and they were back the next year, another government program that, once started, refused to go away.

The fate of the United States, indeed, of the Earth was still very much in jeopardy in those days from the Cold War's Mutually Assured Destruction. Thank God, it never happened, but we lived with that terrible risk as we now seem incapable of living with the risk of a small number of fanatical enemies who, even in our most nightmarish scenarios, don't pose a tenth of a percent of that decades-long threatened nuclear holocaust. Our biggest complaints about air travel were that it was uncomfortable, boring, expensive and too often delayed. We were spending a vast fortune on defense, but at least we were defending ourselves against a credible threat. Accusations of an imperial presidency focused more on Nancy's White House china patterns than on jackbooted thugs hauling U.S. citizens off to prison without so much as a hint of due process.

Of course, both the world and America have changed in many ways for the better in the past quarter-century. Many, but not all. I have no idea what sort of controlled environment or enhanced security the National Park Service is imposing on the crowds today down at the Mall, but I know I want no part of it. And I'm not at all nostalgic for the 1980s, however much this comes across that way. Sure, I'd like my youth back, but that doesn't mean I'd like to be living in 1983 again.

I merely note, like Joni Mitchell, that the passage of time involves loss as well as gain. Some things, like youth, we cannot help but lose. Whether we lose other things, like the courage to demand free lives and accountable government, is up to us, as is our relationship with the rest of the world. I, for one, would prefer the world to think of us as a people willing to risk a bottle rocket or two with a can of beer in our hands singing along to "Fun, Fun, Fun," than for the nationalistic bombast of the 1812 Overture, especially when you consider how the Battle of Borodino turned out.

Classic TV Finales, Palestinian Style

Farfour is dead. In the final Hamas-affiliated Al Aqsa TV episode, the Mickey Mouse knockoff who preached Islamic domination was, wait for it... beaten to death by an Israeli Jew.

This whole "beaten to death by Jews" idea for TV series finales could save Hollywood a whole lot of needless time and trouble. Just think, for example, how much easier it would have been to write the final episode of The Sopranos if, by long standing tradition, audiences understood that Tony and his two families would be beaten to death in the end by Hyman Roth's avenging descendants. Of course, such a tradition would have to have started decades ago, so here's what the final episodes of some old TV shows would have gone like if those Farfour writers had been in charge:

Howdy Doody - Clarabell never spoke a word for 13 years until the final minutes of the last show when Buffalo Bob read a note from the clown. "Why, I can't believe it!" Bob exclaimed. "Clarabell can talk! Is this true?" Clarabell nodded. "Well", Bob said, "Go ahead. Say something!" "JEWS!" the clown screamed as Jewish thugs beat the entire cast, crew and kiddie audience to death.

The Fugitive - Just before being stoned to death for killing his wife (ordinarily just a misdemeanor, but she was the Imam's daughter), Dr. Raji Kimble escapes, only to be pursued for years by the relentless police Lt. Mustafa Gerard. Just as Gerard is about to capture Kimble, the One-Armed Jew is discovered lurking in the shadows. Kimble and Gerard catch him and beat him to death, Kimble's name is cleared and the Imam declares a Great Victory and gives Kimble two more of his daughters as a reward.

The Mary Tyler Moore Show - While Mary and the gang at WJM-TV have one final group hug, the phone rings and they discover that their contracts, drawn up by crafty Jewish lawyers, are air-tight and they can't be fired after all. The evil Jewish station owners, outraged, burst into the newsroom and beat them all, except for Ted Baxter, to death.

M*A*S*H: "Goodbye, Farewell and Allahu Akbar" - After the rest of the 4077th bugs out while Jewish North Koreans sweep through the front lines beating to death everyone they encounter, B.J. takes the still recuperating Hawkeye to a waiting helicopter. Once the helicopter is aloft, Hawkeye opens and reads a note from B.J. that reads "My initials stood for ben Judah, you fool!" Realizing he's been duped by evil Jews, Hawkeye is nonetheless too weak to fight back as the evil Jewish helicopter pilot throws him from the chopper to his death. As he plummets, the last thing he sees is where B.J. formed a huge Star of David from stones on the hillside.

Newhart - Bob gets into an altercation with handymen Larry, Darryl and Darryl and they knock him unconscious with a Moose head. When he awakens, he discovers he is in his apartment bedroom lying next to his wife, Rhoda. "What's the matter, Bob?" she asks him, "You've been tossing and turning like a meshugener!" He tells her about his dream and she says, ""That's the last time you nosh on pastrami before bed. You kept me up all night, you putz!" She then beats him to death.

Seinfeld - For no reason at all, the entire cast beat each other to death.

Could The Rule Of Law Be Making A Comeback?

Strange and perhaps even unprecedented doings at the Supreme Court, vacating an earlier order denying review and requesting new briefs from the parties in two Guantanamo Bay detainee cases. SCOTUSblog provides good commentary, but the fact is that there isn't enough public information to get a good sense of what the Court is up to. After his thoroughgoing defeat over immigration reform, there isn't much left for Bush to lose on at this point beyond his sweeping assertion of war powers. Pelosi may be right -- he may not be worth impeaching. His (and Cheney's) continued administration can do nothing at this point but aid the Democratic Party however much the nation may suffer in the meanwhile.

Thanks Again to Our "Good Friends and Loyal Allies," the Saudis

How is the fight against Radical Islam going?

All things considered, not badly at all. At least not according to an excellent, must-read article by Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek. Zakaria makes a number of excellent points about how unlike the perceived "global threat" of Islamist extremism is the reality of how small, disorganized, dispersed, unconnected and increasingly inwardly focused the majority of such groups are and how, with few exceptions, the very reason they pursue their objectives with violence is because they have no hopes of swaying the larger Islamic world to their fanaticism.

Still, almost in a throw-away paragraph toward the end, Zakaria mentions that "[t]he current issue of Britain's Prospect magazine has a deeply illuminating profile of the main suicide bomber in the 7/7 London subway attacks, Mohammed Siddique Khan..."

... who at first glance appeared to be a well-integrated, middle-class Briton. The author, Shiv Malik, spent months in the Leeds suburb where Khan grew up, talked to his relatives and pieced together his past. Khan was not driven to become a suicide bomber by poverty, racism or the Iraq War. His is the story of a young man who found he could not be part of the traditional Pakistani-immigrant community of his parents. He had no memories of their Pakistani life. He spoke their language, Urdu, poorly. He rejected an arranged marriage in favor of a love match. And yet, he was also out of place in modern British culture. Khan was slowly seduced by the simple, powerful and total world view of Wahhabi Islam, conveniently provided in easy-to-read English pamphlets (doubtless funded with Saudi money). The ideology fulfilled a young man's desire for protest and rebellion and at the same time gave him a powerful sense of identity. By 1999—before the Iraq War, before 9/11—he was ready to be a terrorist.
[Emphasis added.]

If one seeks, perhaps not the root cause, but certainly both the financial and ideological life-line of Islamist terrorism, one need look no further than the devil's bargain between the Wahhabi movement and our "good friends and loyal allies," the House of Saud.

"Muslim peer compares Rushdie to 9/ll bombers"

Or so the title of the (U.K.) Telegraph reads. The member of the British House of Lords in question, Lord Ahmed of Rotherham, is quoted as follows:

This honour is given in recognition of services rendered to Great Britain.

Salman Rushdie lives in New York. He is controversial man who has insulted Muslim people, Christians and the British. He does not deserve the honour.

Two weeks ago Tony Blair spoke about constructing bridges with Muslims. What hypocrisy.

What would one say if the Saudi or Afghan governments honoured the martyrs of the September 11 attacks on the United States?

Good question, Nazir, old boy.

But here's an even better question: What does one say in response to a member of the British House of Lords who refers to the 9/11 terrorists as "martyrs"?

Review: A Tragic Legacy by Glenn Greenwald

A Tragic Legacy: How A Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency by Glenn Greenwald. Crown, 320 pp.

There is an oratorical tone to Glenn Greenwald’s A Tragic Legacy, the rhythms and word choices of a trial lawyer making his case to the jury from opening statement to presentation of the evidence to closing statement. The defendant here, George W. Bush, is charged with a failed administration both proximately and primarily caused by his unbending Manichean world view, more about which in a moment.

Greenwald was an appellate attorney before turning author by way of political blogger, and appellate briefs do not admit the rhetorical flourishes of a trial; but it is the rare lawyer of any sort who does not at least fanaticize himself in command of the courtroom, mesmerizing the rapt jury. (The real aim of law school, after all, is to turn natural born anal retentives into oral aggressives and vice versa. Learning the law comes later.) In any case, A Tragic Legacy reads neither like the quiet work of a scholar nor the brisk, adjective starved prose of a professional journalist but, well, like the work of a lawyer who writes more clearly and interestingly than the average lawyer.

Okay, so there is a bit of damning with faint praise in that last, but for those who enjoy current events / political analysis books Greenwald's contribution is at least as worthy as the vast majority of the rest and better than more than a few I've suffered through in recent years. It needs to be said, however, that such books are not my cup of tea, lest the reader here take my somewhat tepid endorsement as more negative than intended. Disclaimer done, back to the book.

Manichaeism is the belief that the world is a battleground between roughly equal forces of Good and Evil, between the two of which there is no ground for compromise. A third century Persian religion, Manichaeism’s influences on Christianity were quickly deemed heretical (Satan may indeed exist but is surely no equal to God in orthodox Christian theology), but it is not the doctrinal Manichaeism that Greenwald accuses Bush of so much as the Manichaeism mind-set. As far as it goes, it strikes me as a fair charge. The question occurs, however, whether Greenwald required over three hundred pages to make his case or whether, more to the point, the reader requires plowing through same to be convinced that Bush’s simplistic moral absolutism has led to disastrous effect.

Here, striped of its quasi-theological trappings and with a few liberties of my own taken along the way, is a far shorter version of Greenwald’s thesis: Moral ambiguity and nuance are not George W. Bush’s strong suits. Raised in privilege, Bush has never had to suffer the consequences of his bad decisions nor even to abide, let alone compromise with those who were disloyal or who even merely disagreed with him. His conversion at age 40 to evangelical Christianity fitted him out not so much with a moral as with a moralistic lens processing the world in black and white, good and evil terms that were and still are largely indifferent to such trivialities as political theory or the rule of law. The enormity of 9/11 gave Bush both tremendous political popularity and thus political power but, more importantly, it became his blindingly bright focal point in the battle between good and evil with, of course, the Islamist terrorists on the side of evil and America and himself on the side of good. Public opinion, now that it has turned against him, be damned – Bush sees himself on God’s side and will not waiver in fighting the good fight.

Greenwald’s secondary agenda is a critique and criticism of contemporary conservatism and especially of what, I think over-broadly, he includes under the rubric of neoconservatism. Such conservatives (neo- or not) both cheered on and, among Bush’s inner circle of advisors, manipulated his policy and decision making at first. Now, however, the pundits, at least, have increasingly abandoned Bush rather like, to keep the religious metaphor going, Peter repeatedly denied Christ once things got ugly.

There is some truth to this, too, though I think rather less than Greenwald would have us believe. To cite, say, National Review’s Rich Lowery endorsing Bush for a second term as evidence of conservatives' belief in Bush’s conservative bona fides is a bit of a stretch. Political rhetoric is political rhetoric, and Bush was the better choice for conservatives in 2004, notwithstanding his manifold sins and transgressions against conservativism in his first term. The lesser of two evils is still the better choice and it would simply be naïve to expect advocacy journalists not to engage in, well, advocacy, especially in the midst of an election.

I don't recall there ever being a time when Bush wasn't the target of serious and often scathing criticism especially from economic / small government conservatives, nor will it do to conflate all conservatives of any sort who ever supported the war in Iraq as members in good standing of the neoconservative movement of the past few decades. Moreover, people do, after all, change their minds, the occasional disingenuousness in that fact which Greenwald accurately notes among some right-wing writers aside.

Indeed, one of the weaker points of the book is Greenwald’s heavy reliance on block quotes from various conservative pundits, both those who have continued to support Bush publicly (whatever they may believe in private) and those who have changed their public views, to make his case. There is a damned if you do, damned if you don’t quality about Greenwald’s take here, not to mention the very short shrift paid to the genuine differences and ongoing arguments inside what might broadly be called the American Right for far longer than the Bush years.

Though he takes some trouble at the onset to distinguish general conservative theory and principles from the actual policies of self-identified conservative office holders, Greenwald takes too little account of the differences between, say, Burkean or social conservatives and Hayekian or economic conservatives, nor do his occasional and arguably gratuitous swipes at Ronald Reagan’s administration take adequate account of the political realities precluding Reagan from dismantling more of the Great Society he inherited.

Speaking of which, Greenwald’s concluding comparison of Bush to Lyndon Johnson is insightful and, up to a point, quite apt. Johnson’s administration will forever be judged through the prism of the Viet Nam war which, unlike Bush, Johnson did not instigate but did significantly escalate. On the domestic front, his economic policies were doomed to failure because they were bad economics, but Johnson also did what no Kennedy could or Nixon would ever have done. This unlikeliest of civil rights champions pushed passage of civil rights legislation through force of will and a political ruthlessness and singlemindedness that would have made Richard Nixon, let alone George W. Bush, blush. That is Johnson’s real and lasting legacy. So what, then, is Bush's?

Greenwald concludes that Bush’s legacy will forever be not only his failed war in Iraq (and perhaps, worse yet, in Iran) with all the damage to constitutional law and America’s standing in the world it has wrought but also his failure, because of his Manichean obsession with terrorism, to accomplish anything on the domestic front beyond the unintended and tattered remains of the conservative movement in America.

Perhaps. Surely, much damage has been done to the American republic in these past six and a half years. As for Bush’s legacy in terms of his historical standing among other presidents, however, who cares?

For the Judeo-Christian theists among us, there is also a recurring theme in the Old Testament of God’s wrath being visited upon his errant people over and over again, nevertheless always sparing a righteous remnant for a new beginning. Theology aside and using that metaphor in purely political terms, especially for those of us who have always opposed the prospect of American Empire, it is at least worth suggesting that America is far better off now than it would have been had Bush’s holy war met with greater success. The Lord or, if you will, the Zeitgeist works in mysterious ways, after all.