The Review

Blog Hiatus

(Review) Life, it is said, is about more than blogging. I agree, and am begining a short hiatus, so that my lovely partner Christine and I can take a little time for recreation.

I'm going to Disneyland!

Testing for credibility

Here in California, the California Teachers Association (CTA) is the big labor union for Teachers. In recent weeks they've been running a lot of radio ads that Criticize the "No Child Left Behind" Act for it's insistence on standardized testing.

Now, I have my own criticisms about the act. Well, one criticism, which is that it exists. That's pretty much my criticism for the whole Department of Education, but that's not important right now.

What is important is that the Teachers' Unions really, really don't like the standardized testing idea. Why, the ad declares, before you know it, teachers will be teaching to the test!

Uh, well, actually, that's what they're supposed to be doing.

You see, I've been a teacher for several years. Back in 1987, the USAF sent me off to Lowry AFB in Denver for a couple of months to attend Technical Training Instructor's School. One of the central portions of the curriculum was Instructional systems design.

When you build a training course you do it in a particular order, to ensure that the your curriculum teaches students what it is they're supposed to know. The process, greatly simplified, is as follows:

1) Create your objectives. Figure out what students are supposed to know when the course is over.

2) Create tests and measures. Write the tests or practical evaluations you are going to use to determine whether students have satisfactorily learned the material.

3) Develop Lesson Plans. Once you know your objectives, and how you're going to test to see if the students achieved them, you write lesson plans that specifically cover the items to be tested in appropriate detail.

In essence, you teach to the test, because the test is the measure of how well the student has learned the material. If you don't teach the items that are on the test, then how in the world can you test students on stuff you haven't taught them.

You see, here's why the Teachers' Unions despise the idea of standardized testing. Because if you do create curriculum in the manner above, and the students still fail, then people might expect that problem lies with you. After all, the students are literally ignorant. They can't be expected to pass the test if they aren't taught properly. And what if some teachers' students pass the tests regularly, and other teachers' student don't?

Why, that might indicate some level of incompetence. Thus, standardized tests are a threat to the job security of teachers.

Now, a lot of teachers will tell you that they're offended by the idea of grading students anyway. "How do you measure learning?" they ask, without a hint of irony. And they really don't like to hear, "Testing," as a response. Learning, they assure us, isn't about answers, or reaching a destination. It's about the journey, man.

That's just a load of hippie crap. Being comfortable with "the journey" doesn't help much on the construction site when you have to decide if the safety regs allow you to lift a 50 lb bucket of concrete on a rope that's rated at 150 lbs., when your company requires a safety factor of four¹.

And, of course, there's that pesky self-esteem issue. Why, if a student does poorly, his self-esteem will be damaged, the little darling. Nowhere does it even enter their mind that failure is a useful spur to additional effort, and that self-esteem is not something that is given, but rather earned through the accomplishment of difficult tasks.

Those are, I think, just excuses. Because, when people ask, "is our students learning", and discover they aren't, the suspicion tends to flow inevitably towards the people who are supposed to be providing that learning.

And that's the last thing the Teacher's Unions want. Teacher's Unions are not academic colloquia whose purpose is to improve education. They're unions. Their sole purpose is to protect the interests of their employees.

Technical training, which I did, is pretty straightforward. Especially for the military, which tends to rate on a pass/fail system. Either the student can load and fire the weapon, or he can't. Either the student does find the secret hand grenade when searching the POW, or he doesn't. And, of course, the incentive is high, because if you don't do something properly in the military, it often means that someone, usually you, dies².

That tends to keep people's heads in the game, in a way that learning to find the value of X in algebra does not. But there's only one way to find out if a kid knows how to get the value of X, and that's to throw a "(X-2) x 3 = 17.4" and see what he comes up with. If he comes up with "42" then either he's an idiot, or his teacher is.

And, frankly, the Teachers' Unions don't want you to find out which one the idiot is.
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¹ Answer: No. The minimum is a rope rated at 200 lbs.

² That's also why the military still tests rigidly, and if you fail, they tell you so. "No, you will not be allowed to carry this weapon, Private Sparky, because you cannot be trusted to do so, without becoming a danger to yourself or others."

Sexed up reporting

(Review) Lord Hutton's inquiry into the whole Iraqi WMD/BBC reporting deal has led to the top two BBC executives resignation, while at the same time clearing Tony Blair of lying about Iraq's WMD programs.

Clearly, the BBC went too far in allowing a reporter's personal biases to color his reporting.

The appropriate conclusions about the Bush Administration should also be drawn, especially in the Wake of David Kay's testimony to Congress.

The question is, how do we fix the intelligence agencies that seem to have been so completely wrong about Saddam's WMD programs? The answer to that question is not, I think, an easy one.

The central problem is the difficulty of piercing the veil of secrecy that exists in any totalitarian state. That's tough enough. It's even tougher in a one-man state like Iraq was, where the dictator's activities are carried out by people from his hometown. It's not like you can simply insert an agent into that chain of command. It's a practical impossibility.

Intelligence is not a science, it's an art. It consists mainly of pulling tiny bits of information gleaned from communications interepts, interviews with defectors, comparisons with past activities, recon photos, and the like, and analyzing them in such a way as to obtain a picture of what's happening.

There's simply no way to make such a process infallible.

But to jump from the faulty intelligence--a fault that seems to have been shared by practically everyone--to the "Bush Lied" meme is simply fantasy.

I remain convinced that the Left doesn't hate Bush because they hate the war. They hate the war because they hate Bush. No amount of evidence will convince them that the WMD problem is the result of incompetence on the CIA's part, rather than conspiracy on the part of Bush.

The Keen political instincts of Al Gore

(Review) Everybody from the Dem establishment is jumping on the John Kerry bandwagon now, and the Dean campaign is deflating as potential supporters scurry away into the darkness like rats departing a sinking ship. Nothing succeeds like success, I gues, and nothing fails like failure.

And, speaking of failures, I think the Dean Campaign died the day Al Gore decided to endorse him. I mean, you can just look back at the polls and see his headlong rush to ignominy began almost the minute Al Gore opened his mouth.

AL Gore is a loser. There's just not a nice way to put it. His whole life, he was protected from his own instincts by handlers and political minders, all of whom were apparently much sharper than he is.

Now, the thing about losing a presidential campaign is that it's liberating in many ways. Unless you're William Jennings Bryan or Adlai Stevenson, and you expect to run again, losing the Big One deprives you of all the minders in one fell swoop. Suddenly, you're a has-been that no one cares to waste time on, because, really, where do you go after losing the presidency?

But once all the handlers are gone, you're pretty much left to your own instincts. You're free of those nagging minders telling what to do and say all the time, but you're also free of their advice, too. That can be dangerous if, like Al Gore, you're actually politically tone deaf, and not the sharpest knife in the drawer, besides¹.

Gore came in for Dean way, way too early. Nobody was even scheduled to vote for another month, and Gore comes along, endorses him, and tells all the other candidates, "Get Out."² Nobody was even scheduled to vote in a primary for another 6 weeks, and there was Al, assuring us it was all over.

There are some truisms in politics, and Al Gore, who's been a politician for most of his adult life, should be familiar with them. And one of those truths is that, until people start actually voting, no one is the front-runner. Before New Hampshire, any talk about front-runners is all smoke and mirrors. We've seen this proven time and time again. But Al's never been a man to let the obvious be an obstacle.

What Gore should have done, is...well, pretty much what he should always do, namely, keep his trap shut.

Why? Well, you see, there are really only two reasons to make a public endorsement of a candidate.

First, you do it because you want to pick a winner. It makes you look like a sharp guy for choosing wisely, and maybe it gives you some leverage to call up the guy later and ask for a quid pro quo for your support if the candidate wins the office for which he's running. For example, let's say you have, like Al Gore, a hard-drinking young rapscallion of a son, and getting him appointed Deputy Assistant Undersecretary of Public Affairs for the Department of the Interior's Western Tennessee region allows him to have a job that's not too taxing, pays well, and lets you keep him close so you can keep an eye on him. In other words, you want to be able to call in a marker at some point in the future.

The second reason is because you really want a particular candidate to win, out of principle. This is the non-cynical reason. You just want to help.

The thing is, no matter which reason Al Gore had for choosing Howard Dean as his best new buddy, he should have waited before doing so. Your endorsement, theoretically, is precious. You can't waste it, and once you give it, it's gone. If you go back later and decide to endorse another candidate, it doesn't have anywhere near the same value.

If Gore was really sincere about helping Dean should have waited at least until after the Iowa Caucuses before jumping in. An endorsement then might have been extraordinarily helpful in overcoming the whole "Yeeeeaaarrrrrgh!" thing. Even now, it might help. In the meantime, Gore could have publicly talked about how attracted he was to Howard Dean's candidacy, without officially endorsing him. It would been an assist for Dean--to the extent that Al's support is an assist for anyone--but, depending on whether the reasons for Gore's endorsement were cynical or sincere, it would have provided either a) in the case of the former, cover for Gore if Dean's campaign went south, or b) if the latter was true, an opportunity to wait until a critical moment when an endorsement would be truly helpful.

What Gore actually got was the worst of both alternatives. He provided a key endorsement at a time when Howard Dean was peaking, and didn't really need it. So he gets no credit for helping out the candidate out of sincere motives, and no really useful markers to call in on Dean later, because Dean was already the "front-runner".

What Gore actually got was an impression that, the second he touched the Dean campaign, he spoiled it utterly.

And, since it's Al Gore we're talking about here, maybe that's true. Al Gore is the ultimate insider. OK, since he was vice-president he's the penultimate insider. But that's still pretty far inside the establishment.

The whole thing about Dean was that he was this rough and plain-spoken outsider, one of whose key points was to rail against the "Washington Democrats". There is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that Al Gore is a "Washington Democrat", so for him to jump onto the Dean bandwagon when the barrels of the dean campaign were aimed straight at Gore and his ilk, it had to make some people start wondering.

I think that, more importantly, Gore torpedoed the Dean campaign because his announcement focussed so much press attention on Dean. Once Dean was under much closer scrutiny by the press his little gaffes became much more widely known. And the more people saw of him, the less they liked him.

Gore's endorsement said that Dean was important, a man to whom attention must be paid. Once people started paying attention to him, they decided that he wasn't a man to whom their votes should be given.

Either way, the Al Gore endorsement was the kiss of death for Howard Dean.
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¹ Yeah, I know he's supposed to be this big policy wonk, and W is supposed to be a frat-boy moron. But W is the guy with a Harvard MBA, and Al Gore is the guy who flunked out of divinity school. I mean, how dumb do you have to be to flunk "God"?

² Whatever happened to "Every vote must Count," Al?

Ah, Joe, we hardly knew ye...

(Review) Howard Dean has kicked campaign manager Joe Trippi to the curb. Trippi has been replaced by Roy Neel, "a former Washington lobbyist tied to Al Gore."

Al Gore? As if the stink of death wasn't already hovering around the campaign.

In a further sign of distress, the one-time front-runner implemented cost-cutting measures as he looked ahead to a series of costly primaries and caucuses, asking staff to defer their paychecks for two weeks.

Yeah, that's a sign of a healthy campaign.

I suspect that very soon, Howard Dean will be going to a place that's small, cold, east of here, and has a large supply of maple syrup readily available.

I bet he wishes he had those matching Federal Funds now

Photo: Reuters/Jim Bourg

John Edwards is a compasionate guy

Photo: AP Photo/Steven Senne

NH Postmortem

(Review) John Ellis gives us an interesting look at where the Democratic presidential race lies now, and how Kerry could still lose.

Let's be blunt about John Forbes Kerry; he's a cold fish and coldly calculating as well. Former Massachusetts State Senate President William Bulger (D) once said that the initials "JFK" stood for "Just for Kerry." Bulger's view is widely shared at the national level. In Massachusetts, Kerry fans are hard to find. To know him is not to love him. And the more you know him, the more you understand why.

More important, Kerry is not a constituency politician. He's self-created and actualized. There is no safety net beneath him, as there was for Reagan when he faltered in Iowa, as there was for Mondale when he lost New Hampshire, as there was for George W. Bush when he lost New Hampshire four years ago. Kerry has a base, but it's psychographic, not demographic. If he begins to slide, aging yuppies will not be the only ones to cut him loose.

So he needs to be the winner, because everybody loves a winner. And in order to be the winner, he has to make sure that no one else wins. And that is why the decisions he makes today will largely determine whether or not he leverages his success in Iowa and New Hampshire into becoming the Democratic presidential nominee, or whether he lets his remaining rival, Senator Edwards, back up off the floor.

Republicans better hope Kerry is a better politican than he appears to be. A Bush v. Edwards campaign in the fall would be a Republican nightmare.

Big Media: Wrong again. And again. And...

(Review) John Podhoretz writes that, once again, the Dean Campaign shows that big media hype is usually wrong.

The Deaniacs brought "new passion" to politics, we heard. They joined up and found a glorious community of like-minded people to talk with, have house parties with - and, of course, hook up with.

Well, guess what? It was all basically bull. The same wide-eyed, breathless nonsense has been thrown at us for decades by wide-eyed, breathless journalists who are desperate to catch lightning in a bottle and get famous for spotting the Next Big Thing.

We had to listen to this argle-bargle about Eugene McCarthy in 1968, John Anderson in 1980, Gary Hart in 1984, Jerry Brown in 1992 and John McCain in 2000. The candidates become addicted to the idea that they represent something revolutionary and as their candidacies progress, they tend to become strangely messianic - as though it is their role to purify and cleanse American politics of its sinful taint...

Howard Dean has now lost the two states he was once supposed to win handily. Dean now has a new use for the Deaniacs - he blames his youthful supporters for riling him up so much during his concession speech in Iowa that he was compelled to let loose with the Screech Heard Round the World.

The press has been wrong about everything. Everything. Keep that in mind for the rest of the year. You can be sure that the political media won't remind you of it.

Well, except for big media people like John Podhoretz.

A product that doesn't sell itself

(Review) John Kerry may be a good product, writes William Saletan, but he's not one that can sell himself.

But before this rebound relationship drifts to the altar, maybe Democrats should ask what they're getting in Kerry. After watching him for a year and seeing him work New Hampshire, here's my warning: You're getting a guy who has plenty of selling points but can't make the sale himself.

Like my colleague Chris Suellentrop, I've watched the Kerry surge with amazement. I've asked myself how Kerry is persuading previously skeptical voters to change their minds about him. The answer is, he isn't. Other people are doing the persuasion. Other people are doing the testimonial ads, as first lady Christie Vilsack did for Kerry in Iowa. Other people are firing up his crowds. Other people are telling his story. Other people are touting his virtues at rallies because he doesn't reliably display those virtues himself. The man who stood up to serve his country as a soldier is being propped up as a candidate...

Kerry can't ad lib to save his life. Sometimes, in small gatherings, when he's late, tired, and punchy, he escapes his script and gives people a glimpse of the human being beneath the senator. There were flashes of that in Nashua. At first, Kerry bounced across the stage and arched back his shoulders, letting his jacket slip off with a smile you'd expect to see from a stripper. But soon enough, he tightened up. As Kennedy entertained the crowd, Kerry sat in the background with his fingers clasped together, sucking his lower lip and patting his hair nervously to make sure it was still in place. Just before Kerry rose to speak, his wife placed both hands on his shoulders, trying to impart strength. Hundreds of fans waved Kerry signs and applauded his every word. He wasn't there to inspire them. They were there to inspire him.

Physically, Kerry's repertoire is painfully limited. He thrusts his index finger at the audience in an overhead arc again and again, as though launching a projectile. He seems to be trying not to animate his thoughts but to expel them. Above the neck, nothing but his mouth moves. If you showed anyone a video of Kerry with his lips blacked out, they'd never know he was speaking. On television, it often seems as though Kerry is looking at you but not seeing you. In person, you realize he is looking at you but not seeing you. His words are even more stilted, particularly when he ruins a good line by adding prepositional phrases—"in this country … as a fundamental commitment … to all our citizens … regardless of circumstance"—until everyone is silently begging him to stop.

Irrespective of his personal talents, that makes it a bit harder for a presidential candidate in the general election. If you lack that shallow charisma we Americans tend to look for in our national leaders, that can be a big handicap.

And when it's just you, going mano a mano in debate with the President of the United States, there's nobody else in the sales force out there on that stage to prop you up. No Jean Shaheens. No Teddy Kennedys. No Teresa Heinzes, for that matter. Just you, and your drab, wooden little personality in the cold, pitiless glare of the camera lens.

Fortunately, Kerry will be running against George Bush, so it'll be a little more even.

Jeez, can you image Kerry having to face somebody like Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan in his prime?

Claudia Rosett get's it right

(Review) Read Claudia Rosett in the Wall Street Journal today.

Which brings me back to the current U.S. debate, in which the agreed trigger for action seems somehow restricted to weapons of mass destruction--and the sure knowledge and certain existence thereof. This is peculiar in itself. While WMDs certainly matter, they are by no means the sum total of an evil regime's capacity to do damage. In the case of the Soviet Union, which possessed thousands of nuclear warheads and conducted hundreds of detectable nuclear tests, none of those bombs ever actually went off in a war. Yet the harm done by that corrosive empire was vast beyond imagining, and in very tangible ways--including such legacies as Kim's North Korea--still haunts us today.

According to "The Black Book of Communism," the death toll from communism was some 100 million people. That same system supplied to a host of nations worldwide, including in the Middle East, blueprints for the one thing that Soviet communism developed with greater efficiency than any other system ever devised--techniques for the repression of human beings. And it is political repression, not weapons of mass destruction per se, that has turned the Middle East into the danger it now constitutes for the democratic world.

But somehow, in the hurly-burly of election-year politics, the focus is all on those elusive weapons. By all means, beef up our intelligence and double-check information--and wish everyone good luck in penetrating with perfect clarity the secrecy and layers of lies that are precisely the specialty of the world's most dangerous states. But let's not pretend that this is the chief standard by which we will ensure the safety of our children's children.

We seem to be heading for the surreal conclusion that it is all right to be a murderous tyrant who only thinks he is pursuing weapons of mass destruction--even if he apparently believes it himself strongly enough to take the risk of kicking out U.N. arms inspectors for four years. Somehow, I am not comforted by the vision of a Saddam presiding over a country where he is allocating resources for WMD, terrorists are traipsing through, and whatever is really going on is anyone's guess, including Saddam's.

What needs to start sinking in, somehow, is that while arsenals matter, what matters even more is the set of rules and values that a regime defends and its leaders live by. This, more than anything signed on paper or offered as totalitarian propaganda, tells us where the worst dangers lie.

Read the whole thing.

I bet she believes in pixies, too

(Review) Joan Venochi writes that Howard Dean's campaign isn't dead. He can still win. Really.

As I read this, I was reminded of Fredo yelling, "I'm smart! I can handle stuff!"

Yeah. Sure you can, buddy.

This might be fun

(Review) Michelle Malkin writes that, if you think Howard Dean has a tenuous grasp on his temper, you really, oughtta take a look at John Kerry's wife, Teresa Heinz.

Evidently, she's on a really short fuse.

No better place for that than in the stress of a national policial campaign. I just hope they have a film crew there when her cork pops. That'll be good TV.

Iraqi WMDs

(Review) The wonderfully named Peter Feaver¹ writes in today's Washington Post about what we know now about Iraqi WMDs, compared to what we knew then.

The first thing such a comparison does, he notes, is allow us to dismiss the "Bush Lied" meme as conspiratorial foolishness.

Democrats have gleefully claimed that since the Iraqi WMD program was (apparently) not as advanced as the Bush administration claimed it to be, the neoconservatives in the Bush administration must have deliberately lied. Despite its popularity on the campaign primary trail, this conspiracy theory is so nutty that Bush defenders have just as gleefully avoided tougher questions and contented themselves with knocking it down: How could even the all-powerful neocons have manipulated the intelligence estimates of the Clinton administration, French intelligence, British intelligence, German intelligence and all the other "co-conspirators" who concurred on the fundamentals of the Bush assessment?

And we need to dismiss such foolishness, because concentrating on it prevents us from concentrating on the true lessons to be learned.

• The alternatives confronting the Security Council in March 2003 were not viable. If eight months of largely unfettered investigations could not provide a smoking gun to prove the existence or nonexistence of a stockpile, certainly Hans Blix would fail as well.
• Intelligence failure was inevitable given the nature of the Iraqi regime. The new conventional wisdom is that Hussein wanted us to think he had a more advanced WMD program than he thought he had, and that Hussein himself thought he had a more advanced WMD program than he really had. If Hussein could be deceived in a country where he had absolute power, where he regularly punished betrayers by slipping them through human shredders or having their wives raped in front of them, then any external intelligence service was going to be deceived as well.
• Intelligence failures beget intelligence failures. The intelligence community has a sorry record of assessing just how advanced an incipient WMD program really is.
• Intelligence cannot substitute for political judgment. Coercive diplomacy, the alternative to war, requires political judgment under conditions of uncertainty, a fact lost in the increasingly rancorous partisan debate.

As far as the last item goes, this used to be commonly recognized by nearly everyone in the past, leading to the old saw that "politics stops at the water's edge". To bad the Left has discarded that bit of actual wisdom, too.
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¹ One can only imagine the torture that he went through as a schoolboy. It's almost as bad as being named "Richard Head".    

Inflexible Ideologues

(Review) Mark Krikorian writes that the Wall Street Journal's blind support of open borders makes Tuesday's lead editorial intellectually dishonest when it claimed that we've made sincere attempts to police the borders. Krikorian responds that that is absolutely untrue, and anyone with a lick of common sense knows it.

In the Journal's words, "if a policy keeps failing for nearly two decades maybe some new thinking is in order."

Actually, I agree. The problem is that the "new thinking" we need is a commitment to enforce the law. Over the past 20 years, we have done almost nothing to control immigration except beef up the Border Patrol. And while that's a worthwhile goal in itself, any border agent will tell you that his job is only one part of any effort to enforce sovereign borders.

The Journal claims that the ban on hiring illegals, passed in 1986, has been tried and failed. Again, this is false. Enforcement of this measure, intended to turn off the magnet attracting illegals in the first place, was spotty at first and is now virtually nonexistent. Even when the law was passed, Congress pulled its punch by not requiring the development of a mechanism for employers to verify the legal status of new hires, forcing the system to fall back on a blizzard of easily forged paper documents.

And even under this flawed system, the INS was publicly slapped down when it did try to enforce the law. When the agency conducted raids during Georgia's Vidalia onion harvest in 1998, thousands of illegal aliens — knowingly hired by the farmers — abandoned the fields to avoid arrest. By the end of the week, both of the state's senators and three congressmen — Republicans and Democrats — had sent an outraged letter to Washington complaining that the INS "does not understand the needs of America's farmers," and that was the end of that.

So, the INS tried out a "kinder, gentler" means of enforcing the law, which fared no better. Rather than conduct raids on individual employers, Operation Vanguard in 1998-99 sought to identify illegal workers at all meatpacking plants in Nebraska through audits of personnel records. The INS then asked to interview those employees who appeared to be unauthorized — and the illegals ran off. The procedure was remarkably successful, and was meant to be repeated every two or three months until the plants were weaned from their dependence on illegal labor.

Local law-enforcement officials were very pleased with the results, but employers and politicians vociferously criticized the very idea of enforcing the immigration law. Gov. Mike Johanns organized a task force to oppose the operation; the meat packers and the ranchers hired former Gov. Ben Nelson to lobby on their behalf; and, in Washington, Sen. Chuck Hagel (R., Neb.) (coauthor, with Tom Daschle, of the newest amnesty bill, S.2010) made it his mission in life to pressure the Justice Department to stop. They succeeded, the operation was ended, and the INS veteran who thought it up in the first place is now enjoying early retirement.

I don't know what kind of glockkukuksheim the Journal's editors live in in New York City, but wherever it is, it needs to get back in touch with reality.

The truth is that in California, if you can make it across the border, and then past the Border Patrol stations in Rainbow on the I-15 and San Clemente on the I-5, you're home free. And if you want to stay in San Diego county, you don't have to worry about the latter at all.

With enemies like these...

(Review) Last night was another bad night for Howard Dean. He's certainly not the front-runner any more. The thing is, he's got the organization and the money to stay in the race for a while yet. Now that the race is moving into the South and Southwest, Dean has a much tougher audience to face than Midwest Progressives and Northeastern liberals.

To have any hope of winning, he's got to attack John Kerry, and let everybody know what a weasel Kerry really is.

Rich Lawry writes that, If Dean can't be nominated, he'll settle for that kind of internecine bloodletting as a satisfactory second place.

In continuing the fight against John Kerry, the former Vermont governor will inevitably have to point out how Kerry's anti-Washington, anti-special-interest rhetoric is an affectation. Dean was already doing this, fairly gently, in New Hampshire. More will almost certainly be on the way. When he was down and out, Kerry argued that Dean was phony. Turnabout will now be fair play.

The Democratic establishment will realize this and push to get Dean out of the race, but with his base of activists and his network of Internet donors Dean has the capacity to resist pressure. And he has plenty of motive, because he thinks he was done dirty. Asked by Brit Hume last night about Terry McAuliffe's test that a candidate should have won something by Feb. 3 to stay in, Dean said basically that McAuliffe should stuff it, recalling that the DNC chairman had done nothing to stop the negative attacks against him. Attaboy Howard! You wuz robbed, robbed, robbed!

Dean has recently taken to complaining that his rivals in Iowa had game-plans to try to dissuade caucus-goers from supporting him. Oh, the outrage! What has the democratic process come to? Don't stand for it, Howard. Fight back — in New Mexico, in Arizona, in South Carolina, in North Dakota, in Missouri, etc., etc. It is time for the politics of paranoia and grievance to devour its own. Since you helped create John Kerry — his message has been to a significant extent Deanified — who better than you to point out his inadequacies and contradictions?

And the nice thing is that Dean can stay in at least until the California Primaries on 2 March, because a big win in California, coupled with respectable second palce showings everywhere else, might actually get him the nomination. At least mathematically. Especially if John Edwards does well in the South, which might hurt Kerry's delegate count more than anybody else's.

All the while, Howard Dean will be bashing Kerry, over and over, and over. Sure, Dean won't win, but he can still hurt Kerry enough to make him a weaker candidate in the general election.

Go, Howard, Go!

I'll take failed presidential bids by former governors for 400, Alex

(Review) John Kerry opened a can of whupass on Howard Dean in NH.

Kerry: 39%
Dean: 24%
Edwards: 13%
Clark: 12%
Lieberman: 9%

That's with a little more than 1/3 of the precincts counted. 

Al Franken's Fascist Tendencies

(Review) Al Franken attacked a Lyndon LaRouche supporter who was heckling Howard Dean. The heckler was shouting when Franken slammed into from behind, grabbed him, and threw him to the floor.

I don't know what that is in NH, but here in CA, it's a violation of sec. 242 of the Penal Code, and is punishable by 6 months in the county jail.

I suspect that the LaRouche people, being exceptionally irritating people, will now be suing the pants off Franken, who, by the way, apparently doesn't mind the violent crushing of dissent when it's dissent he doesn't like.

If you or I did that, we'd be leaving the big political rally in handcuffs.

Churchill's "Traditions of the Royal Navy", No. 2

Photo: AP Photo/Stephen Vaughan, 20th Century Fox 

With apologies to Lewis Carroll

Photo: AFP/Patrick Kovarik

He's so much like Eisenhower, It's Uncanny

Photo: Reuters/Brian Snyder
 

More Migrations

(Review) Bear Flagger Patrick Prescott has moved his blog into new digs. Check it out.

Wes Clark: Peggy Noonan's Worst Nightmare

(Review) Peggy Noonan writes that The Little General isn't...well...normal.

Mr. Dole, a little emollient, then a little mischievous, told Gen. Clark, first, that "somebody [had] to lose" in Iowa and, next, that "politically you just became a colonel instead of a general." This little barb set off a pompous harrumph of a retort: "Well, I don't think that's at all--Senator, with all due respect, he's [Kerry's] a lieutenant and I'm a general. You got to get your facts on this. He was a lieutenant in Vietnam. I've done all of the big leadership." The exchange ended with Gen. Clark telling Mr. Dole that he, Wesley, had "been in a lot of tough positions in my life, one of them was leading the operation in Kosovo . . ."

"I won a war"? "I pitch a 95-mile-an-hour fastball"? "I've done all of the big leadership"? "I've been in a lot of tough positions"?

Oh no. Another one...

It is true that Americans respect and often support generals. But we like our generals like Eisenhower and Grant and George Marshall: We like them sober, adult and boring. The title "general" is loaded enough. We don't want one who is temperamental and unpredictable and strange.

Tempramental, unpredictable, and strange. I can't think of a better shorthand character sketch of The Little General.

Steyn Predicts

(Review) Mark Steyn goes on the record with his predictions for New Hampshire:

But, barring a Larouche surge, my bet for today's vote is as follows:

1) Senator John Kerry 29 per cent
2) Governor Howard Dean 28 per cent
3) Senator John Edwards 19 per cent
4) Senator Joe Lieberman 12 per cent
5) General Wesley Clark 10 per cent
6) Everybody else 2 per cent

You can have a good laugh about these predictions tomorrow morning.

As a New Hampshire resident, he also weighs in with some observations about the campaign from his point of view. For Instance, what's a Kerry "rally" like?

If you go to a Kerry rally – something of an oxymoron, but let that pass – the senator's stump speech is a karaoke tape of floppo populist boilerplate. If he'd downloaded it for free from the internet, that'd be one thing. Instead, he paid a small fortune to hotshot consultant Bob Shrum, who promptly faxed over the same old generic guff he keeps in the freezer: "I (insert name here) will never stop fighting for ordinary people against the powerful interests that stand in your way."

This shtick worked so well for Shrum's previous clients - President Dick Gephardt (1988), President Bob Kerrey (1992), President Al Gore (2000) and President Insert Namehere (2008) that he evidently sees no reason why it shouldn't elect a fifth president this time round.

The most interesting observation, though, is that the image the candidates are trying to project--except for Howard Dean--is different than the traditional Democratic image.

That's the real story here: for all Howard Dean's talk that you can't beat Bush with "Bush Lite", the candidates who'll survive to the southern primaries next week are doing their best not to sound anti-war, anti-tax cuts or anti-guns. In other words, even in the Democratic primary, this election's now being fought on Republican terms.

Now, that is an interesting development.

Pauline Kael redux

(Review) In an article entitled, "I See Dean People", William Saletan takes several vicious, but well-deserved, swipes at the whole Dean Campaign.

The Internet helped Deaniacs find, organize, and fortify each other. Together, they built confidence and strength. They spent hours discussing topics such as "Why I love Howard Dean," "When did you fall in love with Howard Dean," and "Enough about Howard Dean—what do you love about Howard Dean?" But the more they affirmed each other, the more they lost touch with the rest of us. Even their first taste of reality, a third-place finish in Iowa, couldn't shake them...

The airbrushed, self-validating fantasy goes on as actor Martin Sheen takes the stage to introduce Dean. Sheen plays President Josiah Bartlet on NBC's The West Wing, which the Dean campaign has adopted as its model...Lately, Sheen has been stumping for Dean, as though Bartlet's imaginary presidential authority should carry weight in the real world. "As the acting president of the United States," Sheen begins, and the crowd whoops with delight...

Howard Dean has taken the microphone to "thank President Bartlet" as everyone applauds. Dean proceeds to describe an imaginary world in which he was "the only one" to oppose President Bush on a series of issues. "I'm the only governor in the country who stood up for civil unions" for gay couples, says the man who signed Vermont's civil unions bill behind closed doors after his state's Supreme Court forced him to.

Dean makes light of his concession speech on caucus night in Iowa, in which he vented his emotions with a visceral roar. In the week since then, he has repeatedly explained that he wasn't trying to scare the television audience; he was just trying to mirror and affirm the enthusiasm of his supporters who were in that room in Iowa. But that's the problem. Dean wasn't talking to the country. He was talking to his movement...It was the speech of a crusader, not a president.

Today, as Dean starts to talk about health care, a guy in the balcony interrupts him. The guy says he was unemployed but was able to see a doctor, thanks to Vermont's health insurance program. "Some people heard Howard Dean scream, and it made them run away," the guy shouts. "I heard Howard Dean scream, and it made me wake up!" The crowd whoops, and Dean smiles...

I don't know whether there are enough people like this guy to power Dean through tomorrow's primary. But I do know there aren't nearly enough of them to elect Dean president. I wonder whether Dean and his followers will ever wake up—and how many of the rest of us will have to run away before they do.

Don't hold back. Tell us how you really feel.

The dollar's decline

(Review) David Ignatius writes that the odd thing about the decline of the dollar's value in FOREX markets is that it doesn't seem to bother anyone. The theory seems to be "Strong dollar? Good. Weak Dollar? Good."

There is, however, deep pessimism about Europe's economic prospects with a strong Euro. I suspect, however, that's because of economic fundamentals that have to do with things other than their currencies strength. For instance, the looming pensions crisis, or their unsustainable welfare spending.

Where there is real optimism though, is among the Chinese.

The Chinese, in a nod toward reality, have said they will allow some upward flexibility in their currency this year -- and various Chinese bankers were offering teasing hints here about just when and how much the renminbi might rise. Indeed, a Davos parlor game was devising proxy investments that would allow you to place an advance bet on the inevitable rise in the Chinese currency once it becomes convertible. Ironically, the favorite proxy was the Taiwan dollar. The one thing few here seemed to doubt was that China's economic power will someday rival that of the United States. I asked one Chinese investor whether he thought the dollar would remain the world's reserve currency 50 years from now. "Of course not," he said. "The reserve currency will be Chinese."

Yeah? Well not with the current government, or any similar successor, it won't.

The Chinese have--have always had, really--this peculiar conceit that they are truly The Middle Kingdom, the world's center of, well, everything.

Now, maybe over the next 50 years, China's economy will boom fantastically. Maybe they'll throw off the shackles of their totalitarian overlords, and get a real, consensual government, All that will be wonderful.

But it's not like the US economy will be sitting on idle for the next five decades while that happens. And we don't have a quarter-billion people with no electricity still using outdoor toilets. Nor do we have vast tracts of wasteland caused by 60 years of environmental neglect that must be reclaimed.

China will require massive amounts of growth just to take a "Great Leap Forward" into the 20th century.

Big day in NH

(Review) It's primary day in the tiny state of New Hampshire, or as Howard Dean calls it, upside-down Vermont.

So, who takes the prize there today? The polls say Kerry. But then, when it comes to New Hampshiore, the polls say a lot of things, and often wildly different things at the same time.

NH voters are...iconoclastic. They make last minute vote switches. 30% of the NH electorate in the last poll said they were still willing to change their minds about who to vote for. 15% are still undecided.

I note that The Little General won last night in the voting taken in Dixville Notch and Hart's Location.

Heh. What a load of fun it'd be if Clark actually ran away with this thing. Then Edwards won big in SC next week.

I think it'd be really funny if, after front-loading their primaries to choose a candidate by March, thus giving him the rest of the year to go after George Bush, what the Dems actually got was 3 or 4 candidates, each with 1,000 delegates or so. Then, they'd be deadlocked with no candidate until their convention chose one.

I think that'd be a scream. They'd all be sniping at each other for the next 6 months.

That Terry McAuliffe would sure be popular then.

More losses for Blogger

Fellow Bear Flaggers Infinite Monkeys and Boi From Troi have left Blogger behind, and are happily ensconced in their new MT-powered digs. Drop by and say hi.

The Dems' bottom Line

(Review) Lileks distills the Democratic policy arguments against Bush to it's essence.

A Democrat could have a good shot at Bush's job if he concentrated on spending, not tax cuts. But they can't. They won't. And so they send the message that [they] will never cut your taxes. Ever. Can't be done. We need to raise taxes and we must never alienate France is not a winning strategy, I think. However they dress it up, that's what it comes down to.

Oh, and according to Wes Clark, if you don't believe in progressive taxation, you're unpatriotic.

Where are the WMDs?

(Review) So, we haven't found any WMDs in Iraq. Chief weapons inspector David Kay says he doesn't think we will find them.

So what happened?

We already know what the John Kerrys of the country will say.

"It confirms what I have said for a long period of time, that we were misled - misled not only in the intelligence, but misled in the way that the president took us to war," Kerry said on "Fox News Sunday." "I think there's been an enormous amount of exaggeration, stretching, deception."

Yeah. Shut the f*** up, Johnny.

You thought the guy had WMDs all the way back to 1998, when Bill Clinton made whacking Saddam the law of the land.

So, bite me. You and Teddy both.

Everybody thought the guy had a WMD program. Even Jacques Chirac's intelligence poodles yapped on and on about it.

So, either Saddam got rid of them at the last moment, or it was all a big bluff. Either way, good call, Saddam. How's that workin' out for ya?

But, I think the CIA owes us all a big explanation. How did the intelligence agencies of every country in the civilized world--and the Russians--get fooled so badly for so long.

We need to know because, at the end of the day, if we ever start talking about how the President-for-Life of Kaplackistan is building nuclear missiles, people are gonna wonder if it's true, or if we're just shining them on. We have to figure out how we can fix this, get the right info in the future, and how we can get other countries to get their own confirmation.

Because if we don't, then from now on, and for as long as the sun burns hot in space, every time a US president starts talking about some tin-pot dictator getting hold of a nuclear weapon, the French are gonna start screaming, "Il est tout un grand mensonge! Un mensonge!

And even though nobody here will understand that because we don't speak frog, let me tell you, it isn't an indication of high esteem for our credibility.

Now, the CIA are the same guys that estimated that the Soviet GDP was about twice as high as it actually was, which may a go a long way toward explaining why they also missed the fact that the whole Warsaw Pact was about to collapse in 1989. They didn't know the Iraqis were invading Kuwait in 1991 until the Republican Guard's battalion commanders were already dipping themselves in the Emir's warm marble bathtubs in Kuwait City. And now they evidently missed this. Oh, and the CIA and the FBI didn't exactly do a bang-up job of preventing 911, either.

So, who is it that actually works at the CIA? And why are they still there?

And how do we ensure that this never happens again? 

It's called the Theory of Comparative Advantage: Look into it

(Review) Arnold Kling comes to Paul Krugman's defense on trade policy. And, increasingly, he's beginning to agree with Krugman that people who don't understand the Theory of Comparative Advantage shouldn't be allowed to talk about international trade.

Oh, and along the way, Kling manages to put to rest the idea that outsourcing to India is some sort of huge economic threat.

And he does it without graphs or math. Trust me, if you're an economist, that's not easy to do.

Who'd he have to sleep with the get this published?

(Review) Terry Moe somehow conned the New York Times into publishing his erudite defense of school vouchers on the op/ed page.

The fallacyof the left: Economic determinism

(Review) Tom Friedman is a thinking man. But he is also a man of the Left, and prone therefore to the fallacy of thinking the economic determinism is at the heart of the problem in the Middle East. Why are there terrorists? Friedman seems to imply it's because they don't have jobs.

Just read the numbers and weep: of the 90 million Arab youth today (between the ages of 15 and 24), 14 million are unemployed, many of them among the 15 to 20 million Muslims now living in Europe. "There's not enough jobs and not enough hope," Jordan's King Abdullah told the Davos economic forum. According to the 2003 Arab Human Development Report, between 1980 and 1999 the nine leading Arab economies registered 370 patents (in the U.S.) for new inventions. Patents are a good measure of a society's education quality, entrepreneurship, rule of law and innovation. During that same 20-year period, South Korea alone registered 16,328 patents for inventions. You don't run into a lot of South Koreans who want to be martyrs.

I was at Google's headquarters in Silicon Valley a few days ago, and they have this really amazing electronic global map that shows, with lights, how many people are using Google to search for knowledge. The region stretching from Morocco to the border of India had almost no lights. I attended a breakfast at Davos on the outsourcing of high-tech jobs from the U.S. and Europe to the developing world. There were Indian and Mexican businessmen there, and much talk about China. But not a word was spoken about outsourcing jobs to the Arab world. The context — infrastructure, productivity, education — just isn't there yet.

No one, of course, denies that education and material well-being are unimportant. But behavior is not determined by economics. It is determined by the values impressed upon a people by their culture.

It's important to note the anomalous way in which the left has, ever since Marx, regarded the importance of economics. Economics, they seem to be saying, determines values. People are poor, so they feel hopeless, from whence it is only a short step to blowing stuff up. But, if economics determines values, then why doesn't the Left believe the rich are the most virtuous of us? If poverty makes you angry and violent, then why do riches make you, in the eyes of the Left, an evil and vicious exploiter of the poor? It seems, in the left's ideology, at least, that there is an exceptionally narrow range in which economics allows one to become a paragon of virtue.

If only, the Left cries, these people could have education and jobs their hatred would disappear. Funny, though, it didn't seem to prevent the Europeans from embroiling themselves in WWI. Nor did a university education at the Sorbonne prevent Pol Pot from becoming one of the 20th century's most prolific mass murderers.

And let's look at those patent figures. Is the lack of Arab patents indicative of poverty, or are they rather an indication of the Arab Muslim world's lack of freedom, intimidation of dissent, and repression of rational, skeptical inquiry? Indeed, isn't the poverty and lack of jobs themselves symptomatic of these deeper problems, rather than the source of them?

A poor economy is the result, not the cause of Arab cultural failures.

This is especially saddening when one realizes that Early Islam was the world's prime center of scientific and medicinal research. Indeed, many of the West Later cultural triumphs were possible only because Early Islam kept alive the writings and traditions of the Ancient Greeks, and retransmitted them to the West after the Dark Ages. But that brand of Arab Muslim culture is dead. For whatever reason, that particular culture today is intolerant, and viciously hostile to dissent or rational, skeptical inquiry.

This is not the atmosphere in one can—or should—expect innovation in science, business, or public policy. And without innovation, one can hardly expect dynamic, flexible economies.

So, then, where does the terrorism come from? After all, most Haitians are dismally poor, yet they don't blow themselves up in shopping malls in Fort Lauderdale and Mobile. Why doesn't their poverty cause terrorism? For that matter, why aren't Mexicans, Guatemalans, or Hondurans doing it either? Could it be because they have a different set of cultural values that include strong prohibitions against terrorism?

I submit that Arab Muslim culture has far weaker strictures against terrorism, at least if terrorist acts are committed against non-muslims. I submit that terrorism results from two dangerous ideas prevalent in Arab Muslim culture.

First, is the idea of Jihad. Of the world's major religions, Islam is the only one whose primary spread was advanced through military action. Now, Muslim scholars speaking for CAIR can repeat ad nauseum that the concept of Jihad refers to the personal struggle against sin. But the actual known history of their religion, and the fairly widespread Wahabbi interpretation of the concept of Jihad, is something entirely different.

Second is the Leftist idea that the problems faced by the Arab world, and in the Third World in general, are the direct results of colonization. As a practical matter, this is utter hogwash, as far as the Arab world is concerned. Their colonial power for hundreds of years, right up to 1918, was Moslem Turkey. While 30 years of colonization by western powers from roughly 1918-1948 may not have improved the lot of the Arab world by much, they certainly didn't cause pathologies that have festered for 60 years. Frankly, neither the British nor the French were that competent. But it is a lot more satisfying to blame outsiders, especially non-Muslims, for your problems than it is to look at your own society and realize that its pathologies are the cause of your misery.

But those two ideas together are a dangerous potion. Because they simultaneously tell you that non-Muslims are exploiting your people, and that killing those non-Muslims wholesale is a perfectly acceptable response. And it is a compelling argument, even if you, like the 911 hijackers, are university-educated members of the middle and upper middle class. It's compelling even to the successful, billionaire construction company owner who remains the world's chief terrorist today.

Assuming he's still alive.

If economics determined values, Osama bin Laden would instead be one of the world's chief saints.

Steyn Speaks

(Review) The best writer in English language journalism, Mark Steyn, weighs in on the Democratic presidential contest in NH"

What seems to be happening on the ground in New Hampshire is this: Now that John Kerry is the sane alternative to Howard Dean, much of Wesley Clark's support has leached away to Kerry. But at the same time Dean has been so subdued and demoralized that some of his wackier support has leached away to Clark. If Kerry is the sane alternative to Dean, Clark is the crazy alternative to Kerry.

Don't take my word for it -- ask Michael Moore, the corpulent conspirazoid. He has endorsed Clark, not Dean. Message: Vote for the real crazy, not the karaoke crazy. In Thursday's debate, Peter Jennings twice gave Gen. Clark the opportunity to repudiate retrospectively Moore's characterization of the president as a ''deserter,'' as Clark had failed to do when Moore made the charge standing alongside him. Instead, Clark claimed to have no views on the matter, not to have looked into it, and said that Moore is ''not the only person who's said that.'' Clark doesn't scream: He has that weirdly intense stare. But, for as long as he's in the race, he'll do more damage to Democratic credibility than any amount of howling from Howard. He's very touchy about status: As he pointed out on CNN, he's a four-star general while Kerry was a mere lieutenant. In the ranks of the deranged, he's Field Marshal Flakey while Dean would be lucky to make corporal.

That brings us to the ''Comeback Kerry,'' as he styled himself last Monday, though even his missus, Theresa Heinz, could only force a grin at that line. In Iowa, the Ketchup Kid left Dean lying in a big pool of red sticky stuff, and establishment Dems breathed a sigh of relief. But it's hard to see why. Consciously or otherwise, Democrats seemed to be trying to neutralize the war as an issue -- the overwhelming majority is still opposed to it but in Iowa they just wanted it to go away, so they could get back to talking about their issues: health, education, mandatory bicycling helmets, etc.

Now that's a good line.

Going "all in"

(Review) Chip Griffin writes that Howard Dean is putting everything he has into New Hampshire, to the exclusion of every other state.

And betting big he is. The Dean campaign has pulled TV ads in all states except New Hampshire. They are dumping 120,000 videotapes of the Diane Sawyer interview all over the state (enough for about 1 out of every 10 men, women, and children here). The reclusive "Doc Judy" has even begun to pop up almost as much as a whack-a-mole.

Will it pay off? It might. The (admittedly) notoriously unreliable tracking polls seem to indicate that Dean's freefall has abated and some even suggest a little recovery. These same surveys show that Dean's supporters are solid, with roughly three-quarters saying they won't change their mind.

It the only choice he has to stave off complete disaster for his campaign. And, maybe it'll be worth it. After all, he could win.

No matter what the polls say, NH is almost always a surprise, as the Washington Post points out today. NH has exceedingly odd rules about registration and voting in the primaries, so polling is sometimes so off-base, it doesn't even have a bad cell-phone connection with reality.

Zogby Dissents

(Review) Despite every other poll showing Howard Dean all but finished in New Hampshire, the Zogby Tracking poll shows him with quite a lot of strength, and only 3 points behind John Kerry.

We'll know tomorrow if I--and everyone else--was wrong to write Dean off as a loser after Iowa.

A Different Kind of Conservative

(Review) According to John Fund, Andrew Sullivan isn't the only person who's got problems with George W. Bush.

For 30 years, the foot soldiers of the conservative movement have gathered here for the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. It is the only major conclave in which all elements of the conservative movement--from home-schoolers to antitax crusaders to missile-defense advocates--are represented.

What should worry President Bush is that at the CPAC meeting that ended Saturday there was a clear undercurrent of discontent with his administration. "The people here will vote for Bush, but their friends could be dispirited and stay home just as [White House adviser] Karl Rove said some did in 2000," says Don Devine, who served as President Reagan's director of federal personnel. "We all know how close that election turned out."

Let's take it as a given the conservative small-government rhetoric is more overblown than the actuality. I remember back in 1981, right after the inauguration of Ronald Reagan (one of whose platform planks was to eliminate the Department of Education), when Terrel H. Bell, Reagan's Education Secretary went in to the office for his first full day of work.

Bell was taken into a large meeting area, where the employees were gathered. Bell looked around for a few seconds, then quipped, "All you people work here?"

The employees laughed, for just a second, then the reality of what he was talking about--shutting down the Department--hit them, and they began to groan.

Of course, as it turns out, groans were uneccessary. The Department of Education is not only still there, but W is substantially increasing its money.

W is exactly the opposite type of conservative that Reagan was. Reagan was a social libertarian and a fiscal conservative. Oh, sure, he made all the required pious mouth noises about abortion, and the baby Jesus, but he never actually did anything about them.

Although, come to think of it, he didn't actually do much to hinder the growth of the Federal government either. But Bush doesn't even try to use fiscally-conservative rhetoric.

Bush is a social conservative, fiscally liberal president. Need protection from those pesky foreign competitors for steel, lumber, or textiles? Well, we'll just slap some tariffs on those puppies! Elderly and need medicine? Why just let ol' Unca Sam pay for it! Kids aren't doing to well in school? Why, nothing a few billion bucks thrown at the Education Department can't fix!

I think George W. Bush is not unbeatable. All it takes is for disaffected fiscal conservatives and libertarians to stay home, and against Kerry or Edwards, he may just lose. Against Lieberman, he'd be complete toast.

In fact, under that scenario, I'd probably vote for Liberman.

Big-Covernment Conservatism

(Review) Andrew Sullkivan isn't happy with the Bush Administration, and it's Nanny in Chief. And, as far as domestic policy goes, why should he be?

There's barely a speech by President Bush that doesn't cite the glories of human freedom. It's God's gift to mankind, he believes...But there's a strange exception to this Bush doctrine. It ends when you reach America's shores...When your individual choices conflict with what the Bush people think is good for you, they have been only too happy to intervene...

The President is proud of his Big Government moralism. As he put it in his first State of the Union message, "Values are important, so we have tripled funding for character education to teach our children not only reading and writing, but right from wrong." Sounds inoffensive enough. But who exactly determines what is right and what is wrong? Churches? Synagogues? Parents? Teachers? Nah. The Federal Government...

There has always been a tension in conservatism between those who favor more liberty and those who want more morality. But what's indisputable is that Bush's "compassionate conservatism" is a move toward the latter — the use of the government to impose and subsidize certain morals over others. He is fusing Big Government liberalism with religious-right moralism. It's the nanny state with more cash. Your cash, that is. And their morals.

I think this is precisely right. Apart from actively prosecuting the War on Terror and maintaining the tax cuts, I can't think of a single reason for which I would vote for George W. Bush.

Unfortunately, my choices do not include "idealized domestically libertarian, strongly pro-defense candidate". They include George W. Bush and "a quasi-socialist, UN-style internationalist to be named later".

Thanks for the choice. 

Jeez, we coulda repealed the 22nd Amendment and just re-elected Clinton and gotten pretty much what we have now.  

UPDATE:
Jon Henke quips that we'd actually have a better trade policy.

Mexifornia

(Review) Cobb both agrees and disagrees with my statements on illegal immigration.

What I agree with is that it benefits Mexico to have their citizens working in the US and delivering funds back to their home country. It stands to reason that these funds are not adequately taxed.

Well, it doesn't matter whether they are taxed or not. The advantage to Mexico lies not in the revenue the government extracts from this income (although, as inefficient as their tax system is, they must surely extract some), but in the fact that such income is available to the families of illegal immigrants. Remember, the Mexican government uses immigration as a safety valve to short-circuit calls for greater reform and transparency in the government. They eliminate some of this pressure by making economic refugees out of a potentially troublesome part of their population. For those the government cannot export, the extra income from the US ameliorates their complaints.

Let us assume that the Mexican government derives not one red cent from currency repatriation. It is still in their best interests to allow it.

I haven't heard much tell of the Mexican oligarchs being mercantilist, I'm not even quite sure what it means, but I'm sure some clever Mexicans have figured out a way to make a buck out of the way expatriot workers are making a buck.

Most of the economies of Central and South American states are popularly believed to be capitalist economies. They are not. They are mercantilist economies, to one extent or another. Mercantilism is essentially a type of economic nationalism. In general, mercantilist countries attempt to have regular trade surpluses. They restrict the ownership of certain industries—or, like Mexico, all industries and property—to their own nationals. Industries that might be substantially owned by foreigners face the constant threat of nationalization. (Indeed, one of the reasons why investors are so adverse to investment in Central and South America has been the nationalization of many industries in the past. Always after heavy norteamericano investment, of course.)

This has been changing in the last decade, as the economies of Central and South America have moved closer to free markets and free trade. But, mercantilist policies are still a powerful force in Latin America.

As far as Mexicans figuring out how to make a buck out of expat workers, I'm sure that's true. Or not. It isn't germane to my point, however. What is germane is that the influx of so much currency into Mexico helps them to maintain a current account surplus, which by mercantilist lights, improves the measure of Mexico's wealth.

Franks takes a swipe at theoritical multiculturalism as if it were the reason for playing nice nice with the immigrants. Having grown up in Los Angeles, and playing pickup soccer all through high school for what it's worth, I've always viewed multiculturalism as a formalization of what we do here anyway. Multiculturalism may need a jumpstart in Boston where they can't even cook decent barbecue ribs, much less understand Spanglish, but here in California it is de rigeur, if not de jure.

I strongly disagree. America is not, nor has it ever been multicultural. America has always been multi-ethnic, which is a different thing entirely. Until 30 years ago, assimilation into American culture was an inalterable requirement for any kind of success. It was rigidly enforced in schools, businesses, and in public life.

As I stated in an earlier post, being an American is a philosophical commitment to a set of principles, not a matter of membership in a particular ethnic or racial group. This has allowed America to maintain an essentially peaceful civic society, despite having immigrants from every ethnic group in the world. What has made America successful is that it has been unicultural and multi-ethnic. We play nice with immigrants because public civility and tolerance is part of American culture. And we demand that they play nice, because while they can kill as many Serbs or Croats as they want back on the Old Country, we won't tolerate it here.

It is the ossification of the ethos which sets many conservative folks off.

No, it isn't. It is the tendentious stupidity of the idea in the first place, and its apparent failure everywhere else in the world its been tried. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Rwanda, Uganda, Yugoslavia, Chechnya, etc., etc., etc. You'd think that if multiculturalism were such a bang-up success, it wouldn't require a totalitarian like Tito to keep it from exploding into tribal violence.

You can have a successful multi-ethnic country. Despite our problems, we've done it for 220 years.

Multiculturalism, however, is a horse of an entirely different color. And a spectacularly unsuccessful one, as far as I can see.

Multiculturalism won, and it still rubs people the wrong way. Still, but I think it the height of hypocrisy for those who are incapable of even a modest bit of Spanish to assert any mandate for mono- or bilingualism. Remember the old jokes they used to tell at my crusty prep school - Can you speak Spanish? No. How does it feel to be dumber than a Mexican? (Har Har!) My word on this is best illustrated by that wild man Ishmael Reed who appropriately says, if you're not speaking the language, you're not learning the culture. This cuts both ways, against kneejerk assimilationists who believe Mexican culture is inferior, and liberal activists who respect bilingualism in kids who don't read well in either language. The grain of truth is that the culture that lives on, lives on in literature, arts and philosophy but most people embroiled in immigration controversy aren't generally looking in that direction.

I would say that ethnicity and ethnic heritage lives on, and that culture shouldn't. And I don't particularly care if ethnic heritage lives on. Mexican immigrants can speak Spanish all they want. But they shouldn't, like Inspector Reynaud in Casablanca, be shocked—shocked!—to learn that lack of ability to speak the majority language limits their horizons.

On the other hand, if we all learned to speak fluent Spanish, and yet kept our commitment to republican principles, America would be completely unchanged, aside from that. The language one speaks does not determine the direction of one's culture. The things in which people believe does.

Now, about " kneejerk assimilationists who believe Mexican culture is inferior". Let me be plain. Mexico's culture is inferior. After all, there are 12 million Mexicans living illegally in the US. The reverse is not true. That is prima facie evidence of inferiority right there.

To believe otherwise is to believe that Mexican culture has nothing to do with that country's staggering political corruption, its lack of a middle class and stratification into two classes, one small class of fabulously wealthy hidalgos and one large class of crushingly poor campesinos, it's utter inability to provide economic growth and jobs for its citizenry, or any of a host of other things that sends its own citizens to this country by the millions. Are we to believe Mexican culture has nothing whatsoever to do with the problems that have continuously plagued that country for the past four centuries?

To believe that if Mexican culture were prevalent here, all of those attendant problems would melt away simply because it happens to be geographically located north of the Rio Grande is naïve in the extreme. Mexico's problems have very little indeed to do with its geographical location. To the extent that Mexican culture would not be a failure in America, it would be because the culture had changed to become more like America's, and less like Mexico's.

When it comes to American politics, immigration is a racial and an economic issue, despite Mr. Franks honest protestations.

I never said otherwise. I just said that my arguments weren't based on either race or economics. I can't speak for others' arguments. I can only speak for my own.

My point is that in many ways West Texas is already an American Mexico, and everything is just dandy. Who are we to determine what is the proper character for an American city? If Deaborn, Michigan is suddenly recognized as the capital city if Islam in America are we suddenly to become upset with Dearborn?

And my point is that West Texas shows a large amount of Mexican ethnic character, but it operates under American, not Mexican, cultural assumptions. And that's perfectly fine.

If Dearborn, MI, was Muslim Arab in ethnicity, and classically liberal and American in outlook, then, no, we wouldn't have a problem with that. If, on the other hand, civil authorities in Dearborn proclaimed sharia law as the official mode of jurisprudence, began requiring women to veil themselves, and began taxing all Christian and Jewish community members with a special surtax, we would object quite strenuously indeed.

Such rules, of course, would be perfectly consonant with those that already exist in the Arab world, but they would be fundamentally un-American.

John Kerry Lies

(Review) Jon Henke has the proof.