Unbelievable. Just saw a close-up of a young fellow rolling his own cigarette, and I'm guessing that wasn't tobacco.

Uh-oh. The REVEREND Jackson just took the podium in Washington.

Do they expect to be taken seriously? I'm here watching a little bit of the national anti-war demonstration in Washington, and although I'm not really shocked or surprised, it is nonetheless somewhat stunning to see and hear what these people are saying. One woman, with Jesse Jackson looking on, called President Bush a terrorist. Leonard Weinglass is just now telling us, in the style of Noam Chomsky, that the US has harbored anti-Cuba terrorists for 40 years. The crowd is dotted with any number of crudely fashioned signs and posters; one that just flitted across the screen: "BUSH IS A MOTHER F****R." Boy, if I were riding the fence on this one, such rhetoric would surely have won me over.

Promulgation and Enunciation of Doctrine. How doctrines come to be defined as such, according to Bill Safire.

Sex and Man at Yale. This is what Yale has become--sex in the paper (the US's oldest college daily), sex on bulletin boards, sex in the library. In the library? Oh, yes...in case you didn't know, Comedy Central's recent Porn 'N' Chicken was based on events right here at America's third oldest college--a pornography-viewing club that attempted to make its own film, The Staxxx (does it go without saying that one of the "stars," before the project went bust, was a Women's Center activist?). Not that the Yale Daily News is a bastion of fine reporting and insightful perspectives, but it is an Ivy League organ, of which William F. Buckley was once editor, and to draw 200,000 web hits for a column on fellatio is embarrassing--at least to me, and it should be to the university. When the library has been used as the setting for a smutty film, when the daily newspaper has become one-handed literature, one must seriously question whether the university is fulfilling its mission.



Limbaugh for Talent. That's David Limbaugh and Jim Talent. Of course, it's no surprise that Limbaugh endorses the Missouri Republican. And he also has some praise for Newt Gingrich--and I'm an unrepentant, unreconstructed Newt admirer. So I thought it worth linking.

Beijing on Lake Michigan? There's something unsettling about a crowd of Americans waving Chinese flags.

A "politically correct, morally equivalent hell-zone." The UN, that is. I couldn't have said it much better than Tim Blair does.

Nugent's Advice. Rocker, hunter, and conservative Ted Nugent recently visited a middle school to pass on some words of wisdom to teens. Some pearls, among others:

Jimi got high, and Jimi is dead; I went hunting, and I'm still Ted.

You ever hear anybody say they want the Mexican dream?

Puking and dying probably isn't a party.

Bush Saves the Day. The GOP response to that Bush-kills-old-people ad.

Diplomacy, Texas-Style. Chinese President Jiang Zemin will be in Crawford this weekend for some high-level discussions with the president. Think what you may about the propriety (or morality) of bringing such leaders to the ranch (as, too, with the Saudis, who visited some months ago), Bush's tactics down there speak to his down-to-earth, no-glamour approach--if, too, it's a shade humorous. According to Ari Fleischer, "President Jiang is looking forward to riding in the pickup truck." Can't wait to see the pictures of that.

Our DefSec. The following transpired at a recent (Oct. 17) Defense Department press conference:

Q: There is one point in the article, perhaps, that is accurate, for those of us who know you, Mr. Secretary. It says you're a "tough hombre" in your dealings and --

Rumsfeld: I am sweet and lovable. (Laughter.) Goddang.

(From Jay Nordlinger's Impromptus and the DoD.)

Hell hath no fury... Nice bleat from Lileks today. Commenting on the possibility of a Muslim sniper going after American children:

We don’t dress up our children in dynamite belts - and they think this makes us weak. We shield our children from death, not marinate them in its bloody juices, and they think this means we lack conviction. Morons. Come after our children, and you don’t know what you’re in for. You heard the part about awakening a sleeping giant? The sleeping giantess is the one you want to look out for, because she’ll tear off your head and lactate down your throat. Do not mess with American moms.

Which reminds me of those lines from Tocqueville:

If one asked me to what do I think one must principally attribute the singular prosperity and growing force of this people, I would answer that it is to the superiority of its women.

I think they're onto something there.

Best Days. According to the Farmers' Almanac, today is a prime day for jams and jellies. However, if you were planning to castrate that bull any time soon, you're going to have to wait--the best days were October 10-19.

Ever deeper. After reading his Death of the West last spring, I must admit I was intrigued by Pat Buchanan's bleak picture of Western society and culture. While I am, and remain, quite convinced of the moral decline of the United States, I drift farther and farther from Buchanan as he moves farther to the right (or is it the left?) in his opposition to a war in Iraq. His Monday column comes dangerously close to being pro-Hitler, without actually saying so, as is Buchanan's style. Buchanan is no Hitler sympathizer, I am sure, and certainly not a neo-Nazi in Reform Party clothes, but the moral equivalence which marks this piece blur the line.

• Hitler's opposition to Versailles was justified because Britain and the US, by 1933, deemed the treaty "unwise" and "unjust."
• "[Hitler's] leaving [the League of Nations] was no more a crime than America's refusal to join in 1919."
• "Hitler's decision to rearm Germany was a breach of Versailles, but his decision to build a navy...was happily assented to by the British government in negotiations."
• "Hitler's remilitarization of the Rhineland was a breach of Versailles and the Locarno Pact... But if France did not think German soldiers on German soil west of the Rhine was worth a war, why should America, which had rejected Versailles and was never a party to Locarno?"
• Mussolini, who had opposed the 1934 murder of Chancellor Dollfuss by Nazis, was driven into alliance with Hitler when the League of Nations--wrongly, to Buchanan--imposed sanctions after the Italian's invasion of Abyssinia.

Such assertions appear throughout and must cause even the most isolationist of the conservatives to squirm. One other item, a historical inaccuracy, must be pointed out. Buchanan states that "Hitler first won power democratically," which is false. Hitler was never elected to power. Indeed, his NSDAP scored some electoral victories in the 1920s and 1930s and was the second largest party after the September 1930 Reichstag elections, but he was defeated by the aging Hindenburg for the presidency in 1932. In the election immediately preceding his appointment as chancellor, the NSDAP actually lost seats, and Hitler was appointed under the assumption that he could be controlled. Strictly speaking, though, he was not democratically elected. Shoddy history and moral equivalance do not make for a convincing argument.

When men forget God. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's 1983 Templeton Address remains pertinent, despite the passage of almost 20 years and the collapse of the Soviet Union. He wrote against Communism not in the economic terms that dominated Western opposition but, rather, from a spiritual perspective (a view which Whittaker Chambers also seemed to espouse)--at the root ("the central pivot") of Communism is "militant atheism." And while the Cold War is over and Western economic and political systems have proved victorious, that spiritual dimension--the rejection of God and transcendence--remains very much unresolved. Solzhenitsyn understood, twenty years ago, that the West, for all its freedom, was losing its "religious consciousness"--a dimunition which has only gained speed in the interlude.

Imperceptibly, through decades of gradual erosion, the meaning of life in the West has ceased to be seen as anything more lofty than the "pursuit of happiness, "a goal that has even been solemnly guaranteed by constitutions. The concepts of good and evil have been ridiculed for several centuries; banished from common use, they have been replaced by political or class considerations of short lived value. It has become embarrassing to state that evil makes its home in the individual human heart before it enters a political system. Yet it is not considered shameful to make dally concessions to an integral evil. Judging by the continuing landslide of concessions made before the eyes of our very own generation, the West is ineluctably slipping toward the abyss. Western societies are losing more and more of their religious essence as they thoughtlessly yield up their younger generation to atheism.... When external rights are completely unrestricted, why should one make an inner effort to restrain oneself from ignoble acts?

He found symptoms of this rejection in the West's art--in the artist's attempt to be God; modern times--in which fecal matter becomes art--hardly refute Solzhenitsyn's observation. Moreover, he recognized the materialism which was coming to dominate Western life.

Our life consists not in the pursuit of material success but in the quest for worthy spiritual growth. Our entire earthly existence is but a transitional stage in the movement toward something higher, and we must not stumble and fall, nor must we linger fruitlessly on one rung of the ladder. Material laws alone do not explain our life or give it direction. The laws of physics and physiology will never reveal the indisputable manner in which the Creator constantly, day in and day out, participates in the life of each of us, unfailingly granting us the energy of existence; when this assistance leaves us, we die. And in the life of our entire planet, the Divine Spirit surely moves with no less force: this we must grasp in our dark and terrible hour.... [For] there is nothing else to cling to in the landslide: the combined vision of all the thinkers of the Enlightenment amounts to nothing.

I fear that we have not yet learned these lessons. Still we cling to Enlightenment ideas--taken to their extremes--and believe they are the greatest goods, our salvation. Our post-Enlightenment twentieth century, civilization's bloodiest, teaches us otherwise, but we persist in our faith--ironically, paradoxically--in reason, in rational thought. Reason cannot be dismissed, for its combination with faith is powerful. But until we realize that unfettered freedom is not man's highest state and begin to direct our hopes upward, we remain on the verge of losing the world.

Perle responds. We all remember Maureen Dowd's confused and confusing column from Sunday. Richard Perle, her imagined souffle master, responded in a letter to the NYT today:

I think it only fair to advise those of your readers who may have seen Maureen Dowd's Oct. 20 column, "The Soufflé Doctrine," that anyone trying to produce a soufflé in the slapdash manner that she suggests will end up going out for dinner. Combining the egg yolks and other ingredients with the milk requires considerable care.The making of soufflés, like the making of security policy or the making of judgments about presidents, is more difficult than Ms. Dowd imagines.

1880 Census. For all you genealogists and family historians out there, the good people at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints have transcribed the 1880 census (!) and published it on the Internet--for free (!!) and in a searchable form, no less. If you've ever spent any time perusing microfilmed census and soundex records, you know how tedious searching for relatives can be--scrolling through countless census sheets or hundreds of soundex cards. I haven't yet been able to check out this database, since it appears they've experienced some heavy traffic, but it can be found at Family Search. Here's an article from the WP giving an overview of this accomplishment (which took 17 years). Enjoy.

Power corrupts? No, says Jonah Goldberg in a great column today, in which he takes issue with how people use the old Acton quote on absolute power corrupting absolutely. It's how power is used that matters, whether for good or ill. Whereas some on the Right (ahem, libertarians, ahem) argue against government power in virtually all cases--not to mention the paleoconservatives' special animus reserved for Lincoln--conservatives, while understanding, indeed, that smaller, less powerful national government is good, also know that power and authority are necessary and are not inherently corrupting or insidious. Rather, we (conservatives, that is) worry more about the corruption innate to human nature and how power may thus be abused. As a check to that, we have not only our Constitution but also Western civilization.

...the greatest check we have on tyranny is a culture which creates men who do not want to be tyrants in the first place. Every generation the West is invaded by barbarians, Hanna Arendt wrote, we call them children. And in America we teach our children from an early age — by using, among other things, the bastardized Acton quote — that abusing power is a great sin. This is why our businessmen, our police, and our politicians are, as a rule, less corrupt than, say, Russia's or China's — because they were raised that way. To believe that power will corrupt anybody and everybody equally is to believe that raising good citizens is a pointless task.

And, sadly, this remains, by and large, a Western value. "Israel, for example, has the power to wipe out the Palestinians — but it doesn't," writes Goldberg. "If Yasser Arafat had that kind of power, the Israelis would either be dead or being plucked out of the sea by American rescue boats." But in the West, and especially in the United States--even, dare I say, most liberals--we recognize that with power comes the responsibility to act justly and to bind oneself by the "rules of civilization."

Foster v. Florida. Certiorari denied for Charles Foster, who was appealing his death sentence because he had already spent 27 years in prison and had, thus, suffered enough. Wrote Justice Thomas, concurring in the denial:

Petitioner could long ago have ended his "anxieties and uncertainties" by submitting to what the people of Florida deemed him to deserve: execution. Moreover, this judgment would not have been made had petitioner not slit Julian Lanier's throat, dragged him into bushes, and then, when petitioner realized that he could hear Lanier breathing, cut his spine.

How 'bout a trade. Republicans get Miller. Democrats get Chafee. Everybody's happy.

"Mr. Hussein." Seeing that reference reminds me of a footnote in Pollack's The Threatening Storm. The correct shorthand for the dictator is "Saddam." "Hussein" refers to his father, perhaps a rough equivalent of the Russian patronymic, and so it is nonsensical to refer to "Mr. Hussein." Of course, calling Saddam "Mr. Hussein," as both Presidents Bush have done, is surely not without effect: Saddam reportedly despises his father, who died before he was born.

Cracks in the System? Protests in Iraq. "The protests over the last two days are the most visible sign of a new and potentially seismic trend: A willingness among ordinary people to speak up — if only in relatively small numbers, briefly, and to the accompaniment of strident praise for Mr. Hussein — for rights obliterated by him in his 23 years as Iraq's absolute ruler."

Nukes and Tyrants. "Three nuclear-armed rogue states are enough for one small planet; three missed opportunities are already three too many. It is time for the United States, with or without the assistance of other nations, to act against the spread of this menace. It is time to declare a new doctrine — the George W. Bush doctrine, you could call it — that there shall be no more nuclear dictatorships, and that this country will do whatever needs to be done, constrained only by public opinion here in the U.S., to put an end to the nuclear ambitions of despots, criminals, religious fanatics, and lunatics." --John Derbyshire, National Review Online, October 22, 2002

Goldberg=Pure Gold. If anyone was over on The Corner today, I'm sure you saw Jonah Goldberg's hilarious links this morning. They were too good to pass up, so I'll repeat them here: vikings and bunny (with Goldberg's description: "When I say this is a large bunny you damn well better take my word for it").

On War.

War is a pulsation of violence, variable in its strength and therefore variable in the speed with which it explodes and discharges its energy. War moves on its goal with varying speeds; but it always lasts long enough for influence to be exerted on the goal and for its own course to be changed in one way or another--long enough, in other words, to remain subject to the action of a superior intelligence. --Carl von Clausewitz, Vom Kriege

The Cuban Missile Crisis, Properly Understood. By a Scotsman...in The Scotsman, no less. George Kerevan offers a review of that October of yore, with an eye toward our modern crisis, and rebuts the claim that Kennedy's rejection of an invasion of Cuba somehow means, in 2002, that Bush should not invade Iraq. The real lesson, says Kerevan: "Face down evil or live with the consequences."

An Armed Citizenry. A hunter shot and killed a man trying to steal his car...with a bow and arrow. (By way of Instapundit.)

Australia's Bush? Said Australian Prime Minister John Howard of the Bali bombing: "We'll get the bastards who did this." Firm and resolute...I like him already.

Brace yourselves. The World Medical Association wants a "strong international treaty to curb tobacco use." I see where things are heading... Difficult problems? Just draft a multinational treaty. And when that fails to improve things, blame the US.

The Rumsfeld Doctrine? They might just be "guidelines," but what the DefSec laid out last week makes good sense.

"War would crush Iraqi cities." Um, isn't that idea?

Gaddis on Grand Strategy. Great, great article by Yale Prof. John Gaddis in Foreign Policy. Please forgive me if I seem to fawn--I've long admired Gaddis and his writings on the Cold War and am currently in his Cold War history class. He offers, here, a critique of Bush's national security strategy as articulated in last month's policy statement, and his verdict is mostly positive: "the Bush strategy is right on target with respect to the new circumstances confronting the United States and its allies in the wake of September 11" and is more "forceful" and "multilateral" than Clinton's final strategy document of 1999. Gaddis finds the Bush strategy in tune with "sophisticated political science" on other powers' acceptance of America's benign hegemony. He also dismisses arguments that Bush's opposition to Iraq spring from some personal vendetta:

Despite his comment that this is "a guy that tried to kill my dad," George W. Bush is no Hamlet, agonizing over how to meet a tormented parental ghost's demands for revenge. Shakespeare might still help, though, if you shift the analogy to Henry V. That monarch understood the psychological value of victory--of defeating an adversary sufficiently thoroughly that you shatter the confidence of others, so that they'll roll over themselves before you have to roll over them.

Dealing with Iraq, then, represents a critical component of maintaining the "momentum" of the war on terror. Gaddis continues,

Iraq is the most feasible place where we can strike the next blow. If we can topple this tyrant, if we can repeat the Afghan Agincourt on the banks of the Euphrates, then we can accomplish a great deal. We can complete the task the Gulf War left unfinished. We can destroy whatever weapons of mass destruction Saddam Hussein may have accumulated since. We can end whatever support he's providing for terrorists elsewhere, notably those who act against Israel. We can liberate the Iraqi people. We can ensure an ample supply of inexpensive oil. We can set in motion a process that could undermine and ultimately remove reactionary regimes elsewhere in the Middle East, thereby eliminating the principal breeding ground for terrorism.

Some critics oppose an attack on Iraq because it would detract from our ongoing war against terrorism. On the contrary, however, it is very much a part of this war, and the enemies are the same, though the fronts are different, as Gaddis points out. Gaddis' review does, too, point out potential problems with the strategy--the "connection between domestic politics and grand strategy has not yet been made"; it assumes our being welcomed in Baghdad as we were in Kabul; it must remain true to the democratic values--multilateralism, for example--it seeks to spread. On this last point, though, Gaddis is at his weakest, if only because he resorts to caricatures: the Bush administration, he says, has behaved "like a sullen, pouting, oblivious, and overmuscled teenager." I've heard him make this comparison at least three times since early September, and I'm no more convinced than I was then that refusing to join Kyoto or the ICC is the action of a spoiled child. I'll grant him that these and similar actions do detract from our support abroad, notably in Europe, but I'm not willing to concede that we should sacrifice our principles (and our sovereignty) to enhance our moral standing among allies. Overall, though, an excellent and insightful article. And Gaddis does, after all, recognize "that in some situations preemption is preferable to doing nothing."

Violence at a Rap Concert? Shocking, I know. They also might want to edit that first sentence: "A fan stabbed at a concert by rap artist Nelly has died." Not exactly a misplaced modifier, but it does give the wrong impression.

Target: Iraq. Just picked up a copy of Kenneth Pollack's The Threatening Storm, which makes the case for invading Iraq. I hope to do some periodic reviews here once I get into it. In the meantime, here's a review from the NYT, which is generally positive but draws some dubious (this is the Times, remember) conclusions:

It deserves a wide readership, if only (but not only) because it demolishes certain myths that some proponents of invasion have cultivated. If the Bush administration proceeds to mount an invasion to remove Saddam Hussein without meeting all of the conditions Pollack specifies, only an improbable streak of luck will stave off a more serious terrorist threat to American lives and property. And even if Pollack's conditions are met, the risks of invasion may be greater than he believes.

Of course, I haven't yet read the book and really shouldn't comment on the validity of such a statement, but it seems this fellow is unduly pessimistic (although there's nothing wrong with a healthy dose of pessimism) and probably wasn't going to be convinced anyway.