Defining America

Americans Reject Keynesian Economics

Richard Nixon once said, “We're all Keynesians now.” But that was a long time ago, and it's certainly not the case anymore (if it ever was).

While influential 20th Century economist John Maynard Keynes would say it's best to increase deficit spending in tough economic times, only 11% of American adults agree and think the nation needs to increase its deficit spending at this time. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 70% disagree and say it would be better to cut the deficit.

In fact, 59% think Keynes had it backwards and that increasing the deficit at this time would hurt the economy rather than help.

To help the economy, most Americans (56%) believe that cutting the deficit is the way to go.

Eighty-three percent (83%) of Americans, in fact, say the size of the federal budget deficit is due more to the unwillingness of politicians to cut government spending than to the reluctance of taxpayers to pay more in taxes.

Rejection of Keynesian economics is found across demographic and partisan lines. Republicans and those not affiliated with either major party overwhelmingly reject the notion that increasing the deficit is the right prescription in difficult economic times. Among Democrats, 21% agree with the Keynesian approach, and 47% do not.

Investors reject deficit spending even more strongly than non-investors.

Of course, not all deficits are created equal. Forty-nine percent (49%) of the nation's voters believe it's more important to cut spending than to reduce the deficit. Polling released earlier this week shows a similar attitude as voters prefer lower taxes and deficits to higher taxes and a balanced budget.

However, all polling on federal spending and deficits must be viewed with the recognition that only 35% of voters realize that the majority of federal spending goes to just defense, Social Security and Medicare.

"These figures highlight a massive failure of leadership from both Republicans and Democrats among the nation's political elite,” says Scott Rasmussen, president of Rasmussen Reports. “Given the amount of political chatter about the budget in recent years, it is almost beyond comprehension that neither party has seen fit to highlight the basics so that the American people can make reasoned choices on the fundamental issues before them.”

The gap between policy makers and the American people is a key theme in Rasmussen's new book, In Search of Self-Governance.

Pat Caddell, pollster for President Jimmy Carter and others, says that “Rasmussen unmasks the new fault line of our democracy: Mainstream America rising to reassert the supremacy of their sacred right of self governance over a failed Political Class grimly determined to preserve the primacy of their prerogatives of power. With calm reason Rasmussen lays out the contours of the struggle upon which may hang the ultimate fate of our American Experiment.” In Search of Self-Governance is available at Amazon.com.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2010-Jan-31, by Fouad Ajami:

The Obama Spell Is Broken
Unlike this president, John Kennedy was an ironist who never fell for his own mystique.

The curtain has come down on what can best be described as a brief un-American moment in our history. That moment began in the fall of 2008, with the great financial panic, and gave rise to the Barack Obama phenomenon.

The nation's faith in institutions and time-honored ways had cracked. In a little-known senator from Illinois millions of Americans came to see a savior who would deliver the nation out of its troubles. Gone was the empiricism in political life that had marked the American temper in politics. A charismatic leader had risen in a manner akin to the way politics plays out in distressed and Third World societies.

There is nothing surprising about where Mr. Obama finds himself today. He had been made by charisma, and political magic, and has been felled by it. If his rise had been spectacular, so, too, has been his fall. The speed with which some of his devotees have turned on him—and their unwillingness to own up to what their infatuation had wrought—is nothing short of astounding. But this is the bargain Mr. Obama had made with political fortune.

He was a blank slate, and devotees projected onto him what they wanted or wished. In the manner of political redeemers who have marked—and wrecked—the politics of the Arab world and Latin America, Mr. Obama left the crowd to its most precious and volatile asset—its imagination. There was no internal coherence to the coalition that swept him to power. There was cultural "cool" and racial absolution for the white professional classes who were the first to embrace him. There was understandable racial pride on the part of the African-American community that came around to his banners after it ditched the Clinton dynasty.

The white working class had been slow to be convinced. The technocracy and elitism of Mr. Obama's campaign—indeed of his whole persona—troubled that big constituency, much more, I believe, than did his race and name. The promise of economic help, of an interventionist state that would salvage ailing industries and provide a safety net for the working poor, reconciled these voters to a candidate they viewed with a healthy measure of suspicion. He had been caught denigrating them as people "clinging to their guns and religion," but they had forgiven him.

Mr. Obama himself authored the tale of his own political crisis. He had won an election, but he took it as a plebiscite granting him a writ to remake the basic political compact of this republic.

Mr. Obama's self-regard, and his reading of his mandate, overwhelmed all restraint. The age-old American balance between a relatively small government and a larger role for the agencies of civil society was suddenly turned on its head. Speed was of the essence to the Obama team and its allies, the powerful barons in Congress. Better ram down sweeping social programs—a big liberal agenda before the people stirred to life again.

Progressives pressed for a draconian attack on the workings of our health care, and on the broader balance between the state and the marketplace. The economic stimulus, ObamaCare, the large deficits, the bailout package for the automobile industry—these, and so much more, were nothing short of a fundamental assault on the givens of the American social compact.

And then there was the hubris of the man at the helm: He was everywhere, and pronounced on matters large and small. This was political death by the teleprompter.

Americans don't deify their leaders or hang on their utterances, but Mr. Obama succumbed to what the devotees said of him: He was the Awaited One. A measure of reticence could have served him. But the flight had been heady, and in the manner of Icarus, Mr. Obama flew too close to the sun.

We have had stylish presidents, none more so than JFK. But Kennedy was an ironist and never fell for his own mystique. Mr. Obama's self-regard comes without irony—he himself now owns up to the "remoteness and detachment" of his governing style. We don't have in this republic the technocratic model of the European states, where a bureaucratic elite disposes of public policy with scant regard for the popular will. Mr. Obama was smitten with his own specialness.

In this extraordinary tale of hubris undone, the Europeans—more even than the people in Islamic lands—can be assigned no small share of blame. They overdid the enthusiasm for the star who had risen in America.

It was the way in Paris and Berlin (not to forget Oslo of course) of rebuking all that played out in America since 9/11—the vigilance, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the sense that America's interests and ways were threatened by a vengeful Islamism. But while the Europeans and Muslim crowds hailed him, they damned his country all the same. For his part, Mr. Obama played along, and in Ankara, Cairo, Paris and Berlin he offered penance aplenty for American ways.

But no sooner had the country recovered its poise, it drew a line for Mr. Obama. The "bluest" of states, Massachusetts, sent to Washington a senator who had behind him three decades of service in the National Guard, who proclaimed his pride in his "army values" and was unapologetic in his assertion that it was more urgent to hunt down terrorists than to provide for their legal defense.

Then the close call on Christmas Day at the hands of the Nigerian jihadist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab demonstrated that the terrorist threat had not receded. The president did his best to recover: We are at war, he suddenly proclaimed. Nor were we in need of penance abroad. Rumors of our decline had been exaggerated. The generosity of the American response to Haiti, when compared to what India and China had provided, was a stark reminder that this remains an exceptional nation that needs no apologies in distant lands.

***

A historical hallmark of "isms" and charismatic movements is to dig deeper when they falter—to insist that the "thing" itself, whether it be Peronism, or socialism, etc., had not been tried but that the leader had been undone by forces that hemmed him in.

It is true to this history that countless voices on the left now want Obama to be Obama. The economic stimulus, the true believers say, had not gone astray, it only needed to be larger; the popular revolt against ObamaCare would subside if and when a new system was put in place.

There had been that magical moment—the campaign of 2008—and the true believers want to return to it. But reality is merciless. The spell is broken.

Mr. Ajami, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, is the author of "The Foreigner's Gift" (Free Press, 2007).

from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-Dec-4, by Daniel Henninger:

America Needs Its Frontier Spirit
'Traits of the frontier' still shape America, even if the left doesn't like it.

The greatest danger in the current economic crisis is that the United States will lose its historic appetite for risk. The mood now is that risk-taking got us into this mess. Risk, though, is the quintessential American trait that built the nation -- from the Battle of Bunker Hill to the rise of the microchip. If we let risk give way to a new ethos of commercial reserve and regulatory restriction, the upward arc of the U.S. ascendancy will flatten. Maybe it already has.

By "we" I mean the policy makers in Washington who will write the new rules of finance, our stunned bankers and businessmen, and the average Joes of Main Street who with reason have lost confidence. If all lose faith at once in the American idea of risk, refinding it when the recession ends may prove difficult.

This is the moment for Americans to rediscover the "frontier thesis" of Frederick Jackson Turner. In a seminal paper delivered in 1893 to the American Historical Association, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," Turner argued that the U.S. found its identity as it pushed away from the Eastern seaboard and crossed a series of frontier "fall lines": the Allegheny Mountains, the Mississippi, the Missouri, the plains, the Rocky Mountains and California.

Every American absorbs the frontier experience from reading biographies of great Americans or from movies. Frederick Turner, however, made it clear that with this effort to transform the wilderness the Americans broke decisively with what he called, believe it or not, "old Europe." "Here is a new product," Turner wrote, "that is American."

"From the conditions of frontier life," Turner believed, "came [American] intellectual traits of profound importance . . . coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy, that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil." These, he said, are "the traits of the frontier."

Turner's ideas on the frontier lie at the center of many political fights today over domestic and foreign policy. It is hard to overstate how abhorrent Turner's frontier thesis became to the American left, especially its new historians. His paper has been called "notorious and troubling" and a "myth." Their problem with Turner's view of the Americans' tendency to "incessant expansion" needs no elaboration. His critics have called him a racist.

This is unfair. Turner himself later described the political tensions in the new 20th century between Morgan's banks, Harriman's railroads -- "wealth beyond their power to enjoy" -- and the new forces of reform.

If indeed the Democrats' intellectuals want to disown Turner, the conservative movement could profit from adapting what he admired on the frontier. Everyone's ancestors made the frontier, but if it's just a Republican thing now, so be it.

Turner's purpose wasn't to idealize America but to try to understand the wellsprings of its remarkable and self-evident success. He found it, persuasively, in the lessons learned settling a continent.

For our purposes, amid economic meltdown and fiasco, the telling phrase in his list of shaping frontier traits is "that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil."

Individualism working for good is the story of America's entrepreneurs, the wonder of the world the past 100 years. This week Congress is producing the tragic final turn of three of the most famous -- Ford, Chrysler and General Motors.

Most people would view the economic rubble before them as the result of individualism working for ill and evil -- Angelo Mozilo's mindless mortgage originators at Countrywide, Robert Rubin's bonus-addicted risk managers at Citigroup, the politically connected million-dollar managers who opened the vaults at Fannie and Freddie.

The great danger now is that a depressed and angry people will allow the risk-taking American baby to be thrown out with the toxic-securities bathwater. The line of waiting washerwomen is long.

France's Nicolas Sarkozy ("Laissez-faire capitalism is over") and our European friends propose a global regulatory body to monitor financial risk, which of course means it would corral America's cowboy capitalists. Barney Frank wants a "systemic-risk regulator."

Some rethinking of the financial regulatory regime is inevitable. The abrupt September transformation of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley into bank holding companies, most notably with their capital ratios regulated (intensely) by the Federal Reserve is a beginning, and arguably not much more is needed.

What's worrisome is that Congress and an array of piling-on regulatory bodies -- the Fed, Tim Geithner's Treasury, the SEC, the CFTC, a new derivatives regulator -- will create too many designated drivers for American finance and business, producing a status quo of caution.

The current crisis is the result of a world gone madly long on real estate. Daniel Boone, the famed American frontiersman, went belly-up speculating on Kentucky land. He moved on in 1788 and paid his debts. So should we, without losing sight of the American frontier, where we discovered the rewards of risk.

from the Orlando Sentinel, 2010-Jan-27, by Robert Block and Mark K. Matthews:

Obama aims to ax moon mission

Cape Canaveral and Washington — NASA's plans to return astronauts to the moon are dead. So are the rockets being designed to take them there — that is, if President Barack Obama gets his way.

When the White House releases his budget proposal Monday, there will be no money for the Constellation program that was supposed to return humans to the moon by 2020. The troubled and expensive Ares I rocket that was to replace the space shuttle to ferry humans to space will be gone, along with money for its bigger brother, the Ares V cargo rocket that was to launch the fuel and supplies needed to take humans back to the moon.

There will be no lunar landers, no moon bases, no Constellation program at all.

In their place, according to White House insiders, agency officials, industry executives and congressional sources familiar with Obama's long-awaited plans for the space agency, NASA will look at developing a new "heavy-lift" rocket that one day will take humans and robots to explore beyond low Earth orbit. But that day will be years — possibly even a decade or more — away.

In the meantime, the White House will direct NASA to concentrate on Earth-science projects — principally, researching and monitoring climate change — and on a new technology research and development program that will one day make human exploration of asteroids and the inner solar system possible.

There will also be funding for private companies to develop capsules and rockets that can be used as space taxis to take astronauts on fixed-price contracts to and from the International Space Station — a major change in the way the agency has done business for the past 50 years.

The White House budget request, which is certain to meet fierce resistance in Congress, scraps the Bush administration's Vision for Space Exploration and signals a major reorientation of NASA, especially in the area of human spaceflight.

"We certainly don't need to go back to the moon," said one administration official.

Everyone interviewed for this article spoke on condition of anonymity, either because they are not authorized to talk for the White House or because they fear for their jobs. All are familiar with the broad sweep of Obama's budget proposal, but none would talk about specific numbers because these are being tightly held by the White House until the release of the budget.

But senior administration officials say the spending freeze for some federal agencies is not going to apply to the space agency in this budget proposal. Officials said NASA was expected to see some "modest" increase in its current $18.7 billion annual budget — possibly $200 million to $300 million more but far less than the $1 billion boost agency officials had hoped for.

They also said that the White House plans to extend the life of the International Space Station to at least 2020. One insider said there would be an "attractive sum" of money — to be spent over several years — for private companies to make rockets to carry astronauts there.

But Obama's budget freeze is likely to hamstring NASA in coming years as the spending clampdown will eventually shackle the agency and its ambitions. And this year's funding request to develop both commercial rockets and a new NASA spaceship will be less than what was recommended by a White House panel of experts last year.

That panel, led by former Lockheed Martin CEO Norm Augustine, concluded that to have a "viable" human space-exploration program, NASA needed a $3 billion annual budget hike, and that it would take as much as $5 billion distributed over five years to develop commercial rockets that could carry astronauts safely to and from the space station.

Last year, lawmakers prohibited NASA from canceling any Constellation programs and starting new ones in their place unless the cuts were approved by Congress. The provision sends a "direct message that the Congress believes Constellation is, and should remain, the future of America's human space flight program," wrote U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., last month.

Nevertheless, NASA contractors have been quietly planning on the end of Ares I, which is years behind schedule and millions of dollars over budget. NASA has already spent more than $3 billion on Ares I and more than $5 billion on the rest of Constellation.

In recent days, NASA has been soliciting concepts for a new heavy-lift rocket from major contractors, including Boeing Co., Lockheed Martin Corp. and Pratt & Whitney. Last week, a group of moonlighting NASA engineers and rocket hobbyists proposed variations on old agency designs that use the shuttle's main engines and fuel tank to launch a capsule into space. According to officials and industry executives familiar with the presentations, some of the contractor designs are very similar to the one pressed by the hobbyists.

Officially, companies such as Boeing still support Constellation and its millions of dollars of contracts. Some believe that in a battle with Congress, Ares may survive.

"I would not say Ares is dead yet," said an executive with one major NASA contractor. "It's probably more accurate to say it's on life support. We have to wait to see how the coming battle ends."

Few doubt that a fight is looming. In order to finance new science and technology programs and find money for commercial rockets, Obama will be killing off programs that have created jobs in some powerful constituencies, including the Marshall Space Flight Center in Shelby's Alabama. But the White House is said to be ready for a fight.

The end of the shuttle program this year is already going to slash 7,000 jobs at Kennedy Space Center.

One administration official said the budget will send a message that it's time members of Congress recognize that NASA can't design space programs to create jobs in their districts. "That's the view of the president," the official said.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Dec-30, by Daniel Henninger:

A Rodney Dangerfield America?
America isn't dead. It's just dead in the water.

Why pretend? We have arrived at a point where nearly everyone's conversation of more than five minutes about what is going on in the nation or the world ends up in the ditch.

The opinion polls are deep into the no-holiday spirit, competing to deliver low blows to the American psyche. Pew Research Center began dim December with a survey titled "Current Decade Rated Worst in 50 Years." Washington Post/ABC staggered in with the bad word that 61% of the American people think their country is in long-term decline.

The U.S. is starting to sound like one long Rodney Dangerfield joke: "I looked up the family tree and found out I was the sap."

Why the long national face?

Pew's numbers touched the heart of the past decade's sense of sadness. Asked to identify the decade's singular event, 53% said the attacks of September 11, 2001. Nothing else was close.

It is debated often whether 9/11's sense of urgency about the threat of Islamic terror has faded. Apparently not for the American people. We'll catch a break if the past week wakes up Washington.

If at its end the decade was looking for a silver lining, this one got the shaft—another gray September. In September 2008, the U.S. financial system for all intents and purposes blew up. Years of imprudently low interest rates and Congress's political protection of bargain-basement mortgages decked the world in moral hazard. Cheap money was (is) crack for bankers. When the subprime mortgage mania blew, it took down much of Wall Street and a decade's worth of 401(k) gains.

Let's toss in the decade's last straw just for the fun of it: The politicians running California, New York, New Jersey and arguably Congress were shown to be fiscally deranged. If America is in decline, its political class is leading it over the cliff.

Americans are historic optimists. They must be: Another recent study found that the happiest state in the Union is . . . Louisiana. Hurricanes, floods, wars, depression—somehow this country's can-do spirit won't die.

Until now. There is a datum in the pollsters' 10-year ash heap that is disturbing and new. At the start of 2008, according to Pew, well before the September financial implosion, 41% said the U.S. was the world's leading economic power; 30% said China. By this November, those numbers had flipped: 44% said China was on top; only 27% said the U.S.

However false this is, what people are saying is they assume China in time will clean our clock. This is a frightening snapshot of national demoralization.

It is a nation refusing to answer the bell. Throwing in the towel. We can't compete. We're done.

I don't buy it. America isn't dead. It's just dead in the water.

In Pew's comparison of five decades, one trumps the other four: the 1980s. "The balance of opinion about the 1980s is overwhelmingly positive across all age groups." The 1980s' negative rating is just 12%.

How can this be? As the '80s ended, pundits everywhere famously wrote the whole thing off as "The Decade of Greed." Left-wing essayist Barbara Ehrenreich, one of too many to count, called her version of the decade, "The Worst Years of Our Lives."

But it looks like people think the '80s were the best years of their lives. We—especially those among us thinking of running for the presidency—had better try to figure out why fast.

Because all conversation in our politics goes straight into rage if one brings any public figure's name into it, I will preposterously not mention Ronald Reagan.

Forget greed. That was just an artifact, a side show. More than anything, the 1980s freed Americans to do the one thing they love to do above all else: create.

From day one many better decades ago, America has been about compulsive creation. It's a nation driven by the New—new ideas, new cities, new companies, technologies, art forms, production, management, distribution, design, Hollywood, Tin Pan Alley, Silicon Valley.

Some of it's good, some of it's bad, some of it's ugly. So what? This is the upward-moving mojo that Americans want to get them back in the game—the space to create, build and do what's new. The big question raised by you-know-who in the 1980s was whether government was part of the solution to national creativity or part of the problem.

Time's up, so let's not spoil the downer spirit by ending with false optimism.

We are in the anti-1980s. But I don't care how flat the earth is; with competitors like China, India and the others, the belief that our big fat national government can somehow subsidize, much less identify, the U.S.'s next creative edge is straight from the dusty book of the original flat-earth society.

So a New Year's Eve prediction: If we stay on the course set the past year, the next decade will make the 2000s look like the end of the golden age.

from Commentary's Contentions blog, 2009-Oct-12, by John Steele Gordon:

American Exceptionalism

The winners of the Nobel Prize in economics were announced today. They are two Americans, Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University and Oliver Williamson of UC Berkeley.

So now that all the 2009 prizes have been awarded, let's recap: The Nobel in medicine went to three Americans. The Nobel in physics went to three Americans. The Nobel in chemistry went to two Americans and one Israeli. The Nobel in literature went to a German. The Nobel Peace Prize went to an American, and now the Nobel in economics has gone to two Americans.

Thus, of the 13 winners this year, 11 are Americans. A country with 4 percent of the world's population produced 85 percent of the winners. To be sure, we are to some extent playing with numbers here. After all, Israel, with .08 percent of the world's population, produced 7 percent of the winners. But over the 108 years they have been handing out Nobel Prizes, the number won by American citizens is exceptionally large.

I wonder if that fact embarrasses this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner.

from the Washington Examiner, 2009-Oct-18, by Michael Barone:

Unlike Obama, Americans reject European model

An interesting paradox. Last year America elected a president who, in attitudes and policies, is closer to the elites of Western Europe than any of his predecessors. Yet in the nine months that he has been in office ordinary Americans have been moving away from those attitudes and policies and have increasingly embraced positions that over the years have made Americans distinctive from those in other advanced Western democracies.

Barack Obama's European tendencies aren't in doubt. His policies on government spending, taxation, health care and carbon emissions would all tend to bring America in line with European norms, to a far greater degree than any other president of the last 40 years and probably any president ever.

And what of America's special place in the world? "I believe in American exceptionalism," Obama said on one of his trips to Europe, "just as I suspect that Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism." In other words, not at all. One cannot imagine Presidents Roosevelt, Truman or Kennedy, Eisenhower or Reagan, uttering such sentiments.

Obama told European Union lawmakers in Strasbourg that he hailed "your dynamic union," but most Americans seem to have some vestigial knowledge that over the last 60 years America has been more dynamic -- economically, culturally, politically, militarily -- than our friends across the Atlantic. And when presented with public policies that would make us more like Europe, Americans have tended to recoil.

Examples abound. Despite the recession, by about 50 to 40 percent Americans continue to prefer smaller government with fewer services to larger government with more services (June ABC/Washington Post and CBS/New York Times polls). Some 80 percent want the government to sell its interest in General Motors (July Rasmussen poll).

A 58 to 35 percent majority say keep the budget deficit down even if it takes longer for the economy to recover (NBC/WSJ June). A 53 to 33 percent majority oppose more government regulation of the finance sector (Rasmussen October).

As Europeanizing policies receive more attention they become less popular. June's 50 to 45 percent approval of Democratic health care proposals morphs to a similar margin of disapproval in October (Rasmussen). And satisfaction with one's own health care arrangements rises from 29 percent in 2008 and 35 percent in May 2009 to 48 percent in August (Rasmussen again).

European elites support gun control and curbs on carbon emissions almost unanimously. Americans don't -- and are moving in the other direction. Support for a handgun ban has fallen from 60 percent in 1960 and 43 percent in the early 1990s to 29 percent in May 2009 (Gallup). By a 48 to 34 percent margin Americans believe global warming is caused by long-term planetary trends rather than human activity (Rasmussen April); in 2008 it was almost exactly the other way around.

European leaders agree with Obama's decision to close the Guantanamo detention facility. Americans disagree by a 52 to 39 percent margin (NBC/WSJ June). Europeans accept a large role for unions. American approval for labor unions fell from 59 percent in 2008 to 48 percent in spring 2009, by far the lowest figure since Gallup began asking the question in 1936.

Gallup reports that 39 percent of Americans this year say their views have grown more conservative, while only 18 percent say they have become more liberal. No wonder Democratic pollster Peter Hart, who with Republican Bill McInturff conducts the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, said in June that Obama and the Democrats "are going to have to navigate in pretty choppy waters."

The late political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset, who wrote a book on American exceptionalism, long noted that Americans are more individualistic and less collectivist than Western Europeans (or Canadians). The election of a president who in many ways seeks to push America in a European direction seems to have increased rather than decreased those differences.

Why? My explanation is that until November 2008 Americans did not have any reason to contemplate what a more European approach would mean in real-life terms. Now, with Obama in the White House and a heavily Democratic Congress, they do. And they mostly don't like it.

Hence the embarrassment of liberal commentators and, it seems, the president himself when five Norwegian lawmakers tendered him the Nobel Peace Prize. European elites are delighted with Obama's European approach. Most American voters aren't.

Michael Barone, The Examiner's senior political analyst, can be contacted at mbarone@washingtonexaminer.com. His columns appear Wednesday and Sunday, and his stories and blog posts appear on ExaminerPolitics.com.

from City Journal, 2009-Summer, by Steven Malanga:

Whatever Happened to the Work Ethic?
The financial bust reminds us that free markets require a constellation of moral virtues.

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville worried that free, capitalist societies might develop so great a “taste for physical gratification” that citizens would be “carried away, and lose all self-restraint.” Avidly seeking personal gain, they could “lose sight of the close connection which exists between the private fortune of each of them and the prosperity of all” and ultimately undermine both democracy and prosperity.

The genius of America in the early nineteenth century, Tocqueville thought, was that it pursued “productive industry” without a descent into lethal materialism. Behind America’s balancing act, the pioneering French social thinker noted, lay a common set of civic virtues that celebrated not merely hard work but also thrift, integrity, self-reliance, and modesty—virtues that grew out of the pervasiveness of religion, which Tocqueville called “the first of [America’s] political institutions, . . . imparting morality” to American democracy and free markets. Some 75 years later, sociologist Max Weber dubbed the qualities that Tocqueville observed the “Protestant ethic” and considered them the cornerstone of successful capitalism. Like Tocqueville, Weber saw that ethic most fully realized in America, where it pervaded the society. Preached by luminaries like Benjamin Franklin, taught in public schools, embodied in popular novels, repeated in self-improvement books, and transmitted to immigrants, that ethic undergirded and promoted America’s economic success.

What would Tocqueville or Weber think of America today? In place of thrift, they would find a nation of debtors, staggering beneath loans obtained under false pretenses. In place of a steady, patient accumulation of wealth, they would find bankers and financiers with such a short-term perspective that they never pause to consider the consequences or risks of selling securities they don’t understand. In place of a country where all a man asks of government is “not to be disturbed in his toil,” as Tocqueville put it, they would find a nation of rent-seekers demanding government subsidies to purchase homes, start new ventures, or bail out old ones. They would find what Tocqueville described as the “fatal circle” of materialism—the cycle of acquisition and gratification that drives people back to ever more frenetic acquisition and that ultimately undermines prosperous democracies.

And they would understand why. After flourishing for three centuries in America, the Protestant ethic began to disintegrate, with key elements slowly disappearing from modern American society, vanishing from schools, from business, from popular culture, and leaving us with an economic system unmoored from the restraints of civic virtue. Not even Adam Smith—who was a moral philosopher, after all—imagined capitalism operating in such an ethical vacuum. Bailout plans, new regulatory schemes, and monetary policy moves won’t be enough to spur a robust, long-term revival of American economic opportunity without some renewal of what was once understood as the work ethic—not just hard work but also a set of accompanying virtues, whose crucial role in the development and sustaining of free markets too few now recall.

The American experiment that Tocqueville chronicled in the 1830s was more than just an effort to see if men could live without a monarch and govern themselves. A free society had to be one in which people could pursue economic opportunity with only minimal interference from the state. To do so without producing anarchy required a self-discipline that was, to Max Weber, the core of the capitalist ethic. “The impulse to acquisition, pursuit of gain, of money, of the greatest possible amount of money, has in itself nothing to do with capitalism,” Weber wrote in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. “Unlimited greed for gain is not in the least identical with capitalism, and still less its spirit.” Instead, the essence of capitalism is “a rational tempering” of the impulse to accumulate wealth so as to keep a business (and ultimately the whole economy) sustainable and self-renewing, Weber wrote. It is “the pursuit of profit, and forever renewed profit, by means of continuous, rational . . . enterprise.”

Weber famously argued that the Protestant Reformation—with John Calvin’s and Martin Luther’s emphasis on individual responsibility, hard work, thrift, providence, honesty, and deferred gratification at its center—shaped the spirit of capitalism and helped it succeed. Calvinism and the sects that grew out of it, especially Puritanism and John Wesley’s Methodism in England, were religions chiefly of the middle and working classes, and the virtues they promoted led to a new kind of affluence and upward mobility, based not on land (which was largely owned by the aristocracy) but on productive enterprises.

Nowhere did the fusing of capitalism and the virtues that made up the work ethic find a fuller expression than in America, where Puritan pioneers founded settlements animated by a Calvinist dedication to work. One result was a remarkable society in which, as Tocqueville would observe, all “honest callings are honorable” and in which “the notion of labor is therefore presented to the mind on every side as the necessary, natural, and honest condition of human existence.” Unlike in Europe, where aristocrats and gentry often scorned labor, in the United States, “a wealthy man thinks that he owes it to public opinion to devote his leisure to some kind of industrial or commercial pursuit, or to public business. He would think himself in bad repute if he employed his life solely in living.”

This thick and complex work ethic, so essential to the success of the early, struggling American settlements, became part of the country’s civic fabric. It found its most succinct expression in the writings of Benjamin Franklin, whose well-known maxims, now considered quaintly old-fashioned, recommended to citizens of the new country a worldview that promoted work and the pursuit of wealth. “Time is money” and “Never keep borrowed money an hour beyond the time you promised” and “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise” voiced virtues that Franklin and his contemporaries viewed not chiefly as religious but as utilitarian. A reputation for honesty makes it easier to borrow money for new ventures, Franklin counseled. A man who displays self-discipline in his personal life inspires confidence in lenders and business partners. This constellation of virtues, which Weber described as “the ideal of the honest man of recognized credit,” is how one gets ahead in life.

Franklin’s best-selling writings had an enormous impact on America. His ideas, widely applauded, permeated popular culture and education. The leading grammar school textbooks of the nineteenth century, for example, by William Holmes McGuffey and his brother Alexander, inculcated children with the virtues of work and thrift. To dramatize the “Consequences of Idleness,” McGuffey’s Fourth Eclectic Reader told the story of poor George Jones, who frittered away his time in school and wasted the money his father had devoted to his education, winding up a poor wanderer. In fifth grade, students memorized Eliza Cook’s paean to labor, simply titled “Work,” which urged them to “Work, work, my boy, be not afraid; / Look labor boldly in the face.”

Schooled in such attitudes, America’s nineteenth-century youth embraced the rags-to-riches novels of Horatio Alger, Jr., who sold some 200 million books with plotlines that are a road map of the work ethic. In his first commercial success, Ragged Dick, Dick Hunter, 14 and homeless, impresses patrons with his honesty and industriousness and slowly rises in the world. When he teeters on the verge of losing everything because a thief pilfers his savings-account passbook, bank officials recognize him from his regular visits to make deposits, and they have the thief arrested. In a later novel, Bound to Rise, poor Henry Walton wins a biography of Ben Franklin for acing exams and, inspired by his life story, goes off to earn a fortune.

The work ethic even shaped American play. The most popular game of its time, “The Checkered Game of Life,” produced by Milton Bradley in the mid-nineteenth century and sold door-to-door, challenged players to travel through life and earn points for successfully completing school, getting married, and working hard, while avoiding pitfalls like gambling and idleness. In his patent application for the game, Bradley observed that it was intended to “impress upon the minds of youth the great moral principles of virtue and vice.” Its success spawned a whole genre. “Many games with similar moral thrusts followed,” observed Jennifer Jensen of the New-York Historical Society in an article called “Teaching Success Through Play.” These games “emphasized secular virtues such as thrift, neatness, and kindness.”

The work ethic also distinguished the northern colonies from the southern, and later helped the North win the Civil War. Many southern settlers came in search not of religious freedom but only of economic opportunity. Instead of founding villages or towns with a common civic life, southern settlers developed isolated, widely separated plantations. They cultivated a few staple crops using slave labor, instead of developing a diversified economy. They created a society where a relatively few plantation owners acted like an aristocracy. Rather than viewing all honest work as honorable, they developed what historian C. Vann Woodward calls the “Southern ethic,” which saw some work as fit only for slaves. In the end, these attitudes proved the South’s greatest vulnerability, as the North, shaped by the work ethic, brought to bear its industrial might against the narrow economy of the South, built precariously on tobacco and slave labor and a Cavalier rather than a Puritan ethic.

After the Civil War, this secularized version of the Protestant ethic served as a lodestar for millions of poor immigrants, many from countries with little experience of free markets and democracy. Their assimilation into a culture that they recognized not as Protestant but as American reinvigorated the country, helping to set late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America on a distinctly different path from much of Europe.

Many of these immigrants, ironically, absorbed their Franklinesque code from the American Catholic Church. Key members of the church hierarchy—notably, New York’s brilliant, Irish-born first archbishop, John Hughes, who rose from poverty—lived by the ethic and understood its role in the country’s success. Hughes set as his task the moral and economic uplift of Gotham’s millions of poor Irish immigrants. He founded a network of some 100 Catholic schools that taught Irish children not just the three Rs but also a “faith-based code of personal conduct,” as William J. Stern wrote in City Journal (“How Dagger John Saved New York’s Irish,” Spring 1997). Hughes’s church was, as he put it, “a church of discipline.” He fostered residential schools that taught vocational skills and conduct to thousands of orphaned or abandoned Irish street children and sent them off successfully into American society. Catholic schools around the country copied his work, and many of them continue today to succeed even with at-risk kids.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the Irish had largely shaken off poverty and joined the American mainstream. Waves of Southern and Eastern European Catholics followed them, as well as Eastern European Jews—some 20 million immigrants between 1890 and 1925—who quickly replicated the success of the Irish in a country whose institutions emphasized and rewarded hard work, thrift, and self-improvement. Within a single generation, one study shows, the average early-twentieth-century immigrant family had achieved income and educational parity with American-born families, so that the children of these immigrants were just as likely to be accountants, engineers, or lawyers as the children of families rooted here for generations.

The breakup of this 300-year-old consensus on the work ethic began with the cultural protests of the 1960s, which questioned and discarded many traditional American virtues. The roots of this breakup lay in what Daniel Bell described in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism as the rejection of traditional bourgeois qualities by late-nineteenth-century European artists and intellectuals who sought “to substitute for religion or morality an aesthetic justification of life.” By the 1960s, that modernist tendency had evolved into a credo of self-fulfillment in which “nothing is forbidden, all is to be explored,” Bell wrote. Out went the Protestant ethic’s prudence, thrift, temperance, self-discipline, and deferral of gratification.

Weakened along with all these virtues that made up the American work ethic was Americans’ belief in the value of work itself. Along with “turning on” and “tuning in,” the sixties protesters also “dropped out.” As the editor of the 1973 American Work Ethic noted, “affluence, hedonism and radicalism” were turning many Americans away from work and the pursuit of career advancement, resulting in a sharp slowdown in U.S. productivity from 1965 through 1970. So great a transformation of values was occurring that, as George Bloom of MIT’s Sloan School of Management wrote in a 1971 essay on America’s declining work ethic, “It is unfortunate but true that ‘progress’ is becoming a bad word in virtually all sectors of society.”

Attitudes toward businessmen changed, too. While film and television had formerly offered a balanced portrait of work and employers, notes film critic Michael Medved in Hollywood vs. America, from the mid-1960s onward, movies and TV portrayed business executives almost exclusively as villains or buffoons. The era’s iconic film, the 1967 Oscar winner The Graduate, is a prime example in its tale of a recent college grad adrift and questioning adult society’s strive-and-succeed ethic. No character appears more loathsome than a family friend who counsels the graduate, “I just want to say one word to you—just one word: plastics. There’s a great future in plastics.” Such portrayals both reflected and strengthened the baby-boom generation’s attitudes. One 1969 Fortune poll, for instance, found that 92 percent of college students thought business executives were too profit-minded.

In this era, being virtuous became something separate from work. When the Milton Bradley Company reintroduced “The Checkered Game of Life” in a modern version called “The Game of Life” in the mid-1960s, it abandoned the notion of rewarding traditional bourgeois virtues like completing an education or marrying. What was left of the game was simply the pursuit of cash, until Milton Bradley, criticized for this version, redesigned the game to include rewards for doing good. But its efforts produced mere political correctness: in the new version, recycling trash and contributing to save an endangered species were virtuous actions that won a player points. Such gestures, along with tolerance and sensitivity, expanded like a gas to fill the vacuum where the Protestant ethic used to be.

The cultural upheavals of the era spurred deep changes in institutions that traditionally transmitted the work ethic—especially the schools. University education departments began to tell future grammar school teachers that they should replace the traditional teacher-centered curriculum, aimed at producing educated citizens who embraced a common American ethic, with a new, child-centered approach that treats every pupil’s “personal development” as different and special. During the 1960s, when intellectuals and college students dismissed traditional American values as oppressive barriers to fulfillment, grammar schools generally jettisoned the traditional curriculum. “Education professors eagerly joined New Left professors to promote the idea that any top-down imposition of any curriculum would be a right-wing plot designed to perpetuate the dominant white, male, bourgeois power structure,” writes education reformer E. D. Hirsch, Jr., in his forthcoming The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools.

The bourgeois values, however, had helped to sustain Weber’s “rational tempering” of the impulse to accumulate wealth: they helped put the rationality in “rational self-interest,” or, as Tocqueville put it, “self-interest rightly understood.” When the schools and the wider society demoted them, the effects were predictable. In schools, for instance, the new “every child is special” curriculum prompted a sharp uptick in students’ self-absorption, according to psychologists Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell in The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement. What resulted was a series of increasingly self-centered generations of young people displaying progressively more narcissistic personality traits, including a growing obsession with “material wealth and physical appearance,” the authors observe. Thus did the sixties generation spawn the Me Generation of the seventies. By the mid-1980s, a poll of teens found that more than nine in ten listed shopping as their favorite pastime.

The economic shocks that followed the tumultuous late 1960s, especially the devastating inflation of the 1970s, reinforced an emerging materialism. Thanks to the Johnson administration’s illusion that the country could finance massive social-welfare programs and a war without consequences, the U.S. by 1974 staggered under double-digit annual inflation gains, compared with an average annual gain of about 1 percent in the early 1960s. The inflation hit hardest those who had embraced the work ethic, destroying lifetimes of savings in unprecedented price spikes and sending the message that “saving and shunning debt was for saps,” Fortune observed. “The lesson seemed to be, buy, buy, buy, before the money visibly crumbling to dust in your hand vanishes completely.”

Once Fed chairman Paul Volcker’s tight-money policy tamed inflation in the early 1980s, America began to pick itself up. But it was a different country, one that had lost to some degree the “rational tempering” of the “pursuit of gain” that Max Weber had seen as the key to “forever renewed profit.” The corporate restructurings of the 1980s, prompted by a new generation of risk-taking entrepreneurs and takeover artists who used aggressive financial instruments with provocative names like “junk bonds” to buy and then make over big companies that failed to remake themselves, reordered corporate America, shaking it out of its 1970s complacency. But the plant closings, downsizings, and restructurings of the 1980s also stoked anxiety among workers, as the old ideal of lifetime employment at one paternalistic company gave way to a job-hopping career in a constantly changing business landscape. While the results were often salutary—innovation for companies and income gains for the most talented players—the “get it while you can” mentality that developed among some workers and investors found its ultimate expression in the “day traders” of the technology stock boom, speculators with a “right now” time horizon rather than long-term investors. When takeover-era titans Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky pleaded guilty to insider-trading charges, their confessions strengthened a growing sense that a new ethic had superseded the old standard of playing by the rules. The 1980s version of the Horatio Alger tales was not an inspiring story of uplift but the popular movie Wall Street, with Gordon Gekko’s infamous “greed is good” speech.

With government policy reinforcing the “get it now” mentality, a new era of consumption based on credit blossomed in the resurgent 1980s, and Americans turned from savers to debtors. Ostentatious displays of wealth grew more common. From 1982, the year that Volcker finally tamed inflation, to 1986, luxury-car sales doubled in America. The average age of a purchaser of a fur coat—that ultimate status symbol—declined from 50 to just 26 in the mid-1980s. To fuel such purchases, inflation-adjusted total U.S. consumer-credit debt rose nearly threefold, to $2.56 trillion, from 1980 to 2008, while the nation’s savings rate shrank from an average of about 12 percent of personal income annually in the early 1980s to less than 1 percent by 2005. Some middle-class Americans came to resemble not the thrifty bourgeoisie of the early Industrial Revolution but the landed gentry of that era who drained their real estate for cash to fund lavish living. One stark illustration of the change: by 2006, those who refinanced their mortgages were taking out in cash nearly a quarter of the equity they’d accumulated—compared with just 5 percent a decade earlier. A big reason Americans’ debt was growing, in other words, was that they were borrowing against their rapidly appreciating assets as fast as they grew.

The denouement of this transformation was the 2008 meltdown of world financial markets. America has certainly had its con artists, robber barons, and speculators before, but what distinguished the latest panic was that millions of mortgages belonging to ordinary Americans triggered it—mortgages that were foolhardy at best and fraudulent at worst. A typical case is Bradley Collin, a 27-year-old Minnesota housepainter with three kids. He decided to try to make a killing in real estate because, as he told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune last year, “I didn’t want to paint the rest of my life.” With the help of shady mortgage brokers, he and his wife simultaneously purchased four homes in new developments, intending to flip them for a profit. To buy the houses, the Collins had to make four separate mortgage applications, lie on each about their intentions, and hide each sale from the other three lenders, because no bank would have given them money to purchase four homes. When the local housing market stopped rising, the couple defaulted on their loans, abandoning the houses to the banks and helping further drive down their neighbors’ real-estate values.

The Collins were hardly alone. According to the FBI, reports of mortgage fraud soared tenfold nationwide from 2001 to 2007. No one knows precisely how deep the problem ran, but some mortgage servicers, examining portfolios of subprime mortgages that went bad in 2007, found that up to 70 percent of them had involved some kind of misrepresentation. Loans that required no verification of the borrower’s income infamously became known as “liar loans.” One mortgage lender who compared 100 of these loans with IRS tax filings found that in 60 percent of cases, the applicants exaggerated their incomes (or underreported them to the IRS). Occupancy fraud, in which investors intent on buying new homes and then quickly flipping them for a profit lied about their intentions, accounted for about 20 percent of all fraudulent mortgage applications. Since the mortgage meltdown began in 2006, builders in some regions have found that as many as a quarter of the buyers of the homes that they sold in new developments lied about their purposes.

This multitude of scams required the complicity of businesses that ultimately destroyed themselves and shattered an entire industry. The fall of America’s sixth-largest bank, Washington Mutual, which built an empire based on reckless lending, exemplifies these failings. As the housing boom heated up, WaMu raced after a piece of the action at all costs. Its supervisors chastised loan officers who tried to verify suspicious claims on mortgage applications. Executives gave loan officers flyers that said, “A thin file is a good file,” according to testimony by former employees. The lender set up phone banks, like penny-stock boiler-room operations, to sell home-equity loans. Ultimately, swamped by over $11 billion in bad loans, WaMu was seized by the federal government and sold to JPMorgan Chase, an object lesson in what Weber called the pursuit of “irrationally speculative opportunities,” which undermines capitalism rather than nourishes it.

Needless to say, this is not what Adam Smith had in mind. Smith laid the groundwork for the economic theories of The Wealth of Nations in his preceding book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which traces the evolution of ethics from man’s nature as a social being who feels shame if he does something that he believes a neutral observer would consider improper. Smith proposed that as societies evolve, they form institutions—courts of law, for instance—that reflect and codify these ethical perceptions of individuals, and that these institutions provide the essential backbone of any sophisticated commercial system.

Modern experiments in neuroscience have tended to confirm Smith’s notion that our virtues derive from our empathy for others, though with an important qualification: the ethics of individuals need reinforcement from social institutions and can be undermined by the wrong societal message, as neuroeconomist Paul Zak writes in Moral Markets: The Critical Role of Values in the Economy. When people find themselves bombarded by the wrong message—like the Washington Mutual employees whose supervisors constantly pushed them into riskier and riskier actions—some will resign in disgust, but others will gradually suppress what scientists call the brain’s “other-regarding” behavior and the shame that goes along with it and violate their own ethics.

This mechanism of deception pervaded the recent housing bubble; cheating to get mortgages became so commonplace that cheaters barely seemed to perceive that they were committing fraud. A vivid case in point is New York Times economics reporter Edmund Andrews’s remarkable confessional tale, “My Personal Credit Crisis.” Andrews relates how he obtained a mortgage under dubious circumstances, aided by a broker who encouraged him to lie on his credit applications and a lender that, when its underwriters caught his intended deception, nonetheless allowed him to apply for another, riskier kind of mortgage. Granted a loan so oppressive that he will eventually default, Andrews admits to feeling that he had “done something bad” but also feeling “kind of cool” for making such a big score. Even today, society continues to reinforce Andrews’s lack of shame: he received a contract to detail his credit woes in a provocatively titled book, Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown, which was published this spring.

In the wake of the market crash, our national discussion about how to fix capitalism seems limited to those who believe that more government will fix the problem and those who think that free markets will fix themselves. Few have asked whether we can recapture the civic virtues that nourished our commerce for 300 years.

We’re not likely to find many churches preaching those virtues today. Though America is more religious than most industrialized countries, today’s pulpits hardly resound with the bourgeois work ethic. While John Wesley once observed that religion produces “industry and frugality,” and the American Congregationalist preacher Henry Ward Beecher declared that the way to avoid poverty was through “provident care, and foresight, and industry and frugality,” today the National Council of Churches, to which these denominations belong, advocates for a left-wing “social gospel” of redistributing wealth (see “The Religious Left, Reborn,” Autumn 2007). And though the Catholic Church once strove to assimilate generations of poor immigrants into American economic life, today its major social-welfare organization, Catholic Charities, has become an arm of the redistributionist welfare state (see “How Catholic Charities Lost Its Soul,” Winter 2000). Even our evangelical churches, whose theology most resembles that of the great Protestant reformers, have focused their energies primarily on social issues, such as fighting abortion or gay marriage, or even inveighing against welfare reform that encourages single mothers to return to work.

True, a few groups, including the Consumer Federation of America and the Institute for American Values, have launched a national campaign, modeled on World War II efforts to encourage savings, to reintroduce thrift into American life. But trying to teach adults about thrift or the patient accumulation of wealth through hard work, when they didn’t learn these things at home or in school, will be an uphill battle.

Could the schools do what they once did—create educated citizens inculcated with the ethical foundations of capitalism? That would require rededicating the schools to “making Americans,” as Hirsch proposes in his forthcoming book. Promisingly, a few public and private schools around the country have replaced the child-centered curriculum with one focused on learning about our culture and its institutions. Hirsch’s “Core Knowledge” curriculum, for instance, introduces kindergartners to the Pilgrims, Independence Day, and George Washington; first-graders to Ben Franklin and the concept of law in society; and second-graders to the Constitution as the foundation of our democracy. Other school reformers, according to David Whitman in Sweating the Small Stuff, have raised the achievement of low-income kids by using a “no excuses” model that teaches bourgeois “virtues like diligence, politeness, cleanliness, and thrift.” But these examples amount only to a tiny handful, swimming against the educational mainstream.

Late in life, Adam Smith noted that government institutions can never tame and regulate a society whose citizens are not schooled in a common set of virtues. “What institution of government could tend so much to promote the happiness of mankind as the general prevalence of wisdom and virtue?” he wrote. “All government is but an imperfect remedy for the deficiency of these.”

America in the twenty-first century is learning that lesson.

Steven Malanga is the senior editor of City Journal and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He is the author of The New New Left.

from the Guardian of London (as the "Observer"), 2009-Oct-4, by Paul Harris:

Will California become America's first failed state?

Los Angeles, 2009: California may be the eighth largest economy in the world, but its state staff are being paid in IOUs, unemployment is at its highest in 70 years, and teachers are on hunger strike. So what has gone so catastrophically wrong?

California has a special place in the American psyche. It is the Golden State: a playground of the rich and famous with perfect weather. It symbolises a lifestyle of sunshine, swimming pools and the Hollywood dream factory.

But the state that was once held up as the epitome of the boundless opportunities of America has collapsed. From its politics to its economy to its environment and way of life, California is like a patient on life support. At the start of summer the state government was so deeply in debt that it began to issue IOUs instead of wages. Its unemployment rate has soared to more than 12%, the highest figure in 70 years. Desperate to pay off a crippling budget deficit, California is slashing spending in education and healthcare, laying off vast numbers of workers and forcing others to take unpaid leave. In a state made up of sprawling suburbs the collapse of the housing bubble has impoverished millions and kicked tens of thousands of families out of their homes. Its political system is locked in paralysis and the two-term rule of former movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger is seen as a disaster – his approval ratings having sunk to levels that would make George W Bush blush. The crisis is so deep that Professor Kevin Starr, who has written an acclaimed history of the state, recently declared: "California is on the verge of becoming the first failed state in America."

Outside the Forum in Inglewood, near downtown Los Angeles, California has already failed. The scene is reminiscent of the fallout from Hurricane Katrina, as crowds of impoverished citizens stand or lie aimlessly on the hot tarmac of the centre's car park. It is 10am, and most have already been here for hours. They have come for free healthcare: a travelling medical and dental clinic has set up shop in the Forum (which usually hosts rock concerts) and thousands of the poor, the uninsured and the down-on-their-luck have driven for miles to be here.

The queue began forming at 1am. By 4am, the 1,500 spaces were already full and people were being turned away. On the floor of the Forum, root-canal surgeries are taking place. People are ferried in on cushions, hauled out of decrepit cars. Sitting propped up against a lamp post, waiting for her number to be called, is Debbie Tuua, 33. It is her birthday, but she has taken a day off work to bring her elderly parents to the Forum, and they have driven through the night to get here. They wait in a car as the heat of the day begins to rise. "It is awful for them, but what choice do we have?" Tuua says. "I have no other way to get care to them."

Yet California is currently cutting healthcare, slashing the "Healthy Families" programme that helped an estimated one million of its poorest children. Los Angeles now has a poverty rate of 20%. Other cities across the state, such as Fresno and Modesto, have jobless rates that rival Detroit's. In order to pass its state budget, California's government has had to agree to a deal that cuts billions of dollars from education and sacks 60,000 state employees. Some teachers have launched a hunger strike in protest. California's education system has become so poor so quickly that it is now effectively failing its future workforce. The percentage of 19-year-olds at college in the state dropped from 43% to 30% between 1996 and 2004, one of the highest falls ever recorded for any developed world economy. California's schools are ranked 47th out of 50 in the nation. Its government-issued bonds have been ranked just above "junk".

Some of the state's leading intellectuals believe this collapse is a disaster that will harm Californians for years to come. "It will take a while for this self-destructive behaviour to do its worst damage," says Robert Hass, a professor at Berkeley and a former US poet laureate, whose work has often been suffused with the imagery of the Californian way of life.

Now, incredibly, California, which has been a natural target for immigration throughout its history, is losing people. Between 2004 and 2008, half a million residents upped sticks and headed elsewhere. By 2010, California could lose a congressman because its population will have fallen so much – an astonishing prospect for a state that is currently the biggest single political entity in America. Neighbouring Nevada has launched a mocking campaign to entice businesses away, portraying Californian politicians as monkeys, and with a tag-line jingle that runs: "Kiss your assets goodbye!" You know you have a problem when Nevada – famed for nothing more than Las Vegas, casinos and desert – is laughing at you.

This matters, too. Much has been made globally of the problems of Ireland and Iceland. Yet California dwarfs both. It is the eighth largest economy in the world, with a population of 37 million. If it was an independent country it would be in the G8. And if it were a company, it would likely be declared bankrupt. That prospect might surprise many, but it does not come as news to Tuua, as she glances nervously into the warming sky, hoping her parents will not have to wait in the car through the heat of the day just to see a doctor. "It is so depressing. They both worked hard all their lives in this state and this is where they have ended up. It should not have to be this way," she says.

It is impossible not to be impressed by the physical presence of Arnold Schwarzenegger when he walks into a room. He may appear slightly smaller than you imagine, but he's just as powerful. This is, after all, the man who, before he was California's governor, was the Terminator and Conan the Barbarian.

But even Schwarzenegger is humbled by the scale of the crisis. At a press conference in Sacramento to announce the final passing of a state budget, which would include billions of dollars of cuts, the governor speaks in uncharacteristically pensive terms. "It is clear that we do not know yet what the future holds. We are still in troubled waters," he says quietly. He looks subdued, despite his sharp grey suit and bright pink tie.

Later, during a grilling by reporters, Schwarzenegger is asked an unusual question. As a gaggle of journalists begins to shout, one man's voice quickly silences the others. "Do you ever feel like you're watching the end of the California dream?" asks the reporter. It is clearly a personal matter for Schwarzenegger. After all, his life story has embodied it. He arrived virtually penniless from Austria, barely speaking English. He ended up a movie star, rich beyond his dreams, and finally governor, hanging Conan's prop sword in his office. Schwarzenegger answers thoughtfully and at length. He hails his own experience and ends with a passionate rallying call in his still thickly accented voice.

"There is people that sometimes suggest that the American dream, or the Californian dream, is evaporating. I think it's absolutely wrong. I think the Californian dream is as strong as ever," he says, mangling the grammar but not the sentiment.

Looking back, it is easy to see where Schwarzenegger's optimism sprung from. California has always been a special place, with its own idea of what could be achieved in life. There is no such thing as a British dream. Even within America, there is no Kansas dream or New Jersey dream. But for California the concept is natural. It has always been a place apart. It is of the American West, the destination point in a nation whose history has been marked by restless pioneers. It is the home of Hollywood, the nation's very own fantasy land. Getting on a bus or a train or a plane and heading out for California has been a regular trope in hundreds of books, movies, plays, and in the popular imagination. It has been writ large in the national psyche as free from the racial divisions of the American South and the traditions and reserve of New England. It was America's own America.

Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and now an adopted Californian, remembers arriving here from his native New England. "In New England you would have to know people for 10 years before they let you in their home," he says. "Here, when I took my son to his first play date, the mother invited me to a hot tub."

Michael Levine is a Hollywood mover and shaker, shaping PR for a stable of A-list clients that once included Michael Jackson. Levine arrived in California 32 years ago. "The concept of the Californian dream was a certain quality of life," he says. "It was experimentalism and creativity. California was a utopia."

Levine arrived at the end of the state's golden age, at a time when the dream seemed to have been transformed into reality. The 1950s and 60s had been boom-time in the American economy; jobs had been plentiful and development rapid. Unburdened by environmental concerns, Californian developers built vast suburbs beneath perpetually blue skies. Entire cities sprang from the desert, and orchards were paved over into playgrounds and shopping malls.

"They came here, they educated their kids, they had a pool and a house. That was the opportunity for a pretty broad section of society," says Joel Kotkin, an urbanist at Chapman University, in Orange County. This was what attracted immigrants in their millions, flocking to industries – especially defence and aviation – that seemed to promise jobs for life. But the newcomers were mistaken. Levine, among millions of others, does not think California is a utopia now. "California is going to take decades to fix," he says.

So where did it all wrong?

Few places embody the collapse of California as graphically as the city of Riverside. Dubbed "The Inland Empire", it is an area in the southern part of the state where the desert has been conquered by mile upon mile of housing developments, strip malls and four-lane freeways. The tidal wave of foreclosures and repossessions that burst the state's vastly inflated property bubble first washed ashore here. "We've been hit hard by foreclosures. You can see it everywhere," says political scientist Shaun Bowler, who has lived in California for 20 years after moving here from his native England. The impact of the crisis ranges from boarded-up homes to abandoned swimming pools that have become a breeding ground for mosquitoes. Bowler's sister, visiting from England, was recently taken to hospital suffering from an infected insect bite from such a pool. "You could say she was a victim of the foreclosure crisis, too," he jokes.

But it is no laughing matter. One in four American mortgages that are "under water", meaning they are worth more than the home itself, are in California. In the Central Valley town of Merced, house prices have crashed by 70%. Two Democrat politicians have asked for their districts to be declared disaster zones, because of the poor economic conditions caused by foreclosures. In one city near Riverside, a squatter's camp of newly homeless labourers sleeping in their vehicles has grown up in a supermarket car park – the local government has provided toilets and a mobile shower. In the Los Angeles suburb of Pacoima, one in nine homeowners are now in default on their mortgage, and the local priest, the Rev John Lasseigne, has garnered national headlines – swapping saving souls to saving houses, by negotiating directly with banks on behalf of his parishioners.

For some campaigners and advocates against suburban sprawl and car culture, it has been a bitter triumph. "Let the gloating begin!" says James Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency, a warning about the high cost of the suburban lifestyle. Others see the end of the housing boom as a man-made disaster akin to a mass hysteria, but with no redemption in sight. "If California was an experiment then it was an experiment of mass irresponsibility – and that has failed," says Michael Levine.

Nowhere is the economic cost of California's crisis writ larger than in the Central Valley town of Mendota, smack in the heart of a dusty landscape of flat, endless fields of fruit and vegetables. The town, which boldly terms itself "the cantaloup capital of the world", now has an unemployment rate of 38%. That is expected to rise above 50% as the harvest ends and labourers are laid off. City officials hold food giveaways every two weeks. More than 40% of the town's people live below the poverty level. Shops have shut, restaurants have closed, drugs and alcohol abuse have become a problem.

Standing behind the counter of his DVD and grocery store, former Mendota mayor Joseph Riofrio tells me it breaks his heart to watch the town sink into the mire. His father had built the store in the 1950s and constructed a solid middle-class life around it, to raise his family. Now Riofrio has stopped selling booze in a one-man bid to curb the social problems breaking out all around him.

"It is so bad, but it has now got to the point where we are getting used to it being like this," he says. Riofrio knows his father's achievements could not be replicated today. The state that once promised opportunities for working men and their families now promises only desperation. "He could not do what he did again. That chance does not exist now," Riofrio says.

Outside, in a shop that Riofrio's grandfather built, groups of unemployed men play pool for 25 cents a game. Near every one of the town's liquor stores others lie slumped on the pavements, drinking their sorrows away. Mendota is fighting for survival against heavy odds. The town of 7,000 souls has seen 2,000 people leave in the past two years. But amid the crisis there are a few sparks of hope for the future. California has long been an incubator of fresh ideas, many of which spread across the country. If America emerges from its crisis a greener, more economically and politically responsible nation, it is likely that renewal will have begun here. The clues to California's salvation – and perhaps even the country as a whole – are starting to emerge.

Take Anthony "Van" Jones, a man now in the vanguard of the movement to build a future green economy, creating millions of jobs, solving environmental problems and reducing climate change at a stroke. It is a beguiling vision and one that Jones conceived in the northern Californian city of Oakland. He began political life as an anti-poverty campaigner, but gradually combined that with environmentalism, believing that greening the economy could also revitalise it and lift up the poor. He founded Green for All as an advocacy group and published a best-selling book, The Green Collar Economy. Then Obama came to power and Jones got the call from the White House. In just a few years, his ideas had spread from the streets of Oakland to White House policy papers. Jones was later ousted from his role, but his ideas remain. Green jobs are at the forefront of Obama's ideas on both the economy and the environment.

Jones believes California will once more change itself, and then change the nation. "California remains a beacon of hope… This is a new time for a new direction to grow a new society and a new economy," Jones has said.

It is already happening. California may have sprawling development and awful smog, but it leads the way in environmental issues. Arnold Schwarzenegger was seen as a leading light, taking the state far ahead of the federal government on eco-issues. The number of solar panels in the state has risen from 500 a decade ago to more than 50,000 now. California generates twice as much energy from solar power as all the other US states combined. Its own government is starting to turn on the reckless sprawl that has marked the state's development.

California's attorney-general, Jerry Brown, recently sued one county government for not paying enough attention to global warming when it came to urban planning. Even those, like Kotkin, who are sceptical about the end of suburbia, think California will develop a new model for modern living: comfortable, yes, but more modest and eco-friendly. Kotkin, who is writing an eagerly anticipated book about what America will look like in 2050, thinks much of it will still resemble the bedrock of the Californian dream: sturdy, wholesome suburbs for all – just done more responsibly. "We will still live in suburbs. You work with the society you have got. The question is how we make them more sustainable," he says.

Even the way America eats is being changed in California. Every freeway may be lined with fast-food outlets, but California is also the state of Alice Waters, the guru of the slow-food movement, who inspired Michelle Obama to plant a vegetable garden in the White House. She thinks the state is changing its values. "The crisis is bringing us back to our senses. We had adopted a fast and easy way of living, but we are moving away from that now," she says.

There is hope in politics, too. There is a growing movement to call for a constitutional convention that could redraw the way the state is governed. It could change how the state passes budgets and make the political system more open, recreating the lost middle ground. Recently, the powerful mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa, signed on to the idea. Gerrymandering, too, is set to take a hit. Next year Schwarzenegger will take steps to redraw some districts to make them more competitive, breaking the stranglehold of party politics. He wants district boundaries to be drawn up by impartial judges, not politicians. In previous times that would have been the equivalent of a turkey voting for Christmas. But now the bold move is seen for what it is: a necessary step to change things. And there is no denying that innovation is something that California does well.

Even in the most deprived corners of the state there is a sense that things can still turn around. California has always been able to reinvent itself, and some of its most hardcore critics still like the idea of it having a "dream".

"I believe in California. It pains me at the moment to see it where it is, but I still believe in it," said Michael Levine.

Perhaps more surprisingly, a fellow believer is to be found in Mendota in the shape of Joseph Riofrio. His shop operates as a sort of informal meeting place for the town. People drop in to chat, to get advice, or to buy a cold soft drink to relieve the unrelenting heat outside. The people are poor, many of them out of work, often hiring a bunch of DVDs as a cheap way of passing the time. But Riofrio sees them as a community, one that he grew up in. He is proud of his town and determined to stick it out. "This is a good place to live," he says. "I want to be here when it turns around." He is talking of the stricken town outside. But he could be describing the whole state.

• This article was amended on 5 October 2009 because we inadvertently referred to the historian, Kevin Starr, as Kenneth.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-May-21, p.A17, by Daniel Henninger:

The Hubble: Real Men at Work
Amid our obsession with what's wrong comes a magnificent success.

The news inundates us now with daily battle reports from the low-grade war that is America's politics. One cost is a national preoccupation with failure.

Politics always and forever is about the failure of others. President Obama appears before us daily, and that ensures we will hear again about "the failed policies of the past." The laws of political physics then require that his opponents crack back at his manifest failures. To spend all one's time with politics is to marinate in failure.

It becomes easy to forget that most people go to work each day to succeed, not fail. Still, it was startling last week to catch sight on TV of men floating in space. This was Servicing Mission 4, NASA's long-scheduled flight to fix the space-based Hubble telescope.

It was pure success. Anyone able to avert their eyes the past week from Speaker of the House Pelosi swimming in her own marinade of failure could have watched a team of Americans doing miracles in space for days.

The Hubble telescope has become the Washington Monument of U.S. science -- beautiful, beloved and important. One of the astronauts who went up to fix it, astronomer John Grunsfeld, this week called it "arguably the most important scientific instrument ever created."

It was put up there, 350 miles above the Earth, because the sight line into the stars of ground-based telescopes is impaired by the Earth's atmosphere. For 19 years the Hubble has wowed scientists with its data and the rest of us with its eerie, awesome images of other galaxies. It put "black hole" into everyone's vocabulary.

Unfortunately, as SM4's astronauts discovered when they arrived, the Hubble's bolts were stuck -- just like when we can't get the lug nuts off a flat tire in the middle of nowhere. Except that you're not floating alongside your car at 17,000 miles an hour in a space suit with thick gloves that barely bend and while breathing bottled oxygen.

"I don't think it's coming out, Drew," astronaut Mike Massimino said to Drew Feustel on spacewalk four as he fought a bolt on a handrail attached to the Hubble's spectrograph, which transforms light into colors that reveal celestial chemistry.

Mike Massimino did what you'd do; he sucked in his breath and muscled it. It gave. But you wouldn't have had to then remove 111 little screws from the cover plate, and make sure none of them floated into space.

On the first long spacewalk last Thursday -- and just about the time federal employee Nancy Pelosi was wrestling with the press over the meaning of "briefing" -- Astronauts Grunsfeld and Feustel installed a new camera and data-handling unit to beam images back here. On Friday, Massimino and Mike Good replaced six gyroscopes. That took eight hours. The next day Grunsfeld and Feustel fixed a camera not designed for repairs in space. After Massimino's Sunday battle with the bolt, Monday was kind of a Home-Depot day, installing new insulation.

Hubble's good now for at least another five years. Then, once and for all, it will fall apart.

On departing the telescope, astronaut Grunsfeld called the week a "tour de force of tools and human ingenuity." And as well of training and raw smarts in the service of, hard to believe just now, nothing but human progress.

Lessons abound in what one witnessed during the 11-day mission to restore the legendary Hubble, which ends tomorrow when the astronauts land in Florida. Here's one: Like the Hubble team, try to be lucky enough once in life to be part of a great project worked by great people -- the early Microsoft or Genentech, the Manhattan Project, the 1927 New York Yankees, many now-gone Wall Street financial "shops" at the top of their game, or the Iraq surge. It's an ethos of team-driven possibility caught in the famous title of a book, "The Soul of a New Machine."

The mortal enemy of all this is bureaucracy. The Hubble project's struggle not to be strangled by bureaucracy was conveyed last year in a stirring history, and cautionary tale, by Robert Zimmerman -- "The Universe in a Mirror: The Saga of the Hubble Space Telescope and the Visionaries Who Built It." Worth a read.

Across 20 years, several thousand very smart people worked on the Hubble project which, easy to forget, was always a line-item in the federal budget. As one of Mr. Zimmerman's reviewers noted, if the Hubble itself hadn't been so compelling, the political system would have killed it. Men broke themselves, their friends and families to get that thing into space.

The magnificence of Servicing Mission 4 is ended, and it's back to earth, where we read that the Obama administration may create a new regulator for consumer financial products.

I imagine the Obama inner circle thinks of itself as a smart, once-in-a-lifetime team of visionaries who will build and leave behind great things. It is ironic, or at least unusual, that their creations will be several large new bureaucracies. They call them "investments in the future."

The intense interest in our politics today is over whether that is true. Whether the soul of a new bureaucracy really can lead men to dream about, and work to create, the next Hubble.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Jul-22, by Bret Stephens:

Celebrity Culture vs. The Right Stuff

It's a safe bet that 100 years from now most half-way educated people will know about Neil Armstrong. It's also a safe bet that in a century the name Michael Jackson will be familiar only to five or six cultural anthropologists and, possibly, a medical historian. So what does it say about the United States in 2009 that the late moon-walker is a household name but the living one is not?

Plenty has been written about the Apollo program: the technological wonder; its place in history; the fact that we haven't gone very far since. Not enough has been written about the Apollo astronauts and, in particular, about their place in the history of American character. That's a pity: What they have, or had, is something Americans could use.

That something is “The Right Stuff,” which in the movie version means fearlessness, ambition, unblinking patriotism and a penchant for understated irony. Most of us would probably think of the Right Stuff as some combination of piloting skills and a barrelful of guts.

But the really essential ingredient is personal modesty, if not in private than certainly in public. “One day you're just Gene Cernan, young naval aviator, whatever,” recalls the commander of Apollo 17 in the documentary, “In the Shadow of the Moon.” “And the next day you're an American hero. Literally. And you have done nothing.”

Mr. Cernan is the last man to have walked on the moon. Nobody can accuse him of lacking for courage. He is simply expressing the very human bewilderment of a sentient person caught in the blandishments of modern celebrity culture. Does America make men like Gene Cernan anymore?

Then again, Mr. Cernan is positively boastful compared to Mr. Armstrong. The flesh-and-blood “first man” is nowhere to be seen in the documentary. His media availability is nearly zero. He hasn't pitched a product on TV for 30 years, and only then for Chrysler during its last bankruptcy. When he speaks of the moon, he never fails to mention the 400,000 people who worked to get him there. He doesn't unload about his politics, pet causes or personal “issues,” including family tragedies.

None of this is because Mr. Armstrong is a recluse living in his own Neverland. He seems to have a normal family life—including divorce and remarriage. He's made money, though not the kind of money that comes from endorsing every golf ball, hemorrhoidal cream and sugar substitute thrown his way. You likely wouldn't recognize him if he sat across from you at a diner, which is just as he wants it to be.

Modern parlance allows us the term “private person” to describe people like Mr. Armstrong. Closer to the mark, I suspect, is that he abides by a private code of conduct. He understands that fate has assigned him a historic, if somewhat fortuitous role, and he means to honor the terms of the bargain.

That this should seem at all peculiar tells us something about the age. Codes of personal conduct were once what Americans—great ones, at least—were all about. In his superb book “American Heroes,” Yale historian Edmund S. Morgan writes about Benjamin Franklin and George Washington that “both men cared enormously about their reputations, about their honor. Their deliberate refusals to do things, employed to great advantage in serving their country, originated in a personal ambition to gain honor and reputation of a higher order than most people aspired to.”

This is not the way we live now. Modern culture has severed many of the remaining links between merit and celebrity. We make a fetish of uninteresting, detestable, loud or unaccomplished people: Paris Hilton, Princess Di, Keith Olbermann, Michael Jackson. Disgrace can be a ticket for even greater celebrity, particularly when mixed with confession. Stoicism, on the other hand, is regarded as a form of denial, meaning borderline lunacy.

I detest anti-Americanism, but I'll concede this: It's hard to watch American celebrity culture at work and not feel revolted. By contrast, much of what made the Apollo missions such a tribute to America was the character of the astronauts: their clipped exchanges between Houston and the spacemen; or Lovell, Anders and Borman reading from Genesis on Apollo 8; or the unflappable Flight Director Gene Kranz working the problems of Apollo 13 to triumph.

These sorts of people are still around, often in the military. Perhaps too often. Great democratic civilizations can't survive on values that emerge from a single, undemocratic cultural stream. A century from now, who will be remembered as the early 21st century's Neil Armstrong, the one who had all the Right Stuff? Barack Obama?

from the Washington Post, 2009-May-22, by Joel Achenbach:

Successful Hubble Repair Mission Widens Policy Rift at NASA

NASA's triumphant mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope this week has cracked open a policy rift within the space agency, with a top NASA scientist saying that the United States is on the way to losing the capability of doing what it has just done so dramatically.

David Leckrone, the senior project scientist for the Hubble, said NASA's new strategy for the post-space shuttle era does not include servicing scientific instruments in space, and he fears that vast amounts of accumulated knowledge and technical expertise will quickly vanish.

"It just makes me want to cry to think that this is the end of it," Leckrone said at a news conference earlier this week. "There is no person out there, there is no leadership out there, there is no vision out there to pick up the baton that we're about to hand off, and carry it forward."

His words, streamed around the planet on the NASA Web site, ruffled the agency and incited rebuttals from headquarters. But Leckrone, who plans to retire in October, is not backing down, and Friday he reiterated his case.

"I feel like NASA's doing what it's done before -- it comes up with a great capability and, for political or budgetary reasons or whatever, it abandons it," Leckrone told The Post. He added, "I've been besieged by NASA people thanking me for saying what they think needed to be said."

NASA released a statement saying Leckrone's comments reflect faulty assumptions about the design of the next generation of spacecraft. "There is nothing about the architecture that would preclude satellite rescue work," said NASA spokesman Grey Hautaluoma. The agency is also conducting a $20 million study to see how orbital servicing might be included in future missions.

The dispute has created a rift between Leckrone and the head of space science at NASA, Edward Weiler. The two scientists have devoted much of their long NASA careers to the Hubble -- they hugged after the successful shuttle launch last week in Florida -- but Weiler, from his perch at agency headquarters, has a dim view of sending astronauts to fix things in space. He said the cost is too high.

"Servicing was great on Hubble, but it cost a few bucks," Weiler said. "The Hubble program has cost about 10 billion dollars."

He said it might have been cheaper to launch three or four Hubbles rather than keep fixing and upgrading the one instrument. And he noted that none of the many scientific instruments currently in orbit, other than the Hubble, were designed to be serviced.

"What are you going to service? There's nothing up there that's serviceable," Weiler said.

To which Leckrone responds: The next big optical telescope, one that might be launched in the early 2020s, should be designed in tandem with the design of the new rockets and crew capsules being built under NASA's new Constellation human spaceflight program.

That initiative is primarily designed to send astronauts both to the International Space Station in low earth orbit and also all the way to the moon and perhaps someday to Mars. But fixing instruments in space is not a significant part of the plan.

Echoing Leckrone's view is Frank Cepollina, deputy associate director for the Hubble Space Telescope Development Project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Cepollina, whose biography calls him "the father of on-orbit servicing," would like to see still another servicing mission to Hubble. He thinks it is a waste of taxpayer money to launch costly scientific instruments and let them fend for themselves in space without hope of repair.

"I believe that there should be a national mandate to repair all capital assets in space, anywhere, anytime, whether they be by humans or by robots," Cepollina said.

Constellation's "architecture" resembles that of Apollo, with a capsule called Orion perched on top of a rocket. That will remove much of the hazard associated with launching the shuttles, nestled as they are next to its powerful solid rocket boosters.

But Orion is much smaller than the shuttle. It lacks a robotic arm like the one the shuttle used to grab Hubble and position it for the spacewalking astronauts to replace an array of worn-out components. Orion will have nothing comparable to the shuttle's payload bay. And although Orion astronauts will be able to do a space walk, the current design would require a complete depressurization of the capsule.

"If we develop a new vehicle, dammit, that vehicle should have all the capabilities that [the shuttle] has," Cepollina said.

Former NASA administrator Michael Griffin, meanwhile, argues that Orion will be capable of servicing missions. And he pointed out that the Hubble's successor, the James Webb Space Telescope scheduled for launch in 2014, will have a docking ring in case it needs to be fixed robotically, or even by astronauts.

If the money spent on the recent Hubble mission were spent on an Orion servicing mission, Griffin said in an e-mail message, it could fix a telescope.

"It is all just budget," Griffin said.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-May-14, by Daniel Henninger:

Earmark Nation
The Founders never imagined spending such vast sums.

In the year of our nation, 2005, "earmark," a term of trade known only to political technicians, became a household word. The Bridge to Nowhere, a mere outlay of $320 million in that year's $2.5 trillion federal budget, led to the decline and fall of the Republican Party. In 2006, a disgusted American electorate threw Republicans from office, and transferred House control to the Democrats.

When earlier this week President Obama signed a $410 billion spending bill to keep the government running through the fall, every account of the event noted the 800-pound contradiction in the room. Mr. Obama had campaigned against earmarks, even saying he would cut them back to levels before 1994, the start of the Gingrich-GOP interregnum. Now here was Obama as president signing a bill soaked in earmarks.

In the course of explaining his way through this contradiction, Mr. Obama dropped a hard truth of modern American politics: "Individual members of Congress understand their districts best, and they should have the ability to respond to the needs of their communities."

This is the Murtha earmark defense. Rep. John Murtha, Democrat from Johnstown, Pa., is the current holder of what we might call the Ted Stevens Trophy, a rotating award for whichever Member of Congress the press is vilifying most for earmark abuse. Mr. Murtha's stock defense of the budget loot he has earmarked and shipped to Johnstown is that if he didn't do it, bureaucrats who know nothing about the real America would decide where to spend the money. That's what President Obama just said. Murtha himself calls the $787 billion stimulus package the Obama earmarks bill.

Mocking this presumed hypocrisy is good sport, but the Murtha example deserves a closer look. You just might find that you are staring at a Pogo problem: We have met the enemy, and he is us.

Consider: In March, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter Dennis Roddy went to Johnstown and discovered the rationale its citizens had built around what Mr. Murtha does.

Briefly, this steel town was dying in the 1970s. The city fathers decided their future lay with John Murtha's seniority, and over the years his earmarks, in the billions, created companies that use the locals' skills, such as welding, to produce armor plating or Humvees. Johnstown became a mini-defense industry. Podcast

Listen to Daniel Henninger's Wonder Land column, now available in audio format.

Mr. Murtha says without apology: "Johnstown would have been like Detroit is today. We would have been a ghost town."

Along with this salvation, however, came such excesses as the John Murtha Airport, which has gotten $150 million of federal funds. It has three flights daily to and from one city -- Washington, D.C.

To this, the Johnstown locals likely would say, So what? That's probably what locals in congressional districts everywhere say about their earmarks.

About all this, John Murtha has said something to ponder: "If I'm corrupt, it's because I take care of my district."

When we speak of public corruption, we normally mean an official has been convicted of breaking a law. The bad pols did it. We are at the point, though, where it is hard to say that the corruptions of government are only about the politicians.

Murtha may be right. We are all earmarkers now.

Here's another way of putting it: The U.S. budget is now history's biggest mountain of swag; it is uncountable goodie bags filled with tax revenue. Mr. Obama's swag mountain, the fiscal year 2010 "budget," is $3.59 trillion high (25% of total GDP of about $14 trillion). His $800 billion stimulus bill was another pile of public cash. We the people have concluded that if we don't use the Honorable John or Nancy or Ted in Congress to get our piece of it, someone else will get it.

For the longest time, we were able to believe that these corruptions were the inevitable but petty price of politics. But I agree with John Murtha. It isn't petty anymore. It isn't just about amusing "pet projects." The whole system has become an earmark. The politicians have been shaping the system so that more and more people have to buy in to the earmark philosophy -- we pay, they decide -- or get left out.

Barack Obama isn't a reformer. He's the president of Earmark Nation. We are about to enact the Obama federal health-insurance entitlement, which on top of all the other entitlements and their limitless liabilities will require pulling trillions of dollars more into the federal budget. Whatever nominal public good this is supposed to achieve, it means that they, these 535 pols, most of them gerrymandered for life, will decide in perpetuity the details of how to dole it out.

When this experiment called the United States began some 200 years ago, neither the "liberals" nor "conservatives" of that time imagined their successors would have such vast sway over the nation's income, or that U.S. politics would be mostly factions begging and fighting to have fragments of it disbursed back to them. The phrase "pay to play" would have disgusted them.

"If I'm corrupt, it's because I take care of my district."

John Murtha of Johnstown is the canary in the mine shaft. In politics, the canaries don't die. They adapt and learn to live with the toxic fumes of public spending on scales beyond morality or understanding. We are just about there.

from City Journal online, 2009-Apr-17, by Andrew Klavan:

The Little Red Wagon That Can
What I saw at the Tea Party

I’m not sure—I’m no prophet—but I think I just saw something genuinely profound, genuinely amazing, and cool that could be the tidal wave of the future.

Here’s the setup. It was Tax Day. Thousands of self-organized protesters had gathered around the nation to protest the irresponsible, incredibly rapid expansion of government under the current administration. The Democratic Party and the elite media had done everything in their power to first ignore, then discourage, ridicule, and belittle this grassroots movement. Theoretically respectable journalists were reduced to making double-entendre sexual jokes about tea bags. These are the same people who rushed en masse to cover Cindy Sheehan and a dozen or so antiwar protesters in Crawford, Texas, rechristening that sad, emotionally unpredictable woman with two of the most cherished words in the English language: Peace Mom. But what was their attitude when thousands of ordinary people gathered in defense of their rights all over the country? “Just move on, folks, nothing to see here.”

Ah well, they’re nervous, and I don’t blame them. Because despite their claims that the Tea Party movement is without ideas, it was the people at those protests who represented the beliefs of our Founding Fathers. And it’s the government and the press that have betrayed them.

James Madison, in the famous Federalist #10, said it was the “first object of government” to protect those “diverse faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate,” and from which also originate “the possession of different degrees and kinds of property.” He warned that these faculties and these rights were in danger when what the Founders called “a majority faction” took over government. The Constitution, Madison said, was intended to help prevent such majority factions from working for “a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project.”

“The apportionment of taxes on the various descriptions of property is an act which seems to require the most exact impartiality,” Madison warned; “yet there is, perhaps, no legislative act in which greater opportunity and temptation are given to a predominant party to trample on the rules of justice.”

It is that voice—Madison’s voice, and the Constitution’s—with which the protestors spoke on Tax Day, and which the Democrats and the mainstream press have dismissed with such contempt.

So that’s the setup. Here’s what I saw at the Tea Party. I went to voice my opinions in an interview with Bill Whittle on the website Pajamas TV, where I do my “Klavan on the Culture” video commentaries. I walked into the modest studio in a skyscraper out near LAX. And it was wonderful.

There was a makeshift newsroom there like no other I had ever seen. Extra laptops and big-screen monitors were slung up everywhere, volunteer citizen journalists called in reports from the protests around the country on their cellphones, bloggers like Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds Skyped in live commentary, Tweeters sent in field observations. It was a People’s Media that seemed to have risen up out of the ground like Cadmus’s army of old to spread the word about a movement that had likewise risen up in spite of, and in defiance of, the powers that be.

Do you know what it reminded me of? Remember the film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington? Remember how the lone righteous senator, played by Jimmy Stewart, takes on the entrenched interests in a filibuster but the powerful media, in league with the government, does everything it can to shut him up and shut him down? Unable to get the word out, Mr. Smith calls on the little kids who love him to print up newspapers on their toy printing presses and distribute them in their little red wagons. And they do it—little kids telling the story that a corrupt media is no longer willing to tell.

And do you remember what Mr. Smith says at his darkest hour, when they silence him, when they cut off every means he has of communicating with the American people?

He says: “You all think I’m licked. But I’m not licked.”

And then he brings those scoundrels down.

Andrew Klavan is a City Journal contributing editor and the author of such best-selling novels as True Crime, Don’t Say a Word, and Empire of Lies. His latest book is The Last Thing I Remember.

from Breitbart.com's Big Hollywood, 2009-May-25, by Kurt Schlichter:

Memorial Day: A Rejection of Peacenik Foolishness

Memorial Day puts the lie to the nonsense that violence never solves anything.

Those rows of white tombstones decorated with little flags are the reason Americans don’t walk downtown, past the ruins where the synagogue once stood, to grab a schnitzel und ein bier from that little imbiss next to der bahnhof. They are why there isn’t a smoking pit in the heart of Los Angeles where the Library Tower used to be.

Violence never solves anything, war is not the answer, arms are for hugging…. It’s hard to believe that there are adults out there that actually buy into such foolishness.

Memorial Day is about men and women who didn’t orient their lives to the dictates of poorly thought-through bumper sticker clichés that belong on the rear of some NPR-listening public school administrator’s Prius. It’s about men and women who understood that sometimes doing the right thing means doing the hardest thing.

Violence can solve things. Hitler - solved. Tojo - solved. Saddam - solved. Sometimes it takes time: Bin Laden - solution pending. But all the earnest teach-ins and doofy drum circles in the world haven’t kept one Darfurian from being killed by the janjaweed Islamist militia. The only thing that will ever do that is a division of Marines; until the activists call for the Devil Dogs to go in, they’re just posing.

Frequently, war is the answer. With the sorry state of history education in America, it’s easy to see how some people could embrace the delusion that there is nothing worth fighting for. But the Nazi concentration camps didn’t liberate themselves. Bosnia and Kosovo’s ethnic cleansing didn’t end because Milosevic got a pretty please with sugar on top. And the Taliban aren’t about to see the light and stop throwing acid in schoolgirl’s faces for the crime of wanting to learn to read.

War and violence aren’t the only answers - I worked in civil affairs on one deployment and we made a huge difference without firing a shot. Sometimes American soldiers’ arms are for hugging - I’ve seen that too - but before you can build a peace you have to enforce security. That means a grunt standing watch, M4 in hand, with a pilot in an F-15 overhead and a destroyer off-shore.

What is ironic is that Hollywood, for all its superficial peacenik posing, gets it. The messages of two of the biggest movies out right now, Star Trek and Terminator Salvation, are that there are things worth fighting for and dying for. Sadly, Hollywood feels the need to cloak that truth in the guise of battles against pointy-eared space aliens and death-dealing cyborgs that look like our governor.

Hollywood, just lose the metaphors. It would be nice to see a straight-up movie about the sacrifices of American soldiers in the War on Terror that doesn’t replace jihadi psychos with Romulans or SkyNet.

Memorial Day is the perfect occasion to embrace the truth. Do not listen to those who say that it is just another day off where people do nothing but drink beer and eat barbecue with their buddies. That’s a strawman offered up by the bumper sticker set because they fear Memorial Day’s true meaning.

At the risk of being presumptuous, those who gave their lives for our country would want you to gather your buddies and drink beers and eat barbecue (Resolved: Barbecued beef ribs are superior in every way to pork ribs. Discuss.). I plan to. There is a reason that on Memorial Day the flag flies at half-staff only until noon, when it is raised to the top of the pole again. It symbolizes that we honor our dead by going forward with our lives.

Honor our fallen by remembering them, and just as importantly, what they did. We can do that best by confronting the nonsense that surrounds us by telling the stories of these brave American men and women. When little Jimmy comes home confused because the teacher said that America is irremediably racist, you tell him about the Union soldiers who fell at Gettysburg. When your daughter tells you her textbook says that World War II was really instigated by war profiteers, pop in the disc of the Band of Brothers episode where Easy Company stumbles onto a Nazi death camp. When your son asks what that bumper sticker saying “End the War” means, you tell him about what the cops and firefighters had to do on 9/11. Let the truth be your tribute.

Memorial Day is about remembering that sanctimonious sayings are not a substitute for action and that easy political posturing is made possible only by men and women who take a stand to stop evil instead of just muttering vacuous slogans. Sometimes violence does solve things, and sometimes war is the answer. Thank God for the men and women who understood that, and for the ones who still do today.

from the American Enterprise Institute via the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Mar-24, by Charles Murray:

Europe Syndrome
The trouble with taking the trouble out of everything.

When I began to work on this lecture a few months ago, I was feeling abashed because I knew I couldn't talk about either of the topics that were of the gravest national importance. Regarding Iraq and Afghanistan, I have not publicly said a word on foreign policy since I wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times in 1973. Regarding the economic crisis, I am not an economist. In fact, I am so naive about economics that I continue to think that we have a financial meltdown because the federal government, in its infinite wisdom, has for the last two administrations aggressively pushed policies that made it possible for clever people to get rich by lending money to people who were unlikely to pay it back.

The topic I wanted to talk about was one that has been at the center of my own concerns for more than 20 years, but I was afraid it would seem remote from these urgent immediate issues. How times change. As of the morning of Feb. 24, this is the text I had written to introduce the topic: "It isn't usually put this way, but the advent of the Obama administration brings this question before the nation: Do we want the United States to be like Europe?" And then on the evening of the 24th, President Obama unveiled his domestic agenda to Congress, and now everybody is putting it that way. As Charles Krauthammer observed a few days later, "We've been trying to figure out who Barack Obama is, where he's really from. From Hawaii? Indonesia? The Ivy League? Chicago? Now we know: he's a Swede."

In short, the question has suddenly become urgently relevant because President Obama and his leading intellectual heroes are the American equivalent of Europe's social democrats. There's nothing sinister about that. They share an intellectually respectable view that Europe's regulatory and social welfare systems are more progressive than America's and advocate reforms that would make the American system more like the European system.

Not only are social democrats intellectually respectable, the European model has worked in many ways. I am delighted when I get a chance to go to Stockholm or Amsterdam, not to mention Rome or Paris. When I get there, the people don't seem to be groaning under the yoke of an evil system. Quite the contrary. There's a lot to like--a lot to love--about day-to-day life in Europe, something that should be kept in mind when I get to some less complimentary observations.

The European model can't continue to work much longer. Europe's catastrophically low birthrates and soaring immigration from cultures with alien values will see to that. So let me rephrase the question. If we could avoid Europe's demographic problems, do we want the United States to be like Europe?

Tonight I will argue for the answer "no," but not for economic reasons. The European model has indeed created sclerotic economies, and it would be a bad idea to imitate them. But I want to focus on another problem.

My text is drawn from Federalist 62, probably written by James Madison: "A good government implies two things: first, fidelity to the object of government, which is the happiness of the people; secondly, a knowledge of the means by which that object can be best attained." Note the word: happiness. Not prosperity. Not security. Not equality. Happiness, which the Founders used in its Aristotelian sense of lasting and justified satisfaction with life as a whole.

I have two points to make. First, I will argue that the European model is fundamentally flawed because, despite its material successes, it is not suited to the way that human beings flourish--it does not conduce to Aristotelian happiness. Second, I will argue that 21st-century science will prove me right.

First, the problem with the European model, namely: It drains too much of the life from life. And that statement applies as much to the lives of janitors--even more to the lives of janitors--as it does to the lives of CEOs.

I start from this premise: A human life can have transcendent meaning, with transcendence defined either by one of the world's great religions or one of the world's great secular philosophies. If transcendence is too big a word, let me put it another way: I suspect that almost all of you agree that the phrase "a life well-lived" has meaning. That's the phrase I'll use from now on.

And since happiness is a word that gets thrown around too casually, the phrase I'll use from now on is "deep satisfactions." I'm talking about the kinds of things that we look back upon when we reach old age and let us decide that we can be proud of who we have been and what we have done. Or not.

To become a source of deep satisfaction, a human activity has to meet some stringent requirements. It has to have been important (we don't get deep satisfaction from trivial things). You have to have put a lot of effort into it (hence the cliché "nothing worth having comes easily"). And you have to have been responsible for the consequences.

There aren't many activities in life that can satisfy those three requirements. Having been a good parent. That qualifies. A good marriage. That qualifies. Having been a good neighbor and good friend to those whose lives intersected with yours. That qualifies. And having been really good at something--good at something that drew the most from your abilities. That qualifies. Let me put it formally: If we ask what are the institutions through which human beings achieve deep satisfactions in life, the answer is that there are just four: family, community, vocation and faith. Two clarifications: "Community" can embrace people who are scattered geographically. "Vocation" can include avocations or causes.

It is not necessary for any individual to make use of all four institutions, nor do I array them in a hierarchy. I merely assert that these four are all there are. The stuff of life--the elemental events surrounding birth, death, raising children, fulfilling one's personal potential, dealing with adversity, intimate relationships--coping with life as it exists around us in all its richness--occurs within those four institutions.

Seen in this light, the goal of social policy is to ensure that those institutions are robust and vital. And that's what's wrong with the European model. It doesn't do that. It enfeebles every single one of them.

Put aside all the sophisticated ways of conceptualizing governmental functions and think of it in this simplistic way: Almost anything that government does in social policy can be characterized as taking some of the trouble out of things. Sometimes, taking the trouble out of things is a good idea. Having an effective police force takes some of the trouble out of walking home safely at night, and I'm glad it does.

The problem is this: Every time the government takes some of the trouble out of performing the functions of family, community, vocation and faith, it also strips those institutions of some of their vitality--it drains some of the life from them. It's inevitable. Families are not vital because the day-to-day tasks of raising children and being a good spouse are so much fun, but because the family has responsibility for doing important things that won't get done unless the family does them. Communities are not vital because it's so much fun to respond to our neighbors' needs, but because the community has the responsibility for doing important things that won't get done unless the community does them. Once that imperative has been met--family and community really do have the action--then an elaborate web of social norms, expectations, rewards and punishments evolves over time that supports families and communities in performing their functions. When the government says it will take some of the trouble out of doing the things that families and communities evolved to do, it inevitably takes some of the action away from families and communities, and the web frays, and eventually disintegrates.

If we knew that leaving these functions in the hands of families and communities led to legions of neglected children and neglected neighbors, and taking them away from families and communities led to happy children and happy neighbors, then it would be possible to say that the cost is worth it. But that's not what happened when the U.S. welfare state expanded. We have seen growing legions of children raised in unimaginably awful circumstances, not because of material poverty but because of dysfunctional families, and the collapse of functioning neighborhoods into Hobbesian all-against-all free-fire zones.

Meanwhile, we have exacted costs that are seldom considered but are hugely important. Earlier, I said that the sources of deep satisfactions are the same for janitors as for CEOs, and I also said that people needed to do important things with their lives. When the government takes the trouble out of being a spouse and parent, it doesn't affect the sources of deep satisfaction for the CEO. Rather, it makes life difficult for the janitor. A man who is holding down a menial job and thereby supporting a wife and children is doing something authentically important with his life. He should take deep satisfaction from that, and be praised by his community for doing so. Think of all the phrases we used to have for it: "He is a man who pulls his own weight." "He's a good provider." If that same man lives under a system that says that the children of the woman he sleeps with will be taken care of whether or not he contributes, then that status goes away. I am not describing some theoretical outcome. I am describing American neighborhoods where, once, working at a menial job to provide for his family made a man proud and gave him status in his community, and where now it doesn't. I could give a half dozen other examples. Taking the trouble out of the stuff of life strips people--already has stripped people--of major ways in which human beings look back on their lives and say, "I made a difference."

I have been making a number of claims with no data. The data exist. I could document the role of the welfare state in destroying the family in low-income communities. I could cite extensive quantitative evidence of decline in civic engagement and document the displacement effect that government intervention has had on civic engagement. But such evidence focuses on those near the bottom of society where the American welfare state has been most intrusive. If we want to know where America as a whole is headed--its destination--we should look to Europe.

Drive through rural Sweden, as I did a few years ago. In every town was a beautiful Lutheran church, freshly painted, on meticulously tended grounds, all subsidized by the Swedish government. And the churches are empty. Including on Sundays. Scandinavia and Western Europe pride themselves on their "child-friendly" policies, providing generous child allowances, free day-care centers and long maternity leaves. Those same countries have fertility rates far below replacement and plunging marriage rates. Those same countries are ones in which jobs are most carefully protected by government regulation and mandated benefits are most lavish. And they, with only a few exceptions, are countries where work is most often seen as a necessary evil, least often seen as a vocation, and where the proportions of people who say they love their jobs are the lowest.

What's happening? Call it the Europe Syndrome. Last April I had occasion to speak in Zurich, where I made some of these same points. After the speech, a few of the 20-something members of the audience approached and said plainly that the phrase "a life well-lived" did not have meaning for them. They were having a great time with their current sex partner and new BMW and the vacation home in Majorca, and saw no voids in their lives that needed filling.

It was fascinating to hear it said to my face, but not surprising. It conformed to both journalistic and scholarly accounts of a spreading European mentality. Let me emphasize "spreading." I'm not talking about all Europeans, by any means. That mentality goes something like this: Human beings are a collection of chemicals that activate and, after a period of time, deactivate. The purpose of life is to while away the intervening time as pleasantly as possible.

If that's the purpose of life, then work is not a vocation, but something that interferes with the higher good of leisure. If that's the purpose of life, why have a child, when children are so much trouble--and, after all, what good are they, really? If that's the purpose of life, why spend it worrying about neighbors? If that's the purpose of life, what could possibly be the attraction of a religion that says otherwise?

The same self-absorption in whiling away life as pleasantly as possible explains why Europe has become a continent that no longer celebrates greatness. When life is a matter of whiling away the time, the concept of greatness is irritating and threatening. What explains Europe's military impotence? I am surely simplifying, but this has to be part of it: If the purpose of life is to while away the time as pleasantly as possible, what can be worth dying for?

I stand in awe of Europe's past. Which makes Europe's present all the more dispiriting. And should make its present something that concentrates our minds wonderfully, for every element of the Europe Syndrome is infiltrating American life as well.

We are seeing that infiltration appear most obviously among those who are most openly attached to the European model--namely, America's social democrats, heavily represented in university faculties and the most fashionable neighborhoods of our great cities. There are a whole lot of them within a couple of Metro stops from this hotel. We know from databases such as the General Social Survey that among those who self-identify as liberal or extremely liberal, secularism is close to European levels. Birthrates are close to European levels. Charitable giving is close to European levels. (That's material that Arthur Brooks has put together.) There is every reason to believe that when Americans embrace the European model, they begin to behave like Europeans.

This is all pretty depressing for people who do not embrace the European model, because it looks like the train has left the station. The European model provides the intellectual framework for the social policies of the triumphant Democratic Party, and it faces no credible opposition from Republican politicians. (If that seems too harsh, I am sure that the Republican politicians in the audience will understand when I say that the last dozen years do raise a credibility problem when we now hear you say nice things about fiscal restraint and limited government.)

And yet there is reason for strategic optimism, and that leads to the second point I want to make tonight: Critics of the European model are about to get a lot of new firepower. Not only is the European model inimical to human flourishing, 21st-century science is going to explain why. We who think that the Founders were right about the relationship of government to human happiness will have an opening over the course of the next few decades to make our case.

The reason is a tidal change in our scientific understanding of what makes human beings tick. It will spill over into every crevice of political and cultural life. Harvard's Edward O. Wilson anticipated what is to come in a book entitled "Consilience." As the 21st century progresses, he argued, the social sciences are increasingly going to be shaped by the findings of biology; specifically, the findings of the neuroscientists and the geneticists.

What are they finding? I'm afraid that I don't have anything to report that you will find shocking. For example, science is proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that males and females respond differently to babies. You heard it here first. The specific findings aren't so important at this point--we are just at the beginning of a very steep learning curve. Rather, it is the tendency of the findings that lets us predict with some confidence the broad outlines of what the future will bring, and they offer nothing but bad news for social democrats.

Two premises about human beings are at the heart of the social democratic agenda: what I will label "the equality premise" and "the New Man premise."

The equality premise says that, in a fair society, different groups of people--men and women, blacks and whites, straights and gays, the children of poor people and the children of rich people--will naturally have the same distributions of outcomes in life--the same mean income, the same mean educational attainment, the same proportions who become janitors and CEOs. When that doesn't happen, it is because of bad human behavior and an unfair society. For the last 40 years, this premise has justified thousands of pages of government regulations and legislation that has reached into everything from the paperwork required to fire someone to the funding of high school wrestling teams. Everything that we associate with the phrase "politically correct" eventually comes back to the equality premise. Every form of affirmative action derives from it. Much of the Democratic Party's proposed domestic legislation assumes that it is true.

Within a decade, no one will try to defend the equality premise. All sorts of groups will be known to differ in qualities that affect what professions they choose, how much money they make, and how they live their lives in all sorts of ways. Gender differences will be first, because the growth in knowledge about the ways that men and women are different is growing by far the most rapidly. I'm betting that the Harvard faculty of the year 2020 will look back on the Larry Summers affair in the same way that they think about the Scopes trial--the enlightened versus the benighted--and will have achieved complete amnesia about their own formerly benighted opinions.

There is no reason to fear this new knowledge. Differences among groups will cut in many different directions, and everybody will be able to weight the differences so that their group's advantages turn out to be the most important to them. Liberals will not be obliged to give up their concerns about systemic unfairnesses. But groups of people will turn out to be different from each other, on average, and those differences will also produce group differences in outcomes in life, on average, that everyone knows are not the product of discrimination and inadequate government regulation.

And a void will have developed in the moral universe of the left. If social policy cannot be built on the premise that group differences must be eliminated, what can it be built upon? It can be built upon the restoration of the premise that used to be part of the warp and woof of American idealism: People must be treated as individuals. The success of social policy is to be measured not by equality of outcomes for groups, but by open, abundant opportunity for individuals. It is to be measured by the freedom of individuals, acting upon their personal abilities, aspirations and values, to seek the kind of life that best suits them.

The second bedrock premise of the social democratic agenda is what I call the New Man premise, borrowing the old Communist claim that it would create a "New Man" by remaking human nature. This premise says that human beings are malleable through the right government interventions.

The second tendency of the new findings of biology will be to show that the New Man premise is nonsense. Human nature tightly constrains what is politically or culturally possible. More than that, the new findings will broadly confirm that human beings are pretty much the way that wise human observers have thought for thousands of years, and that is going to be wonderful news for those of us who are already basing our policy analyses on that assumption.

The effects on the policy debate are going to be sweeping. Let me give you a specific example. For many years, I have been among those who argue that the growth in births to unmarried women has been a social catastrophe--the single most important driving force behind the growth of the underclass. But while I and other scholars have been able to prove that other family structures have not worked as well as the traditional family, I cannot prove that alternatives could not work as well, and so the social democrats keep coming up with the next new ingenious program that will compensate for the absence of fathers.

Over the next few decades, advances in evolutionary psychology are going to be conjoined with advances in genetic understanding and they will lead to a scientific consensus that goes something like this: There are genetic reasons, rooted in the mechanisms of human evolution, that little boys who grow up in neighborhoods without married fathers tend to reach adolescence unsocialized to norms of behavior that they will need to stay out of prison and hold jobs. These same reasons explain why child abuse is, and always will be, concentrated among family structures in which the live-in male is not the married biological father. And these same reasons explain why society's attempts to compensate for the lack of married biological fathers don't work and will never work.

Once again, there's no reason to be frightened of this new knowledge. We will still be able to acknowledge that many single women do a wonderful job of raising their children. Social democrats will simply have to stop making glib claims that the traditional family is just one of many equally valid alternatives. They will have to acknowledge that the traditional family plays a special, indispensable role in human flourishing and that social policy must be based on that truth. The same concrete effects of the new knowledge will make us rethink every domain in which the central government has imposed its judgment on how people ought to live their lives--in schools, workplaces, the courts, social services, as well as the family. And that will make the job of people like me much easier.

But the real effect is going to be much more profound than making my job easier. The 20th century was a very strange century, riddled from beginning to end with toxic political movements and nutty ideas. For some years a metaphor has been stuck in my mind: the twentieth century was the adolescence of Homo sapiens. Nineteenth-century science, from Darwin to Freud, offered a series of body blows to ways of thinking about human beings and human lives that had prevailed since the dawn of civilization. Humans, just like adolescents, were deprived of some of the comforting simplicities of childhood and exposed to more complex knowledge about the world. And 20th-century intellectuals reacted precisely the way that adolescents react when they think they have discovered Mom and Dad are hopelessly out of date. They think that the grown-ups are wrong about everything. In the case of 20th-century intellectuals, it was as if they thought that if Darwin was right about evolution, then Aquinas is no longer worth reading; that if Freud was right about the unconscious mind, the "Nicomachean Ethics" had nothing to teach us.

The nice thing about adolescence is that it is temporary, and, when it passes, people discover that their parents were smarter than they thought. I think that may be happening with the advent of the new century, as postmodernist answers to solemn questions about human existence start to wear thin--we're growing out of adolescence. The kinds of scientific advances in understanding human nature are going to accelerate that process. All of us who deal in social policy will be thinking less like adolescents, entranced with the most titillating new idea, and thinking more like grown-ups.

That will not get rid of the slippery slope that America is sliding down toward the European model. For that, this new raw material for reform--namely, a lot more people thinking like grown-ups--must be translated into a kind of political Great Awakening among America's elites.

I use the phrase "Great Awakening" to evoke a particular kind of event. American history has seen three religious revivals known as Great Awakenings--some say four. They were not dispassionate, polite reconsiderations of opinions. They were renewals of faith, felt in the gut.

I use the word "elites" to talk about the small minority of the population that has disproportionate influence over the culture, economy and governance of the country. I realize that to use that word makes many Americans uncomfortable. But every society since the advent of agriculture has had elites. So does the United States. Broadly defined, America's elites comprise several million people; narrowly defined, they amount to a few tens of thousands. We have a lot of examples of both kinds in this room tonight.

When I say that something akin to a political Great Awakening is required among America's elites, what I mean is that America's elites have to ask themselves how much they really do value what has made America exceptional, and what they are willing to do to preserve it. Let me close with a few remarks about what that will entail.

American exceptionalism is not just something that Americans claim for themselves. Historically, Americans have been different as a people, even peculiar, and everyone around the world has recognized it. I'm thinking of qualities such as American optimism even when there doesn't seem to be any good reason for it. That's quite uncommon among the peoples of the world. There is the striking lack of class envy in America--by and large, Americans celebrate others' success instead of resenting it. That's just about unique, certainly compared to European countries, and something that drives European intellectuals crazy. And then there is perhaps the most important symptom of all, the signature of American exceptionalism--the assumption by most Americans that they are in control of their own destinies. It is hard to think of a more inspiriting quality for a population to possess, and the American population still possesses it to an astonishing degree. No other country comes close.

Underlying these symptoms of American exceptionalism are the underlying exceptional dynamics of American life. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote a famous book describing the nature of that more fundamental exceptionalism back in the 1830s. He found American life characterized by two apparently conflicting themes. The first was the passion with which Americans pursued their individual interests, and made no bones about it--that's what America was all about, they kept telling Tocqueville. But at the same time, Tocqueville kept coming up against this phenomenal American passion for forming associations to deal with every conceivable problem, voluntarily taking up public affairs, and tending to the needs of their communities. How could this be? Because, Americans told Tocqueville, there's no conflict. "In the United States," Tocqueville writes, "hardly anybody talks of the beauty of virtue. . . . They do not deny that every man may follow his own interest; but they endeavor to prove that it is the interest of every man to be virtuous." And then he concludes, "I shall not here enter into the reasons they allege. . . . Suffice it to say, they have convinced their fellow countrymen."

The exceptionalism has not been a figment of anyone's imagination, and it has been wonderful. But it isn't something in the water that has made us that way. It comes from the cultural capital generated by the system that the Founders laid down, a system that says people must be free to live life as they see fit and to be responsible for the consequences of their actions; that it is not the government's job to protect people from themselves; that it is not the government's job to stage-manage how people interact with each other. Discard the system that created the cultural capital, and the qualities we love about Americans can go away. In some circles, they are going away.

Why do I focus on the elites in urging a Great Awakening? Because my sense is that the instincts of middle America remain distinctively American. When I visit the small Iowa town where I grew up in the 1950s, I don't get a sense that community life has changed all that much since then, and I wonder if it has changed all that much in the working-class neighborhoods of Brooklyn or Queens. When I examine the polling data about the values that most Americans prize, not a lot has changed. And while I worry about uncontrolled illegal immigration, I've got to say that every immigrant I actually encounter seems as American as apple pie.

The center still holds. It's the bottom and top of American society where we have a problem. And since it's the top that has such decisive influence on American culture, economy, and governance, I focus on it. The fact is that American elites have increasingly been withdrawing from American life. It's not a partisan phenomenon. The elites of all political stripes have increasingly withdrawn to gated communities--"gated" literally or figuratively--where they never interact at an intimate level with people not of their own socioeconomic class.

Haven't the elites always done this? Not like today. A hundred years ago, the wealth necessary to withdraw was confined to a much smaller percentage of the elites than now. Workplaces where the elites made their livings were much more variegated a hundred years ago than today's highly specialized workplaces.

Perhaps the most important difference is that, not so long ago, the overwhelming majority of the elites in each generation were drawn from the children of farmers, shopkeepers and factory workers--and could still remember those worlds after they left them. Over the last half century, it can be demonstrated empirically that the new generation of elites have increasingly spent their entire lives in the upper-middle-class bubble, never even having seen a factory floor, let alone worked on one, never having gone to a grocery store and bought the cheap ketchup instead of the expensive ketchup to meet a budget, never having had a boring job where their feet hurt at the end of the day, and never having had a close friend who hadn't gotten at least 600 on her SAT verbal. There's nobody to blame for any of this. These are the natural consequences of successful people looking for pleasant places to live and trying to do the best thing for their children.

But the fact remains: It is the elites who are increasingly separated from the America over which they have so much influence. That is not the America that Tocqueville saw. It is not an America that can remain America.

I am not suggesting that America's elites sacrifice their own self-interest for everybody else. That would be really un-American. I just want to accelerate a rediscovery of what that self-interest is. Age-old human wisdom has understood that a life well-lived requires engagement with those around us. That is reality, not idealism. It is appropriate to think that a political Great Awakening among the elites can arise in part from the renewed understanding that it can be pleasant to lead a glossy life, but it is ultimately more fun to lead a textured life, and to be in the midst of others who are leading textured lives. Perhaps events will help us out here--remember what Irving Kristol has been saying for years: "There's nothing wrong with this country that couldn't be cured by a long, hard depression."

What it comes down to is that America's elites must once again fall in love with what makes America different. I am not being theoretical. Not everybody in this room shares the beliefs I have been expressing, but a lot of us do. To those of you who do, I say soberly and without hyperbole, that this is the hour. The possibility that irreversible damage will be done to the American project over the next few years is real. And so it is our job to make the case for that reawakening. It won't happen by appealing to people on the basis of lower marginal tax rates or keeping a health care system that lets them choose their own doctor. The drift toward the European model can be slowed by piecemeal victories on specific items of legislation, but only slowed. It is going to be stopped only when we are all talking again about why America is exceptional, and why it is so important that America remain exceptional. That requires once again seeing the American project for what it is: a different way for people to live together, unique among the nations of the earth, and immeasurably precious.

Mr. Murray is the W. H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the recipient of AEI's 2009 Irving Kristol Award. He delivered this lecture at the award dinner earlier this month.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-May-7, p.A15, by Daniel Henninger:

Should the GOP Forget Reagan?

The Republican Party's unending tale of woe sounds like a friend's account of sitting through the New York Yankees' 22-4 loss to the Cleveland Indians at the new Yankee Stadium April 18.

In the 14-run second inning, three Indians hit home runs into the right-field seats, including a grand-slam. One ball hit a woman in the head because the fans had stopped watching the game. A nasty fight broke out in the stands. After the fourth inning (16-2), the subway trains taking Yankee faithful back to Manhattan were packed. Republicans know the feeling.

Rookie President Barack Obama has been pounding policy after policy through the Republicans' hapless defense. His approval is out of the park. He's teeing up his first Supreme Court appointment. Al Franken -- in a "say-it-ain't-so" moment if ever there was one -- is close to giving the Democrats a filibuster-proof Senate majority. And Republican voters are heading for the exits, with a puny 31% willing to tell a pollster they belong to the party.

During downturns in sports, three rules of thumb are: Don't panic, stay within your game, play to your strengths. This being politics, the Republicans naturally are violating all three.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush made headlines last weekend suggesting it's time for the party to get over its glory days: "I felt like there was a lot of nostalgia and the good old days in the [GOP] messaging. I mean, it's great, but it doesn't draw people toward your cause." Joyful Democratic bloggers put this more clearly in five tight words: GOP Needs to Forget Reagan.

Is this true?

The answer to that historic question is an apt subject this week as the GOP, looking for a path from the wilderness, says farewell at National Cathedral tomorrow to Jack Kemp, who remained a Reaganite to the end.

Jack Kemp, anyone who spent time around him will tell you, stayed on message. That message, like Reagan's, had a number of parts, but it is not possible to even guess how many times Jack Kemp summarized his explanations of that message in three words: "Work, save and invest." Republicans should think hard about building a governing philosophy on the foundation of those three words, ideas that most voters understand.

The full Kemp phrase, of course, was "incentives to work, save and invest." Those incentives were to be the result of a government willing to admit the social benefits of modesty -- in taxation and regulation of the economy. For now, the American public has elected an immodest government. This government says that circumstance forced it to spend $787 billion on stimulus. Its $3.5 trillion fiscal year 2010 budget, however, will by choice take spending to 25% of GDP next year.

Last weekend, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor began a GOP "listening tour." What's to hear? People want what they always want: a job that will let them build a life and family. What they want from Republicans is leadership toward that goal.

Today Mr. Obama releases the details of his $3.5 trillion budget, his path to the same goal. Rather than drown as usual in this accounting morass, Republicans should contrast the Obama-Pelosi budget with the Reagan-Kemp philosophy of how a striving nation works, saves and invests.

Republicans can start by taking the time to read the first Obama budget document, "A New Era of Responsibility." The word "investment" occurs over 140 times in its 142 pages. But this "investment" isn't private capital invested in private start-ups, what Mr. Kemp constantly called "entrepreneurial capitalism" and what most parents hope their children will join. Mr. Obama's document genuflects to "the market economy," then argues that it won't endure unless we "sacrifice" (through tax increases) to make "overdue investments" (which literally only means public spending) on four explicit goals: green energy, infrastructure, public health care, and education.

This calls to mind the way Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry guided that economy from 1949 to 2001. The Obama-Rattner strategy for GM and Chrysler -- a rescue if the companies agree to the government's desire to build more small "green" cars, presumably sold with a large tax credit -- is industrial policy. Why be postwar Japan?

It is not conceivable that a Reagan or Kemp would have directed the U.S. economy's legendary energies into building hybrid cars, windmills and bullet trains. It would not have occurred to them that America's next Silicon Valley -- Apple, Intel and Oracle -- could grow out of "investments" listed in the federal budget. This would not have occurred to either man because their politics were rooted in the 300-year-old, singularly American tradition of individuals freely deciding how to spend their productive hours and money inside a public system that mainly provides security and safety.

Mr. Obama won the election and deserves time to see what his vision adds to the nation's productive life. If while it awaits that, the Republican Party can't renew what Reagan and Kemp gave them, its listening tour could last a very long time.

from the American, 2009-Apr-24, by Ben Casnocha:

Success on the Side
The role of side projects in entrepreneurial success has a rich history in the United States.

In 1921, a 22-year-old engineering school dropout named Richard Drew applied for a job at 3M’s research lab in St. Paul, Minnesota. William McKnight, then 3M’s vice president, was impressed with Drew’s raw eagerness and hired and assigned him to an auto body paint shop to test 3M’s new sandpaper. But it was not the sandpaper chore that grabbed Drew’s attention: while at the shop he noticed that the painters were having problems painting two-tone colors. Plaster tape was supposed to act as a straight-line guide but it either kept ripping off paint or the tape adhesive stuck on the car’s surface permanently. Drew vowed to solve the problem.

After a couple weeks of exploring better tape solutions, Drew was ordered to get back to what he was supposed to be doing—improving sandpaper. After all, he had no practical work experience prior to 3M that would suggest he was the man to take on a self-directed engineering challenge. His last job was playing the banjo for traveling dance bands. But Drew was convinced the problem represented a big opportunity: “You’re wrong, I’m right, and I’m going to prove it,” McKnight remembered Drew saying. In 1925, Drew developed a prototype of a nondrying adhesive tape. He gave a sample to the auto shop workers, who tested it and responded, “Take this tape back to those Scotch bosses of yours and tell them to put more adhesive on it!” They meant “Scotch” as in parsimonious or cheap. Drew added a bit more adhesive and—boom!—the famed “Scotch” masking tape was born.

How should 3M brass have responded to a success that took root in an underling’s challenge of authority? One approach would be to celebrate the lucky break but not conclude as a matter of protocol that subordinates can ignore directives as they wish. The other is to ponder what type of systematic, organizational changes could be made to foster more such lucky breaks going forward. In considering their response, Drew’s bosses had to confront an uncomfortable question: How could a young punk like Drew have had a better sense for a potential product than their older, wiser selves? The humbling conclusion followed: It is hard for even experts to predict or plan the next innovation, and thus all employees, especially those on the front lines, should have a part in allocating R&D resources.

So 3M implemented a groundbreaking policy called the 15-percent-time rule: regardless of their assignments, 3M technical employees were encouraged to devote 15 percent of their paid working hours to independent projects. “Most of the inventions that 3M depends upon today came out of that kind of individual initiative,” says Bill Coyne, retired senior vice president of research and development. It could have well been called the “Richard Drew Policy”: encourage more freethinking employees to hatch up world-changing ideas.

Employees such as Art Fry. In 1968, 3M employee Fry was singing in the church choir and got annoyed that his bookmark kept falling out of his hymnal. “It was during the sermon,” Fry remembers, “that I first thought, What I really need is a little bookmark that will stick to the paper but will not tear the paper when I remove it.” Fry wondered whether it would be possible to create a repositionable bookmark that would stick only gently to a page. In the months after his church choir daydreaming, he spent his side-project time researching what would ultimately become the adhesive behind the hugely popular yellow Post-it Note. It was an unexpected, even random, invention that saw the light of day thanks to 3M’s flexible employee policy.

While 3M was one of the first for-profits to institutionalize independent-project time, open-mindedness to side projects and a willingness to entertain tasks of uncertain importance has a long tradition in America—all the way back to America’s original start-up entrepreneurs, the Founding Fathers.

_______             

On June 11, 1776 the Continental Congress appointed a committee to draft a call for independence that would summarize the colonies’ case. 

Clearly, this call was important enough to demand the services of some of America’s best men. Congress did not assign it to just anyone. The drafting committee’s five members included Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson.

But this new task also fit at best in the middle of the committee members’ sprawling to-do lists, and Congress hardly stopped in its tracks to await Jefferson’s output. Adams worked on 23 committees at the time, Jefferson was on nearly as many. No one seemed to expect that the document would do more than convey an argument that was everywhere in the air; already, towns, militias, assemblies, and others had produced statements of principle. 

Jefferson had better things to do than write the Declaration of Independence. It was not a glamorous project. Writing what was thought to be a fairly uninteresting position paper demanded skills that Adams considered unimportant—“like children’s play at marbles,” he later wrote Jefferson. The floor debate would decide, after all, whether or not Jefferson’s resolution would actually pass. It was not even the piece of prose to which Jefferson felt most devoted. He had spent May pleading for the right to go home, to the state he called “my country,” to write Virginia’s constitution (for which he wrote three drafts when not otherwise occupied).

So the Congress was hardly waiting with bated breath for the committee that had been assigned to produce a Declaration; this task struck most of them as rhetorical gift-wrapping, a simple restatement of political commonalities. The real work—hard, hand-to-hand political infighting that would sway wavering state delegations to the side of independence—took place behind the scenes. (Adams later complained that the mere words of the Declaration were “a theatrical side show… Jefferson ran away with the stage effect.”)

In what Adams remembers as just a few days later, Jefferson offered a draft Declaration to the committee. Despite its status, by implication and occasionally direct statement, as a secondary task—a side project of Jefferson from his other committee projects—the other members (Franklin, in particular) strove to perfect Jefferson’s text. In this process they realized that his eloquence and forcefulness had the potential to unite a nation. The Continental Congress edited the document exactingly, and the result was that what had been expected at the outset to present little more than yet another statement of the colonists’ endless grievances against King and Parliament took on historic and mythic resonance. Jefferson’s side project—sharpened and clarified by editors committed to honing its essential message for maximum popular appeal—now represented the core of revolutionary values with a clarity that none of its creators had exactly foreseen at the time.

More than two centuries later, the Declaration remains not merely a keystone in the history of liberty, but an important lesson in pursuing with curiosity and devotion what may seem like (and start as) secondary assignments.

_______

From the Declaration of Independence to Scotch tape and Post-it Notes, the success of side projects throughout history has not gone unnoticed today, least of all by one of the world’s most admired companies: Google. As with 3M, it took an insider hitting the jackpot before management institutionalized the encouragement of such work.

In the early days, Paul Buchheit, employee number 23 at Google, was focused on Web search like most other engineers. But like many other restless, smart workers, Buchheit also enjoyed hacking away at random stuff during his free time. What makes Buchheit different is that his Friday afternoon time was unusually productive: He conceived the initial prototypes for Gmail, the popular email program now used by millions of people, and AdSense, which is responsible for most of the company’s billions. AdSense is the technology that displays relevant ads on the right-hand side of the search results page.

Buchheit did not plan on his successes—or at least did not expect them to materialize as they did. Gmail and AdSense started as mere part-time pursuits. “It was just a random project . . . something that I’d been thinking about because I’d been sort of unhappy with email for a long time,” Buchheit says about his creation of Gmail in the book Founders at Work. “I’ve done a lot of random things . . . I like to just try out ideas and a lot of them don’t go anywhere.”

Partly thanks to Buchheit’s innovations, Google instituted a side-project policy similar to 3M’s: technical people are now encouraged to spend 20 percent of their time on approved side projects.

Is giving away a day a week of your employees’ time worth it? Google executives seem to think so. They cite first the enormous goodwill generated internally: “20-percent time sends a strong message of trust to the engineers,” says Marissa Mayer, Google vice president of search products and user experience. Then there is the actual product output which of late includes Google Suggest (auto-filled queries) and Orkut (a social network). In a speech a couple of years ago, Mayer said about 50 percent of new Google products got their start in 20 percent time.

Jack Hipple, a consultant who works with companies on innovation, says corporate support for employees’ natural curiosity can lead to better new product ideas than traditional focus groups: “You have to have some vehicle for side-project time because senior managers or customers don’t know enough about the future to know what’s coming.”

Bottom-up product development of this sort has held various names over the years. German scholar Peter Augsdorfer studies the phenomenon of “bootlegging” in companies, which he defines as unauthorized innovative activity that the employees themselves define and secretly organize. One of Augsdorfer’s favorite examples is of a scientist at the British pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline who went to his boss in 1982 with a “brilliant” idea to improve a membrane filtration system. Undeterred by his boss’s immediate and terse “No!” he spent the next 12 months covertly researching his idea on paid company time using company facilities. He turned out to be right, and his bootlegging led to the eventual corporate investment of tens of millions of pounds in his revolutionary product.  

True undercover work is less common than “skunk works,” a trademarked term from Lockheed Martin to refer to authorized bootlegging. There, higher-ups direct a business group to work on projects autonomously so as to avoid bureaucratic morass.

Google’s approach is riskier than bootlegging or skunk works. They allocate employee time and trust that employees use it wisely. There is no guarantee that the side-project labor will produce a return for the corporation. Indeed, for all the high-profile success stories of side projects, there are countless hours spent experimenting with nothing to show for it.

How, then, do you balance the need to focus and complete known important projects with the desire for side-project randomness and creativity? Even within organizations that have embraced side projects like Google, insiders say the focus vs. side project tension burns bright. A few years ago, in a different industry, music fans saw what happens when the tension goes unresolved.

In 2001 bassist Jason Newsted left the heavy metal band Metallica in a dispute about his interest in recording non-Metallica music on the side. “My dedication [to Metallica] was being challenged,” said Newsted of his side project Echobrain. His bandmates told him Metallica required 100 percent commitment, or none at all. “We just disagree about side projects,” the band leader James Hetfield said in an interview in 2001, “We’ve been the same guys since day one, essentially… When someone does a side project, it takes away from the strength of Metallica.”

Not all band leaders agree. Some bands actually encourage musical side projects with a long-term justification similar to 3M and Google’s: cross-pollinating your brain with different activities (or instruments or rhythms) rejuvenates your creative instincts. This belief—that exercising mental muscles on new and different projects sharpens one’s overall creative energy—lessens the importance of any one project’s actual outcome. Even if a side project goes nowhere, fresh experimentation delivers long-term benefits to the company’s human capital.

_______

Of course, not every organization can tolerate a side-project policy. Alex Payne, a lead engineer at the San Francisco start-up Twitter, says in hiring interviews he always asks potential employees what side projects they are hatching, but his company of 30 employees is not big enough for such projects to happen on paid time: “At some point Twitter should institutionalize side-project time like Google. Maybe in another six months to a year we’ll be there,” says Payne. Until then, as a small company, there are too many essential tasks that need to get done simply to survive.

Tom Kinnear, a professor of entrepreneurial studies at the University of Michigan, says Google and 3M both could support experimenting after their core products became profitable: “At the outset there are such tight margins it’s hard to allow for side projects. The pressure from your investors to focus, focus, focus is just overwhelming.”

It is not just start-ups who decide focus, focus, focus will lead to a better outcome than encouraging engineers to dabble of their own volition. Apple used to have a skunk works program in the 1980s but has discontinued it, and does not offer side-project time to employees. Over the past decade it has reined in its more experimental R&D experiments. “Apple’s $489 million R&D spend is a fraction of its larger competitors. But by rigorously focusing its development resources on a short list of projects with the greatest potential, the company created an innovation machine,” noted a Booz Allen report in 2005.

Apple enjoys a high return on their focused investment and a rich culture of grassroots innovation. Thanks to a CEO who champions creative, interdisciplinary thinking at all levels of the organization, and more than 30 years’ history of invention, experimental projects can get started by those employees who want to take the initiative. A case-by-case policy means the company is spared an across-the-board hit of 20 percent of all employee time, 365 days a year. 3M acted similarly as of late. According to senior scientist John Huizinga, 3M has recently been preaching “15-percent culture” more than time, an attitude not an allocation.

_______

Figuring out innovation—how to come up with a killer new idea and then execute it—has long been an obsession of entrepreneurs and the academics and journalists who study them. One of the great myths of the innovation process, often reported in the popular press, involves a creative genius experiencing a “eureka moment,” refining the golden idea, and then pursuing it toward blockbuster status.

Successful side projects and the policies that nurture them somewhat deflate this myth. First, they highlight the random circumstances that can give rise to important inspiration. Second, they promote experimentation—not abstract brainstorming—because the “aha!” moment does not always happen at the outset, as mythologized, but somewhere in the middle of the process. Third, they underscore not the mad, brilliant scientist at the top but the collective brainpower of all employees, especially those close to the customer—Richard Drew at 3M, Paul Buchheit at Google. These people are critical to sustaining innovation over the long term.

Most of all, side project successes serve as a reminder that when you try more stuff than the next guy, up go the odds that you are going to do something right. It is the law of large numbers in entrepreneurship. Thomas Jefferson once wrote, “It is amazing how much may be done if we are always doing.” And as Jefferson later learned, it is amazing what can come of some of the things we least expect, which is good reason to always keep that crackpot project bubbling on the side and to stay open-minded about what it might one day become.

Ben Casnocha is the author of My Start-Up Life: What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley. He is a commentator on public radio’s Marketplace and writes a popular blog on business, books, and ideas. Historian Jesse Berrett contributed to this article.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Apr-18, p.W9, by Susan Sessions Rugh:

A One-Vehicle Presidential Motorcade

"Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure"
By Matthew Algeo
Chicago Review Press, 262 pages, $24.95

On July 5, 1953, a Pennsylvania state trooper pulled over a black Chrysler sedan that was moving slowly in the westbound passing lane of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, blocking traffic. The trooper approached the driver's-side window and started to speak to the man behind the wheel. As the officer later reported, he was "flabbergasted" to discover that the driver was Harry Truman. The trooper cautioned the former president to stay in the right-hand lane if he was going to drive below highway speeds. Bess Truman, the former first lady, leaned across from the passenger seat and said: "Don't worry, Trooper, I'll watch him." Let off with a warning, the Trumans got back on the road and continued their summer vacation.

Journalist and public-radio reporter Matthew Algeo relates the story in "Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure," an engaging account of the Trumans' three-week driving trip from the Midwest to the East Coast. To tell "the story of the monumental changes that have occurred in America since then," Mr. Algeo also juxtaposes the 1953 Truman trip with his own more recent journey retracing the former first family's route.

When Harry and Bess Truman took their vacation, they were part of a growing American pastime: the automobile vacation. Postwar prosperity, brand-new highways and an itch to see the country made road travel popular with the middle class. In the golden age of the American family vacation, Detroit's Big Three auto makers manufactured family-friendly cars that were both roomy and affordable. The price of gas was 27 cents per gallon, and uniformed attendants filled up the tank and cleaned the windshield. Motels -- where you could pull right up to the door of your room -- were a new phenomenon.

The Trumans' trip in 1953 took them from their home in Independence, Mo., to Washington, D.C., where, until January of that year, the couple had been living in the White House. Truman drove the entire length of the 2,500-mile route on the old "blue highways" of the pre-interstate era, except for his stint on the turnpike in Pennsylvania. It was 102 degrees the day that they departed, in a car that wasn't equipped even with the rudimentary air-conditioning then available. Harry "never much saw the need for AC," Mr. Algeo says. With the windows rolled down, Harry at the wheel and Bess watching the speedometer, they traveled all day, with a midday stop for lunch, and usually arrived at their motel in the evening exhausted from the heat, wind and dust. Everywhere the Trumans stopped, they were surrounded by curious well-wishers. Harry shook hands and posed for pictures even though he was worn out from the ride.

The cross-country jaunt was not just a sightseeing trip, and Mr. Algeo ably depicts the political sideshow that accompanied the Truman family vacation. In Washington, the former president held court at the Mayflower Hotel with Democratic Party leaders. In New York, where the couple stayed at the Waldorf-Astoria (on the house), Truman visited the United Nations. He took a side trip by rail to Philadelphia, where he delivered his first major speech since leaving office. In the address, Truman attacked President Dwight Eisenhower for proposing to cut defense spending. "Big talk does not impress the rulers of the Soviet empire," he said. "What impresses them are planes, and divisions, and ships."

In keeping with one of the book's conceits, Mr. Algeo makes a pilgrimage to the Grand Ballroom of Philadelphia's Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, where Truman spoke. "I was standing in the very spot where Harry had stood exactly fifty-five years earlier, front and center in his white dinner jacket, under the blazing klieg lights, measuring an imaginary fish, and giving Ike hell." Through such vignettes Mr. Algeo takes us back to a time, despite Cold War anxieties, "of unbridled optimism," then brings us forward to our supposedly more cynical age.

The author retraced the Trumans' trip in stages from fall 2006 to summer 2008, hunting down the service stations where the couple bought gasoline, the diners where they ate a square meal and the hotels where they stayed the night. He even tracked down eyewitnesses who remembered the Trumans passing through, including one man who had saved the Coke bottle that Truman drained at a Gulf gas station in Maryland. The station owner asked the former president to take his mechanic to task for being a Republican, Mr. Algeo reports, but Truman replied that it was "too hot to give anybody hell." We even see the former president polishing off the soda in one of the many charming snapshots of the traveling Trumans that Mr. Algeo unearthed.

The small-town America that Truman visited -- where he seems to have been enthusiastically greeted by folks eager to thank him for his service -- is of course much changed when Mr. Algeo arrives, following in the president's footsteps. Those same towns are now generally in a decline that began a few years after Truman passed through, when President Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 and created the interstate highway system that sent travelers whizzing past towns where once they might have stopped for gas or a meal or an overnight stay. As Mr. Algeo reports, the Parkview Motel in Decatur, Ill., where the Trumans stayed in 1953, is now owned by the Illinois Department of Corrections, home to prisoners finishing out the last year of a sentence.

For readers who want to get lost in the Trumans' story, Mr. Algeo's repeated returns to the present can present annoying detours. So, too, can the historical background -- well-researched though it might be -- that the author ladles into the story. It's a bit of a stretch to launch into a discussion of a civil-rights bus boycott in Baton Rouge, La., just because it started on the same day that the Trumans were leaving Independence on their trip. But such digressions, by reminding us of a social order that required a drastic overhaul, do have the benefit of tempering nostalgia for the era.

But as the title of "Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure" suggests, the book is not heavy going. It's a light read, more suitable for an airplane ride than a long car trip. Some readers will wish that Mr. Algeo had paused to ponder more deeply the meaning of the changes he chronicles.

One of the most dramatic transformations, of course, has occurred in the presidency itself. Harry Truman was the last ex-president to travel about the country as he pleased. The idea that George W. and Laura Bush would hop in an SUV in Crawford, Texas, and drive to Washington seems absurd to us now. In effect, American standard-bearers for freedom are denied the freedom of the road.

Ms. Rugh is a history professor at Brigham Young University and the author of "Are We There Yet? The Golden Age of the American Family Vacation" (University Press of Kansas, 2008). Her latest book, "Family Vacation," is just out from Gibbs Smith.

[View several period photos at the original source. -AMPP Ed.]

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Apr-6, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge:

God Still Isn't Dead
The decline of religion in America has been predicted again and again.

America was famously founded by companies and churches. The woes of American capitalism are well known: Wall Street is a synonym for excess and greed around the world, and Detroit is tottering on the edge of bankruptcy. But just as its temples to Mammon are under fire, so suddenly are its churches to God.

With Easter week upon us, Newsweek's April 13 cover proclaims "The Decline and Fall of Christian America." The new American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) shows that the proportion of Americans who claim to have no religion has increased to 15% today from 8.2% in 1990. The Christian right has lost yet another battle, this time in the heartland state of Iowa, with its Supreme Court voting unanimously to legalize gay marriage. The proportion of Americans who think that religion "can answer all or most of today's problems" is now at a historic low of 48%.

America has long stood out among developed countries for its religiosity. This has less to do with innate godliness than with the free market created by the First Amendment. Pre-Revolutionary America was not that religious, because the original Puritans were swamped by less wholesome adventurers -- in Salem, Mass., the setting for "The Crucible," 83% of taxpayers by 1683 confessed to no religious identification.

America became religious after the Constitution separated church from state, thus ensuring that religious denominations could only survive if they got souls into pews. While state-sponsored religion withered in Europe, American faith has been a hive of activity: from the Methodists, who converted close to an eighth of the country in the half century after the Revolution, to the modern megachurches.

Has this model really run out of steam? Betting against American religion has always proved to be a fool's game. In 1880, Robert Ingersoll, the leading atheist of his day, claimed that "the churches are dying out all over the land." In its Easter issue in 1966, Time asked "Is God Dead?" on its cover. East Coast intellectuals have repeatedly assumed that the European model of progress, where modernity equals secularization, would come to the U.S. They have always been wrong.

Look closer and the new poll numbers are not quite as simple as headlines suggest. For one thing, they show that America remains remarkably religious by the standards of other advanced countries -- with three-quarters of the country still firmly Christian. And a significant number of Americans are becoming more godly, not less so: The increase in the number of atheists is going hand in hand with ever more conservative Christians and Pentecostals.

Religion, like everything else, is polarizing, with the faithful more willing to call themselves "born again" and doubters more willing to call themselves unbelievers or atheists. George W. Bush may have been a factor: Many of the unbelievers are less worried about religion per se as about the fusion of religion and political power in the form of the new right. A fifth of the "atheists" in a recent Pew Survey said that they believed in God, a semantic confusion rich in meaning.

The polling numbers actually underline the strength of the nation's pluralism. More than one in four Americans have swapped religions. Americans harbor a powerful distaste for religious establishments, seeing faith as something that they should choose rather than inherit. More than ever, they mix and match spiritual traditions. In other words, the forces that made America such a uniquely religious country, competition and choice, are working as powerfully as ever. In the American model, modernity goes with pluralism.

Most of the evidence from the ground indicates that the American religious marketplace remains vibrant. The biggest megachurches attract tens of thousands of people. There is plenty of data to show that the turmoil of modernity stimulates demand for religion. The churches act both as a storm shelter for people who feel overwhelmed by social change and a community for people who feel atomized. Above all, there is the search for spiritual meaning that has haunted man through the ages. The forces that drove the young Barack Obama to find purpose in a Chicago church will keep on occurring.

Meanwhile, the supply seems as plentiful as ever. Religion, no less than software or politics, is a competitive business, where organization and entrepreneurship count. Religious America is led by a series of highly inventive "pastorpreneurs" -- men like Bill Hybels of Willow Creek or Rick Warren of Saddleback. These are far more sober, thoughtful characters than the schlock-and-scandal televangelists of the 1970s, but they are not afraid to use modern business methods to get God's message across.

Mr. Hybels's immaculately organized church employs several hundred staff, and the church has both its own mission statement and its own consulting arm. Mr. Warren's book "The Purpose Driven Life" has sold almost 30 million copies, with the author comparing his purpose driven formula to an Intel operating chip that other churches can use.

The real strength of religious America lies in its diversity. There are more than 200 religious traditions in America, with 20 different sorts of Baptists alone. Religious America is remarkably good at segmenting its customer base: There are services for bikers, gays and dropouts (the Scum of the Earth Church in Denver); Bibles for cowboys, brides, soldiers and rap artists ("Even though I walk through/The hood of death/I don't back down/for You have my back"); and even theme parks for every faith. This Holy Week you can visit the Golgotha Fun Park in Cave City, Ky., or the Ave Maria Grotto in Cullman, Ala., which includes a mini-version of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.

Looked at from a celestial perspective, the American model of religion, far from retreating, is going global. Pastorpreneurs are taking their message around the world. In Latin America, Pentecostalism has disrupted the Catholic Church's monopoly. Already five of the world's 10 biggest churches are in South Korea: Yoido Full Gospel Church, which has 800,000 members, is a rival in terms of organization for anything Messrs. Warren and Hybels can offer. China is the latest great convert. There are probably close to 100 million Christians in China, most of them following a very individualistic American-style faith. Already more people attend church each Sunday than are members of the Communist Party. China will soon be the world's biggest Christian country and also possibly its biggest Muslim one.

The Christian right has certainly stirred up an angry reaction to its attempt to marry religion to political power. But it would be a mistake to regard this reaction as evidence that America is losing its religion.

Mr. Micklethwait is the editor in chief of the Economist. Mr. Wooldridge is its Washington bureau chief. They are the authors of "God is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith is Changing the World," published this week by Penguin Press.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Mar-19, by Zachary Karabell:

Washington Has Always Demonized Wall Street

'Wall Street, as we knew it, is dead. The system that allowed the U.S. economy to be a dynamic innovator has been fundamentally broken and the implications of these structural changes have yet to be fully felt."

It's now commonly accepted that the economic meltdown has forever changed the nature of the financial industry. But the words above weren't written in the past weeks. They were penned by financial analyst Richard Wayman in 2003, after investigations by then New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer led to a structural shift in the relationship between research and investment banking following the stock-market collapse of 2001-02. [Washington Has Always Demonized Wall Street] Martin Kozlowski

Among the many remarkable aspects of our present crisis is the speed with which we have collectively forgotten past crises, even ones that happened recently. The current meltdown is substantial, dramatic, and systemically dangerous -- but it is hardly the first to merit that description. And each crisis, without fail, results in unequivocal pronouncements that such excesses will never again be allowed.

When President Barack Obama lambastes Wall Street bonuses as "shameful," he is keeping up with the American tradition of vilifying Wall Street. Almost since the founding of the country, the U.S. has oscillated between admiration and condemnation of money men. When the first Bank of the United States was established in Philadelphia in 1791, it was amid fears that it would allow merchants and speculators to subvert the new republic for their own gain. Decades later, Andrew Jackson's presidency was bolstered by his staunch opposition to the Second Bank of the United States. He positioned himself as the defender of the common man against supporters of the bank who used their money to obtain influence.

From the 19th century to the present day, denunciation of financiers has gone hand in hand with each recession, speculative bust and depression. Each time the economy falls, the chattering classes announce that the old ways have brought the country to the brink of ruin and that the riches of society will no longer remain in the hands of the greedy few.

Little recalled now is "The Long Depression" of the 1870s that began with the Panic of 1873. The Panic was triggered by the collapse of the Jay Cooke and Company Bank, which came on the heels of Jay Gould's infamous attempt to corner the national gold market in 1869 and the speculative boom in railroad building. During the 1870s, as much as 50% of the U.S. labor force was out of work at one time or another, making it by far the worst economic collapse in the country's history. In the agrarian heartland of the country, early stirrings of populism led to attacks on eastern barons for robbing Americans of their birthright.

From then on, busts followed almost like clockwork every 20 years, with the panics of 1873 and 1877 followed by the panic of 1893 and then the "Bankers' Panic" of 1907, when J.P. Morgan orchestrated the recapitalization of the financial system from his mansion in Manhattan. It was the TARP, the "bad bank," and the stimulus of its day, and it earned Morgan the gratitude of a nation and the applause of President Theodore Roosevelt.

Having lionized Morgan, a few years later the country turned on him and his ilk with a vengeance. In 1913, a populist congressman from Louisiana, Arsène Pujo, launched an investigation of the so-called "Money Trust" that he claimed was exerting undue and deleterious influence on the body politic. Exhibit No. 1 was none other than one-time savior Morgan, who was interrogated by the committee as if he had committed a heinous crime. One member of the committee said Morgan represented "a moneyed oligarchy more despotic and dangerous to industrial freedom than anything civilization has ever known." Strict regulations followed -- as they always have on the heels of such crises.

Yet 20 years later, the market imploded with the crash of 1929. The ranks of the unemployed swelled to at least 25%, and the country was plunged into the Great Depression. Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously indicted the "money changers" in his 1933 inaugural address, but he was even more caustic in private, vowing to end forever "speculation with other people's money." The raft of modern regulatory institutions, from the Securities and Exchange Commission to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, was one result. Wall Street was tamed and quiet for a while.

Later on, the "Go-Go" years of Wall Street in the late 1960s quickly gave way to the bust of the so-called "Nifty-Fifty," the 50 largest blue-chip companies. Then came inflation, severe unemployment, and the stock market collapse of 1973-74. Between 1964 and 1982, the major stock indices went nowhere fast -- the Dow began that period at about 800 and ended at the same. Wall Street in those years was more of a cottage industry, one that few suspected would again return to its prominent and controversial position at the apex of American society.

The booming 1980s -- mergers and acquisitions and arbitrage -- were capped by the highly publicized trials of Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken, who were pursued by the Eliot Spitzer of his day, Rudy Giuliani. Combined with the market crash of 1987, the subsequent Savings and Loan debacle (which had little to do with Wall Street per se, but was wrapped up with the same crowd in public imagining), and the recession of 1991-92, Wall Street was once again pronounced immoral and in need of tight reins. Yet within a few years, the Nasdaq was soaring, animal spirits were in control, and the Internet bubble was in full bloom.

Wall Street's obituary has been written many times. Yet what is striking today is that cycles that used to take a few decades now take a few years. And our cultural amnesia has gotten worse. The rapid sequence of the dot-com bubble of the 1990s, the recession of 2001, and the 2002 collapse of Enron combined with major fines levied against investment banks, all became a distant echo in a surprisingly short amount of time. At the rate we've been going, we're due for a new boom with obscene profits for the financial industry -- albeit with different names and different companies -- before Mr. Obama runs for re-election.

The fact that we have been in similar places in the past doesn't make the specific problems we face any less pressing. New regulations may prevent an exact recurrence of yesterday's crises, but our relentless capacity for reinvention means that we will produce innovations that will in turn create new problems.

Recognizing that our present is not quite so breathlessly unprecedented doesn't make the challenges less critical, but it could lead to a more level approach. That can begin with steady leadership from President Obama. Wall Street has been humbled and will change, but capital will continue to flow. That much, at least, is certain.

Mr. Karabell is president of River Twice Research. His new book, "In the Red: How China and America Became One Superpower Economy," will be published by Simon & Schuster in October.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Apr-10, by Peggy Noonan:

Lessons From the Recovery of 2001
Not so long ago, there were heroes on Wall Street.

Wall Street, or what remains of it, has dealt a catastrophic blow to its reputation in the past eight months of bonuses, bailouts and bankruptcies. What its current leaders, and the young who are lucky enough to be entering business, have to do now is begin rescuing and restoring that reputation.

This will, in fact, be the great work of a generation of American business leaders.

More is at stake than their standing. At stake is the standing of a free-market system that has flourished since America's founding and made it the wealthiest nation in the history of man.

In his classic "The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism," the philosopher Michael Novak noted that capitalism is good because, of all the economic systems devised by man, it is the one that lifts the greatest numbers out of poverty. Capitalism is itself not selfish, exploitative, unequal; it wants to grow and produce, bringing more services, more creativity, more opportunity, more ferment and movement—more life. It is not just an economic system, it is a public good.

To Mr. Novak, business is a vocation, a deeply serious one. But it cannot exist in a void. It requires an underlying moral edifice, a knowledge of right and wrong, "a sense of sin." Greed is not good. Wall Street is a stage, a platform on which men and women can each day take actions that are ethical or not, constructive or not. When their actions are marked by high moral principle, they heighten their calling—they are not just "in business" but part of a noble endeavor that adds to the sum total of human happiness. The work they do strengthens the ground on which democracy and economic freedom stand. "The calling of business is to support the reality and reputation of capitalism."

Noble. Constructive. Admirable.

When was the last time anyone thought of Wall Street like that?

There was a moment, a very public one well within memory, that was all of those things. And it might help the coming generation of business leaders to keep its lessons in mind.

It had to do with the last time Wall Street was in ashes—literally. It had to do with how they brought it back.

"There was this huge, thunderous bang, and the entire building shook. The skies darkened, there was nothing but ash and smoke." That's how Arthur Cashin remembers it. He was on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange as a broker for UBS PaineWebber.

"The floor turned dark," said Rich Adamonis, a vice president at the exchange. "It was worse than night."

They were remembering the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, when the towers came down. You know what it looked like—the smoke and debris, the demonic cloud that chased people down the streets.

The exchange never opened that morning, and by the end of the day no one knew when it would. Downtown New York looked like a battlefield, the World Trade Center still burning. There was heavy debris on the roof of the exchange. The entire building was coated in ash. Catherine Kinney, a vice president at the NYSE, thought the facade looked "like nuclear winter."

On Sept. 12, the heads of the NYSE member firms met uptown at Bear Stearns. All the giants were there—Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, UBS PaineWebber, Salomon Smith Barney, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase—and representatives from all levels of government, including the Treasury and the mayor's office. Dick Grasso, chairman of the NYSE, convened and addressed the damage. How many dead in the firms? Who lost their offices? Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and Lehman had offices at the Trade Center—all gone. Firms offered to house other firms. Ms. Kinney: "There was an incredible esprit de corps among all the CEOs. They all sat side by side. They gave each other space on their trading desks and phones."

To stock exchange staff, it didn't look as if they could get back up and operating quickly. But they had to. Wall Street was a symbol of America, the exchange an icon of freedom. For Mr. Grasso it was about the bell: when that thing rang, freedom rang. Reopening "was a way for the entire financial community to clasp hands and say, 'We're gonna bring a message to the terrorists.'" That message? "You lose."

They would do the impossible and open the following Monday, five days away. Herculean labors lay ahead. They had to clean up a huge debris field, get generators, reroute and throw in new phone and data lines. Verizon had lost its central switching station, and part of its central office. Public transportation was down, so they'd have to create a shuttle-bus system and get up to 5,000 people downtown, past police cordons and military checkpoints. Tunnels into the city and subway stations had to be tested, support services and food brought into lower Manhattan.

Verizon rerouted circuits, and when they had to, they laid lines in the streets and covered them with rubber. They put huge electrical and phone cables on Broad Street, Exchange Place, New Street.

The exchange knew there would be a huge wave of selling when trading resumed, so they had to be ready for massive volume. If there were any glitches, it would be demoralizing. It all had to work. The world was watching. And this was America.

People slept in their offices, on cots in the medical area, on the floor of the chairman's office, on the couches of a restaurant called the Luncheon Club. They worked overnight and all day.

And all the time they were doing this, they were hearing about friends and relatives who'd died. "The only smiles on Wall Street were in the posters of the missing that the families put up," said Mr. Cashin.

They tested all the new systems on Sunday the 16th. One after another the big firms reported in from wherever they'd set up shop: Their lines were working.

And so the next morning, Monday, Sept. 17, 2001, the New York Stock Exchange opened with a podium full of firemen, cops, emergency medical workers and elected officials. A Marine Corps major sang "God Bless America." There was silence. Then a Port Authority police officer, one of the last guys to come out of the pile, began to ring the bell. The others on the podium joined in. And as the bell rang out in triumph, the traders on the floor began to cry and cheer and shout themselves hoarse. Catherine Kinney was below the podium. "Was there a cheer—oh my God, you wouldn't believe. I cried, I did. And prices start to go across the tape . . ."

America was open for business again.

It was a great moment in Wall Street history.

We all know what followed. A bubble grew, and then burst, and Wall Street was forever altered. In fact it's not there anymore; it exists merely as a metaphor for "business" and "investing." Many of the firms that helped Dick Grasso are gone, their CEOs humiliated, as was Mr. Grasso himself, in a salary scandal.

In the years after 2001, they took care of themselves. But that bright shining week, Sept. 11 through 17, they took care of tradition, the exchange and their country.

So maybe wisdom begins there for them, and for those entering and living out lives in business in America: Look only to yourself and wind up with ashes. Know it's bigger than you and wind up a hero.

But then it begins there for everyone.

[An additional dimension Peggy doesn't explore is that what bin Laden's attacks couldn't accomplish, recklessness and malfeasance by market stakeholders, and particularly by government officials, can. -AMPP Ed.]

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Feb-28, by Thomas Fleming:

Was George W. Bush the Worst President?
A historian urges us to take a deep breath before we answer.

Several polls of historians have named George W. Bush the worst president in American history. This baffles me. I've been writing about presidents for a long time. What I know, and what I presume these gentleman know, doesn't connect.

Is Mr. Bush worse than John Adams? When a shooting war at sea started between the United States and revolutionary France in 1798, Honest John wrote a letter to George Washington, offering to resign so that George could resume the job. How's that for presidential leadership? Meanwhile, Adams had kept Washington's cabinet officers on the job, although he loathed them. He finally fired them in a fit of hysteria, which made them wonder if he had lost his mind.

Is Mr. Bush worse than Thomas Jefferson in his second term? Rather than build a decent navy to deal with the British -- who had a habit of boarding American ships on the high seas and forcing kidnapped sailors into semislavery -- Jefferson declared an embargo on all trade with England and the rest of Europe. The American economy came to a horrific standstill; smuggling became New England's chief industry. Someone described the embargo as "cutting a man's throat to cure a nosebleed." Nonplussed, Jefferson quit, telling only James Madison, his secretary of state, who was de facto acting president for the last year of Tom's term.

James Madison, who officially succeeded Jefferson in 1808, made presidential passivity into an art form. "Little Jemmy," as they called him in New England, watched while 4,500 British troops disembarked from their ships, marched to Washington, D.C., and burned the White House, the Capitol and almost everything else worth torching. You can't do much worse as a war leader than that performance.

Woodrow Wilson? When World War I exploded, Irish-Americans objected to his pro-British tilt. Wilson responded that ethnics like these loudmouthed micks were "pouring poison into the veins of our national life," alienating the largest voting bloc in the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, as a Southern-born pol to his wingtips, he segregated almost all employees of the federal government.

Next, Wilson talked Congress into declaring war on Germany on the assumption that we would not have to send a single soldier to France. Before the war ended, we had 2,000,000 troops overseas, and in three months of fighting lost 144,000 men.

Elected by seven million votes thanks to the electorate's loathing for Wilson, Warren G. Harding confessed to reporters that he was not up to the job. He told one newsman that he wanted to make the U.S. tariff higher than the Rocky Mountains to help Europe's industries recover from World War I. The appalled reporter realized the president had one of the biggest issues of the era exactly backward.

Harding had a concealed box at the Gayety Burlesque Theater where he spent many afternoons and nights. In the leftover hours he concentrated on poker and trysts with a blonde named Nan Britton -- reputedly in a closet off the Oval Office -- while his appointees looted the federal government.

Is Mr. Bush worse than Roosevelt in his second term? Re-elected by a massive majority, FDR wanted to pack the Supreme Court with Democrats. Congress, dominated by members of his own party, wasted a year wrangling over the bill and ultimately rejected it. Meanwhile, FDR's intemperate remarks about greedy businessmen wrecked confidence and triggered a semireplay of the Great Depression in 1937. The Republicans made massive gains in the 1938 midterm elections. FDR was rescued from an exit even more humiliating than Jefferson's by World War II, which he used as an excuse to run for a third term.

Worse than Jimmy Carter, the self- proclaimed Washington "outsider" who presided over the most horrendous stagflation in our history? As his poll numbers sank, Mr. Carter had the temerity to lecture citizens on their "crisis of spirit." His approval rating had plummeted to 22% when Ronald Reagan defeated him. Let us skip Bill Clinton. He and Bush are too contiguous; proximity makes comparisons inevitably rancorous.

My purpose is not to denigrate these men. John Adams had great political courage. He often espoused unpopular views, warning us, among other things, that a majority can be as tyrannical as a king or dictator -- something that we may need to remember in the next few years.

Thomas Jefferson displayed good judgment in his first term when he put aside his ideological scruples and purchased the Louisiana Territory. James Madison deserves admiration for the way he gave his remarkable wife, Dolley, a chance to create the role of First Lady and establish women as important political players. Woodrow Wilson's idealism was flawed, but his vision of America's role as a world power was profound. FDR's masterful confrontation with the fear created by the Great Depression made his first term an unforgettable achievement.

In this light, however wavering, maybe it's time to suspend the rush to judgment on George W. Bush for 10 or 20 years. I suspect we will decide Mr. Bush's first term, with his decisive response to 9/11, deserves some praise, and that his second term succumbed to an awesome amount of bad luck, from his generals' disagreements on how to fight the war in Iraq to the Wall Street collapse of 2008.

Many presidents have run out of luck in their second terms, but Mr. Bush's record in this department will be hard to match. Beyond the popularity polls there may be a dimension we should remember in judging every president: sympathy.

Mr. Fleming is a former president of the Society of American Historians. His most recent book, "The Perils of Peace, America's Struggle to Survive After Yorktown," (Smithsonian) has just been issued in paperback.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Feb-13, by Peggy Noonan:

Is 'Octomom' America's Future?
What's more depressing than the economic slowdown.

A moment last Monday, just after noon, in Manhattan. It's slightly overcast, not cold, a good day for walking. I'm in the 90s on Fifth heading south, enjoying the broad avenue, the trees, the wide cobblestone walkway that rings Central Park. Suddenly I realize: Something's odd here. Something's strange. It's quiet. I can hear each car go by. The traffic's not an indistinct roar. The sidewalks aren't full, as they normally are. It's like a holiday, but it's not, it's the middle of a business day in February. I thought back to two weeks before when a friend and I zoomed down Park Avenue at evening rush hour in what should have been bumper-to-bumper traffic.

This is New York five months into hard times.

One senses it, for the first time: a shift in energy. Something new has taken hold, a new air of peace, perhaps, or tentativeness. The old hustle and bustle, the wild and daily assertion of dynamism, is calmed.

And now Washington becomes the financial capital of the country, of the world. Oh, what a status shift. Oh, what a fact.

If you want to feel the bruise of what's happened, pick a neighborhood full of shops and go up and down the street. Here's Second Avenue in the 80s. A jewelry and consignment store on 84th has a new sign on the window: "We Buy Gold." Paul is at the counter, spraying the tarnish off a silver chain. How's business? "No buyin', no sellin', no nothin'. It's a joke. People scared. They're in shock." Nearby, an empty storefront, a bar that had been in business only 10 months. The sign on the window—you see it all over Manhattan now—says, "Retail Space Available." Next door, in a small beauty salon, the owner says "We're trying to survive." In September business plummeted. It's down "at least 30%," she says. July and August had been surprisingly good; her clients didn't go away on vacation. In the fall they were fired. "They lost the job, so they don't need to cut and color so much."

In a liquor store just off 82nd, the owner, from India, says volume is still high but profits are down. "In business, if you have a product under $15, is good. People used to spend $70, $80 on a bottle of wine, all the bankers, the young kids. Nothing moving more than $15."

On 81st, the kosher restaurant has closed. On 79th, the Talbots is gone. "Left a few months ago," says the doorman next door.

Turn down to Madison Avenue in the 80s. A high-end butcher who's been in the neighborhood more than 30 years is moving to the West Side because his rent has been raised more than he can afford. Why are landlords raising rents in a recession? It's not landlords, he says, you can reason with them, it's co-op boards that own a building. The people in the apartments upstairs are paying high maintenance, and they're worried about their jobs, their businesses, their bonuses. So they raise the rent on the shop downstairs to cut their maintenance. When the shopkeeper says he'll move and who'll take his place in this economy, the boards say, "It's Madison Avenue, we'll be able to rent it." He says, "They will for a while. But not if it gets worse."

The windows of the Jil Sander shop on Madison off 79th are newly covered in paper. A sign says they plan to relocate. How's business in the small art gallery down the street? "It's soft," the owner says, discreetly. At 84th and Madison, a ladies boutique has a new sale: "Buy 2 sale items (already marked down 50% off) 3rd item Free!" The Boltons on 86th and Madison, gone. The shoe store three doors down, gone. The children's boutique off 87th, gone. Not all the news is bad—there's a new department store coming in—but people don't close up shop when the immediate future is promising. And every day there's a new surprise. Wednesday it was the little French dress shop on 91st and Madison. The sale sign in the front window said 80% off. "Is she moving?" I asked a woman in line for the dressing room. "She's closing," she said.

Politicians keep saying, "People have to begin to understand we're in bad shape," and "People should realize it's a crisis." I think they know, Sherlock. Do you? Our political leaders are like a doctor who rushes to the scene of a terrible crash, bends over a hemorrhaging woman and says, "This is serious, lady, you can't take it lightly." She looks up at him: "Help me, do something, I'm bleeding out!" The doctor, to the local TV cameras: "I hope she knows she's in trouble."

There's a sense that everyone's digging in. President Obama has dug in on this stimulus bill: Pass it or see catastrophe. Republicans are dug in: Pass it and see catastrophe. The digging in is a way of showing certitude, and they're showing certitude because they're lost.

We hire politicians to know what to do about empty stores, job loss, and "Retail Space Available." But they don't, and more than ever we know they don't.

And there's something else, not only in Manhattan but throughout the country. A major reason people are blue about the future is not the stores, not the Treasury secretary, not everyone digging in. It is those things, but it's more than that, and deeper.

It's Sully and Suleman, the pilot and "Octomom," the two great stories that are twinned with the era. Sully, the airline captain who saved 155 lives by landing that plane just right—level wings, nose up, tail down, plant that baby, get everyone out, get them counted, and then, at night, wonder what you could have done better. You know the reaction of the people of our country to Chesley B. Sullenberger III: They shake their heads, and tears come to their eyes. He is cool, modest, competent, tough in the good way. He's the only one who doesn't applaud Sully. He was just doing his job.

This is why people are so moved: We're still making Sullys. We're still making those mythic Americans, those steely-eyed rocket men. Like Alan Shepard in the Mercury rocket: "Come on and light this candle."

But Sully, 58, Air Force Academy '73, was shaped and formed by the old America, and educated in an ethos in which a certain style of manhood—of personhood—was held high.

What we fear we're making more of these days is Nadya Suleman. The dizzy, selfish, self-dramatizing 33-year-old mother who had six small children and then a week ago eight more because, well, she always wanted a big family. "Suley" doubletalks with the best of them, she doubletalks with profound ease. She is like Blago without the charm. She had needs and took proactive steps to meet them, and those who don't approve are limited, which must be sad for them. She leaves anchorwomen slack-jawed: How do you rough up a woman who's still lactating? She seems aware of their predicament.

Any great nation would worry at closed-up shops and a professional governing class that doesn't have a clue what to do. But a great nation that fears, deep down, that it may be becoming more Suley than Sully—that nation will enter a true depression.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-Dec-30, by Fouad Ajami:

Samuel Huntington's Warning
He predicted a 'clash of civilizations,' not the illusion of Davos Man.

The last of Samuel Huntington's books -- "Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity," published four years ago -- may have been his most passionate work. It was like that with the celebrated Harvard political scientist, who died last week at 81. He was a man of diffidence and reserve, yet he was always caught up in the political storms of recent decades.

"This book is shaped by my own identities as a patriot and a scholar," he wrote. "As a patriot I am deeply concerned about the unity and strength of my country as a society based on liberty, equality, law and individual rights." Huntington lived the life of his choice, neither seeking controversies, nor ducking them. "Who Are We?" had the signature of this great scholar -- the bold, sweeping assertions sustained by exacting details, and the engagement with the issues of the time.

He wrote in that book of the "American Creed," and of its erosion among the elites. Its key elements -- the English language, Christianity, religious commitment, English concepts of the rule of law, the responsibility of rulers, and the rights of individuals -- he said are derived from the "distinct Anglo-Protestant culture of the founding settlers of America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries."

Critics who branded the book as a work of undisguised nativism missed an essential point. Huntington observed that his was an "argument for the importance of Anglo-Protestant culture, not for the importance of Anglo-Protestant people." The success of this great republic, he said, had hitherto depended on the willingness of generations of Americans to honor the creed of the founding settlers and to shed their old affinities. But that willingness was being battered by globalization and multiculturalism, and by new waves of immigrants with no deep attachments to America's national identity. "The Stars and Stripes were at half-mast," he wrote in "Who Are We?", "and other flags flew higher on the flagpole of American identities."

Three possible American futures beckoned, Huntington said: cosmopolitan, imperial and national. In the first, the world remakes America, and globalization and multiculturalism trump national identity. In the second, America remakes the world: Unchallenged by a rival superpower, America would attempt to reshape the world according to its values, taking to other shores its democratic norms and aspirations. In the third, America remains America: It resists the blandishments -- and falseness -- of cosmopolitanism, and reins in the imperial impulse.

Huntington made no secret of his own preference: an American nationalism "devoted to the preservation and enhancement of those qualities that have defined America since its founding." His stark sense of realism had no patience for the globalism of the Clinton era. The culture of "Davos Man" -- named for the watering hole of the global elite -- was disconnected from the call of home and hearth and national soil.

But he looked with a skeptical eye on the American expedition to Iraq, uneasy with those American conservatives who had come to believe in an "imperial" American mission. He foresaw frustration for this drive to democratize other lands. The American people would not sustain this project, he observed, and there was the "paradox of democracy": Democratic experiments often bring in their wake nationalistic populist movements (Latin America) or fundamentalist movements (Muslim countries). The world tempts power, and denies it. It is the Huntingtonian world; no false hopes and no redemption.

In the 1990s, when the Davos crowd and other believers in a borderless world reigned supreme, Huntington crossed over from the academy into global renown, with his "clash of civilizations" thesis. In an article first published in Foreign Affairs in 1993 (then expanded into a book), Huntington foresaw the shape of the post-Cold War world. The war of ideologies would yield to a civilizational struggle of soil and blood. It would be the West versus the eight civilizations dividing the rest -- Latin American, African, Islamic, Sinic, Hindu, Orthodox, Buddhist and Japanese.

In this civilizational struggle, Islam would emerge as the principal challenge to the West. "The relations between Islam and Christianity, both orthodox and Western, have often been stormy. Each has been the other's Other. The 20th-century conflict between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism is only a fleeting and superficial historical phenomenon compared to the continuing and deeply conflictual relation between Islam and Christianity."

He had assaulted the zeitgeist of the era. The world took notice, and his book was translated into 39 languages. Critics insisted that men want Sony, not soil. But on 9/11, young Arabs -- 19 of them -- would weigh in. They punctured the illusions of an era, and gave evidence of the truth of Huntington's vision. With his typical precision, he had written of a "youth bulge" unsettling Muslim societies, and young, radicalized Arabs, unhinged by modernity and unable to master it, emerging as the children of this radical age.

If I may be permitted a personal narrative: In 1993, I had written the lead critique in Foreign Affairs of his thesis. I admired his work but was unconvinced. My faith was invested in the order of states that the West itself built. The ways of the West had become the ways of the world, I argued, and the modernist consensus would hold in key Third-World countries like Egypt, India and Turkey. Fifteen years later, I was given a chance in the pages of The New York Times Book Review to acknowledge that I had erred and that Huntington had been correct all along.

A gracious letter came to me from Nancy Arkelyan Huntington, his wife of 51 years (her Armenian descent an irony lost on those who dubbed him a defender of nativism). He was in ill-health, suffering the aftermath of a small stroke. They were spending the winter at their summer house on Martha's Vineyard. She had read him my essay as he lay in bed. He was pleased with it: "He will be writing you himself shortly." Of course, he did not write, and knowing of his frail state I did not expect him to do so. He had been a source of great wisdom, an exemplar, and it had been an honor to write of him, and to know him in the regrettably small way I did.

We don't have his likes in the academy today. Political science, the field he devoted his working life to, has been in the main commandeered by a new generation. They are "rational choice" people who work with models and numbers and write arid, impenetrable jargon.

More importantly, nowadays in the academy and beyond, the patriotism that marked Samuel Huntington's life and work is derided, and the American Creed he upheld is thought to be the ideology of rubes and simpletons, the affliction of people clinging to old ways. The Davos men have perhaps won. No wonder the sorrow and the concern that ran through the work of Huntington's final years.

Mr. Ajami is professor of Middle East Studies at The Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies. He is also an adjunct research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Mar-2, by Jay Winik:

Newspaper Wars
How the press – brash, irreverent, partisan – served early America.

As the economy reels and the Obama administration makes its first calls to action, not a day goes by that we don't hear urgent pleas for thoughtful bipartisan debate as a way of finding our way out of the morass we're in. In the same vein, we are told that the fulminations on 24-hour cable networks and talk radio -- or even on the editorial pages of newspapers -- stifle rather than enhance a proper consideration of "the issues." A subtext of these claims is that there once existed a golden age -- notably the Founding Era -- when Olympian political figures and impartial, public-spirited newspapers guided the nation in its times of crisis.

To get some perspective on such views, one need go no further than "Scandal & Civility," Marcus Daniel's detailed study of the American press in the 1790s. The idea that this critical period was marked by a calm spirit of reasoned debate is a myth, as Mr. Daniel shows, and a deeply misleading one at that. The postrevolutionary age witnessed the unexpected rise of fiercely contending political parties; an increasingly bloody French Revolution that divided Americans into warring camps; a string of crises, such as the Genet affair, the Whiskey Rebellion, the XYZ affair; and the passage of the Alien and Sedition acts punishing dissent. It would not be too strong to assert that every step along the way the very survival of the nation was at risk.

And what role did newspapers play? A profound one. As Mr. Daniel amply shows, they stoked debate with abandon as well as with a mean- spiritedness and partisan passion that make today's scuffles seem tame by comparison.

One of the most famous editors of the age was Philip Freneau, an ardent Republican and once "penniless young poet," and the publisher of the National Gazette, a semiweekly newspaper. What makes Freneau so interesting is that George Washington's secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, hired Freneau to work as a minor clerk at the State Department; however, his real responsibility was to galvanize, through his newspaper, Republican opposition to the administration he served. Rival journalist Richard Fenno, who was himself aligned with Washington rather than Jefferson, accused Freneau of being a "demon of slander," and Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, who often felt the sting of Freneau's articles, condemned Jefferson for paying Freneau with public funds, though to no avail.

Scandal & Civility By Marcus Daniel (Oxford, 386 pages, $28)

Sick of the constant tirades against the government, an outraged President Washington called on Jefferson to put a stop to Freneau. Remarkably, Jefferson refused, insisting the National Gazette had "saved our Constitution." But if Washington felt the pain of Freneau's attacks, it was nothing compared with what he suffered at the hands of another Republican, Benjamin Franklin Bache, who published the Aurora, a newspaper whose inimitable motto was Surgo ut Prosim ("I rise that I might serve"). A grandson of Benjamin Franklin, the worldly Bache was no run-of-the-mill journalist, which only gave more force to his criticisms. He labeled "unconstitutional" Washington's actions on behalf of the Jay Treaty -- a 1794 agreement with Britain, reviled by pro-French Republicans, concerning trade, sovereignty and the looming specter of war -- and called for the president's impeachment. Remember, until then Washington was seen as virtually untouchable.

Nor did Bache stop there. At the same time that his paper praised revolutionary France's bloodthirsty dictator, Maximilian Robespierre, as the "embodiment of virtue," he derided Washington as a "Demi-God of a Turkish seraglio." Others joined the fray: One writer spoke of Washington's "childish ambition"; another said that Washington was "cowardly"; a third that he was "insipid." Bache himself blasted Washington as "guilty of the foulest designs against the liberty of the people." (Victims of Keith Olbermann or Sean Hannity take note: This was some of the tamer stuff.)

Yet if it got personal between editors and politicians, it was equally personal between journalists and journalists. Where Freneau ridiculed Fenno's "court sycophantism," Bache published a scathing account of William Cobbett's personal life -- the eccentric Englishman, who had come to the U.S. in the early 1790s, published the pro-British Porcupine's Gazette -- and one cartoon even pictured Cobbett as acting upon the urgings of the "devil." Dripping with contempt for his adversaries, Cobbett fired back at pro-Jacobins like Bache, labeling them "deluded," among other things.

With almost eerie echoes for today, Mr. Daniel shows how a number of the most prominent newspapers in the 1790s rose and fell, going out of business almost as quickly as they were launched. Richard Fenno watched in horror as the financial affairs of his influential Gazette of the United States deteriorated, and he was even forced to receive a small publishing commission from George Washington. Meanwhile, the publisher of the daily paper Minerva, Noah Webster -- of Webster's "speller" fame -- tired of the rough-and-tumble of journalism and withdrew from public life altogether.

The press had other problems, too. Cobbett became the first editor to be prosecuted for libel by the federal government, losing his case in a "ruinous verdict," and in 1800 returned to England, convinced that America's free press was in jeopardy. And radical journalist William Duane saw his paper slowly strangled by the Sedition Act of 1798. In words that would ring as true today, he moaned that "newspaper debts are the worst of all others."

In an age when our newspaper industry is increasingly embattled, "Scandal & Civility" serves as a timely reminder of just how vital a thriving news culture is to the well-being of our democracy. The book, it should be said, is the outgrowth of a doctoral dissertation and is at times marred by the jargon one finds in graduate seminars. But it neatly presents an animated portrait of the postrevolutionary era, when opinionated, brash, irreverent newspapers were indispensable. They are no less indispensable to us today.

Mr. Winik is the author of "The Great Upheaval" and "April 1865."

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Feb-26, by Bill Kauffman:

That Sinking Feeling
The last of the independent fishermen – and their troubles.

Wandering the "dreary streets" of the New Bedford, Mass., waterfront in search of lodging, Ishmael, in "Moby-Dick," wonders if he hasn't stumbled upon the remains of Gomorrah. According to Rory Nugent's "Down at the Docks," there is still plenty of sin and smuggling in the old whaling town, but a modern Pequod might never set sail unless Capt. Ahab donned a corporate straitjacket and filled out paperwork thicker than Herman Melville's novel. In six discrete profiles, Mr. Nugent, a mariner who spent 17 years bunking in New Bedford between voyages, offers a movingly profane lament for a "threatened species": the independent fishermen of New Bedford.

This port city of 100,000 is home to "America's largest fishing fleet," comprising almost 300 boats and 3,000 fishermen, though the quarry these days runs to scallops and lobster, not whales. Mr. Nugent's cast of New Bedfordians includes Fatima, the Keeper of the Coffee Pot at a harbor café. This Portuguese beauty -- a finalist in the 1978 Miss Teen Massachusetts Pageant, she'll remind you -- has matured into a thrice-divorced hellcat who observes that families seldom gather at dockside to bid sailors farewell because nowadays "nobody gives a damn about a divorced Mr. and Mrs. Whatever. Twenty-five years ago, not many fishermen and certainly no Portuguese fishermen were getting divorced. It was a big-like sin back then."

Mr. Nugent's most engaging subject is a fisherman named Mako, a 46-year-old believer in "the American Promise, valuing sweat over pedigree, push over pull." Mako slugs an IRS agent and rides out an ocean blizzard on "a high-octane blend of coke and crystal." But then booze, drugs and unreported income are as much a part of the docks these days as the "rank smell of muck, fish bits and seaweed."

Down at the Docks By Rory Nugent (Pantheon, 290 pages, $24.95)

Mako detests Washington as "a genuinely demonic force" that is destroying New Bedford. Mr. Nugent explains that, in the 1970s, federally guaranteed loans for boat construction encouraged the production of outsized vessels with the capacity for larger catches. As with farmers, it was get big or get out. To pay off the loans, the big guys revoked the customary down time and kept their boats running almost nonstop, depleting the cod and scallop populations. The feds, responding to a problem they had exacerbated, slapped regulations on crew size and fishing hours. A dull gray cloud of conformity enveloped the docks, as forms, rules and drug tests were imposed by, in Mr. Nugent's words, "landlubbers who don't know jack about the sea."

Federal regulation has helped degrade New Bedford from a seafaring brotherhood of hundreds of mom-and-pop operations to a waterfront run by "large corporations." Ignominiously, the corporations pay their sailors salaries -- salaries! -- instead of treating the crewmembers as shareholders and splitting the proceeds from each haul. Seamen are thus becoming "company men," although Mako says that "he'd shoot himself before he'd ever sign on as a salaried deckhand." Live by the swordfish, die by it too: Half a century earlier, these docks had been the beneficiary of a government-directed boom, when in World War II the authorities ordered smaller ports closed and the fleet centralized in New Bedford.

Mr. Nugent decries the regimentation of "ill-mannered watermen" who once did business by handshake and lived by codes that an outsider might appreciate but could never really understand. He and his dockmates prefer the yesterdays when "every fisherman was an independent cuss working alongside an independent cuss who happened to own a boat. It worked damn good for a hundred years." Another of Mr. Nugent's characters, the superannuated mob fixer Pink, worries that small-scale commercial fishing is going the way of whaling and that soon, in Mr. Nugent's typically pungent paraphrase, "the docks will turn into some sort of Sturbridge Village by the Sea, sanitized and saltless, with college boys pretending to be deckhands and former pencil pushers posing as captains."

Mr. Nugent has a great reservoir of unsentimental affection for these men, whose hardness he does not hide. "If you're not greedy, you're not a fisherman, least not a good one," says Fatima. Mako and his fraternity seem not so much rapacious freebooters as wild spirits who are being broken by regulators and accounting departments. Mr. Nugent takes from the decline of New Bedford the lesson that the "age of Emersonian self-reliance is behind us." The last of the independents are sinking into corporate servitude, welfare or meth-bleared nothingness.

"Down at the Docks" doesn't quite finish its own voyage, as the last two chapters drift into the doldrums. By the time we meet a lesbian who fences stolen goods, we have oversampled the demimonde. Isn't there a Rotary Club in New Bedford? Still, Mr. Nugent speaks with just and salty outrage on behalf of rough men "on the wrong side of tomorrow." He concludes that the "old frontier mentality at sea" has "been criminalized and holdouts will be pursued until they either convert and renounce their old ways or go to jail and disappear."

Today's Ishmael is eking out an existence on New Bedford's margins, scalloping when he can, smuggling when he must, fighting to keep off the junk and the dole. Call him discouraged.

Mr. Kauffman's most recent books are "Ain't My America" (Holt) and "Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet: The Life of Luther Martin" (ISI).

from First Things via the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Mar-11, by Stephen H. Webb:

Soccer Is Ruining America
And we have no one to blame but ourselves.

Soccer is running America into the ground, and there is very little anyone can do about it. Social critics have long observed that we live in a therapeutic society that treats young people as if they can do no wrong. Every kid is a winner, and nobody is ever left behind, no matter how many times they watch the ball going the other way. Whether the dumbing down of America or soccer came first is hard to say, but soccer is clearly an important means by which American energy, drive and competitiveness are being undermined to the point of no return.

What other game, to put it bluntly, is so boring to watch? (Bowling and golf come to mind, but the sound of crashing pins and the sight of the well-attired strolling on perfectly kept greens are at least inherently pleasurable activities.) The linear, two-dimensional action of soccer is like the rocking of a boat but without any storm and while the boat has not even left the dock. Think of two posses pursuing their prey in opposite directions without any bullets in their guns. Soccer is the fluoridation of the American sporting scene.

For those who think I jest, let me put forth four points, which is more points than most fans will see in a week of games—and more points than most soccer players have scored since their pee-wee days.

1) Any sport that limits you to using your feet, with the occasional bang of the head, has something very wrong with it. Indeed, soccer is a liberal's dream of tragedy: It creates an egalitarian playing field by rigorously enforcing a uniform disability. Anthropologists commonly define man according to his use of hands. We have the thumb, an opposable digit that God gave us to distinguish us from animals that walk on all fours. The thumb lets us do things like throw baseballs and fold our hands in prayer. We can even talk with our hands. Have you ever seen a deaf person trying to talk with his feet? When you are really angry and acting like an animal, you kick out with your feet. Only fools punch a wall with their hands. The Iraqi who threw his shoes at President Bush was following his primordial instincts. Showing someone your feet, or sticking your shoes in someone's face, is the ultimate sign of disrespect. Do kids ever say, "Trick or Treat, smell my hands"? Did Jesus wash his disciples' hands at the Last Supper? No, hands are divine (they are one of the body parts most frequently attributed to God), while feet are in need of redemption. In all the portraits of God's wrath, never once is he pictured as wanting to step on us or kick us; he does not stoop that low.

2) Sporting should be about breaking kids down before you start building them up. Take baseball, for example. When I was a kid, baseball was the most popular sport precisely because it was so demanding. Even its language was intimidating, with bases, bats, strikes and outs. Striding up to the plate gave each of us a chance to act like we were starring in a Western movie, and tapping the bat to the plate gave us our first experience with inventing self-indulgent personal rituals. The boy chosen to be the pitcher was inevitably the first kid on the team to reach puberty, and he threw a hard ball right at you.

Thus, you had to face the fear of disfigurement as well as the statistical probability of striking out. The spectacle of your failure was so public that it was like having all of your friends invited to your home to watch your dad forcing you to eat your vegetables. We also spent a lot of time in the outfield chanting, "Hey batter batter!" as if we were Buddhist monks on steroids. Our chanting was compensatory behavior, a way of making the time go by, which is surely why at soccer games today it is the parents who do all of the yelling.

3) Everyone knows that soccer is a foreign invasion, but few people know exactly what is wrong with that. More than having to do with its origin, soccer is a European sport because it is all about death and despair. Americans would never invent a sport where the better you get the less you score. Even the way most games end, in sudden death, suggests something of an old-fashioned duel. How could anyone enjoy a game where so much energy results in so little advantage, and which typically ends with a penalty kick out, as if it is the audience that needs to be put out of its misery? Shootouts are such an anticlimax to the game and are so unpredictable that the teams might as well flip a coin to see who wins—indeed, they might as well flip the coin before the game, and not play at all.

4) And then there is the question of sex. I know my daughter will kick me when she reads this, but soccer is a game for girls. Girls are too smart to waste an entire day playing baseball, and they do not have the bloodlust for football. Soccer penalizes shoving and burns countless calories, and the margins of victory are almost always too narrow to afford any gloating. As a display of nearly death-defying stamina, soccer mimics the paradigmatic feminine experience of childbirth more than the masculine business of destroying your opponent with insurmountable power.

Let me conclude on a note of despair appropriate to my topic. There is no way to run away from soccer, if only because it is a sport all about running. It is as relentless as it is easy, and it is as tiring to play as it is tedious to watch. The real tragedy is that soccer is a foreign invasion, but it is not a plot to overthrow America. For those inclined toward paranoia, it would be easy to blame soccer's success on the political left, which, after all, worked for years to bring European decadence and despair to America. The left tried to make existentialism, Marxism, poststructuralism, and deconstructionism fashionable in order to weaken the clarity, pragmatism and drive of American culture. What the left could not accomplish through these intellectual fads, one might suspect, they are trying to accomplish through sport.

Yet this suspicion would be mistaken. Soccer is of foreign origin, that is certainly true, but its promotion and implementation are thoroughly domestic. Soccer is a self-inflicted wound. Americans have nobody to blame but themselves. Conservative suburban families, the backbone of America, have turned to soccer in droves. Baseball is too intimidating, football too brutal, and basketball takes too much time to develop the required skills. American parents in the past several decades are overworked and exhausted, but their children are overweight and neglected. Soccer is the perfect antidote to television and video games. It forces kids to run and run, and everyone can play their role, no matter how minor or irrelevant to the game. Soccer and television are the peanut butter and jelly of parenting.

I should know. I am an overworked teacher, with books to read and books to write, and before I put in a video for the kids to watch while I work in the evenings, they need to have spent some of their energy. Otherwise, they want to play with me! Last year all three of my kids were on three different soccer teams at the same time. My daughter is on a traveling team, and she is quite good. I had to sign a form that said, among other things, I would not do anything embarrassing to her or the team during the game. I told the coach I could not sign it. She was perplexed and worried. "Why not," she asked? "Are you one of those parents who yells at their kids? "Not at all," I replied, "I read books on the sidelines during the game, and this embarrasses my daughter to no end." That is my one way of protesting the rise of this pitiful sport. Nonetheless, I must say that my kids and I come home from a soccer game a very happy family.

Mr. Webb is a professor of religion and philosophy at Wabash College. His recent books include "American Providence" and "Taking Religion to School."

from the Washington Post, 2009-Jan-23, p.A15, by Charles Krauthammer:

Obama's Inaugural Surprise

Fascinating speech. It was so rhetorically flat, so lacking in rhythm and cadence, one almost has to believe he did it on purpose. Best not to dazzle on Opening Day. Otherwise, they'll expect magic all the time.

The most striking characteristic of Barack Obama is not his nimble mind, engaging manner or wide-ranging intellectual curiosity. It's the absence of neediness. He's Bill Clinton, master politician, but without the hunger.

Clinton craves your adulation (the source of all his troubles). Obama will take it, but he can leave it, too. He is astonishingly self-contained. He gives what he must to advance his goals, his programs, his ambitions. But no more. He has no need to.

Which seems to me the only way to understand the mediocrity of his inaugural address. The language lacked lyricism. The content had neither arc nor theme: no narrative trajectory like Lincoln's second inaugural; no central idea, as was (to take a lesser example) universal freedom in Bush's second inaugural.

This is odd because Obama is so clearly capable of more. But he decisively left behind the candidate who made audiences swoon and the impressionable faint. And that left the million-plus on the Mall, while unshakably euphoric about the moment, let down and puzzled by the speech. He'd given them nothing to cheer or chant, nothing to sing.

Candidate Obama had promised the moon. In soaring cadences, he described a world laid waste by Bush, a world that President Obama would redeem -- bringing boundless hope and universal health, receding oceans and a healing planet.

But now that Obama was president, the redeemer was withholding, the tone newly sober, even dour. The world was still in Bushian ruin, marked by "fear . . . conflict . . . discord . . . petty grievances and false promises . . . recriminations and worn-out dogmas." But no more the prospect of magical restoration. In a stunning exercise in lowered expectations, Obama offered not quite blood, sweat and tears, but responsibility, work, sacrifice and service.

When candidate Obama said "it's not about me, it's about you," that was sheer chicanery. But now he means it, because he really cannot part the waters. Hence his admonition to rely not on the "skill or vision of those in high office," but on "We the People."

On the issue of race, he was even more withholding, and admirably so. He understood that his very presence was enough to mark the monumentality of the moment. Words would be superfluous -- as introducer Dianne Feinstein was apparently unaware -- and he gave it very few.

This was surprising, given that the announced theme of the inaugural -- "a new birth of freedom" -- invited grandiose comparison to Lincoln. Yet in the inaugural address, Obama abandoned the conceit. He allowed that "a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath." When he followed that with "So let us mark this day with remembrance of who we are and how far we have traveled," you were sure he would trace the journey back to Lincoln and the Second (post-Gettysburg) Republic or to King and the civil rights revolution.

But Obama didn't. Remarkably, he instead reached back -- over King and Lincoln -- to George Washington. He rooted the values he cherishes most (and wants us to renew) in the Founders, in the First Republic, the slave-tainted one (as our schoolchildren are incessantly reminded) that had to await Lincoln for its cleansing.

Obama's unapologetic celebration of Washington and the Founders of the original imperfect union was a declaration of his own emancipation from -- or better, transcendence of -- the civil rights movement. The old warrior Joseph Lowery prayed for the day when "white will embrace what is right." Not Obama. By connecting himself in this historic address to Washington rather than Lincoln the liberator, Obama was legitimizing the full sweep of American history without annotation or mental reservation. If we ever have a post-racial future, this moment will mark its beginning.

Obama did this in prose, not his usual poetry. And he buried it in an otherwise undistinguished speech marred by a foreign policy section featuring the mushy internationalism of his still-bizarre Berlin adventure.

Perhaps that was just a bone to appease the faithful he had otherwise left hungry. We have no way of knowing. A complicated man, this new president. Opaque, contradictory and subtle. And that's just day one.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Jan-3, by Jay Winik:

Obama Will Find the White House Is a Lonely Place
The best advisers can't take momentous decisions out of the president's hands.

The day after Abraham Lincoln's election, he assembled a gaggle of reporters and boisterously declared, "Well boys, your troubles are now over; mine have only just begun."

Little did he know just how prophetic his words would be. Between Election Day and his inauguration, seven Southern states seceded from the Union and the Fort Sumter crisis reached a dangerous flashpoint.

His own general-in-chief, Winfield Scott, strongly advised him to surrender the fort. William Seward, his secretary of state, ardently counseled negotiations with the South, and even privately assured the Confederates that Sumter would be evacuated. Most of his cabinet sided with Seward and voted to evacuate as well.

That was when Lincoln decided that he alone would have to decide. To the flicker of oil lamps, he stayed up all night on March 28. Shortly after dawn the next morning, he informed the cabinet that he would re-provision the besieged Fort Sumter -- a fateful move that all but ensured civil war.

The war would grind on for four long years and as late as 1864, an exhausted Lincoln would aimlessly roam the White House corridors, moaning, "I must have relief from this terrible anxiety or it will kill me." If it didn't kill him the ongoing avalanche of public and private criticism almost did, not to mention his string of distressingly ineffective generals. Little wonder that, instead of glory in the presidency, Lincoln once confessed, he found "only ashes and blood."

Lincoln was one of our two greatest presidents, saving the Union and freeing the slaves. But never was the going easy, not in the beginning of the great crisis, not in the middle, not at the end. When he took office, Lincoln never dreamed of a civil war that would last for four years and consume 620,000 lives.

For our president-elect, who is looking to history for guidance, herein lies a cautionary tale. Barack Obama will soon learn two lessons that all of our presidents, the great ones as well as the failed ones, discover -- often the hard way. The challenges he will face will almost certainly be different from what he thought. And however talented his team, he will never be able to escape the often overwhelming isolation of presidential decision making.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who stands as another inspirational model for President-elect Obama, also discovered the unrelenting burdens of presidential leadership. The American people always knew him for his jaunty smile, his customary grin and his reassuring voice. But in the autumn, 1937, it seemed as though the world was again coming unglued.

The New York Stock Exchange endured its worst day since 1929, manufacturing slumped sharply, and within weeks, the market precipitously plunged nearly 40%. By the New Year, the economy shed a staggering four million jobs, leaving Roosevelt's advisers to bemoan the "depression within a depression." Normally the surest of politicians, Roosevelt uncharacteristically waffled. "You are just treading water," Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau told him. After one cabinet meeting, Harold Ickes wrote that Roosevelt "doesn't know which way to turn."

Eventually, Roosevelt was able to stanch the economic hemorrhaging, but he soon confronted war in Europe. Roosevelt had promised that America would stay out of the conflict. However, after Hitler's armies overran Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg and France, his challenge quickly became to rally the nation against the German fury.

Privately, the strain began to take its toll: "I am walking on eggs," Roosevelt confessed. His blood pressure became dangerously high. One evening in late February, 1940, he collapsed unconscious at the dinner table, an affair that alarmed his doctors but which was quickly hushed up.

Yet no less than Lincoln, Roosevelt was a rock. Farsighted and tough-minded, he led a partnership with Winston Churchill and eventually Joseph Stalin that inexorably battered the German armies, not to mention the Nazi will. Throughout, his own personal example became central to this effort.

But the private effects on an increasingly ailing Roosevelt were profound. By 1944, his health was so impaired that he spent a full month convalescing at a friend's estate in South Carolina as Allied forces prepared to storm the beaches on D-Day. And despite the enormous risks -- he would die just three months later -- Roosevelt crossed the Atlantic in January 1945 to confer with Churchill and Stalin at Yalta. He knew he could not delegate the crucial decisions involved in post-war leadership.

Such are the imperatives of the presidency. Notwithstanding the best of staff and advice, it has never been a shared burden. And just as often presidencies go awry or become defined by the unexpected.

Within hours of assuming the office, Harry Truman was confronted with the awesome decision of whether or not to use the atomic bomb on Japan -- a bomb that he didn't even know existed. A confident John F. Kennedy badly stumbled into the Bay of Pigs and was forced to extricate himself from disaster in the Cuban missile crisis. Lyndon Johnson was mercilessly undone by Vietnam and the civil rights cauldron at home. Jimmy Carter watched dumbstruck as the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and the Iranians seized American hostages. By contrast, Ronald Reagan, against all establishment prognostications, negotiated the first nuclear arms control deal with the Soviets and deftly steered the Cold War to a peaceful conclusion. George W. Bush, who campaigned on humility in foreign policy, was of necessity haunted by the specter of 9/11.

While much of the country is caught up in the emotion over Mr. Obama's pending inauguration and policies he may or may not follow, the president-elect has given the appearance of getting down to business with the same steadiness that he ran his campaign. He is right to do so. He is also right to have picked impressive historical models to guide his presidency, and to have spoken about the "grave" and "urgent" issues the nation faces.

But Mr. Obama should be under no illusions that things will turn out as neat or tidy as he hopes. Like every other president before him, he will not so easily be able to anticipate the next crisis coming around the bend, or the final shape of the current crisis roiling the country. And time and again he will ultimately be making the decisions utterly alone.

Despite his many talents, Mr. Obama's presidency will almost certainly be a tall order given his lack of experience. Only the years ahead will tell. But perhaps he will be in good company. No less than the unanimously elected Gen. George Washington, whose wartime composure was legendary, nervously improvised at his first inauguration and actually trembled during his address to the Senate shortly thereafter. Little has changed since.

Mr. Winik, a historian, is the author of "April 1865" (HarperCollins, 2001) and "The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800" (Harper, 2007).

from the Daily Mail of London, 2008-Nov-10, by Peter Hitchens:

The night we waved goodbye to America... our last best hope on Earth

Anyone would think we had just elected a hip, skinny and youthful replacement for God, with a plan to modernise Heaven and Hell – or that at the very least John Lennon had come back from the dead.

The swooning frenzy over the choice of Barack Obama as President of the United States must be one of the most absurd waves of self-deception and swirling fantasy ever to sweep through an advanced civilisation. At least Mandela-worship – its nearest equivalent – is focused on a man who actually did something.

I really don't see how the Obama devotees can ever in future mock the Moonies, the Scientologists or people who claim to have been abducted in flying saucers. This is a cult like the one which grew up around Princess Diana, bereft of reason and hostile to facts.

It already has all the signs of such a thing. The newspapers which recorded Obama's victory have become valuable relics. You may buy Obama picture books and Obama calendars and if there isn't yet a children's picture version of his story, there soon will be.

Proper books, recording his sordid associates, his cowardly voting record, his astonishingly militant commitment to unrestricted abortion and his blundering trip to Africa, are little-read and hard to find.

If you can believe that this undistinguished and conventionally Left-wing machine politician is a sort of secular saviour, then you can believe anything. He plainly doesn't believe it himself. His cliche-stuffed, PC clunker of an acceptance speech suffered badly from nerves. It was what you would expect from someone who knew he'd promised too much and that from now on the easy bit was over.

He needn't worry too much. From now on, the rough boys and girls of America's Democratic Party apparatus, many recycled from Bill Clinton's stained and crumpled entourage, will crowd round him, to collect the rich spoils of his victory and also tell him what to do, which is what he is used to.

Just look at his sermon by the shores of Lake Michigan. He really did talk about a `new dawn', and a `timeless creed' (which was `yes, we can'). He proclaimed that `change has come'. He revealed that, despite having edited the Harvard Law Review, he doesn't know what `enormity' means. He reached depths of oratorical drivel never even plumbed by our own Mr Blair, burbling about putting our hands on the arc of history (or was it the ark of history?) and bending it once more toward the hope of a better day (Don't try this at home).

I am not making this up. No wonder that awful old hack Jesse Jackson sobbed as he watched. How he must wish he, too, could get away with this sort of stuff.

And it was interesting how the President-elect failed to lift his admiring audience by repeated – but rather hesitant – invocations of the brainless slogan he was forced by his minders to adopt against his will – `Yes, we can'. They were supposed to thunder `Yes, we can!' back at him, but they just wouldn't join in. No wonder. Yes we can what exactly? Go home and keep a close eye on the tax rate, is my advice. He'd have been better off bursting into `I'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony' which contains roughly the same message and might have attracted some valuable commercial sponsorship.

Perhaps, being a Chicago crowd, they knew some of the things that 52.5 per cent of America prefers not to know. They know Obama is the obedient servant of one of the most squalid and unshakeable political machines in America. They know that one of his alarmingly close associates, a state-subsidised slum landlord called Tony Rezko, has been convicted on fraud and corruption charges.

They also know the US is just as segregated as it was before Martin Luther King – in schools, streets, neighbourhoods, holidays, even in its TV-watching habits and its choice of fast-food joint. The difference is that it is now done by unspoken agreement rather than by law.

If Mr Obama's election had threatened any of that, his feel-good white supporters would have scuttled off and voted for John McCain, or practically anyone. But it doesn't. Mr Obama, thanks mainly to the now-departed grandmother he alternately praised as a saint and denounced as a racial bigot, has the huge advantages of an expensive private education. He did not have to grow up in the badlands of useless schools, shattered families and gangs which are the lot of so many young black men of his generation.

If the nonsensical claims made for this election were true, then every positive discrimination programme aimed at helping black people into jobs they otherwise wouldn't get should be abandoned forthwith. Nothing of the kind will happen. On the contrary, there will probably be more of them.

And if those who voted for Obama were all proving their anti-racist nobility, that presumably means that those many millions who didn't vote for him were proving themselves to be hopeless bigots. This is obviously untrue.

I was in Washington DC the night of the election. America's beautiful capital has a sad secret. It is perhaps the most racially divided city in the world, with 15th Street – which runs due north from the White House – the unofficial frontier between black and white. But, like so much of America, it also now has a new division, and one which is in many ways much more important. I had attended an election-night party in a smart and liberal white area, but was staying the night less than a mile away on the edge of a suburb where Spanish is spoken as much as English, plus a smattering of tongues from such places as Ethiopia, Somalia and Afghanistan.

As I walked, I crossed another of Washington's secret frontiers. There had been a few white people blowing car horns and shouting, as the result became clear. But among the Mexicans, Salvadorans and the other Third World nationalities, there was something like ecstasy.

They grasped the real significance of this moment. They knew it meant that America had finally switched sides in a global cultural war. Forget the Cold War, or even the Iraq War. The United States, having for the most part a deeply conservative people, had until now just about stood out against many of the mistakes which have ruined so much of the rest of the world.

Suspicious of welfare addiction, feeble justice and high taxes, totally committed to preserving its own national sovereignty, unabashedly Christian in a world part secular and part Muslim, suspicious of the Great Global Warming panic, it was unique.

These strengths had been fading for some time, mainly due to poorly controlled mass immigration and to the march of political correctness. They had also been weakened by the failure of America's conservative party – the Republicans – to fight on the cultural and moral fronts.

They preferred to posture on the world stage. Scared of confronting Left-wing teachers and sexual revolutionaries at home, they could order soldiers to be brave on their behalf in far-off deserts. And now the US, like Britain before it, has begun the long slow descent into the Third World. How sad. Where now is our last best hope on Earth?

from Commentary Magazine, 2005-Jan, by David Gelernter:

Americanism—and Its Enemies

Anti-Americanism has blossomed frantically in recent years. Nearly the whole world seems to be pock-marked with lesions of hate. Some of this hatred focuses on George W. Bush, but much of it goes beyond the President to encompass the supposed evils of America and Americanism in general. In its passionate and unreasoning intensity, anti-Americanism resembles a religion—or a caricature of a religion. And this fact tells us something important about Americanism itself.

By Americanism I do not mean American tastes or style, or American culture—that convenient target of America-haters everywhere. Nor do I mean mere patriotic devotion; many nations command patriotic devotion from their citizens (or used to). By Americanism I mean the set of beliefs that are thought to constitute America’s essence and to set it apart; the beliefs that make Americans positive that their nation is superior to all others—morally superior, closer to God.

Frenchmen used to think France superior on account of its culture and civilisation; many still do. Germans once thought they were smarter, deeper and (possibly) racially superior. Englishmen once considered themselves natural rulers and believed that their governmental structures set Britain on a higher plane. And so on. Not all nations have “isms,” and not all those who do (or did) have been equally serious about their particular “ism.” America has one and is dead serious about it.

Most national “isms” have seemed fearsome or hateful only insofar as they were militarily threatening. Communism was feared because of its power to foment internal subversion. In the late-18th and 19th centuries, America stood for radical republicanism and the breaking-down of inherited rank—grounds for hatred among much of the European elite. But over the last century or so, America has remained an object of hatred within nations that have themselves gone over to American-style democracy; has been hated by people who had nothing whatsoever to fear from American power. America, Winston Churchill said during World War II, was the great republic “whose power arouses no fear and whose pre-eminence excites no jealousy.” Evidently this is no longer true.

Americanism is notable, of course, not merely for its spectacular ability to arouse hate. Over the roughly four centuries of American and proto-American existence, it has also inspired remarkable feats of devotion. You would need some sort of fierce determination to set forth in a puny, broad-beamed, high-pooped, painfully slow, nearly undefended 17th-century ship to cross the uncharted ocean to an unknown, unmapped new world. You would need remarkable determination to push westward into the heartland away from settlement and safety. You would need ferocious bravado to provoke the dominant great power of the day on the basis of rather flimsy excuses, and ultimately to declare war and proclaim your independence. The Union side in the Civil War would have needed practically incandescent determination to keep fighting after the South had won decisive battles, slaughtered vast numbers of Union soldiers, and gained the sympathy of the two leading West European powers.

In the 20th century, you would have needed enormous determination to turn your back on the isolationism and anti-militarism that comes naturally to Americans and butt into World War I—and then, after World War II, to reject isolationism once again when you accepted the Soviet empire’s challenge. Freedom and independence for Greece and Turkey—not exactly pressing American interests—occasioned America’s entry into the cold war. And what on earth would make an Idaho or Nebraska farmer—that man about whom Tony Blair spoke so feelingly in his eloquent 2003 address to Congress—believe that it was his responsibility to protect the Iraqi people and the world from Saddam Hussein? What did all that have to do with him?

Americanism is potent stuff. It is every bit as fervent and passionate a religion as the anti-Americanism it challenges and rebukes.

II

That Americanism is a religion is widely agreed. G.K. Chesterton called America “the nation with the soul of a church.” But Americanism is not (contrary to the views of many people who use these terms loosely) a “secular” or a “civil” religion. No mere secular ideology, no mere philosophical belief, could possibly have inspired the intensities of hatred and devotion that Americanism has. Americanism is in fact a Judeo-Christian religion; a millenarian religion; a biblical religion. Unlike England’s “official” religion, embodied in the Anglican church, America’s has been incorporated into all the Judeo-Christian religions in the nation.

Does that make it impossible to believe in a secular Americanism? Can you be an agnostic or atheist or Buddhist or Muslim and a believing American too? In each case the answer is yes. But to accomplish that feat is harder than most people realize. The Bible is not merely the fertile soil that brought Americanism forth. It is the energy source that makes it live and thrive; that makes believing Americans willing to prescribe freedom, equality, and democracy even for a place like Afghanistan, once regarded as perhaps the remotest region on the face of the globe. If you undertake to remove Americanism from its native biblical soil, you had better connect it to some other energy source potent enough to keep its principles alive and blooming.

But is it not true that the Declaration of Independence—one of America’s holiest writings—treats religion in a cool, Enlightenment sort of way? It does. But we ought to keep in mind an observation by the historian Ralph Barton Perry. The Declaration, Perry reminds us, was an ex post facto justification of American beliefs. It was addressed to educated elite opinion, especially abroad; it was designed to win arguments, not to capture the essence of Americanism as Americans themselves understood it. That essence emerges in the less guarded pronouncements of the Founding Fathers and many other leading exponents and prophets of Americanism, from Winthrop and Bradford through John Adams and Jefferson through Lincoln and Wilson, Truman, Reagan.

Few believing Americans can show, nowadays, how Americanism’s principles are derived from the Bible. But many are willing to say that these principles are God-given. Freedom comes from God, George W. Bush has said more than once; and if you pressed him, I suspect you would discover that not only does he say it, he believes it. Many Americans all over the country agree with him. The idea of a “secular” Americanism based on the Declaration of Independence is an optical illusion.

III

Suppose you were to put together a bookful of pronouncements and predictions about America’s destiny, ranging over four centuries. What title would you give it?

Such an anthology did appear in 1971; it was edited by an associate professor of religious studies and subtitled “Religious Interpretations of American Destiny.” The book’s main title was God’s New Israel. From the 17th century through John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Americans kept talking about their country as if it were the biblical Israel and they were the chosen people.

Where did that view of America come from? It came from Puritanism—Puritanism being not a separate type of Christianity but a certain approach to Protestantism. And here is a strange fact about Puritanism. It originated in 16th-century England; it became one of the most powerful forces in religious if not all human history. It consistently elicited bitter hatred—and was directly responsible for (at least) two world-changing developments. It provoked the British Civil War (in which the Puritans and Parliament asserted their rights against the crown and the established church), and the first settlements by British religious dissenters in the new world.

And then it simply disappeared. In the late 1700’s or early 1800’s, Puritanism dropped out of history. Traces survived in Britain and (even more so) in America, in the form of churches once associated with it. But after the 18th century, we barely hear about Puritanism as a live force; before long everyone agrees that it is dead.

What happened to it? In a narrow sense, Puritan congregations sometimes liberalized and became Unitarian; the Transcendentalists, prominent in American literature from roughly 1820 through 1860, are often described as the spiritual successors of the Puritans. But Puritanism was too potent, too vibrant simply to vanish. Where did all that powerful religious passion go?

Puritanism had two main elements: the Calvinist belief in predestination with associated religious doctrines, and what we might call a “political” doctrine. The “political” goal of Puritanism was to reach back to the pure Christianity of the New Testament—and then even farther back. Puritans spoke of themselves as God’s new chosen people, living in God’s new promised land—in short, as God’s new Israel.

I believe that Puritanism did not drop out of history. It transformed itself into Americanism. This new religion was the end-stage of Puritanism: Puritanism realized among God’s self-proclaimed “new” chosen people—or, in Abraham Lincoln’s remarkable phrase, God’s “almost chosen people.”

Many thinkers have noted that Americanism is inspired by or close to or intertwined with Puritanism. One of the most impressive scholars to say so recently is Samuel Huntington, in his formidable book on American identity, Who Are We? But my thesis is that Puritanism did not merely inspire or influence Americanism; it turned into Americanism. Puritanism and Americanism are not just parallel or related developments; they are two stages of a single phenomenon.

This is an unprovable proposition. But as a way of looking at things, it buys us something valuable. Consider: Puritanism was shared by people of many faiths, at any rate within Protestant Christianity. You could find Puritans in Congregationalist and Presbyterian churches, and in Baptist and Quaker churches; some Puritans never left the Episcopalian or Anglican church, and eventually you could find Puritans in Methodist churches, too. Later, as I have noted, you could even find them in Unitarian churches—despite Unitarianism’s dramatic disagreements with other forms of Protestantism.

Americanism has these same peculiar properties, and takes them a step further. It, too, is a religion professed by people of many different faiths. Because of its “political” or biblical aspect, specifically its “Old Testament” focus, it was destined ultimately to be at home not merely in many kinds of Protestant churches but in every congregation that venerated the Hebrew Bible—in American Protestant churches, American Catholic churches, and American synagogues. This may seem like a strange set of attributes for a Judeo-Christian religion—yet Puritanism itself had the same attributes.

IV

If Americanism is the end-stage of political Puritanism, which in turn was the yearning to live in contact with God as a citizen of God’s new Israel, what is its creed?

The idea of an “American creed” has been around for a long time. Huntington lists its elements as “liberty, equality, democracy, individualism, human rights, the rule of law, and private property.” I prefer a different formulation: a conceptual triangle in which one fundamental fact creates two premises that create three conclusions.

The fundamental fact: the Bible is God’s word. Two premises: first, every member of the American community has his own individual dignity, insofar as he deals individually with God; second, the community has a divine mission to all mankind. Three conclusions: every human being everywhere is entitled to freedom, equality, and democracy.

In the American creed, both premises and all three conclusions refer back to the Bible, especially the Hebrew Bible. Americans have defined the “community” of the premises more and more broadly over the years, until it has grown to encompass the whole population of adult citizens—thus bringing the premises gradually into line with the universal conclusions. Today there is pressure to define the community more broadly still, so that it includes (for example) illegal as well as legal residents.

Freedom, equality, democracy: the Declaration held these truths to be self-evident, but “self-evident” they were certainly not. Otherwise, America would hardly have been the first nation in history to be built on this foundation. Deriving all three from the Bible, theologians of Americanism understood these doctrines not as philosophical ideas but as the word of God. Hence the fervor and passion with which Americans believe their creed. Americans, virtually alone in the world, insist that freedom, equality, and democracy are right not only for France and Spain but for Afghanistan and Iraq.

V

How are the creed’s three conclusions derived from the Bible? Freedom is the message of the Exodus, one of the Hebrew Bible’s great underlying themes. Bible readers believed that the Exodus story predicted the fate of nations. The literary scholar David Jeffrey names three major works that “illustrate the power of the Exodus story in the formation of American national identity”: Samuel Mather’s Figures and Types of the Old Testament (1673), Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana (a history of 17th-century New England, 1702), and Jeremiah Romayne’s The American Israel (1795).

In 1777 Nicholas Street preached in East Haven, Connecticut:

The British tyrant is only acting over the same wicked and cruel part, that Pharaoh king of Egypt acted toward the children of Israel some 3,000 years ago.

The same day the Declaration of Independence was adopted, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson were appointed as a committee to propose a seal for the brand-new United States. Given what we know about Americanism, it is hardly surprising that they suggested an image of Israel crossing the Red Sea and Moses lit by the pillar of fire, with the motto: “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.” (The seal was never adopted, but a copy of the recommendation survives in the papers of the Continental Congress.)

Next, equality. Equality was connected with Genesis—every man is created in God’s image—and also with the powerful anti-monarchy message delivered by the prophet Samuel. Abraham Lincoln took the largest and most important step in American history toward putting this part of the creed into effect, and also gave the clearest exposition of its biblical roots. Citing the words of the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln said:

This was [the Founding Fathers’] lofty, and wise, and noble understanding of the justice of the Creator to His creatures. Yes, gentlemen, to all His creatures, to the whole great family of man. In their enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows. They grasped not only the whole race of man then living, but they reached forward and seized upon the farthest posterity.

A near-relative of Lincoln’s argument appears in one of the first documents of colonial American history, Alexander Whitaker’s Good Newes From Virginia of 1613. Whitaker urges that the Indians be well treated; after all, “One God created us, they have reasonable soules and intellectuall faculties as well as wee; we all have Adam for our common parent: yea, by nature the condition of us both is all one.”

There is also a remarkable similarity between Lincoln’s thought and a rabbinic midrash according to which a phrase in Genesis—“these are the archives of Adam’s descendants”—is the single greatest statement in the Torah. Why? Because it teaches that all men, being descended from the same ancestors, are equal in dignity.

Of the creed’s three elements, democracy might seem the least likely to be traced back to biblical sources—but Americans of past ages knew the Bible much better than we do. The Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, often called the “first written constitution of modern democracy,” were inspired not by democratic Athens or republican Rome or Enlightenment philosophy but by a Puritan preacher’s interpretation of a verse in the Hebrew Bible. They were drafted in May 1638, in response to a sermon by Thomas Hooker before the general assembly in Hartford.

Hooker cited the biblical passage, “Take ye wise men, and understanding, and known among your tribes, and I will make them rulers over you” (Deuteronomy 1:13). This he interpreted to mean “that the choice of public magistrate belongs unto the people, by God’s own allowance. . . . The foundation of authority is laid, firstly, in the free consent of the people.”

Hooker’s interpretation was hardly novel or eccentric. Many preachers knew and believed the same thing. In 1780, roughly a century and a half after Hooker’s epoch-making sermon, with the Revolutionary War under way, Pastor Simeon Howard of Boston was pondering the new nation’s government. He too decided—on the basis of this same passage, and of the classical Jewish historian Josephus—that America should be a democratic republic.

Howard’s advice was as radical as it was straightforward, as avant-garde as it was Puritan, Bible-centered, and godly. “In compliance with the advice of Jethro,” he preached,

Moses chose able men, and made them rulers [over the Israelites in the desert]; but it is generally supposed that they were chosen by the people [emphasis added]. This is asserted by Josephus, and plainly intimated by Moses in his recapitulary discourse, recorded in the first chapter of Deuteronomy.

Historians have pointed out that the clergy wielded far more influence over the colonial public than a Tom Paine or John Locke did. In 1776, three-quarters of American citizens were Puritan. Puritans have long been classified as strait-laced, dour, and joyless, far from passionate revolutionaries or radical democrats. Like nearly all stereotypes, these are partly true—but they are a long way from the whole truth.

A recent Pew Research Center survey found that not even a third of American journalists have “a great deal of confidence” that the American electorate makes correct choices at the polls. The Puritans thought otherwise, and so did Abraham Lincoln. The historian William Wolf cites Lincoln’s belief “that God’s will is ultimately to be known through the people.” Lincoln said: “I must trust in that Supreme Being who has never forsaken this favored land, through the instrumentality of this great and intelligent people.” What chance is there that American journalists or professors or school-teachers would describe Americans today as “this great and intelligent people”?

VI

We can go further. To sum up Americanism’s creed as freedom, equality, and democracy for all is to state only half the case. The other half deals with a promised land, a chosen people, and a universal, divinely ordained mission. This part of Americanism is the American version of biblical Zionism: in short, American Zionism.

The relation between Americanism and American Zionism is something like the relation between Anglicanism and Anglo-Catholicism. Anglo-Catholicism is Anglicanism, but the name was invented to underline the closeness between Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism. The term “American Zionism” similarly underlines the closeness between Americanism and the biblical idea of a divinely chosen people and promised land.

When I say that Americanism equals American Zionism, I am in one sense merely adding up statements by eminent authorities. John Winthrop in 1630: “Wee shall finde that the God of Israell is among us.” Thomas Jefferson in his Second Inaugural address: “I shall need . . . the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life.” (The last phrase is an update of the Bible’s “flowing with milk and honey.”) Abraham Lincoln declared his wish to be a “humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty and of this, His almost chosen people.”

Hundreds of other statements along the same lines might be gathered from the whole formative period of Americanism, from the early 1600’s through the Civil War. Among the most striking is one of the earliest, from the famous journal of William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation. Once the Pilgrims had landed in the new world, Bradford writes, “What could now sustain them but the Spirit of God and His grace?” And he continues:

May not and ought not the children of these fathers rightly say: “Our fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in the wilderness; but they cried unto the Lord, and He heard their voice and looked on their adversity,” etc.

Bradford is paraphrasing verses from Deuteronomy (26:5 ff.) that read (in the Geneva Bible of 1560, which Puritans preferred to the King James version): “A Syrian was my father, who being ready to perish for hunger, went downe into Egypte. . . . When we cried unto the Lord God of our fathers, the Lord heard our voyce, & looked on our adversitie.”

The Bible reports that the Israelites were instructed to speak these verses when they brought the year’s first fruits to the Temple in Jerusalem, there to recall publicly the Lord’s gift of the promised land. Bradford was equating the arrival of Englishmen in Plymouth with the arrival of the wandering Israelites in the promised land. The same verses play a central role in the Haggadah recited by Jews on Passover to this day—although Bradford could not have known that. Showing an uncanny tendency to think like a Jew, he singled them out on his own, and put them at the center of his own version of (what we might call) a Pilgrim seder.¹

Evidently the historian Samuel Eliot Morison did not realize the Passover significance of these verses, either. His scrupulous edition of Bradford’s journal is the scholarly standard, with plenty of footnotes—but none at this point. In other places where Bradford quotes or paraphrases the Hebrew Bible without giving a citation, it is not quite clear whether or not Morison has picked up the reference. Yet you cannot really understand the Pilgrims, or Puritans in general, unless you know the Hebrew Bible and classical Jewish history; knowing Judaism itself also helps. But people with this sort of basic knowledge have rarely bothered to study the Puritans, and those who study the Puritans have rarely bothered to know what the Puritans knew.

Early exponents of Americanism tended to define even their own Christianity in ways that make it sound like Judaism. Thus John Winthrop: “the onely way to avoyde this shipwracke [of angering the lord] and to provide for our posterity is to followe the Counsell of Micah, to doe Justly, to love mercy, to walke humbly with our God.” Lincoln, a profoundly religious man, refused all his life to join a church. But he did make the celebrated assertion that he would join a church whose entire creed was “what our lord said were the two great commandments, to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and mind and soul and strength, and my neighbor as myself.” He was referring to the Gospel passage in which Jesus cites these two verses from the Hebrew Bible as the essence of Christianity.

I do not claim that Lincoln, Winthrop, and Bradford were crypto-Jews. They were not. The point is that classical Israel’s (and classical Zionism’s) contribution to Americanism is incalculable. No modern historian or thinker I am aware of—not Huntington or Morison or Perry or Mead or Perry Miller or even Martin Marty or Sydney Ahlstrom—has done justice to this extraordinary fact. They seem to have forgotten what the eminent 19th-century Irish historian William Lecky recognized: that “Hebraic mortar cemented the foundations of American democracy.” And even Lecky, I suspect, did not grasp the full extent of this truth. Unless we do grasp it, we can never fully understand Americanism—or anti-Americanism.

VII

There have been at least four crucial turning points—“climacterics,” Churchill would have called them—at which Americans spoke explicitly and simultaneously about the religious content and the world mission of Americanism. The first was when the colonies declared their independence. Here is Dr. Banfield, in 1783:

’Twas [God] who raised a Joshua to lead the tribes of Israel in the field of battle; raised and formed a Washington to lead on the troops of his chosen States. ’Twas He who in Barak’s day spread the spirit of war in every breast to shake off the Canaanitish yoke, and inspired thy inhabitants, O America!

In 1799, with the Great Republic safely established, Abiel Abbot delivered a Thanksgiving sermon:

It has been often remarked that the people of the United States come nearer to a parallel with Ancient Israel, than any other nation upon the globe. Hence OUR AMERICAN ISRAEL is a term frequently used; and our common consent allows it apt and proper.

Washington’s early biographer Jared Sparks quotes him to the effect that “there never was a people who had more reason to acknowledge a divine interposition in their affairs than those of the United States.”

The second climacteric was the Civil War. Lincoln’s understanding of that conflict, writes Edmund Wilson, “grew out of the religious tradition of the New England theology of Puritanism.” In 1862, Lincoln made “a solemn vow before God” to free the South’s slaves. William Wolf notes that this vow was “more in conformance with Old Testament than with New Testament religion,” was “imbedded in Lincoln’s biblical piety,” and “came to him as part of the religious heritage of the nation.” The “climactic expression of his biblical faith,” according to Wolf, was the Second Inaugural address:

It reads like a supplement to the Bible. In it there are fourteen references to God, four direct quotations from Genesis, Psalms, and Matthew, and other allusions to scriptural teaching.

“We can appreciate even in these few words,” writes Sidney Ahlstrom of the Second Inaugural, “the astounding profundity of this self-educated child of the frontier, this son of a Hard-shell Baptist who never lost hold of the proposition that nations and men are instruments of the Almighty.” If Americanism is a religion, this is its holiest document after the Bible and the Declaration; and Lincoln is its greatest prophet.

World War I marked the third turning point: America stepped forward to assume its role as a world power. It happened under President Woodrow Wilson, the son and grandson of Presbyterian ministers.

Many people found Wilson hard to take. At the end of his career, on his return from negotiations in Paris at the close of the war, he went down in flames—shot out of the sky like the Red Baron by a Senate and nation unwilling to join the League of Nations, which Wilson had more or less invented, or ratify the Treaty of Versailles, which he championed.

Yet Wilson stands right at the center of classical Americanism. No President spoke the language of Bible and divine mission more lucidly. His First Inaugural address was composed in pure and perfect American, Lincoln-inspired:

The nation has been deeply stirred by a solemn passion, stirred by the knowledge of wrong, of ideals lost, of government too often debauched and made an instrument of evil. The feelings with which we face this new age of right and opportunity sweep across our heartstrings like some air out of God’s own presence, where justice and mercy are reconciled and the judge and the brother are one.

During Wilson’s administration, Americanism accomplished a fundamental transition. It had always included the idea of divine mission. But what was the mission? Until the closing of the frontier in the last decade of the 19th century, the mission was to populate the continent. With the frontier closed, the mission became “Americanism for the whole world.” Of this transition, the historian William Leuchtenberg writes:

The United States believed that American moral idealism could be extended outward, that American Christian democratic ideals could and should be universally applied. . . . The culmination of a long political tradition of emphasis on sacrifice and decisive moral combat, the [world] war was embraced as that final struggle where the righteous would do battle for the Lord.

In his speech asking for a declaration of war, Wilson told Congress that “The world must be made safe for democracy”—a much-ridiculed phrase, and one that captures perfectly America’s sense of obligation to spread its own way of life and its own good fortune. In another speech, this one explaining American war aims and intended for German consumption, Wilson concluded with these words about America: “God helping her, she can do no other.” The historian Mark Sullivan comments:

Probably not one in a hundred of his American hearers recognized that paraphrase of Martin Luther’s declaration, immortal to every German Lutheran, “Ich kann nicht anders” (I can do no other).

And so we circle back to the beginnings of Protestantism, which begot Puritanism, which begot Americanism.

The final climacteric was the cold war—its start and its finish. Franklin D. Roosevelt had taken the United States into World War II, but stubbornly refused to accept Churchill’s diagnosis of Stalin as a ruthless imperialist. His successor, Harry Truman, followed FDR’s path—at first. But in 1946 Truman changed course dramatically. When Britain was no longer able to prop up the non-Communist governments of Greece and Turkey, Truman decided that the U.S. must take over that soon-to-lapse commitment. He announced the Truman Doctrine. From then on, the Soviets would no longer be allowed unlimited scope for their imperialist ambitions; the United States had decided to get into the game.

Truman’s announcement was in the spirit of classical Americanism. It recognized America’s message and duty to all mankind:

I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressure. . . . The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms.

Although historians often skip over this point, Truman’s world-view centered on the Bible nearly to the extent Lincoln’s had. By his own account, he had read through the Bible three times by age fourteen; he read it through seven times more during the years of his presidency. It shaped his understanding of the American enterprise. Truman makes this remarkable comment in his Memoirs: “What came about in Philadelphia in 1776 really had its beginning in Hebrew times.”

The end of the cold war was presided over by Ronald Reagan, who returns us (once again) to the nation’s beginning. In one of his best-remembered phrases, Reagan declared that America was and must always be the “shining city upon a hill.” John Winthrop had conceived this idea aboard the Arabella bound for Massachusetts Bay in 1630. The phrase goes back to Matthew (“Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid”), and indirectly to the prophet Isaiah (“In the end of days it shall come to pass that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and many nations shall flow unto it”). Reagan’s use of these words connected modern America to the humane Christian vision—the Puritan vision—the vision (ultimately) of the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish people—that created this nation.

VIII

Some agreed with Ronald Reagan and some disagreed. Some approved of him and some disapproved. Yet, to a remarkable extent, those who hated him are the ones who hate America—for many of the same religion-mocking reasons that made them ridicule Woodrow Wilson.

The great British economist John Maynard Keynes had this to say regarding Wilson’s behavior at the Paris Peace Conference: “Now it was that what I have called his theological or Presbyterian temperament became dangerous.” Wilson’s idealistic peace plan—the “Fourteen Points”—became, according to Keynes, “a document for gloss and interpretation and for all the intellectual apparatus of self-deception, by which, I daresay, the President’s forefathers had persuaded themselves that the course they thought it necessary to take was consistent with every syllable of the Pentateuch.”

The British diplomat Harold Nicholson concurred. He described Wilson as “the descendant of Covenanters, the inheritor of a more immediate Presbyterian tradition. That spiritual arrogance which seems inseparable from the harder forms of religion had eaten deep into his soul.”

The same type of accusation would be directed at Ronald Reagan. On the occasion of his “evil empire” speech, for example, the columnist Mary McGrory called Reagan’s denunciation of the Soviet Union “a marvelous parody of a revivalist minister.” Another journalist, Colman McCarthy, wrote that Reagan had descended “to the level of Ayatollah Khomeini”—to the level, that is, of an enemy of mankind who uses religion to do evil.

That Americanism is the successor of Puritanism is crucial to anti-Americanism. In the 18th century, anti-Americans were conservative, monarchist anti-Puritans. (Boswell reports Samuel Johnson’s announcement that “I am willing to love all mankind, except an American.”) In the 19th century, European elites became increasingly hostile to Christianity—which inevitably entailed hostility to America. In modern times, anti-Americanism is closely associated with anti-Christianism and anti-Semitism.²

Anti-Americans are still fascinated and enraged by Americans’ bizarre tendency to believe in God. In the months before the Iraq war in spring 2003, a Norwegian demonstrator waved a placard reading, “Will Bush Go to Hell?” An expatriate American wrote recently (for the FrontPage website) of being instructed by Londoners that “the United States is one giant fundamentalist Christian nation peopled by raging Bible-thumpers on every street”; that America is “running wild with religious extremism that threatens the world far more than bin Laden.”

And we needn’t go to Norway or Britain to find angry denunciations of President Bush and the Americans who support him in religion-mocking terms. The President’s faith, said one prominent American politician in September 2004, is “the American version of the same fundamentalist impulse that we see in Saudi Arabia, in Kashmir, and in many religions around the world.”

The speaker was former Vice President Al Gore. His comments were offensive and false. Today’s radical Islam is a religion of death, a religion that rejoices in slaughter. The radical Christianity known as Puritanism insisted on choosing life. Americanism does, too.

Puritans took to heart these famous words from the Hebrew Bible: “I have set before you this day life and death, blessing and curse: therefore choose life and live, you and your children” (Deuteronomy 30:19). On board the Arabella, John Winthrop closed his famous meditation of 1630 by citing that verse from Deuteronomy, centering his words on the page for emphasis:

Therefore let us choose life

that wee, and our Seede,

may live; by obeying his

voice, and cleaveing to him,

for hee is our life, and

our prosperity.

No Saudi fanatic, no Kashmiri fanatic could have written those words. John Winthrop was a founder of this nation; we are his heirs; and we ought to thank God that we have inherited his humanitarian decency along with his radical, God-fearing Americanism.

DAVID GELERNTER is a professor of computer science at Yale and the author of Machine Beauty, Drawing Life, 1939, and other books. His novella, “Swan House,” appeared in our July-August 2004 issue; “Judaism Beyond Words,” a five-part series, was published in 2002 and 2003. The present article, in different form, was given as a lecture sponsored by Susan and Roger Hertog in New York in October of last year.

1 One day, it seems to me, there will be a Thanksgiving Haggadah for Americans to recite at the national holiday Lincoln proclaimed. I have in mind an actual document telling the story of Puritan sufferings in England; of America’s birth; of the bloody Civil War struggle to realize the creed’s promises; of repeated re-enactments of the Exodus that make up America’s history—interspersed with passages from the English Bible. This is a project I’m at work on myself.

2 It has been many centuries since Christians in the West have been routine objects of organized hatred; they do not even have a word for it. But they had better find one.

from Newsweek, 2008-Oct-31, by Christian Caryl:

Long Live U.S. Imperialism
The financial crisis may seem to spell the end of American military hegemony, but the world still needs a cop.

A few weeks ago, as the U.S. financial crisis was causing ripples of anxiety throughout world markets, I was on the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS George Washington as it sailed into the Japanese port it will be calling home for the next few years. As the immense ship pirouetted around its axis in the middle of Yokosuka Harbor before backing up to its berth, it occurred to me that there are few manifestations of American power more awe-inspiring than an aircraft carrier. I've seen many other examples of America's military reach—from Kosovo to Central Asia, Guam to Iraq—but the George Washington takes the cake. It has 5,200 members on board, and its galleys serve 18,000 meals a day. It is home to an entire Navy air wing of 60 to 70 planes altogether. It's as tall as a 24-story building. And thanks to its nuclear reactors, it can stay out at sea, well, pretty much forever.

Conventional wisdom has it that the George Washington is soon to become an empty symbol. According to everyone from Hamas to Maureen Dowd of The New York Times, the American Empire is over. The era of U.S. hegemony is done for, finito. The reason is simple enough: the financial and economic crisis is already tipping the United States into recession. The huge amounts of money now being spent on reviving the banking system will crimp America's leading role in the world. Whoever the next president is, he'll find it hard to push-through dramatic tax increases; and without additional revenue, the already huge U.S. budget deficit can only get bigger. Aircraft carriers like the George Washington cost $4.5 billion a pop, and keeping them afloat isn't much cheaper. In 2007, the Department of Defense budget was about $440 billion—and that didn't include additional funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which add more to the bill. Surely the sheer lack of cash will end up restraining Washington's ambitions to remake the world.

There's just one problem with this thesis: The United States was short on cash long before this latest crisis hit, but that didn't stop it from continuing to build up the world's most formidable military. (According to one estimate, the U.S. accounted for 47 percent of the world's defense spending in 2003.) Many people may not have noticed, but for the past few years the United States has paid for its policies by borrowing money from other countries—primarily Japan, China, and other East Asian economic giants who have America buy their stuff by loading themselves down with U.S. Treasury debt. This is something that those neo-conservative theoreticians who rejoiced at America's new spirit of foreign policy activism after 9/11 didn't like to talk about much. It's also one of many reasons why the 21st century usually turns out to be more complicated than talk of 19th-century statecraft and balance of power politics would allow. Today's great powers are economically linked in all sorts of ways that make big wars a lot less likely.

So does that mean that the military factor is irrelevant in today's globalized world? Not at all. Let's go back to the USS George Washington. Since it arrived in Japan this September, it's the only one of the U.S. Navy's 11 carriers to be permanently stationed ("homeported") in a foreign country. Why is that? Just take a look at the map. The George Washington is the biggest ship of the 50-some-odd vessels that make up America's Seventh Fleet, whose area of responsibility extends from the western Pacific to the Indian Ocean. That includes, for example, the Strait of Malacca. Every year a quarter of the world's oil sails through that narrow chokepoint from its source in the Persian Gulf to the economies of East Asia—one of the world's three major economic centers of gravity, along with the United States and the European Union.

The problem with East Asia, though, is that none of its countries trust each other. If, let us say, the Seventh Fleet were to evaporate tomorrow, China would suddenly get very nervous about protecting what strategists call its "sea-line of communications." Four-fifths of China's entire supply of oil comes through the Strait of Malacca. Were China to beef up its military presence there, though, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan—all dependent on the same oil—would immediately have to confront similar concerns. And because China hardly offers a model of transparent government, they would find themselves having to do a lot of guessing. Unpredictability is a very dangerous thing when the vital national interests of states are involved. Just to make it more interesting, China, for its part, has good historical reasons to worry about the motives of Japan, while South Korea is intensely paranoid about both Japan and China. Like it or not, the Seventh Fleet is a powerful insurance policy that ensures more or less stable rules of the game.

The same principle applies around the world. Just to cite one example, the Balkan Wars of the 1990s happened in the European Union's backyard, but they ended only when the United States—belatedly and reluctantly—applied its military leverage. It's entirely true that, as my colleague Fareed Zakaria has argued, America's pseudo-imperial role is being diluted as more and more countries embrace their own forms of market-oriented democracy, which helps them to build confidence in each other. That's a good thing and undoubtedly serves the cause of general stability. And I readily concede that America's intense belief in the rightness of its own system sometimes tempts it into destabilizing adventures. Yet, on balance, the world would still be a much more dangerous place without America around. In a world of intensifying competition for natural resources, trust is still the rarest commodity of all. U.S. influence will undoubtedly wane as more and more countries build confidence in each other. But that's going to take a long time.

No question about it, America is overstretched. As economic turbulence hits home, U.S. voters are already less inclined to pay for overseas adventures. Yet to an extent, they don't have much choice. For the reasons I've described above, the world will probably need someone to play the role of arbiter, enforcer, hegemon—call it what you will—for a long while to come. ("Hegemony," by the way, is a Greek word that means "leadership.") Americans may not want to play that role, and the rest of the world doesn't always like the United States when it does. Yet I don't see anyone around who's ready to take its place. The European Union? It can't even forge a common foreign policy, much less a strategy for regional security and defense. China? Many of its neighbors are unlikely to be enthusiastic. Russia? Give me a break.

Both McCain and Obama have talked about the greater need for cooperation with U.S. allies and placed far less emphasis on Bush-style unilateralism. Both have talked about overarching challenges that unite the international community. And there's certainly a lot of work to be done in all these respects. But I have a feeling that someone, somehow, is going to go on paying for the Seventh Fleet.

from the New York Post, 2008-Nov-3, by Ralph Peters:

America's Burden
Next Prez Will Shape World

WE'RE condemned to lead.

No matter which presidential candidate we choose tomorrow, his decisions to act or not to act will determine not only the safety of our country but the future of the world.

Allies and non-aligned states kick and complain, but expect us to make their boo-boos go away. Ignore the nonsense about America's (oft-predicted and yet to be witnessed) decline: We remain the indispensable power.

When we act, we'll be called a bully. When we fail to act, we'll be mocked as weak. No president can enduringly please foreign powers and populations. Our might - which remains unparalleled - was resented, is resented and will be resented. That's human nature.

Nor will we ever have the luxury of withdrawing from the world. If we tried, the world would simply come to us - as it did on 9/11. It's always better to act abroad than to wait to be acted upon at home. And we'll always be stuck with the dirty jobs - our international coworkers just want to collect their disability checks.

Consider the failures of the "world community" in cases when a strained Bush administration shrugged off a leadership role: As an endless civil war in Congo killed millions, the United Nations sent a few thousand military welfare recipients with pea-shooters. Rape and slaughter drag on as you read.

Ditto for Darfur. Zimbabwe starves as a tyrant fakes negotiations (the opium of the chattering classes). Russia invades its neighbors, murders dissidents and sells its newest weapons to rogue regimes. China commits ecogenocide against its own people. (Our allies prefer to criticize the United States.) Iran yearns for a nuclear Armageddon. Peace in Lebanon? Baloney.

The greatest danger to the United States and the world isn't from a president who does too much, but from one who does too little - or one who believes that words substitute for deeds. There are times when we must act, and damn the torpedoes.

For our part, we, the people, must accept that we'll never be loved by each last Syrian secret policeman. Jealousy is far too powerful an emotion. If we expect thanks, we'll always be disappointed. We must back our presidents when they do what is right, even if the world does not applaud.

For all that, we're not nearly as "hated" as our Left would have you believe. Anti-Americanism was far worse in the 1950s and '60s than over the past eight years. The 1970s seethed with Yankee-go-home sentiments (as I saw first-hand). And American power was supposed to be finished at the end of the Vietnam War. It's just that today's irresponsible media amplify every negative event.

Convincing themselves that President Bush spoiled a fairy tale, American leftists forget how gruesome fairy tales really are. When no one takes on the wicked witch, she wins. Sometimes, she wins anyway.

The recent efforts of President Nicolas Sarkozy of France to galvanize the European Union to fill the current leadership vacuum only underscore Washington's indispensability. The boldest leader the old world has produced since Margaret Thatcher could not unite Europeans to buttress their economies in this crisis - nor could he convince the European Union to muster a few thousand troops to save a few million lives in Congo.

To whom should the world then turn? To the Russians? The Chinese? The Taliban?

An American president too anxious to please the world is bound to do it great harm. Should the American electorate choose Sen. Barack Obama tomorrow, his first challenge will be deciding which groups of his supporters he'll disappoint first. The struggle against Islamist fanaticism will continue to demand costly, long-term commitments - it isn't a problem we can solve by sending in the San Francisco Police Department.

Without our military leadership, our allies would restrict themselves to defense in the global terror emergency. And you can't win on defense. Nature may abhor a vacuum, but terrorists love one. The demand for disciplined, capable men and women in American uniforms is only going to increase (while economic problems and campaign promises will threaten defense budgets). In this horribly troubled world, our troops remain the ultimate foreign aid. Only they protect us from global darkness.

All the conflict-resolution theories in the world aren't worth a single rifleman with an American flag on his sleeve. Aggressors won't be stopped with earnest petitions, and terrorists don't cower at repartee. As Jimmy Carter learned so very painfully, good will is no substitute for strength.

The political campaigns are ending. Even Sen. Joe "Backfire" Biden recently admitted that our new president soon would need to do the right thing as he faces his first crisis. And the right thing may not be popular at home or abroad.

Ralph Peters' latest book is "Looking for Trouble: Adventures in a Broken World."

from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-Nov-5, by Jeffrey Scott Shapiro:

The Treatment of Bush Has Been a Disgrace
What must our enemies be thinking?

Earlier this year, 12,000 people in San Francisco signed a petition in support of a proposition on a local ballot to rename an Oceanside sewage plant after George W. Bush. The proposition is only one example of the classless disrespect many Americans have shown the president.

According to recent Gallup polls, the president's average approval rating is below 30% -- down from his 90% approval in the wake of 9/11. Mr. Bush has endured relentless attacks from the left while facing abandonment from the right.

This is the price Mr. Bush is paying for trying to work with both Democrats and Republicans. During his 2004 victory speech, the president reached out to voters who supported his opponent, John Kerry, and said, "Today, I want to speak to every person who voted for my opponent. To make this nation stronger and better, I will need your support, and I will work to earn it. I will do all I can do to deserve your trust."

Those bipartisan efforts have been met with crushing resistance from both political parties.

The president's original Supreme Court choice of Harriet Miers alarmed Republicans, while his final nomination of Samuel Alito angered Democrats. His solutions to reform the immigration system alienated traditional conservatives, while his refusal to retreat in Iraq has enraged liberals who have unrealistic expectations about the challenges we face there.

It seems that no matter what Mr. Bush does, he is blamed for everything. He remains despised by the left while continuously disappointing the right.

Yet it should seem obvious that many of our country's current problems either existed long before Mr. Bush ever came to office, or are beyond his control. Perhaps if Americans stopped being so divisive, and congressional leaders came together to work with the president on some of these problems, he would actually have had a fighting chance of solving them.

Like the president said in his 2004 victory speech, "We have one country, one Constitution and one future that binds us. And when we come together and work together, there is no limit to the greatness of America."

To be sure, Mr. Bush is not completely alone. His low approval ratings put him in the good company of former Democratic President Harry S. Truman, whose own approval rating sank to 22% shortly before he left office. Despite Mr. Truman's low numbers, a 2005 Wall Street Journal poll found that he was ranked the seventh most popular president in history.

Just as Americans have gained perspective on how challenging Truman's presidency was in the wake of World War II, our country will recognize the hardship President Bush faced these past eight years -- and how extraordinary it was that he accomplished what he did in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

The treatment President Bush has received from this country is nothing less than a disgrace. The attacks launched against him have been cruel and slanderous, proving to the world what little character and resolve we have. The president is not to blame for all these problems. He never lost faith in America or her people, and has tried his hardest to continue leading our nation during a very difficult time.

Our failure to stand by the one person who continued to stand by us has not gone unnoticed by our enemies. It has shown to the world how disloyal we can be when our president needed loyalty -- a shameful display of arrogance and weakness that will haunt this nation long after Mr. Bush has left the White House.

Mr. Shapiro is an investigative reporter and lawyer who previously interned with John F. Kerry's legal team during the presidential election in 2004.

from City Journal, 2008-Summer, by Guy Sorman:

Economics Does Not Lie
The dismal science is at last a science—and the world is the beneficiary.

Though economics as a discipline arose in Great Britain and France at the end of the eighteenth century, it has taken two centuries to reach the threshold of scientific rationality. Previously, intuition, opinion, and conviction enjoyed equal status in economic thought; theories were vague, often unverifiable. Not so long ago, one could teach economics at prestigious universities without using equations and certainly without the complex algorithms, precise (though not infallible) mathematical models, and computers integral to the field today.

No wonder bad economic policies ravaged entire nations during the twentieth century, producing more victims than any epidemic did. The collectivization of land in Russia during the twenties, in China during the fifties, and in Tanzania during the sixties starved hundreds of millions of peasants. The uncontrolled printing of currency destabilized Weimar Germany, facilitating the rise of Nazism. The nationalization of enterprises and the expulsion of entrepreneurs ruined Argentina during the forties and Egypt a decade later. India’s License Raj—requiring businesses to obtain a host of permits before opening their doors—froze the country’s economic development for decades, keeping millions impoverished.

On an even larger scale, the century witnessed a war between two economic systems: state socialism and market capitalism. In the socialist system, property was public, competition forbidden, and production planned. In the market system, property was private, competition encouraged, and production determined by entrepreneurs. Faced with the choice of which system was superior, nations hesitated and economists remained divided.

The state of affairs today is entirely different. When the Soviet Union crumbled, the socialist model that it embodied imploded, too—or, more precisely, the Soviet Union fell because the socialist economic system proved unworkable. Now only one economic system exists: market capitalism. Virtually everywhere, the public sector has given ground to privatization; currency has escaped state control, to be governed by independent central banks; competition has taken wing, thanks to the deregulation of markets and the opening of borders; taxation has become less progressive, so as to encourage entrepreneurs and create jobs.

The results have been breathtaking. Opening economies and promoting trade have helped reconstruct Eastern Europe after 1990 and lifted 800 million people, many of them in China, Brazil, and a now-license-free India, out of poverty. Even in Africa and the Arab Middle East, nations that have embraced capitalism have begun to escape from the terrible underdevelopment that has long plagued them.

Behind all this unprecedented growth is not only the collapse of state socialism but also a scientific revolution in economics, as yet dimly understood by the public but increasingly embraced by policymakers around the globe. The revolution began during the sixties and has finally brought economists to a broad, well-founded consensus about what constitutes good policy. No longer does economics lie; no longer would Baudelaire be able to write that “economics is a horror.” For the mass of mankind, on the contrary, it has become a source of hope.

If economics is finally a science, what, exactly, does it teach? With the help of Columbia University economist Pierre-André Chiappori, I have synthesized its findings into ten propositions. Almost all top economists—those who are recognized as such by their peers and who publish in the leading scientific journals—would endorse them (the exceptions are those like Joseph Stiglitz and Jeffrey Sachs, whose public pronouncements are more political than scientific). The more the public understands and embraces these propositions, the more prosperous the world will become.

1. The market economy is the most efficient of all economic systems. Adam Smith’s eighteenth-century take on market efficiency was metaphorical, nearly metaphysical: he said that it seemed to be guided by an “invisible hand” that produced outcomes beneficial to society. In the mid-twentieth century, Friedrich Hayek observed that no central-planning institution could possibly manage the huge quantity of information that the market organized automatically and spontaneously by pricing resources. More recently, Berkeley economist Gérard Debreu has used computers to demonstrate that the spontaneous order that Hayek postulated does indeed exist in a mathematical world.

Market mechanisms are so efficient that they can manage threats to long-term development, such as the exhaustion of natural resources, far better than states can. If global warming does become a real problem, for example, price mechanisms or a carbon tax would easily encourage a more efficient use of energy. It’s worth recalling that during the 1970s, when an excess of sulfur in the atmosphere was sometimes producing acid rain harmful to North American forests, the U.S. government didn’t ban sulfur emissions outright. Instead, it created a market in which companies could buy and sell the right to pollute above a certain amount or “cap,” pricing emissions so that factories had a financial incentive to turn to non-sulfurous technology, which was already available. Over time, companies shifted to cleaner technology and the acid rain disappeared—to the dismay of many green activists, who tend to prefer doomsday discourse to efficient market solutions.

Some economists favor free markets not only for their efficiency in allocating resources but for political reasons as well, fearing that central planning or excessive bureaucratic controls could, in the guise of rationality, stifle individual freedom. Markets leave us “free to choose,” wrote Rose and Milton Friedman, and society is the better off for it—though not all economists embrace their libertarian political vision.

2. Free trade helps economic development. As Smith observed when his native Scotland began to benefit from free trade, it is through access to the world market that poor nations become rich. They never do so by trying to become self-sufficient. Free trade also makes rich countries richer, economists agree. By importing less expensive goods made in low-wage nations like China, wealthy nations effectively increase their own citizens’ income—and the main beneficiaries are poor and middle-class people, who can buy cheaper clothes, electronics, and myriad other goods. In addition, importing cheaper components—computer chips, say—lowers the cost of equipment in wealthier economies. In fact, economists have long understood the law of comparative advantage: whenever differences in the cost of producing goods exist between two countries, both will benefit from free trade, a mechanism that allocates their resources most effectively.

Free trade not only generates the greatest possible growth; it tends to distribute it widely, both within nations and among them. For evidence, consider the emergence of vast middle classes in all free-market societies, as well as the economic convergence among nations that have embraced capitalist economics. After less than 20 years of market-driven growth, Brazil, China, and India—whatever their injustices—are closer to the Western level of development than they were before that growth got under way.

This does not mean, as some observers fret or gleefully predict, that the United States is about to stop leading the world economically. Other nations may draw closer to it—Western Europe in 1950 had a per-capita income half that of the U.S.; now it’s 80 percent—but the American economy has remained the world’s most vigorous for more than a century because of its superior efficiency, demographic dynamism, and innovation (today, for example, the U.S. is the world leader in the hugely promising fields of nanotechnology and biotechnology). One might add that no globalization, with all its economic benefits, could take place without a global security framework to protect shipping from piracy and to contain border conflicts. Today the U.S. military provides that security, just as the British navy once did.

3. Good institutions help development. The research of Stanford University economist Avner Greif makes a forceful case for this proposition. Back in the twelfth century, he notes, Genoese merchants competed fiercely with the Maghrebis, Jews from northwest Africa. The Maghrebis relied entirely on family and tribal connections to raise funds for their business ventures; powerful as they were, this tribalism limited their resources and hence the reach of their commercial expeditions. The Genoese, on the other hand, built institutions to bolster good economic practices, such as private contracts, insurance firms, bills of trade, bank credit, courts of appeal to handle disputes, and a financial market, from which they could raise capital to finance far-flung journeys. The Genoese also founded a city-state, probably the first state to follow the rule of law. Over time, they won the competition and the Maghrebis faded away. Familial trust proved no match for reliable, neutral institutions.

All economists acknowledge today that economic development requires an independent and reliable legal system to enforce contracts and ensure fair competition. Institutions that improve market transparency are particularly important, since they counter what Nobel laureate George Akerlof calls “asymmetrical information.” Economic actors don’t all have the same information at their disposal. Without institutions to improve transparency, insiders can easily manipulate markets, making outside investors lose faith in the system and withdraw their funds. This is why the government bans insider trading.

In complex free economies, private informational intermediaries, such as ratings agencies, also spring up, helping economic actors make relatively well-informed decisions in the labyrinths of global finance. These intermediaries aren’t perfect, of course, as financial crises like the Enron collapse in 2001 or the current mortgage meltdown show: investors, relying on them, believed for far too long that Enron was a healthy company and that bonds backed by subprime mortgages carried virtually no risk. But in general, the intermediaries improve the operation of modern markets.

Some argue that a new field of research, neuroeconomics, inaugurated by the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel in economics in 2002 for his work, demonstrates the need for greater activity by the most powerful institution of all: government. This field shows that economic actors tend to behave both rationally and irrationally. Laboratory work has demonstrated that one part of our brain bears blame for many of our economically mistaken short-term decisions, while another is responsible for decisions that make economic sense, usually taking a longer view. Just as the state protects us from Akerlof’s asymmetry by forbidding insider trading, should it also protect us from our own irrational impulses? To a certain extent, it already does—for example, by giving borrowers a grace period in which they may decide not to take out a loan after all. Jean Tirole, a French expert on the subject, suggests that knowing about our irrationality should compel the private sector to inform consumers better about the consequences of their actions—again, the mortgage crisis comes to mind—but that it would be preposterous to use behavioral economics to justify restoring excessive state regulations. After all, the state is no more rational than the individual, and its actions can have enormously destructive consequences. Neuroeconomics should encourage us to make markets more transparent, not more regulated.

There is less agreement among economists on which other institutions are essential, and less still on how to create them. Democracy, for example: its relation to economic development resists any unequivocal description, as each seems to evolve on its own plane. (There are cases of capitalism without democracy—such as China—but none of democracy without market capitalism.) Analyses also diverge, but these days only marginally, on the roles of culture, history, and religion in creating the institutional conditions for prosperity. Until the sixties, many sociologists, embracing Max Weber’s cultural determinism, believed that culture was the cornerstone of economic development. According to Weber, Confucianism was incompatible with economic growth. But the rise of South Korea and Taiwan has put paid to that theory. Some today say that Islam impedes development, but both Turkey and Indonesia are growing at a fast clip.

4. The best measure of a good economy is its growth. Unlike other proposed measures (happiness, for example), economic growth can be determined objectively: it is the rate of increase in a country’s gross domestic product (GDP) over a given period. Yes, some economists believe it necessary to temper that purely quantitative measurement with such factors as quality of life and efficient management of resources, and there is wide agreement that GDP omits important aspects of economic activity, such as home production. But all economists agree on growth’s importance: while a high rate of growth doesn’t solve every problem, its absence doesn’t solve any.

Economic science also distinguishes between long- and short-term growth. As Nobel Prize winner Edward Prescott has shown, long-term growth—in the West, roughly 2 percent per capita per year over the last century—results from capital accumulation and, above all, technological innovation, which makes labor ever more productive. States have few ways to promote this long-term trend, but those they do have are key: improving the rule of law, securing property, developing infrastructure, and enhancing the quality of education.

Governments also have the capacity to intervene and create seemingly positive outcomes when it comes to short-term growth, which is subject to incessant fluctuation. Yet the eventual effects of such interventions, which are more likely to have political than economic motivations, are always costly and can ultimately slow growth. The U.S. government’s recent rebate checks are a good example. While taxpayers have a few more dollars in their pockets right now, perhaps giving the economy a brief boost, the checks add more than $100 billion to the nation’s debt and could push inflation higher, adding to long-term economic woes.

The Anglo-Bengali economist Amartya Sen, another Nobel laureate, has distinguished—usefully, to my mind—growth that takes place under democratic conditions from that which occurs under tyranny. In China’s case, the Communist Party channels the country’s newly generated wealth less to benefit the people than to build a powerful state with imperial ambitions (see “The Empire of Lies,” Spring 2007). But in a democracy like India, where popular demands cannot be ignored, the wealth trickles down to the people, improving the daily lives of most Indians. Over time, Sen argues, democratic institutions provide a more stable basis for development, since they are predictable, whereas authoritarian rule is not.

5. Creative destruction is the engine of economic growth. As the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter famously argued, capitalism unleashes a “gale” of innovation that “incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.” This ceaseless replacement of the old with the new—driven by technical innovation and entrepreneurialism, itself encouraged by good economic policies—brings prosperity, though those displaced by the process, who find their jobs made redundant, can understandably object to it.

6. Monetary stability, too, is necessary for growth; inflation is always harmful. No reputable economist today would deny that a stable money supply encourages investment and bolsters social cohesion, since it helps people save for the future. Inflation, on the other hand—always caused by governments’ spending more money than they have, and then printing extra money or borrowing to finance the expenditure—destroys entrepreneurship, slows growth, and generates social inequality. It is an incentive not for investment but for speculation: those who can afford to will buy goods, wait, and then resell them at higher prices, a process that creates nothing at home—least of all, new jobs. Those with less money fall victim as wages and pensions lag behind prices. It’s no surprise that hyperinflation often leads to revolution. Milton Friedman’s advocacy of monetary stability, “monetarism,” considered revolutionary when first proposed in the sixties, is now common wisdom.

The best way to restrain inflation, economists now understand, is to transfer money management from governments to independent central banks like the Federal Reserve and the European Bank, which—monetarists all, these days—try to create only enough credit to provide liquidity and prevent the financial panic that often accompanies credit crunches, resisting vocal politicians who believe that printing more would generate new jobs. Even in a slowdown, the banks seek to keep money stable in order to stimulate investment.

7. Unemployment among unskilled workers is largely determined by how much labor costs. So regulating the labor market (with a minimum wage, for example) adds to labor costs, economists acknowledge, and increases unemployment. No solution to excessive unemployment is conceivable without reducing such regulations. The rigidity of European labor markets—in France, for example, firing an employee requires paying him a large indemnity and obtaining a judge’s consent—is likely one reason that the unemployment rate in European countries remains much higher than in the United States.

8. While the welfare state is necessary in some form, it isn’t always effective. Economists recognize that government assistance always produces incentives that may affect, for good or ill, recipients’ behavior and well-being. The key is to avoid making individuals and groups dependent on state assistance, locking them into sustained semi-poverty. This economic truth is now better accepted in the U.S., where welfare reform triumphed in the nineties, than in statist Western Europe. Central and Eastern European countries, because of their socialist experience, are more attuned to the dangers of welfare dependency.

9. The creation of complex financial markets has brought about economic progress. These sophisticated instruments, like derivatives, have facilitated risk-sharing on a global scale, boosting innovation and hence prosperity. There is no economic rationale for distinguishing this “virtual capitalism” from “real capitalism”: nothing real has ever been produced without first being financed. The new instruments aren’t free of problems, as seen in the subprime failure. Financial enterprises are enterprises like any other—they think up new ideas, try them out, and sometimes crash. But even in a time of financial crisis, the global benefits of the new financial markets have surpassed their costs. The debate among economists today concerns only the degree of transparency and regulation necessary for their effective functioning.

10. Competition is usually desirable. Beyond that, there is no unanimity: some economists believe that under certain circumstances, a private or public monopoly may contribute to innovation or progress. What kind of protection to extend to intellectual property is also disputed. Economists remember that a British patent protected James Watt’s steam engine from competitors from 1769 through 1790, stalling the Industrial Revolution. To what extent do patents for computer software or drugs slow or enhance progress? The most creative period in Silicon Valley’s history took place before the patenting of software, it’s worth noting. Stanford University’s Paul Romer, the leading U.S. economist in this field, suggests that the answer may be “soft property”—short-term property rights that would make research worthwhile without hindering competition unduly.

These ten propositions should guide all economic policymaking, and to an increasing degree they do, worldwide. Does this mean that we’ve reached an “end of history” in economics, to borrow a phrase made famous by Francis Fukuyama, by way of Hegel and Alexandre Kojève? In one sense, perhaps: economic science will never rediscover the virtues of hyperinflation or industrial nationalization. Some critics charge that economics is not a science in the way that, say, physics is—after all, economists can’t make precise predictions, as an exact science can. But this isn’t quite true: economists can predict that certain bad policies will lead necessarily to catastrophe. If economics, a human science, lacks the precision of physics, a natural one, it advances the same way—evolving from one theory to the next, each approximating a reality that eludes our complete grasp.

But if we understand the end of history in economics to mean the complete realization, in practice, of the findings of economic science, then it has not arrived. The free market still has enemies and critics, ranging from those who dream of a world more just, more spiritual, or transformed in some other utopian way to those who simply seek to defend their own narrow material interests to those legitimate researchers who try to look beyond the market. And we must not overlook ignorance: economic principles aren’t widely understood among the public or even among lawmakers. The indisputable fact that the world has experienced a long period of growth as global trade has expanded remains strangely unknown. Doubtless the news is too good.

In the future, the threat to the beneficent influence of economic science will come less from tired socialist revolutionary rhetoric than from new dangers, such as terrorism and epidemics. Terrorism is, in part, a consequence of globalization: young, uprooted people unable to adapt to a dynamic, capitalist world invent new global ideologies and seek to put them into practice with global weapons. Globalization can also accelerate the proliferation of deadly illnesses. The AIDS epidemic was the first global attack by a mutant virus; SARS, avian flu, or some unknown illness could follow, surging from uncontrolled Chinese, Indian, or African backwaters and following the massive migrations of a global economy. Terror and epidemics could both unleash political upheavals that would undermine the market order itself.

Then there’s the fear of ecological disturbances, which could result in incoherent policies that wouldn’t necessarily diminish risks to the environment but might prevent development and thus harm the interests of the poorest peoples. One example: prohibiting genetically modified organisms—which, evidence suggests, pose no threat whatsoever to the environment—will hurt the productivity of farming at a time when global demand for food will grow.

Another danger is inseparable from the very nature of economic systems: growth is cyclical. Despite the present anxiety about a recession, the time of major global economic crises seems to have passed, in large part because the progress of economic science allows governments and economic actors to understand crises and manage them better. The Great Depression probably couldn’t happen again, since the political mistakes that aggravated it, such as protectionism and the drying-up of credit, aren’t as likely to be repeated in the future: the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, and the Bank of England have demonstrated as much in the current mortgage crisis by supporting the banking system. But smaller crises are inevitable, bound up as they are with innovation—and as the new drives out the old in creative destruction and forces sometimes painful adaptations, we find these upheavals harder to bear as we grow more accustomed to perpetual growth.

Similarly, free trade means that some people will lose their jobs, as we all know; foreign competition can wipe out entire companies or even entire industries. We all know it because, as Friedman argued, layoffs and closings get disproportionate media coverage. Meanwhile, nobody talks about the ongoing reduction in prices for consumers and investors, scattered among a huge number of beneficiaries. That helps explain why politicians are prone to deride free trade and voters are too often ready to agree.

To help the losers in the free market, government shouldn’t back away from either free trade or creative destruction and start subsidizing doomed and obsolete activities, a protectionist course that guarantees only economic decline. Instead, it should help the losers change jobs more easily by improving educational opportunities and by facilitating new investment, which creates more employment. An essential task of democratic governments and opinion makers when confronting economic cycles and political pressure is to secure and protect the system that has served humanity so well, and not to change it for the worse on the pretext of its imperfection.

Still, this lesson is doubtless one of the hardest to translate into language that public opinion will accept. The best of all possible economic systems is indeed imperfect. Whatever the truths uncovered by economic science, the free market is finally only the reflection of human nature, itself hardly perfectible.

Guy Sorman, a City Journal contributing editor, is the author of numerous books, most recently The Empire of Lies: The Truth About China in the Twenty-First Century. His article was translated from the French by Ralph C. Hancock.

from the Washington Times, 2008-Oct-5, by Victor Davis Hanson:

HANSON: Global nervous breakdown?

Ancient thinkers from Thucydides to Cicero insisted money was the real source of military power and national influence. We have been reminded of that classical wisdom these last three weeks.

In a manner not seen since the Great Depression, Wall Street went into panic mode from too many bad debts. The symbolic pillars of American monetary strength for years - AIG, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Shearson-Lehman and Washington Mutual - in a matter of hours either went broke, were absorbed or were reconstituted. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac collapsed like the house of cards they were.

Even though the U.S. government rushed to restore trust, hundreds of billions of dollars in paper assets simply vanished. Friends and enemies abroad were unsure whether the irregular American heartbeat was a major coronary or a mere cardiac murmur. How strong really was the world's greatest economy? Was this panic the tab for years of borrowing abroad for out-of-control consumer spending? Had America finally gone too far enriching dictators by buying energy that it either could not or would not produce itself? Had the chickens of lavishing rewards on Wall Street and Washington speculators rather than Main Street producers finally come home to roost?

Allies trust the United States is the ultimate guarantor of free communication and commerce - and they want immediate reassurance that their old America will still be there. In contrast, opportunistic predators - such as rogue oil-rich regimes - suddenly sniff new openings.

We've seen the connection between American economic crisis and world upheaval before. In the 1930s, the United States and its democratic allies, in the midst of financial collapse, disarmed and largely withdrew from foreign affairs. That isolation allowed totalitarian regimes in Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia to swallow their smaller neighbors and replace the rule of law with that of the jungle. World War II followed.

During the stagflation and economic malaise of the Jimmy Carter years, the Russians invaded Afghanistan, the Iranians stormed our embassy in Tehran, the communists sought to spread influence in Central America and a holocaust raged unchecked in Cambodia.

It was no surprise that an emboldened Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad once again last week called for elimination of Israel. He's done so several times before. But rarely has he felt brazen enough to blame world financial problems on the Jews in general rather than on just Israelis. And he spouted his Hitlerian hatred in front of the United Nations General Assembly - in New York, just a few blocks away from the Ground Zero of the Wall Street meltdown.

Flush with petrodollar cash, a cocky Iran thinks our government will be so sidetracked borrowing money for Wall Street that disheartened taxpayers won't care to stop Tehran from going nuclear.

At about the same time, a Russian flotilla was off Venezuela to announce new cooperation with the loud anti-American Hugo Chavez and his fellow Latin American communists. The move was a poke in the eye at the Monroe Doctrine - and a warning that from now on the oil-rich Russians will boldly support dictatorships in our hemisphere as much as we encourage democratic Georgia and Ukraine in theirs. Mr. Chavez himself called for a revolution in the United States to replace our "capitalist" Constitution.

The lunatics running North Korea predictably smelled blood as well. So it announced it was reversing course and reprocessing fuel rods to restart its supposedly dismantled nuclear weapons program.

Meanwhile, some shell-shocked American bankers looked to our "friend" China, which holds billions in American government securities, for emergency loans. But the Chinese - basking in their successful hosting of the Olympics, their first foray into outer space, and a massive rearmament - showed no interest in sending cash to reeling Wall Street firms.

During this Wall Street arrhythmia, Islamic suicide bombers attacked the U.S. Embassy in Yemen and the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan. Suspected Islamic terrorists were caught boarding a Dutch airliner in Germany. And suicide bombers were busy again in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The natural order of the world is chaos, not calm. Like it or not, for over a half-century the United States alone restrained nuclear bullies, kept the sea lanes free from outlaws and corralled rogue nations. America alone could provide that deterrence because we produced a fourth of the world's goods and services, and became the richest country in the history of civilization.

But the bill for years of massive borrowing for oil, for imported consumer goods and for speculation has now has finally come due on Wall Street - and for the rest of us as well.

Should that heart of American financial power in New York falter - or even appear to falter - then eventually the sinews of the American military will likewise slacken. And then things could get ugly - real fast.

Victor Davis Hanson is a nationally syndicated columnist and a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

from the New York Times, 2008-Oct-20, by William Kristol:

Here the People Rule

According to the silver-penned Peggy Noonan, writing in The Wall Street Journal over the weekend, “In the end the Palin candidacy is a symptom and expression of a new vulgarization in American politics.”

Leave aside Noonan's negative judgment on Sarah Palin's candidacy, a judgment I don't share. Are we really seeing “a new vulgarization in American politics”? As opposed to the good old non-vulgar days?

Politics in a democracy are always “vulgar” — since democracy is rule by the “vulgus,” the common people, the crowd. Many conservatives have never been entirely comfortable with this rather important characteristic of democracy. Conservatives' hearts have always beaten a little faster when they read Horace's famous line: “Odi profanum vulgus et arceo.” “I hate the ignorant crowd and I keep them at a distance.”

But is the ignorant crowd really our problem today? Are populism and anti-intellectualism rampant in the land? Does the common man too thoroughly dominate our national life? I don't think so.

Last week, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press released its latest national survey, taken from Oct. 9 to 12. Americans are dissatisfied with the way things are going in the country and of course concerned about the economy. But, as Pew summarized, “there is little indication that the nation's financial crisis has triggered public panic or despair.”

In fact, “There is a broad public consensus regarding the causes of the current problems with financial institutions and markets: 79 percent say people taking on too much debt has contributed a lot to the crisis, while 72 percent say the same about banks making risky loans.”

This seems sensible. Indeed, as Sept. 11 did not result in a much-feared (by intellectuals) wave of popular Islamophobia or xenophobia, so the market crash has resulted in remarkably little popular hysteria or scapegoating.

And considering what has happened, the vulgar public on Main Street has been surprisingly forgiving of those well-educated types on Wall Street — the ones who devised and marketed the sophisticated financial instruments that have brought the financial system to the brink of collapse.

Most of the recent mistakes of American public policy, and most of the contemporary delusions of American public life, haven't come from an ignorant and excitable public. They've been produced by highly educated and sophisticated elites.

Needless to say, the public's not always right, and public opinion's not always responsible. But as publics go, the American public has a pretty good track record.

In the 1930s, the American people didn't fall — unlike so many of their supposed intellectual betters — for either fascism or Communism. Since World War II, the American people have resisted the temptations of isolationism and protectionism, and have turned their backs on a history of bigotry.

Now, the Pew poll I cited earlier also showed Barack Obama holding a 50 percent to 40 percent lead over John McCain in the race for the White House. You might think this data point poses a challenge to my encomium to the good sense of the American people.

It does. But it's hard to blame the public for preferring Obama at this stage — given the understandable desire to kick the Republicans out of the White House, and given the failure of the McCain campaign to make its case effectively. And some number of the public may change their minds in the final two weeks of the campaign, and may decide McCain-Palin offers a better kind of change — perhaps enough to give McCain-Palin a victory.

The media elites really hate that idea. Not just because so many of them prefer Obama. But because they like telling us what's going to happen. They're always annoyed when the people cross them up. Pundits spent all spring telling Hillary Clinton to give up in her contest against Obama — and the public kept on ignoring them and keeping her hopes alive.

Why do elites like to proclaim premature closure — not just in elections, but also in wars and in social struggles? Because it makes them the imperial arbiters, or at least the perspicacious announcers, of what history is going to bring. This puts the elite prognosticators ahead of the curve, ahead of the simple-minded people who might entertain the delusion that they still have a choice.

But as Gerald Ford said after assuming the presidency on Aug. 9, 1974, ”Here the people rule.”

One of those people is Joe Wurzelbacher, a k a Joe the Plumber. He's the latest ordinary American to do a star turn in our vulgar democratic circus. He seems like a sensible man to me.

And to Peggy Noonan, who wrote that Joe “in an extended cable interview Thursday made a better case for the Republican ticket than the Republican ticket has made.” At least McCain and Palin have had the good sense to embrace him. I join them in taking my stand with Joe the Plumber — in defiance of Horace the Poet.

from the Associated Press, 2008-Oct-25, by Adam Geller:

Ordinary Joes have mixed feelings on wealth

NEW YORK — The war of words waged by John McCain and Barack Obama for the votes of plumbers and other average Joes is a reminder of the nation's long-standing doubts about concentrated wealth — and its qualms about doing something about it.

Americans have voiced concerns about putting too much wealth in to too few hands since the country was founded, but the public's views also come with contradictions.

Now it's clearer than ever — thanks to Obama's much scrutinized talk about taxes with a certain Ohio voter and McCain's dogged criticism — that these mixed feelings about income inequality are a long way from being resolved.

"I think that when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody," Obama told the man — maybe you've heard of him — Joe the Plumber.

The remark may have sounded pretty innocuous. But McCain has lambasted his rival's words as sounding "a lot like socialism," and turned the criticism into a central theme of his campaign's final round. Obama's remarks, McCain says, are emblematic of a tax plan to confiscate wealth and give it to the poor that would make the IRS "into a giant welfare agency."

The comments of both presidential candidates touch nerves in American politics — longtime concern about too much concentration of wealth, but also about the role of government and the individual. More than two centuries after Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and other early leaders warned about the hazards of too much in the hands of too few, Americans have developed complex views on the intertwining issues.

A substantial majority of Americans say the rich don't pay their fair share of taxes, opinion polls show. A growing number say the U.S. is becoming a nation of haves and have-nots.

The public's concerns reflect a shifting dynamic in recent years, as an increasing share of the wealth has gone to people at the top of the income scale. The top tenth of U.S. households now earn an average of 11.2 times what those in the bottom tenth make, according to the Census Bureau. That's up from a ratio of 8.7 three decades ago. The wealthiest fifth of U.S. households now take in 50 percent of all income, up from 44 percent in 1977. The differences are even more pronounced in analyses of incomes for the top 1 percent of households.

"The income gap between the rich and the rest of the U.S. population has become so wide, and is growing so fast, that it might eventually threaten the stability of democratic capitalism itself," then-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said in 2005.

But Americans are divided on whether government should be heavily taxing the rich in order to benefit those with less.

"It's a complicated area to try to understand American attitudes," said Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of the Gallup Poll. "It's kind of like, in some instances, conflicting medical research ... There's no one answer."

A majority of Americans — 51 percent in a poll by Gallup this past April — said they support "heavy taxes" on the rich to redistribute wealth. That is significantly higher than when the same question was asked in 1939, at the tail end of the Great Depression, when 35 percent agreed.

But people's support for higher taxes on the wealthy are tempered by their own aspirations.

"Most Americans hope to some day be wealthy and as a result, the idea of kind of redistributing income is not as popular as (government policies resulting in) making a bigger pie so everybody does better off," said Dennis Jacobe, chief economist for Gallup.

The tension between those ideas runs through American politics in ways that don't always seem logical. Even many wealthy people support higher taxes on the rich. In a country that believes in itself as a place where anybody who works hard enough can make it, though, there's a certain wariness of taxes that might discourage hard work.

McCain's criticism of Obama's tax plan is "trying to go for this idea that, in the U.S., is much more popular than in other countries ... that you get ahead through your own efforts," said Bryan Caplan, author of "The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies," and an economics professor at George Mason University. "I think he's trying to tap into what is a distinctly American view."

That view is far from universal, but it does go way back. In fact, the debate over distribution of wealth has been going on since the U.S. was a brand new nation.

After years of being ruled by British royalty, the country's first political leaders argued that the U.S. must avoid creating its own aristocracy that would allow the wealthy to exert unfair power. But the party that touted itself as the true champions of economic equality was the Democratic-Republicans, led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.

"Of course, in actuality, many followers of Jefferson were also slaveholders and the greatest disparities in wealth concentration were right in front of their noses," said Robert E. Wright, who teaches economic and financial history at New York University's Stern School of Business.

Americans didn't face the first tax on personal income until 1861, when a Union government desperate for cash to fight the Civil War decided it had little choice. The tax was sold as a way of making sure the rich, most of whom who were not marching off to war, were bearing their fair share of responsibility, Wright said.

That tax — a flat assessment — survived until 1895, when it was declared unconstitutional.

The country's first experiments with income taxes were promoted as necessities, rather than as a way to shift wealth to where it was needed. Over time, economists came to embrace the concept of a progressive tax — one that levies higher rates in proportion to income — as a means of not just paying for government, but ensuring fairness.

And when the income tax was brought back with the passage of the 16th Amendment to the Constitution, the tax that was enacted was progressive. Rates began at 1 percent and rose to 7 percent for taxpayers with income above $500,000. Less than 1 percent of the population paid income tax at the time.

A 2003 survey of U.S. economists found most endorse policies resulting in redistribution of wealth. The strongest support came from economists who identified themselves as Democrats, said Daniel B. Klein, a co-author of the survey. But self-identified Republican economists were near neutral, offering only mild opposition to the concept.

Misgivings about wealth are pretty universal. For most of economic history, people viewed the total amount of wealth in society as finite and those with less viewed those with more as having gotten it by unfair means.

That view has shifted in modern economies, as people have embraced the idea that policies that lead to growth can improve all fortunes. Still, in much of the world, proposals to share wealth more fairly by means of higher taxes on the wealthy would win wide support.

But the U.S. is a young nation with a highly developed economy, giving rise to a uniquely American strain of thought. Those with less look at those with more and try to figure out how to catch up.

"Here we call it 'keeping up with the Joneses,'" Wright said.

Americans do strongly favor higher taxes on those with more, and back efforts to help those with less.

When Americans were polled by Gallup in April, 68 percent said they believe money and wealth should be distributed more fairly. In a survey in July, 49 percent said the U.S. has become a nation of haves and have-nots, up from 37 percent who felt the same way four years ago.

But a majority of Americans also say the government is doing too much and should instead be leaving more to individuals and businesses. And when asked how government should fix the economy, people overwhelmingly said they favor policy to improve overall economic conditions and the jobs situation, rather than steps to redistribute income.

In retrospect, though, the question forced people to make a choice that now seems obvious, Gallup's Newport said. Who wouldn't favor policies to improve the total economy?

To him, the poll showing more than half of people favor "heavy" taxes on the rich is more revealing, given the strong wording of the question.

But even with such support, politicians have learned to walk a careful line in explaining the need for higher taxes.

"It's not like, 'Look, we're raising your taxes to (more evenly) distribute," income, Caplan says. "We're doing it because we need to raise money."

from Investor's Business Daily, 2008-Oct-10:

Talking Ourselves Into A Depression

Economy: Feeling a bit, well, depressed? It's not surprising. Headlines around the world are filled with the D word, as if an epic global economic collapse were inevitable — especially here in the U.S. It isn't.

No, we're not hopelessly out of touch. As our coverage shows, we know how serious the current financial mess is — and how important it is to the U.S. and the rest of the world that we begin to settle down our markets.

The loss of $8 trillion in stock market wealth in a matter of months is no small thing. The dive will have a major impact on people's spending and investment decisions.

A new economic forecast of 52 leading economists shows most expect the U.S. economy to shrink in the third and fourth quarters, plus the first quarter of 2009 — the first time in nearly half a century that the economy will undergo three quarters of contraction.

In short, we might be in for a brief, yet brutal, recession.

But talk of a depression and other apocalyptic possibilities are way overdone. One investment house last week called this the "death throes of the old economic order." The Washington Post, in a front-page article, asked plaintively if this episode marks "The End Of American Capitalism?"

Just two weeks ago, German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck told Britain's Daily Telegraph today's crisis was an "American problem" that would end the U.S.' "superpower status."

Sorry, but such Euro-gloating aside, this crisis won't last. We won't even be close to a depression. And when it ends, fundamentals will reassert themselves — namely, population and productivity growth, the two engines to long-term economic success.

This is the U.S.' edge — and it's not going away soon.

Since 1980, real per capita GDP has expanded 69.2% in the U.S. vs. 65.6% for the EU 15. Why? Our productivity is greater. In just the last 10 years, U.S. productivity has expanded 2.5% a year, with Europe growing nearly a full percentage point less.

This will widen. "Historically speaking . . . America's economic hegemony has never been greater," wrote Gerard Baker in London's Times a few months back. He's right. Financial crisis notwithstanding, the U.S. economy will be twice Europe's size by 2025.

Even after our stock market and housing losses, the U.S. is still extraordinarily wealthy. In the second quarter, Fed data show, the U.S. private sector owned $110.6 trillion in assets — an immense amount of wealth. The estimated $1 trillion to $2 trillion cost of the current financial mess is small by comparison.

During the Great Depression, U.S. output plunged 27% in four years; unemployment neared a third of the work force. Real private investment shrank 87% in three years; personal spending plunged 41%. We're not close to that. Nor are we likely to be — unless we foolishly pursue high-tax policies that would kill growth.

It's easy to give in to excessive pessimism these days. But the U.S. model — based on productive labor, free trade, fewer rules, lower taxes and rewards for entrepreneurial effort — is still sound. We'll soon emerge stronger, and better, for our current tribulations.

from the Weekly Standard, 2001-Sep-24, by Matt Labash:

South Toward Hell
The sad streets of New York.

New York
IT DOESN'T SEEM RIGHT, really--romanticizing catastrophe instead of just confronting its grim particulars head-on. Still, they cut quite a swath at Sir Harry's Bar in the Waldorf-Astoria, these brave men with forearm tattoos and walrus mustaches--firefighting volunteers who have swooped in from places like Danbury and Pittsburgh to shore up New York's own decimated ranks. The hotel has graciously provided free accommodations. So after a 12-hour shift sifting through World Trade Center rubble, firemen stagger into the bar like flame-retardant cowboys, still wearing their charbroiled gear. As they fill the room, I turn to a well-heeled patron, trying to summon an appropriate reference from a Peckinpah movie. "They look like somebody," I say, struggling. "Like goddamned heroes," he replies, as the fireman douse their dust-infested insides with complimentary rounds.

But the further south one travels from Midtown, the fewer morale-quickening encounters one has. On the ride down to 14th Street, I notice splintered glass embedded in the dashboard of my cab. "It flew through my open window," says cabbie John Parafestas, who was driving near the south tower when the second hijacker steered the plane through it. "I busted a U-turn on the West Side Highway. I thought, 'I gotta get home now, or I'll never get home again.'"

Below the 14th Street perimeter, non-rescue vehicles and civilians are forbidden. Lower Manhattan has been emptied by terrorists. Even the drug-dealers and nut-cake orators are on leave from Washington Square Park. And while it is just eerily silent from the Village to Little Italy, everything below Canal Street looks like Pompeii.

Even after two days of clean-up, many streets retain footprints in a light snow of concrete ash. Emergency vehicles, many of them caught in the towers' collapse, are stacked like soot-covered matchbox cars. Newcomers to the scene needn't ask directions to the heart of the wreckage--since the spot is marked by a smoky, sulfuric cloud that changes shape with the wind, but never quite moves on. Signs marking closed businesses--"Lingerie, Lounge Wear, Essentials"--seem profoundly decadent, as all that matters now (besides, as my cabbie suggests, "bringing the pain" to whoever did this) is the 20-story-high heap of broken stones and people.

On my walk down to the site, I catch up with an iron worker from Queens. He doesn't want his name used, nor does he seem thrilled that I'm interrupting his breakfast--a Budweiser tall-boy which he sips out of a slim paper bag. "I need this drink," he says. After he tells of his prior day's work, it's understood why.

"Yesterday was cruel to the system," he explains, as if the human-interest stories on the cable shows haven't quite conveyed the intensity. He spent his volunteer shift not only cutting through fallen I-beams, but also recovering human remains. Not bodies, exactly. "Everything was in parts," he says. "I filled 25 bags full of parts." The part he's seeing now--and saw last night during haunted sleep--belonged to a woman. He knows this because her toes were painted, though everything above her thigh was gone. We stop at a security checkpoint beyond which I'm not allowed. He now seems reluctant to part. "I don't want to go back in there," he says. His eyes fill up behind aviator sunglasses, but he snaps to, taking a final anesthetic swig. Still buried under concrete slabs and twisted steel are two firefighter friends and a paramedic cousin. "I just want to use my skills, cut metal, whatever," he says. "That's why I'm going back."

There are also plenty of horrors above 14th Street, and nowhere more than at the National Guard Armory on 26th and Lexington. Outside the grimy, gothic building where a surly gargoyle keeps sentry, people wind around the block in two lines. The first line contains those who are, for the first time, filling out "Personal Information Questionnaires"--not about themselves, but about loved ones who have not turned up since the Twin Towers collapsed. The second line contains people who have already filled out the painstaking identification survey (the facial hair category, for instance, contains 10 subcategories from "Fu Manchu" to "Handle Bar"), but who have more information to give.

In this second category are Elliot and Andy Waller, two Maryland brothers on the lookout for their cousin, Josh Rosenthal, last seen on the 90th floor of Tower Two. The Wallers have come to supply investigators with more information, such as hair samples they pulled from their cousin's brush. After telling me how they almost failed to secure Josh's dental X-rays (his dentist's office is near Barneys, which today received a bomb threat), they hand me a "Missing" poster describing all their cousin's vitals. While the Wallers store their posters in a manila envelope, others are less subtle, preferring to advertise missing loved ones on their torsos--as if they were wandering city streets, waiting to be recognized.

The inside of the armory represents something Dante would have conceived of if he'd possessed a truly dark imagination. Hundreds of people sit on metal folding chairs on a scuffed wood floor, while hundreds more clog the aisles. It's difficult to tell if people are crying or perspiring, as the only cooling agents are two small fans propped against televisions beaming the latest in disaster developments. Row upon row of people shrug off detectives and chaplains and oversolicitous Red Cross volunteers, who every 30 seconds or so offer anxious family members bottled water or chocolate chip cookies or Arizona Iced tea.

"They ought to give you tranquilizers instead," jokes Edlene LaFrance, a nurse from the Bronx who is waiting, along with her adult son Jody Howard and his wife, to find out what became of Alan LaFrance, her husband and Jody's father.

It's about the only joking the family does. They, like other relatives, sit in stony silence, facing the door that leads to the basement, where, 20 at a time, they are taken to see two lists indicating that their loved one has been located and is either hospitalized or deceased. After two hours of waiting--"the most nervous I've ever been" says Edlene--the family finally gets the call. They go through an archway, descend a staircase, and snake down a long hall to see the lists. One volunteer offers a final shot of Pepsi, as if caffeine can prepare someone for the worst news they'll ever get. At a basement table, a Red Cross volunteer offers to comb the lists for Alan's name. Edlene assents, then lays her head on the table like a despondent child. Alan has not turned up in any of the hospitals. Neither is he on the deceased list.

For a moment, hope is restored. Edlene clutches a wedding picture of her husband in his white tuxedo. Their twenty-first anniversary is in two weeks, and maybe she'll be able to give him his already-purchased present--a new wedding ring. But then there's the hard math. It's been 58 hours since Alan disappeared in Tower Two. Though Alan wasn't on the "bad list," he wasn't on the "good list" either. Edlene's consolation prize, it turns out, is not much of one at all. Tomorrow, the bad list will be updated, and she'll have to look at it again.

Matt Labash is a senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-May-28, p.A17, by David Boaz:

Our Collectivist Candidates

On Sunday Barack Obama urged graduates of Connecticut's Wesleyan University to devote themselves to "collective service." This is not an unusual theme for a commencement address. But it was interesting how long he went on discussing various kinds of nonprofit activism without ever mentioning the virtues of commerce or of individual achievement.

He also did not cite the military as an example of service to one's country. This is a surprising omission in a Memorial Day weekend speech to college-age students by a man seeking to be entrusted with the defense of the U.S.

Sen. Obama told the students that "our individual salvation depends on collective salvation." He disparaged students who want to "take your diploma, walk off this stage, and chase only after the big house and the nice suits and all the other things that our money culture says you should buy."

The people Mr. Obama is sneering at are the ones who built America – the traders and entrepreneurs and manufacturers who gave us railroads and airplanes, housing and appliances, steam engines, electricity, telephones, computers and Starbucks. Ignored here is the work most Americans do, the work that gives us food, clothing, shelter and increasing comfort. It's an attitude you would expect from a Democrat.

Or this year's Republican nominee. John McCain also denounces "self-indulgence" and insists that Americans serve "a national purpose that is greater than our individual interests." During a Republican debate at the Reagan Library on May 3, 2007, Sen. McCain derided Mitt Romney's leadership ability, saying, "I led . . . out of patriotism, not for profit." Challenged on his statement, Mr. McCain elaborated that Mr. Romney "managed companies, and he bought, and he sold, and sometimes people lost their jobs. That's the nature of that business." He could have been channeling Barack Obama.

"A greater cause," "community service" – to many of us, these gauzy phrases sound warm and comforting. But their purpose is to disparage and denigrate our own lives, to belittle our own pursuit of happiness. They're concepts better suited to a more collectivist country than to one founded in libertarian revolution – a revolution intended to defend our rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

One gets the sense that Mr. McCain would like to see us all in the armed forces. In a Washington Monthly essay published in October 2001, his vision of national service sounded militaristic. He wrote with enthusiasm for programs whose participants "not only wear uniforms and work in teams . . . but actually live together in barracks on former military bases, and are deployed to service projects far from their home base," and who would "gather together for daily calisthenics, often in highly public places such as in front of city hall."

Mr. Obama wouldn't send us into the military. All he wants is our souls. As his wife Michelle said at UCLA on February 3, two days before the California primary, "Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. . . . That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed."

There is a whiff of hypocrisy here. Mr. Obama, who made $4.2 million last year and lives in a $1.65 million house bought with the help of the indicted Tony Rezko – and whose "elegant suits" and "impeccable ties" made him one of Esquire's Best-Dressed Men in the World – disdains college students who might want to "chase after the big house and the nice suits." Mr. McCain, who with his wife earned more than $6 million last year and who owns at least seven homes, ridicules Mr. Romney for having built businesses.

But hypocrisy is not the biggest issue. The real issue is that Messrs. Obama and McCain are telling us Americans that our normal lives are not good enough, that pursuing our own happiness is "self-indulgence," that building a business is "chasing after our money culture," that working to provide a better life for our families is a "narrow concern."

They're wrong. Every human life counts. Your life counts. You have a right to live it as you choose, to follow your bliss. You have a right to seek satisfaction in accomplishment. And if you chase after the almighty dollar, you just might find that you are led, as if by an invisible hand, to do things that improve the lives of others.

Mr. Boaz is executive vice president of the Cato Institute and author of "The Politics of Freedom" (Cato, 2008).

from National Review, 2007-Apr-30, by Richard John Neuhaus:

In search of American identity

Psychologists tell us that there is no more important or complex process in childhood than the formation of an answer to the question “Who am I?” It is a recurring question that is not settled once and for all. From infancy through adulthood and until the day we die, we are defining ourselves, and we are defining ourselves in relation to others. Beginning with our parents and family, the question of who I am is inseparable from the question of who we are. In the Christian understanding of things, the questioning will continue until the end of time — until, in the words of St. Paul, “we know even as we are known” (I Corinthians 13).

The question is that of identity, which is a very big word in our cultural, political, and psychological vocabularies. The word is from the Latin idem, meaning “the same.” A standard dictionary definition of identity is “sameness of essential or generic character in different instances.” As much as we might wish it were not so, sameness is defined by difference, like is defined by unlike. In the jargon of the social sciences, identity may be ascribed, inherited, elected, achieved, or constructed — or all of these in confused combination — but it is always and inevitably a process of differentiation. Identity, whether personal or communal, also excludes. We are this and not that.

Today there is lively and confused contention about national identity, racial identity, sexual identity, and sundry other identities that are frequently expressed in “identity politics.” In this confusion the question of who we are as Americans runs up against the claim that there is no American identity but only a hodgepodge of identities in both complementarity and competition. There is, it is said, no American culture but only a mosaic of subcultures in which individuals elect to be who they want to be and therefore most truly are.

Who are we Americans? The question is as old as the European settlement of this continent, and the settlers took many stabs at answering it, especially in distinguishing the New World from the Old. Almost 200 years on, Tocqueville remains the master analyst of American identity. Fifty years before Tocqueville, Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur wrote in Letters from an American Farmer, “The American is a new man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas and form new opinions. . . . This is an American.”

Whatever else America is, America is new. Few politicians win elections by promising to preserve the status quo or restore the past. Conservatism, when successful, presents itself as the promise of the future, as in Ronald Reagan's “morning in America.” The market economy is premised upon the anticipation of unrealized possibilities. The Great Seal of the United States speaks of the form of both government and society in declaring America to be a novus ordo seclorum — a new order for the ages. The oddity of American conservatism, as distinct from European conservatism, is that it reveres the past not in defense of an ancien régime but as the guide to the future. American identity is memory in the service of promise.

American identity defies the assumption that we must choose between the particular and the universal. With a confidence that can easily be mistaken as arrogance, and at times succumbs to arrogance, America understands itself as a particular in the service of the universal. From the founding of the constitutional order and, before that, from the Puritan “errand into the wilderness,” America was viewed as an experiment on a universal stage, and experiments can either succeed or fail. In Lincoln's fine phrase, America is “an almost chosen people,” a people abiding by a social contract premised upon a transcendent covenant.

Both contract and covenant are integral to American identity. We are a nation under law by constitutional contract — a contract presupposing covenantal accountability. To say that we are a nation “under God” is to speak of promise, but it is, at least as importantly, to speak of a nation under judgment. Thus is contract tied to covenantal aspiration and covenantal aspiration restrained by contractual agreement.

This dialectic, if you will, between contract and covenant is the distinctly American way of joining the particular and the universal. Contemporary multiculturalisms that would embrace every culture but our own dissolve the dialectic, reaching for an inclusiveness that, were they to have their way, would result in the exclusion of American identity. Like Esperanto, the supposedly universal language spoken only by a small band of sectaries, multiculturalism as conventionally promoted rejects the particular for the sake of the universal and ends up betraying both. Multiculturalism, like Esperanto, ends up as the monoculturalism of a very small culture.

THE STORY OF A PEOPLE

America, it has been said, is the first universal nation, meaning that it is not constituted by tribal, ethnic, religious, or other identities but rather by principles, and is open to all who embrace those principles. As with multiculturalism, there is a measure of truth in this claim. But it fails to appreciate adequately that the principles are embedded in a narrative. America is the story of a people — the people who are Americans and who aspire to become Americans. Samuel Huntington's recent book, Who Are We? The Challenges to American National Identity, has been largely ignored and, when not ignored, derided as an anti-immigrant or even nativist tract. This is, I believe, both unfair and unfortunate. While one may question some of his analyses and prescriptions (and I do), he poses hard and necessary questions to the claim that America is or can be a “universal nation” or even “a nation of immigrants” apart from the narrative of a particular people who joined contract and covenant in constituting this novus ordo seclorum.

That narrative of what might be called a contract within a covenant is nicely caught by Michael Novak in his 2001 book, On Two Wings, in which he displays the inseparability of religious faith and common sense in the American founding. (A particular merit of Novak's account is his underscoring of the fact that, in the founding, Christian cannot be understood except as Judeo-Christian.) There is an important distinction to be made between a Christian society and a Christian nation, the one referring to the people and the other to the polity. In our republican ordering of democratic government, however, there is the danger of that distinction's becoming a division which pits polity against people and people against polity, with the result that both the republican and the democratic character of this constitutional order are undone.

In a unanimous decision of 1892, the Supreme Court declared, “These, and many other matters which might be noticed, add a volume of unofficial declarations to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation.” Needless to say, such a statement by the Supreme Court today would occasion puzzlement, controversy, and widespread outrage. It is not immediately evident why this should be the case. By the measurements available to researchers, an argument can be made that America is no less Christian, and is possibly more Christian, than it was in 1892. It is commonly said that we have become a much more religiously pluralistic society, but that is a claim — and, on the part of some, no doubt a wish — that is unsupported by the evidence.

The frequently visceral reaction to the idea of “Christian America” has several sources. Since the rise to political prominence of the so-called Religious Right in the late 1970s, frequently hysterical alarms have been raised, and have now reached a climax, against the looming threat of a “theocratic” dismantling of our constitutional order. While conservative Christian voices are frequently strident, the stridency should, I believe, be understood as an aggressive defense by a large part of the population that has been made to feel that they are strangers in their own land.

Although their insurgency was not initially sparked by the Supreme Court's imposition of an unlimited abortion license, Roe v. Wade's exercise of “raw judicial power” (as Justice Byron White called it) has turned out to be the single most important factor in the realignment of public sentiment over the last half century that has resulted in what are aptly called the “culture wars.” Support for laws protective of the unborn has in very large part driven hostility to the idea of Christian America. In second place as a cause of the culture wars, with a force that almost nobody anticipated 20 years ago, is the effort to “normalize” homosexual relations, focused in the controversy over same-sex marriage.

In a larger historical context, it has been argued that the bohemian and libertine agitations of the 1910s and 1920s were merely interrupted by the Great Depression, World War II, and the Baby Boom, and were then temporarily rerouted into the countercultural enthusiasms of the 1960s and 1970s, only to resume their direct assault on Christian America in more recent years. This is a suggestive argument and is not without heuristic value, but it perhaps partakes too much of historical determinism to be entirely convincing.

This is not to deny that hostility to the idea of Christian America has a historical lineage. One thinks, for instance, of “The Humanist Manifesto” of 1933 and its robust promotion of an ideology of secularism. It was signed by a wide and representative array of what today would be called “public intellectuals,” led by the formidable John Dewey. This ideology was powerfully reinforced by a series of Supreme Court decisions on church-state questions, beginning in the late 1940s, that repudiated the idea of Christian America and declared the state to be neutral toward or, in the view of some, hostile to the religio-cultural identity of the American people. These developments and their consequences I have described in detail in The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America, and they have been insightfully analyzed from a legal perspective by, among others, Philip Hamburger in Separation of Church and State.

An unintended consequence of the torrent of literature warning against the threat of an impending theocracy may be an increased interest in the question of how America is and is not a Christian society, and what difference that may make. An additional reason for increased interest may be the realization, still slowly dawning on most Americans, that we are confronted by a militant Islam with no doubts that America is the Christian enemy, manipulated by a cabal of Jews. The Judeo-Christian factor in American identity is reinforced by the challenge of Islam, which believes it has displaced both Judaism and Christianity in the purposes of God, and by a violent jihadist ideology set upon forcing the submission of the world to Allah by any means necessary. Zev Chafets, an American-Israeli journalist, is among those who envision a rapprochement between American Jews and evangelical Christians, the latter of whom constitute by far the largest and most politically potent base of popular support for America's commitment to Israel.

A QUESTION FIT FOR POLITE COMPANY

Whatever the several reasons, the subject of Christian America — long ruled out of order in polite company — is receiving increased attention. Representative is an article in the current issue of Political Science Quarterly titled “Is America a Christian Nation?” The author, Hugh Heclo, previously of Harvard and now of George Mason University, writes, “The question being posed is politically provocative in our own times because we have reached a stage of contesting the fundamentals of knowing who we really are.”

Like most thoughtful people addressing this subject, Heclo answers his title question in both the affirmative and the negative. Yes, demographically speaking, there is no doubt that America is a Christian society. But if one asks whether most Americans are morally guided by or doctrinally committed to Christianity, the answer is no. On the other hand: “America's political institutions (especially in a legal separation of church and state) and America's political ethos (especially in its moralizing, redemptive character) carry the imprint of the nation's Christian heritage, making America still today a derivatively `sort of' Christian nation.”

To which one might respond that a “sort of” Christian nation is all that might be expected in view of human sinfulness and the limitations of history. Revising Gibbon, it might be said that the Holy Roman Empire was sort of holy, sort of Roman, and sort of an empire, but there is no doubt that it understood itself to be Christian. Heclo relies, perhaps inevitably, on survey research, which is a notoriously unreliable instrument for discovering what people truly believe. Like other commentators, he is impressed by the fact that most Americans are reluctant to judge the religious beliefs of others and therefore concludes that they do not really believe the teachings of Christianity. This overlooks a general reluctance to talk to strangers about matters of ultimate concern, an American protocol of civility in declining to criticize other people's religion, and a very Christian observance of the command of Jesus to “judge not that you be not judged.” I suspect that doctrinally the American people are a great deal more Christian than the sociological literature suggests.

Also like others, Heclo cites the prevalence of divorce and pornography, the trash of popular entertainment, and other factors as evidence that Americans are not seriously Christian, or not Christian at all. But morality is a dubious measure. In his classic 1970 work, The Unheavenly City, Edward Banfield notes that in early-18th-century Boston there were more brothels per capita than there probably are today, but nobody suggests that 18th-century Boston was not a Christian city. The pertinent fact is that Christianity majors in sin and forgiveness. A persistent problem in discussions of Christian America, both scholarly and popular, is the tendency to use “Christian” as both an honorific and a descriptive term. Except for those who make an idol of the nation and confuse America with the Church — and there are some who are prone to doing that — nobody contends that America deserves to be called a Christian nation.

There is truth in G. K. Chesterton's observation that America is a nation with the soul of a church, and further truth in the observation that, in the “almost” of almost-chosen peoplehood, Americans are aware of failing the covenant by which the nation is constituted. Conservative critics frequently fail to appreciate that expressions of “anti-Americanism” can sometimes be better understood as Americans' continuing the long tradition of the mourners' bench of American revivalism. The late Jeane Kirkpatrick was right about the “blame-America-first crowd.” But it will not disappear; not only because some really do hate America, but because so many more believe America is called to be better. There is much to be said in favor of America's accepting the fact that it is a normal nation, simply a nation among nations — but that is a very un-American idea.

So we return to the question “Who are we?” America is a capitalist nation, an English-speaking nation, a democratic nation, a compassionate nation, a law-abiding nation, a rich nation. We are not any of those things without notable exceptions, but we are, in general, all of those things. And we are, among all the things we are, a nation constituted by a contract within the context of a covenant. That covenant is the narrative of God's dealings with the People of Israel, a narrative borne through time by a society that is incorrigibly, however confusedly, Christian America. I do not say it should be that way. There are reasons to wish it were not that way. But it has been that way and will be that way until, which is very unlikely, the narrative is displaced by another.

Fr. Neuhaus is the founder and editor in chief of First Things. This essay was prepared for the 2007 Bradley Symposium addressing the topic “Who Are We Today? American Character and Identity in the 21st Century,” to be held May 3, 2007, in Washington, D.C. For an invitation to the symposium, please contact Krista Shaffer at Krista@hudson.org.

from the New York Times, 2008-Jun-24, by Neela Banerjee:

Survey Shows U.S. Religious Tolerance

Although a majority of Americans say religion is very important to them, nearly three-quarters of them say they believe that many faiths besides their own can lead to salvation, according to a survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

The report, titled U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, reveals a broad trend toward tolerance and an ability among many Americans to hold beliefs that might contradict the doctrines of their professed faiths.

For example, 70 percent of Americans affiliated with a religion or denomination said they agreed that “many religions can lead to eternal life,” including majorities among Protestants and Catholics. Among evangelical Christians, 57 percent agreed with the statement, and among Catholics, 79 percent did.

Among minority faiths, more than 80 percent of Jews, Hindus and Buddhists agreed with the statement, and more than half of Muslims did.

The findings seem to undercut the conventional wisdom that the more religiously committed people are, the more intolerant they are, scholars who reviewed the survey said.

“It's not that Americans don't believe in anything,” said Michael Lindsay, assistant director of the Center on Race, Religion and Urban Life at Rice University. “It's that we believe in everything. We aren't religious purists or dogmatists.”

The survey confirms findings from previous studies that the most religiously and politically conservative Americans are those who attend worship services most frequently, and that for them, the battles against abortion and gay rights remain touchstone issues.

“At least at the time of the surveys in 2007, cultural issues played a role in political affiliation,” and economic issues less so, said John C. Green, an author of the report and a senior fellow on religion and American politics at Pew. “It suggests that the efforts of Democrats to peel away Republican and conservative voters based on economic issues face a real limit because of the role these cultural issues play.”

The survey, which is based on telephone interviews with more than 35,000 Americans from May 8 to Aug. 13, 2007, is the second installment of a broad assessment Pew has undertaken of trends and characteristics of the country's religious life. The first part of the report, published in February, depicted a fluid and diverse national religious life marked by people moving among denominations and faiths.

According to that report, more than a quarter of adult Americans have left the faith of their childhood to join another religion or no religion. Every denomination and religion lost and gained members, but the survey indicated that the group that had the greatest net gain was the unaffiliated. Sixteen percent of American adults say they are not part of any organized faith, which makes the unaffiliated the country's fourth-largest “religious group.”

The new report sheds light on the beliefs of the unaffiliated. Like the overwhelming majority of Americans, 70 percent of the unaffiliated said they believed in God, including one of every five people who identified themselves as atheist and more than half of those who identified as agnostic.

“What does atheist mean? It may mean they don't believe in God, or it could be that they are hostile to organized religion,” Mr. Green said. “A lot of these unaffiliated people, by some measures, are fairly religious, and then there are those who are affiliated with a religion but don't believe in God and identify instead with history or holidays or communities.”

The most significant contradictory belief the survey reveals has to do with salvation.

Previous surveys have shown that Americans think a majority of their countrymen and women will go to heaven, and that the circle is wide, embracing minorities like Jews, Muslims and atheists. But the Pew survey goes further, showing that such views are held by those within major branches of Christianity and minority faiths, too.

Scholars said such tolerance could stem in part from the greater diversity of American society: that there are more people of minority faiths or no faith and that “it is hard to hold a strongly sectarian view when you work together and your kids play soccer together,” Mr. Lindsay said.

But such a view of salvation may also grow out of doctrinal ignorance, scholars said.

“It could be that people are not very well educated and they are not expressing mature theological points of view,” said Todd Johnson, director of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. “It could also be a form of bland secularism. The real challenge to religious leaders is not to become more entrenched in their views, but to navigate the idea of what their religion is all about and how it relates to others.”

The survey tried to determine how people's religious affiliation and practice shaped their views of culture and politics.

As past surveys have shown, this report found that Americans who prayed more frequently and attended worship services more often tended to be more conservative and “somewhat more Republican” than other people. Majorities of Mormons and evangelicals say they are conservative, compared with 37 percent of Americans over all. (Twenty percent say they are liberal, and 36 percent say moderate.)

Respondents were evenly split about whether churches should express their views about politics, with evangelicals and black Protestants favoring such activities far more than people of other faiths.

Nearly two-thirds of respondents favored more government help for the poor, even if it meant going deeper into debt. Sixty-one percent of respondents also said “stricter environmental laws and regulations are worth the cost.”

A majority said the United States should pay more attention to problems at home than those abroad, but in the area of foreign policy, 6 out of 10 respondents said that diplomacy, not military strength, was the best way to ensure peace.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-Jul-5, p.A11, by Fergus M. Bordewich:

Alexander Hamilton's Capital Compromise

Last month, workmen jacked up a 206-year-old yellow clapboard house, levered it onto a set of remote-controlled dollies, and trundled it two blocks to a new site in St. Nicholas Park, overlooking East Harlem in New York City.

The Grange, as it is called, was the home of Alexander Hamilton, best known as co-author of the Federalist papers and America's first secretary of the Treasury. But this founding father also had an extraordinary role in the infant nation's attempt to come to grips with the curse of slavery.

Born in the West Indies, Hamilton was one of the most ardent abolitionists of his generation. Rare among white men of his time, he grasped the basic psychology of racism and rejected the notion of black inferiority. "The contempt we have been taught to entertain for the blacks," he wrote to fellow founding father John Jay during the Revolutionary War, "makes us fancy many things that are founded in neither reason nor experience."

He even proposed recruiting slaves to fight in return for their freedom. Arming them, he said, would "secure their fidelity, animate their courage and I believe have a good influence upon those who remain [in slavery], by opening a door to their emancipation." Hamilton was a driving force behind the New York Manumission Society, and in 1785 issued a then-radical proposal for gradual emancipation.

When he took office as secretary of the Treasury in 1789, the United States of America was in financial crisis. The federal government and the states together owed a staggering $79 million, or more than $2 trillion in present-day money, with an annual interest bill of $4.5 million – triple the foreseeable national income.

Hamilton came up with an audacious plan to consolidate the states' debts, and to create a system of credit for the national government which would enable it to recover the trust of the foreign bankers upon whom it depended for future loans. Anti-Federalists, many of them Southerners, fiercely opposed the plan, predicting that it would lead to overbearing centralization and tyranny by New York and Philadelphia money men.

Meanwhile, Congress was also at loggerheads over the site for a permanent national capital. More than 30 sites had been proposed, from Kingston, N.Y., to the frontier port of Marietta, in the future state of Ohio.

In the spring of 1790, the leading candidate was centrally located Pennsylvania, where with the assistance of local Quakers, emancipated slaves were creating the first autonomous black communities in the U.S. This was a prospect that Southern slave owners deemed horrifyingly subversive.

Snarled Rep. Aedanus Burke: "I would as soon pitch my tent beneath a tree in which was a hornet's nest, as I would, as a delegate from South Carolina, vote for placing the government in a settlement of Quakers." Northerners just as ferociously opposed the scheming of Potomac Valley planters and other Southern interests to plant the nation's permanent capital in the slave-holding South.

The result was a Congress paralyzed. Southerners were threatening secession. Hamilton was desperate: With reason, he believed that the stability of his new country depended on passage of his stalled financial package.

One day Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson found the Treasury secretary, "a pathetic picture" of despair, trudging back and forth in front of President George Washington's residence in New York City, the nation's temporary capital. That chance encounter led to the grand-daddy of all political backroom deals.

On the afternoon of June 20, 1790, Hamilton, Jefferson and James Madison met over dinner in Jefferson's rented quarters at 57 Maiden Lane in what is now New York's financial district. On the question of the new capital, Hamilton controlled enough Northern votes to sway the decision toward either Pennsylvania or the Potomac. He had already offered his support to the Pennsylvanians. But they were fatally split between advocates for Philadelphia and for a site on the Susquehannah River.

The Virginians were willing to deal. They agreed, albeit "with a revulsion of stomach almost convulsive," as Jefferson later put it, to trade enough votes to pass Hamilton's financial plan in return for his support for a capital on the Potomac, far from Philadelphia's free blacks and those worrisome Quakers.

The decision was a fateful one for the financial stability of the young nation – and for the future of 700,000 Americans held as slaves.

Had the capital been rooted in the free soil of Pennsylvania, Northerners rather than pro-slavery Southerners would have filled the ranks of government service. Southern congressmen would have witnessed the success of Pennsylvania's policy of emancipation, easing the nation toward a peaceful solution of its most divisive issue. Instead, Hamilton traded away a free national capital for one that would within a few years become one of the country's busiest slave markets, and that protected the institution of slavery from serious political challenge for another 70 years.

While the Grange is a national landmark, Hamilton's house has rarely been visited except by local school groups. Its dramatic new location at the park's steep crest will, after its restoration, doubtless draw an increasing number of pilgrims hoping to commune, in some fashion, with the spirit of the man who did more than any other to set the U.S. on a firm financial foundation. These visitors should also reflect upon the inspired idealism of a man who grappled early and daringly with the problem of race and slavery – yet who, in a twist of history, betrayed enslaved Americans in the most important decision he ever made that affected their fate.

Although Alexander Hamilton's contribution to the politics of emancipation was far greater than that of any other founding father, it was also more tragic. Fittingly, when his home reopens to the public next year, it will gaze out from its perch in St. Nicholas Park over one of the most vibrant black neighborhoods in America.

The restored Grange should be more than a hagiographic "house beautiful" monument to a marble-bust version of a founding father. Both Hamilton and black Americans deserve a memorial that squarely faces his racial idealism – as well as the noble intentions that collided with cruel political reality over Jefferson's dinner table that day in June 1790.

Mr. Bordewich is author of "Washington: The Making of the American Capital," published in May by Amistad.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-Nov-3, by Jonathan Karl:

Revolution Is No Tea Party
Rabble-rouser, wordsmith, strategist and defender of liberty.

These days Samuel Adams is more likely to be known as a brand of beer than a revolutionary leader. While it is true that he ran his father's Boston malt house for a time, he was perhaps the most forceful single figure behind the American Revolution. He was also America's first great political operative, mastering the arts of spin and strategy in ways that future generations of David Axelrods and Lee Atwaters could profitably emulate. Ira Stoll, in his pithy and well-researched biography, sets out to rescue Adams from historical obscurity.

In his time, Adams needed no such help. He was the famous Adams, an elder cousin of John and a man so reviled by the British that two months after the shots fired at Lexington and Concord the top British general in America offered a "gracious pardon" to all colonists willing to put down their arms "excepting only Samuel Adams and John Hancock, whose offenses are of too flagitious a nature to admit of any other consideration than that of condign punishment."

"Samuel Adams: A Life" makes it abundantly clear why the British so detested Adams. He started talking independence more than a decade before the Declaration and did more than anyone to organize opposition to colonial taxes and to make "no taxation without representation" a rallying cry. He was a prolific newspaper columnist -- one of his pen names was "Vindex," the name of the Roman Senator who led a tax rebellion against the Emperor Nero -- and, later, an outspoken elected leader.

On March 5, 1770, a lone British private guarding the customs house found himself taunted by unruly Bostonians. Several British soldiers came to protect him. The crowd grew larger and started pelting the soldiers with snowballs. One of the soldiers was knocked down, and, as he came up, fired into the crowd. In the confusion, other shots were fired and, by the time the smoke cleared, 11 colonists were shot, five of them fatally.

Samuel Adams: A Life By Ira Stoll (Free Press, 338 pages, $28)

For Samuel Adams the incident demonstrated the tyranny of British rule, and, as importantly, provided an opportunity to galvanize support for the revolutionary cause. The facts surrounding the incident are still in dispute, but, writes Mr. Stoll, "what is certain is that Adams pressed immediately and aggressively to wring every possible bit of political advantage from the bloodshed." He started by giving it a name: the Boston Massacre.

Adams helped turn the trials of the British soldiers into a sensation, writing more than 20,000 words on the subject in various Boston newspapers. When the jury acquitted six of the soldiers and found two guilty of merely manslaughter, Adams wrote of the jurors: "They're accountable to God and their consciences, and in their day of trial, may God send them good deliverance." One can only imagine what he thought of his cousin John, who defended the British soldiers in court.

Adams wasn't merely a rabble-rouser, however. In November 1772, he created a "committee of correspondence" to organize the first collective opposition to British policies. A document composed by the committee, as Mr. Stoll notes, provided a framework for the Declaration of Independence, enumerating the rights of the colonists: "First. A right to Life; secondly to Liberty; thirdly to Property."

Adams's next major move was to instigate what turned out to be the Boston Tea Party, a protest against yet another British tax. Adams publicized the episode in a way that would, once again, maximize support for the cause of independence. He pointed out -- in public letters and newspaper columns -- that the ships themselves were not harmed, only the tea; in a bit of revolutionary spin, he blamed the whole thing on the unyielding royal governor. Edmund Burke, though among the pro- American members of the House of Commons, recommended punishing Adams for the tea-party insurrection. Instead the British punished all of Boston, effectively imposing martial law, a move that would lead to the "shot heard round the world" on April 19, 1775.

One delegate at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia said that Adams, a fellow delegate, used "fiction, falsehood and fraud" to "incite the ignorant and vulgar to arms." But even he conceded that Adams "drinks little, sleeps little, thinks much, and is most decisive and indefatigable in the pursuit of his objects." Those objects did not include self-enrichment. He was frequently in debt and disliked the extravagance of rich patriots like John Hancock as much as the pretensions of British royalty.

After the war, in the 1790s, Adams served as governor of Massachusetts. In national politics he was a Republican rather than a Federalist like his cousin. Shortly after Thomas Jefferson was sworn in as president, in 1801, he wrote to Samuel Adams to say that, while crafting his inaugural address, "I often asked myself, is this exactly in the spirit of the patriarch of liberty, Samuel Adams? Is it as he would express it? Will he approve of it?" Jefferson lamented that the 81-year-old Adams could not serve in his administration, but, he wrote, "give us your counsel my friend, and give us your blessing." Adams died two years later.

If Mr. Stoll's biography lacks the narrative power of books on other Founders, such as David McCullough's "John Adams," the reason may be that the paper trail left by Samuel Adams is frustratingly short. He destroyed much of his correspondence during the revolutionary years, fearful that it could fall into the wrong hands. Some of the letters that remain end with the words "burn this." This Adams wasn't playing for the history books. He was trying to plot a revolution. Mr. Stoll makes a convincing case that Samuel Adams is not just the most underrated of the Founders but also one of the most admirable, down-to-earth and principled (he worked to abolish slavery). I'd also add that if the pollsters' question "Who would you want to have a beer with?" were asked of the Founders, a good answer would be: Samuel Adams.

Mr. Karl is senior national security correspondent for ABC News.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2007-Jun-29, by Peggy Noonan:

On Letting Go
How we become American.

Happy Fourth of July. To mark this Wednesday's holiday, I share a small moment that happened a year ago in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. I was at a wake for an old family friend named Anthony Coppola, a retired security guard who'd been my uncle Johnny's best friend from childhood. All the old neighborhood people were there from Clinton Avenue and from other streets in Brooklyn, and Anthony's sisters Tessie and Angie and Gloria invited a priest in to say some prayers. About a hundred of us sat in chairs in a little side chapel in the funeral home.

The priest, a jolly young man with a full face and thick black hair, said he was new in the parish, from South America. He made a humorous, offhand reference to the fact that he was talking to longtime Americans who'd been here for ages. This made the friends and family of Anthony Coppola look at each other and smile. We were Italian, Irish, everything else. Our parents had been the first Americans born here, or our grandparents had. We had all grown up with two things, a burly conviction that we were American and an inner knowledge that we were also something else. I think we experienced this as a plus, a double gift, though I don't remember anyone saying that. When Anthony's mother or her friend, my grandmother, talked about Italy or Ireland, they called it "the old country." Which suggested there was a new one, and that we were new in it.

But this young priest, this new immigrant, he looked at us and thought we were from the Mayflower. As far as he was concerned--as far as he could tell--we were old Yankee stock. We were the establishment. As the pitcher in "Bang the Drum Slowly" says, "This handed me a laugh."

This is the way it goes in America. You start as the Outsider and wind up the Insider, or at least being viewed as such by the newest Outsiders. We are a nation of still-startling social fluidity. Anyone can become "American," but they have to want to first.

It has had me thinking a lot about how people become American.

---

I don't know that when my grandfather Patrick Byrne and his sisters, Etta and Mary Jane, who had lived on a hardscrabble little farm in Donegal, on the west coast of Ireland, felt about America when they got here. I don't know if they were "loyal to America." I think they were loyal to their decision to come to America. In for a penny, in for a pound. They had made their decision. Now they had to prove to themselves it was the right one. I remember asking Etta what she'd heard about America before she got here. She said, "The streets were paved with gold." All the immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th century used that phrase.

When I was in college in the 1970s, I got a semester abroad my junior year, and I took a boat from England to Ireland and made my way back to Donegal. This was approximately 55 years after my grandfather and his sisters had left. There I met an old man who'd been my grandfather's boyhood friend. He lived by himself in a shack on a hill and was grateful the cousins I'd found had sent me to him. He told me he'd been there the day my grandfather, then a young man, left. He said the lorry came down the lane and stopped for my grandfather, and that his father said goodbye. He said, "Go now, and never come back to hungry Ireland again."

My grandfather had his struggles here but never again went home. He'd cast his lot. That's an important point in the immigrant experience, when you cast your lot, when you make your decision. It makes you let go of something. And it makes you hold on to something. The thing you hold on to is the new country. In succeeding generations of your family the holding on becomes a habit and then a patriotism, a love. You realize America is more than the place where the streets were paved with gold. It has history, meaning, tradition. Suddenly that's what you treasure.

A problem with newer immigrants now is that for some it's no longer necessary to make The Decision. They don't always have to cast their lot. There are so many ways not to let go of the old country now, from choosing to believe that America is only about money, to technology that encourages you to stay in constant touch with the land you left, to TV stations that broadcast in the old language. If you're an immigrant now, you don't have to let go. Which means you don't have to fully join, to enmesh. Your psychic investment in America doesn't have to be full. It can be provisional, temporary. Or underdeveloped, or not developed at all.

And this may have implications down the road, and I suspect people whose families have been here a long time are concerned about it. It's one of the reasons so many Americans want a pause, a stopping of the flow, a time for the new ones to settle down and settle in. It's why they oppose the mischief of the Masters of the Universe, as they're being called, in Washington, who make believe they cannot close our borders while they claim they can competently micromanage all other aspects of immigration.

---

It happens that I know how my grandfather's sister Mary Jane became an American. She left a paper trail. She kept a common-place book, a sort of diary with clippings and mementos. She kept it throughout the 1920s, when she was still new here. I found it after she'd died. It's a big brown book with cardboard covers and delicate pages. In the front, in the first half, there are newspaper clippings about events in Ireland, and sentimental poems. "I am going back to Glenties . . ."

But about halfway through, the content changes. There is a newspaper clipping about something called "Thanksgiving." There are newspaper photos of parades down Fifth Avenue. And suddenly, near the end, there are patriotic poems. One had this refrain: "So it's home again and home again, America for me./ My heart is turning home again, and there I long to be./ In the land of youth and freedom beyond the ocean bars/ Where the air is full of sunlight, and the flag is full of stars."

Years later, when I worked for Ronald Reagan, those words found their way into one of his speeches, a nod from me to someone who'd made her decision, cast her lot, and changed my life.

I think I remember the last time I told that story. I think it was to a young Mexican-American woman who was a speechwriter for Bill Clinton. I think she completely understood.

God bless our beloved country on the 231st anniversary of its birth.

Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father" (Penguin, 2005), which you can order from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Fridays on OpinionJournal.com.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2007-Feb-15, by John H. Fund:

Libertarians in America
Free to choose, and a good thing too.

Scores of books have been written on the role of communists and socialists in the U.S., dour chronicles of welcome failure. But very few writers have devoted much attention to the role of libertarians, a more appealing and optimistic group of thinkers, political activists and ordinary citizens who believe that respect for the individual and the spontaneous order of market forces are the key to progress and social well-being.

The neglect is strange, given how much libertarians and their limited-government logic have shaped the culture and economy of the U.S. The ideas of John Locke and David Hume animated the writings of Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine. Libertarian principles kept what we think of as "big government" in check for much of the 19th century and well into the 20th, despite tariffs and war. The federal income tax officially arrived, in permanent form, as late as 1913. Coolidge and his Treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon, took a famously minimalist approach to governing. Of course, we now live in a post-FDR age, with government programs everywhere. Still, the libertarian impulse is part of our political culture. "I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism," Ronald Reagan declared.

Today, pollsters find only 2% of people refer to themselves as libertarians, but some 15% of voters hold broadly libertarian views and can be a swing factor. In the photo-finish presidential race of 2000, some 72% of libertarian-minded voters supported George W. Bush. Last November, many of them abandoned the GOP, disillusioned by its profligate ways, and helped hand control of Congress to Democrats.

With "Radicals for Capitalism," Brian Doherty finally gives libertarianism its due. He tracks the movement's progress over the past century by focusing on five of its key leaders--Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard and Milton Friedman. The emphasis is on their ideas, but Mr. Doherty also takes into account their personal struggles--not least their feuds with other thinkers and their relation to an intellectual establishment that for most of their lives thought they were either crazy or irrelevant or both.

---

Libertarian ideas have enjoyed a surge of respect lately, helped by the collapse of Soviet central planning, the success of lower tax rates and the appeals of various figures in popular culture (e.g., Drew Carey, John Stossel and Clint Eastwood) who want government out of both their bedroom and wallet. Even so, libertarianism is often not the people's choice. Part of the problem is the inertia of the status quo. "In a world where government has its hand in almost everything," Mr. Doherty writes, "it requires a certain leap of imagination to see how things might work if it didn't." Many people couldn't make that leap when, for example, economists proposed channeling some Social Security payroll taxes into private accounts.

Mr. Doherty introduces us to an entertaining cast of minor characters who kept individualist ideas alive from the New Deal through the Great Society. There was Rose Wilder Lane, the editor of her mother's "Little House on the Prairie" frontier books, and Robert Heinlein, the science-fiction writer who coined the acronym "Tanstaafl" (for "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch"). Howard Buffett, the father of financier Warren Buffett, was a fiery Old Right congressman from Nebraska who compared the military draft to a form of slavery. During World War II, Henry Hazlitt put economic analysis from his friend von Mises into unsigned editorials he wrote for the New York Times, then a far more free-market paper than today.

Mr. Doherty is candid enough to note that not every individualist he sketches consistently respected the rights of individuals. Textile baron Roger Milliken, for instance, required his executives to attend a libertarian "college" in the Rockies but also lobbied for tariffs to protect his products. And other libertarians showed a certain want of personal character. LSD guru Timothy Leary raised money for Libertarian Party candidates but didn't exercise the integrity or personal responsibility he himself said must accompany freedom. Ayn Rand sold millions of copies of her novels but treated her acolytes abominably and "ended up kicking out of her life pretty much everybody."

Inevitably--as with any constellation of like-minded people--there is squabbling and the petty search for heretics. But there is also, Mr. Doherty shows, the great work of fertile, unorthodox minds. Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick abandoned the New Left when he realized capitalism worked best but acknowledged feeling for a while that "only bad people would think so." Hayek, a supreme rationalist, ended his life believing that "a successful free society will always be in a large measure a tradition-bound society." He even praised religion for encouraging restraint and long-term thinking "under circumstances where everyone believes that God will punish all for the sins of some."

---

Today the Internet has become, Mr. Doherty notes, an efficient way to transmit libertarian ideas and show their practical application. (With its decentralized, free-wheeling ethos, the Internet is itself libertarian without even trying to be.) Jimmy Wales, the man who started the interactive online encyclopedia Wikipedia, believes that "facts can help set the world free." The largest retail market in the world is eBay, which allows anyone to buy and sell without a government license.

Louis Rosetto, the "radical capitalist" who founded Wired magazine, notes that, even if libertarian ideas must now push against a statist status quo, "contrarians end up being the drivers of change." Among the most ornery contrarians, he says, are the libertarians "laboring in obscurity, if not in derision." They have managed "to keep a pretty pure idea going, adapting it to circumstances and watching it be validated by the march of history." Mr. Doherty has rescued libertarianism from its own obscurity, eloquently capturing the appeal of the "pure idea," its origins in great minds and the feistiness of its many current champions.

Mr. Fund is a columnist for OpinionJournal.com. You can buy "Radicals for Capitalism" from the OpinionJournal bookstore.

from the American Spectator via OpinionJournal.com, 2007-May-23, by Jeff Emanuel:

'I Love Those Guys'
Embedded journalists in Iraq are having their minds changed left and right by U.S. soldiers.

Operation Iraqi Freedom saw the advent of a practice that revolutionized modern war reporting: the embedding of journalists with frontline combat units in war. This practice gave the media, the American public and the world unprecedented access to the soldiers on the front lines, as well as to the war itself, through the filing of stories, photographs and video from the battlefront in real time, by reporters who were right there with the soldiers doing the fighting. "We were offered an irresistible opportunity: free transportation to the front line of the war, dramatic pictures, dramatic sounds, great quotes," said Tom Gjelten of National Public Radio. "Who can pass that up?"

While the military also benefited from having an eager outlet for its stories and successes, the biggest result of the embedding process was the shift it caused in the relationship between the military and the media, which laid the groundwork for a fundamental change in the dynamics of war reporting. As Maj. Gen. Buford Blount of the Army's Third Infantry Division explained, "A level of trust developed between the soldier and the media that offered nearly unlimited access."

Despite the obvious benefits of embedded reportage, though, the practice has met with its share of (expected) criticism from members of the Fourth Estate. Beginning even before Operation Iraqi Freedom kicked off, media spokesmen and others--such as University of Texas professor Robert Jensen--expressed concern that "embedded reporters would inevitably become too sympathetic to the troops with whom they were traveling." Theories were put forth that this was a "primary motivation on the part of military planners in designing the embedded system in the first place," and that the U.S. government was simply taking the approach of "feed the media beast enough stories that cast U.S. troops in the best possible light and the job of managing the media message is all but taken care of."

The latter is, of course, an absurdly simplistic notion. Rather than simply sitting back and receiving dispatches and releases carefully crafted to "cast U.S. troops in the best possible light," embedded reporters, by the very nature of their task, see the troops with whom they are living, working, and experiencing danger at all times--the good, the bad, the heroic, the angry, the emotional and the rest of the entire human spectrum. The former, though, does ring true to a degree; the debate on that count, then, is whether or not that is actually a bad thing.

---

While I was at the Combined Press Information Center in Baghdad on my recent trip to Iraq, a pair of Spanish journalists--a newspaper reporter and a photojournalist--walked in, fresh from their embed with the 1-4 Cavalry of the First Infantry Division (the unit with which I embedded only days later). They had spent two weeks amongst the troops there, living and going on missions with them, including house-to-house searches and seizures, and their impressions of these soldiers were extremely clear.

"Absolutely amazing," said David Beriain, the reporter (and the one who spoke English), said of the young Cavalry troops. "In Spain, it is embarrassing--our soldiers are ashamed to be in the army. These young men--and they seem so young!--are so proud of what they do, and do it so well, even though it is dangerous and they could very easily be killed." Mr. Beriain explained that the company he had been embedded with had lost three men in the span of six days while he was there--one to a sniper and two to improvised explosive devices, both of which had blown armored Humvees into the air and flipped them onto their roofs. Despite this, he said, and despite some of the things they might have said in the heat of the moment after seeing another comrade die, the soldiers' resolve and morale was unshaken in the long term, and they remained committed to carrying out their mission to the best of their ability for the duration of their tours in Iraq.

It was in the process of performing that mission, of coping with the loss of loved ones, and of just being themselves as American soldiers that these young men were able to win over the admiration and affection of more than one journalist who had arrived in their midst harboring a less-than-positive opinion of the Iraq war, and of those who were tasked with prosecuting it.

"I love those guys," Mr. Beriain said, looking wistfully out the window of the media cloister in the Green Zone that is the Combined Press Information Center. "From the first time you go kick a door with them, they accept you--you're one of them. I've even got a 'family photo' with them" to remember them by. "I really hated to leave."

Such a radical transformation--and such a strong bond of affection--can rarely be forged in so little time outside of the constant, universal peril of a wartime environment. "It is those common experiences," Mr. Beriain explained, "where you are all in danger, and you go through it together. It builds a relationship instantly."

It doesn't matter how skeptical of the war a journalist might be, according to an Army public affairs officer who spoke with me about it on condition of anonymity. "So often, they come out of that experience and--even if their opinion of the war hasn't changed--they're completely won over by the troops."

"I was one of those," admitted Mr. Beriain, speaking broken English and blinking away tears. "No matter what you think of the war, or what has happened here, you cannot be around the soldiers and not be completely affected. They are amazing people, and they represent themselves and the Army better than anyone could ever imagine." A retired Army officer concurred, telling me that "young troops are some of the best goodwill ambassadors we've ever produced. It would never occur to one to not tell you what he's really thinking, and they are so earnest" that it is almost impossible not to be won over by them if given enough time.

---

The most spectacular recent case of a journalist with an antiwar mindset being completely overwhelmed into a change of heart by American soldiers, according to the public affairs officer, was a Greek public television reporter who had been embedded with an infantry unit that became entrenched in a 45-minute firefight with insurgents. Yanked out of the line of fire by a soldier who put the journalist's life above his own, he waited under cover and in fear of his life for the almost hourlong duration of the battle, with the best view possible of American soldiers in action against an armed and murderous enemy. He credits his having lived to tell the tale directly to those young troops.

"He had tears in his eyes as he talked about it," said the public affairs officer. "He just kept saying, 'They saved my life, they saved my life. . . . These are great men; they are heroes.' Even after telling it several times, he couldn't get through the story without choking up--and this was a man who had arrived here with all of the disdain for the Iraq mission and for the American soldiers who he [like seemingly most Europeans] had seen as the bad guys in this fight."

While embedding may be decried by some for causing journalists, who claim the utopian titles of "objective" and "neutral" for their reportage, to lose their cold detachment and actually begin to see the soldiers they live alongside as humans, it is that very quality that makes the practice of embedding reporters with military units so beneficial to both parties. Rather than observing events from a safely detached distance--and thus being able to remove the human element from the equation--embedded reporters are forced to face up to the humanity of their subjects, and to share common experiences--often of the life-and-death variety--with those they are covering.

Human nature being what it is, such close working conditions, and such common, life-threatening experiences, will have an effect on both parties involved--and it is a testament both to the soldiers themselves, and to the journalists who volunteer to live and work alongside them, that that effect has, in so many cases, been so positive.

Mr. Emanuel, a special operations military veteran who served in Iraq, is a leadership fellow with the Center for International Trade and Security at the University of Georgia. He is also a contributing editor for RedState.com, and is a columnist for the Athens (Ga.) Banner-Herald.

from the Guardian of London, 2007-Aug-6, by Oliver Kamm:

Terrible, but not a crime
Hiroshima and Nagasaki should be remembered for the suffering which was brought to an end

Today is Hiroshima day, the anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb. As the wartime generation passes on, our sense of gratitude is increasingly mixed with unease regarding one theatre of the second world war. There is a widespread conviction that, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, America committed acts that were not only terrible but also wrong.

Disarmament campaigners are not slow to advance further charges. Greenpeace maintains that a different American approach might have prevented the cold war, and argues that new research on the Hiroshima decision "should give us pause for thought about the wisdom of current US and UK nuclear weapons developments, strategies, operational policies and deployments".

This alternative history is devoid of merit. New historical research in fact lends powerful support to the traditionalist interpretation of the decision to drop the bomb. This conclusion may surprise Guardian readers. The so-called revisionist interpretation of the bomb made headway from the 1960s to the 1990s. It argued that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were less the concluding acts of the Pacific war than the opening acts of the cold war. Japan was already on the verge of surrender; the decision to drop the bomb was taken primarily to gain diplomatic advantage against the Soviet Union.

Yet there is no evidence that any American diplomat warned a Soviet counterpart in 1945-46 to watch out because America had the bomb. The decision to drop the bomb was founded on the conviction that a blockade and invasion of Japan would cause massive casualties. Estimates derived from intelligence about Japan's military deployments projected hundreds of thousands of American casualties.

Truman had to take account of this, and dropped the bomb for the reasons he said at the time. Contrary to popular myth, there is no documentary evidence that his military commanders advised him the bomb was unnecessary for Japan was about to surrender. As the historian Wilson Miscamble puts it, Truman "hoped that the bombs would end the war and secure peace with the fewest American casualties, and so they did. Surely he took the action any American president would have undertaken." Recent Japanese scholarship provides support for this position. Sadao Asada, of Doshisha University, Kyoto, has concluded from analysis of Japanese primary sources that the two bombs enabled the "peace party" within Japan's cabinet to prevail.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki are often used as a shorthand term for war crimes. That is not how they were judged at the time. Our side did terrible things to avoid a more terrible outcome. The bomb was a deliverance for American troops, for prisoners and slave labourers, for those dying of hunger and maltreatment throughout the Japanese empire - and for Japan itself. One of Japan's highest wartime officials, Kido Koichi, later testified that in his view the August surrender prevented 20 million Japanese casualties. The destruction of two cities, and the suffering it caused for decades afterwards, cannot but temper our view of the Pacific war. Yet we can conclude with a high degree of probability that abjuring the bomb would have caused greater suffering still.

Commemoration of war is part of our civic culture, and campaigners against Trident and the US missile defence system have every right to state their case. But those things must not be confused. The campaigners must advance independent grounds for their policy views. Dubious historical claims are not a legitimate way to advance them.

Oliver Kamm is the author of Anti-Totalitarianism: the Left-Wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2007-Jun-4, by Irshad Manji:

Muslim Melting Pot
Once again, America beats Europe on assimilation.

Against the backdrop of civil war, Abraham Lincoln stirred Americans by appealing to their "better angels." Now some of those angels appear in an unprecedented study about Muslims in the United States--and they may show us how to prevent civil war in Europe.

"Muslim Americans," released by the Pew Research Center, contains moments of bad news. For example, one in four respondents under the age of 30 accepts suicide bombing. As a reformed-minded Muslim, I say that honoring any religion of peace through violence is like preserving virginity through pre-marital sex. Think about it.

But the Pew report offers a lot more good news. Political Islam has not caught on in America as it has in Europe because most Muslims in the U.S. are--dare it be said--treated with dignity.

The vast majority of those surveyed like their communities and describe their lives as "pretty happy" or "very happy." Which means lobbyists do not speak for Muslim Americans when they cry that the U.S. hates Islam.

---

In Berlin recently, an audience buzzed nervously when I suggested that Europe can learn from America about integrating Muslims. Afterwards, several people confided to me that they know the U.S. is getting something right. What is that something? As I engage with young Muslims on both sides of the Atlantic, I see three factors: economics, diversity and faith.

• For plenty of Muslims in the United States, ambition and initiative pay off. The Pew survey reinforces this lesson, telling us that 71% of Muslim Americans believe most people in the U.S. "can make it if they are willing to work hard."

Meanwhile, in Europe, young Muslims face blatant discrimination in employment, educational and social opportunities, even when they are citizens. Many subsist on welfare, which only gives them time to stew and surf the Web for preachers who spew a rigid identity. This is the path that led Mohammed Bouyeri to murder Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh.

• In much of America, diversity is a reason to intermingle. The Pew study reveals that most Muslims are close friends with non-Muslims.

In much of Europe, diversity has become an excuse to self-segregate. Many of Europe's mosques, and the Muslims who attend them, refuse to communicate in the language of their new surroundings. As a result, young Muslim men drift away from moderate religious authorities and fall for online opportunists. That is how Mohammad Sidique Khan, mastermind of the London transit bombers, fell under the sway of "Sheikh Google," the collective nickname for Islamist Web sites.

• To Americans, it is not the fact of having faith that invites scrutiny, but what one is perceived to be doing with that faith. Western Europeans, still steeped in a backlash against the Catholic Church, often show suspicion or outright contempt to people of faith. Such "secular fundamentalism" leads some Muslims to believe that they will never be accepted by their adopted countries. So why integrate?

Small wonder that young Muslims in Western Europe whisper to me, "I wish I lived in the United States." The honesty doesn't end there. Muslim men, in their twenties, have complained to me that in an effort to appear sensitive, Europeans downplay shared values. This confuses many Muslim youth and creates a vacuum that radical clerics can exploit.

Translation: A common aspiration such as the American Dream is crucial to giving Muslims a sense of belonging to something larger and more dynamic than cultural enclaves.

But what about the Patriot Act and Guantanamo Bay? The answer always comes back that these are unfortunate and unjust exceptions. In America, they say, you can be more than a Muslim. You are a member of the wider public.

Naïve? Not according to the Pew study. More than half of Muslims in the U.S. identify themselves as Americans first, easily eclipsing patriotism among Muslims in Germany, Spain or Britain. Clearly, the U.S. has retained its genius as a nation of immigrants.

---

To be sure, there is a long way to go in giving non-immigrant Muslims, especially African-Americans, a sense of belonging. Most are not among the better educated, wealthier and politically influential Americans that so many South Asian, Iranian and Arab Muslims are.

However, that gap is the product of America's persistent racial battle. It has almost nothing to do with a fear of Islam.

For the all the slogans, accusations and fulminations of the Islam industry's lobbyists, fear is not what mainstream Americans feel about Muslims. Just ask the 73% of Muslims who told Pew that they have never been discriminated against in the U.S.

Europe, take notes. America, take a break from self-flagellation. Reformist Muslims, take your cue. In the U.S., you have the possibility of a voice. Islam's better angels depend on it.

Ms. Manji, a senior fellow at the European Foundation for Democracy, is author of "The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith" (St. Martin's, 2005).

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2006-Jun-6, by Josiah Bunting III:

A Noble Virtue Under Siege
Do Americans still understand the meaning of honor?

In our culture of therapy, self-absorption and celebrity, "honor" has very little cachet. An abuse of honor--say, by perpetrating a public fraud or acting duplicitously in private life--is but the occasion for the administration of comforting words of understanding, the application of medicines to assuage lingering anxieties and the invitation to appear on "Oprah," the better to explain the forces that, overwhelming meager resources of conscience and character, impelled a dishonorable act. Next may come an invitation to undertake the labor of a book, more fully to explore and expiate the fall from grace. Closure (as it is called) will then, at last, be obtained.

In short, there is no shame in actions once known as dishonorable, and the virtues that supported honor seem moribund. Chastity and modesty--so important to honor in social relations--are treated as relics from Jane Austen and "Little Women." When a high-school girl defends a sexual encounter on the grounds that an American president said that her particular act was not really sex, both she and her role model are, if not completely forgiven, understood to be, as members of the human family, subject to the same vagaries of uncontrollable temptations as you and I.

Things used to be so different. James Bowman's "Honor: A History" offers a brilliantly astringent accounting for the disappearance of honor as a normative standard of conduct in American society. Mr. Bowman traces the idea of honor from its classical origins to its aristocratic and democratic forms. Along the way, he discusses religious teachings (in Christianity and Islam), philosophical definitions (e.g., Aristotle and Nietzsche) and literary treatments (Arthurian legend, Shakespeare, Hemingway). Throughout, he cites the emblems of honor--or dishonor--in current events and popular culture. Perhaps most pertinent to the present moment, he surveys America's use of honor (and prestige) as causes (and justifications) for going to war, indeed for serving in the armed forces.

---

As late as the mid-1960s, lest we forget, members of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations prized "toughness" in foreign affairs and considered national honor a principal justification for fighting in Vietnam. There was a need, the architects of foreign policy felt, "to avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat (to our reputation as a guarantor)." What was on the line, Mr. Bowman writes, "was the 'prestige' that was really old-fashioned honor under a different name." Yet the war was not always justified to the American people in such terms, and when Richard Nixon promised "peace with honor," few believed him: Honor was, by then, understood as a slipshod synonym for "this is all we can take. We've done all we reasonably could for our ally."

In the West, the identity of personal with national honor was part of the fighting spirit in World War I, though it nearly sank in the slime of Passchendaele and the Somme. Its last florescence was in World War II, Mr. Bowman observes. And even then, "honor" and "duty" in the stiff, upper-class sense of the terms gave way, during the war, to a democratic ideal: the average guy "just doing a job." For America, this antiheroic theme was part of a national self-definition. "We were still, surely, different from . . . those old-fashioned jingoist or imperialist forebears who had been able to speak unashamedly of honor and its demands."

The rhetoric surrounding war changed over time--in Korea, in Vietnam, in the Balkans and now in Iraq. Governments came to feel, Mr. Bowman argues, that appeals to national honor, prestige and reputation for toughness no longer worked. The Marines may remain determined to keep their honor clean, but no such justification seems to animate the country as a whole in its role in the world. When terrorists took over Fallujah in 2004 and the Marines moved in to take them out, Mr. Bowman remembers a commentator saying: "This isn't about national security anymore: it's about pride and credibility." True enough, but the words were rare and tell-tale. Mr. Bowman notes that only in a post-honor society would such an explanation be necessary: Pride and credibility, he argues, are "commonly used substitutes for the old-fashioned sounding 'honor.' " They imply "jealousy for reputation" and the respect that countries and armies once demanded and expected.

---

Can honor be resuscitated? As Mr. Bowman notes, "honor is stark and unforgiving," and early-21st-century America does not like stark choices. ("Then it is the brave man chooses / While the coward turns aside," in the words of the old hymn.) "Character," meaning resolution, the persistence in right action whatever its costs, seems a quaint and Victorian crotchet. Citizens feverishly, fitfully, deplore the inadequacies of body armor for their Marines and soldiers; three days later, they have moved on. Did you say 32 Iraqis were blown up this morning, and a soldier killed, north of Baghdad? Shame. Let's see what that does to the president's poll numbers.

How well America understands its enemies' notions of honor--and how prepared the country is, itself, to act honorably--will be tested between now and the fall elections. A failure to understand, though not inevitable, may be writ large in a headline like this one: "Administration Announces Withdrawal of 28,000 American Troops by End of Year." As Vo Nguyen Giap and Ho Chi Minh must have smiled the first time they heard the word "Vietnamize," radical Islamists will rejoice at such a development, irrefutable evidence that America neither understands their own misbegotten notions of honor nor has the will, if it does understand, to act honorably in confronting them. Mr. Bunting is president of the H.F. Guggenheim Foundation in New York. You can buy "Honor: A History" from the OpinionJournal bookstore.

from WhiteHouse.gov, 2005-Jan-20:

President Sworn-In to Second Term

Vice President Cheney, Mr. Chief Justice, President Carter, President Bush, President Clinton, reverend clergy, distinguished guests, fellow citizens:

On this day, prescribed by law and marked by ceremony, we celebrate the durable wisdom of our Constitution, and recall the deep commitments that unite our country. I am grateful for the honor of this hour, mindful of the consequential times in which we live, and determined to fulfill the oath that I have sworn and you have witnessed.

At this second gathering, our duties are defined not by the words I use, but by the history we have seen together. For a half century, America defended our own freedom by standing watch on distant borders. After the shipwreck of communism came years of relative quiet, years of repose, years of sabbatical - and then there came a day of fire.

We have seen our vulnerability - and we have seen its deepest source. For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny - prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder - violence will gather, and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat. There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom.

We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.

America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. From the day of our Founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and earth. Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave. Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our Nation. It is the honorable achievement of our fathers. Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation's security, and the calling of our time.

So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.

This is not primarily the task of arms, though we will defend ourselves and our friends by force of arms when necessary. Freedom, by its nature, must be chosen, and defended by citizens, and sustained by the rule of law and the protection of minorities. And when the soul of a nation finally speaks, the institutions that arise may reflect customs and traditions very different from our own. America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling. Our goal instead is to help others find their own voice, attain their own freedom, and make their own way.

The great objective of ending tyranny is the concentrated work of generations. The difficulty of the task is no excuse for avoiding it. America's influence is not unlimited, but fortunately for the oppressed, America's influence is considerable, and we will use it confidently in freedom's cause.

My most solemn duty is to protect this nation and its people against further attacks and emerging threats. Some have unwisely chosen to test America's resolve, and have found it firm.

We will persistently clarify the choice before every ruler and every nation: The moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right. America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies.

We will encourage reform in other governments by making clear that success in our relations will require the decent treatment of their own people. America's belief in human dignity will guide our policies, yet rights must be more than the grudging concessions of dictators; they are secured by free dissent and the participation of the governed. In the long run, there is no justice without freedom, and there can be no human rights without human liberty.

Some, I know, have questioned the global appeal of liberty - though this time in history, four decades defined by the swiftest advance of freedom ever seen, is an odd time for doubt. Americans, of all people, should never be surprised by the power of our ideals. Eventually, the call of freedom comes to every mind and every soul. We do not accept the existence of permanent tyranny because we do not accept the possibility of permanent slavery. Liberty will come to those who love it.

Today, America speaks anew to the peoples of the world:

All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.

Democratic reformers facing repression, prison, or exile can know: America sees you for who you are: the future leaders of your free country.

The rulers of outlaw regimes can know that we still believe as Abraham Lincoln did: "Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves; and, under the rule of a just God, cannot long retain it."

The leaders of governments with long habits of control need to know: To serve your people you must learn to trust them. Start on this journey of progress and justice, and America will walk at your side.

And all the allies of the United States can know: we honor your friendship, we rely on your counsel, and we depend on your help. Division among free nations is a primary goal of freedom's enemies. The concerted effort of free nations to promote democracy is a prelude to our enemies' defeat.

Today, I also speak anew to my fellow citizens:

From all of you, I have asked patience in the hard task of securing America, which you have granted in good measure. Our country has accepted obligations that are difficult to fulfill, and would be dishonorable to abandon. Yet because we have acted in the great liberating tradition of this nation, tens of millions have achieved their freedom. And as hope kindles hope, millions more will find it. By our efforts, we have lit a fire as well - a fire in the minds of men. It warms those who feel its power, it burns those who fight its progress, and one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world.

A few Americans have accepted the hardest duties in this cause - in the quiet work of intelligence and diplomacy ... the idealistic work of helping raise up free governments ... the dangerous and necessary work of fighting our enemies. Some have shown their devotion to our country in deaths that honored their whole lives - and we will always honor their names and their sacrifice.

All Americans have witnessed this idealism, and some for the first time. I ask our youngest citizens to believe the evidence of your eyes. You have seen duty and allegiance in the determined faces of our soldiers. You have seen that life is fragile, and evil is real, and courage triumphs. Make the choice to serve in a cause larger than your wants, larger than yourself - and in your days you will add not just to the wealth of our country, but to its character.

America has need of idealism and courage, because we have essential work at home - the unfinished work of American freedom. In a world moving toward liberty, we are determined to show the meaning and promise of liberty.

In America's ideal of freedom, citizens find the dignity and security of economic independence, instead of laboring on the edge of subsistence. This is the broader definition of liberty that motivated the Homestead Act, the Social Security Act, and the G.I. Bill of Rights. And now we will extend this vision by reforming great institutions to serve the needs of our time. To give every American a stake in the promise and future of our country, we will bring the highest standards to our schools, and build an ownership society. We will widen the ownership of homes and businesses, retirement savings and health insurance - preparing our people for the challenges of life in a free society. By making every citizen an agent of his or her own destiny, we will give our fellow Americans greater freedom from want and fear, and make our society more prosperous and just and equal.

In America's ideal of freedom, the public interest depends on private character - on integrity, and tolerance toward others, and the rule of conscience in our own lives. Self-government relies, in the end, on the governing of the self. That edifice of character is built in families, supported by communities with standards, and sustained in our national life by the truths of Sinai, the Sermon on the Mount, the words of the Koran, and the varied faiths of our people. Americans move forward in every generation by reaffirming all that is good and true that came before - ideals of justice and conduct that are the same yesterday, today, and forever.

In America's ideal of freedom, the exercise of rights is ennobled by service, and mercy, and a heart for the weak. Liberty for all does not mean independence from one another. Our nation relies on men and women who look after a neighbor and surround the lost with love. Americans, at our best, value the life we see in one another, and must always remember that even the unwanted have worth. And our country must abandon all the habits of racism, because we cannot carry the message of freedom and the baggage of bigotry at the same time.

From the perspective of a single day, including this day of dedication, the issues and questions before our country are many. From the viewpoint of centuries, the questions that come to us are narrowed and few. Did our generation advance the cause of freedom? And did our character bring credit to that cause?

These questions that judge us also unite us, because Americans of every party and background, Americans by choice and by birth, are bound to one another in the cause of freedom. We have known divisions, which must be healed to move forward in great purposes - and I will strive in good faith to heal them. Yet those divisions do not define America. We felt the unity and fellowship of our nation when freedom came under attack, and our response came like a single hand over a single heart. And we can feel that same unity and pride whenever America acts for good, and the victims of disaster are given hope, and the unjust encounter justice, and the captives are set free.

We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom. Not because history runs on the wheels of inevitability; it is human choices that move events. Not because we consider ourselves a chosen nation; God moves and chooses as He wills. We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul. When our Founders declared a new order of the ages; when soldiers died in wave upon wave for a union based on liberty; when citizens marched in peaceful outrage under the banner "Freedom Now" - they were acting on an ancient hope that is meant to be fulfilled. History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of Liberty.

When the Declaration of Independence was first read in public and the Liberty Bell was sounded in celebration, a witness said, "It rang as if it meant something." In our time it means something still. America, in this young century, proclaims liberty throughout all the world, and to all the inhabitants thereof. Renewed in our strength - tested, but not weary - we are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom.

May God bless you, and may He watch over the United States of America.

from WhiteHouse.gov, 2003-Nov-6:

President Bush Discusses Freedom in Iraq and Middle East
Remarks by the President at the 20th Anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy

United States Chamber of Commerce
Washington, D.C.

11:05 A.M. EST

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you all very much. Please be seated. Thanks for the warm welcome, and thanks for inviting me to join you in this 20th anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy. The staff and directors of this organization have seen a lot of history over the last two decades, you've been a part of that history. By speaking for and standing for freedom, you've lifted the hopes of people around the world, and you've brought great credit to America.

President George W. Bush delivers remarks at the 20th Anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy at the U. S. Chamber of Commerce Thursday, Nov. 6, 2003. Pictured with President Bush is Vin Weber, the endowment's chair and former Congressman from Minnesota. I appreciate Vin for the short introduction. I'm a man who likes short introductions. And he didn't let me down. But more importantly, I appreciate the invitation. I appreciate the members of Congress who are here, senators from both political parties, members of the House of Representatives from both political parties. I appreciate the ambassadors who are here. I appreciate the guests who have come. I appreciate the bipartisan spirit, the nonpartisan spirit of the National Endowment for Democracy. I'm glad that Republicans and Democrats and independents are working together to advance human liberty.

The roots of our democracy can be traced to England, and to its Parliament -- and so can the roots of this organization. In June of 1982, President Ronald Reagan spoke at Westminster Palace and declared, the turning point had arrived in history. He argued that Soviet communism had failed, precisely because it did not respect its own people -- their creativity, their genius and their rights.

President Reagan said that the day of Soviet tyranny was passing, that freedom had a momentum which would not be halted. He gave this organization its mandate: to add to the momentum of freedom across the world. Your mandate was important 20 years ago; it is equally important today. (Applause.)

A number of critics were dismissive of that speech by the President. According to one editorial of the time, "It seems hard to be a sophisticated European and also an admirer of Ronald Reagan." (Laughter.) Some observers on both sides of the Atlantic pronounced the speech simplistic and naive, and even dangerous. In fact, Ronald Reagan's words were courageous and optimistic and entirely correct. (Applause.)

The great democratic movement President Reagan described was already well underway. In the early 1970s, there were about 40 democracies in the world. By the middle of that decade, Portugal and Spain and Greece held free elections. Soon there were new democracies in Latin America, and free institutions were spreading in Korea, in Taiwan, and in East Asia. This very week in 1989, there were protests in East Berlin and in Leipzig. By the end of that year, every communist dictatorship in Central Europe [GWB said "Central America" in the live appearance, as does the transcript, with an asterisk noting the correct reading. -AMPP Ed.] had collapsed. Within another year, the South African government released Nelson Mandela. Four years later, he was elected president of his country -- ascending, like Walesa and Havel, from prisoner of state to head of state.

As the 20th century ended, there were around 120 democracies in the world -- and I can assure you more are on the way. (Applause.) Ronald Reagan would be pleased, and he would not be surprised.

We've witnessed, in little over a generation, the swiftest advance of freedom in the 2,500 year story of democracy. Historians in the future will offer their own explanations for why this happened. Yet we already know some of the reasons they will cite. It is no accident that the rise of so many democracies took place in a time when the world's most influential nation was itself a democracy.

The United States made military and moral commitments in Europe and Asia, which protected free nations from aggression, and created the conditions in which new democracies could flourish. As we provided security for whole nations, we also provided inspiration for oppressed peoples. In prison camps, in banned union meetings, in clandestine churches, men and women knew that the whole world was not sharing their own nightmare. They knew of at least one place -- a bright and hopeful land -- where freedom was valued and secure. And they prayed that America would not forget them, or forget the mission to promote liberty around the world.

Historians will note that in many nations, the advance of markets and free enterprise helped to create a middle class that was confident enough to demand their own rights. They will point to the role of technology in frustrating censorship and central control -- and marvel at the power of instant communications to spread the truth, the news, and courage across borders.

Historians in the future will reflect on an extraordinary, undeniable fact: Over time, free nations grow stronger and dictatorships grow weaker. In the middle of the 20th century, some imagined that the central planning and social regimentation were a shortcut to national strength. In fact, the prosperity, and social vitality and technological progress of a people are directly determined by extent of their liberty. Freedom honors and unleashes human creativity -- and creativity determines the strength and wealth of nations. Liberty is both the plan of Heaven for humanity, and the best hope for progress here on Earth.

The progress of liberty is a powerful trend. Yet, we also know that liberty, if not defended, can be lost. The success of freedom is not determined by some dialectic of history. By definition, the success of freedom rests upon the choices and the courage of free peoples, and upon their willingness to sacrifice. In the trenches of World War I, through a two-front war in the 1940s, the difficult battles of Korea and Vietnam, and in missions of rescue and liberation on nearly every continent, Americans have amply displayed our willingness to sacrifice for liberty.

The sacrifices of Americans have not always been recognized or appreciated, yet they have been worthwhile. Because we and our allies were steadfast, Germany and Japan are democratic nations that no longer threaten the world. A global nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union ended peacefully -- as did the Soviet Union. The nations of Europe are moving towards unity, not dividing into armed camps and descending into genocide. Every nation has learned, or should have learned, an important lesson: Freedom is worth fighting for, dying for, and standing for -- and the advance of freedom leads to peace. (Applause.)

And now we must apply that lesson in our own time. We've reached another great turning point -- and the resolve we show will shape the next stage of the world democratic movement.

Our commitment to democracy is tested in countries like Cuba and Burma and North Korea and Zimbabwe -- outposts of oppression in our world. The people in these nations live in captivity, and fear and silence. Yet, these regimes cannot hold back freedom forever -- and, one day, from prison camps and prison cells, and from exile, the leaders of new democracies will arrive. (Applause.) Communism, and militarism and rule by the capricious and corrupt are the relics of a passing era. And we will stand with these oppressed peoples until the day of their freedom finally arrives. (Applause.)

Our commitment to democracy is tested in China. That nation now has a sliver, a fragment of liberty. Yet, China's people will eventually want their liberty pure and whole. China has discovered that economic freedom leads to national wealth. China's leaders will also discover that freedom is indivisible -- that social and religious freedom is also essential to national greatness and national dignity. Eventually, men and women who are allowed to control their own wealth will insist on controlling their own lives and their own country.

Our commitment to democracy is also tested in the Middle East, which is my focus today, and must be a focus of American policy for decades to come. In many nations of the Middle East -- countries of great strategic importance -- democracy has not yet taken root. And the questions arise: Are the peoples of the Middle East somehow beyond the reach of liberty? Are millions of men and women and children condemned by history or culture to live in despotism? Are they alone never to know freedom, and never even to have a choice in the matter? I, for one, do not believe it. I believe every person has the ability and the right to be free. (Applause.)

Some skeptics of democracy assert that the traditions of Islam are inhospitable to the representative government. This "cultural condescension," as Ronald Reagan termed it, has a long history. After the Japanese surrender in 1945, a so-called Japan expert asserted that democracy in that former empire would "never work." Another observer declared the prospects for democracy in post-Hitler Germany are, and I quote, "most uncertain at best" -- he made that claim in 1957. Seventy-four years ago, The Sunday London Times declared nine-tenths of the population of India to be "illiterates not caring a fig for politics." Yet when Indian democracy was imperiled in the 1970s, the Indian people showed their commitment to liberty in a national referendum that saved their form of government.

Time after time, observers have questioned whether this country, or that people, or this group, are "ready" for democracy -- as if freedom were a prize you win for meeting our own Western standards of progress. In fact, the daily work of democracy itself is the path of progress. It teaches cooperation, the free exchange of ideas, and the peaceful resolution of differences. As men and women are showing, from Bangladesh to Botswana, to Mongolia, it is the practice of democracy that makes a nation ready for democracy, and every nation can start on this path.

It should be clear to all that Islam -- the faith of one-fifth of humanity -- is consistent with democratic rule. Democratic progress is found in many predominantly Muslim countries -- in Turkey and Indonesia, and Senegal and Albania, Niger and Sierra Leone. Muslim men and women are good citizens of India and South Africa, of the nations of Western Europe, and of the United States of America.

More than half of all the Muslims in the world live in freedom under democratically constituted governments. They succeed in democratic societies, not in spite of their faith, but because of it. A religion that demands individual moral accountability, and encourages the encounter of the individual with God, is fully compatible with the rights and responsibilities of self-government.

Yet there's a great challenge today in the Middle East. In the words of a recent report by Arab scholars, the global wave of democracy has -- and I quote -- "barely reached the Arab states." They continue: "This freedom deficit undermines human development and is one of the most painful manifestations of lagging political development." The freedom deficit they describe has terrible consequences, of the people of the Middle East and for the world. In many Middle Eastern countries, poverty is deep and it is spreading, women lack rights and are denied schooling. Whole societies remain stagnant while the world moves ahead. These are not the failures of a culture or a religion. These are the failures of political and economic doctrines.

As the colonial era passed away, the Middle East saw the establishment of many military dictatorships. Some rulers adopted the dogmas of socialism, seized total control of political parties and the media and universities. They allied themselves with the Soviet bloc and with international terrorism. Dictators in Iraq and Syria promised the restoration of national honor, a return to ancient glories. They've left instead a legacy of torture, oppression, misery, and ruin.

Other men, and groups of men, have gained influence in the Middle East and beyond through an ideology of theocratic terror. Behind their language of religion is the ambition for absolute political power. Ruling cabals like the Taliban show their version of religious piety in public whippings of women, ruthless suppression of any difference or dissent, and support for terrorists who arm and train to murder the innocent. The Taliban promised religious purity and national pride. Instead, by systematically destroying a proud and working society, they left behind suffering and starvation.

Many Middle Eastern governments now understand that military dictatorship and theocratic rule are a straight, smooth highway to nowhere. But some governments still cling to the old habits of central control. There are governments that still fear and repress independent thought and creativity, and private enterprise -- the human qualities that make for a -- strong and successful societies. Even when these nations have vast natural resources, they do not respect or develop their greatest resources -- the talent and energy of men and women working and living in freedom.

Instead of dwelling on past wrongs and blaming others, governments in the Middle East need to confront real problems, and serve the true interests of their nations. The good and capable people of the Middle East all deserve responsible leadership. For too long, many people in that region have been victims and subjects -- they deserve to be active citizens.

Governments across the Middle East and North Africa are beginning to see the need for change. Morocco has a diverse new parliament; King Mohammed has urged it to extend the rights to women. Here is how His Majesty explained his reforms to parliament: "How can society achieve progress while women, who represent half the nation, see their rights violated and suffer as a result of injustice, violence, and marginalization, notwithstanding the dignity and justice granted to them by our glorious religion?" The King of Morocco is correct: The future of Muslim nations will be better for all with the full participation of women. (Applause.)

In Bahrain last year, citizens elected their own parliament for the first time in nearly three decades. Oman has extended the vote to all adult citizens; Qatar has a new constitution; Yemen has a multiparty political system; Kuwait has a directly elected national assembly; and Jordan held historic elections this summer. Recent surveys in Arab nations reveal broad support for political pluralism, the rule of law, and free speech. These are the stirrings of Middle Eastern democracy, and they carry the promise of greater change to come.

As changes come to the Middle Eastern region, those with power should ask themselves: Will they be remembered for resisting reform, or for leading it? In Iran, the demand for democracy is strong and broad, as we saw last month when thousands gathered to welcome home Shirin Ebadi, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. The regime in Teheran must heed the democratic demands of the Iranian people, or lose its last claim to legitimacy. (Applause.)

For the Palestinian people, the only path to independence and dignity and progress is the path of democracy. (Applause.) And the Palestinian leaders who block and undermine democratic reform, and feed hatred and encourage violence are not leaders at all. They're the main obstacles to peace, and to the success of the Palestinian people.

The Saudi government is taking first steps toward reform, including a plan for gradual introduction of elections. By giving the Saudi people a greater role in their own society, the Saudi government can demonstrate true leadership in the region.

The great and proud nation of Egypt has shown the way toward peace in the Middle East, and now should show the way toward democracy in the Middle East. (Applause.) Champions of democracy in the region understand that democracy is not perfect, it is not the path to utopia, but it's the only path to national success and dignity.

As we watch and encourage reforms in the region, we are mindful that modernization is not the same as Westernization. Representative governments in the Middle East will reflect their own cultures. They will not, and should not, look like us. Democratic nations may be constitutional monarchies, federal republics, or parliamentary systems. And working democracies always need time to develop -- as did our own. We've taken a 200-year journey toward inclusion and justice -- and this makes us patient and understanding as other nations are at different stages of this journey.

There are, however, essential principles common to every successful society, in every culture. Successful societies limit the power of the state and the power of the military -- so that governments respond to the will of the people, and not the will of an elite. Successful societies protect freedom with the consistent and impartial rule of law, instead of selecting applying -- selectively applying the law to punish political opponents. Successful societies allow room for healthy civic institutions -- for political parties and labor unions and independent newspapers and broadcast media. Successful societies guarantee religious liberty -- the right to serve and honor God without fear of persecution. Successful societies privatize their economies, and secure the rights of property. They prohibit and punish official corruption, and invest in the health and education of their people. They recognize the rights of women. And instead of directing hatred and resentment against others, successful societies appeal to the hopes of their own people. (Applause.)

These vital principles are being applies in the nations of Afghanistan and Iraq. With the steady leadership of President Karzai, the people of Afghanistan are building a modern and peaceful government. Next month, 500 delegates will convene a national assembly in Kabul to approve a new Afghan constitution. The proposed draft would establish a bicameral parliament, set national elections next year, and recognize Afghanistan's Muslim identity, while protecting the rights of all citizens. Afghanistan faces continuing economic and security challenges -- it will face those challenges as a free and stable democracy. (Applause.)

In Iraq, the Coalition Provisional Authority and the Iraqi Governing Council are also working together to build a democracy -- and after three decades of tyranny, this work is not easy. The former dictator ruled by terror and treachery, and left deeply ingrained habits of fear and distrust. Remnants of his regime, joined by foreign terrorists, continue their battle against order and against civilization. Our coalition is responding to recent attacks with precision raids, guided by intelligence provided by the Iraqis, themselves. And we're working closely with Iraqi citizens as they prepare a constitution, as they move toward free elections and take increasing responsibility for their own affairs. As in the defense of Greece in 1947, and later in the Berlin Airlift, the strength and will of free peoples are now being tested before a watching world. And we will meet this test. (Applause.)

Securing democracy in Iraq is the work of many hands. American and coalition forces are sacrificing for the peace of Iraq and for the security of free nations. Aid workers from many countries are facing danger to help the Iraqi people. The National Endowment for Democracy is promoting women's rights, and training Iraqi journalists, and teaching the skills of political participation. Iraqis, themselves -- police and borders guards and local officials -- are joining in the work and they are sharing in the sacrifice.

This is a massive and difficult undertaking -- it is worth our effort, it is worth our sacrifice, because we know the stakes. The failure of Iraqi democracy would embolden terrorists around the world, increase dangers to the American people, and extinguish the hopes of millions in the region. Iraqi democracy will succeed -- and that success will send forth the news, from Damascus to Teheran -- that freedom can be the future of every nation. (Applause.) The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution. (Applause.)

Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe -- because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export. And with the spread of weapons that can bring catastrophic harm to our country and to our friends, it would be reckless to accept the status quo. (Applause.)

Therefore, the United States has adopted a new policy, a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East. This strategy requires the same persistence and energy and idealism we have shown before. And it will yield the same results. As in Europe, as in Asia, as in every region of the world, the advance of freedom leads to peace. (Applause.)

The advance of freedom is the calling of our time; it is the calling of our country. From the Fourteen Points to the Four Freedoms, to the Speech at Westminster, America has put our power at the service of principle. We believe that liberty is the design of nature; we believe that liberty is the direction of history. We believe that human fulfillment and excellence come in the responsible exercise of liberty. And we believe that freedom -- the freedom we prize -- is not for us alone, it is the right and the capacity of all mankind. (Applause.)

Working for the spread of freedom can be hard. Yet, America has accomplished hard tasks before. Our nation is strong; we're strong of heart. And we're not alone. Freedom is finding allies in every country; freedom finds allies in every culture. And as we meet the terror and violence of the world, we can be certain the author of freedom is not indifferent to the fate of freedom.

With all the tests and all the challenges of our age, this is, above all, the age of liberty. Each of you at this Endowment is fully engaged in the great cause of liberty. And I thank you. May God bless your work. And may God continue to bless America. (Applause.)

END 11:37 A.M. EST

from The New Republic, posted 2005-Dec-6, by William J. Stuntz:

Lincoln and Iraq
Brief wars rarely produce lasting results. Long wars often do.

In 1861 Abraham Lincoln led what was left of his country to war to restore "the Union as it was," to use the popular phrase of the time. Free navigation of the Mississippi River, the right to collect customs duties in Southern ports, the status of a pair of coastal forts in South Carolina and Florida--these were the issues over which young American men got down to the business of killing one another that sad summer.

It was all a pipe dream. "The Union as it was" was gone, forever. Events proved William Tecumseh Sherman--the prophet of that war--right, and everyone else wrong: An ocean of blood would be required to reunite the United States, and once that blood was spilled, the country over which James Buchanan had presided was as dead as the soldiers whose corpses littered the battlefields of Shiloh and Gettysburg, Antietam and Cold Harbor.

But there was a much bigger, much better, and above all much nobler dream waiting in the wings: "that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom" (to use Lincoln's own words)--that the chains of four million slaves might be shattered forever, that freedom and democracy might prevail against tyranny and aristocracy in a world still full of tyrants and aristocrats.

The loss of hundreds of thousands of American men--a lost generation comparable to the generation of young French, German, and British men lost in Flanders fields a half-century later--for the sake of a few Southern forts and ports would have been a tragedy as great as the senseless killing at the Somme and Passchendaele. World War I was senseless, both because it was fought over territory and because it settled nothing. The Civil War that Lincoln and Jefferson Davis set out to fight would have been no different. If control of America's rivers had remained the war's object, then whoever won the day in the early 1860s would have had to defend that object again a generation later, just as World War II saw a generation of British and American men fight for the same territory their fathers won a generation after their fathers won it.

Freedom and democracy, justice and the equality of all men before God and before the law--those causes were very different. Shedding an ocean of blood for them was terribly sad but not tragic: The essence of tragedy is waste, and the blood shed on the Civil War's battlefields was not wasted. Horrible as its killing fields were, those young men accomplished something profoundly good: Their deaths ensured that (to use Lincoln's words again) "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." That is why the Civil War has gone down in history not as America's own World War I, but as the war of America's true "greatest generation," the generation that preserved freedom and democracy for us and for the rest of humankind.

In 1861 neither Lincoln nor Davis could have won a fair vote for the war they wound up fighting. Lincoln nearly lost his office, and hence the war, over his decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. In 1861 the North could not imagine the suffering of the next four years--and had Northern voters done so, they would have bid the South go in peace and left slavery's chains intact. Thankfully, no one guessed the future (well, almost no one--Sherman came close), and the future was better because of it.

What does this history teach us? Three things: First, that Victor Davis Hanson is right--wars often change purposes after they begin. Second, that sometimes the new purpose is vastly better than the one it replaces. Few nations choose up front to sacrifice their sons for the sake of others' freedom. When such sacrifices are made, they usually flow not from design but from accident and error--just as the North's military blunders prolonged the Civil War, and thereby made it a struggle to bring that new birth of freedom to the war-torn land over which the soldiers fought.

The third lesson is the most important. Brief wars rarely produce permanent results, but long wars often do. Had McClellan's army taken Richmond and ended the war early in 1862, slavery and secessionism would have survived, and "the South shall rise again" would have been a prediction rather than a slogan. Hitler conquered most of Western Europe--Denmark, Norway, the Low Countries, and France--in a two-month campaign in the spring and early summer of 1940. It took five years to undo the conquest. But the long, hard slog to Berlin worked: The Thousand-Year Reich was ended centuries before its self-proclaimed expiration date. Napoleon's marshals occupied Spain in a few months in 1808. It took Wellington and Spanish guerrillas six years to dislodge the French. But the dislodging lasted: In the 19 decades since, no French government has ruled an acre of the Iberian Peninsula.

What would have happened had the second Iraq war turned out like the first, as the White House apparently expected? Saddam would have been toppled, the Iraqi people would have celebrated, order would have been restored quickly, followed by a speedy exit for British and American troops. Then what? Maybe the rule of Iran-style Shia mullahs, perhaps another brutal Sunni autocrat to take the place of the last one, possibly an endless civil war between the two. Today, there is a real chance of a vastly better result--precisely because the insurgency survived, because it wasn't quickly defeated. Sunni intransigence needed to be crushed slowly; a quick in-and-out war was not enough to kill the dream of forever tyrannizing Iraqi Kurds and Shia. More important, thousands of senseless murders over the past 32 months have taught Iraqis--Sunni, Shia, and Kurd alike--just how vicious Zarqawi and his allies are. That lesson will have very useful consequences for the long-term health of the region.

Today's fighting in Iraq bears little resemblance to Pickett's charge or the Union assault on Marye's Heights in Fredericksburg. For one thing, the Civil War was infinitely bloodier: Its worst battles killed more American soldiers in a day than have died in two-and-a-half years of fighting in Iraq. And the purpose for which our current war was begun--capturing Saddam Hussein's supposed stash of WMDs--seems nobler than the fight over who held Fort Sumter. Still, some key parallels remain. Toppling Saddam and seizing his chemical and biological weapons probably wasn't worth the sacrifice of 2,000-plus American lives (as long as nuclear weapons weren't in the picture). Similarly, control over the Mississippi wasn't worth the bloodletting across the length of the Confederacy's border that took place in Lincoln's first term.

Thankfully, Lincoln saw to it that the war's purpose changed. George W. Bush has changed the purpose of his war too, though the change seems more the product of our enemies' choices than of Bush's design. By prolonging the war, Zarqawi and his Baathist allies have drawn thousands of terrorist wannabes into the fight--against both our soldiers and Muslim civilians. When terrorists fight American civilians, as on September 11, they can leverage their own deaths to kill a great many of us. But when terrorists fight American soldiers, the odds tilt towards our side. Equally important, by bringing the fight to a Muslim land, by making that land the central front of the war on Islamic terrorism, the United States has effectively forced Muslim terrorists to kill Muslim civilians. That is why the so-called Arab street is rising--not against us but against the terrorists, as we saw in Jordan after Zarqawi's disastrous hotel bombing. The population of the Islamic world is choosing sides not between jihadists and Westerners, but between jihadists and people just like themselves. We are, slowly but surely, converting bin Laden's war into a civil war--and that is a war bin Laden and his followers cannot hope to win.

We see the fruits of that dynamic across the Middle East. Democracy is rising, fitfully to be sure, but still rising: in Lebanon, in Palestine, in Egypt, in Iran, even in Saudi Arabia--not just because it is also rising in Iraq, but because its enemies are the same as our enemies. That is a war very much worth fighting.

Today our forces and Iraqis are fighting together and, slowly, winning a good and noble war that holds the hope of bringing to millions a measure of freedom they never knew before. And yet today, America seems ready, even eager, to concede defeat and withdraw: a sad twist on the famous George Aiken formula for extricating American soldiers from Vietnam. It sounds bizarre--why would anyone want to throw away the chance of such a great victory, when victory seems within reach? But it isn't bizarre. On the contrary, it has happened before.

Again, consider the politics of the Civil War. In 1863 the Northern street--the term didn't exist then, but the concept did--rose, and New York saw the worst rioting in our nation's history. The rioters' cause was ending the draft on which Lincoln's war depended. A year later Lincoln seemed headed for electoral defeat, even as Grant's and Sherman's armies seemed headed for decisive military victories. Victory often seems most elusive to civilians when it is most nearly within soldiers' grasp. And noble causes often do not sound noble to the nation whose sons must fight for them. (Those who do the fighting understand: Lincoln had the overwhelming support of soldiers in the field, and I would bet my next paycheck that today's soldiers overwhelmingly support fighting through to victory in Iraq.) In many American towns and cities, then as now, the cause of freedom for others did not seem a cause worth fighting and dying for.

But it is, partly because--as Lincoln saw better than anyone--others' freedom helps to guarantee our own. A world where Southern planters ruled their slaves with the lash was a world where Northerners' rights could never be secure; if birth and privilege and caste reigned supreme in the South, those things would more easily reign elsewhere, closer to Northern homes. Lincoln had it right: Either democracy and freedom would go on to new heights or they might well "perish from the earth." So too today. A world full of Islamic autocrats is a world full of little bin Ladens eager to give their lives to kill Americans. A world full of Islamic democracies gives young Muslim men different outlets for their passions. That obviously means better lives for them. But it also means better and safer lives for us.

None of this excuses the bungling and bad management that have plagued the Iraq war. The administration has made some terrible mistakes that have cost precious lives, both among our soldiers and among Iraqi civilians. But bungling and bad management were far more evident in Lincoln's war than they have been in Bush's. Most wars are bungled; battle plans routinely go awry. Sometimes, error gives rise to larger truths; nations can stumble unawares onto great opportunities. So it was in the 1860s. So it is today in the Middle East.

Two-and-a-half years ago, our armed forces set out to fight a small war with a small objective. Today we find ourselves in a larger war with a larger and vastly better purpose. It would be one of history's sadder ironies were we to turn away because that better purpose is not the one we set out to achieve. Either we fight the fight our enemies have chosen until they are defeated or (better still) dead, or millions of Muslim men and women may lose their "last, best hope"--and we may face a mushroom cloud over Manhattan, the work of one of the many Mohammed Attas that Middle Eastern autocracies have bred over the last generation. The choice belongs not to the president alone, but to all of us. Here's hoping we choose as wisely as Lincoln's generation did.

William J. Stuntz is a professor at Harvard Law School.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2004-Dec-17, by Daniel Henninger:

Here's One Use Of U.S. Power Jacques Can't Stop
"American influence" is the great white whale of the 21st century.

We see where a curator at France's Pompidou Center says his museum is opening a branch in Hong Kong, because "U.S. culture is too strong" there, and "we need to have a presence in Asia to counterbalance the American influence." With the Pompidou Center?

"American influence" is the great white whale of the 21st century, and Jacques Chirac is the Ahab chasing her with a three-masted schooner. Along for the ride is a crew that includes Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, Vladimir Putin, North Korea's Kim Jong-Il, Kofi Annan, the Saudi royal family, Robert Mugabe, the state committee of Communist China and various others who have ordained themselves leaders for life. At night, seated around the rum keg, they talk about how they have to stop American political power, the Marines or Hollywood.

The world is lucky these despots and demagogues are breaking their harpoons on this hopeless quest. Because all around them their own populations are grabbing the one American export no one can stop: raw technology. Communications technologies, most of them developed in American laboratories (often by engineers who voted for John Kerry), have finally begun to effect an historic shift in the relationship between governments and the governed. The governed are starting to win.

Not that long ago, in 1989, the world watched demonstrators sit passively in Tiananmen Square and fight the authorities with little more than a papier-mâché Statue of Liberty. Poland's Solidarity movement had to print protest material with homemade ink made from oil because the Communist government confiscated all the printers' ink.

In 2004, in Ukraine's Independence Square, they had cell phones.

Using the phones' SMS messaging technology, demonstrators sent messages to meet to 10 or so friends, who'd each SMS the message to 10 more friends, and so on. It's called "smart-mobbing."

---

Meanwhile, community Web sites in Ukraine would post the numbers of tents on the square where medical help was needed, or the sites would recruit people with specific TV skills needed at Channel 5, the lone independent TV station. The Ukrainian Supreme Court's historic Dec. 3 decision, declaring the election a fraud, was streamed on the Internet live from a Kiev courtroom and watched real time in London, New York, Washington and Toronto, sent out on e-mail distribution lists so the next steps could be discussed by the reform network and put in motion within an hour.

Until recently, one-party or no-party governments had a standing list of answers for people with a different notion: a) we don't care what you think; b) shut up; c) we kill you. There's no sure cure for c, but Plans a and b are becoming obsolete. Once impervious political authorities must now face the possibility of having their information monopoly hammered by an array of mostly American-engineered technology--smart cell phones, communication satellites, e-mail, Web logs (or "blogs") and a seemingly endless stream of information-sharing programs whose arcane names (RSS, Atom) hide their great power. The mass-market power of the older media--radio, TV, print--is also being integrated with the precision targeting of new technologies.

This past weekend, a few hundred of the people creating and driving these things gathered at a conference organized by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. It included individuals who are proselytizing the new communications technologies to Iran, China, Iraq, South Korea, Malaysia, India, Western Africa and even the U.S. military (individual GIs are running an estimated 100 Web logs).

Isaac Mao, a Chinese entrepreneur who runs a blog-hosting service, reported that in two years the number of personal, Chinese-language Web logs has grown from 1,000 to 600,000. Many are run by English speakers, who import, translate and distribute material from outside China.

Anyone want to guess the third-most used language on the Web, behind English and Chinese? Farsi. Iran now has about 75,000 individual Web logs. That's because a young, Toronto-based Iranian journalist who publishes as Hoder created tools in Farsi to make it possible. Only 10% of the Iranian blogs could be called political; most discuss music, movies, poetry and Iranian or Western culture. "Iran's most interesting political conversations take place in taxis," said Hoder.

There's more coming. Developers from California at the conference introduced the first Arabic-language blogging tool. Created with support from Spirit of America, it will be used now in Iraq. The Fadhil brothers of Iraqthemodel.com plan to assemble 25 Internet journalists to report the Jan. 30 election. This effort will be patterned after Ohmynews.com, the influential South Korean Web newspaper.

China uses up to 40,000 bureaucrats to police its explosion of blogs. We'll no doubt find out how many anti-Web divisions Syria's President Bashar al-Assad has. (One provocateur at the conference plausibly suggested the greatest opportunities for these technologies lie with one of the world's most monopolized precincts--local U.S. politics.) In Africa, by contrast, the best political communication occurs outside cyberspace, on talk-radio. The most interesting is Ghana's JoyFM (it maintains a lively Web site of Ghanaian news at myjoyonline.com).

---

There is no need to oversell the power of these technologies. What happened in Ukraine won't happen in Cairo next month. But unless Hosni Mubarak and Vladimir Putin can come up with a way to shut down every engineer and programmer in America who is inventing new ways to output/input ideas and tweaking the ones we already have, they've got a problem.

Their problem--and the promise here--is that this stuff is moving the world's people, and fast, toward the one American product that governing elites really need to fear: free speech. Some at the Berkman conference worried this still isn't enough to "change things." Jeff Jarvis, one of this movement's most intelligent thinkers set them straight: "This is not about causes or organizing people. It's about us creating these tools and then simply having faith in people who use them elsewhere to do good."

Even the Pompidou Center won't stop that.

Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.

from the Missoulian, 2006-Jul-5, by Vince Devlin:

Paint on the tracks: Call it vandalism or art, `tagging' on boxcars does show creativity

MISSOULA, Mont. -- Art, or vandalism?

To Montana Rail Link employees who daily see the often-elaborate graffiti painted on boxcars roll by them in their train yard, it's a bit of both.

“It's become more and more prevalent,” says trainmaster Jim Lyons of Missoula, “and the quality has become exponentially better.”

One boxcar features a painting of an elephant with the message, “I am not the elephant man.”

On another, a monster is pictured plucking boxcars off a track. In another part of the yard, there's a man's face being stretched down a boxcar by a hand.

“Why on a boxcar?” asks yard foreman Jim Coleman. “For my entertainment, I guess.”

Very few boxcars remain a blank canvas. Much of the graffiti is the work of taggers, people who attach their own logo to buildings, bridges, boxcars and whatever else they find to paint it on. The tags are often difficult to read, at least to the uninitiated. Some are believed to be gang-related, but not all.

“Utah Glue” one appears to say. “Dreds,” reads another. There is “Hype.” “Smack.” “Plot.” “Crise.” “Zerc.” “Pryer.” “STS.”

Near the “STS” tag is an explanation: “State Too State,” it says it stands for.

But most are indecipherable.

Some have three-digit numbers attached to them, which may refer to police scanner codes, or might be a telephone number area code that identifies the tagger's location. Virtually all of the artwork/vandalism is done outside Montana.

But the boxcars eventually wind up back here.

“It happens so quickly,” MRL spokeswoman Lynda Frost says. “We'll get a brand new car in, and you can trust the next time it goes off our system it will come back painted. We have no control over it.”

“I don't understand a lot of it,” Lyons says. “My take is there are hidden meanings in them, but I would not know what they are. It's like trying to solve `The Da Vinci Code.' ”

Both Frost and Lyons say it causes problems. First, trains are very dangerous things to be around - boxcars are constantly being moved hither and yon in a train yard, and no sooner does Lyons warn that cars can move incredibly quietly than several roll silently by on a nearby track.

And the taggers paint over vital information about load weights and brake information stenciled on the boxcars.

“Although some have started painting around it,” Lyons says.

If they don't, railroad companies will re-stamp the information over the artwork.

There is some evidence that a wee bit of the work has been done locally. “Go Griz,” it says on a couple of boxcars, and the messages are signed “Mr. Bass.”

The most impressive Lyons has seen - it was on the Internet, and not in his yard - was a boxcar whose side had been completely covered with a beautiful scene of pandas peering out of a bamboo forest.

Most boxcar graffiti is limited to the lower half of the car, which artists/taggers can reach without the help of a ladder.

“We surely do not want anyone around something that big and heavy who is not trained to be on it,” Lyons says. “I'm not sure the artist is best served having their work on the side of a rail car, anyway.”

Part of the attraction to taggers is that their work becomes a traveling art show that will be seen who knows where. Kansas City? L.A.? Missoula, Mont.?

Boxcar graffiti has been around as long as Lyons can remember, and he spent 25 years with the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway before joining Montana Rail Link 2 1/2 years ago.

“It was usually the `Kilroy was here' sort of thing,” Lyons says. “It hasn't always been at this level.”

There's still plenty of the former. Someone named “Walt” was not only here, he appears to have been many places by the number of times you can find “Walt was here” painted on boxcars.

“Rest in peace, David,” reads another. “Where have you gone Joe Richardson?” “You shook?”

Some get more involved.

“Why am I so scared? Scared of what I could do next. Painting to have fun,” says a message on one boxcar.

“I spent too much time doing this foolishness,” says another. “My mom tells me so. My mom can't remember my name. My dad can't forget my face. All on you then. What a waste.”

Lyons thinks most of the painting goes on while boxcars are awaiting loading or unloading at customer sites, not in train yards. Locomotives are usually untouched because “at a million dollars a pop, they're kept in more secure locations,” he says.

On a recent tour of the MRL yards in Missoula, there were only a couple of words of profanity found among hundreds of examples of boxcar graffiti.

Some of the work is signed. “The Rambler” and “Pancho of the Frisco” are two Lyons has noticed often over the years.

“All I know,” Lyons says, “is there is a tremendous amount of talented people in this country with a lot of time on their hands.”

from the Wall Street Journal, 2004-Dec-28, p.A11, by George Melloan:

Salute to 2004's Technical Miracle Workers

Americans have had no lack of dramatic news this year. The Boston Red Sox finally broke the 86-year-old "curse of the Babe" and won a World Series. Martha Stewart went voluntarily to the slammer for five months rather than wait for the scales of justice to possibly tip her way. Afghans proved they deserved liberation by holding a free election and Americans liberated themselves from months of campaign boredom by the same means.

But events that don't make headline news often are more important than those that do. That quiet backdrop is explored by Sir Harold Evans, a British journalist, in "They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine -- Two Centuries of Innovation," (Little Brown & Co.) In an interview in the winter issue of "Invention & Technology" magazine, he is quoted as saying that America became economically strong through the "adaptive genius of innovators and inventors."

The lengthy report of an ambitious investigation of the "Culture, Leadership and Organization" of 62 societies, called the Globe project, finds that Americans get one of the best marks on what the study calls "uncertainty avoidance." Business leaders and their organizations rely less than those of most other cultures on "formalized policies, procedures and rules and tend to be less calculating when taking risks," according to Wharton management professor Robert J. House, who initiated the study. The score suggests a nation of risk-takers and innovators who adapt readily to change.

Globe doesn't draw any broad conclusions from its sociological study but the research surely suggests that the American success story can be related to the American success in developing a free and liberal economic order. There is not much holding anyone with a good idea back, neither a stratified class structure, nor an excess of regulations designed to protect an existing order, nor a lack of access to as much learning as the individual can master.

It is this dynamic mobility that drives the American economy, creating new products every year that consumers didn't know they needed before they were invented but now find indispensable. How many people did you see walking around with cell phones a decade ago?

The freeing up of the telecom industry since the Jan. 8, 1982, break-up of AT&T has been messy and tangled in regulatory and courtroom red tape. But despite all this, new technologies have emerged and are now bringing dramatic change in the ways people communicate. Moving into place now is Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP), which will give families with broadband Internet connections a cheap way to talk with friends and relatives throughout the world. Then there are the new wireless technologies like Wi-Fi and Wi-Max that link up hand-held devices to the Internet.

Information technology grows apace. Google is broadening search capabilities into books, peer-reviewed academic papers, abstracts and other sources that will enable scholars to easily and quickly search the current literature of their fields. IBM seeks to create a world-wide grid using available time on 10 million private computers that would reduce the time required for large computational projects. These two efforts, if they succeed, will broaden the scope and depth of scientific inquiry.

With these kinds of new tools, and others, research and development laboratories in corporations, academia and government will unlock further new secrets. Nanotechnology, the manipulation of individual atoms and molecules, is in its infancy but already producing ways to alter industrial coatings and other materials to make them more versatile and useful. Microbiology, a related field, is producing new discoveries in medicine and agriculture. The U.S. Patent Office last year issued 189,597 patents, not only to research giants but to individuals puttering around in their garages to come up with a better screwdriver, or, yes, mousetrap.

Necessity may be the mother of invention, but private gain is the father. Inventors want to get rich, and many do. That's why the private sector drives the technology game. What better example than Burt Rutan, who may have opened the age of private space travel this year by developing SpaceShipOne, a two-passenger vehicle that won the $10 million X Prize with two consecutive trips to 62.5 miles (100 kilometers) above the earth's surface. Mr. Rutan told "Wired" magazine that with his simple and relatively inexpensive craft, he hopes some day to approach the $100,000 ticket price that a NASA-funded study has estimated would attract a million people to space flight.

Mr. Rutan, who proved himself with the nonstop around-the-world flight of his Voyager aircraft in 1986, got his spaceship funding from Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen. Many other inventors find it harder to scare up venture capital. A great many of these risk-takers took a cold shower when the dot-com boom collapsed in 2001, but there are signs that they are venturing out of their caves again. They come back wiser for the experience, looking for projects that are more than just a glimmer in an innovator's eye.

The one wild card is, as usual, laws and regulations. Responding to public resentment of fat executive compensation packages, Congress and the Financial Accounting Standards Board have been crunching possible rules to make it mandatory for companies to treat stock options as an expense. That has some merit in an academic sense, but stock options are an important way for small start-up companies with a promising product to attract high-quality talent to give them the skills needed for further marketing and development.

Then, of course, there are the politically ambitious prosecutors hoping to bag the next Martha Stewart guilty of successful innovation. An even more important threat are the parasitic plaintiff lawyers who, if they aren't restrained, have a good chance of shutting down medical research. But for the moment, it's a good time to celebrate the fruits of invention.

from Reuters, 2005-Jan-30, by Luke Baker:

Defiant Iraqis Vote in Their Millions Despite Bombs

BAGHDAD - Some came on crutches, others walked for miles then struggled to read the ballot, but across most of Iraq millions turned out to vote Sunday, defying insurgent threats of a bloodbath.

Suicide bombs and mortars killed at least 33 people, but Iraqis still came out in force for the first multi-party poll in 50 years. While in some areas turnout was scant, in most places, including violent Sunni Arab regions, it exceeded expectations.

Many cheered with joy at their first chance to cast a free vote, while others shared chocolates with fellow voters.

Even in Falluja, the Sunni city west of Baghdad that was a militant stronghold until a U.S. assault in November, a steady stream of people turned out, confounding expectations. Lines of veiled women clutching their papers waited in line to vote.

"We want to be like other Iraqis, we don't want to always be in opposition," said Ahmed Jassim, smiling after he voted.

In Baquba, a rebellious city northeast of Baghdad, spirited crowds clapped and danced at one voting station. In Mosul, scene of some of the worst insurgent attacks in recent months, U.S. and local officials said turnout was surprisingly high.

That said, there were also areas of the Sunni heartland where turnout was scarce and intimidation appeared to have won.

One of the first to vote was President Ghazi al-Yawar, a Sunni Muslim Arab with a large tribal following, who cast his ballot inside Baghdad's fortress-like Green Zone.

"Thanks be to God," he told reporters, emerging from the booth with his right index finger stained with bright blue ink to show he had voted. "I hope everyone will go out and vote."

In the relatively secure Kurdish north, people flowed steadily to the polls. One illiterate man in Arbil, 76-year-old Said Rasool, came alone and was turned away, unable to read the ballot paper. He said he would return with someone to help.

Even in the so-called "triangle of death," a hotbed of Sunni insurgency south of Baghdad, turnout was solid, officials said.

FESTIVE VOTING

In mainly Shi'ite Basra, Iraq's second biggest city, hundreds queued patiently to vote. "I am not afraid," said Samir Khalil Ibrahim. "This is like a festival for all Iraqis."

A small group cheered in Baghdad as Sharif Ali bin al-Hussein, a descendant of Iraq's last king, went to the polls.

Western Baghdad polling stations were busy, with long queues of voters. Most went about the process routinely, filling in their ballots and leaving quickly without much emotion.

Others brought chocolates for those waiting in line, and shared festive juice drinks inside the voting station.

Samir Hassan, 32, who lost his leg in a car bomb blast in October, was determined to vote. "I would have crawled here if I had to. I don't want terrorists to kill other Iraqis like they tried to kill me. Today I am voting for peace," he said, leaning on his metal crutches, determination in his reddened eyes.

In Sadr City, a poor Shi'ite neighborhood of northeast Baghdad, thick lines of voters turned out, women in black abaya robes in one line, men in another.

Some of the first to vote countrywide were policemen, out in force to protect polling centers from attack, part of draconian security measures put in place by U.S. and Iraqi officials.

In Samarra, a restive Sunni-Shi'ite city north of Baghdad, only about 100 people voted at one of two polling sites. One woman, covered head-to-toe in black robes, kept her face concealed, but said she had voted with pride.

In nearby Baiji, some people were unable to vote because electoral officials failed to turn up. "We are waiting for the manager with the key," said an election worker, apologizing.

"VOTE FOR HUMANITY"

In the shrine city of Najaf in the Shi'ite heartland, hundreds of people walked calmly to polling stations. Security around Najaf, attacked before, was some of the tightest.

Shi'ites, who make up 60 percent of Iraq's people, are expected to win the vote, overturning years of oppression. In Kirkuk, Kurds turned out in force, as expected, but Arabs and Turkmen appeared to boycott, angered by what they saw as voting rules that favor Kurds.

By the end of the day in Baghdad, voters were running to polling stations to get there before polls closed at 5 p.m. (1400 GMT). Some old women were pulled along by young sons. One of the biggest surprises was Mosul, a mixed Sunni Arab and Kurd city in the far north, where U.S. army officers said they were surprised to see long lines at many voting centers.

Baghdad's mayor was overcome with emotion by the turnout of voters at City Hall, where he said thousands were celebrating.

"I cannot describe what I am seeing. It is incredible. This is a vote for the future, for the children, for the rule of law, for humanity, for love," Alaa al-Tamimi told Reuters.

from the Wall Street Journal Online, 2005-Jan-30, by Vauhini Vara:

Bloggers Share the View From Election Day in Iraq

Bloggers have been buzzing about Iraq's first free election in half a century. These Web logs – whose authors run the gamut from professional journalists to ordinary Iraqis looking to share their observations – have been chronicling the situation in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein. Here is a sampling of what's being written by those inside the country. Note that many bloggers don't reveal their real names, and we have not verified their reports.

* * *

"Ali" of Free Iraqi reported that he woke up by 6:30 a.m. local time to vote -- "I do this once every century." He recalled: "The voting center that was chosen in our district is a high school in the middle of the neighborhood. This was the same place I went in 1996 to cast my vote in a poll asking if we wanted to have Saddam as a president for life or not. I had to go at that time. The threats for anyone who refused to take that poll were no less than the death penalty." Later, he added: "This time we went by choice and the threat was exactly the opposite."

* * *

At Cigars in the Sand, an American working in Baghdad reported driving three bus loads of Iraqis to polling centers. "Every bus load has sang and danced the entire drive home," he wrote. He posted a picture of a polling center -- "WELLCOME" was painted in English on the wall (he notes it's the thought, not the spelling, that counts) -- and said the men waiting in line seemed unfazed by the "multiple" explosions that could be heard in the distance. The blog has several interesting photographs from election day, including some from inside polling places. The site's author said he planned to spend tonight dodging celebratory gunshots. "After that," he wrote, "it's back to the hard task of capturing the momentum and translating it into real political access and choice. That will be long and difficult – undoubtedly plagued by further violence and setbacks. Today is a new beginning, not an end."

* * *

Husayn Uthman changed the name of his blog from "Democracy in Iraq" to "Democracy in Iraq (Is Here!)." The 26-year-old Iraqi described his turn at the polls. "My voting was only a simple act. I went, I identified myself, got my finger stained, filled out a ballot and dropped it in a box," he writes. "It is not a complex or grand process to the eye, but it is one that I will forever remember and will recount to my children, and their children." On a blog called The Mesopotamian, the author wrote, "This is a very hurried message, while we are witnessing something quite extraordinary. I myself have voted and so did members of my family. Thank God for giving us the chance."

Several bloggers gave thanks to the U.S. government. Among them, a writer identified only as "Hammorabi," who operates a blog under the same name: "Our thanks go to George W. Bush who will enter the history as the leader of the freedom and democracy in the recent history! He and his people are our friends for ever!" Others said it was too soon to celebrate. "The current early and premature Iraqi election is being marketed as THE event, THE peak, THE happening! As if everything will be over after the day of elections! Just like in some stupid love movies where the curtain falls after the two lovers get married," wrote "Raed" of Raed in the Middle. "What matters is not the election, what matters is what will happen next."

* * *

Several bloggers posted pictures of Iraqis proudly displaying their ink-stained fingers (the ink was used at polling places to prevent people from voting more than once). From I Should Have Stayed Home, written by two Americans in Iraq: "The permanent ink that so many people were afraid of is being worn as a mark of pride by every single person I have seen in the streets. They hold up their fingers to show that they voted." According to Iraq the Model, one of the more popular Iraqi blogs: "Everyone we saw was holding up his blue tipped finger with broad smiles on the faces while walking out of the [polling] center." And on Kurdo's World, "Kurdo" writes, "In Kurdistan and Iraq now, people check others' index fingers: 'Oh you have a normal finger?!! How come it is not blue?! You are not democratic at all.'"

* * *

Freelance journalist Christopher Allbritton updated his blog several times during the day. Early on, he described the strict rules that were being enforced in the name of security. "No driving, dusk to dawn curfews, states of emergency," he wrote. "If that's what it takes to provide security in Iraq, why erase one police state only to replace it with another?" Later, he wrote that those he saw at polling centers "looked happier than I've seen them in months" By the end of the day, he deemed the election a success. "Everyone out on the streets is happy, even the Iraqi security forces who will laugh and joke with journalists -- the first time they've done it in months," he wrote.

* * *

On A Star From Mosul, a 16-year-old Iraqi girl wrote about feeling guilty for not voting -- and jealous of her grandmother, aunt and uncle, who were old enough to cast their votes. "Don't be angry at me," she wrote. "I have nothing to do with me not voting." Her uncle writes a blog called Life in Baghdad, and is fond of verbose postings. On Thursday, he wrote a lengthy discourse explaining that he was conflicted on whether or not to vote. Many in his family had urged him not to, worried about his safety. But he feared that if he didn't vote, the guilt would be overwhelming. Today, he revealed his decision in a two-word entry: "I did."

from the Wall Street Journal, 2004-Dec-22, p.A14:

Goodbye, Taliban

It wasn't long ago the story line coming out of Afghanistan was that the country was sliding toward warlordism and anarchy. This, it was said, was just one example of how the Bush Administration's war in Iraq was causing reverses in the broader war on terror.

Or not. Earlier this month, Pakistan's Daily Times reported that the U.S. military has been contacted by Taliban fighters seeking to lay down their arms in exchange for an amnesty. Barring some bitter-enders, it seems many former Taliban fighters now realize their future lies within the country's democratic political process, not against it.

We also read that a confidential report by Lieutenant General David Barno, the senior U.S. military official in Afghanistan, offers a positive assessment of the Afghan army and police forces, whose ranks this year are projected to double to 33,000 and 62,000, respectively. In part thanks to them, the report says, the power of warlords and their militias is on the decline, while the reach of the central government is widening.

Add to this the success of October's presidential election, and Afghanistan -- economically destitute, culturally backward, ethnically fractious, Islamic, the "graveyard of empires" -- is emerging as a success story in rebuilding failed states. It is solid evidence that President Bush is right to insist that a democratization strategy for the Middle East is a security strategy for the United States.

We realize Afghanistan is not out of the woods. General Barno's report is said to warn that Taliban holdouts could join forces with drug traffickers, creating an Afghan version of Colombia's narcoterrorist FARC. Obviously that's a scenario Coalition and Afghan forces must work to prevent. But it's also worth pointing out the enormous progress that has been made despite two years of criticism that we didn't have enough troops, hadn't disarmed the warlords, and in the words of former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer -- aka "Anonymous" -- had made an "ignorant lunge to failure." Let's have more such failures.

from the Weekly Standard, 2004-Dec-20, by Stephen F. Hayes:

Present at the Creation
With Dick Cheney at the inauguration of Afghanistan's first elected president.

Kabul, Afghanistan -- NINETY MINUTES before he was inaugurated as the first democratically elected president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai emerged from a private meeting at his presidential palace with Vice President Dick Cheney to address reporters. "Presidential palace" is what the Afghans call it, anyway. It's a generous description. Many of the buildings in the heavily fortified compound are at least partially collapsed. Windows of the edifice that served as the backdrop for the brief press conference bear the scars of the fighting that was routine in modern Afghanistan.

Those battles have subsided in recent months. "Jihad fatigue" was the explanation from one burly State Department security contractor, a former Special Forces soldier with nearly two years in Kabul. His colleague, a more recent arrival, told me he is astonished at the improvements in the security situation in the two months since he came to Afghanistan.

Still, Taliban remnants had threatened to disrupt Karzai's inauguration, and every precaution was being taken to thwart those efforts. Those attending the ceremony were subjected to a full-body search. An American security official sporting the long hair and full beard that have become Special Forces trademarks guided bomb-sniffing dogs as they carefully examined each bag that visitors hoped to bring into the compound. Snipers were conspicuously perched atop each building in the complex; others peered out windows or the gaping holes in the bombed-out structures. Reporters using cell phones inside the palace grounds were scolded--cell phones are frequently used to detonate explosives.

Afghan workers wearing traditional, loose-fitting clothing and American-made sneakers scurried from building to building making last-minute preparations, their faces straining with effort as they hoisted unwieldy stacks of chairs onto their shoulders and darted toward the inaugural hall. U.S. Secret Service officials looked nervously about as they spoke into their wrists.

All of this activity came to a halt when Karzai, dressed in his flowing green silk coat and black lambskin hat, approached the microphone. He thanked Vice President Cheney for making the trip from Washington and then turned his attention to the American people:

Whatever we have achieved in Afghanistan--the peace, the election, the reconstruction, the life that the Afghans are living today in peace, the children going to school, the businesses, the fact that Afghanistan is again a respected member of the international community--is from the help that the United States of America gave us. Without that help Afghanistan would be in the hands of terrorists--destroyed, poverty-stricken, and without its children going to school or getting an education. We are very, very grateful, to put it in the simple words that we know, to the people of the United States of America for bringing us this day.

Sadly, most Americans never heard these words. Gratitude, it seems, is not terribly newsworthy. Neither is democracy. The Washington Post played Karzai's inauguration on page A-13, a placement that suggested it was relatively less important than Eliot Spitzer's decision to run for governor of New York or the decision of the U.S. government to import flu vaccine from Germany.

This is an embarrassment. The foreign policy of George W. Bush will likely be remembered for two highly controversial decisions: (1) to eliminate not only terrorist networks but also the regimes that sponsor them, and (2) to cultivate democracy in the region of the world long thought least hospitable to it.

These are radical goals. And we may ultimately fail to achieve them. But with the removal of the Taliban and especially the inauguration of Karzai as Afghanistan's first democratically elected president, they can no longer be dismissed as naive or unrealistic.

That was a point Cheney made repeatedly when I spoke to him for half an hour aboard Air Force Two. Establishing democracy in Afghanistan and the Islamic world, however imperfect, "is not a romantic or idealistic notion," he said. "In many respects it's a very pragmatic proposition."

Cheney called the Karzai inauguration "historic" and said, "I think it's one more example of the power of the idea of democracy, self-government, and the right of people to elect their own leaders."

BEFORE THE CEREMONY BEGAN, two lines of Afghan soldiers assembled in front of the once-elegant building where the inauguration would take place. They stood at attention in their olive green dress uniforms as an older man paced purposefully in front of them, stopping every so often to bark instructions in the face of an unlucky soldier. A long red banner hung behind them from two large pillars. The words were in English, in large gold lettering: "December 7th celebrates the decision of the Afghan nation." Whoever made the sign had run out of room, and so the word "nation" was written in much smaller letters, tucked underneath "Afghan."

Cheney arrived first. He and his wife, Lynne, were greeted at the entrance and escorted to their seats in the front row. Karzai came minutes later in a black Mercedes with tinted windows. He accompanied a very frail King Mohammed Zahir Shah, who ruled Afghanistan from 1933 to 1973 and until recently lived in exile in Italy.

Media access to the inauguration ceremony was strictly limited, and most reporters watched it on big-screen televisions set up in a tent adjacent to the main building. With help from a very accommodating member of Karzai's media relations staff, I took my Sony "Cyber-shot" digital camera and posed as a photojournalist to gain access to the ceremony. We photographers were divided into two groups and led into opposite sides of the hall where we were to take pictures from against the side walls. But journalists--especially photographers--don't like to be told where they can and cannot go, and as soon as the ceremony began my new colleagues began inserting themselves into the crowd to get the best possible shots.

Ten rows from the stage was a larger-than-normal gap--maybe two feet--between the otherwise tightly packed rows of dignitaries. Several of the photographers used this gap to gain access to the front side of a large pillar in the middle of the crowd that provided a clear view of the stage. But in order to get to that spot the photographers shuffled directly in front of a row of five elderly Afghan men dressed in matching black and gold robes with white turbans. The Afghan elders briefly tolerated the presence of the photographers, but their weathered faces showed impatience when it became clear their view would be blocked for the entire ceremony. As the proceedings began, one of the old men, having had quite enough of the disruption, extended his leg across the opening, effectively blocking the photographers from coming or going. One, a young western woman wearing a traditional Afghan scarf, whispered complaints in English to the old man, who apparently did not understand and, in any case, wouldn't budge. She cursed him under her breath and resigned herself to standing along the wall with the rest of us. After several minutes, the man finally moved his leg: He and his colleagues from the new Afghan Supreme Court were called to the stage to administer the oath of office to Karzai.

Karzai's inaugural address was frequently interrupted by enthusiastic applause. Several members of the audience were moved to tears as he pledged to secure the country and prepare it for parliamentary elections. (Karzai's speech was also interrupted several times by the chirping of cell phones, and at least one foreign dignitary snored loudly as the new Afghan president spoke.) Karzai told the story of an elderly woman from the Farah province who came to a polling station with two voter's cards:

She went up to an election worker and declared that she wanted to vote twice, once for herself, and again for her daughter who, she said, was about to deliver her child and unable to come to the polling station to vote. "We are sorry, but no one can vote for another person, this is the rule," the elderly lady was told. So she voted--for herself--and left the station. Later in the day, the election worker was shocked to see the elderly woman back, this time accompanying her young daughter to the polling station. Her daughter carried her newborn baby, as well as her voting card which she used to cast her vote.

The measure of significance the Bush administration attaches to Karzai's inauguration is evident from the presence of Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Cheney and his entourage traveled for 45 hours to attend the ceremony, flying from Andrews Air Force Base to Frankfurt, Germany, to Muscat, Oman, and then on to Kabul, where we were on the ground for only seven hours. We returned via Oman and Shannon, Ireland. (Spending nearly two full days in the air allowed us to take in nine movies, including Anchorman and First Daughter, a movie about a romance between a presidential daughter and her Secret Service agent. The Secret Service agents traveling with us dismissed the movie as unrealistic. "Like we would stand on top of her in a classroom," one scoffed.)

Cheney, who seemed relaxed and upbeat as we began the long journey home, sipped from a cup of Starbucks in his cabin and reflected on the significance of the Karzai inauguration:

Think about what's happened in that country, what change has brought. Back in the '70s, we were fighting the Soviets, up to the devastation of the '90s, the civil war, the ultimate triumph of the Taliban, 9/11, and, uh, back when it was a safe haven for al Qaeda--all of the training camps, the training they gave maybe 20,000 terrorists in the late 1990s, the state from which they launched the 9/11 attack. Today, we swore in the first democratically elected president in 5,000 years. I think most of us think of it in terms of 9/11 and the subsequent three years. But there's a lot more history to it than that.

Cheney should know. He recalled his involvement in Afghanistan in the 1980s as a member of the House Intelligence Committee, when Washington supported the Afghan mujahedeen in their efforts to end the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. "I can remember coming to Pakistan with Henry Hyde and Bob Stump about 1987 and meeting with a group of mujahedeen leadership they brought out into Pakistan to meet with us," Cheney said. "We couldn't go into Afghanistan, obviously. We drove up to the Khyber Pass--as far as we went--and one night we had dinner with them."

One of the men who dined with Cheney in 1987, Sibghatullah Mujaddedi, was seated two seats to his left during the inaugural ceremonies last Tuesday. "In those days he was one of the leaders of the muj," Cheney recalled. Mujaddedi, who served briefly in 1992 as the president of Afghanistan and more recently headed the Loya Jirga, delivered the closing prayer.

None of this was inevitable. The Bush administration launched the war in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001. By October 31, 2001, R.W. Apple wrote a "news analysis" for the New York Times comparing the "quagmire" in Afghanistan to the years-long one in Vietnam three decades earlier. Even if the war were successful, Apple concluded, Afghanistan's political future was bleak: "In Afghanistan as in South Vietnam, there is a huge question about who would rule if the United States vanquished its foe. Washington never solved that issue satisfactorily after the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963, and solving it in Afghanistan, a country long prone to chaotic competition among many tribes and factions, will probably not be much easier."

He may yet be right. There is, as Cheney acknowledged, "much work to be done." But since that column was written, between 3.5 and 4 million Afghan refugees have returned to their country. Ten million Afghans registered to vote, and of that group about 80 percent showed up at the polls. The majority of those Afghans voted for Hamid Karzai in an election that was praised by outside observers as clean and extraordinarily well run, and Karzai was inaugurated without incident in Kabul. "It's a hell of a story," says Cheney.

At the press conference in Kabul, Cheney followed Karzai's remarks with some of his own. He congratulated Karzai on his victory and pledged American support of Afghan democracy. There was a brief pause at the end of Cheney's statement as both men seemed unclear about the procedures for the question-and-answer session to follow. When Karzai looked to Cheney for direction, the vice president leaned toward the Afghan leader and away from the microphone and in a voice audible only to those standing nearby, reminded Karzai of the obvious. "You're in charge now."

Stephen F. Hayes is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard.

(I like the following story, so I include three separate tellings of it:)

from the Baltimore Sun, 2004-Dec-4, by Rob Hiaasen:

President's new team started at the bottom
There's a pattern of humble beginnings

Horatio Alger has nothing on these guys.

Fleeing post-revolutionary Cuba, Carlos M. Gutierrez began working for Kellogg's by selling cereal off his truck. He is now chief executive of the cereal giant.

Abandoned by his mother at age 4, Bernard Kerik took a fat pay cut to be a beat cop in crime-riddled Times Square. He later played a key role in New York City's response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Living in a two-bedroom house with seven siblings, Alberto Gonzales was raised by loving parents who were migrant workers and who never finished elementary school. He could become the highest-ranking Hispanic to serve in the U.S. government.

What do Gutierrez, Kerik and Gonzales have in common - besides the fact they all might soon be working way, way inside the Washington Beltway? Their backgrounds have become material for bootstrapped political narratives that clearly resonate with President George Bush and, arguably, the country. In nominating Gutierrez for commerce secretary, Gonzalez for attorney general, and Kerik for homeland security secretary, Bush made a point to publicly note the humble beginnings of his appointees.

"There's no question that this president is fascinated by these wonderful stories," says Stephen Hess, professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University. "These 'Only in America' stories are very important and meaningful to him. It's a pattern."

Remember Bush's first Cabinet in 2001, Hess says. Norman Mineta - Bush's nominee for transportation secretary - was among the 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry forced into internment camps during World War II. Colin Powell's parents immigrated to the United States from Jamaica. Elaine Chao, whose parents were refugees from Communist China, became the first Asian-American woman to hold a Cabinet position.

Also from Bush's first Cabinet, Rod Paige, then education secretary, grew up in the segregated South, as did Condoleezza Rice. Last month, Bush again noted Rice's humble beginnings in nominating her as the next secretary of state.

With seven of the 15 members of Bush's Cabinet having announced their resignations, the president has taken the opportunity to again create a "counter Cabinet," says Paul Light, a professor at New York University's Wagner School of Public Service. Americans expect Republicans to nominate fat cats, Light says. Rather, Bush is drawn to people who have survived tough upbringings - in contrast to the president's life story.

"These Bush nominees didn't go to the so-called right schools or make the right connections. In a sense, they are the anti-Bush," Light says. "They are what Bush wanted to be."

Presidential historian Robert Dallek says the biographies of the appointees might soon be forgotten, but what remains is the president's anti-establishment impulses. "Bush is very drawn to these anti-establishment types. It's his stock and trade," says Dallek. And remember, he says, that Bush likes to "brag about being a down-home fellow."

Bush's life story does not resemble Lincoln's log cabin, Carter's peanut farm, Clinton's place called Hope or even the tale of an Austrian boy who took to body building then governing California. Bush is, of course, the son of a president. He attended Yale, ran an oil company, owned a baseball team and governed Texas. "He didn't do it by selling cereal off the back of a truck," as Hess says.

The president never sold peanuts, either. But his vice president, after dropping out of Yale, did spend two years working on power lines in Wyoming.

That's not a bad story.

from Knight Ridder, 2004-Dec-10, by Ron Hutcheson:

Some of Bush's top advisers have rags-to-riches stories that outdo fiction

WASHINGTON - President Bush was born to wealth and privilege, but he has a soft spot for advisors who know another side of life.

His top Cabinet nominees have included the son of a prostitute, a high school dropout, the son of migrant farm workers and an immigrant who once peddled Frosted Flakes to corner grocery stores in Mexico City. Some of their personal stories can match any rags-to-riches tale dreamed up by novelists.

To Bush, they're living symbols of the American dream and confirmation that anyone can make it in America. They also fit the president's self-image as a down-to-earth man.

Although born to a family with deep roots in the Eastern establishment, Bush sees himself as a product of the Texas oil patch, where anyone has a shot at wealth and prominence. He detests intellectual snobbery and class-based pretension.

He clearly enjoys mixing with Americans who know little about the elite prep schools or Ivy League institutions that shaped his youth.

Elevating aides from humble backgrounds tends to breed the kind of intense loyalty that Bush demands from his inner circle. And reaching out to Hispanics and blacks who have overcome hardship sends a powerful political message.

''It's clear to us that we're not here by accident,'' said Alphonso Jackson, the housing and urban development secretary, speaking for himself and other children of poverty in the top ranks of the Bush administration.

''We're here because we believed in the American work ethic: If you work hard, you will get rewarded,'' Jackson said.

Jackson, the youngest of 12 children born to a father with a fifth-grade education, broke out of poverty by following his parents' urgings to get a good education.

An African American, he forged a close friendship with Bush when they lived in the same Dallas neighborhood in the 1990s.

Jackson bristled at the suggestion that Bush wants to surround himself with aides who won't dare challenge his authority or his ideas.

'The president has never told me how to run anything. Never. The president has never picked up the phone and said, `A.J., you must do this,' '' Jackson said.

``Knowing him as well as I do, if I didn't give him my best advice and if I didn't give him my opinion, he wouldn't respect me.''

Still, there's no question that Bush's up-by-the-bootstraps aides feel deeply indebted to him.

' `Just give me a chance to prove myself' -- that is a common prayer in my community,'' White House counsel Alberto Gonzales said when Bush nominated him for attorney general last month.

''Mr. President, thank you for that chance,'' Gonzales said.

Gonzales, who's awaiting Senate confirmation, is one of three top Bush nominees who escaped poverty by joining the military.

His parents didn't finish elementary school and scratched out a living as migrant farm workers before settling in Houston.

Gonzales and his seven siblings grew up in a two-bedroom home with no hot water and no telephone.

As a boy, he sold sodas at Rice University's football stadium, never dreaming that he would go to school there one day.

''After the games, as we waited for the crowd to disperse so that we could go home, I would stare over the stadium walls and watch the Rice students. . . . I wondered what it would be like to be one of you,'' he said in a commencement speech at the school last May.

Seeing no other option, Gonzales joined the Air Force after high school. He left the military, graduated from Rice, then earned a law degree from Harvard.

Former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, whom Bush picked to head the Homeland Security Department but who later withdrew his name from consideration, left behind a life even more bleak when he joined the Army and went to Korea.

Kerik's mother, a prostitute, abandoned him when he was 4. He grew up in Paterson, N.J., with his father, an alcoholic who regularly downed two six-packs a night.

Kerik dropped out of high school and turned to petty theft before straightening out his life in the military.

Years later, he had New York City police detectives track down his mother's arrest record and a coroner's report indicating that she had been beaten to death, possibly by the pimp whom Kerik knew as his stepfather.

''It's hard now, looking down at a stack of papers and seeing a person's life, my mother's life, reduced to a rap sheet and a coroner's report,'' Kerik wrote, recalling the moment in his memoirs. ``Maybe what I've thought of as striving for a career and living a life of honor is actually just chasing the shadow of my abandonment.''

Surgeon General Richard Carmona, the son of Puerto Rican immigrants who settled in Spanish Harlem, is another high school dropout from an alcoholic family. He found his salvation with a Green Beret unit in Vietnam and went on to become a physician, specializing in emergency trauma medicine.

In 1986, he joined the Pima County, Ariz., sheriff's department as a member of the SWAT team and department surgeon.

In a 1992 exploit that became grist for a made-for-TV movie, Carmona dangled from a helicopter to pluck an injured man from a mountaintop in Arizona.

Seven years later, he shot and killed an assailant who grazed Carmona's scalp with a bullet during a shootout.

Some Bush appointees found other paths to success:

• Carlos Gutierrez, Bush's nominee for commerce secretary, was 6 when his family fled Cuba to escape life under Fidel Castro. He learned English from a hotel bellhop and later drove a delivery truck for Kellogg's cereal in Mexico City. He became Kellogg's chief executive in 1999.

• Another Cuban refugee, Sen.-elect Mel Martinez of Florida, served as Bush's first secretary of housing and urban development. He came to the United States alone and unable to speak English at age 15, and grew up in a series of foster homes. He was elected to the Senate in November.

Bush, who often highlights the hard-luck backgrounds of his aides, takes obvious pleasure from his role as a mentor. In his autobiography, written when he was still governor of Texas, he recalled the pleasure he received from giving Gonzales the oath of office as a Texas Supreme Court justice before an audience in the Texas Capitol that included some visiting Hispanic high school students.

''Just like Al Gonzales perched in Rice Stadium, those kids, perched in the House gallery, got a glimpse that day of what can happen when you dare to set high goals and dream big,'' Bush wrote.

Jackson, who replaced Martinez at HUD, said Bush placed a high value on achievement born of adversity because it validated the president's belief that anyone could succeed in America. It's a belief that his aides share.

''His background is totally different from mine,'' said Jackson, who had a standing lunch date with Bush every six weeks when they lived in Dallas.

``I do believe that I symbolize the American dream. This is what it's about. My father had a fifth-grade education. I work for the president of the United States. I serve the people of America.''

from USA Today, 2005-Jan-6, by Richard Benedetto:

Bush picks already picked themselves up

WASHINGTON — President Bush finds a lot to admire in people who came up the hard way.

Rather than follow the traditional path of populating his Cabinet with academics, Washington insiders and CEOs, Bush has assembled a Cabinet that is not only diverse in gender and ethnicity but also an American mosaic in background.

Bush, of course, is the son of a president and grandson of a senator. He attended Phillips Academy, an elite prep school in Andover, Mass., and experienced Washington through his father's posts at the CIA and in Congress and the White House.

Strikingly, many of his appointees have humble backgrounds or overcame hardships to succeed in business, government or both.

In November, when Bush named African-American Condoleezza Rice, his national security adviser, to succeed Colin Powell as secretary of State, he said people who come up the hard way bring qualities to their jobs that those who had an easier time might not.

"Dr. Rice has a deep, abiding belief in the value and power of liberty, because she has seen freedom denied and freedom reborn," he said. "As a girl in the segregated South, Dr. Rice saw the promise of America violated by racial discrimination and by the violence that comes from hate. But she was taught by her mother, Angelina, and her father, the Rev. John Rice, that human dignity is the gift of God, and that the ideals of America would overcome oppression."

Peter Schweizer, who wrote The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty, with his wife, Rochelle, says the younger Bush's Cabinet choices reflect his personality. "Unlike his father, who was much more a man of the Establishment, Bush prides himself on being kind of a rebel," Schweizer says. "Even though he grew up in privilege, he identifies on a certain level with people who are willing to take risks and challenge convention."

Bush's sentiments were clear when he announced the nominations of four other Cabinet secretaries for his second term:

• He told the story of Carlos Gutierrez, his pick for Commerce secretary, who fled to the USA from Castro's Cuba with his parents in 1960, when he was 6. Gutierrez, whose hearing Wednesday launched the confirmation process for Bush's new nominees, started with Kellogg as a cereal salesman and worked his way up to CEO.

• He noted that Alberto Gonzales, his nominee for attorney general, is one of eight children of Mexican migrant workers who never finished elementary school. Gonzales graduated from Rice University and Harvard Law School before becoming a Texas judge and later Bush's White House counsel. His confirmation hearing opens today.

• He said Jim Nicholson, named to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs, grew up in "modest circumstances." Nicholson was more blunt, noting that he grew up "dirt poor in a tenant house without plumbing and sometimes without food." He won an appointment to West Point, was a decorated Army officer in the Vietnam War and later became a millionaire businessman-lawyer. He is now U.S. ambassador to the Vatican.

• Bush said Nebraska Gov. Mike Johanns, his choice for Agriculture secretary, grew up on a dairy farm in Iowa, making him better able to understand the interests of farmers

"The constant theme here is that they all have great personal stories, stories that reflect true grit," says Stephen Hess, a presidential scholar at the Brookings Institution.

Hess, a veteran of the Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations, says Bush had the same fascination with great stories when he named his first Cabinet.

Powell, son of Jamaican immigrants, was secretary of State. Mel Martinez, a Cuban refugee, headed Housing and Urban Development. Rod Paige, a product of segregated Mississippi schools, took over Education.

Norman Mineta, who was sent to a U.S. internment camp for Japanese-Americans during World War II when he was 10, is staying on as Transportation secretary. And Elaine Chao, a Chinese immigrant, continues as Labor secretary.

In Bush's first round of Cabinet picks, 11 of 15 had working-class or immigrant parents. Most were in the first generation of their families to go to college, often on scholarship. In eight replacements this year, at least five fit the pattern.

"Time and time again, he has reached out and picked people with these fascinating Horatio Alger success stories," Hess says

Bush's other Cabinet choices might not have great personal stories, but none was born to wealth or pedigree.

His nominees are a departure from the people his father, George H.W. Bush, tapped in 1992. The first President Bush turned to denizens of the capital for 10 of his 14 Cabinet jobs. James Baker, Elizabeth Dole, Dick Thornburgh, Caspar Weinberger and Lauro Cavazos had been Cabinet members in the Reagan administration. Dick Cheney, Jack Kemp, Manuel Lujan and Ed Derwinski were members of Congress. Adm. James Watkins was a retired chief of naval operations.

Half of Bill Clinton's Cabinet picks had working-class or minority backgrounds, but Clinton emphasized their ethnicity and résumés rather than hurdles they had overcome.

Shirley Anne Warshaw, a Gettysburg College political scientist who wrote The Keys to Power and other books on presidential management, says Bush's penchant for people with modest backgrounds is part of the evolution of the Republican Party from country clubs and Wall Street to middle America.

"It is moving from being the party of the wealthy and elite to the party of the common man, the NASCAR dad," she says. "Bill Clinton set out to create a Cabinet that looked like America. Bush set out to create a Cabinet that looks like the America that voted for him."

Asked four years ago, shortly before he took office, whether he was trying to send a message with his Cabinet, Bush replied, "You bet: that people who work hard and make the right decisions in life can achieve anything they want in America."

Scott McClellan, his spokesman, says Bush didn't choose his nominees solely for their up-by-their-bootstraps stories.

"They were selected because the president believes they possess the skills, the integrity and the experience to do the job," he says. "The values of hard work and responsibility that come from overcoming great challenges go along with that."

from the Wall Street Journal, 2004-Nov-11, p.D9, by Geoffrey Norman:

The Forgotten Revolution

The last decade or so has seen an explosion of titles about World War II. The Civil War, of course, has been keeping publishers busy for almost a century and a half. But the conflict without which the others would not have been possible -- the American Revolution -- seems a poor stepchild.

We are oddly uncurious about the military side of the war that made us a nation. While the founders are an inexhaustible seam of rich ore that biographers ceaselessly and productively mine, the battles, the generals and, especially, the soldiers dwell for the most part in literary obscurity.

Except, that is, in the works of Richard Ketchum, whose latest volume, "Victory at Yorktown" (Henry Holt & Co.), came out last month. It is Mr. Ketchum's fifth narrative of the Revolution. He began writing about the war in the '50s, when he produced "Decisive Day: The Battle for Bunker Hill." And, from there, he went on to write "The Winter Soldiers: The Battles for Trenton and Princeton," "Saratoga: Turning Point of America's Revolutionary War" and "Divided Loyalties: How the American Revolution Came to New York."

He also edited "The American Heritage Book of the Revolution," and it was this undertaking, back in 1957, that got him started on what has become his life's work.

Mr. Ketchum was a young magazine editor, back from his own war -- he commanded a sub-chaser in the South Atlantic -- and his colleague at American Heritage was the Civil War historian Bruce Catton. Mr. Catton edited the magazine and Mr. Ketchum worked the book side of the operation. "We divided up American history, and I got the short straw," Mr. Ketchum says over lunch in Dorset, Vt., where he has lived, on and off, for almost 60 years. "It was at a lunch like this, except that Bruce was drinking martinis. Everybody drank at lunch back in those days -- especially in the publishing business -- but nobody did it quite like Bruce."

Mr. Ketchum says he admired Mr. Catton greatly, and "I tried to model my stuff after the way Bruce did his...unsuccessfully, of course."

False modesty, perhaps. False, certainly. Mr. Ketchum's books have the narrative energy and vividly drawn characters that readers like in popular histories, and his books have all been critically well received, especially the Saratoga volume. But they have not achieved bestseller status, and Ken Burns has never called about a multipart series for PBS.

The reason, one thinks, lies not with the prose but with the material. The Revolution, for some reason, does not fire the American imagination. One can visit the Saratoga battlefield, 30 or 40 miles from where Mr. Ketchum is lunching, and walk it virtually alone. Gettysburg, on the other hand, is always crawling with visitors.

Why is that, one wonders.

"Oh, I think there are many reasons. If you wanted one that sort of stands for all the others, it is that the Revolution occurred before there was photography. The camera gives us an intimacy with the people who fought the Civil War that you just don't get from those formal, stylized paintings of the Revolution and the men who fought it."

It was a different epoch, Mr. Ketchum goes on. So much more formal, for one thing. And where literacy was common, if not universal, among Civil War soldiers, many Revolutionary War troopers lacked the ability to keep journals or write letters. Also, there were no contemporaneous newspaper accounts of, say, the Battle of Cowpens, which Mr. Ketchum describes in detail in his current book.

"There are original sources, of course, but not an abundance. You certainly aren't overwhelmed the way the Civil War historians are."

Despite this, Mr. Ketchum still finds himself making the sort of empathetic connections with his characters that Shelby Foote and Mr. Catton made with the Civil War figures they wrote about. He is a passionate admirer of George Washington. "For his leadership, above all. Until Yorktown, he had never won a major battle. But when you consider what he was up against, it is extraordinary that he held things together. His soldiers and officers were not being paid and they didn't have enough to eat... didn't have enough of anything. But he was the kind of giant figure who could make men believe even when all the evidence suggested they shouldn't."

He has other, more obscure favorites, like Nathaniel Greene, a Rhode Island ironmaker who became a successful, fighting general in spite of his Quaker roots. In the Yorktown campaign, Greene led his troops on a march every bit as arduous and successful as those Stonewall Jackson's men made up and down the Shenandoah Valley. Greene saved his little army from Cornwallis, who was pursuing -- and it was, to steal a phrase from another epic general, "A damned near-run thing."

Mr. Ketchum, of course, found personalities who inspired another kind of feeling. Benedict Arnold figures in the Yorktown narrative, and his treachery plainly strikes the historian as odious. "It was strictly for money and his own vanity," Mr. Ketchum says distastefully, then adds: "I'm still not sure about his wife's involvement. Peggy was awfully young and she may not have realized what she was getting into."

Another villain of the Yorktown saga is British Col. Banastre Tarleton, known to the Rebels as "the Butcher." Tarleton was plainly the model for the bad guy in the Mel Gibson movie "The Patriot" (2000), which Mr. Ketchum has not seen. Tarleton, in fact, survived the war, but Mr. Ketchum describes his humiliation at Yorktown with clear relish.

There is much more to fascinate the reader, especially the story of a Rebel who was sent on a mission where he claimed to have deserted and joined the British. His objective was to capture Arnold and bring him to justice, something Washington craved. John Champe risked being found out and hanged and was lucky to escape with his own life. He failed to capture Arnold and vanished into history. "A very brave man. And, like a lot of them, never rewarded. Never even paid."

Asked about Irving Kristol's insight that the American Revolution should be studied because it is one of the few successful modern revolutions, Mr. Ketchum ponders the question and says: "Yes, I suppose. But one of the interesting things that is often overlooked is that it was both a revolutionary and a civil war. The country was very evenly divided between Tories and Rebels. The Tories were not necessarily operating out of simple self-interest. They believed theirs was the honorable course and the Rebels were engaged in treason. People were very bitterly divided. It was a hard, testing time."

Which, given current passions, makes it all the more worth reading about. Richard Ketchum's books are a fine place to start.

Mr. Norman's most recent book is "Inch by Inch," a novel.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2004-Dec-7, by Victorino Matus:

The Longest Winter
Sixty years ago, a puzzled enemy met America's "quiz kids."

It all has a familiar ring to it. The enemy believes that it takes only a taste of real war, followed by a few casualties, to send Americans running home with their tails between their legs. The American president, weighed down by public opinion, will then be forced to make concessions and abandon the field.

Sixty years ago, Adolf Hitler had exactly such thoughts. He launched a devastating offensive in Western Europe in the hope that he could weaken America's willingness to fight and thus splinter the Allies, leaving him free to deal with the Soviet Union. In retrospect, such a strategy seems mere wishful thinking. But in December 1944 it had a plausible logic to it. With the future of his Reich at stake, Hitler saw an all-out strike against the massing U.S. and British forces as his last chance to force them into making a separate peace.

What the Fuehrer did not count on was the stubborn resistance of largely untested American GIs. This fierce opposition, particularly from one platoon, is the subject of Alex Kershaw's "The Longest Winter." In his previous history, "The Bedford Boys," Mr. Kershaw followed a group of soldiers from Bedford, Va., to the beaches of Normandy, where 19 of them were cut to pieces in the first terrible minutes of D-Day. "The Longest Winter" picks up where "The Bedford Boys" left off, following another platoon's journey through liberated France into Belgium on the eve of the Battle of the Bulge.

---

Most of the 26 men who composed the 394th Regiment's Intelligence and Reconnaissance platoon came from college programs, meant to replenish the military's badly depleted ranks. Derisively called "quiz kids," they proved themselves as physically adept as they were academically proficient. But not even rigorous Camp Maxey, Texas, in the sweltering heat of July 1944 could prepare them for their mission in Europe later that year.

On Dec. 10, the platoon was ordered into the village of Lanzareth, Belgium, to fill a gap between Allied divisions along the Western front. The leader, First Lt. Lyle Bouck, was told that the move would be temporary--after all, as Mr. Kershaw explains, "I&R platoons were not intended to be frontline riflemen. The highly mobile platoon did not have sufficient firepower to hold such a position in the event of a strong German attack."

Little did the Allies know (thanks to one of the greatest intelligence blunders of the entire war) that a strong German attack was indeed heading their way. Hitler's counteroffensive, launched on Dec. 16, involved almost a half-million men and thousands of tanks and artillery pieces, all aimed at slicing through the Ardennes forest, recapturing Antwerp and leaving the Allied forces in disarray. As Hitler saw it, "this battle is to decide whether we shall live or die. The enemy must be beaten--now or never! Thus lives our Germany!"

The enemy's advance just happened to go through tiny Lanzareth. But after Lt. Bouck confirmed that a massive force was approaching, headquarters ordered his men "to hold at all costs." The Germans, meanwhile, were commanded to charge up the hill where the platoon was positioned. "They advanced like they were out for a Sunday stroll," recalled Pvt. Risto Milosevich. "I figured we were going to get it, so I was going to take all the Germans with me I could." And he did. Hundreds of Germans were mowed down in what Lt. Bouck described as "a lot of human waste." And yet the sheer number of enemy troops would ultimately spell the platoon's doom, exhausting their supply of ammunition and leaving them no choice but to surrender.

The remainder of "The Longest Winter" follows the I&R platoon scattered throughout some of the most notorious POW camps inside the Third Reich. According to Mr. Kershaw, "it was a lucky man who did not at some point suffer from dysentery. In most barracks and wards, there were just two latrine pails left by the Germans each night. Both were always overflowing each morning." Malnutrition was rampant. Cpl. Aubrey McGehee, who served under Lt. Bouck, went to 120 pounds from 205.

---

Despite such conditions, the 394th's I&R platoon survived. "Only a miracle," writes Mr. Kershaw, "could explain why every one of Lyle Bouck's men got home that summer when so many other units had been decimated." According to Charles B. MacDonald, author of the monumental "A Time for Trumpets," some 19,000 Americans died at the Battle of the Bulge.

The Nazis at first perceived the American soldier to be "a gum-chewing spoiled brat." Instead they faced an adversary willing to stand his ground. The 394th's I&R platoon played a pivotal role in slowing the German advance--a delay that would prove costly. "We knew it weren't no little thing," said Sgt. George Redmond. "But I figured if I'd gotten that far, I'd get the rest of the way. You only have to go when your time comes." America's enemies would do well not to underestimate this sense of courage and duty.

Mr. Matus is an assistant managing editor at The Weekly Standard. You can buy "The Longest Winter from the OpinionJournal bookstore.

from the Washington Post, 2001-Oct-24, p.A25, by Michael Kelly:

What The U.S. Isn't

Because this war was forced on us, and because it has brought us death and fear, it is natural to see this moment only in terms of painful burden. It is that, but it is also one of extraordinary opportunity.

The best-case scenario is, in the short term, victory. Short-term victory means the destruction of al Qaeda, the defeat of the Taliban and the establishment of a government in Afghanistan that is not hostile to the United States. It means also accomplishing these goals without creating an environment that leads to ancillary disaster, notably the takeover in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia by radical anti-American Islamicists.

This is a result that is not guaranteed but is reasonable to hope for. The early indications in Afghanistan all augur well. The U.S. campaign, largely waged from the air, appears well on the way to destroying much of the Taliban's military infrastructure. With its command centers, its airplanes, its tanks, forts and artillery wrecked, the Taliban may well fall to the forces of the rebel Northern Alliance. The odds of success here are improved by the reports of significant defections from the Taliban ranks.

And, so far, ancillary disaster does not seem to loom. While there have been fairly widespread demonstrations against the United States and in support of al Qaeda throughout the Middle East and even into the Far East, there have not been (yet, at least) any signs of popular unrest sufficient to cause the toppling of any regime.

Cassandras see a victory in Afghanistan as a defeat in waiting. Look, they say, at what happened to the Russians when they tried to run that place with a puppet government. But here is exactly where the opportunity for a transformative moment occurs: The United States is not the Soviet Union.

Specifically, it is not an imperial or colonial power; it has no desire (because its people have no desire) to conquer Afghanistan, to occupy it, to own it by proxy. It simply wants Afghanistan to be run by people who will not use it as a base for terror against the United States. It is perfectly content, after that, to let Afghanistan do with itself what it will -- indeed to help Afghanistan.

The Afghans don't know this, of course, and neither do a lot of other people in the Middle East. The idea of the United States as Europe came to know it -- a great power that was also a good power; a liberator and a protector but not a conqueror or an occupier -- is news still to much of the Eastern world. (For that matter, it is news still to many on the left in the Western world.) Bernard Lewis, the great Islamic scholar and author, argues that, generally speaking, the United States is seen in the Middle East in terms of a continuum that stretches back through several hundred years as just the latest in a series of Western, white, Christian powers (France, Britain, now America) whose interests in the region were materialistic and imperialistic.

In this view, America's interest in the affairs of Arabic and Islamic states is (like that of the European colonial powers) entirely selfish and corrupt, and the proof of this may be found in America's support for selfish and corrupt regimes, notably Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. America (again, like the Europeans) is chronically duplicitous, always willing to betray trusts and allies as its interests shift. And finally, in this view, America is a paper tiger; technologically superior but at bottom cowardly, and thus in the end susceptible to defeat by a more courageous foe.

Lewis believes that the United States had one great chance to show the Middle East that it was different: the Gulf War. Here, America had an opportunity to rescue a captive people -- not the Kuwaitis but the Iraqis -- from a terrible and much-hated regime. In failing to do this, and in the process shamefully betraying the Kurdish and Shiite Iraqis whom it had encouraged to rebel, the United States confirmed the Middle Eastern long view.

The battle of Afghanistan gives America a rare second chance. Start with the radical assumption that Afghans do not like starving in poverty under the rule of psychopaths. What would happen if the United States made it possible for them to live, not under American rule, but under a sane self-rule, with material assistance from this nation? What would happen, in short, if the United States rescued the Afghans?

We have a shot at that here. Long-term victory for the United States lies in convincing the people of the Middle East of the great and simple truth: America is not the Britain of old; it is not the France of old; it is different.

from The Telegraph of London, 2004-Nov-3, by Janet Daley:

Bush's 'crime'? Just being a patriot

By the time you read this, you may know who is to be the next President of the United States. Then again, you may not.

If things really are as tight as they look at the moment of writing, then the American presidency may be paralysed for months, in a time of great national peril, by a litigious frenzy. Please God, let's not go there, if only because the sight of both sides trying to sue their way into the White House would license yet another wave of supercilious European Ameriphobia.

Now - in this hiatus between my copy deadline and the election result - is probably the ideal moment to look at some of the self-regarding delusions that European and British analysis has perpetrated about this election.

The first - and the most outrageous - is that attacks on George W Bush personally and the United States generally, are a direct consequence of the war on Iraq.

In fact, Bush was loathed by the British and European Left-liberals before he had done anything in office. He was detested purely and simply for what he was - a point to which I shall return. But the idea that the most recent wave of rabid anti-Americanism stems from mistakes in Iraq is simply absurd. Anyone whose historical memory goes back more than 10 minutes should recall the extraordinary effusion of hatred that spewed from sections of the opinion-forming class as a consequence of America being attacked.

Like most expatriate Americans living in Britain, it was a phenomenon I am unlikely ever to forget. The response to the deaths of 3,000 civilians, by comment writers in the Left-wing newspapers and the producers of "flagship" BBC current affairs programmes, was to orchestrate abuse of the bereaved country. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when I read a leader in Saturday's Guardian which pronounced with brazen sanctimoniousness: "The attack of September 11 2001, an event of historic seriousness, created an unprecedented outpouring of solidarity worldwide."

Oh really? Well, then the Guardian must have been wildly out of step with world solidarity at the time because it was gleefully leading a chorus of "America got what it deserved". And the BBC - sorry to return to this again but it remains burnished in my consciousness - staged an edition of Question Time in which anyone who expressed sympathy for the US was howled down.

Anybody who says that this kind of pathological hatred - the kind that relishes the loss of innocent life as a well-deserved "lesson" - would evaporate with the election of John Kerry, or any other contender who was remotely in tune with the American political culture, is trying very hard to deceive himself or the rest of us.

Perhaps there is a clue to the psychological logic of this argument in the Guardian leader's triumphal conclusion: "Three years later, much of that solidarity has been squandered."

Are the people who attacked the US at the time of 9/11 now trying to justify that gratuitous viciousness by claiming that it has been, as it were, retrospectively justified by the invasion of Iraq?

And they conveniently overlook the fact that the protest over America's actions in Iraq had an earlier incarnation. Try hard and you will recall that much the same doom-saying condemnations of "imperialism" and "war-mongering" were made prior to the invasion of Afghanistan.

The choir began singing this tune almost immediately after 9/11: America will "rush in" and take precipitate action to remove the Taliban regime even though it is what the Islamic people of that country want.

Well, they didn't rush in - they waited and planned for what seemed an unconscionable length of time. Then they liberated Kabul from a regime which - as it turned out - even most Muslims in Afghanistan hated.

The Afghans have just had their first free elections without any terrorist disruption from al-Qa'eda. But the Bush-haters have largely forgotten their opposition to that venture, so happily immersed are they in the more troubled outcome in Iraq. I wonder how quickly amnesia will set in if the Iraqi elections in January go surprisingly well?

So, no - George W Bush is not hated here and in Europe because he removed a genocidal tyrant in Iraq and failed to anticipate the chaos that followed.

He is hated because he is the embodiment of everything that the United States is, and Europe is not: not just enormously powerful, militarily and economically, but brashly confident and fervently patriotic. Where Europe is steeped in historical guilt and self-loathing - so immersed in its own unforgivable past that it is trying to fashion a constitution that actually prohibits national pride - America is profoundly proud of the success of its own miraculous achievement.

What it has succeeded in doing is cracking the great dilemma of modern history: how can disparate and ethnically diverse people live together? How can people of differing and deeply felt religious convictions survive, with their beliefs intact, in a single unified country - evangelical Protestants such as Mr Bush alongside practising Catholics with Jewish roots such as Mr Kerry - without their cities turning into Belfast or Beirut?

The answer lies not in the post-religious, anti-clerical mania of the European Union which has just rejected a commissioner for espousing mainstream Catholic principles, but in that patriotism so despised by European elites. It is the unifying force of national self-belief with all those ridiculed school rituals - pledging allegiance to the flag, reciting the preamble to the Constitution - that makes America whole and at one with itself.

Bush is the personification of that unashamed America and that is why Europe cannot bear the sight of him.

from The Telegraph of London, 2004-Nov-4:

No power on Earth can intimidate a free nation

In the end, it wasn't even close. George W Bush won a decisive endorsement from the American people for the most radical presidency of modern times. It was a vindication of his own idiosyncratic kind of conservatism: folksy, evangelical, optimistic, unapologetic and, when necessary, martial. The triumph of this Churchillian conservatism will delight the President's friends and confound his critics, but it will also strike fear into all enemies of America and the West.

For those enemies understand very well what the re-election of Mr Bush really signifies. Following hard on the heels of John Howard's triumph in Australia, it demonstrates that the leaders of the war on terror, at least in the English-speaking nations, have enough support to persevere in their task, and that our democracies are sufficiently robust to withstand attempts by the terrorists to influence elections. The President would have won even without Osama bin Laden's sinister re-emergence in the last week of the campaign, but it is heartening to know that the margin of victory was almost certainly widened by

al-Qa'eda's intervention. Americans voted in record numbers to return to the White House a president who had been more reviled, at home and abroad, than ever before. They have demonstrated once and for all that no power on Earth can intimidate a free nation. This now takes its place among those truths which Americans hold to be self-evident.

Not the least impressive aspect of the Bush victory was its unambiguous rejection of the argument that carried so much weight on this side of the Atlantic: that only a new president would be able to heal the wounds left by the liberation of Iraq. Mr Bush has now been given the tools to finish the job of helping the Iraqi people to create the first genuine democracy in the Arab world.

He obtained his mandate without making irresponsible promises to withdraw US troops by a certain date or to hand over the burden to others, such as the UN, without the means to protect this fragile plant. Afghanistan's first free election has established a precedent that Iraq, with Britain's help, can hope to follow. Slowly but surely the tide may be turning in Iraq, as the jihadis holed up in Fallujah will soon discover.

The result has brought those in Europe who dreamt of a Kerry victory down to earth. It ought to be a wake-up call for those European states - above all Germany and France -which have held aloof not only from the liberation, but also from the reconstruction of Iraq. There is no point in hoping that the French and Germans will change their minds about Mr Bush, or vice versa, but self-interest dictates that both sides should draw a line under the past.

European leaders should not wait till next January to embrace the new, democratic Iraq. Mr Bush, for his part, is also likely to adopt a more conciliatory style in his second term - aware that his Administration's public diplomacy has hitherto been its Achilles' heel. The President will want to banish the unjust accusation of unilateralism, but, as the leader of the free world, he needs to retain the flexibility to act speedily and decisively. Pre-emptive military force is a last resort, but a necessary one.

This raises the two issues that are likely to test the Atlantic partnership over the next year: Iran and Israel. Teheran's imminent acquisition of a nuclear capability and its role in the Iraqi insurgency make Iran the most urgent item in Mr Bush's in-tray. He cannot ignore this threat, but neither can he afford another Iraq on a bigger scale. Britain, France and Germany have tried and failed to appease Iran. Regime change is the only long-term solution, but Mr Bush is likely to rely on backing the internal opposition, rather than military options, to help bring this about.

Europeans should not repeat the mistake they made over Iraq, supporting the insupportable and then crying foul when America kicked away the last props. This time, Europe itself could provide the model for regime change: in Iran, the ayatollahs are as unpopular as the communists were in eastern Europe before 1989. Mr Bush should follow Reagan's example, appealing to the Iranians over the heads of their leaders. If he does, Europe should back him.

On Israel, there is a widespread expectation (voiced yesterday in the Commons) that the President will now bully Ariel Sharon into giving the Palestinians what they have failed to extort by terrorism. That is not what Mr Bush believes, nor what he was elected to do. But he is uniquely placed to reassure the Israeli public that a withdrawal from Gaza, and ultimately most of the West Bank, could make Israel and Palestine more rather than less secure. If Mr Bush can broker a two-state solution that even Mr Sharon can live with, then there is a chance that it might happen - especially if Yasser Arafat is no longer able to sabotage it.

What does the second Bush term mean for the United States? The economy is in urgent need of rather more attention than the President has been able to give it since September 11, 2001. The ballooning budget deficit requires cuts in public spending; Arnold Schwarzenegger has shown what can be done in California. Tax cuts are still the unique selling point of Bush's brand of politics, but priority should now go to the taxpayers of middle America rather than the corporate interests of Wall Street. During his first term, "compassionate conservatism" was just a slogan; now Mr Bush can make it happen.

This was not merely a vote for the status quo, but for an idealistic vision of America as the land of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Terrorism threatens all three, and the electorate chose the candidate whom it judged to be the best guardian of that patriotic archetype. Americans do not expect their president to run their lives for them, but to let them pursue their own, infinitely various, ways of life. Yet they knew exactly what Mr Bush stands for. His opposition to same-sex marriages, for example, was endorsed by constitutional amendments in 11 states.

His attitude to embryonic stem cell research and abortion was equally clear. Second-term presidents are often less radical, and it may be that Mr Bush will appoint less abrasive colleagues in order to ameliorate America's image abroad. But the country he leads is diverging from Europe: it is younger, more self-confident, more prosperous, more devout, more diligent, more democratic and, in short, more conservative. Europe must come to terms, not only with Mr Bush, but with the nation that has elected him. This is a president who really can speak for America.

from the New York Times, 2004-Nov-21, by Thomas L. Friedman:

Postcards From Iraq

Of all the images I saw on a short visit to Iraq last week, two stand out in my mind. One was a display that the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, in the Sunni Triangle, prepared for the visiting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers. It was a table covered with defused roadside bombs made from cellphones wired to explosives. You just call the phone's number when a U.S. vehicle goes by and the whole thing explodes. The table was full of every color and variety of cellphone-bomb you could imagine. I thought to myself that if there is a duty-free electronics store at the gates of hell, this is what the display counter looks like.

The other scene was a briefing by Lt. Gen. John Sattler, the Marine commander in Falluja. General Sattler was explaining how well the Marines, Army, Air Force and Navy Seabees had worked together in Falluja as a combined task force. As General Sattler was speaking, I looked around at the assembled soldiers in the room. It was a Noah's Ark of Americans: African-Americans and whites, Hispanic Americans and Asians, and men and women I am sure of every faith. The fact that we can take for granted the trust among so many different ethnic groups, united by the idea of America - and that the biggest rivalry between our Army and Navy is a football game - is the miracle of America. That miracle, and its importance, hits you in the face in Iraq when someone tells you that the "new" Iraqi police unit in a village near Falluja is staffed by one Iraqi tribe and the "new" National Guard unit is staffed by another tribe and they are constantly clashing.

What unites these two scenes is the obvious fact, which still bears repeating, that we are trying to plant the seeds of decent, consensual government in some very harsh soil. We are not doing nation building in Iraq. That presumes that there was already a coherent nation there and all that is needed is a little time and security for it to be rebuilt. We are actually doing nation creating. We are trying to host the first attempt in the modern Arab world for the people of an Arab country to, on their own, forge a social contract with one another. Despite all the mistakes made, that is an incredibly noble thing. But for Iraqis to produce such a social contract, such a constitution, requires a minimum of tolerance and respect for majority rights and minority rights - and neither of those is the cultural norm here. They are not in the drinking water.

I have been to this play before, though. Fifteen years ago I wrote a book about the Arab-Israel conflict, including a chapter on the Marines in Beirut in 1982. I called that chapter "Betty Crocker in Dante's Inferno." It was my way of expressing the contrast between the truly pure intentions of those Marines trying to refashion Lebanon into a more decent, democratic polity and the harsh soil that was Lebanon of that day.

Cultures can change, though. But it takes time. And, be advised, it is going to take years to produce a decent outcome in Iraq. But every time I think this can't work, I come across something that suggests, who knows, maybe this time the play will end differently. The headlines last week were all about Falluja. But maybe the most important story in Iraq was the fact that while Falluja was exploding, 106 Iraqi parties and individuals registered to run in the January election. And maybe the second most important story is the relatively quiet way in which Iraqis, and the Arab world, accepted the U.S. invasion of Falluja. The insurgents there had murdered hundreds of Iraqi Muslims in recent months, and, I think, they lost a lot of sympathy from the Arab street. (But if we don't get the economy going on the Iraqi street, what the rest of the Arab world thinks will be of no help.)

Readers regularly ask me when I will throw in the towel on Iraq. I will be guided by the U.S. Army and Marine grunts on the ground. They see Iraq close up. Most of those you talk to are so uncynical - so convinced that we are doing good and doing right, even though they too are unsure it will work. When a majority of those grunts tell us that they are no longer willing to risk their lives to go out and fix the sewers in Sadr City or teach democracy at a local school, then you can stick a fork in this one. But so far, we ain't there yet. The troops are still pretty positive.

So let's thank God for what's in our drinking water, hope that maybe some of it washes over Iraq, and pay attention to the grunts. They'll tell us if it's time to go or stay.

from the Ayn Rand Institute, 2001-Oct-5, by Michael S. Berliner:

What America Stands For and Why the Terrorists Hate Us
Terrorists vs. America

Like many Americans, I've been trying to find occasional respite from the horrors of September 11. And like many Americans, I found it through the video rental store. My wife and I watched a delightful Australian movie called "The Dish." Having seen part of it two months ago on an airplane, I thought it would be just what the situation called for: an absorbing, benevolent and inspiring story that would remind me that evil doesn't dominate. And it worked . . . for a while.

The title refers to the radio-telegraph dish in a small Australian town that provided the television pictures of the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. The plot involves the struggle of the local crew to keep the dish operational. It is an innocent movie, not in the sense that it is naïve, but in the sense that the people are untouched by evil or even cynicism. With the exception of an unsympathetic, politically correct, cliché-spouting teenager, the cast of characters admires the space program and the human efficacy it represents.

I found myself thinking of the crew and townspeople as personifying the traits that are quintessentially American and that represent the best in people of any nationality: optimism, common sense, independence, self-confidence. I was carried off into this benevolent world-until the dish's supervisor, reprimanding a complaining employee, said: "We are in the middle of the greatest feat ever attempted." Ironically, this beautiful insight brought me back to current events, because a horrible contrast suddenly struck me and stayed with me throughout the rest of the film. For the individuals involved in the moon landing, their greatest feat was an unprecedented scientific/technological achievement; but for the terrorists, their greatest feat was . . . pure destruction.

The men and women of the space program, and their legions of scientific antecedents, spent countless hours acquiring the knowledge and developing the moral values that led to the moon landing. Not many years later, Osama bin Laden and his fellow terrorists also spent many hours of planning, sitting not in laboratories and libraries, but in tents and caves, with one goal: not to create, but to annihilate human creations. The scientists measured their success by how much they could produce. The terrorists measure their success by how much they can destroy. The space program represents life; bin Laden represents death. That is the philosophic choice the two sides represent-and the choice we all have to make.

Many commentators, in and out of the government, note that the World Trade Center was targeted because it represented the American way of life. It did indeed represent the American way of life-more accurately, the Western way of life, a way of life found in individuals in various places, across the globe. And what does that mean? Like the space program, the Trade Center stood for the essential values of Western civilization: reason, science, production, self-esteem, freedom, success.

Underlying our technological achievements is the conviction that success is possible, that if you put your mind to the task, you can accomplish great things, that through your own efforts you can forge a human way of life out of the wilderness. You are not the victim of chance or genetic makeup; you are not the plaything of the stars or some ineffable deity. You are a human being, able to think, act and produce on your own, able and worthy of living a joyous life here on earth. And that is precisely what the terrorists want to destroy. That is precisely why they hate us.

There are too many terrorists worldwide for their actions to be explained as psychotic. Whether they are Osama bin Ladens or Ted Kaczynskis, they take their philosophy seriously. For them, evil lives in the form of Western man, in a capitalist society, using his own mind to reshape the world to achieve his own happiness. The terrorists want to destroy that.

Their ideal world, the Eden envisioned by these nihilists, is a negation-a world absent of things: no skyscrapers, no space program, no science, no technology. It is a world devoid of the products of the rational, independent human mind. It is a world of self-abnegation, submission and subservience. It is a world of living death.

The fundamental battle we face today consists not of bombs and rockets, but of ideas-the ideas of those who value human life on earth versus the ideas of those who oppose it.

Dr. Berliner is a member of the board of directors of the Ayn Rand Institute in Marina del Rey, Calif. The Institute promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.

from Space.com, 2004-Jun-21, by Leonard David:

SpaceShipOne Makes History: First Manned Private Spaceflight

Updated 11:50 a.m. ET. A detailed account of the historic flight is here.

MOJAVE, CALIFORNIA -- The first non-governmental rocket ship flew to the edge of space today and was piloted to a safe landing on a desert airport runway here.

Civilian test pilot, now turned astronaut Mike Melvill brought SpaceShipOne down to the Mojave Airport tarmac after flying to 100 kilometers (62 miles) in altitude, leaving the Earth's atmosphere during his history-making sub-orbital space ride.

After touchdown, Melvill rolled past thousands of spectators in the early morning Sun, flashing the thumbs up. Then he got out and spoke to the cheering crowd.

"The flight was spectacular," Melvill said. "Looking out that window, seeing the white clouds in the LA Basin, it looked like snow on the ground."

Roaring to life

Take-off occurred at about 9:45 a.m. ET, or 6:45 a.m. local time, with SpaceShipOne tucked under the White Knight carrier craft.

Once set free an hour later, and after a few seconds of glide control at around 47,000 feet, Melvill ignited SpaceShipOne's hybrid rocket motor. From the ground, flame and smoke could be seen as the rocket plane roared to life and shot upward through Mojave Desert skies. Slicing skyward and outside the Earth's atmosphere, the vehicle and pilot spent about three minutes in freefall weightlessness.

"As I got to the top I released a bag of M&Ms in the cockpit. It was amazing," said Melvill, 62.

During the reentry process, Melvill flipped SpaceShipOne's large tail section up, a step needed to slow the vehicle down as it nosed itself toward a terra firm touchdown.

After the speed-reducing maneuver, SpaceShipOne's tail piece was put back into glide mode. The vehicle circled overhead as onlookers who had filled up local motels and camped at the airport cheered. The craft landed at around 11:15 a.m. ET directly in front of a public viewing area on the same runway on which it took off roughly an hour and a half earlier.

Melvill reported hearing a bang during the high-altitude portion of the flight. Something was seen hanging from the bottom of the craft at the landing site. There appeared to be damage at or near the left rear landing gear, but it was not clear if it had anything to do with the bang.

Step-by-step test program

Scaled Composites, designer and builder of the rocket plane, say the successful mission will "demonstrate that the space frontier is finally open to private enterprise."

"This event could be the breakthrough that will enable space access for future generations," a pre-launch Scaled Composites press statement explains.

Microsoft cofounder turned investor and philanthropist, Paul Allen is the behind-the-scenes financial backer of the project, joining forces with aviation designer, Burt Rutan, chief of Scaled Composites.

"It's hard for me to talk right now," Rutan said moments after the landing. He said he was very pleased with the flight and called the landing "beautiful."

Melvill, a test pilot and vice president-general manager of Scaled Composites, called the flight a mind-blowing experience. "It all worked exactly as you told us," he said to Rutan. When asked what he would do next, Melvill said: "I think I'll back off a little bit and ride my bike."

High-altitude record

Since the White Knight carrier plane first took to the air in early August 2002, a step-by-step test program has been instituted by Scaled Composites. To date, given today's success, there have been 57 flights of hardware associated with this morning's mission of SpaceShipOne.

The rocket plane itself has now undertaken a series of 14 piloted captive carry, free-flight, and four engine-powered missions. Today's event marked the highest-altitude ever reached by a non-government aerospace program.

SpaceShipOne project officials have already begun gearing up for flying back-to-back missions of the craft in order to snag the $10 million Ansari X Prize. This international competition can be won by the first team to create a reusable aircraft that can launch three passengers into sub-orbital space, return them safely home, then repeat the launch within two weeks with the same vehicle.

Anthony Duignan-Cabrera contributed to this report from the Mojave Airport.

from CNN.com, 2004-Oct-4, by Michael Coren:

SpaceShipOne captures X Prize
Privately funded craft reaches altitude requirement

MOJAVE DESERT, California (CNN) -- SpaceShipOne achieved its most spectacular flight yet, climbing to an altitude of 377,591 feet (71 1/2 miles) to win the $10 million Ansari X Prize on Monday.

X Prize officials said it set an altitude record exceeding the military X-15's top altitude of 354,200 feet (67 miles) set on August 22, 1963.

With a wish of "Good luck and Godspeed," mission control sent the privately funded craft toward space for the second time in a week, the requirements for winning the X Prize.

"Today we have made history. Today we go to the stars," said Peter Diamandis, co-founder of the X Prize Foundation.

The $10 million award is intended to spur civilian spaceflight.

"You have raised a tide that will bring billions of dollars into the industry and fund other teams to compete," Diamandis said. "We will begin a new era of spaceflight."

The craft left a near perfect dovetail of exhaust contrails with the White Knight turbo jet, which carried it aloft, as its rocket ignited for 84 seconds. The rocket burn sent SpaceShipOne on a trajectory that sent it climbing for almost a minute after the engine shut down.

"It looks great," said Brian Binnie, SpaceShipOne's pilot, on his way up to space at Mach 3.

Binnie, now only the second person in history to earn his commercial astronaut wings, reported a shaky flight with "a little roll" but did not experience the 29 rolls Mike Melvill experienced last week.

"The experience is quite literally a rush," he said. "You light off the vehicle and the world wakes up around you."

He said the view from above could not be conveyed in the images.

Paul Allen, who financed the program, Richard Branson, who recently founded Virgin Galactic for space tourism, and Burt Rutan greeted the newly minted astronaut on the runway. Brinnie's family also joined him on the podium.

Space ShipOne and White Knight, featured a new paint job promoting Virgin Galactic, Branson's new venture, which recently announced a deal to license the SpaceShipOne technology for a fleet of commercial spacecraft

Winning the X Prize with SpaceShipOne is only the beginning for Rutan.

"I have a hell of a lot bigger goal now (than NASA)," he said.

He is now determined to supply the craft for Virgin Galactic.

"I absolutely have to develop a space tourism system that is at least 100 times safer than anything that has flown man into space, and probably significantly more than that," Rutan said.

After some unexpected acrobatics during the the last flight, Rutan said Monday's would be a smooth one, but he was prepared for stability issues.

"We believe we have solved these and we don't believe we'll see the rolls tomorrow," he said Sunday. "But if we do, we don't believe they're dangerous. ... After all, what we're doing is research."

The spacecraft was outfitted with a stronger engine and some aerodynamic modifications from its first record-breaking flight into space on June 21.

Melvill flew the craft's first mission to space and reached, just barely, the required 62-mile altitude, passing the internationally recognized boundary of space. Wind shear and a jammed control on the tail meant the craft veered about 20 miles off course, but it returned for a smooth landing. It was only SpaceShipOne's fourth flight using the rocket engine

On Wednesday, SpaceShipOne streaked even higher to 337, 569 feet (64 miles). However, during its ascent, the private spacecraft began a series of rolls that Melvill brought under control only after ending the rocket burn 11 seconds early.

SpaceShipOne's thrust was provided by two innocuous substances that, when mixed together, are explosive: nitrous oxide and rubber.

A fuel tank about six feet in diameter at the center of the craft holds liquid nitrous oxide, also known as laughing gas. A hollow tube leading from the tank to the engine nozzle is filled with solid rubber. The combustive combination produces thousands of pounds of thrust, although exact amount remains secret.

The nonprofit X Prize Foundation is sponsoring the contest to promote the development of a low-cost, efficient craft for space tourism in the same way prize competitions stimulated commercial aviation in the early 20th century.

The prize is fully funded through the end of the year.

The Federal Aviation Administration commended Scaled Composites on accomplishment and the prospects for commercial space flight.

"We do see this as the frontier of transportation around the around the world," said Marion Blakely, administrator of the FAA. "We know there will be risks, but those are risks are worth taking."

Branson, chairman of Virgin Atlantic Airways, announced last Monday that he would invest $25 million in a new space venture, to be called Virgin Galactic. The project will license Scaled Composite's SpaceShipOne technology for commercial suborbital flights starting at about $200,000.

Branson expects it could fly 3,000 people within five years.

"The development will also allow every country in the world to have their own astronauts rather than the privileged few," he said.

from the New York Times, 2008-Sep-28, by John Schwartz:

Private Company Launches Its Rocket Into Orbit

A privately financed company launched a rocket of its own design successfully into orbit on Sunday night, ushering in what the company's founders hope will be a new era of spaceflight.

It was the fourth launching attempt by the company, Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, which was founded by Elon Musk, an Internet entrepreneur born in South Africa.

“We've made orbit!” Mr. Musk exclaimed to his employees at the company's headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif., proclaiming the moment “awesome.”

“There were a lot of people who thought we couldn't do it — a lot, actually,” he said after thanking his employees. “But, you know, the saying goes, fourth time's the charm.”

Mr. Musk, 37, founded SpaceX in 2002 after selling the online payment company he helped found, PayPal, to eBay for $1.5 billion.

SpaceX, which has more than 500 employees, captured one of the most coveted prizes of the new space industry: a commercial orbital transportation services contract worth as much as $100 million. Known by its acronym, Cots, the program encourages private-sector alternatives to the space shuttle.

The company is developing a larger rocket, the Falcon 9, to provide cargo services to the International Space Station for NASA after the shuttle program winds down in 2010. The company also hopes to adapt its technology to carry people to the station, which could help bridge the gap until the debut of the next generation of NASA spacecraft, planned for 2015.

“This is just the first step in many,” Mr. Musk told his team.

His relief was obvious. The first three efforts by SpaceX had ended in failure. The first, in March 2006, failed about a minute into the ascent because of a fuel line leak. A second rocket, launched in March 2007, made it to space but was lost about five minutes after launching.

In the most recent flight, on Aug. 2, mission control lost contact with the craft shortly after the separation of the first stage. That third flight carried three small satellites for NASA and the Defense Department, as well as small amounts of the cremated remains of 200 people, including Gordon Cooper, one of the original seven Mercury astronauts, and James Doohan, who played the character Montgomery Scott on the original “Star Trek” television series.

Engineers identified the problem as a small amount of residual thrust from the first stage after the engine was cut off; the first stage rear-ended the second after separation. Mr. Musk said the company had fixed the problem by telling the rocket to wait a few more seconds after cut-off before jettisoning the first stage, a change that required rewriting a single line of computer code.

This time around, SpaceX took no chances with a customer's payload and instead launched what it called a payload mass simulator — a 364-pound weight — from the Kwajalein Atoll in the central Pacific Ocean at 7:16 p.m., Eastern time.

Those at headquarters cheered lustily at the launching, and even more so when the first and second stages separated successfully on live video that was also shown on the company's Web site, spacex.com. There was a long moment of concern as mission control lost contact with the craft as it neared orbital velocity, its engine nozzle glowing bright red. But the image reappeared, and the cheers resumed.

In a news conference after the launching, Mr. Musk told reporters, “It's great to have this giant monkey off my back.”

from the Washington Post, 2004-Dec-6, p.A1, by Guy Gugliotta:

DeLay's Push Helps Deliver NASA Funds

Without a separate vote or even a debate, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) has managed to deliver to a delighted NASA enough money to forge ahead on a plan that would reshape U.S. space policy for decades to come.

President Bush's "Vision for Space Exploration," which would send humans to the moon and eventually to Mars, got a skeptical reception in January and was left for dead in midsummer, but it made a stunning last-minute comeback when DeLay delivered NASA's full $16.2 billion budget request as part of the omnibus $388 billion spending bill passed Nov. 20.

DeLay, whose newly redrawn district includes the Johnson Space Center, and NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe have all but claimed a mandate; but even with the money and parts of the project already up and running, the questions that once threatened to kill the initiative still remain largely unresolved.

What will it really cost? What NASA programs will be cut to fund it? How will other science agencies be affected? Instead of a debate and vote on the merits of the president's plan, the measure was adopted largely because DeLay threatened to scuttle the entire omnibus bill unless Bush got every nickel he requested.

"I wouldn't say we're critical of the moon-Mars program, but we are critical of the lack of clarity about the scientific benefits," said physicist Michael Lubell, spokesman for the American Physical Society, the nation's largest association of research physicists. "This is bound to be an extremely costly project, so what are we going to get from it?"

The responses are many: that humankind needs challenges; that robots will never be supple enough to take full scientific advantage of visits to other worlds; that if the United States doesn't do it, some other nation -- China, quite likely -- will. DeLay, a self-described "space nut," told Johnson Space Center employees a few days after the vote that "NASA helps America fulfill the dreams of the human heart."

And at a news conference the next day, O'Keefe said the omnibus bill embodied "as strong an endorsement as anyone could have hoped for the national space policy that the president articulated."

NASA's share amounted to 4.1 percent of the omnibus bill, and the space agency ended the year as one of the few non-security scientific agencies to get a raise for 2005, says the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Funding for the others was flat or fell.

Bush announced the space "Vision" to considerable fanfare Jan. 14, promising to "extend a human presence across our solar system," starting with a return to the moon by 2020 and eventual travel to Mars.

Lawmakers of both parties welcomed a new set of goals for a human spaceflight program traumatized and seemingly adrift after last year's loss of the space shuttle Columbia. Even today, the proposal finds few congressional detractors -- as an overall concept.

But the devil, now, as then, is in the details: "I support the president's initiative -- if it's paid for," said Rep. Bart Gordon (Tenn.), the Science Committee's leading Democrat. "I'm afraid we're setting ourselves up for a future train wreck."

Early in the year, O'Keefe tried to sell the proposal as a slow, steady initiative requiring a NASA budget increase in 2005 of only $800 million. It was the beginning of "a journey," he said, quoting from the Bush speech, "not a race."

But the plan, if carried out, would be the most ambitious space enterprise ever undertaken, and lawmakers wondered whether other programs would be scaled back to make room for it: Would spectacular science missions such as the robotic Mars rovers suffer? Or Earth science, astronomy or aeronautics?

O'Keefe did not satisfy his questioners, but while Bush's plan languished in Congress, NASA was moving ahead aggressively to implement it. O'Keefe created a new Office of Exploration Systems, headed by Associate Administrator Craig E. Steidle, a retired Navy rear admiral, test pilot and military procurement specialist.

During the year, Steidle's office developed a timetable for the moon-Mars initiative, mapped its priorities and gathered experts to chop the project into contract-size pieces. By Thanksgiving, the agency had let more than 120 contracts.

The plan's early centerpiece is the next-generation "Crew Exploration Vehicle," designed to fly by 2014 and to reach the moon by 2020. NASA received about 1,000 responses to its initial request for "concepts" of what the vehicle should be.

"We selected 11 teams, and next August we're going to reduce them to two, or maybe three, who will actually build a vehicle, test and demonstrate it [without a crew] in 2008," Steidle said in an interview at NASA headquarters.

For the plan's other needs, NASA has vetted more than 3,700 proposals to provide technologies including navigation systems, tools and machinery. Caterpillar Inc. of Peoria, Ill., will provide equipment for doing construction on the moon, and Hamilton Sunstrand of Windsor Locks, Conn., will develop new techniques to reclaim water from human waste.

NASA next must pick a rocket system for launching the vehicle, and "we're looking at everything," Steidle said. In a few months, the agency will decide whether to use a single, "shuttle-derived" heavy launch rocket, a smaller spacecraft or a combination. The hybrid would put the crew exploration vehicle and a supplementary rocket into orbit separately, where they would link up for the lunar flight.

NASA projects that Bush's plan will cost $100 billion by 2020, and Steidle said, "I feel very good about" being able to deliver a crew vehicle by 2014 with "the money that's in the budget right now. What's beyond gets a little foggy."

But not excessive. "It's not like building a space station," NASA Comptroller Steven J. Isakowitz said in a telephone interview. "Costs are more manageable" because the new spaceship is the only major piece of hardware scheduled for construction in the next decade.

Some in Congress were not convinced. On June 20, the House Appropriations subcommittee charged with funding NASA trimmed Bush's 2005 budget request by $1.1 billion and eliminated all $438 million slated for the crew exploration vehicle.

"It was about the money," recalled subcommittee Chairman James T. Walsh (R-N.Y.). "I remember Sean [O'Keefe] coming in and trying to give people a comfort level, but the budget we had to work with didn't even come close."

Three days later, White House budget director Joshua B. Bolten sent a letter threatening a veto unless the bill gave the plan "adequate funding levels." DeLay had visited the White House hours earlier.

The bill never reached the House floor, but if Walsh wanted to get higher-ups to focus on it, he had succeeded. "We created the atmosphere where people could come to our rescue," Walsh said.

But it took awhile. In September the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released a report suggesting that NASA intended to fund the president's plan in part by taking $10 billion from signature science programs such as the one that produced the Mars rovers.

NASA's Isakowitz said most of the reallocations resulted from shifting control of existing programs to Steidle's office, not canceling them. For instance, he said, the Office of Explorations absorbed Project Prometheus, a $400 million-a-year program to develop nuclear power for space use.

Still, Isakowitz acknowledged that NASA has delayed start-up or funding increases for some science projects in order to fund Bush's plan. These will bring the plan $2.7 billion from 2005 to 2009.

The projects affected are mostly in two areas: "Beyond Einstein," astrophysics missions, and "Explorers," extremely competitive small missions usually focused on astronomy and the history of the universe.

Concerns about funding and priorities remained unresolved into the autumn, but Bush's reelection gave the administration a political boost. In a post-election interview, O'Keefe said he was "feeling better every day" about the plan's budget and "supremely confident" that it would be passed as written.

And so it proved. NASA was identified as a major sticking point when Senate and House conferees sat down to craft the final version of the omnibus spending bill near midnight Nov. 19, but Bolten, Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) and DeLay were holding out for more money.

The negotiators appeared to agree on $15.9 billion for NASA, but that wasn't good enough, DeLay said later at the Space Center. "The main responsibility of the majority leader is to set the agenda for the House floor. I wouldn't schedule the bill until NASA was taken care of," he said.

And it was.

"Once you get into an omnibus bill, the leadership takes over, and you need to have an advocate in that circle," Walsh said. DeLay "was getting me more allocation every time he stepped up to the plate. He made the difference."

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2004-Jul-19, by Andrew Kleinfeld and Judith Kleinfeld:

Go Ahead, Call Us Cowboys
A visit to the Alaska-Canada border brings home the differences between the cultures.

Everywhere, Americans are called "cowboys." On foreign tongues, the reference to America's Western rural laborers is an insult. Cowboys, we are told, plundered the earth, arrogantly rode roughshod over neighbors, and were addicted to mindless violence. So some of us hang our heads in shame. We shouldn't. The cowboy is in fact our Homeric hero, an archetype that sticks because there's truth in it.

Cowboys were of course plainsmen--Midwesterners operating from Texas to Kansas to the Dakotas. But their ideas and ideals spread across the continent to our Mountain West as well, even as far as the Alaskan West.

A few years ago, a Canadian anthropologist explained to us how different her countrymen are from Americans. She had a perfect comparison to illustrate this. She suggested that we go to the extreme western edge of Canada and have a look at two small towns named Stewart and Hyder. Stewart is situated in British Columbia, Hyder at the southeastern tip of Alaska. Though just two miles apart, these towns are very different in their "habits of the heart." If we visited them, our anthropologist friend implied, we would immediately understand the superiority of Canadian culture.

We decided to take up her challenge.

---

First we called up the respective town authorities. Hyder, the American town, turned out to have no town authorities--and, technically, no town. The Hyderites chose not to incorporate as a municipality, creating instead a community association--a private nonprofit corporation. Stewart, the Canadian town, is a real municipality with a traditional government.

When we phoned Stewart, the government agent refused to answer any questions until they were submitted in writing. The Hyder community association representative said, sure, she'd tell us anything we wanted to know, right now, on the phone. But to make it a fair comparison, we faxed written questions to both parties, and got written answers back.

The Canadian government official, evidently aspiring to create a faceless bureaucracy in this 700-person outpost, signed the response as "Government Agent"--capital letters but no name or sex--and explained that Stewart had a "Municipal Government incorporated under the laws of the Province of British Columbia," with a mayor and a city council of six members. As to Stewart's nearby neighbors, Government Agent from Canada said diplomatically, "I'm not sure how Hyder is governed," but expressed polite disapproval of its apparent libertarian streak.

Stewart developed very early into a regulated community, explained Government Agent, while Hyder chose to follow the path of less community and more personal freedom. Hyder is a collection of individuals first and a community second, while Stewart has a "community first" attitude, according to Government Agent. "We are generally more accepting of government's involvement in our day-to-day lives."

The Hyder representative--definitely not a Government Agent--signed her name, Caroline Gutierez, to her answers, which she sent on her personal stationery advertising her several businesses. She runs Boundary Gallery, where she is proprietor as well as artist, and Wood Bee Lumber Enterprise, as well as filling eight community positions ranging from music teacher to curator of the town museum. "I came with my family to Hyder on a summer vacation and am pleased to say I am still on vacation," Ms. Gutierez said. She applauded the very same cowboy attitudes that Government Agent disdained. Hyder, she said, was "spirited, rebellious, and independent," while Stewart was "cautious and cleaving to Mother England."

---

The differences in these answers were interesting enough to convince us to undertake a three-day, 1,200-mile drive from our home in Fairbanks, Alaska. We arrived first at Stewart, Canada, an orderly, well-kept town with paved streets. Then we drove off the blacktop into Hyder, USA--a mélange of disorder where at dark we could find little but a raunchy-looking bar and lodge. We stayed on the Canadian side, at the King Edward Hotel. At our lace-and-doilies Stewart breakfast spot, we found a promotional map. It showed that Stewart had a neat grid of streets and municipal facilities, but not much else. Hyder, on the other hand, with about one-seventh the population and no straight or paved roads at all, had 23 business and community enterprises.

Driving back and forth in daylight, our initial impressions of Stewart as solid and prosperous, Hyder as wild and ramshackle, turned completely inside out. Stewart is definitely much more attractive and inviting, with sidewalks, flower boxes and bicycles to borrow free at the well-staffed government tourist office. But Hyder was the confident, prosperous community. Stewart's houses needed paint. Its shops needed tourists. Its roads needed traffic. It was a semi-ghost town, bravely struggling on. With mining and logging drying up (environmentalist-orchestrated bans on logging in Alaska's Tongass National Forest and the closing of Ketchikan's pulp mill devastated the lumber economy in this region), many of Stewart's businesses, elegant restaurants, and small tourist attractions (e.g., the world's leading toaster museum) had discreet "for sale" signs in the windows.

Hyder, meanwhile, turned out to be a lot more productive and enterprising than it had looked at dusk. The Hyderites had evidently found other ways to make money when the mines and mills were shut down. The pickup trucks in Hyder were newer and better, and there were a lot more satellite dishes.

The best restaurant in the Hyder-Stewart metropolitan area, we discovered, was an old school bus and tent in Hyder serving fresh fish. The proprietor had traded a snowmobile for the bus, gutted it and turned it into a kitchen. She served halibut and charcoal-grilled salmon supplied by local fishermen. She had the highest prices in town, yet her restaurant was the only one with lines.

Hyder's most visible business (aside from the bar) was the "Border Bandit Discount Store." Between two giant American flags, this emporium expressed the town's style on its sign:

Hyder Alaska--a town of about a hundred happy people and a few old s---heads.
Discount tobacco
Tax free bed & breakfast
Tax free storeboat rental
Custom importing
Pawn, buy, sell, gold
Sporting goods guns & ammo
Marine supplies
Industrial materials
Almost anything else

We chatted with a Hyder resident (retired, so he had time to talk) who was definitely among the "hundred happy people." He'd built a $2 million business in this tiny frontier town from such enterprises as selling discount appliances and charging $25 in Hyder for a carton of cigarettes that costs $50 in Stewart. People drove to his store from all over northern British Columbia and the Yukon. Hyderites, he explained, made money on "everything that's legal or close to it."

---

Doubtless the academics would say that Hyder illustrates the immorality of markets and the lamentable limitations of sovereignty, which prevented Canada from imposing its higher taxes and fewer commercial freedoms so close to its borders. A case history of the commercial anarchy that results from lack of government.

There was no arguing the lack of government. Not only is there no municipality in Hyder, but no border station either. Once there had been one, but the Hyderites had protested the nuisance of having to stop when they drove back and forth. And after all, no such municipality as Hyder exists--a nonexistent place doesn't need a border station.

Stewart, on the other hand, has a well-maintained government border station with numerous polite and apologetic employees staffing three shifts. Each time our Jeep passed back and forth between the two towns we answered the same litany of questions to people who quickly got to know us and our answers. We asked one of the Canadian border guards what Hyderites were like. "Free spirits. Wild. They have guns, you know." We were asked if we had any guns each time we drove back to Stewart, since handguns (a near-universal in Alaskan bear country) are contraband in Canada.

We made this trip in the first week of July. The "Canada Day" celebrations that took place in Stewart on July 1 were very vanilla. They included a "jaws of life" rescue equipment demonstration, a Name the Babies Contest, and the Annual Community Potluck Dinner in the early evening.

Three days later on July 4, Hyder spiced its national celebration with dashes of politically incorrect cayenne. There was an Ugly Vehicle Contest featuring pickups held together with duct tape and decorated with moose antlers (unlike the shiny ones in the driveways). There were parades of children with pets, toy guns and cowboy costumes. There was a Wilderness Woman Contest. Contestants raced to split wood, wash clothes, shoot a bear, flip pancakes, change a baby, and put on lipstick. The winner did it all barefoot.

Even Hyderites recognize their limits--in an earlier year's self-staged July 4 fireworks display, they had accidentally burned down their fire hall with the fire engine inside. So this year Hyder hired Canadian experts to stage the pyrotechnics. The show started around midnight, during the late evening barbecue. Stewart residents courteously joined in the fun, bringing new government trucks and a poodle.

---

The people of Hyder and Stewart are not nearly so different as they make themselves seem. They're friends, they go back and forth frequently, and they do a lot of the same kinds of work. It's not so much that they are different as individuals as that they choose to be different as communities.

The enterprising and economically productive Hyderites pretend they're just fooling around. Hyder's most available T-shirt shows a logger with red suspenders and a bottle of something warming, and the slogan "I've been Hyderized." The Stewartites pretend they're upright Victorians. Their most featured T-shirts display the official seal of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

It is striking how people doing exactly the same thing can portray their activities to themselves in opposite ways. Different cultural spectacles affect what citizens see and feel. In Stewart and Hyder, people mostly seek the same thing from government--money. Stewart needs jobs, and so welcomes all the customs officers and government officials and employees it can get.

Hyder also got government funding--for a 73,000-square-foot water-bottling plant on one of its mud roads, to sell Alaska Glacier Blue water from a glacier. The plant is expected to employ 40 people (not bad for a town of 100). But the people of Hyder didn't interpret their public funding as Canadians would have. The Americans saw themselves as independent and self-reliant people taking something from their government. The Hyderites saw the water-bottling plant as clear evidence of their aggressive enterprise and ability to get what they wanted through hard work together. The Canadians, on the other hand, generally see themselves as dependents of government, as sometimes grateful but sometimes resentful receivers of government alms.

Canadian sociologist Kaspar Naegele compares his country and the U.S. this way: "In Canada there seems to be greater acceptance of limitation, of hierarchical patterns. There seems to be less optimism, less faith in the future, less willingness to risk capital or reputation." American sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset concludes that Canada is a "more law-abiding, statist, and collectivity-oriented society" than the U.S.

---

If we made a checklist of objective facts about a desirable place to live, Stewart would probably come out ahead. The Canadian way has virtues--clean paved streets, free medical care, a border station with a government presence, free bicycles. We had, after all, chosen to stay in Stewart, not Hyder. The American way, on the other hand, celebrates wildness. It celebrates common people and tolerates vulgarity. It is less interested in reprimanding iconoclasts.

But when we reacted to these two towns emotionally, instead of with checklists, Canada left us feeling flat and constrained. It was nice, but it wasn't us. When we crossed the border a couple of days later, out of the calm Canadian dusk into American neon lights, Joshua, our Yale philosophy major son, put his finger on our collective feelings. "America is thumos," he said. Thumos, an ancient Greek psychological concept, cannot be translated directly into English because it combines the qualities and emotions of passion, spirit, energy and courage. Thumos has a negative side--the anger of Achilles, or the Hyderites' reckless burning down of their own firehouse. But it is also a creative force of great and positive life powers.

Cowboys, venture capitalists, brilliant scientists, businesspeople like Bill Gates or Carly Fiorina, warriors like George S. Patton--have thumos. Modern people often ignore the role of "spiritedness." Psychologists measure intelligence, attitudes, emotions and values, but spiritedness is not a category of much academic interest. For ancient people, in contrast, spiritedness was central to an understanding of a society and the individual psyche. Socrates divided the soul into three parts: reason, thumos and appetite. Critics disdainful of America today often mischaracterize as aggressive or greedy "appetite" what should more accurately be interpreted as "spiritedness."

The role of freedom in creating prosperity has been the central discovery of economics over the past two centuries. What still tends to go unappreciated is that individual freedom has an emotional and spiritual value at least as important as its economic value. When one's activities are freely chosen and freely pursued, they create pleasure in themselves, not just through what is produced. That's why Caroline Gutierez of Hyder saw herself as "still on vacation" despite her two businesses and eight volunteer positions.

Americans enjoy the emotions freely chosen activities bring. We enjoy the autonomy and sense of authenticity, the exhilaration, the "wind in your hair" feeling of motion and freedom.

For centuries those describing our social character have identified exuberant energy and spiritedness as the most distinctive trait among Americans. "The place is so alive." "It makes you feel you can do so much more." These are common expressions among visiting observers of all ideologies.

Some individuals do not care for highly spirited people. There are quite a few American characteristics that seem unpleasant to people with different definitions of virtue. People who have a strong taste for order and hierarchy, who enjoy calm and quiet and leisure, who prefer security to risk, who take aesthetic pleasure in simplicity rather than in the bustling variety of human commerce--such people are not likely to enjoy America much. The British painter John Butler Yeats (the poet's father) spent 15 years trying to be an American. "A sort of European old-maidishness gets between me and them," he mourned. "Depend upon it, it is a mistake sometimes to have been too well brought up."

America's thumos appears most often in our pursuit of enterprise. The ancient passions for bravery in battle have reappeared in our prosaic, commercial culture. Tocqueville was quite taken with the American style of building lower-quality sailing ships, then taking over ocean commerce by sailing more of them faster, heedless of the risk of shipwreck, so that shipping could be cheaper. "Americans put a sort of heroism into their manner of doing commerce," he noted.

---

The place where America's national legends have been acted out has been our Western frontier. Even as the frontier has moved, we continue to use its imagery to describe ourselves, as when we refer to "homesteading on the electronic frontier." America's critics also favor Western and frontier imagery to describe us, as in the disdainful European references to "cowboys."

In every language in which we have tested this, "frontier" means something nearly opposite to its American sense. The French Larousse gives only one meaning for frontière, and that is the border between two nations--which in an oft-invaded country like France conjures up danger rather than opportunity. In Mandarin Chinese the term is bian jie or "boundary." In Cantonese, the word for frontier is huang di, which carries a negative connotation of "wilderness" or "wasteland." A frontier is a barren hardship post, not a place of opportunities, explains a Chinese colleague.

Russians have a very similar attitude toward frontiers. A Russian who discovered that one of these authors maintains his judicial chambers in Alaska blurted out, "Why were you sent?" The idea that there might be appeal in an assignment on America's Alaskan frontier seemed incomprehensible to him.

During America's expansion westward, frontier transformed into the very opposite of a boundary or limit. Its primary meaning in American English came to be a "boundless realm of possibility." Indeed some foreign dictionaries call this meaning of "frontier" an "Americanism."

The attractiveness of frontiers to Americans is demonstrated by our much more frequent use of the word. When we recently counted usages of the word frontier in business names in a number of different countries, we found that Americans use frontier in business names four times as often as the French, 15 times as often as the British, and 25 times more than the Argentines. And these numbers understate the national differences, because in other countries frontier is often used in reference to a business on the border (e.g., "State Line Liquor") to advertise businesses that leverage cross-border tax or regulatory differences.

---

Americans have many symbols of the Western frontier--mountain man, pioneer woman, homesteader, prospector--but our main symbol of the frontier is the cowboy. Hardly anyone needs stirrup-friendly, pointy-toed boots for his daily chores anymore, but plenty of people buy them. The cowboy best encapsulates the emotion, hostility, and fantasy of American independence.

Though detractors Marxify the cowboy into some sort of violent capitalist, the "Western" fable was actually a rebuke to the "Gilded Age." Americans did not choose as their heroes of song and image the men who financed the railroads and endowed the libraries. The Plains hero of Owen Wister's novel, "The Virginian" (a favorite of Theodore Roosevelt), had no property, no schooling, no social standing, no money and no interest in getting these things. What gave him pride was his courage, competence, self-discipline, self-reliance, physical prowess and most of all integrity and sense of justice. The cowboy, an impoverished hired hand who slept in bunkhouses or on the ground, was a figure of aristocratic honor. As Wister put it, "If he gave his word, he kept it; Wall Street would have found him behind the times." The cowboy was a knight, albeit one with no land or money.

"High Noon" portrayed a sheriff who, unable to get any of the townsmen to stand with him against brutal thugs taking over their remote town, faced them down alone, and survived only because his Quaker wife picked up a gun and sacrificed her abstract pacifism to the concrete virtue that the hero represented. "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon" presented John Wayne as a military hero who, through great courage and skill, prevented an Indian war. In "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence," Jimmy Stewart played a lawyer who had no skill with a gun, happily wore an apron, and dried the dishes in the kitchen until he was forced by a sense of honor and justice to confront the villain who ruled the town by brute force. "Shane" told the story of a brave man who wanted peace but risked his life to protect homesteaders from the men who were destroying them. In all the classic Westerns the hero, by dint of great courage and competence, fights alone for justice, achieves it, and leaves without riches or fame, with nothing but honor.

Because the cowboy melded the aristocratic virtues of honor and indifference to material things with the democratic values of self-reliance, discipline, and independence, this myth appealed deeply to our national character. Freedom imposes burdens--isolation, inequality and anxiety about whether our choices are wise. The cowboy ideal stimulates in us the vigor to attempt difficult new tasks.

When foreigners see us as cowboys, they are not mistaken. As a people, we still exhibit a high degree of courage, independence, aggressiveness, competence, and spirit. Diplomatic Europeans have responded to tyranny over the latest century mostly with accommodation, like the townspeople in "High Noon." Cowboy Americans, on the other hand, have hungered to confront and defeat tyrants, in real life as in legend. Our Western experience--love of freedom, little deference to wealth and status, an idealistic drive for justice, and a willingness to be ferocious toward these ends--continues to drive much of what is best about America.

So can they call us cowboys? You bet. Because we are. Our response ought to be that of the Virginian when he was described as a son of a bitch: "When you call me that, smile!"

Mr. Kleinfeld is a judge on the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Mrs. Kleinfeld is director of the Northern Studies Program at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. This article appears in the July/August issue of The American Enterprise.

from the Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2006-Nov-15, by Vedran Vuk:

The Dreadful, Dreary, Boring World of Commie Casinos

In Canada, government-owned and run casinos made a mess of the true entertainment value created by casinos in a competitive free market. The government-owned casinos of Ontario claim to be the "peoples'" factors of production. But anyone with experience in real casinos can only see this as a pathetic joke.

I realized this on a recent visit to Niagara Falls, Canada. The town had two government-owned casinos, five minutes apart. The design of the casinos was the same with no theme and no real difference in games and services provided. The first casino is called the Niagara Casino, and the second is called the Niagara Fallsview Casino.

Many anti-capitalists argue that capitalism is only concerned about money and ignores things such as beauty and creativity. The truth of socialism is on display with these two casinos.

Compare to the grand capital of gambling, Las Vegas, and all the creative themes and architectural designs that have come forth. We have Venice, Manhattan, Paris, and a pyramid in the desert! This would simply be impossible in socialist Canada unless some politician decided a pyramid in the snow was a good way to get votes.

A policy so offensive resides in Niagara Falls' casinos that I shiver at the thought of it. Of course, I speak of the policy of no "free" alcoholic beverages. Free drinks in casinos is something that we have come to take for granted in our free-market-driven casino industry.

Many people go to casinos exclusively for the free drinks. But of course we can't have anything enjoyable in socialism. One beer is US$7. Furthermore, the classic cheap and delicious casino buffet was nowhere to be seen. The buffet had few choices, tasted like roasted nutria, and cost about US$12.

Another difference was that no special offers were given by the casino. Usually, casinos have crazy spectacular car giveaways or remote resort vacation trips to be won, but in Canada? No way.

Las Vegas casinos do not give great buffets, free drinks, and special prizes out of the goodness of their hearts. These offers come through the concern for their own bank accounts and the competition with other casinos. The commie casino designed for the people of Ontario is worse for the customers than casinos based on profit.

These casinos are almost doll house images of real casinos. This can be most seen at the Texas Hold 'Em Poker tables at which I had the pleasure of waiting an hour and a half before being permitted to play. There are ten tables, seven dealers, and four people managing the waiting list.

An inefficiency such as this would never go on long in a real casino. What is the purpose of the four managers when all the casino needs is dealers?! Is there even a need for one manager of the waiting list? God forbid that the commie casino would do anything that might be efficient and profit maximizing.

With no shareholders to answer to and no real competition, there is no incentive to get more dealers instead of waiting-list managers. The bloated staff of Canada's commie casinos is typical of the kind of patronage schemes that infect all government enterprises. The end result is me waiting for ninety minutes, during which time the casino is making no money from me.

To add salt to the wound, the casinos actually changed their dealers regularly, like a competitive casino. This is normally done to ensure that there is less cheating going on. A question then for my socialist Canadian commie friends: What is the point of preventing cheating when you've already hired four waiting-list managers? You've already cheated yourself for whatever their salary may be!

Ludwig von Mises pointed out the flaws of government-run non-profit organizations by saying, "In the absence of profit and loss the entrepreneurs would not know what the most urgent needs of the consumers are. If some entrepreneurs were to guess it, they would lack the means to adjust production accordingly."

The government-run casinos have fake entrepreneurs that cannot adjust their production through dealers and effective management to match the demand of customers. They only make guesses at the number of customers that may possibly come into the casino. This is exactly what Mises is speaking about when he says of such quasi-markets, "They want people to play market as children play war, railroad, or school. They do not comprehend how such childish play differs from the real thing it tries to imitate."

No citizen of Canada can effectively push the casinos into efficiency. Since citizens cannot sell their "stock" in the casinos, there is no one to push for higher profits and greater efficiency. No person is in the position to lose their entire fortune. No person is investing into the company for their children's college education or for their retirement. This means no person is in a position to push for profit maximization.

So play it safe and please avoid Canada's commie casinos.

Vedran Vuk is a major in economics and finance at Loyola University of New Orleans. He is temporarily taking classes at Loyola College in Maryland due to Hurricane Katrina.

from National Review Online, 2004-Nov-19, by Victor Davis Hanson:

The Real Humanists
Revolution from Afghanistan to Iraq.

In September and early October 2001 we were warned that an invasion of Afghanistan was impossible — peaks too high, winter and Ramadan on the way, weak and perfidious allies as bad as the Islamists — and thus that the invasion would result in tens of thousands killed and millions of refugees. Where have all these subversive ankle-biters gone? Apparently into thin air — or to the same refuge of silence as all the Reagan-haters of the 1980s who swore that a nuclear freeze was the only humane policy of dealing with Soviet expansionism.

After the seven-week defeat of the Taliban, these deer-in-the-headlights critics paused, and then declared the victory hollow. They said the country had descended into rule by warlords, and called the very idea of scheduled voting a laughable notion. We endured them for almost two years. Yet after the recent and mostly smooth elections, Afghanistan has slowly disappeared from the maelstrom of domestic politics, as all those who felt our efforts were not merely impossible but absurd retreated to the shadows to gnash their teeth that Kabul is not yet Carmel. Western feminists, homosexual-rights advocates, and liberal reformists have never in any definitive way expressed appreciation for the Afghan revolution now ongoing in the lives of 26 million formerly captive people. They never will. Instead, Westerners simply now assume that there was never any controversy, but rather a general consensus that Afghanistan is a "good thing" — as if the Taliban went into voluntarily exile due to occasional censure from The New York Review of Books.

The more ambitious effort to achieve similar results in Iraq is following the same script, despite even more daunting challenges. Fascistic neighbors rightly see elections in Iraq as near fatal to their own bankrupt regimes. Some have oil; others have terrorists; still more, like Iran and Saudi Arabia, have both. Unlike Afghanistan, there is no neutral India or Russia nearby to keep Islamists wary, only the provinces of the ancient caliphate to supply plenty of jihadists to continue the work of September 11. Our mistakes in the reconstruction of Iraq were never properly critiqued as naïve and too magnanimous, but rather they were decried by the Left as cruel and punitive — as if being too lax was proof of being harsh.

Yet, thanks to the brilliance of the U.S. military and despite the rocky reconstruction and our own election hysteria, there is a good chance that the January elections can begin a cycle similar to what we see in Afghanistan. And at that point things should get very, very interesting.

Just as the breakdown of a few Communist Eastern European states led to a general collapse of Marxism in the east, or the military humiliation in colonial Africa and the Falklands led to democratic renaissance in Iberia and Argentina, or American military efforts in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Panama City brought consensual government to Central America, a reformed Afghanistan and Iraq may prompt what decades of billions of dollars in wasted aid to Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinians, the 1991 Gulf War, and 60 years of appeasement of Gulf petrol-sheiks could not: the end of the old sick calculus of Middle East tyrannies blackmailing the United States through past intrigue with the Soviet Union, then threats of oil embargos and rigged prices, and, most recently, both overt and stealthy support for fundamentalist killers.

The similar effort to isolate Arafat, encourage the withdrawal from Gaza, and allow the Israelis to proceed with the fence have brought more opportunity to the Middle East than all of Dennis Ross's shuttles put together, noble and well-meant though his futile efforts were. The onus is on the Palestinians now either to turn Gaza into their own republic or give birth to another Lebanon — their call before a globalized audience. They can hold elections and shame the Arab League by being the embryo of consensual government in the Middle East, or coronate yet another thug and terrorist in hopes that again the United States will play a Chamberlain to their once-elected Hitler.

If someone wonders about the enormous task at hand in democratizing the Middle East, he could do no worse than ponder the last days of Yasser Arafat: the tawdry fight over his stolen millions; the charade of the First Lady of Palestine barking from a Paris salon; the unwillingness to disclose what really killed the "Tiger" of Ramallah; the gauche snub of obsequious Europeans hovering in the skies over Cairo, preening to pay homage to the late prince of peace; and, of course, the usual street theater of machine guns spraying the air and thousands of males crushing each other to touch the bier of the man who robbed them blind. Try bringing a constitution and open and fair elections to a mess like that.

But that is precisely what the United States was trying to do by removing the Taliban, putting Saddam Hussein on trial, and marginalizing Arafat. Such idealism has been caricatured with every type of slur — from both the radical Left and the paleo-Right, ranging from alleged Likud conspiracies and neo-con pipe dreams to secret pipeline deals and plans for a new American imperium in the Middle East shepherded in by the Bush dynasts. In fact, the effort not just to strike back after September 11, but to alter the very landscape in which our enemies operated was the only choice we had if we wished to end the cruise-missile/bomb-'em-for-a-day cycle of the past 20 years, the ultimate logic of which had led to the crater at the World Trade Center.

Oddly, our enemies understand the long-term strategic efforts of the United States far better than do our own dissidents. They know that oil is not under U.S. control but priced at all-time highs, and that America is not propping up despotism anymore, but is now the general foe of both theocracies and dictatorships — and the thorn in the side of "moderate" autocracies. An America that is a force for democratic change is a very dangerous foe indeed. Most despots long for the old days of Jimmy Carter's pious homilies, appeasement of awful dictatorships gussied up as "concern" for "human rights," and the lure of a Noble Prize to ensure nights in the Lincoln bedroom or hours waiting on a dictator's tarmac.

In the struggle in Fallujah hinges not just the fate of the Sunni Triangle, or even Iraq, but rather of the entire Middle East — and it will be decided on the bravery and skill of mostly 20-something American soldiers. If they are successful in crushing and humiliating the fascists there and extending the victory to other spots then the radical Islamists and their fascistic sponsors will erode away. But if they fail or are called off, then we will see Days of Sorrow that make September 11 look like child's play.

We are living in historic times, as all the landmarks of the past half-century are in the midst of passing away. The old left-wing critique is in shambles — as the United States is proving to be the most radical engine for world democratic change and liberalization of the age. A reactionary Old Europe, in concert with the ossified American leftist elite, unleashed everything within its ample cultural arsenal: novels, plays, and op-ed columns calling for the assassination of President Bush; propaganda documentaries reminiscent of the oeuvre of Pravda or Leni Riefenstahl; and transparent bias passed off as front-page news and lead-ins on the evening network news.

Germany and France threw away their historic special relationships with America, while billions in Eastern Europe, India, Russia, China, and Japan either approved of our efforts or at least kept silent. Who would have believed 60 years ago that the great critics of democracy in the Middle East would now be American novelists and European utopians, while Indians, Poles, and Japanese were supporting those who just wanted the chance to vote? Who would have thought that a young Marine from the suburbs of Topeka battling the Dark Ages in Fallujah — the real humanist — was doing more to aid the planet than all the billions of the U.N.?

Those on the left who are ignorant of history lectured the Bush administration that democracy has never come as a result of the threat of conflict or outright war — apparently the creation of a democratic United States, Germany, Japan, Italy, Israel, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, Serbia, and Afghanistan was proof of the power of mere talk. In contrast, the old realist Right warned that strongmen are our best bet to ensure stability — as if Saudi Arabia and Egypt have been loyal allies with content and stable pro-American citizenries. In truth, George Bush's radical efforts to cleanse the world of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, bring democracy to the heart of the Arab world, and isolate Yasser Arafat were the most risky and humane developments in the Middle East in a century — old-fashioned idealism backed with force in a postmodern age of abject cynicism and nihilism.

Quite literally, we are living in the strangest, most perilous, and unbelievable decade in modern memory.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is victorhanson.com.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2004-Aug-20, by Daniel Henninger:

Olympic Games Reflect Sacrifice By the U.S.A.
How many countries have France and Germany liberated since World War II?

Even Howard Dean's heart had to skip a beat when the Iraqi athletes walked in to Santiago Calatrava's magnificent stadium at the Olympics opening ceremony. Boy, did they look happy. Genuinely happy. Compare their elation--reaching toward he crowd, tapping their hearts--with the athletes from Iran or Saudi Arabia, who had that smile-or-disappear look Olympic athletes forlornly wore when they represented the Soviet Union or the "Eastern bloc" nations. In a word, the Iraqis looked free.

It occurred to me watching this pageant of superb sportsmen and sportswomen that much the same true freedom of spirit could be seen on the faces of athletes from a list of nations with familiar names--Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Afghanistan, Grenada, Kuwait, South Korea, the former captive nations of Romania, Bulgaria, the Czechs, Slovakia, Estonia, Lithuania (all holding elections since the early 1990s), and the other former Soviet republics.

These Olympians have one thing in common: They come from the nations the U.S. has liberated since the end of World War II.

Across the past half century, the United States used the power of its soldiers, its financial power or its diplomatic power to liberate these people from authoritarian and totalitarian governments or invaders. Save perhaps for Cubans, there will be no defections to the U.S. at these Games. It is no longer fair sport to root against athletes from Communist Poland and Hungary. These two nations are now U.S. allies; their soldiers fight in Iraq alongside Americans.

Afghanistan's first election is scheduled for October 9. Iraq's is in January. We can expect the members of Iraq's soccer team, the miracle story of these Olympics, to return home to cast votes in their nation's first free election. Formerly they went home to be tortured by Uday Hussein, whom the U.S. recently killed.

How many nations have free France and free Germany liberated since 1945?

---

My apologies for ruffling the global fellow-feeling that lies officially beneath the summer Games. But for many of us it has become more than a little tiresome of late hearing how much the Europeans "hate us" and how the U.S. has "alienated" our "friends." And how all this global ill will is because George W. Bush "invaded" Iraq to wage an "unjustifiable" or unnecessary war.

The notion that we have become a lumbering, ham-handed interventionist in the private affairs of people like Saddam Hussein has been made an issue in the current campaign. In John Kerry's now-famous phrase, "the United States of America never goes to war because we want to, we only go to war because we have to."

Mr. Kerry draws attention to his vote against "Ronald Reagan's illegal war in Central America." But the athletes who strode into the opening ceremony from Nicaragua, representing a constitutional democracy, looked happy with the result of the Reagan intervention, which thwarted both a dictatorship and a Soviet beachhead in Central America.

Afghanistan's flagbearer was Nina Suratger. Is she displeased that the United States twice involved itself in her formerly godforsaken country--during its war with the Soviet Union and more recently to drive out the Taliban? Ms. Suratger herself wouldn't be carrying that flag had not Americans fought to liberate Afghanistan from the Taliban.

Saudi Arabia had no women in its Olympic delegation, but it just might at the Beijing Olympics if the political process struggling to take root in Iraq spreads there--or to Syria, Yemen or Jordan. And if the notion of an Arab constitutional democracy makes your eyes roll, as it does for William Odom and Francis Fukuyama in the current National Interest, perhaps we can let Iraqi soccer coach Abdul Kareem Hajim speak for at least laying the cornerstone: "Now we have freedom. Our chains are broken. We just need a stable government to make sure everyone has work and a salary."

Let us consider Nedzad Fazliga, the 36-year-old flagbearer for Bosnia-Herzegovina. He is old enough to remember the friends who didn't survive the internecine war that burned in a corner of Europe for years until the U.S. sent in troops. Here is the official reason why the U.S. entered that war:

"Over the last four years, a quarter of a million Bosnians have been killed, more than half of Bosnia's people have been driven from their homes, a million of them are still refugees. We have seen parents divided from their children, children deprived of their dreams, people caged like animals in concentration camps, women and young girls subject to systematic rape. We have seen unbelievable horrors. But now we have a chance to end this misery for good, and we have a responsibility to act." That was President Bill Clinton, Dec. 2, 1995.

Here's President Bush speaking this week: "A free and peaceful Iraq and a free and peaceful Afghanistan will be powerful examples in a part of the world that is desperate for freedom. Free countries do not export terror. Free countries do not stifle the dreams of their citizens."

It is most certainly true that not all American interventions work out well for local peoples. Haiti and Somalia remain disordered. Sudan appears beyond reach. None has a team in Athens. Serious people can always measure and debate foreign commitments against America's interests, goals and resources. Dean Acheson in 1950 suggested South Korea lay "outside" America's defense perimeter. A similar argument is being made now about Iraq--that Mr. Bush overstated the threat.

In the meantime, perhaps the athletes from Bosnia, Afghanistan and Ceausescu's Romania will find their way to the Iraqi pavilion to hear familiar stories about living in a land of exterminations--of Shiite peoples murdered in southern Iraq and Kurds in the north. That has ended, thanks, as in many other places around the world, to American intervention, however unnecessary or poorly planned.

We thrill to see Olympic athletes strain across the ground or through the air and water to free themselves from limits set by nature on physical human effort. I for one am happy that America has strained to free many more people from man-made limits on personal freedom, most recently in Iraq.

Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.

from WhiteHouse.gov, 2002-Jun-1:

President Bush Delivers Graduation Speech at West Point

Remarks by the President at 2002 Graduation Exercise of the United States Military Academy
West Point, New York

9:13 A.M. EDT

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much, General Lennox. Mr. Secretary, Governor Pataki, members of the United States Congress, Academy staff and faculty, distinguished guests, proud family members, and graduates: I want to thank you for your welcome. Laura and I are especially honored to visit this great institution in your bicentennial year.

In every corner of America, the words "West Point" command immediate respect. This place where the Hudson River bends is more than a fine institution of learning. The United States Military Academy is the guardian of values that have shaped the soldiers who have shaped the history of the world.

A few of you have followed in the path of the perfect West Point graduate, Robert E. Lee, who never received a single demerit in four years. Some of you followed in the path of the imperfect graduate, Ulysses S. Grant, who had his fair share of demerits, and said the happiest day of his life was "the day I left West Point." (Laughter.) During my college years I guess you could say I was -- (laughter.) During my college years I guess you could say I was a Grant man. (Laughter.)

You walk in the tradition of Eisenhower and MacArthur, Patton and Bradley - the commanders who saved a civilization. And you walk in the tradition of second lieutenants who did the same, by fighting and dying on distant battlefields.

Graduates of this academy have brought creativity and courage to every field of endeavor. West Point produced the chief engineer of the Panama Canal, the mind behind the Manhattan Project, the first American to walk in space. This fine institution gave us the man they say invented baseball, and other young men over the years who perfected the game of football.

You know this, but many in America don't -- George C. Marshall, a VMI graduate, is said to have given this order: "I want an officer for a secret and dangerous mission. I want a West Point football player." (Applause.)

As you leave here today, I know there's one thing you'll never miss about this place: Being a plebe. (Applause.) But even a plebe at West Point is made to feel he or she has some standing in the world. (Laughter.) I'm told that plebes, when asked whom they outrank, are required to answer this: "Sir, the Superintendent's dog -- (laughter) -- the Commandant's cat, and all the admirals in the whole damn Navy." (Applause.) I probably won't be sharing that with the Secretary of the Navy. (Laughter.)

West Point is guided by tradition, and in honor of the "Golden Children of the Corps," -- (applause) -- I will observe one of the traditions you cherish most. As the Commander-in-Chief, I hereby grant amnesty to all cadets who are on restriction for minor conduct offenses. (Applause.) Those of you in the end zone might have cheered a little early. (Laughter.) Because, you see, I'm going to let General Lennox define exactly what "minor" means. (Laughter.)

Every West Point class is commissioned to the Armed Forces. Some West Point classes are also commissioned by history, to take part in a great new calling for their country. Speaking here to the class of 1942 -- six months after Pearl Harbor -- General Marshall said, "We're determined that before the sun sets on this terrible struggle, our flag will be recognized throughout the world as a symbol of freedom on the one hand, and of overwhelming power on the other." (Applause.)

Officers graduating that year helped fulfill that mission, defeating Japan and Germany, and then reconstructing those nations as allies. West Point graduates of the 1940s saw the rise of a deadly new challenge -- the challenge of imperial communism -- and opposed it from Korea to Berlin, to Vietnam, and in the Cold War, from beginning to end. And as the sun set on their struggle, many of those West Point officers lived to see a world transformed.

History has also issued its call to your generation. In your last year, America was attacked by a ruthless and resourceful enemy. You graduate from this Academy in a time of war, taking your place in an American military that is powerful and is honorable. Our war on terror is only begun, but in Afghanistan it was begun well. (Applause.)

I am proud of the men and women who have fought on my orders. America is profoundly grateful for all who serve the cause of freedom, and for all who have given their lives in its defense. This nation respects and trusts our military, and we are confident in your victories to come. (Applause.)

This war will take many turns we cannot predict. Yet I am certain of this: Wherever we carry it, the American flag will stand not only for our power, but for freedom. (Applause.) Our nation's cause has always been larger than our nation's defense. We fight, as we always fight, for a just peace -- a peace that favors human liberty. We will defend the peace against threats from terrorists and tyrants. We will preserve the peace by building good relations among the great powers. And we will extend the peace by encouraging free and open societies on every continent.

Building this just peace is America's opportunity, and America's duty. From this day forward, it is your challenge, as well, and we will meet this challenge together. (Applause.) You will wear the uniform of a great and unique country. America has no empire to extend or utopia to establish. We wish for others only what we wish for ourselves -- safety from violence, the rewards of liberty, and the hope for a better life.

In defending the peace, we face a threat with no precedent. Enemies in the past needed great armies and great industrial capabilities to endanger the American people and our nation. The attacks of September the 11th required a few hundred thousand dollars in the hands of a few dozen evil and deluded men. All of the chaos and suffering they caused came at much less than the cost of a single tank. The dangers have not passed. This government and the American people are on watch, we are ready, because we know the terrorists have more money and more men and more plans.

The gravest danger to freedom lies at the perilous crossroads of radicalism and technology. When the spread of chemical and biological and nuclear weapons, along with ballistic missile technology -- when that occurs, even weak states and small groups could attain a catastrophic power to strike great nations. Our enemies have declared this very intention, and have been caught seeking these terrible weapons. They want the capability to blackmail us, or to harm us, or to harm our friends -- and we will oppose them with all our power. (Applause.)

For much of the last century, America's defense relied on the Cold War doctrines of deterrence and containment. In some cases, those strategies still apply. But new threats also require new thinking. Deterrence -- the promise of massive retaliation against nations -- means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens to defend. Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies.

We cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best. We cannot put our faith in the word of tyrants, who solemnly sign non-proliferation treaties, and then systemically break them. If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long. (Applause.)

Homeland defense and missile defense are part of stronger security, and they're essential priorities for America. Yet the war on terror will not be won on the defensive. We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge. (Applause.) In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation will act. (Applause.)

Our security will require the best intelligence, to reveal threats hidden in caves and growing in laboratories. Our security will require modernizing domestic agencies such as the FBI, so they're prepared to act, and act quickly, against danger. Our security will require transforming the military you will lead -- a military that must be ready to strike at a moment's notice in any dark corner of the world. And our security will require all Americans to be forward-looking and resolute, to be ready for preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives. (Applause.)

The work ahead is difficult. The choices we will face are complex. We must uncover terror cells in 60 or more countries, using every tool of finance, intelligence and law enforcement. Along with our friends and allies, we must oppose proliferation and confront regimes that sponsor terror, as each case requires. Some nations need military training to fight terror, and we'll provide it. Other nations oppose terror, but tolerate the hatred that leads to terror -- and that must change. (Applause.) We will send diplomats where they are needed, and we will send you, our soldiers, where you're needed. (Applause.)

All nations that decide for aggression and terror will pay a price. We will not leave the safety of America and the peace of the planet at the mercy of a few mad terrorists and tyrants. (Applause.) We will lift this dark threat from our country and from the world.

Because the war on terror will require resolve and patience, it will also require firm moral purpose. In this way our struggle is similar to the Cold War. Now, as then, our enemies are totalitarians, holding a creed of power with no place for human dignity. Now, as then, they seek to impose a joyless conformity, to control every life and all of life.

America confronted imperial communism in many different ways -- diplomatic, economic, and military. Yet moral clarity was essential to our victory in the Cold War. When leaders like John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan refused to gloss over the brutality of tyrants, they gave hope to prisoners and dissidents and exiles, and rallied free nations to a great cause.

Some worry that it is somehow undiplomatic or impolite to speak the language of right and wrong. I disagree. (Applause.) Different circumstances require different methods, but not different moralities. (Applause.) Moral truth is the same in every culture, in every time, and in every place. Targeting innocent civilians for murder is always and everywhere wrong. (Applause.) Brutality against women is always and everywhere wrong. (Applause.) There can be no neutrality between justice and cruelty, between the innocent and the guilty. We are in a conflict between good and evil, and America will call evil by its name. (Applause.) By confronting evil and lawless regimes, we do not create a problem, we reveal a problem. And we will lead the world in opposing it. (Applause.)

As we defend the peace, we also have an historic opportunity to preserve the peace. We have our best chance since the rise of the nation state in the 17th century to build a world where the great powers compete in peace instead of prepare for war. The history of the last century, in particular, was dominated by a series of destructive national rivalries that left battlefields and graveyards across the Earth. Germany fought France, the Axis fought the Allies, and then the East fought the West, in proxy wars and tense standoffs, against a backdrop of nuclear Armageddon.

Competition between great nations is inevitable, but armed conflict in our world is not. More and more, civilized nations find ourselves on the same side -- united by common dangers of terrorist violence and chaos. America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge -- (applause) -- thereby, making the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless, and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace.

Today the great powers are also increasingly united by common values, instead of divided by conflicting ideologies. The United States, Japan and our Pacific friends, and now all of Europe, share a deep commitment to human freedom, embodied in strong alliances such as NATO. And the tide of liberty is rising in many other nations.

Generations of West Point officers planned and practiced for battles with Soviet Russia. I've just returned from a new Russia, now a country reaching toward democracy, and our partner in the war against terror. (Applause.) Even in China, leaders are discovering that economic freedom is the only lasting source of national wealth. In time, they will find that social and political freedom is the only true source of national greatness. (Applause.)

When the great powers share common values, we are better able to confront serious regional conflicts together, better able to cooperate in preventing the spread of violence or economic chaos. In the past, great power rivals took sides in difficult regional problems, making divisions deeper and more complicated. Today, from the Middle East to South Asia, we are gathering broad international coalitions to increase the pressure for peace. We must build strong and great power relations when times are good; to help manage crisis when times are bad. America needs partners to preserve the peace, and we will work with every nation that shares this noble goal. (Applause.)

And finally, America stands for more than the absence of war. We have a great opportunity to extend a just peace, by replacing poverty, repression, and resentment around the world with hope of a better day. Through most of history, poverty was persistent, inescapable, and almost universal. In the last few decades, we've seen nations from Chile to South Korea build modern economies and freer societies, lifting millions of people out of despair and want. And there's no mystery to this achievement.

The 20th century ended with a single surviving model of human progress, based on non-negotiable demands of human dignity, the rule of law, limits on the power of the state, respect for women and private property and free speech and equal justice and religious tolerance. America cannot impose this vision -- yet we can support and reward governments that make the right choices for their own people. In our development aid, in our diplomatic efforts, in our international broadcasting, and in our educational assistance, the United States will promote moderation and tolerance and human rights. And we will defend the peace that makes all progress possible.

When it comes to the common rights and needs of men and women, there is no clash of civilizations. The requirements of freedom apply fully to Africa and Latin America and the entire Islamic world. The peoples of the Islamic nations want and deserve the same freedoms and opportunities as people in every nation. And their governments should listen to their hopes. (Applause.)

A truly strong nation will permit legal avenues of dissent for all groups that pursue their aspirations without violence. An advancing nation will pursue economic reform, to unleash the great entrepreneurial energy of its people. A thriving nation will respect the rights of women, because no society can prosper while denying opportunity to half its citizens. Mothers and fathers and children across the Islamic world, and all the world, share the same fears and aspirations. In poverty, they struggle. In tyranny, they suffer. And as we saw in Afghanistan, in liberation they celebrate. (Applause.)

America has a greater objective than controlling threats and containing resentment. We will work for a just and peaceful world beyond the war on terror.

The bicentennial class of West Point now enters this drama. With all in the United States Army, you will stand between your fellow citizens and grave danger. You will help establish a peace that allows millions around the world to live in liberty and to grow in prosperity. You will face times of calm, and times of crisis. And every test will find you prepared -- because you're the men and women of West Point. (Applause.) You leave here marked by the character of this Academy, carrying with you the highest ideals of our nation.

Toward the end of his life, Dwight Eisenhower recalled the first day he stood on the plain at West Point. "The feeling came over me," he said, "that the expression 'the United States of America' would now and henceforth mean something different than it had ever before. From here on, it would be the nation I would be serving, not myself."

Today, your last day at West Point, you begin a life of service in a career unlike any other. You've answered a calling to hardship and purpose, to risk and honor. At the end of every day you will know that you have faithfully done your duty. May you always bring to that duty the high standards of this great American institution. May you always be worthy of the long gray line that stretches two centuries behind you.

On behalf of the nation, I congratulate each one of you for the commission you've earned and for the credit you bring to the United States of America. May God bless you all. (Applause.)

END 10:05 A.M. EDT

from the Wall Street Journal Europe, 2004-Aug-18:

Europe's Brain Drain

Between 1998 and 2001, Germany had a great run for the Nobel Prizes, producing four laureates in physics and medicine. But far from recognizing Germany's excellence in advanced research, the awards more properly documented how unattractive their home country had become for Germany's brightest: All four scientists lived and worked in the U.S.

This brain drain to opportunities across the Atlantic is not only a German phenomenon. America is also destination number one for many of the best scientists from the rest of the European Union. According to a European Commission survey, more than 70% of the EU-born recipients of U.S. doctorates between 1991 and 2000 planned to stay in America. Altogether some 100,000 European-born researchers currently work in the U.S.

Europe can ill afford to lose its most talented minds. The EU Commission fears that by the end of this decade, Europe will have 700,000 fewer scientists and engineers than will be needed to compete in the global knowledge economy.

The high quality of teaching and research in the U.S. is among the scientists' prime motivation for seeking new career opportunities in America. U.S. elite universities and company research labs usually have much more money than their European counterparts. Europe invests 40% less in research & development than the U.S., with most of the difference accounted for by the private sector. And the gap is widening.

Government funding in much of Europe keeps most universities at the same mediocre level while creating stifling bureaucracies and burdensome restrictions. In contrast to that, American universities have more freedom and, thanks to their close cooperation with industry, are also more successful in turning scientific discoveries into economically viable projects.

Cultural differences also matter. Americans are generally quicker in embracing new technologies whereas in Europe scientific advancement is often greeted with skepticism -- witness the controversy surrounding genetically modified organisms in Europe which has put the continent years behind in this field of agricultural research. Add the lower European salaries and higher taxes and you have some strong incentives for researchers to leave Europe.

In a world where ideas and scientific knowledge are central to innovation and growth, keeping the best brains in Europe or encouraging them to come back will be key if Europe wants to rejuvenate the sluggish economies in what have traditionally been its most productive states.

from the Associated Press, 2004-Jul-23, by Mark Sherman:

When government failed: Passengers of Flight 93 saved America from even greater horror

America would have been even more devastated that sunny late-summer morning -- the Capitol aflame or the White House destroyed -- if not for a few dozen strangers on an airplane who took the kind of quick, decisive action their government was incapable of on Sept. 11.

Nearly three years on, the passenger revolt against the hijackers on United Flight 93 stands out as a moment of honor and as a success story -- if that term can be used to describe the deaths of 44 people -- among the glaring government failures.

There were, of course, many heroes that day: the police, firefighters and rescue workers who risked and lost their own lives to help others. It does not diminish those feats to point out that emergency workers train for those moments. In some sense, their heroism is expected, part of a shared culture of valor.

The people aboard Flight 93 shared only a common destination, San Francisco, and no expectation of doing anything that morning other than sitting back and enjoying the flight.

Instead, aboard the hijacked Boeing 757, passengers took pre-emptive action that spared the nation even more destruction and death at a pillar of U.S. democracy. Their action also gave Americans conviction that they, too, could fight back against terrorists.

And, as the final report of the Sept. 11 commission makes clear, the passengers' actions displayed a small group's ability to quickly grasp something brand-new, figure out what it meant and dream up and execute a plan at a moment of extreme stress and unimaginable fear.

The report, released Thursday by the 10-member bipartisan panel after a 20-month investigation, cited multiple intelligence failures that contributed to the deadliest terror attack in U.S. history and caught citizens and government officials alike off guard.

Nearly 3,000 people were killed when 19 hijackers flew airliners into New York's Twin Towers, the Pentagon and the Pennsylvania countryside.

The report shows that on at least one other plane, United Flight 175, some passengers correctly surmised what was happening and what had to be done.

Minutes before that plane struck the World Trade Center, passenger Brian David Sweeney told his mother that the passengers were thinking about storming the cockpit to take control of the plane away from the hijackers, the Sept. 11 report says.

During Peter Hanson's haunting last telephone conversation with his father, he said, "I think they intend to go to Chicago or someplace and fly into a building. Don't worry, Dad. If it happens, it'll be very fast -- my God, my God."

Moments later, Flight 175 became the second plane to crash into a World Trade Center tower.

Flight 93 was the last of the four planes to be commandeered by al-Qaida terrorists. In the passengers' final, heartrending telephone conversations with family members, information was flowing both ways. The Twin Towers were already on fire and the passengers learned of that.

In deciding to rush the cockpit, the passengers, thinking quickly, knew or could guess that these hijackers, too, intended to turn the plane into a missile. They also could have reasoned that they were not altering their own fates. They probably were going to die in a fiery crash.

And what did they do first? They took a vote before they took on the hijackers.

Their actions caused the hijackers to give up on their plan to fly to Washington and deliberately slam the plane into a Pennsylvania field.

No one knows how many lives they saved. But at the intended target, confusion reigned.

Hundreds of people were at the White House and Capitol on Sept. 11, trying to make sense of what they were watching on television from New York and the black smoke they could see rising from the Pentagon.

Police ordered the evacuation of the Capitol after the Pentagon was hit, but it was chaotic.

The Air Force has maintained that fighter jets that had belatedly been sent aloft to intercept the hijacked planes would have shot down Flight 93 before it reached Washington.

"We are not so sure," the Sept. 11 commission said. "We are sure that the nation owes a debt to the passengers of United 93. Their actions saved the lives of countless others, and may have saved either the Capitol or the White House from destruction."

Now, this following article is precious. As a friend pointed out to me, the headline suggests CNN is disappointed that criminal mayhem did not precipitate from the great blackout. However, it did produce criminal mayhem - not in free market America, but in the capital of socialist Canada! They do tack this note on (derived from a Reuters wire item) at the very end.

from CNN, 2003-Aug-15:

Outage fails to generate crime spree

As the blackout cloaked parts of the Northeast and Midwest United States and a swath of Canada on Thursday afternoon, many U.S. police forces found that crime did not go up when the power went down.

In New York -- which has reported about 70,000 violent crimes a year since 1998 -- police reported four burglaries in the entire city overnight, and said they had made arrests in all four.

Three deaths overall have been reported that were tied to the outage.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said at least one person died as a result of the blackout, and at least one firefighter was injured. Calls came in for some 3,000 incidents of fire, he said, many from people using candles. Emergency services, he said, responded to 80,000 calls to 911 for help, more than double the average. (Low-tech in unplugged NYC)

In Canada, Ottawa Director of Emergency Services Tony Dimanti said a 15-year-old died from injuries suffered in a fire, and another person died at the scene after being hit by a car during an altercation.

In Manhattan, reputed to have daylight pickpockets and burglars, thousands slept on sidewalks and outside public buildings without fear, just hoping for a breeze.

Mark, a visitor from Chicago, slept in front of the Renaissance hotel in Manhattan and appeared on CNN Friday morning. He said the experience was "definitely interesting" even though the "novelty wore off about 2 in the morning." He said he was "not scared at all. It was pretty calm out here."

But emergency calls skyrocketed. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said emergency services responded to 80,000 911 calls, more than double the average.

"New Yorkers showed that the city that burned in the 1970s when facing similar circumstances [during a blackout] is now a very different place, a city that can conquer adversity instead of succumb to it," he said.

In Cleveland, Ohio, where all electricity should be restored by noon, the mayor said the city had no major crime problems during the blackout. Police did arrest 10 people for trying to break into homes or businesses.

About 100 prisoners were moved from jails to more secure facilities, Mayor Jane Campbell said. About 100 state troopers will monitor traffic in the Cleveland area, because traffic signals could still malfunction, even after power is restored.

Detroit, Michigan, officials reported a similar night of low crime and the police chief reported all personnel were on duty Thursday night.

President Bush on Thursday evening told Americans he appreciated their civility.

"I want to thank the people for their calm response to this emergency situation," he said. "It's been remarkable to watch on TV how resolved the people have been in dealing with this situation. I know their neighbors are thankful for the proper and calm response."

However, in Canada, officials reported a number of thefts and looting.

"There is serious looting going on" in parts of Ottawa, said Ottawa police chief Vince Bevan, adding there have been reports of break-ins, smashed windows and theft in the nation's capital.

Ontario declared a state of emergency after the power outage.

The Associated Press & Reuters contributed to this report.