There are thousands of sites where the imam could locate his monument to interfaith tolerance. But away from Ground Zero, the irony would be lost.

Almost everything about the proposed Ground Zero mosque was cynically brilliant.

Start with the notion of a “Cordoba Initiative.” In the elite modern Western mind, Cordoba has been transmogrified into a mythical Lala Land of interfaith tolerance. To invoke the city is to prove one’s ecumenical credentials. Just ask our president, who, in his June 2009 Cairo speech, fantastically claimed that the Muslim city taught us tolerance while Christians were launching the Inquisition (1478) -- quite a feat two and a half centuries after most of the Muslims of Cordoba had fled, converted, or been cleansed during the city’s fall (1236) to the Christian forces of the Reconquista. But no matter, we got the president’s drift about who was supposedly tolerant and who was not.

#ad#In truth, apart from a brief cultural renaissance, Cordoba, during its five centuries of Islamic rule, was not especially tolerant of nonbelievers. And, like most medieval cities, it was plagued by coups, assassinations, and right-wing clerical intolerance; it was a place where books were both burned and written. But that is not the point of citing Cordoba. Surely Feisal Abdul Rauf knows all that and more: Cordoba is as much a mythical construct of a long-ago multicultural paradise so dear to elite liberals as it is a fantasy rallying cry to Islamists to reclaim the lost Al-Andalus.

So Cordoba is a two-birds-with-one-stone evocation: in the liberal West proof of one’s ecumenical bona fides; in the Middle East proof of one’s Islamist bona fides. It would be easy to find a city emblematic of interfaith outreach other than the Andalusian Cordoba -- from Jerusalem to Ann Arbor -- but then the irony would be lost. 

Then we come to Imam Rauf himself. To his liberal defenders, he is a sort of respectable Deepak Chopra who at respectable places like Aspen mouths pop platitudes of interfaith tolerance -- so much so that our own State Department has employed him, apparently for quite some time, for goodwill gallivanting abroad. 

But to those in the Middle East, he is known equally well for doing what he can, as a Western liberal, to contextualize terrorism, bin Laden, and Islamic extremism within the tired Western postmodern tropes of cultural relativism: “The United States’ policies were an accessory to the crime that happened” on 9/11; “In fact, in the most direct sense, Osama bin Laden is made in the U.S.A.”; “The U.S. and the West must acknowledge the harm they have done to Muslims before terrorism can end”; “The issue of terrorism is a very complex question”; “The Islamic method of waging war is not to kill innocent civilians. But it was Christians in World War II who bombed civilians in Dresden and Hiroshima, neither of which were military targets” -- blah, blah, blah, like all the thinkery that one hears in the faculty lounge.

#page#If the now mysteriously absent Mr. Rauf were not cynical, he simply could do the Oprah/Katie Couric circuit and convince the public that all of the above is taken out of context and that the implications are belied by his longstanding efforts at interfaith outreach. But then he tried that once, on 60 Minutes, with disastrous consequences; and, anyway, the irony of speaking obliquely to two audiences would surely be imperiled. 

#ad#Now we are fighting over how far the perimeter of Ground Zero extends, and where “hallowed” or “sacred” ground begins and ends. But again, the entire notion of a “Ground Zero mosque” was the brainchild of Imam Rauf himself. He grasped at once the brilliant cynicism involved: Here at home well-meaning liberals would applaud the audacity of hope in positioning a mosque near the 9/11 site in order to “commemorate” the “tragedy,” as a token of tolerance where all could come together and thus avoid another misunderstanding of the sort that sent two airliners crashing into two skyscrapers. 

Abroad, the message would, of course, be interpreted quite differently: To the radical Islamists, a mosque rising near Ground Zero well before a new World Trade Center is constructed is a message of Islamic triumphalism -- in the long tradition of minarets on the conquered Santa Sophia in Istanbul, the eighth-century Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem rising on the site of the destroyed Jewish Second Temple, and the great mosque at Cordoba retrofitted from the gutted Christian Church of St. Vincent. Again, there are thousands of sites in New York where another mosque could be built; but without the Ground Zero resonance, the irony would be lost. 

Then we come to the funding of the supposed $100 million, 13-story Islamic center (“mosque” has become a right-wing defamation for a complex devoted to contemplation and meditation). Mr. Rauf is not engaged in a nationwide fundraising drive of the sort Americans are used to for preserving iconic ships or refurbishing the Statue of Liberty. Instead, he is apparently counting on petrodollars from the Middle East. Given the authoritarian, and religiously intolerant, regimes in most of the Gulf sheikdoms, one can assume that donations will not be predicated on Imam Rauf’s supposed efforts at an Islamic Reformation. Otherwise, what better place to start than Saudi Arabia?  

But all that might be unfair second-guessing and right-wing demagoguing. After all, Mr. Rauf can simply embrace transparency, and galvanize Americans to donate to his interfaith center. (Governor Paterson has already offered the help of the New York taxpayer.) Do that, and Gulf money becomes redundant.  

Then there is the image of America. Note that the world is not talking about banning the burqa in France, or shutting down a mosque in Germany. Much less are we familiar with the Russians leveling Muslim Grozny or the Chinese rounding up and jailing or shooting Muslims. And, of course, few care that the Saudis, whether the public or the government, would jail a Christian who built a church in Riyadh, or kill a nonbeliever who tried to enter Mecca. 

#page#No, Imam Rauf wanted to show the world that the most religiously tolerant country in the world was, in fact, hypocritically intolerant. It is hard to do that in an anything-goes America, where Piss Christ art and shoot-Bush Knopf novels are considered hip creative expressions. But build a mosque a stone’s throw away from Ground Zero? Now that was a brilliant move, one that would draw a reaction from everyone from Glenn Beck to the New York labor unions. All Imam Rauf had to do was propose the mosque site, scram out of the country for a month, and let the liberal elite and the media lecture the world on how nativist, xenophobic, and intolerant the most tolerant nation in the world really was -- sort of like lighting a firecracker, tossing it into a crowd from a moving car, speeding away, and watching the ensuing human fireworks in the rear-view mirror. 

#ad#Finally, we come to the greatest irony of all, the politically suicidal entry of President Obama into the fray. After himself invoking Cordoba for just the sort of therapeutic mythmaking that Imam Rauf is far better at, how could the president now stay out? Rauf knew that he had a legal right to build the mosque, that the cultural elite would rally to his defense, that the right wing would go ballistic, and that his “outreach” would be deeply offensive to the vast majority of Americans of all faiths. 

In other words, Rauf is just the sort of Venus’s flytrap that would lure in the unthinking multicultural, multi-everything president, eager to score political points with his omnipresent tolerance, and apparently having learned nothing from his disastrous beer summit and his declaration that clinging Arizonans would arrest Mom and Pop and the kids as they went out for ice cream. Obama could not resist weighing in, and once more he ended up looking the law-professor fool, who in sonorous tones reminds Americans, on the one hand, of the banal (it is perfectly legal to build a mosque near Ground Zero), while, on the other, he plays the Chicago legislator who voted present whenever he could (to a Muslim audience, he kinda, sorta wanted it built; to an American audience the next day, he kinda, sorta really didn’t). 

Imam Rauf is a rascal, but he is at least a brilliantly cynical one. 

-- NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the editor of Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome, and the author of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.

Victor Davis Hanson

With his slap in the face to 9/11 victims, Obama hits a new low.

When the members of Manhattan’s Community Board 1 voted 29–1 in favor of the “Ground Zero Mosque,” some members of the board urged that the religious references in the proposal be deleted because they were “uncomfortable” with such language -- so eager were they to avoid any appearance of infringing on the First Amendment.

Early last week, after months of polarizing debate, New York governor David Paterson sought to placate both sides by offering to give the organizers state-owned property located some distance from Ground Zero (while being sure to mention that he had no problem with the originally planned location). Late last week, President Obama weighed in by defending on First Amendment grounds the group’s right to build the mosque in the name of religious tolerance.

#ad#But the issue here is not freedom of religion; the issue is the obligation to show appreciation for, and sensitivity to, the families and greater community that bore the full brunt of one of the worst attacks ever on U.S. soil. Muslim fanatics murdered thousands of innocent Americans on 9/11 just two blocks from the site of the proposed mosque.

No moderate, the leader of the Ground Zero mosque refuses to recognize Hamas as a terrorist organization. He has even called the United States an accessory to the massacre in Lower Manhattan. In what can only be labeled as surreal, imam Feisal Abdul Rauf claims to be a “bridge builder.” All he has done is incite fury and pour rock salt onto raw wounds.

The failure of local and state officials, as well as the president of the United States, to stand up for New Yorkers -- and by extension all Americans who live with reminders of 9/11 every day -- betrays cowardice and weakness. Many of Obama’s critics have dryly intoned that he apologizes to everyone except the people who elected him.

The president’s highly criticized tin ear on economic and domestic issues is particularly evident in the mosque debate. By following his instinct to lecture rather than listen, he has managed to insult even some of his supporters. New York Daily News columnist Mike Lupica writes:

This debate isn’t about [political] correctness. Or freedom of religion. Or even the idea that if this mosque doesn’t get built, it will mean we are now deciding about religious freedom in this country one neighborhood at a time. It is about common sense.

More than that, it is about the constituency of Sept. 11.

All too often on any given issue, Mr. Obama either insults or completely ignores a key constituency that is adversely affected by his policies or his statements, such as small businesses on health care. By supporting this mosque, President Obama is taking a backhand to the collective faces of 9/11 families and other Americans as well.

If a terrorist attack had occurred on the same scale in my home state of Florida, if elected governor, I would do anything and everything in my power to prevent a project like this from moving forward near the site, because it is simply indefensible. The very notion of building what will be seen by radical Muslims as a victory monument to Mohammed Atta and the other 18 terrorists and their despicable act on 9/11 is unthinkable.

Muslims can, and do, worship freely in the United States -- a freedom not extended to Jews, Christians, and people of other faiths in many Muslim countries. For politicians to act as if the First Amendment enjoins them to support this project is a pathetic cop-out.

While U.S. forces risk their lives and shed their blood in battling to defeat jihadists halfway around the world, their commander-in-chief cannot even make a clear stand for decency at Ground Zero. It is the shameful act of a cowardly politician.

-- Rick Scott is a candidate for governor of Florida.

Rick Scott

Fannie and Freddie cost us $150 billion plus, but <i>next time</i> the government will get it right . . .

‘I feel like Marc Antony presiding over Caesar’s funeral,” said Lewis Ranieri. The financier, a legend on Wall Street for practically inventing mortgage securitization, was made even more famous in Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker. Now he was addressing a room full of housing-industry officials at the Treasury Department. The subject of the conference? The future of housing finance, broadly speaking, in a post‒Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac world.

Antony came to bury Caesar, not to praise him, but the GSEs (government-sponsored enterprises), as Fannie and Freddie are known, aren’t dead yet. They are on taxpayer-financed life support, with an unlimited line of credit at the Treasury. The conference had the feel of “an elegant funeral for Fannie and Freddie,” a phrase that Rep. Barney Frank (D., Mass.) originated and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner employed (so are they all honorable men). What is important, Geithner said, is that reform be about more than just designing a funeral: “It requires a broader reassessment of how much support the government should provide for housing finance.”

#ad#The consensus at the conference? The government should provide quite a lot of support for housing finance. The panels were stacked with people who shared a broad conception of the government’s role in the housing market, from industry players who enjoy making profits backed by government guarantees to “affordable housing” advocates who fear that government subsidies for high-risk lending might disappear in the wake of the crisis.

At the same time, all the panelists were mindful not to sound too supportive of the GSEs, which have cost taxpayers $150 billion and counting. Even Ranieri -- who analogized himself to the man who stealthily turned the crowd against the fallen tyrant’s assassins -- made sure to stress that Fannie and Freddie “permitted what they were meant to prevent.”

Geithner took an even tougher-sounding line: “We will not support returning Fannie and Freddie to the role they played before conservatorship, where they fought to take market share from private competitors while enjoying the privilege of government support.” And yet: “I believe there is a strong case to be made for a carefully designed guarantee in a reformed system, with the objective of providing stability in access to mortgages, even in future downturns.”

This phrase “carefully designed” popped up again and again throughout the conference, as one speaker after another denounced Fannie and Freddie in the strongest terms, only to follow this condemnation with a solemn warning that the government must not let the GSEs’ irresponsible behavior give a bad name to the service they were designed to provide, namely, a subsidy for moderate-to-low-income homebuyers made possible by the implicit government backing the GSEs enjoyed. Speaker after speaker stressed that some more “carefully designed” government program must take the place of the GSEs in providing this subsidy -- as if the government planners behind Fannie and Freddie had set out to create a sloppily designed mortgage subsidy.

#page#Only a few participants in the conference had the temerity to note that the design flaw is intrinsic to the subsidy. AEI’s Alex Pollock was chosen to be the token conservative on a panel of industry special-pleaders such as PIMCO’s Bill Gross and liberal activists such as the Urban League’s Marc Morial. Pollock, to his credit, gave as good as he got. Pollock’s three-step plan for the future of housing finance? 1) Counter-cyclical lending standards, which would actually work to tighten credit risks as speculative bubbles started to form. 2) The reprivatization of mortgage securitization. Contrary to the claims of Bill Gross, the mortgage-bond trader who claimed that private investors would not step in to replace the GSEs in the secondary mortgage market, Pollock noted that the private sector was heavily involved in this market before the financial crisis and would probably return if there was money to be made. That means 3) No more GSEs.

Pollock found few takers for his plan, which was odd considering how many conference participants were eager to declare the GSEs already dead. Later, during one of the breakout sessions, it became clear that, while these specific GSEs are dead, the idea of government-guaranteed mortgage lending is going to be with us for a long time. Numerous participants from the private sector and academia voiced support for some sort of combined mega-GSE that would concentrate the government’s mortgage activities into one entity. The classic Washington game of reshuffling the bureaucracies has not worn out its usefulness as a solution for keeping useless agencies alive.

#ad#Why can’t Fannie and Freddie be put out of our misery? The answer lies in the horror with which conference participants reacted to the idea of a private secondary market of the kind Pollack suggested. Private investors would get involved in such a market only if lending standards were much tighter than they were during the boom -- and the problem is that the community advocates already think standards have gotten too tight in the wake of the bust. Several participants called the idea of robust down payments “extremely disturbing.” We have to find the right trade-off, they said, between tightening lending standards and making sure that home ownership is affordable, and if the private sector is unwilling to make cheap credit available to poor credit risks -- well, in their view, that’s government’s job. All the Obama-administration officials in the room nodded solemnly in agreement.

The GSEs are dead. Long live the GSEs!

-- Stephen Spruiell is an NRO staff reporter.

Stephen Spruiell

Tea partiers should not form their own political party.

It has taken a while for the “experts” to acknowledge that the tea-party movement will be a major force in the upcoming election cycle. But they’re wrong to compare it with other short-term partisan swings of the political pendulum. Rather, the movement is the beginning of a long swing back toward constitutionally limited government. It is to limited government what the progressive movement has been to big government -- and we tea partiers will more rapidly succeed if we learn the right lessons from the progressives.

To shortsighted observers, the tea-party movement is nothing more than a minor backlash to the unpopular initiatives of the Obama White House. They point to the fact that Americans have a well-established tendency to shy away from the party in power and gravitate toward the ideas of the minority party.

#ad#These observers take too short a view. The tea parties rose not merely in response to the policies of the Obama administration, but also in response to the century-long move toward big government that has been orchestrated and perpetrated by progressives. And, like the progressives of the last 100 years, we tea partiers will continue to build off of our momentum until every election in every election cycle features a candidate that shares our ideals.

Today, the Democratic party is overrun by far-left progressives such as Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank. That wasn’t always the case. Understanding how progressives transformed the Democratic party and its agenda can help tea partiers as they attempt to bridge the gap between short-term outrage and true political longevity.

HOW PROGRESSIVISM TOOK ROOT
American progressives can trace their roots back to the late 1800s. Early progressives argued that government should make life “fair” and “equal” by mandating higher wages and shorter hours for workers, by offering welfare, and by curing societal ills through initiatives such as alcohol prohibition. They called for centralized, top-down solutions to the problems of the day. They saw the force of government as a means by which to require everyone in society to behave as they deemed desirable. When campaigning, however, progressives used a bottom-up, grassroots approach in local elections. They attracted regular people and convinced them to donate time and money to their cause.

Much like the tea-party movement of today, the progressive movement of the 1910s was a force to be reckoned with. As they rose to prominence, however, progressives made one critical mistake that tea partiers must avoid. Instead of taking over one of the two major parties from within, they formed a new party and ran their own candidates. In 1912, the Progressive party was formed. Ex-president Theodore Roosevelt tried to reclaim his former position on the party’s ticket -- but even though he was so popular he ended up on Mt. Rushmore, and even though the party had years of local-campaign experience, Roosevelt won only eight electoral votes. Woodrow Wilson won 435. Over the next decade, Progressives were able to get only one governor, one U.S. senator, and 13 House members elected. It’s safe to say that the new third party fell far short of expectations.

Although the Progressive party disbanded, its ideas remained. About a decade after the party’s collapse (subsequent parties used the same name but were even less successful), progressive leader Saul Alinsky began organizing like-minded individuals and training them to be more effective. Alinsky gained fame as a role model for the style of community organizing President Obama famously engaged in. Alinsky wanted to pressure policy makers into supporting the progressive agenda. Instead of attempting to form a new political party -- a venture that had already proved to be ineffective -- Alinsky decided that it would be best to take over an existing political structure from within. That structure was the Democratic party.

#page#It was inevitable that Alinsky should have chosen the Democrats. Progressives, after all, had found their first true champion in Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His base helped him pass the New Deal and select Supreme Court justices who argued for a “living constitution” that evolved with the times. And electoral and legislative victories continued for big-government advocates as progressives mobilized and campaigned for the reelection of Democratic president Lyndon Johnson (who’d taken office following the assassination of John F. Kennedy). His plan to redistribute wealth through his “Great Society” was a cornerstone of the progressive agenda. With the New Deal and the Great Society, progressives succeeded in drastically expanding the size and scope of the federal government.

“Setbacks” such as the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the Republican Revolution of 1994 did not stop progressives. They quietly continued to work their way into every corner of the Democratic party. In the middle of Reagan’s presidency, for example, Democratic activist Ellen Malcolm formed the political action committee EMILY’s List. EMILY’s List describes itself as “a community of progressive Americans” who work to elect women who share their philosophy. Malcolm began the PAC with a group of 24 women in the basement of her home. The list immediately started to produce money, which was sent to candidates the women liked. A year later, EMILY’s List candidate Barbara Mikulski of Maryland became the first female Democrat elected to the U.S. Senate.

#ad#In 1991, almost a century after the progressive movement began, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a self-described socialist, formed the Congressional Progressive Caucus along with five other House Democrats. One year later, EMILY’s List’s membership grew by more than 600 percent, and the group raised $10.2 million. Four more Democratic women were elected to the Senate along with 20 women to the House. Many of them joined the Progressive Caucus.

With the success of EMILY’s List came the founding of other progressive grassroots groups. One such group, MoveOn.org, became an early pioneer in effective online activism. By the 2004 election it had grown to almost 700,000 donating members who raised a total of $32 million to use against Republican candidates. Two years later, in the 2006 elections, progressive groups worked together through the Democratic party to take back control of Congress from the Republicans.

In a 2007 presidential debate, now–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton boldly proclaimed, “I consider myself a proud, modern, American progressive, and I think that’s the kind of philosophy and practice that we need to bring back to American politics.” She isn’t the only one. EMILY’s List–sponsored representative Nancy Pelosi is currently the speaker of the House. And in 2008, MoveOn.org endorsed and campaigned for a man it saw as a champion of progressive thought, Barack Obama.

Today, the largest caucus within the Democratic party is the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which has 83 members. Of the 20 standing committees in the United States House of Representatives, CPC members chair ten. These members include Rep. Barney Frank (Mass., House Financial Services Committee), Rep. George Miller (Calif., House Education and Labor Committee), Rep. Henry Waxman (Calif., House Energy and Commerce Committee), Rep. John Conyers (Mich., House Judiciary Committee), Rep. Charlie Rangel (N.Y., House Ways and Means Committee), and Rep. Louise Slaughter (N.Y., House Rules Committee).

In every branch of modern American government, progressives have a big say.

#page#LESSONS TO LEARN

Over the past 100 years, progressives have worked tirelessly to shape the Democratic party in their own image. Once inside, they used their influence to increase the size of the federal government. Now, after idly watching for decades, fiscally responsible Americans are finally standing up and saying no more. But, to ensure that our movement is sustainable, tea partiers must be willing to learn from the lessons of the past. We must understand what has worked, what has failed, and why. For instance, some have suggested that we follow in the footsteps of the early progressives by forming our own national party -- the Tea Party party -- that runs its own candidates and has its own platform.

On the surface, this option is attractive. In reality, however, history has shown that creating a third party is a surefire way to slip into irrelevancy. Typically, the only third-party candidates that garner national recognition are eccentric billionaires on expensive ego trips. See Ross Perot. In today’s dollars, he spent almost $100 million of his own wealth on his campaign, but he ultimately received zero electoral-college votes in his 1992 bid for the presidency.

#ad#It is within -- not outside of -- the two parties that would-be third-party candidates are able to make the biggest difference. Dennis Kucinich is perhaps the best-known “progressive” in Congress, but he was not elected on the Progressive-party ticket. He’s a Democrat. And Ron Paul is the most successful libertarian in Congress, but he’s always been elected to public office as a Republican. When he ran for president on the Libertarian-party ticket, he lost.

That is why it is imperative that tea partiers bypass the misstep of the young progressive movement. Attempting to form a new party would be an enormous waste of time, energy, and resources. Instead, we must begin our own takeover of an existing political structure. Our vessel is the Republican party. And while it took progressives nearly a century to form their own congressional caucus, it has taken tea partiers little over a year. Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R., Minn.) has already formed the Congressional Tea Party Caucus, and congressmen are lining up to join. That is because the commonsense values that define the tea-party movement -- such as the belief that government should not spend money it does not have -- puts us in the broad middle of American politics. Republicans, if they covet the votes of our broad constituency, need to gravitate toward our values and our issues to get elected. Those who are serious about working with us will sign the “Contract from America” -- a pledge to advocate individual liberty, limited government, and economic freedom. They will become the new majority in the Republican party. It is our responsibility both to get them elected and to hold their feet to the fire once they’re in office.

Progressives already have their political party; the time has come for tea partiers to take theirs.

-- Matt Kibbe is president of the grassroots organization FreedomWorks. This article draws from the book Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto, which Mr. Kibbe wrote with Dick Armey.

Matt Kibbe

It’s not often that we have occasion to speak favorably of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, the federal appellate court that has earned a reputation for aggressive left-wing lawlessness. So let’s take note that on Monday a Ninth Circuit panel -- with two of its three members being Clinton-appointed liberals, no less -- had the modicum of good sense needed to put an abrupt end to the closing act of Judge Vaughn Walker’s anti–Proposition 8 farce.

It’s amazing enough that Judge Walker issued his wild ruling two weeks ago, striking down the California electorate’s restoration of traditional marriage. That ruling, which even a prominent supporter of same-sex marriage has labeled “radical,” was unhinged from reality. Among other things: Judge Walker denied that “gender” -- the opposite sexes of spouses -- has been an intrinsic characteristic of traditional marriage. He contended that the neutral or beneficial effects of same-sex marriage on the institution of marriage were “beyond debate.” He simply ignored compelling evidence of marriage’s procreative purpose. And he concluded that there was no rational basis for traditional marriage -- so that anyone who opposes same-sex marriage is an irrational bigot.

But Walker wasn’t content to issue his final ruling. He also tried to alter the status quo during the appeals process by implementing his ruling right away. The supporters of Proposition 8 requested that Walker block his judgment from taking effect while they pursued their appellate remedies, but Walker denied their request. The obvious effect, and apparent purpose, of his denial would have been to usher in the same-sex marriage revolution in California even before the Ninth Circuit had an opportunity to review his badly flawed reasoning.

In other words, it’s not simply that Walker was overriding the votes of the more than 7 million Californians who voted for Proposition 8. He also tried to make himself essentially a one-man federal judiciary by preventing meaningful review of his ruling by the Ninth Circuit and the Supreme Court.

Monday’s order by the Ninth Circuit operates to maintain the status quo while the court reviews Walker’s ruling. It also means that it is virtually certain that any Ninth Circuit ruling striking down Proposition 8 would also be blocked while the Supreme Court reviews that ruling. It’s very unlikely that the Supreme Court would issue a ruling in this case before June 2012 at the earliest, so don’t expect Walker’s folly to lead to same-sex marriages in California in the meantime.

Remarkably, the Ninth Circuit order marks the third time in less than a year that a reviewing court -- the Supreme Court once, the Ninth Circuit twice -- has rejected Walker’s excesses in this very case. We won’t venture a prediction here whether the Supreme Court will ultimately misinterpret the Constitution and invent a right to same-sex marriage. But under the orderly appellate review that the Ninth Circuit order allows, we hope very much that Walker endures a fourth and final reversal.

The Editors

Republicans don't support privatizing the program, but they have few other options.

So, President Obama believes that Republican leaders are “pushing to make privatizing Social Security a key part of their legislative agenda if they win a majority in Congress this fall.”

To which one responds, “If only!”

#ad#There is no doubt that Social Security desperately needs reform. Social Security is already running a temporary deficit, and that deficit will turn permanent in just five years. In theory, the Social Security Trust Fund will pay benefits until 2037. That’s not much comfort to today’s 35-year-olds, who will face a 27 percent cut in benefits unless the program is reformed before they retire. But even that figure is misleading, because the trust fund contains no actual assets. The government bonds it holds are simply IOUs, a measure of how much money the government owes the system. It says nothing about where the government will get the $2.6 trillion to pay off those IOUs.

Even if Congress can find a way to redeem the bonds, the trust-fund surplus will be completely exhausted by 2037. At that point, Social Security will have to rely solely on revenue from the payroll tax -- and that won’t be sufficient to pay all the promised benefits. Overall, the amount the system has promised beyond what it can actually pay now totals $18.7 trillion.

Moreover, Social Security taxes are already so high, relative to benefits, that Social Security has simply become a bad deal for younger workers, providing a below-market rate of return. In fact, many young workers will end up paying more in taxes than they receive in benefits. And most important, workers have no ownership of their benefits. This means that they are left totally dependent on the goodwill of 535 politicians to determine what they’ll receive in retirement.

Benefits are not inheritable, and the program is a barrier to wealth accumulation. Lower-income families, African-Americans, and working women suffer disproportionately.

But Republican leaders, battered by the failure of President Bush’s reform initiative and years of Democratic demagoguery, show no signs of venturing back into this issue. In fact, the only senior Republican willing to support personal accounts these days appears to be Rep. Paul Ryan, who has included in his “roadmap” a plan to allow younger workers the option of investing slightly less than half of their Social Security taxes. However, it is telling that Ryan’s roadmap has just 13 co-sponsors, none of whom are among the Republican leadership.

Given their large lead in current polls, it is perhaps understandable that Republicans don’t want to risk offending voters, particularly seniors, by wading back into the Social Security thicket. But they are making a mistake.

From a purely political standpoint, if Republicans think that remaining silent on the issue will protect them from Democratic attacks, they are the stupid party indeed. The president’s comments should serve clear notice that Democrats are not going to let a simple thing like Republicans’ actual position to get in the way of a good political weapon. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has run television ads attacking his opponent, Sharron Angle, for wanting “to wipe the program out,” even though she’s made clear she wants to keep it. In Kentucky, Republican senatorial candidate Rand Paul is being criticized for remarks he made in favor of Social Security privatization -- in 1998. There isn’t any escape.

#page#Even worse, as a matter of policy, by taking personal accounts off the table, Republicans may be boxing themselves into a very bad corner. There are, after all, only three options for Social Security reform: raise taxes, cut benefits, or switch to personal accounts. While benefit cuts are defensible economically, they are not likely to prove any more politically popular than personal accounts, probably less so. Democrats are already organizing to fight any reductions. And, if Republican opposition to the Medicare cuts under Obamacare is any indication, no one should expect an overabundance of courage in fighting to cut Social Security benefits.

Therefore, if Republicans are not willing to embrace personal accounts, they will be left with#...#tax hikes, which has been the Democrats’ goal all along.

#ad#One reason the Democrats have been so successful in expanding the government year after year is that they have the courage of their convictions. They lose on an issue time after time, but they keep coming back until they win. Take national health care: After Hillarycare went down to defeat in 1993, the Left didn’t give up. And today we have Obamacare. Republicans lost on Social Security and curled up into a fetal position, begging for mercy.

Factcheck.org rates the president’s statement that Republicans want to privatize Social Security as “mostly false.” Before too long, we may come to wish that this time he had been telling the truth.

-- Michael Tanner is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of Leviathan on the Right: How Big-Government Conservatism Brought Down the Republican Revolution.

Michael Tanner

This whole debate could have been avoided with a few phone calls.

The Ground Zero mosque controversy is one of the stupidest debates of our time. I don’t mean the substance of the debate (though there’s no shortage of stupidity on that front either). I mean that we are having it at all.

The CIA usually defends its existence by pointing out that we never hear about its successes, only its failures. The bombs that don’t go off don’t make headlines. Politics works the same way. Good politicians instinctively see down the road and around the corner. Great politicians do this not just with political headaches but with weighty affairs as well. We call such foresight statesmanship.

#ad#With the Ground Zero mosque, we have gotten the exact opposite. The supposedly pragmatic political wise men have been blinded by ideology or incompetence and have failed to see what was so obviously around the corner. A big, honking Islamic center built to capitalize on 9/11, in a building that was damaged on 9/11? What could go wrong?

It’s as if they’ve wanted to turn a dumb idea into an emotional and unwinnable national controversy.

Let’s start with the incandescent idiocy of New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. If Bloomberg had a scintilla of foresight, he would have prevented anyone from ever hearing the words “Ground Zero” and “mosque” in the same sentence.

Bloomberg is not only the mayor. He’s also a billionaire with massive sway in the city’s media, finance, and cultural institutions. Moreover, the Big Apple is a Hieronymus Bosch hellscape for landlords and developers. Rent control, historic preservation, zoning, environmental impact, community protests, union delays -- not to mention plain old red tape and corruption -- offer enough tools to stop any project before it starts. (Heck, Ground Zero is still a gaping hole, and everyone has wanted that land to be developed, fast.)

The notion that Bloomberg couldn’t have quietly stopped this in New York is like saying Satan is powerless to do anything about the heat in Hades. He could have kept the molehill from becoming a mountain with an afternoon’s worth of phone calls. The center would be built, just not so close to Ground Zero; no big deal.

But instead of quietly extinguishing a controversy, Bloomberg said it was as important a “test of the separation of church and state as we may see in our lifetime.”

He also insists that opponents should be “ashamed” of their bigotry, even though he expects “special sensitivity” from the mosque’s backers. Apparently, it’s only shameful to think Ground Zero requires “special sensitivity” if you oppose the mosque. Bloomberg apparently needs a tutor to pass his own church-state test.

Which brings us to President Obama (who himself could have quietly intervened months ago) and to what may be his most embarrassing blunder yet. At a White House dinner with Muslim leaders Friday night, Obama offered what every major journalistic outfit in the country took to be unqualified support for building the mosque. Indeed, Obama aides preened over his moral courage, telling the New York Times that there was no doubt which side he would take.

“He felt he had a responsibility to speak,” said David Axelrod, as if he were drafting the inscription on Obama’s Profiles in Courage Award. But by Saturday morning, Obama tried to weasel out of it with the sort of lawyerly parsing everybody despises. Speaking to reporters in Florida, Obama claimed he had no position on the “wisdom” of the project, and anyone who mistook his academic comments about building a mosque in Lower Manhattan for an endorsement misunderstood him.

Well, if his real intent was to remain agnostic, he should fire his speechwriter immediately.

Of course that wasn’t his intent. He wanted to seem heroically principled. But when he was hit with an entirely foreseeable backlash (according to one poll, nearly 70 percent of Americans oppose the mosque), he once again led with his glass jaw and, in effect, told everybody they were too dimwitted to grasp the brilliant nuance of his remarks.

This was the opposite of statesmanship. By elevating an already stupid idea and a poisonous debate, he forced everyone to take a side on a polarizing issue (including vulnerable Democrats like Nevada senator Harry Reid, who, late Monday, came out against the mosque), while undermining his own credibility, not to mention America’s reputation around the world.

And it all could have been avoided with some foresight and a few phone calls.

— Jonah Goldberg is an editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. © 2010 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Jonah Goldberg

A former SEIU lawyer is now ruling on SEIU-related cases.

Everything you need to know about President Obama’s fraudulent ethics pledge can be summed up in four words: SEIU lawyer Craig Becker.

Becker is the left-wing lawyer Obama sneakily installed on the National Labor Relations Board. The U.S. Senate declined to confirm Becker’s nomination on a 52‒33 cloture vote in February. Obama responded by flipping senators the bird and ramming through his recess appointment during the congressional spring break. (The New York Times approvingly dubbed it a “muscular show of his executive authority.” When that authority was exercised by GOP president George W. Bush, of course, the Times editorial board called it a “constitutional gimmick.”)

Despite the White House’s much-heralded policy of binding every executive appointee to strict conflict-of-interest guidelines, a defiant Becker now remains free to rule on cases involving his former Big Labor bosses. And the most ethical administration in U.S. history isn’t doing a thing to stop him.

#ad#While serving as an associate general counsel for both the SEIU and the AFL-CIO in 2009, Becker generously lent his legal expertise to the White House. He served as an Obama transition-team member for labor issues and helped draft several union-backed executive orders.

These new rules essentially blackball non-union contractors targeted by labor organizers (and blacklist non-union employees in the private sector) from working on taxpayer-funded projects. Another union-protectionist measure immediately adopted by Obama requires that when a government service contract runs out -- and there’s a new contract to perform the same services at the same location -- the new contractor must retain the old workers. Such regulatory favoritism limits freedom in the workplace and raises the cost of doing business. This suits Becker and his White House champions (who reaped $60 million in SEIU campaign donations and support in 2008) just fine.

Becker’s anti-business views date back to his days as a UCLA professor, when he argued that unions should not be subject to the same rules of democracy and fair elections as everyone else. He favors radical rewriting of union-organizing rules and elimination of the secret-ballot process by administrative fiat.

#page#It’s no surprise that Becker now refuses to hold himself accountable for the ethics pledge he himself signed in April. As the past two years have taught us, Team Obama’s operational slogan is: Rules are for fools. The contractual ethics commitment states: “I will not for a period of two years from the date of my appointment participate in any particular matter involving specific parties that is directly and substantially related to my former employer or former clients, including regulations and contracts.” Yet Becker has participated in numerous NLRB cases involving the SEIU and its affiliates -- and is parsing the definition of “former employer” by arguing that local SEIU chapters are “separate and distinct legal entities” that don’t fall under the ethics rules.

#ad#The National Right to Work Foundation, which has fought both national and local SEIU officials in court on behalf of rank-and-file workers’ rights, eviscerates Becker’s lawyerly blather. The SEIU’s own constitution considers local affiliates “constituent subordinate bodies” of the national union, the foundation notes. “Moreover, in 2009 over 85 percent of the SEIU’s receipts came from a per capita tax on the locals’ membership dues and fees. The national union even has the power to assume control over its locals if they do not conform to International policies.”

In any case, Becker has also acknowledged playing a key role in providing “advice and counsel” to the powerful SEIU affiliate in Illinois “relating to proposed executive orders and proposed legislation giving homecare workers a right to organize and engage in collective bargaining under state law.” Championed by Big Labor water-carrier and disgraced former Democratic governor Rod Blagojevich and current SEIU-endorsed Democratic governor Pat Quinn, such measures effectively bust into private homes for the Purple Shirts of the SEIU and other union competitors hungry for new dues-paying members.

Now Becker is in the catbird seat -- adjudicating challenges to the
power-grab rules he helped author.

Little did America know that when candidate Obama promised the SEIU he would “open up the doors of government” to them, he’d give them the keys to our living rooms, too.

— Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies (Regnery, 2010). © 2010 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Michelle Malkin

This administration has used many different ploys to circumvent the people’s right to debate their nation’s laws.

‘We the people” are the central concern of the Constitution, as well as its opening words, since it is a Constitution for a self-governing nation. But “we the people” are treated as an obstacle to circumvent by the current administration in Washington.

One way of circumventing the people is to rush legislation through Congress so fast that no one knows what is buried in it. Did you know that the so-called health-care-reform bill contained a provision creating a tax on people who buy and sell gold coins?

You might debate whether that tax is a good or a bad idea. But the whole point of burying it in legislation about medical insurance is to make sure “we the people” don’t even know about it, much less have a chance to debate it, before it becomes law.

#ad#Did you know that the huge financial-reform bill that has been similarly rushed through Congress, too fast for anyone to read it, has a provision about “inclusion” of women and minorities? Pretty words like “inclusion” mean ugly realities like quotas. But that too is not something that “we the people” are to be allowed to debate, because it too was sneaked through.

Not since the Norman conquerors of England published their laws in French, for an English-speaking nation, centuries ago, has there been such contempt for the people’s right to know what laws are being imposed on them.

Yet another ploy is to pass laws worded in vague generalities, leaving it up to the federal bureaucracies to issue specific regulations based on those laws. “We the people” don’t vote for bureaucrats. And, since it takes time for all the bureaucratic rules to be formulated and then put into practice, we won’t know what either the rules or their effects are prior to this fall’s elections when we will vote for (or against) those who passed these clever laws.

The biggest circumvention of “we the people” was of course the so-called “health-care reform” bill. This bill was passed with the proviso that it would not really take effect until after the 2012 presidential election. Between now and then, the Obama administration can tell us in glowing words how wonderful this bill is, what good things it will do for us, and how it has rescued us from the evil insurance companies, among its many other glories.

But we won’t really know what the actual effects of this bill are until after the next presidential election -- which is to say, after it is too late. Quite simply, we are being played for fools.

Much has been made of the fact that families making less than $250,000 a year will not see their taxes raised. Of course they won’t see it, because what they see could affect how they vote.

But when huge tax increases are put on electric utility companies, the public will see their electricity bills go up. When huge taxes are put on other businesses as well, they will see the prices of the things those businesses sell go up.

If you are not in that “rich” category, you will not see your own taxes go up. But you will be paying someone else’s higher taxes, unless of course you can do without electricity and other products of heavily taxed businesses. If you don’t see this, so much the better for the Obama administration politically.

This country has been changed in a more profound way by corrupting its fundamental values. The Obama administration has begun bribing people with the promise of getting their medical care and other benefits paid for by other people, so long as those other people can be called “the rich.” Incidentally, most of those who are called “the rich” are nowhere close to being rich.

A couple making $125,000 a year each is not rich, even though together they reach that magic $250,000 income level. In most cases, they haven’t been making $125,000 a year all their working lives. Far more often, they have reached this level after decades of working their way up from lower incomes -- and now the government steps in to grab the reward they have earned over the years.

There was a time when most Americans would have resented the suggestion that they wanted someone else to pay their bills. But now, envy and resentment have been cultivated to the point where even people who contribute nothing to society feel that they have a right to a “fair share” of what others have produced.

The most dangerous corruption is a corruption of a nation’s soul. That is what this administration is doing.

— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. © 2010 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Thomas Sowell

The West villifies Israel because it has undergone a paradigm shift away from the nation-state.

As someone who deeply appreciates what Western civilization, for all its faults, has achieved, I puzzle over the hostility many Westerners harbor toward their own way of life. If democracy, free markets, and the rule of law have created an unprecedented stability, affluence, and decency, how come so many beneficiaries fail to see this?

Why, for example, does the United States, which has done so much for human welfare, inspire such hostility? And tiny Israel, the symbol of rejuvenation for a perpetually oppressed people -- why does it engender such passionate hatred that otherwise decent people desire to eliminate this state?

Yoram Hazony of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem offers an explanation for this antagonism in a profound and implication-rich essay, “Israel Through European Eyes.”

#ad#He begins with the notion of “paradigm shift” developed by Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 study, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” This influential concept holds that scientists see their subject from within a “paradigm,” a specific intellectual framework that underpins their understanding of reality. Facts that do not fit the paradigm are overlooked or dismissed. Kuhn reviews the history of science and shows how, in a series of scientific revolutions, paradigms shifted, as from Aristotelian to Newtonian to Einsteinian physics.

Paradigms also frame politics,and Hazony applies this theory to Israel’s delegitimization in the West. Israel’s standing has deteriorated for decades, he argues, “not because of this or that set of facts, but because the paradigm through which educated Westerners are looking at Israel has shifted.” Responding to the vilification of Israel by offering corrective facts -- about Israel’s military morality or its medical breakthroughs -- “won’t have any real impact on the overall trajectory of Israel’s standing among educated people in the West.” Instead, the latest paradigm must be recognized and fought.

The fading geopolitical paradigm sees nation-states as legitimate and positive, a means of protecting peoples and allowing them to flourish. The Treaty of Westphalia (1648) was the key moment in which the sovereignty of nations was recognized. John Stuart Mill and Woodrow Wilson endowed the nation-state ideal with global reach.

That paradigm, however, “has pretty much collapsed,” Hazony asserts. The nation-state no longer appeals; many intellectuals and political figures in Europe see it “as a source of incalculable evil,” a view that is fast spreading.

The new paradigm, based ultimately on Immanuel Kant’s 1795 treatise Perpetual Peace, advocates the abolition of nation-states and the establishment of international government. Supra-national institutions such as the United Nations and the European Union represent its ideals and models.

Jews and the Holocaust play a strangely central role in the paradigm shift from nation-state to multinational state. The millennial persecution of Jews, culminating in the Nazi genocide, endowed Israel with special purpose and legitimacy according to the old paradigm. From the perspective of the new paradigm, however, the Holocaust represents the excesses of a nation-state, the German one, gone mad.

Under the old nation-state paradigm, the lesson of Auschwitz was “Never again,” meaning that a strong Israel was needed to protect Jews. The new paradigm leads to a very different “Never again,” one which insists that no government should have the means potentially to replicate the Nazi outrages. According to it, Israel isn’t the answer to Auschwitz. The European Union is. That the old-style “Never again” inspires Israelis to pursue the Western world’s most unabashed policy of self-defense makes their actions particularly appalling to New Paradigmers.

Need one point out the error of ascribing Nazi outrages to the nation-state? The Nazis wanted to eliminate nation-states. No less than Kant, they dreamed of a universal state. Thus, New Paradigmers mangle history.

Israelis themselves are not immune to the new paradigm, as the case of Avraham Burg suggests. A former speaker of Israel’s parliament and candidate for prime minister, he switched paradigms and wrote a book on the legacy of the Holocaust that compares Israel to Nazi Germany. He now wants Israelis to give up on Israel as defender of the Jewish people. No one, Burg’s sad example suggests, is immune from the new-paradigm disease.

Hazony’s essay does not offer policy responses, but in a letter to me he sketched three areas to address: building awareness of the new paradigm’s existence, finding anomalies to invalidate it, and revitalizing the old paradigm by bringing it up to date.

His insights are profound and his counsel timely.

— Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. ©2010 by Daniel Pipes. All rights reserved.

Daniel Pipes

Intolerance is not just part of al-Qaeda, it is part of Islam.

Non-Muslims are barred from entering the cities of Mecca and Medina -- not merely barred from building synagogues or churches, but barred, period, because their infidel feet are deemed unfit to touch the ground. This is not an al-Qaeda principle. Nor is it an “Islamist” principle. It is Islam, pure and simple.

“Truly the pagans are unclean,” instructs the Koran’s Sura 9:28, “so let them not . . . approach the Sacred Mosque.” This injunction -- and there are plenty of similar ones in Islam’s scriptures -- is enforced vigorously not by jihadist terrorists but by the Saudi government. And it is enforced not because of some eccentric sense of Saudi nationalism. The only law of Saudi Arabia is sharia, the law of Islam.

As Sunni scholarly commentary in the version of the Koran officially produced by the Saudi government explains, only Muslims are sufficiently “strict in cleanliness, as well as in purity of mind and heart, so that their word can be relied upon.” Thus, only they may enter the holy cities. Authoritative Shiite teaching is even more bracing. As Iraq’s “moderate” Ayatollah Ali Sistani -- probably the world’s most influential Shiite cleric -- has explained, the touching of non-Muslims is discouraged, because they are considered to be in the same “unclean” category as “urine, feces, semen, dead bodies, blood, dogs, pigs, alcoholic liquors, and the sweat of an animal who persistently eats [unclean things].”

These teachings are worth bearing in mind as we listen to the staunch defenses of religious liberty that have suddenly become so fashionable among proponents of the Cordoba Initiative, a planned $100 million Islamic center and mosque to be built on the hallowed ground where remains of the nearly 3,000 Americans killed by Muslim terrorists on 9/11 continue to be found. The most prominent proponent of the project, President Obama, was in high fashion Friday night, as one would expect at a White House gala in observance of Ramadan. “This is America,” he intoned, “and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable.”

The president’s commitment is to a vacant abstraction, not to actual liberty. If his resolve to defend religious freedom were truly unshakable, the last thing he would endorse is the construction of a gigantic monument to intolerance in a place where bigots devastated a city they have repeatedly targeted because of the pluralism and freedom it symbolizes. You can’t aspire to religious freedom by turning a blind eye to the reality of sharia.

Saudi Arabia, the country from which 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers hailed, abides no pluralism or religious freedom. Sure, the Saudis will tell you they allow Christians, Jews, and other non-Muslims to visit their country, which is awfully big of them. Still, the regime prohibits these infidels from polluting the kingdom with their Bibles, crucifixes, and Stars of David.

Mosque proponents like the Manhattan Institute’s Josh Barro scoff at discomfiting comparisons between religious liberty in the United States and in Saudi Arabia. For them, the prospect of a mosque at Ground Zero is our “opportunity to show how we are better than Saudis.” That misses the point in two ways. First, we don’t need to show that we are better than the Saudis. We permit thousands of Muslim houses of worship in our nation, Muslims are celebrated in our public life, and our military has done more to protect and defend Muslims -- including in Saudi Arabia -- than any fighting force in history.  Every objective person already knows that, and anybody who purports to need convincing will never be convinced.

Second and more significant, the comparison of what is permitted in Manhattan and what is permitted in Mecca is not about the Saudis: It is about Islam. Saudi Arabia does not have any law but sharia. Non-Muslims are discriminated against in the kingdom, not because that’s how the Saudis want it. They are discriminated against because that is how the Koran says it must be.

Sura 9:29, the verse of the Koran that immediately follows the commandment to exclude non-Muslims from holy sites, instructs:  “Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the last day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the Religion of Truth, from among the people of the Book [i.e., Jews and Christians], until they pay the jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.”

The jizya is a poll-tax imposed on dhimmis. Those are non-Muslims permitted to live in Islamic territories. The concept is that all the world will eventually be under the thumb of sharia authorities, with dhimmis tolerated so long as they accept their subordinate legal and social status (“and feel themselves subdued”). The alternative for dhimmis is war or death.

Nevertheless, Muslims understand that this global mission cannot be completed in a day. In an Islamic country like Saudi Arabia, where they are in a position to impose sharia in full, that is exactly what they do. In other places, the degree of imposition depends on relative Islamic strength, and it increases as that strength increases. Thus, the standard Muslim position on “Palestine,” where Islamic strength is growing but not yet dominant: Muslims are to be permitted to live freely within the Jewish state, but all Jews must be purged from Palestinian territories. Again, that’s not an al-Qaeda position; it’s the mainstream Islamic view. To the extent there is a mainstream dissenting view, it is that the Jewish state should be annihilated immediately -- not that the two sides should live in reciprocally tolerant harmony.

In the United States, there is no threat to religious liberty  . . . except where there are high concentrations of Muslims. Not high concentrations of al-Qaeda sympathizers -- high concentrations of Muslims. As Muslims have flocked to Dearborn, Mich., for example, Henry Ford’s hometown has become infamous for its support of Hezbollah. Recently, four Christian missionaries were arrested by Dearborn police for the crime of handing out copies of St. John’s gospel on a public street outside an Arab festival. The police called it disturbing the peace. But the peace was disturbed only due to the foreboding sense that Muslims might take riotous offense, because sharia forbids the preaching of religions other than Islam.

In Minneapolis, where thousands of Somalis have settled, taxpayers are being forced to support sharia-compliant mortgages and at least one Islamic charter school. Meantime, taxi drivers refuse to ferry passengers suspected of carrying alcohol, and a student in need of a dog’s assistance for medical reasons was driven from school due to threats from Muslim students against him and the animal -- because sharia regards canines as unclean.

This aggression is a deliberate strategy, called “voluntary apartheid.” The idea, as explained by influential Sunni cleric Yusuf Qaradawi (the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual guide), counsels that Muslims in the West must push political leaders to indulge what he claims is their “right to live according to our faith -- ideologically, legislatively, and ethically.” It is what imam Feisal Rauf means when he urges America to become more sharia-friendly by allowing “religious communities more leeway to judge among themselves, according to their laws.”

This is not the promotion of religious liberty. In America, President Obama observed, religious liberty welcomes “people of all faiths.” Contemporary Islam, by contrast, is counseling supremacism. It rips at our seams, demanding that Americans accept parallel Islamic societies, because Muslims must reject the mores of non-Islamic societies.

This same thinking undergirds Islam’s rejection of freedom of conscience, including the Koran’s prescription, in Sura 4:89, of the death penalty for those who renounce their Islamic faith (“They would have you disbelieve as they themselves have disbelieved, so that you may be all like alike. Do not befriend them. . . . If they desert you seize them and put them to death wherever you find them.”) Again, this is not an al-Qaeda doctrine. As the scholar Ibn Warraq observes, it is the interpretation shared by all classical schools of Muslim jurisprudence.

Moreover, the same theory that considers every Muslim to be a Muslim forever -- whether he wants to be one or not -- analogously holds that if a given inch of land has ever been under Islamic domain, it is Islam’s property in perpetuity. There is a reason Islamic maps of Palestine do not reflect the existence of Israel and that Spain is called al-Andalus.

There are Muslims who want to change this, Muslims who want to evolve their faith into the light of ecumenical tolerance, Muslims who crave true religious liberty and reject sharia’s repression. These reformist Muslims face a daunting challenge, however. The power and money in the Islamic community is in the grip of the supremacists who pressure Muslims to resist assimilating in America.

It is a challenge that the president -- if he actually had an “unshakable” commitment to religious freedom -- could help the reformers try to surmount. No one credibly questions the legal right of Muslim landowners to use their property in any lawful fashion. Legality is an irrelevant issue, even if the back-tracking Obama now wants to pretend it is the only one he was really talking about on Friday night. The question here is propriety.

This president, uniquely, could have framed that question in the right way. He could have called on Muslims who claim to be moderate to reject Hamas, Hezbollah, and al-Qaeda explicitly, by name and without equivocation. He could have called for them to support freedom of conscience, to support the right of Muslims to leave the faith. He could have called for Muslims to reject the second-class citizenship to which sharia condemns women and non-Muslims. He could have demanded that they accept the right of homosexuals to live without fear of persecution. He could have called for a declaration that sharia is a matter of private contemplation that has no place in the formation of public policy.

If the Ground Zero mosque were understood as standing for those values, it would be a monument worth having: A testament to the rise of a uniquely American Islam that stands foursquare against the hate-filled ideology we’re fighting, an Islam for which Americans would be proud to fight. But that’s not in the cards for a president whose idea of a symbolic gesture is a bow to the Saudi king and an open door to the Muslim Brotherhood.

The president may not have noticed, but the commitment of the Saudis and the Muslim Brotherhood to religious intolerance is utterly unshakable.

-- Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Andrew C. McCarthy

The president bravely asserted what no one contests, then voted “present” on the question that matters.

Pres. Barack Obama’s ringing statement in favor of the Ground Zero mosque had a gaping escape clause: He didn’t necessarily support the mosque.

Not that he bothered to spell that out for his entranced listeners at an iftar dinner at the White House last Friday night, or to those of his supporters who rushed to hail the “finest moment” of his presidency. “Moment” turned out to be the right word. Less than 24 hours later he was telling reporters he hadn’t taken a position on the “wisdom” of the mosque project, only on the organizers’ “right to build a place of worship and community center on private property in lower Manhattan.”

#ad#Obama managed to stake a brave stand on a principle no one seriously contests -- the legal right to build the mosque -- while voting “present” on the question that matters: whether they should or not. This is high-toned dodginess, insipidity masquerading as incisiveness.

Obama’s weekend meanderings had the clarifying effect of separating the question of legality from considerations of prudence and advisability. If the president, whose tolerance for minorities is beyond reproach, can pointedly decline to endorse the wisdom of the project, why are all the critics beyond the pale? Especially now that the second-most-powerful Democrat in the country, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, has joined them?

Supporters of the mosque make it sound as though opposition to the project is unusual and un-American. Obviously none of them has ever tried to build a church, or any other house of worship. So prevalent and fierce is the resistance to them -- usually on grounds of noise and traffic, but with an undercurrent of hostility to faith in certain secular communities -- that Congress passed a law in 2000 pushing back against the abuse of local zoning rules to squash these projects.

Before reversing itself after a lawsuit, the town of Bedford in Westchester County, N.Y., used concerns over noise to deny a permit for a small Buddhist temple -- where people would go to meditate silently. Just imagine the controversy if the Pine Hill Zendo had been adjacent to the site of an atrocity carried out in the name of “the awakened one.”

Even in his allegedly ringing iftar speech, Obama said that Ground Zero is “hallowed ground,” that we must “respect the sensitivities surrounding the development of Lower Manhattan,” and that “we must never forget those we lost so tragically on 9/11.”

Those words easily could have been spoken by an opponent of the mosque. “Hallowed” ground deserves special treatment; what is unobjectionable elsewhere can become unseemly and ill-considered on such resonant ground. Which is why the mosque controversy is not about abstract rights but about particularities -- whether a mosque built at this particular location by these particular people is appropriate.

If Obama were to go all-out in favor of the mosque, and eschew all saccharine generalities, he’d say, “I’m fine with a mosque built near Ground Zero established by an imam who partly blamed the United States for the Sept. 11 attacks, who won’t condemn Hamas, and who has connections with groups affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. I won’t say a discouraging word about any of this, and if our friends the Saudis want to chip in $100 million to finance it, that’s okay, too.”

That’d be bracing and starkly honest, although half his party would follow Harry Reid to the exit ramp. Instead, we get the subtle innuendo that all critics of the mosque are intolerant, an empty solicitousness about Ground Zero, and a deliberate obliviousness about the actual organizers of the project -- all wrapped in a rhetoric that is equal parts self-righteous and squirrely. In other words, classic Obama.

The president said at the iftar, correctly, that we are a nation where different faiths “coexist peacefully and with mutual respect.” Is it too much to ask that, in a gesture of respect and cordial coexistence, the Ground Zero mosque go find less hallowed ground?

— Rich Lowry is editor of National Review. He can be reached via e-mail, comments.lowry@nationalreview.com. © 2010 by King Features Syndicate.

Rich Lowry

The Constitution has been a continuing challenge to those who think ordinary people should be ruled by their betters.

‘We the people” are the familiar opening words of the Constitution of the United States -- the framework for a self-governing people, free from the arbitrary edicts of rulers. It was the blueprint for America, and the success of America made that blueprint something that other nations sought to follow.

At the time when it was written, however, the Constitution was a radical departure from the autocratic governments of the 18th century. Since it was something so new and different, the reasons for the Constitution’s provisions were spelled out in the Federalist, a collection of essays written by three of the writers of the Constitution, as a sort of instruction guide to a new product.

#ad#The Constitution was not only a challenge to the despotic governments of its time, but has been a continuing challenge -- to this day -- to all those who think that ordinary people should be ruled by their betters, whether an elite of blood, or of books, or of whatever else gives people a puffed-up sense of importance.

While the kings of old have faded into the mists of history, the principle of the divine rights of kings to impose whatever they wish on the masses lives on today in the rampaging presumptions of those who consider themselves anointed to impose their notions on others.

The Constitution of the United States is the biggest single obstacle to the carrying out of such rampaging presumptions, so it is not surprising that those with such presumptions have led the way in denigrating, undermining, and evading the Constitution.

While various political leaders have, over the centuries, done things that violated either the spirit or the letter of the Constitution, few dared to openly say that the Constitution was wrong and that what they wanted was right.

#page#It was the Progressives of a hundred years ago who began saying that the Constitution needed to be subordinated to whatever they chose to call “the needs of the times.” Nor were they content to say that the Constitution needed more amendments, for that would have meant that the much-disdained masses would have something to say about whether, or what kind of, amendments were needed.

The agenda then, as now, has been for our betters to decide among themselves which constitutional safeguards against arbitrary government power should be disregarded, in the name of meeting “the needs of the times” -- as they choose to define those needs.

#ad#The first open attack on the Constitution by a president of the United States was made by our only president with a Ph.D., Woodrow Wilson. Virtually all the arguments as to why judges should not take the Constitution to mean what its words plainly say but “interpret” it to mean whatever it ought to mean, in order to meet “the needs of the times,” were made by Woodrow Wilson.

It is no coincidence that those who imagine themselves so much wiser and nobler than the rest of us should be at the forefront of those who seek to erode constitutional restrictions on the arbitrary powers of government. How can our betters impose their superior wisdom and virtue on us, when the Constitution gets in the way at every turn, with all its provisions to safeguard a system based on a self-governing people?

To get their way, the elites must erode or dismantle the Constitution, bit by bit, in one way or another. What that means is that they must dismantle America. This has been going on piecemeal over the years, but now we have an administration in Washington that circumvents the Constitution wholesale, with its laws passed so fast that the public cannot know what is in them, its appointment of “czars” wielding greater power than Cabinet members’, without having to be exposed to public scrutiny by going through the confirmation process prescribed by the Constitution for Cabinet members.

Now there is leaked news of plans to change the country’s immigration laws by administrative fiat rather than congressional legislation, presumably because Congress might be unduly influenced by those pesky voters -- with their constitutional rights -- who have shown clearly that they do not want amnesty and open borders, despite however much our betters do. If the Obama administration gets away with this, and can add a few million illegals to the voting rolls in time for the 2012 elections, that can mean reelection, and with it a continuing and accelerating dismantling of America.

— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. © 2010 Creators Syndicate , Inc.

Thomas Sowell

By allowing same-sex marriage, we are declaring that mothers and fathers are interchangeable.

The Left passionately supports the most remarkable and radical change in modern social history -- the redefinition of marriage from male-female to include male-male and female-female.

Marriage is the building block of society; changing its nature will therefore change society. By allowing same-sex marriage, we are effectively saying that sex (now called “gender”) no longer matters for society’s most important institution; thus, it no longer matters in general. Men and women as distinct entities no longer have significance -- which is exactly what the cultural Left and the gay-rights movement advocate, even though the vast majority of Americans who support same-sex marriage do not realize that this is what they are supporting. Most Americans who support same-sex marriage feel (and “feel” is the crucial verb here, as the change to same-sex marriage is much more felt than thought through) that gays should have the right to marry a member of their own sex. It is perceived as unfair to gays that they cannot do so. And that is true. It is unfair to gays.

#ad#But the price paid for eliminating this unfairness is enormous: It is the end of marriage as every society has known it. It is also the end of any significance to gender. Men and women are now declared interchangeable. That is why, as I noted in a recent column, the “T” has been added to “GLB” -- that is, “Transgendered” has been added to “Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual.” “T” does not represent transsexuals -- people who choose to change their sex. No one is arguing against such people. “Transgendered” refers to people who are members of one sex and who wish publicly to act as if they are members of the other sex, e.g., men wearing women’s clothing in public. The transgendered who publicly act out are living the cultural Left’s primary agenda: rendering gender insignificant. Your sex is what you feel it is; and if you feel both, you are both. Gender doesn’t matter.

That is why Judge Walker and his supporters dismiss the argument that, all things being equal, it is better for children to be raised by a married man and woman than by two men or two women. If Judge Walker or GLBT activists and their supporters admitted that children need a mother and father, they would be affirming that there is great significance to the differences between men and women.

They reject that. Instead, they and Judge Walker offer studies that purport to prove that it makes no difference whether or not a child has parents of both sexes. These academic studies are as unserious as all those studies of a generation ago that “proved” that boys do not prefer to play with trucks and soldiers but would be just as happy to play with dolls and tea sets, and that girls do not prefer dolls and tea sets but would be just as happy to play with trucks and soldiers.

These newer “studies” of same-sex parents are as valid as the earlier propaganda presented in the guise of scientific studies. Like the boy-girl studies, these were conducted by academics with agendas: to deny male-female differences and to promote same-sex marriage. That many Americans believe these studies -- studies that are in any case based on a small number of same-sex couples raising a small number of children, during a short amount of time (a couple of decades), based on the researchers’ own notions of what a healthy and successful young person is -- only proves how effectively colleges and graduate schools have succeeded in teaching a generation of Americans not to think critically but to accept “studies” in place of common sense.

Ask anyone who supports same-sex marriage this: Do you believe that a mother has something unique to give to a child that no father can give, and that a father has something unique to give a child that no mother can give?

One has to assume that most people -- including supporters of same-sex marriage -- would respond in the affirmative. How, then, can they support same-sex marriage? The Left’s trinity -- compassion, fairness, and equality -- is one reason. And “studies” and “facts” are another.

That is exactly how so many college graduates came to believe that boys would be happy with tea sets and girls would be happy with trucks -- compassion, fairness, equality, and “studies.” That is also how many Americans, including a judge who overturned a state’s constitutional amendment, have come to believe that never having a mother or never having a father makes absolutely no difference to a child.

And if mothers and fathers are interchangeable, men as men and women as women lose their significance.

— Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. He may be contacted through his website, dennisprager.com.

Dennis Prager

In a gubernatorial primary that’s more marathon than sprint, this Florida candidate is relying on grassroots organization.

When the debates, press conferences, and stump speeches wind down, the only thing that matters is whether voters go out and pull the lever for your candidate.

“Where you win and lose elections in the margins, which is where we are right now, is with your voter-contact program,” says Mike Grissom, statewide field director for Bill McCollum. After months of negative campaign ads and in the face of vacillating polls, this fact -- and the 500 volunteers knocking on doors and making phone calls on the campaign’s behalf -- gives McCollum’s staff confidence about victory in Florida’s GOP gubernatorial primary.

#ad#“We have good, true grassroots organizations and volunteers in every county in the state,” McCollum says. “We have an effort ongoing, and have for some time, to call people, call Republican voters, especially likely Republican voters, first to tell them about me, then to see if they’re supportive, and then to turn them out to vote.”

It used to be a sprint. The GOP’s 72-hour program, for example, so named for its goal of contacting voters in the three days leading up to the election, was cited as a success nationally in Republican victories at the beginning of the decade. But because of the new early-voting rules Florida implemented in 2002, these days it’s more of a marathon. Polls for the August 24 primary opened on August 9, and more Floridians than ever are taking advantage of the opportunity. McCollum’s campaign expects that up to 40 percent of its votes will be cast before Election Day.

“That number has been blown out of the water this year,” Grissom says. “Traditionally, it’s around 30 percent.”

#page#The number of absentee ballots has jumped as well, in part because Florida has made it simple to request one. “If you requested a ballot in 2008 for the presidential preference primary, there was a way that you could request a ballot for the next three elections. You go and you click a box, and you have the ballots automatically getting sent to you,” Grissom says.

According to the campaign, as of Sunday, 227,656 Republicans had mailed in absentee votes, out of the 669,598 Republicans who have requested them. The race is on to capture the rest.

#ad#Volunteers, working out of their homes or one of the campaign’s ten field offices, are making tens of thousands of phone calls and knocking on thousands of doors each week. “As grassroots activists and grassroots political operatives around the country will tell you, the best way to motivate someone to go to the polls and vote is to have a peer-to-peer contact from someone in their community, and that’s what we’re doing,” Grissom says.

The campaign says it has an edge over primary rival Rick Scott in such a task, due to McCollum’s history in Florida politics. “Bill McCollum’s having been a part of the Republican party here in Florida and actively working with these grassroots activists around the state for the last 20 years -- attending meetings, you know, electing Republicans -- has really paid off on our behalf,” Grissom says.

McCollum is also leveraging his myriad endorsements, and has asked organizations to e-mail their members about the campaign. “This is the part of the game where the endorsements are really helping,” Grissom said. “We have all these folks like the Chamber of Commerce, the Fraternal Order of Police, the folks of that nature who are turning out volunteers, who are turning out people.”

Neither advantage, says the campaign, can be replicated by Scott. “We have an extensive organizational capability that he can’t have,” McCollum says. “He can have only what he can buy.”

Scott has poured more than $26 million of personal wealth into his campaign, and funded a bevy of advertising flights. McCollum has ads too, and some big backers have ponied up with advertising on his behalf, but McCollum can’t match Scott dollar for dollar.

But while the campaign can’t go toe-to-toe on air, it hopes to make up the difference on the ground.

“We have a great ground game. Some of the stuff that we’ve seen here for this election cycle in Florida is monumental in the amount of grassroots that we’ve put together in a primary,” Grissom said. “We knew that ultimately this was going to come down to Election Day, and who runs the better programs, and that’s why we have a good feeling about where things are right now.”

— Kyle O. Peterson is Florida election reporter for NRO’s Battle ’10 blog.

Kyle O. Peterson

Lower inflation is a good thing, but lower growth is not.

The economy is suffering from something like a summer swoon. In the words of business columnist Jimmy Pethokoukis, the recovery summer has gone bust. We all know this from the sloppy statistics coming in for jobs, retail sales, and most recently manufacturing. But market-based indicators are telling the same story.

Let’s start with the Treasury bond market. Yields have fallen to 2.6 percent today from 4.1 percent last April. Decomposing this Treasury rally shows that real yields have dropped 79 basis points, which is a signal of lower economic expectations.

#ad#Meanwhile, inflation break-even TIPS (Treasury inflation-protected securities) have fallen 64 basis points, showing that price expectations also have dropped. The consumer price index is only rising 1 percent over the past year. And long-term inflation fears have fallen all the way to 1.7 percent. It’s not deflation. It’s disinflation.

The corporate-bond market shows a similar decline of economic-growth and profits expectations. Credit-risk spreads are widening. The spread between investment-grade corporate bonds and risk-free Treasuries have widened 62 basis points, while higher-yielding junk-bond spreads have increased 138 basis points.

Now, all these bond-market indicators don’t tell us a whole lot about the future. But they are corroborating the summer slump in the present. Lower inflation is a good thing, but lower growth is not.

And here’s another hitch in the story. Using the break-even TIPS, the Federal Reserve’s zero target rate is really minus-1.7 percent, which is the same sort of negative real interest rate we had in the early and mid-2000s. This is undoubtedly why Kansas City Fed president Thomas Hoenig is worried about a new boom-bust cycle.

Hoenig calls the Fed’s latest decision to maintain the zero-interest-rate target a “dangerous gamble.” Those are strong words of criticism leveled at Ben Bernanke and the other Fed bigwigs. Hoenig says the financial emergency is over and predicts a modest economic recovery that requires small increases in the Fed’s target rate -- still accommodative, but slightly less so.

Hoeing also echoes the fears of Stanford economist and former Treasury official John Taylor, who argues that the Fed is keeping its target rate too low for too long, just as it did between 2002 and 2005.

Are we doomed to repeat the boom-bust cycle? Very few people agree with Hoenig and Taylor. But one market that does is gold. While bond rates have been declining this summer, gold has jumped $100, and it is hovering near its all-time nominal high. That’s food for thought.

And let me repeat my own mantra: The Fed can produce new money, but it cannot produce new jobs. Fiscal policy -- and its threat of overtaxing, over-regulating, and overspending -- is what’s ailing the economy. And that threat is reverberating through stock and bond markets. (The stock market, by the way, is still about 11 percent below its late-April peak.)

So the long-run message of the gold rally may be this: The Fed may print too much money, but taxes and regulations may hold back the production of goods and services. And if too much money chasing too few goods is inflationary, then lower taxes and regulations to encourage more goods would promote stronger prosperity and domestic price stability.

Free-market supply-side father Robert Mundell argued for lower tax rates and stable money. Is anyone listening?

-- Larry Kudlow, NRO’s Economics Editor, is host of CNBC’s The Kudlow Report and author of the daily web blog, Kudlow’s Money Politic$.

Larry Kudlow

These much-maligned politicians had their shining moments.

The deaths this week of two political Old Bulls have inspired some harsh commentary.

Writers have noted that Dan Rostenkowski, longtime chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, went to “Club Fed” (as he called it) on minor corruption charges. They have written at length that Ted Stevens, senator from Alaska for 40 years, brought a lot of pork-barrel projects to his state and was convicted on corruption charges -- a conviction overturned because of prosecutorial misconduct.

#ad#Let me put in a few good words for these two Old Bulls, whom I’ve followed in the 40 years that I’ve been co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.

Rosty worked hard in his 14 years as chairman of Ways and Means. The gruff Chicago pol, who got his House seat at age 30 because Mayor Richard J. Daley owed his father a favor, mastered the deals of legislation and could explain them lucidly on the floor.

He was an indispensable player in passing the 1986 tax reform that lowered rates and eliminated hundreds of tax preferences. That was the kind of bipartisan effort you haven’t seen lately and one that was contrary to his institutional interest as chairman.

As for Stevens, he had a point when he said that Alaska, because of its geographical position, demographic character, and heavy federal involvement, had special claims on the federal government.

Moreover, Stevens worked hard and could produce instantaneous justifications for even the most minor project he was backing. I have seen him spout forth the details, sometimes angrily, in both Washington and Alaska.

He deserves special credit for one piece of legislation that I’ve seen mentioned only briefly in the obituaries, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971.

This law was necessary because the Alaska statehood act had left unsettled the land claims of Alaska natives, 15 percent of the state’s population. The North Slope oil fields, discovered in 1968, couldn’t be exploited until those claims were settled.

The Native Claims Act took a novel approach, rejecting the traditional Indian-reservation system and instead setting up a dozen native corporations entitled to select certain lands and pooling mineral-resource income among them. Each native got shares in one of the corporations.

The corporate form gave incentives to the management of each corporation to pay attention to minority opinion (because minorities could elect a director) and at the same time tended to ensure continuity of management. In contrast, some Indian reservations are governed by successive winners of 51 to 49 percent elections, with continued skirmishing and attendant corruption.

Some of the native corporations have been mismanaged, and there have been constant readjustments of the system, in which Stevens played a role. He kept in frequent touch with native leaders and, while not always agreeing with their advocates, always treated them with respect. He took the lead in obtaining jobs for natives on the North Slope oil fields and in defense-contract work.

The result has been a system far superior to that of Indian reservations. The native corporations have mostly invested their income wisely and continue, even as North Slope oil production has tailed off, to provide an income supplement to native shareholders.

This allows natives to choose where they want to live on the spectrum from the native lifestyle -- living in the Alaska bush and participating in subsistence hunting and fishing -- to the mainstream lifestyle, living in Anchorage or Wasilla or the Lower 48 and working in jobs of their choosing.

One of the blotches on America’s history has been our treatment of aboriginal Americans. Thanks in very large part to Stevens, the Native Claims Act has provided a better life and a wider array of choices for Alaska natives than the reservation system.

For Stevens, there was not much of a political payoff. Most natives voted for him in the years when he was reelected almost unanimously, when he didn’t need their votes. In 2008, when he faced a tough opponent and was convicted as a result of prosecutorial misconduct just weeks before the election, most natives voted Democratic, as they usually do. Stevens lost by 3,953 votes.

Rostenkowski and Stevens did not get much political reward for their good work on tax reform and Alaska natives. They just worked hard in what they thought was the public interest. They deserve to be remembered for that.

-- Michael Barone is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner. © the Washington Examiner. Distributed by Creators Syndicate.

Michael Barone

Where we are in Afghanistan.

Bamiyan, Afghanistan

‘The Soviets wouldn’t come up here with less than a battalion,” says Tim Lynch, a retired Marine Corps officer driving us down the two-lane blacktop that crosses the Shomali Plain, one of the largest and most fertile agricultural regions in Afghanistan. Alexander the Great founded the ancient city of Bagram on this plain, which opens up just north of Kabul, widens through Parwan Province, and finally dead-ends at the Salang and Panjshir rivers. Centuries later, Afghanistan’s Communist government would choose the same locale for a major air base, which today hosts the U.S.-led Coalition’s logistics-and-transshipment hub, Bagram Airfield. The Macedonians, the Soviets, and now the Americans: All have found their way to the Shomali Plain.

“This area is primarily Tajik,” Lynch says. “The Tajiks fought the Soviets harder than the Pashtuns, but don’t seem to mind Americans that much.” There are pockets of Pashtuns, but the Tajik predominance makes the drive up the highway, through the plain, and over the ragged road through the mountains to Bamiyan relatively safe for three Americans and a Hazara interpreter/fixer. If a group of Soviet travelers had ventured up here in their day, the mujahedeen would have killed them within an hour. Once in the Hazarajat area, Westerners can mostly roam around freely. The greatest risk in Afghanistan, according to Lynch, is disease or illness. “The second-highest risk is car wreck,” he says, a fact you might pick up from watching him drive in the traditional Afghan style: like a maniac. “Way down on the list is the Taliban,” he says.

There are attacks on U.S. forces on the Shomali Plain and in the surrounding valleys, but they pale in contrast to the Soviet experience. During the Soviet war in Afghanistan, there were nine separate major expeditions into the Panjshir Valley. On the seventh campaign, 15,000 Soviet troops and 5,000 Communist Afghan troops moved over the Shomali Plain in an attempt to take the valley, and at one point an entire Soviet division and Afghan corps were dedicated to clearing out mujahedeen here. They failed. By way of comparison, the U.S.-led Operation Anaconda, launched in March 2002 in Paktia Province, involved 1,700 helicopter-borne troops, 1,000 Afghan militiamen, and several smaller special-operations units. The recent Operation Moshtarak in Helmand Province included a mix of about 4,000 Coalition ground-combat troops and 4,000 Afghan National Army (ANA) troops, and is the only Coalition operation comparable in size to the various Soviet Panjshir expeditions.

For the Soviets and the mujahedeen, the Shomali Plain and the Panjshir Valley were what Sun Tzu termed “desperate ground” -- terrain that must be defended or captured. It is certainly storied ground: “Panjshir” in the Dari language means “five lions,” a reference to the legend of five devout brothers who protected the valley from intruders.

In the war against the Soviets, a new lion emerged -- Ahmed Shah Massoud. An ethnic Tajik and a sophisticated mujahedeen commander, Massoud was educated at Afghanistan’s national military academy and studied engineering at Kabul Polytechnic. He trained his fighters in the use of advanced weapons and developed a logistics pipeline from China. At the peak of his power, he may have led as many as 50,000 fighters, and his well-honed publicity machine ensured that he became known as the “Lion of the Panjshir.” After the Soviets were forced out, Massoud’s party dominated the short-lived mujahedeen government of Afghanistan. In 1994, Massoud and his army returned to their home field in the Shomali and Panjshir, fighting the Taliban to a draw until Massoud was assassinated by al-Qaeda shortly before 9/11.

There is no current equivalent to Massoud in the Shomali and Panjshir now. The Tajiks, with the exception of a few rent-a-fighters and day-labor Taliban, have no quarrel with the Coalition. Many of Massoud’s lieutenants have taken up positions in the current Afghan National Army, working side by side with U.S. forces.

One of them is Col. Zalmat Nbard, commander of the 1st Battalion, 111th Division, southwest of Kabul. Nbard was an effective enough fighter of Soviets that he was commissioned as a colonel by the interim mujahedeen government. He commanded Tajik fighters during the civil war and fought the Taliban until the U.S. invasion in 2001. He was trained in Massoud’s academies and rose through the ranks to become a commander. There is little doubt that he has more combat experience than all his NATO and U.S. advisers combined, and all agree that he is a seasoned leader of Afghans. That Nbard is on the side of the Coalition at all, rather than stirring up trouble in the neighborhood, is telling. The major fights in Afghanistan are in the south and east, the Pashtun areas, not in the northern Tajik ones.

#page#The officers of the Afghan National Army fall into four loose categories. There are former mujahedeen commanders like Nbard, former officers of the Communist regime Nbard fought, a few retired Taliban, and young officers who have no history in the 30 years of war since 1980. There is some tension between the Communist officers and mujahedeen veterans. The Communists criticize the former mujahedeen for their failure to follow doctrine. The mujahedeen slight the Communists as unwilling to fight.

Nbard, who grew up fighting first the Soviets and then the Taliban, is frustrated by the type of war he is being told to fight now. U.S. advisers try to get him to follow ANA doctrine, which is based on U.S. Army doctrine from the 1990s. His superiors at the ministry of defense often are officers from the former Communist regime, and they still fall back on Soviet tactics. His primary counterparts on the battlefield are Turks, whose government has issued rules of engagement that make them incredibly risk-averse.

His frustration shows through during a planning session for a routine patrol with two U.S. officers. They are in turn frustrated that Nbard had not made any plans following the prescribed five-paragraph order of the ANA, as well as by the fact that he does not know how to read a map. Nbard is upset with the mission his superiors have given him.

“It is a useless mission . . . it is a stupid mission . . . it is only good for getting soldiers killed,” Nbard says. The mission is a “presence patrol,” a drive through the Musahee district in the southwest of Kabul Province. A presence patrol is often described by calloused veterans as “driving around waiting to get blown up.” Nbard knows firsthand the uselessness of these types of operations; he spent years ambushing similar Soviet patrols in the 1980s.

In other words, the Coalition is using some of the same tactics that so dismally failed the Soviets, while the Taliban employs those that worked so well for the mujahedeen.

The former mujahedeen often chafe at the bureaucracy and lethargy of the Afghan National Army and the Coalition. “Just give me guns, trucks, ammo, and fuel, and I will defeat the Taliban!” Maj. Shane Gries, a member of the Validation Transition Team, cries in a pitch-perfect parody of Afghan bravado. “But it is not that simple when you start putting NATO elements in the mix.” And so Col. Zalmat Nbard, once a commander of mujahedeen and a loyal deputy to the Lion of the Panjshir, today dutifully follows orders and drives around waiting to get blown up.

But we’re not using all of the old Soviet tactics. For instance, the destroy-and-search mission is out. That practice was exactly what it sounds like: Aircraft would drop bombs on a village, then helicopter gunships would strafe it. Afterward, Soviet soldiers would search what was left of the smoldering village. Those free-gunning operations brought proportional retribution: In one case, an entire battalion of the Soviet 201st Motor Rifle Division was destroyed on the road between Gardez and Khost.

In nine years, about 15,000 Soviet soldiers were killed in Afghanistan. In roughly the same time, the Coalition has lost 1,993.

The failed tactics of the Soviets are on full display in Lester Grau’s book The Bear Went Over the Mountain. Grau culled reports on Soviet actions from the Frunze, a Soviet general-staff college. The reports read like a chronicle of events that could have happened in 2008 rather than 1988 -- the loop of Afghan history repeating itself with better firepower. The companion book to The Bear Went Over the Mountain, one told from the mujahedeen side, is Grau’s Afghan Guerrilla Warfare: In the Words of the Mujahedeen Fighters, written with Ali Ahmad Jalali.

In both books, the Shomali Plain and the road between Kabul and Charikar come up again and again. To take one example, the attack on Mumtaz in 1988, detailed from the mujahedeen side, is notable for the firepower they brought to bear on a brigade-size garrison of government troops. “Mujahideen armaments included one Saqar, one BM12, one 122mm howitzer, six 82mm mortars, eight 82mm recoilless rifles and approximately 40 RPG-7s,” according to the mujahedeen who spoke to the authors. “We also had some ZSU-23-2 anti-aircraft guns and some Stinger anti-aircraft missiles.”

The Sarqar and BM 12 are multiple-rocket launchers with a range of 8,000 meters. The howitzer and ZSU are so heavy that they are usually towed behind a truck.

The plan at Mumtaz was to block the Charikar–Kabul road from the north and south, then bombard the garrison with rockets and artillery for seven days before a 400-man ground assault force would move on it. The Communist government’s troops held out for only a few hours before making a breakout for Kabul, to the south.

By way of contrast, attacks by the Taliban on small U.S. outposts, like Combat Outpost Keating and Wanat in the eastern mountains near the Pakistan border, were fought with only mortars and RPGs. The fighting at Keating and Wanat was fierce, but the Taliban does not have nearly the firepower the mujahedeen employed. On the Shomali Plain, the only comparable attack on U.S. forces was in May 2010, when the Taliban mustered 30 fighters with rifles, RPGs, and suicide vests to make a charge at Bagram Airfield.

What is most striking in Bear and the scholarly Soviet-military writings about Afghanistan is what is missing: There is absolutely no evidence the Soviets seriously attempted population-centric counterinsurgency to win the passive support of the population, which is a key to understanding where the United States stands in Afghanistan. The WikiLeaks documents show that the vast majority of Coalition missions in Parwan are for meetings with Afghan-government officials and assessments for development projects. These discussions and assessments are textbook counterinsurgency.

#page#Soviet counterinsurgency did have economic, social, and political lines of effort -- brutal ones: The Soviets succeeded in destroying the rural agricultural economy by razing crops, clear-cutting orchards in the Shomali Plain, and destroying irrigation systems. Their political line of effort was to exploit tribal and party rivalries among the mujahedeen. The social one was to create hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing to Pakistan while sending select urban youths to be educated and indoctrinated in the Soviet Union. There was a kind of logic to this version of counterinsurgency: If the greatest advantage of the insurgent is to hide in plain sight among the civilian population, then get rid of the civilians.

The Soviets put minimal effort into distinguishing civilians from combatants, and the Taliban was just as brutal, if not more so. Its campaign in the Shomali Plain was as medieval as its imposition of sharia, and at times amounted to no more than a bloody ethnic/sectarian cleansing, the murder of Uzbeks and Hazaras by the thousands. By contrast, Gen. Stanley McChrystal introduced highly restrictive rules of engagement in 2009 to minimize civilian casualties. The changes were controversial, accompanied by many anecdotal accounts of how tying the hands of U.S. forces was causing more of our troops to be killed or wounded in action.

Empirical evidence shows the restrictive ROE can protect Coalition troops. A recent analysis by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that “counterinsurgent-generated civilian casualties from a typical incident are responsible for six additional violent incidents in an average-sized district in the following six weeks.” The tribal code of honor requires badal -- blood revenge -- for the killing of a family or tribe member. If fewer Afghans are accidentally harmed, then there are fewer instances of the blood revenge being sought against Coalition troops.

The Soviet force that arrived in Afghanistan was an artillery army, with some tanks and mechanized infantry. Over the course of the 1980s, the Soviet 40th Army morphed into an air-assault and mechanized-maneuver force. The U.S. military of the late 1990s was heavy and maneuver-based. It has since grown into its counterinsurgency mission, but it still clings to too many conventional habits. The American way of counterinsurgency, as articulated in Field Manual 3-24, written in part by Gen. David Petraeus, is the exact opposite of the Soviet approach. We don’t destroy-and-search, we sit-and-talk, mostly with local tribal leaders. We have different ideas, and a different kind of army.

The Soviets in the 1980s to some degree had a less complicated fight than the one U.S. forces face now. During the Soviet occupation, the mujahedeen would actually come out and fight in the open, at times, in an attempt to hold land and lines. It had standing military units; the Taliban, on the other hand, operates in cells. And, as the study from the NBER shows, a significant portion of the attacks on Coalition forces are driven by revenge rather than by offensive strategy, meaning that the factors in play are more cultural than strictly military.

Perhaps nothing sums up the difference better than what I saw as I drove through the city of Charikar. It passed from Soviet to mujahedeen hands in the 1980s, and the battle between the Taliban and Massoud in the 1990s left it practically a ghost town, pockmarked by bullets and shrapnel. Today, Charikar hums with commerce, especially the downtown jewelry market, where gold chains gleam through the clean plate-glass windows. Four civilians in an old Land Cruiser, packing only pistols, could stop for diesel fuel on the outskirts of town without much worry. Which means Charikar is safer than Tijuana or Juarez -- that’s not saying much, but it’s something.

-- Mr. Johannes is a documentary filmmaker and former Marine. He has traveled through Iraq and Afghanistan, on his own and as an embedded reporter, since 2005.

J. D. Johannes

The president is perfectly unclear about the real question at hand.

‘Let me be clear,” Pres. Barack Obama said at Friday night’s iftar dinner at the White House before making what nearly everyone took to be a deeply felt endorsement of the Ground Zero mosque. “Obama Strongly Backs Islam Center Near 9/11 Site,” was the New York Times headline.

“As a citizen, and as president,” Obama said, “I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country. That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable.”

With the backlash already in full swing, President Obama “clarified” his remarks on Saturday, saying, “I was not commenting, and I will not comment, on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding.”

If this was his meaning all along, he could have stipulated on Friday that he wasn't taking a position on “a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan” and saved the headline writers at the New York Times and every other newspaper in the country from being misled.

Obama’s embarrassing backtracking highlights a more important lesson about the mosque controversy: It doesn’t have anything to do with the free exercise of religion. As Obama spectacularly demonstrated over the last couple of days, you can be a stalwart friend of religious freedom and still not necessarily think the mosque project is a good idea. Indeed, no reasonable opponent of the project contests the right of Muslims to worship as they please in this country -- the First Amendment religious rights of Muslims never have been in question, at all. The critics insist only that this particular location for a project led by these particular people -- including an imam who cannot bring himself to condemn Hamas -- is unseemly and ill-considered. That position in no way implies a disregard for the First Amendment.

No one can seriously doubt that the organizers of the mosque project would have a legal right -- assuming the zoning and permitting were in order -- to use their property to open a 9/11 museum from the perspective that the attacks were provoked by America’s depredations against Islam. As the Constitution clearly says, “Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech.” But surely even the Michael Bloombergs of the world would summon their moral disapproval of such a project, secure in the knowledge they hadn’t violated the First Amendment by speaking out against it.

Once the obfuscations about the free exercise of religion are cleared away, the question at Ground Zero becomes whether the project is, in Obama's word, wise. Most Americans and most New Yorkers think not, for obvious reasons. It is a site that would have been in the shadow of the World Trade Center before it was knocked down by terrorists acting in the name of Islam. Anyone truly interested in fostering understanding between Islam and America would keep a respectful distance. We’re constantly told by our self-appointed betters that America needs to demonstrate its tolerance to the world by happily swallowing the project. But America’s tolerance is a matter of record. What a blessed relief it would be if these lectures were directed, at least occasionally, toward well-meaning Muslims, who should oppose what their co-religionists are doing at Ground Zero.

As for President Obama, what if he had said that he is in such sympathy with the feelings of his fellow Americans about Ground Zero that he respectfully urges the leaders of the mosque project to move it elsewhere, even though they, of course, have the legal right to build it in the current location? And what if he told our friends the Saudis that he will not appreciate it if they fund the mosque at Ground Zero? Alas, that’d take a different president, one who doesn’t combine lawyerly hair-splitting with the irresistible impulse to talk down to the American public.

The Editors

Romantic comedies go sperm for the summer.

Bill O’Reilly was fully occupied with Barack Obama and other familiar “Friends,” but then along came Jennifer Aniston, making comments about modern motherhood that didn’t score well in the “No Spin Zone.”

During a recent O’Reilly Factor segment, the Fox News star hosted a “culture war” debate involving actress Jennifer Aniston’s recent comments about women and motherhood, which related to her new artificial-insemination comedy co-starring Jason Bateman, The Switch.

During a press conference about the movie, Aniston explained: “The point of the movie is, what is it that defines family? It isn’t necessarily the traditional mother, father, two children, and a dog named Spot,” she said. “Love is love, and family is what is around you and who is in your immediate sphere. That is what I love about this movie. It is saying it is not the traditional sort of stereotype of what we have been taught as a society of what family is.” She said that “times have changed, and that is also what is amazing, is that we do have so many options these days, as opposed to our parents’ days, when you can’t have children because you have waited too long.”

#ad#“Women are realizing it more and more knowing that they don’t have to settle with a man just to have that child.”

O’Reilly pushed back against that message. “She’s throwing a message out to 12-year-olds and 13-year-olds that hey, you don’t need a guy, you don’t need a dad,” he said. “That’s destructive to our society.”

The entertainment blogs immediately seized on his comments, spinning his words as Bill O’Reilly’s announcing that Jennifer Aniston is destructive to society, and caricatured his criticism as ridiculous.

You may be experiencing 1992 Murphy Brown flashbacks. Only now we’ve -- evolved doesn’t quite seem the word -- from sleeping with our ex-husband and getting pregnant to discovering a drunken sperm switch. But Dan Quayle was right back then and Bill O’Reilly is right now.

It is, of course, a fact that there are alternatives that exist today for women -- especially women of means -- to have children in ways that their grandmothers and even mothers didn’t have. But it doesn’t follow that we should necessarily embrace them.

Aniston is right to say that “there are children that don’t have homes that have a home and can be loved. And that’s extremely important.” There are, absolutely, occasions where a child needs love, doesn’t have it, and someone is able to provide it in an unconventional way. These exceptions, however, are not reasons to toss out everything we know to be true about moms and dads and the need for them. And this, also, isn’t what we’re talking about in we-women-can-have-babies-however-we-like comedies.

This column is not a review of The Switch. I haven’t seen it but expect to, despite Aniston’s synopsis. It’s put together by some of the people behind Juno, which was a messy story about responsibility and redemption. That’s art. Too often, though, what passes as art today is just an affirmation of mistakes. Instead of inspiring, it seeks to issue an official, collective “It’s all right” about decisions we used to have some healthy sense of shame about. A Hollywood imprimatur only plays a role in covering up what’s not all right.

Another movie this summer, The Kids Are All Right, lets this slip show. The Kids Are All Right is a story about a lesbian couple, their two kids, and the sperm donor who gets a phone call from an 18-year-old in need of a father. The kids, in short, are not quite all right.

My Daddy’s Name Is Donor, a recent study from the Commission on Parenthood’s Future, found that children born after a sperm-bank commercial exchange suffer more feelings of loss, confusion, and isolation than do kids raised in a household with a mom and a dad. And “to fill the paternal hole in their soul,” they often turn to drugs and alcohol, or get in trouble with the law, as commission member W. Bradford Wilcox explains. Further, he says: “The offspring of maverick moms are 177 percent more likely to have a problem with substance abuse and are 146 percent more likely to report having had a run-in with the law, compared with offspring of two biological parents.”

Are twelve-year-old girls going to run out to get artificially inseminated because Jennifer Aniston points to it as a perfectly mainstream option for a modern woman? Of course not. But might a look at a movie trailer just be another cultural influence telling them that Chelsea Clinton’s getting married is just a throwback to an old custom we used to have? That mom and dad and kids are really now but a “stereotype”? Maybe a Fox News hang-up, too?

As my colleague Richard Brookhiser wrote in response to the Quayle speech: “Culture affects behavior. Dan Quayle isn’t the only person who believes this. Every feminist who applauded Thelma and Louise, every parent who wonders about the effects of cop-show violence on his kids, every aging rock critic who credits Elvis with jolting America out of the sexless somnolence of the 50’s thinks culture changes hearts and minds. The question is: In what direction?”

This was the question Bill O’Reilly was asking. This is the question Dan Quayle was asking.

Back in the infamous speech, Quayle said: “It’s time to talk again about family, hard work, integrity, and personal responsibility. We cannot be embarrassed out of our belief that two parents, married to each other, are better in most cases for children than one. That honest work is better than hand-outs -- or crime. That we are our brothers’ keepers. That it’s worth making an effort, even when the rewards aren’t immediate.”

That moment has not passed. The traditional family is not a “stereotype,” but civilizationally foundational. And it is not too late to remind twelve-year-old girls of who they can be. And that they can even want to be it.

— Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online. She can be reached at klopez@nationalreview.com. This column is available exclusively through United Media. For permission to reprint or excerpt it, please contact Carmen Puello at cpuello@unitedmedia.com.

Kathryn Jean Lopez