Georgia Republicans will return to the polls tomorrow to choose a nominee for governor. This runoff election will conclude the race between two conservative candidates: the Sarah Palin–endorsed former Georgia secretary of state Karen Handel, and Newt Gingrich–backed former congressman Nathan Deal.

Polling has been limited, but an August 5 InsiderAdvantage/WSB-TV survey of 514 likely Republican voters has the race at a 46–46 tie.

Attacks between Handel and Deal have been fierce. In an advertisement titled “Solid,” Handel refers to Deal as “a corrupt relic of Washington, D.C.” Prior to resigning from Congress for his gubernatorial bid, Deal was under investigation by the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) over allegations that he used his office in an effort to “preserve a state vehicle inspection program that had generated significant personal benefit for him and a business partner,” according to an OCE report.

#ad#Handel has sought to portray herself as a reformer and a political outsider. “Handel brings the message of an outsider. She has plans for ethics reform and a plan for job creation,” says her spokesman Dan McLagan. He adds, “She is not a career legislator that brings Washington solutions for Georgia problems.”

The Deal campaign sharply repudiates Handel’s allegations. “She makes it seem as though every elected official in Georgia should be in prison,” says Brian Robinson, a Deal spokesman. “She is a ‘Janie Come-Lately’ when it comes to this issue [of ethics reform].” Robinson adds that Deal is not the target of a federal investigation.

Robinson also characterizes Handel as a political opportunist who is unqualified to become governor. “She has run the Seinfeld campaign, a campaign about nothing.” He dismisses Sarah Palin’s endorsement: “All [Handel] has is a handful of mud. Karen Handel is not a momma grizzly. She’s a pander bear.”

Deal’s strategy appears to be to paint himself as the conservative candidate in the race and try and attract those who voted for Eric Johnson and John Oxendine, the candidates who finished third and fourth, respectively. Winning these voters could be crucial for willing the runoff. “The candidates who finished third and fourth took the bulk of the votes in South Georgia. An endorsement from one or both of them would be helpful,” says University of Georgia political-science professor Charles Bullock. Oxendine and Johnson are yet to endorse a candidate in the runoff.

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Robinson believes that Oxendine and Johnson voters will support Deal. “Internal polling shows Oxendine voters backing us and some Johnson voters starting to support us too,” Robinson says. According to the campaign, Deal has the endorsement of 24 of 34 GOP state senators and 31 GOP state representatives.

Some political observers think this strategy will backfire, however. Whit Ayres -- founder of public-opinion firm Ayres, McHenry & Associates, and someone who has worked extensively in southern politics -- says these endorsements are worthless. “Karen Handel has run as an outsider who will clean up state government. Having the very people in power endorsing Deal will only help her campaign,” he says. He has taken on Handel as a client, and expresses no doubt who will win: “Karen Handel will win because she is clean as a whistle, has an ethical record, and Nathan Deal is ethically challenged.”

#ad#The effect that this primary will have on the general election remains to be seen. A Rasmussen Reports poll released two days after the primary showed Deal with a 49–43 lead over Democratic nominee and former governor Roy Barnes, and Handel with a statistically insignificant 45–44 lead over Barnes. “This is a runoff in which the GOP candidates are tearing each other up. This could benefit Roy Barnes,” says Merle Black of Emory University’s political-science department.

But some, such as Bullock, believe the Republican is still likely to win. “I expect that Georgia’s next governor will be a Republican,” Bullock says. “This is a red state. It has not elected a Democrat to a statewide open position since 1998.”

Bullock also believes that turnout may favor the Republican candidate. He notes that while Republicans had a 44–32 advantage in 2006, the Democrats had a 38–35 margin in the 2008 election, which saw Obama’s victory. Yet it evaporated just one month later, in the December U.S. Senate runoff between Republican Saxby Chambliss and unsuccessful challenger Jim Martin. “Having Mike Thurmond [the challenger to GOP Sen. Johnny Isakson] at the top of the Democratic ticket in 2010 will not have the drawing power that Obama had,” Bullock says.

 

— Jesse Naiman, a Collegiate Network intern at National Review, is editor-in-chief of The Observer at Boston College.

When the House convenes today in a special session to vote on a $26 billion package of aid funds for state and local governments, it will have to decide whether to single out one state -- Texas -- for special treatment. This is not the kind of special treatment that we’re used to seeing in Washington, where senators often secure extra benefits for their states in return for their votes. Instead, Democrats are trying to punish Texas for its fiscal responsibility, above and beyond the punishment inherent in a “state bailout” that is intended mostly to help spendthrift states such as California, but that Texas taxpayers must help pay for nevertheless.

The provision in question, an amendment authored by Rep. Lloyd Doggett, an Austin Democrat, would deny Texas its share of the bill’s education funds unless its governor “provides an assurance” that it will not reduce the percentage of total revenues it spends on education at any time in the next three years. Gov. Rick Perry argues that this is impossible: The state legislature controls education funding in Texas, not the governor, and the governor cannot bind future legislatures to any level of spending. Because Perry cannot provide the kind of assurance the Doggett amendment appears to require, he argues that it would deny Texas, and only Texas, over $800 million in education funds.

#ad#Doggett has fired back that this is nonsense: When Perry applied for $3.2 billion in education funds from the stimulus bill that passed last year, he signed a “maintenance of effort” pledge committing Texas to keep education spending above 2006 levels. All Doggett wants, he says, is for Perry to sign a similar pledge this time. But Doggett is ignoring the fact that, along with his state’s application, Perry submitted a letter to Education Secretary Arne Duncan stating: “After a great deal of review and hard work, Texas leaders determined that federal rules pertaining to [the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund] do not commit Texas to future revenue or spending obligations.”

It is important to note that this isn’t just a meaningless line Perry used as cover for taking federal dollars: In areas where he determined that federal rules would commit Texas to future revenue or spending obligations, he turned down federal money. Perry famously rejected over $550 million in increased unemployment-insurance funding because he determined that accepting the aid would require the state to raise benefit levels (and, eventually, taxes). With regard to the education funds in the stimulus, however, Perry concluded that non-binding “assurances” of the kind the stimulus bill required of all states would not interfere with Texas’s autonomy: Saying your state can probably keep nominal levels of education spending above where they were in 2006 is one thing; promising to maintain or raise spending levels as a percentage of total state revenues, as the Doggett amendment requires, is quite another.

Following Perry’s acceptance of stimulus funds for education in 2009, the Texas legislature reduced education spending by $3.2 billion, plugged the hole with federal money, and used the savings to shore up a rainy-day fund. This move infuriated Democrats in the Texas congressional delegation, who wrote an angry letter to the speaker of the Texas house. Their letter gave the game away regarding the true purpose of the education funds in the last stimulus as well as the education funds in the current state-bailout bill. It conceded that Texas did not face a shortfall in its education budget and therefore had no need for federal aid. But it argued that, instead of using the money to prepare for future budget shortfalls, Texas should spend it “as the law directs, ‘to provide local educational agencies in the State with subgrants,’” regardless of whether those agencies were facing shortfalls.

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This was an obvious attempt to force Texas into future increases in education spending by juicing the local districts with a temporary influx of federal aid and thus raising the amount they expect to receive every year. In future years, if the federal government ever decides to stop passing stimulus bills, local districts will complain that the state government is forcing them to undertake “massive cuts” because it is either unwilling or unable to pick up where Washington left off.

Meanwhile, the Texas legislature’s decision to save the money from the first stimulus is looking like a wise move. Texas is facing an $18 billion shortfall this year, which its $10 billion rainy-day fund will help it weather. That won’t be enough, of course, and Texas officials are asking agency heads to trim 5 percent from all departments and looking at ways to raise revenue without having adverse effects on economic growth.

#ad#But if Texas lawmakers had listened to Doggett, they’d have about $3 billion less to work with, and the cuts local school districts are complaining about would have to be deeper, because they would be coming out of a higher baseline. Nor are those local school districts in as much trouble as they would have you believe; Sara Talbert of Texas Budget Source recently reported that the five largest districts in Texas are sitting on over $550 million in reserve funds. As Perry pointed out in his letter to Duncan last year, total funding for public education in Texas has increased by 66 percent since 2002, with the state’s share of that funding going up by 80 percent.

At a time when Texas and other fiscally responsible states need maximum flexibility to balance their budgets without resorting to growth-killing taxes, Democrats have decided that stronger handcuffs are needed to bring troublemakers such as Perry into line. But Perry has decided that the Doggett amendment, unlike previous “maintenance of effort” requirements, places impossible constraints on Texas’s autonomy, and the state’s lawyers sound prepared to fight back. “The Governor cannot assure the federal government at this time what the 82nd Legislature will do,” said Texas attorney general Greg Abbott in a statement. “The State’s inability to legally comply with the Doggett Amendment means that Texas is the only state that cannot receive federal dollars under this bill, as it is currently written.”

Doggett set out to force Perry to fund education in the state of Texas at the level at which Democrats in Washington want it funded. Instead, he’s kicked off a high-stakes game of chicken between the advocates of dependency and the state leaders determined to resist them.

 

— Stephen Spruiell is a National Review Online staff reporter.

 

The proposal to build a mosque two blocks north of Ground Zero has provoked a heated debate in the nation about that quintessential American right, religious freedom, and its limits in this age of Islamist terrorism. That there are limits -- that is, beyond the areas in which the law is already clear, including prohibitions against acts of violence, certain types of discrimination, and polygamy -- has at last been recognized in recent Obama policies and pronouncements.

#ad#In fact, the Obama administration has weighed in with a comment specifically directed to the matter of the Ground Zero mosque. During the Q&A at a daily briefing last week, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs stated that America is “not at war with a religion but with an idea that has corrupted a religion.” Without elaborating, he quickly shifted responsibility for the matter of the Ground Zero mosque to local authorities. Delphic in its brevity, the administration’s formulation nevertheless is significant. Unlike the recent National Security Strategy document, it acknowledges that America must defend itself against not only those committing or financing terror in the name of Islam, but also those promoting radical ideas in the context of Islam. This could serve as a useful reference in the controversy over the Ground Zero mosque.

An example of where religious freedom might be limited in the light of the new Islamist challenge was provided in a dramatic way this spring when the administration designated longtime al-Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki, an American based in Yemen, as someone to be captured or killed. Al-Awlaki apparently crossed the line with his fiery web sermons and religious directives over a period of years that incited at least three men to stage terror attacks in the United States in the last year. More recently, the administration also adopted policies prohibiting other people from giving the radical cleric assistance, including legal representation, unless they obtain a waiver.

In that context, it is important to remember that shutting down a particular religious establishment -- or preventing it from being built -- does not constitute barring a religion as a whole, as Mayor Bloomberg erroneously suggested. (“If somebody wants to build a religious house of worship, they should do it and we shouldn’t be in the business of picking which religions can and which religions can’t.”) It could all depend on what the building is used for, how it is operated, and now, after the Al-Awlaki determination, what is the impact of the preaching and instruction that takes place there -- is it likely to motivate people to plan terrorist attacks?

Much of what we know of the plans for the Ground Zero mosque comes from the man who is most frequently cited in articles written on the subject, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. Born in 1948 in Kuwait, of Egyptian descent, the Muslim leader has become known over the past quarter-century as a bridge builder in Manhattan’s interfaith circles through his nonprofit group, the Cordoba Initiative. He also has acquired a reputation for being a master of ambiguity, someone who practices the art of “dialogue” by framing his positions in such a way that they can be understood differently by different people. He seems to make it a practice to utter opposing views in the same breath, and to state different things to different audiences. A good example of the former occurred in a 60 Minutes interview about 9/11. He stated first, “I wouldn’t say that the United States deserved what happened,” and then in the next sentence, “But United States policies were an accessory to the crime that happened.”

#page#As an example of the latter, his latest book has been published under two titles. In the United States, it has the reassuring title What’s Right with Islam Is What’s Right with America. The title for readers abroad, however, sends the disturbing signal that there may be a link between his missionary work (dawa) and Osama bin Laden’s terrorism: A Call to Prayer from the World Trade Center Rubble: Islamic Dawa in the Heart of America Post-9/11. When a radio interviewer this June tried to pin him down on whether he agreed with the State Department’s designation of Hamas as a terrorist organization, he indignantly refused to give a straight answer: “I’m not a politician. I try to avoid the issues. The issue of terrorism is a very complex question. I am a peace builder. . . . I will not allow anybody to put me in a position where I am seen by any party in the world as an adversary or as an enemy.” Giving all sides a little something of what they want to hear seems to be his stock in trade.

#ad#This pattern is worth bearing in mind when evaluating his proposal for the Ground Zero complex, which he calls “Cordoba House.” (The term “Cordoba,” which he adopted both for his dialogue organization and for the Ground Zero project, is itself ambiguous; it can symbolize either interfaith harmony or Islamic conquest.) Rauf describes his vision for the proposed building as “about promoting integration, tolerance of difference, and community cohesion through arts and culture.” He elaborates on this: “Cordoba House will provide a place where individuals, regardless of their backgrounds, will find a center of learning, art, and culture; and most importantly, a center guided by Islamic values in their truest form -- compassion, generosity, and respect for all.”

In his July 21 article for the Washington Post’s “On Faith” blog, the imam announces, “Our community center is not a mosque.” Instead, he states, it will have a “prayer space for many religions,” as well as “recreational facilities, meeting rooms, an auditorium, [and] banquet facilities,” “other amenities that a community needs to be healthy, vibrant and strong,” and “a public memorial to the victims of 9/11.” He emphasizes: “The center will be open to everyone, not just Muslims. That is our mission -- to provide common ground for people of all faiths.”

On his own website, he seems even more emphatic. After reprinting the statement of support for the project by Mayor Bloomberg, who calls it a “house of worship,” Imam Feisal corrects him: “[W]e reiterate our point that the Cordoba House is not intended to be a house of worship, exclusive to Muslims.” The imam then proceeds to describe the project in detail: “The site will contain tremendous amounts of resources that otherwise would not exist in Lower Manhattan; a 500-seat auditorium, swimming pool, art exhibition spaces, bookstores, restaurants -- all these services would form a cultural nexus for a region of New York City that, as it continues to grow, requires the sort of hub that Cordoba House will provide.” He makes no mention of a mosque.

What Imam Feisal is describing here seems to be a no-strings-attached gift to lower Manhattan from a group of idealistic Muslims who aim to soothe interfaith tensions at Ground Zero. In describing a “prayer space for many religions,” he seems to paint a picture of a place where Muslims of every stripe (Sunnis, Shiites, Sufis, Ahmadiyyas, Koranists), along with Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Zoroastrians, and even Baha’i (who are viciously persecuted in the Arab world), can all offer prayers together in interfaith services, and where each faith group can pray separately in its own tradition in space designated for it.

#page#The imam compellingly asks: “What could be a better monument to the victims of 9/11 than a community center whose very presence is an affront to extremists everywhere?” This would indeed be anathema to hardliners: One example of the extremist view is a tract published by Riyadh’s Ibn Taymiyya Press and disseminated in the United States that emphatically instructs Muslims: “Be dissociated from the infidels, hate them for their religion, leave them, never rely on them for support, do not admire them, and always oppose them in every way according to Islamic law.” Imam Feisal’s description, in contrast, sounds good.

#ad#But, apart from the ambiguity of the imam’s statements generally, there is another problem with relying on his vision for the Ground Zero space. It seems that Imam Feisal, though a partner in the endeavor, is not really in charge. A July 24 interview with the project’s lead developer, Sharif el-Gamal, the CEO of SoHo Properties, discloses that he is the one who actually holds title to the property. And he tells a somewhat different story.

Mr. el-Gamal states that a yet-to-be-created nonprofit will actually be in control of this center, not Imam Feisal, who will be only one of many directors of the board and will be in charge only of that part of the operation dealing with “interfaith programming,” which is what will be called “Cordoba House.” El-Gamal states that he cannot reveal the names of the other 22 directors nor that of the executive director, since they have not yet been selected.

El-Gamal clearly describes his plan for the space to be an Islamic center that will include a mosque, and not any other house of worship. (The imam never specifically writes that there won’t be a mosque at the site, and he may have meant only that the building would include much more than a mosque.) El-Gamal explains that there is a need for such a mosque, pointing out, “There are probably one million Muslims in the tri-state area and several hundred thousand in New York City.” He does not say how many of these the proposed mosque aims to hold. As for non-Muslims, they will be more than welcome to share, if not “common ground,” at least Islamic ground.

El-Gamal affirms that the building, which he refers to as “Park51,” will function essentially as an Islamic community center promoting tolerance and understanding among New Yorkers, loosely modeled on the YMCAs, or on the New York Jewish community’s 92nd Street Y. Apart from the mosque, it will have three types of programs open to all New Yorkers: “arts and culture, education, and recreation.” We might ask, however, whether these programs will be free of proselytizing, and whether they will follow some sharia rules -- for example, gender segregation in the pool.

Like Rauf, el-Gamal articulates a broad, noble vision: “We'll offer all New Yorkers valuable services, world-class facilitie,s and empowering opportunities to learn more about the world around us and about each other.” Though he is not in a position to guarantee it, he avows: “What we do not have room for are extremist views and opinions. Radical and hateful agendas will have no place in our community center or in the mosque.”

#page#Although Mayor Bloomberg doesn’t think so, where the money will be found for this endeavor -- estimated at $100 million in building costs, and an unknown amount in annual operating costs -- is a pertinent question. And it is one that neither the imam nor el-Gamal has publicly answered. El-Gamal, who is said to be in his late 30s, does not appear to have the money himself. Information about his background is sketchy, but, according to unconfirmed web reports, he is of Egyptian heritage, born in Liberia, and, a few years before becoming a multi-million-dollar real-estate investor, he was waiting tables at New York City restaurants. El-Gamal gives his assurances that he and his colleagues will refuse assistance from potential donors “who are flagged by our security consultants or any government agencies.” This seems to mean that money will not be accepted from designated terrorist charities, but it does not close the door to donations from such fountainheads of Islamic radicalism as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Libya. Claudia Rosett reports that Imam Feisal is about to embark on a month-long State Department–sponsored tour to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other Gulf states, and she raises the question of whether he will be doing some fundraising for the mosque during his travels.

#ad#As the 2005 study I prepared for Freedom House demonstrated, radical Saudi educational materials have been exported to some of America’s largest mosques, including the Washington Islamic Center in the nation’s capital, which distributed the Ibn Taymiyyah Press tract cited above. This literature calls for Muslims to “spill the blood” of apostates, polytheists (which includes Shiites), homosexuals, and adulterers; declares illegitimate any democratic state governed by “infidel” laws; calls for Muslims to work to establish sharia states in the West through both through aggressive dawa and militant jihad; promotes war to eradicate Israel; and are virulently anti-American.

So far, these radical ideas have been deemed protected under the First Amendment, and none of the mosques or Islamic centers named in the study have been shut down by government authorities (though some foreign imams associated with some of them have been expelled or barred from the country). For example, the Saudi-founded King Fahd Mosque in the west side of Los Angeles, near LAX, remains open. This mosque has distributed radical literature during the past decade, and it was here that two of the Saudi 9/11 hijackers promptly went upon their arrival in America. They made it their base, receiving assistance and friendship while making preparations for the attack on the Twin Towers. The mosque’s imam, Fahad al Thumairy, a well-known Wahhabi extremist and Saudi diplomat, was finally expelled by the U.S. in 2003 for suspected terror connections. The Al Farouq mosque in Brooklyn also has not been shuttered despite its promotion of jihad, both through radical literature on the subject and through sermons by Omar Abdel Rahman, the Blind Sheik, who was eventually convicted of seditious conspiracy for planning the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; another past imam there was a Guyana missionary who is the father of al-Qaeda’s new head of global operations, the American-raised Adnan Shukrijumah. The large Dar Al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Va., constructed with the help of the Saudi embassy, also remains open, although it has a long history of radical connections. Al-Awlaki himself preached there; it hosted some of the 9/11 hijackers; the Fort Hood murderer was associated with it and it may have been partly responsible for his radicalization; and it has distributed radical Saudi educational materials.

#page#Regarding the Ground Zero mosque, based on the information provided by the two partners in the project, we know very little about who will eventually be its directors, or who will fund it. It is the answers to these questions that will determine whether the Ground Zero mosque will be an “affront to extremists everywhere,” or, alternatively, whether it will threaten our homeland security by hindering our war against a dangerous idea that has “corrupted” Islam.

#ad#It is not “Islamophobic” or disrespectful to seek answers to these questions. Transparency is one of our best defenses in this ideological war. At the August 5 briefing for the rollout of this year’s Country Reports on Terrorism, the coordinator of the State Department’s Office of Counterterrorism, Amb. Daniel Benjamin, noted that, in addition to realizing that al-Qaeda has the capacity to strike our homeland, Americans have “learned something else important in the last year.” He went on to explain: “The assumption that Americans have some special immunity to al-Qaeda’s ideology was dispelled. While our overall domestic radicalization problem remains significantly less than in many Western nations, several high-profile cases demonstrate that we must remain vigilant.” This is a warning we would all do well to heed.

The Obama administration has not stated where it intends to draw the line on the continuum of radical Islamist ideology. Such limits will likely emerge on a case-by-case basis. The stream of American Muslims from Minnesota who have been inspired to join Somalia’s terrorist group, for example, could prompt the administration to take further measures in this regard. Ultimately, it will be up to the courts to  decide how to balance religious freedom against national and homeland security. In fact, the ACLU is already challenging the administration’s action on al-Awlaki, arguing that the government has disregarded  the standard  that the violence be “imminent” set  by the Supreme Court for limiting speech that incites violence in the landmark 1969 Brandenburg case. 

Our Constitution rightly protects the building of houses of worship, even when public sensibilities are offended -- unlike, for example, Egypt, which uses just such a standard to limit the building of churches. The possibility that the Islamic center could be a propaganda gift to the enemy by the mere fact of its proximity to Ground Zero (the site was close enough that the building there was damaged in the 9/11 attacks) has been deemed by authorities not to clear the high bar of the First Amendment as a reason to permit its banning. Whether Park51 (or any other American mosque) will become a center of radicalism to an extent warranting its closure for the sake of homeland security -- either under the new al-Awlaki standard or under some future standard necessitated by compelling reasons emerging within the ideological war at large -- will remain to be seen.

-- Nina Shea, a lawyer, is a senior fellow of the Hudson Institute and director of its Center on Religious Freedom.

‘St. Augustine instructed that our love is our weight, best exemplified by the overwhelming remorse he experienced at the death of his beloved mother, Monica. If so, the weight of Chambers’s love was directed towards liberating men from the worship of ideological gods.” So writes Richard M. Reinsch II in his first book, Whittaker Chambers: The Spirit of a Counterrevolutionary. Reinsch’s look at Chambers argues for his impact on the Cold War era and for his continued relevance today. A program officer at the Liberty Fund, Reinsch talks to National Review Online’s Kathryn Lopez about Chambers, the book, and some NR history.

 

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: How was Whittaker Chambers a counterrevolutionary?

RICHARD M. REINSCH II: He states that effective opposition to Communism will not come from modern liberalism and that political freedom can only be understood in light of the Christian reading of man’s nature and destiny. I think the most interesting aspect of Chambers’s writing, which goes beyond Witness, is his sense that modern liberalism, the inevitable output of the continental Enlightenment as he sees it, appeals to the same desiccated humanism that informs Communism. However, in appealing to a similar anti-theist humanism as Communist ideology, modern liberalism was unable to articulate a positive response to the Communist system. Inherently, modern liberalism discounts man and does not tell the truth about who he is. Remember John Paul II’s words in Havana in 1998, when he told Cubans that they were more than Marxists told them they were. A similar sentiment is found in Chambers’s writing.


#ad#LOPEZ: Chambers famously said he left the winning side for the losing side. You’re all about that. How are we the losers? Didn’t we win the Cold War?

REINSCH: That’s exactly it; the statement was so manifestly wrong. Obviously, in retrospect, Chambers, like Solzhenitsyn, overlooked the reserves of liberty and spontaneity that were still present in liberal democracies. Chambers also failed to grasp the superiority of free markets. He was, however, not alone in these failures.

Consider the following anecdote. In November of 1952, Chambers was hospitalized in Baltimore after a heart attack and met a Passionist monk named Father Alan. Chambers asked him whether it was too strong a statement to say that the West was doomed. Fr. Alan’s response was quite revealing: “Who says that the West deserved to be saved”? Implicit in this answer was the notion that nothing was guaranteed to the West, because it had jettisoned its foundational truths. Chambers’s idea was that the West had adopted a materialism comparable, in many respects, to the intrinsic workings of Communist ideology and was therefore unable to engage in the deep metaphysical and religious reflection necessary to renew itself. We won the Cold War, but much of our confusion remains with us. There’s another reason why triumphalism is a strange response to our Cold War victory, and that is our demographic winter. Is a civilization that vanquishes its foe but can’t even reproduce itself one that has the answers correct?


LOPEZ: Is that what the tea-party is about, at least in part?

REINSCH: The tea-party movement, which is certainly one of the best political developments for conservatism in decades, will, I hope, continue to wage war for the first principles of constitutional government. It is a manly attempt to reclaim the ground of self-government. I think the parallel with Chambers’s boldness is that the tea partiers want the truth; they want to tell the truth and be told the truth.

We forget, but when Chambers stepped forward and told the truth about Hiss, he knocked the bloom off the rose of American progressivism. It really was the first time that an American conservative was able to deeply resonate with the American people about the challenge progressivism was issuing to constitutional government. I think the tea-party movement builds on this Chambers moment and sees the severe material deformations that have resulted from progressivism since then.

#page#LOPEZ: What exactly are the “strange and jealous gods of the West”? Are they the same today as when Chambers protested them? 

REINSCH: These are the gods of our own making that certain intellectual leaders in the West began to construct once the tragic dimension of life was dismissed. Chambers is brilliant on this point in his essay “Faith for a Lenten Age.” He moves through the writings of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Barth, and Reinhold Niebuhr to recall man’s dichotomies and the existential torment man must face. Chambers’s judgment was swift: There are no Promethean shortcuts. He saw modern liberalism urging man to believe himself beyond original sin and rushing headlong towards perfection, but for Chambers, the pursuit of perfection is disastrous, because it relies on an anti-theist and ultimately anti-human humanism. Ideology constructs upon reality a system that removes man from his existential limitedness; no longer conceived as a being between two eternities, a denatured man assumes godlike status, projecting truth on empty matter and demanding its transformation. Thus ideology compels obedience from all competing understandings of the human predicament.


#ad#LOPEZ: How important is God -- and in particular the Cross -- in the life and thought of Chambers?

REINSCH: Much of what Chambers does is really incomprehensible without his conversion to Christianity; his understanding of Christianity is total and existential, and, as I argue in the book, he sees himself as a victim-soul in his manifold witnesses. He decried the comfortable decadence of mainline American Protestantism, and he was right; look at those churches today. The differences for Chambers were original sin, pride, and anxiety: These were the parts of man that Christianity spoke to in a way superior to any other set of ideas. (Of course, Christianity is not an idea.)

I think his best thoughts on Christianity’s meaning are in his description of his confused state after leaving the Communist underground: “What I had been fell from me like dirty rags. The rags that fell from me were not only Communism. What fell was the whole web of the materialist modern mind -- the luminous shroud it has spun around the spirit of man, paralyzing in the name of rationalism the instinct of his soul for God.”


LOPEZ: You compare Chambers to St. Augustine. Isn’t that a bit much?

REINSCH: I’m not arguing that Chambers bears the same significance as St. Augustine. The comparison is that both men intended for their religious conversions to be exemplary. Also, both were converting away from what they regarded, correctly I think, as intellectual heresy. This cognitive unlearning was a tremendous part of the conversions of both. They didn’t merely shed their respective errors -- they shed vital parts of their self-understanding.

Chambers also came to understand Augustine’s notion that love is our weight. We become what we love. This is why intellectual error is so disfiguring to man.

#page#LOPEZ: Would Chambers recognize the Left of today?

REINSCH: In certain respects, yes. The Left of today has obviously shed its belief in the necessity of comprehensive planning -- although Donald Berwick’s speeches, assuming they are representative, cause us to reconsider the conventional wisdom. But the Left certainly retains an existential belief in planning.

#ad#Chambers would recognize the Left’s fundamental disloyalty to the dignity and nature of man, as well as its great confusion about liberty, its objects and purposes. The inability to think through the implications of biotechnology, human sexuality, and the issues underlying the culture of death remain with us, and they pour out of the Left’s confusion about man.


LOPEZ: The Right?

REINSCH: Oh, sure. However, one of the most perplexing things about Chambers, at least to me, is how few of the Right’s certainties he shared. (This comes up in his correspondence with William F. Buckley over the prospect of his joining National Review.) Appeals to a purist capitalism left Chambers uninspired. He also thought that Frank Meyer, Frank Chodorov, and Russell Kirk -- these early conservative lions -- were too abstract from political realities. They wanted to roll back the state, undo the New Deal, return to another era, whereas Chambers was more pragmatic. For him, politics is not a direct moral judgment or preference for the good, but is an attempt to think coherently about the goods we have put in common. He’s almost Aristotelian in this regard. He understood the complexity of political reality. I think he anticipates the Reagan coalition and the need conservatism had for such a grouping in order to exercise power in a modern republic.


LOPEZ: What does the Republican revolution of 1994 have to do with Chambers and your book?

REINSCH: I note the ’94 revolution at the beginning of the book because it was a central part of my early political formation. Being on a college campus in its aftermath was exciting; its final undoing in the years of George W. Bush led me to this book. I thought politics was the summum bonum of conservatism. I was wrong.

I wrote the preface of the book in the early days of Obama, when the problems and weaknesses of American conservatism stood revealed, and I kept thinking that conservatism makes its arguments too often from a utilitarian standard or with rather crass appeals to middle-class comfort. We don’t see into the heart of democratic man at this moment and understand the full scope of our problems. Chambers understood these problems well.

#page#LOPEZ: What lessons might Chambers offer in 2010, should Republicans win?

REINSCH: I’m not sure Chambers gives definite answers in this regard. I think he has a broad understanding of conservatism as creating spaces for liberty to flourish. Chambers thought the Taft-Hartley Act was critical in this regard, because it defanged labor unions, allowing for freedom of contract and the mobility of labor to still happen in certain states.


#ad#LOPEZ: How significant was his relationship with Bill Buckley to his thought and life?

REINSCH: Chambers remarked to his wife that Buckley was a “man born not made.” He held him in high regard. I think it fair to say that Chambers was probably a part of Buckley’s own political learning, even though Buckley seemed to discount this in later years. Buckley moves away from an Albert Jay Nock–style libertarian philosophy because of Willmoore Kendall, but also because of Chambers, who, I think, was his conscience on political matters in the 1950s. This isn’t to say that Chambers said it to Buckley and out it came, but that he was an anchor. Their correspondence on the broken West, the bruiser Joseph McCarthy, the Catholic Church in Poland and Hungary, and the direction conservatism needed to take indicates that a substantial conversation occurred between these men.


LOPEZ: Can one read your book without having read Witness?

REINSCH: Sure. I hope it leads people to Witness, which remains one of the best American autobiographies. The intensity, the literary and philosophical allusions, his understanding of modernity, of man -- these things make it timeless.


LOPEZ: Why is your book relevant to hard-working Americans who don’t work in politics or media? After all, they don’t have a ton of time.

REINSCH: We must be citizens. It presents the complete Chambers, provides pointers in the right directions for those who want more, and locates us as Americans in a different way from what many conservatives write.


LOPEZ: How can a policymaker or candidate benefit from your book? 

REINSCH: How can you govern if you don’t know the men and ideas that profoundly shaped our present? If you want to understand the follies of planning, then you should read Hayek, of course, but also Chambers. He offers psychological and spiritual insights that go to the bleeding heart of your opponents. So, heed him before you go on the hustings.


LOPEZ: How long did it take you to write Whittaker Chambers: The Spirit of a Counterrevolutionary?

REINSCH: A year and a half.

#page#LOPEZ: What is your favorite of Chambers’s writings?
 
REINSCH: An essay he wrote on the classically trained performer Marian Anderson, entitled “In Egypt Land.” Anderson was a brilliant performer who experienced segregation as a black woman in the 1940s and 1950s, which led her to perform Negro spirituals, to keep time with the deprivation imposed by Jim Crow laws. Chambers notes that this kind of problem will never be solved by the law alone, but only through forgiveness and self-limitation. The essay is Chambers at his best.


#ad#LOPEZ: What is your favorite of Chambers’s pieces for NR?

REINSCH: The Rand takedown. Commissioned by Buckley, Chambers’s essay “Big Sister Is Watching You” serves notice that Rand’s vision in Atlas Shrugged, while capable of being seen as a heroic depiction of entrepreneurs responding to collectivism, involved a flattened humanism. In 1957, when the piece was written, conservatism was in flux; the battle for its center and for its commanding heights was not settled. Chambers put paid to the notion that the American Right would be defined by Randian rational egoism, which he regarded as a heresy: not wholly wrong, but wrong enough in its distortion and rejection of foundational truths.

For Rand, man was never truer to himself than when acting in pursuit of self-interest as Rand defined it; modern liberty, capitalism, and unbounded individualism were the markers of man’s existential happiness. The clue for Chambers, apart from Rand’s suffocating ideology, was the prominence of sexual adventurism and the relative absence of family and children in her writing. Chambers understood that love unlocks the real purpose of our being -- self-gift, not incessant self-interest, would reveal to man his own nobility and capacity for greatness.

The piece stands as a testament to Chambers’s wisdom. He is the preeminent conservative.


LOPEZ: What’s your most fun fact about Chambers?

REINSCH: He once climbed a fire escape in New York to see Calvin Coolidge.

-- Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online.

Republicans are starting to think about how to answer the Robert Redford question.

You know the scene. In the 1972 movie The Candidate, the Redford character, having won the election, turns to his political consultant and asks, “What do I do now?”

Many Republicans fear they will look as clueless as Redford. They entered this campaign cycle with little hope of winning congressional majorities. Now they have a good chance to do so in the House and an outside chance in the Senate.

#ad#Some cynical Republicans say candidates should just harp on their opposition to the policies of the Obama Democrats and figure out what to do if they’re in the majority when they get there. Others say they should present public-policy alternatives.

Some young House Republicans have put out a call for voters to e-mail their ideas. And House Republican leaders say they’ll put together something in the nature of a 1994-style Contract with America over the August recess.

That’s a good idea. Politicians like to win elections. But if they’re not in the business in order to shape public policy, why are they there at all?

Let’s put this in some historic perspective.

Liberal historians like to depict the past 100 years as a story of step-by-step progress from small government to big government, a progress they see as both inevitable and desirable.

But another way to look at it is to note that after each spasm of big-government legislation, there has been a strong voter backlash. That was the case in the big Republican victory in the 1946 off-year elections right after World War II. And in the 1966 elections, about which I wrote last week, after the passage of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

It happened again with Ronald Reagan’s 44-state landslide in 1980, when Republicans won a Senate majority for the first time in 28 years. And again in 1994, after the Clinton tax increases and health-care plan, when Republicans won both houses in Congress for the first time in 40 years.

#page#
Polls tell us it could happen again this November.

The question is what winning Republicans did with their victories. The answers vary.

After 1946, Republicans passed a big tax cut, ended wartime wage and price controls, and limited the powers of labor unions. These were enduring public-policy successes.

#ad#After 1966, Republicans didn’t achieve much. Richard Nixon, elected president in 1968, continued the anti-poverty program, instituted wage and price controls, created the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency, established racial quotas and preferences, and proposed a guaranteed annual income -- not a conservative success story.

After 1980, Ronald Reagan got Congress to pass major tax cuts and some spending cuts, continued the deregulation begun in the Ford and Carter years and pursued a defense buildup that produced a peaceful victory in the Cold War.

And after 1994, congressional Republicans froze spending and produced balanced budgets, passed market-oriented health measures, and passed education-accountability legislation. Things got patchy toward the end of the twelve years of Republican majorities, but there’s a lot to say for their record as a whole.

There are some obvious targets for Republicans if they win big this year. Democrats have jacked up domestic spending sharply; some reversal should be possible. The many glitches in Obamacare, some apparent now and others as yet undiscovered, could form a basis for derailment if not repeal.

Giveaways to labor unions, like the $26 billion package for the teacher unions that the House is to be summoned back from its recess to pass, presumably will be off the table.

Larger issues need to be addressed. We’re overdue for a simplifying tax reform. And there is the looming crisis in entitlements -- Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

There is an assumption in the political world that spending cuts will be unpopular: Americans, it is said, are ideologically conservative but operationally liberal.

But there is some evidence that voters will back governors who cut spending, such as Mitch Daniels, reelected while Barack Obama was carrying Indiana in 2008, and Bob McDonnell and Chris Christie, elected in Virginia and New Jersey in 2009 and now enjoying good job ratings.

One reason is that as candidates, they let voters know what they would do. There are risks in taking stands. But there are also risks in looking as clueless as Robert Redford.

— Michael Barone is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner. © 2010 the Washington Examiner. 

EDITOR’S NOTE: This column is available exclusively through United Media. For permission to reprint or excerpt this copyrighted material, please contact Carmen Puello.

When it comes to the signature legislation of the current Democrat-run Washington, Nancy Pelosi and her House of Representatives have been about hiding the truth. In contrast, a House under a Speaker John Boehner would be about Hyde -- Henry Hyde.

House Republicans went back to their districts at the end of July with a draft agenda for the fall campaign and priorities for a 112th Congress that they hope will be in their care. Included in it, in the health-care section, is this, a commitment to permanently prohibit taxpayer funding of abortion: “Congress should codify the Hyde Amendment and explicitly prohibit all federal funds from being used to pay for abortion.”

#ad#In a Washington where even self-identified pro-life legislators have been known to drown in the overwhelmingly manipulative spin of those who would hide abortion under a veil of “reproductive rights” or “women’s health,” it’s a groundbreaking goal. It’s also absolutely necessary. And there’s no time like the present to bring it home.

This, you see, is the August where “we told you so” wouldn’t be an inappropriate position for the Republicans in Congress who looked into the eyes of supposedly pro-life Democrats and accused them of buying into a farce.

And then came July, when the National Right to Life Committee highlighted the text of guidelines, publicly available on government websites, of the beginnings of Obamacare’s high-risk pools. Looking through five states’ documentation, the NRLC found an abortion-funding alarm going off in three of them: Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New Mexico. The NRLC and others complained, and the Department of Health and Human Services was pressured into issuing a regulation prohibiting abortion funding in these state programs.

“All of us now know -- as many of us knew then -- that those claims were lies. Not errors. They were lies!” One can almost hear the voice of the late Illinois congressman Henry Hyde back in 1997 on the floor of Congress during the partial-birth-abortion debate echoing again today, as the veils of lies about abortion from the health-care debate of earlier this year are lifted.

The Obamacare abortion lie is now officially up. And if you doubt what I say, just pay attention to the noise coming out of the abortion industry and its advocates and lobbyists. Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America: “This decision has no basis in the law and flies in the face of the intent of the high-risk pools that were meant to meet the medical needs of some of the most vulnerable women in this country.”

She has a point. There is no across-the-board universal law that prohibits domestic abortion funding with federal taxpayer dollars. Despite repeated claims by Nancy Pelosi, Robert Gibbs, and others, the Hyde Amendment never applied to the health-care bill. The Hyde Amendment has only ever applied to money appropriated annually through the HHS appropriations bill. It is also subject to an annual congressional fight. And the Cecile Richardses of the world knew that.

#page#Now that the Obama administration has actually done something to prohibit some taxpayer-funded abortion in one part of the health-care law, albeit at administrative discretion that can go away just as easily as it was added, the Planned Parenthood crew is watching this law “like a hawk”: “We now know we need to be vigilant to make sure there aren’t other areas of the law where there is silence. There is a whole host of areas that we’re going to be watching like a hawk,” Laurie Rubiner, Planned Parenthood vice president for public policy, told Politico in the wake of the HHS announcement.

#ad#Which is why Republican congressman Chris Smith of New Jersey and brave Democrat Dan Lipinski of Illinois introduced the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act” right before they left D.C. for the summer recess. It would do exactly what the House Republican leadership promises to do if they are in the majority next time around: codify the Hyde Amendment across the board.

As John Boehner, who could be the next speaker of the House, puts it: “A ban on taxpayer funding of abortion is the will of the American people, and codification of the Hyde amendment is the only way we’re going to get the federal bureaucracy to heed the people’s will. The events of the past 18 months show that in the absence of a law explicitly banning federal funding of abortion, pro-abortion bureaucrats and politicians in Washington will resort to any means necessary to circumvent the will of the people -- including deception, as evidenced by President Obama’s Executive Order on abortion and the disingenuous manner in which it was portrayed by the White House.”

“The other side is determined to use their huge new bureaucracies to advance a radical social agenda,” rising-star Republican congressman Jim Jordan (Ohio) tells me. “Republicans must confront this attack head-on.#...#When we go out to talk about jobs, the economy, the size and scope of government, and the threats we face in this world, we cannot ignore or shy away from the values debate. I believe that if we do not have the courage to fight for life, family, and religious liberty, then we will soon lose the will to confront the other challenges that we face.”

Consciously or not, Jordan and Boehner -- and Smith and Lipinski, who bucked his party, especially -- echo that late Illinois congressman whose name popped up frequently during the health-care debate. As Hyde once said in a speech to newly elected members: “If you do not know the principle, or the policy, for which you are willing to lose your office, then you are going to do damage here.” And, as it happens, this is a winning issue -- one that unites the majority of Americans, and what promises to be a dramatically different new majority in the House.

-- Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online. She can be reached at klopez@nationalreview.com.

“My analogy is that BP gave part of the Gulf of Mexico a case of the flu. It wasn’t pleasant, and there was pain involved#...#but the patient will recover quickly now that the flu is over. This isn’t cancer#...#and it never was.”

 

Earlier this week came the remarkable news that the vast majority of oil leaked from the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico had been dissipated or collected. Today I chatted about the lessons we should draw from the spill response with a veteran of the oil industry who -- due to his direct and indirect work on the Gulf spill -- has asked to remain anonymous. We’ll refer to him as Derrick.

Derrick is a professional engineer whose career included a stint in the Exxon Valdez response team’s headquarters staff, and who went on to work in regulatory affairs and spill-response planning at a major integrated energy company before forming his own consultancy. In an interview with NRO news editor Daniel Foster, he discusses the politicization of the spill response, the wrongheadedness of the drilling moratorium, and the power of Mother Nature, among other topics.


DANIEL FOSTER: What happened to all the oil? Were you surprised to see it reported that the spill, while undoubtedly bad, hasn’t proven to be the ecological calamity many had feared?

DERRICK: No, I wasn’t. One thing to remember about oil and the environment is that it does biodegrade. For a lot of bacteria, oil is just food. In this case, it was too much food. It’s kind of like eating salty potato chips -- you can only eat so many salty potato chips at a time. Same thing with this.

#ad#The whole purpose of dispersing the oil wasn’t to make the oil go away or hide it from the public or something like that. You disperse the oil because you make one big slab of oil that the bacteria can’t get to into billions and billions of tiny little drops of oil that the bacteria can easily get to, so you’re just increasing the surface area of the oil by creating millions of dots. And you’re breaking it up, literally, into bite-size chunks, billions and billions and billions of little bite-size chunks of oil so that then the bacteria can do their thing.

The other thing to remember is that bacterial activity doubles with every ten-degree change in temperature, so whatever level of bacterial activity you have at 50 degrees, you get twice as much at 60 degrees, and twice as much as that at 70 degrees, and twice as much as that at 80 degrees. So that’s why your refrigerator keeps your food from spoiling, keeps it down in the low 30s so it’ll last a lot longer than it will sitting in your house in the mid-70s.

The Gulf of Mexico is hot. That’s why it spurs hurricanes -- the surface water temperature in the Gulf of Mexico is 80. The amount of bacterial activity you get there is enormous, so if you did what they did, which is disperse a whole lot of the oil in a warm-weather environment like that, it’s going to just magically disappear, in a short period of time, once you cut off the source. Now, the slabs of oil -- there were still slabs of oil that didn’t get dispersed, wash up on the beaches, or wash up in the mangroves -- even that biodegrades; it just biodegrades much slower, because there’s a lot less surface area for bacteria to get to.

#page#FOSTER: So there was confidence inside the industry and scientific communities that the dispersants would do a lot of the work?

DERRICK: There’s a lot of research that’s been done by -- there’s this organization that’s actually part of the state of Louisiana, called the Louisiana Oil Spill Coordinator’s Office. Roland Guidry’s been the oil-spill coordinator for years and years and years, and he funds oil-spill-response research at various, mostly Louisiana universities. They’ve spilled oil in marshes and they’ve monitored recoveries. They try it this way and try it that way -- try cleaning it up with booms or sucking it up, try leaving it alone or try dispersing it, try burning it -- in all these different environments, in all these different weather conditions.

So, only people that weren’t associated with oil industry were surprised here. People knew this would work -- this was not brain surgery.

#ad#The alarmists in the environmental community are eager to make this the biggest disaster that’s ever happened, because they have an agenda they want to work. Talk to the scientists -- NOAA [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration], they got an incredibly bad rap out of this. I don’t know why, because they really are the honest brokers in the whole spill-response business. They’re the government scientists. I’ve known guys there -- as a matter of fact, I know a guy they’ve been quoting lately, and he’s a scientist, not a shill for the industry, and when he says this is okay, he’s saying it because that’s what he thinks.


FOSTER: A National Incident Command study suggests that of an estimated 4.9 million barrels leaked, just 8 percent was chemically dispersed: 16 percent was naturally dispersed; 25 percent dissolved or was evaporated; 17 percent was recovered from the wellhead; 8 percent was burned or skimmed; and 26 percent remains at large. Given those numbers, do you think that the size and coordination of the spill response was justified, or could we have done without it?

DERRICK: There was certainly a lot of response that probably didn’t do any good, but when you get in a major spill like this, a lot of your response is politically motivated, or politically driven. We want to protect our communities. Trust me, one of the things NOAA does is spill-trajectory modeling. They’re running their models, they’re running them all the time, and they say, “The oil’s gonna go here, the oil’s gonna go there” -- it’s like predicting the path for hurricanes. They’re looking at all the natural environmental factors and they’re going, “Okay, this is where we can expect to see oil in the next 24 hours, next 36 hours, next 48 hours.”

This is what the scientist should use to predict where he wants to deploy his booms, where he wants to deploy his skimmers. Unfortunately, in a spill like this, there are so many people who are so emotional about it. The governor of Alabama wants to boom all these precious areas in the state -- or Mississippi or Florida -- whether or not the trajectory analysis would support that. He could care less. He wants to protect his particular beaches, his particular economic areas, and you can understand that. But there’s a whole lot of response that doesn’t have anything to do with the actual oil.

Even if BP had done nothing, the oil would eventually go away. By capturing what they could, burning some, and dispersing the rest -- there just isn’t going to be much left after a couple of weeks. Not on the surface. Not in the subsurface. Not anywhere. It literally evaporated, or was eaten by bacteria. The ongoing reminder will be tar balls, which tend to stick around a while.

My analogy is that BP gave part of the Gulf of Mexico a case of the flu. It wasn’t pleasant, and there was pain involved#...#but the patient will recover quickly now that the flu is over. This isn’t cancer#...#and it never was.

#page#FOSTER: What do you think the policy lessons are, now that we know how Mother Nature handled this spill? What I have in mind, especially, is the deepwater-drilling ban. How do you justify that in light of this good news?

DERRICK: The thing that I want to make sure that people don’t do is rush to judgment against dispersants. Certain scientists that are being very vocal about all the environmental impacts that you could have from dispersed oil#...#it’s like, okay, nobody said that dispersing oil is a great idea -- it’s the least worst idea. You want to not have the oil to begin with. But when you have the oil, what’s your least bad alternative? And when you have a whole lot of oil, the least bad alternative is frequently: We just need to disperse this and let nature take its course, realizing there are going to be other impacts because we dispersed it.

#ad#Maybe oyster beds get harmed more than other things would have been harmed because you dispersed it and it sank below the surface of the water. There should be scientific studies of all that, but I’m afraid that there will be just a political decision saying, “Oh dispersing is bad. We shouldn’t do that. We’re just giving the oil industry an easy way out by letting them disperse it. We should make them clean it up.”

The whole point is you can’t clean it all up. You’re spilling too much. The best answer is to disperse it. So the policy lesson number one is: Don’t condemn dispersants out of hand. You very well may show that this was a great example of how dispersants can do a fantastic job.

Clearly they need to do more work on emergency response in mile-deep water. The surface response wasn’t a problem, in my mind. I think the surface response was everything you could ever hope for, but clearly we’re better at drilling in mile-deep water than we are at responding in mile-deep water, and the oil industries recognize that. Chevron and Exxon Mobil and Conoco Phillips came up with their billion-dollar deep-water response plans. That was needed, and they’re doing it. So that’s good.


FOSTER: What about the deepwater-drilling ban?

DERRICK: The whole moratoria on drilling in deep water -- entirely politically motivated. And people that understand anything about drilling would be glad to explain that to anybody who’s willing to listen, because the thing you have to understand is, when they’re drilling this well to 18,000 feet below the sea floor, most of that is rock. Most deepwater wells that were affected are development wells, so you’ve already drilled at least one test well there; you know where the rocks are and where the reservoir is or may be, so the great majority of time and effort and money is spent just drilling through rock.

Well, it takes me a hell of a long time to drill through three miles of rock before I eventually get to something that might have oil or gas in it. I’m betting a lot of money that there is, but there’s no environmental risk posed by drilling through three miles of rock. That’s not the kind of thing that blows out on you. So the whole moratoria on drilling, period -- you couldn’t drill through three miles of concrete if you wanted to. They could have easily said, “Well, we’re not gonna let you complete wells. We’re not gonna let you get into known pressure reservoirs.”

If they had made just that simple decision, then all those rigs would still be out there drilling right now. You can drill the first 90 percent of ten wells and then when you finally finish your studies and decide what needs to be done in the future, well, then you drill the last 10 percent, which is where you might actually have an environmental problem. But the government wouldn’t do that. They wouldn’t allow that.


FOSTER: Do you think that there’s anything to the idea that this well, the Macondo well, because of its depth and the pressures involved, was too big, too beyond our technological capabilities, and that this was inevitable? Do you put any stock in that?

DERRICK: Not true. Absolutely not true.


FOSTER: So even though it was a record-breaking depth, this was not an inevitable occurrence?

DERRICK: No. All the other majors would be glad to tell you that. Of course, they’re throwing BP under the bus, because the inference from saying that it wasn’t inevitable is that BP screwed up, and there’s a lot of people in the industry that think that’s the case.

-- Daniel Foster is news editor of National Review Online.

If Mayor Michael Bloomberg ever decides to stop buying his way around New York City’s term-limit law, he’d be a perfect fit at the State Department.

Hizzoner was not content with having embarrassed himself by predicting that the attempted bombing of Times Square -- the heart of a city that has been a jihadist target for 17 years -- would prove to be the work of a disgruntled right-winger upset over the health-care bill. Bloomberg has now treated us to a cri de coeur in favor of the Ground Zero mosque. Funding sources for this project, originally known as the “Cordoba Initiative” in honor of the caliphate that conquered Spain, remain unknown. What is known is that the gigantic Islamic center would be located near the crater where Islamist terrorists killed more than 2,700 Americans while destroying the World Trade Center.

#ad#Mayor Bloomberg is clearly ready for prime time in the State Department’s production division: It was only last year that our foreign service used your tax dollars to broadcast, on its website, a little movie called “Eid in America.” Eid, the occasion for this exercise in cinematic hagiography, is the feast that ends what our government takes pains to call “the holy month of Ramadan” and commemorates with gala dinners around Washington. The star of the video was the Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center -- and accompanying mosque -- in Falls Church, Va.

JUST LIKE THE MARINES
Dar al-Hijrah (which means “Land of Migration”) was presented as the moderate face of Islam in America -- exactly what Bloomberg and other government officials assure us the Ground Zero mosque will become. Prominently featured was Johari Abdul-Malik, Dar’s soft-spoken “director of outreach,” who positively glowed as he spoke about his community’s growth.

There were, however, a few lines that Foggy Bottom evidently decided were best left on the cutting room floor. Like imam Abdul-Malik’s call for “sabotage” terrorist attacks against Israel. As he put it in 2001: 

I am gonna teach you now. You can blow up bridges, but you cannot kill people who are innocent on their way to work. You can blow up power supplies#...#the water supply, you can do all forms of sabotage and let the world know that we are doing it like this because they have a respect for the lives of innocent people.

Yes, what better way to show respect! Of course, omitting this speech spared State the embarrassment of explaining that it was given at a conference hosted by the Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP). IAP was the Muslim Brotherhood–created headquarters of U.S. support for Hamas. Incidentally, a top IAP official, Nihad Awad, has become one of the Ground Zero mosque’s most visible supporters. Awad also happens to be a founder of the Council on American Islamic Relations, another Muslim Brotherhood creation. CAIR was named as an unindicted co-conspirator by the Justice Department in the Holy Land Foundation case, in which several defendants were convicted for providing Hamas with millions of dollars in funding.

Imam Feisal Rauf, the force behind the Ground Zero mosque, declines to condemn Hamas, which is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. It has been formally designated a terrorist organization under our law for many years. According to its charter, Hamas’s purpose is to create an Islamic Palestinian state by eliminating Israel through violent jihad.

#page#In “Eid in America,” the State Department also wisely left out imam Abdul-Malik’s 2004 promise of Islamic supremacy in America. He made it in a Friday sermon of the sort that one typically hears at “moderate” mosques like Dar al-Hijra:

Alhamdullilah [Praise to Allah] and we will live, will see the day when Islam, by the grace of Allah, will become the dominant way of life.#...#I’m telling you don’t take it for granted because Allah is increasing this deen [religion] in your lifetime. Alhamdullilah that soon, soon#...#before Allah closes our eyes for the last time, you will see Islam move from being the second largest religion in America -- that’s where we are now -- to being the first religion in America.

“Outreach,” you’ll be pleased to learn, is just Abdul-Malik’s day job. He is also a director of the National Association of Muslim Chaplains (NAMC). As journalist Paul Sperry recounts in his important book, Infiltration, NAMC’s founder, Warith Deen Umar, is best known for his glorification of the 9/11 hijackers: “Even Muslims who say they are against terrorism secretly admire and applaud” them.

#ad#For his part, though, Abdul-Malik is more circumspect. When Sperry asked him about other “sermons” at the mosque that praise violent jihad and “martyrdom,” he couldn’t see what the problem might be. In their own way, he explained, Muslims are like United States Marines, a spiritual force in Allah’s cause: “Telling people to give their all for their faith is not an unusual idea. That’s the same thing as telling Marines in this country semper fidelis.”

I doubt our Marines would be flattered by the comparison.

ISLAMIC CENTERS ARE THE “AXIS”
Dar al-Hijra was established in 1991. Not so coincidentally, that is the same year American leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood wrote an internal memorandum to their global headquarters in Egypt, explaining that they saw their work in the United States as a “grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.” Echoing imam Abdul-Malik, the Brotherhood said its tactic would be “sabotage.” (The memo is here, with the English translation following the original Arabic pages.)

The memorandum elaborates that every city should have an “axis” and “perimeter” from which this jihad-by-sabotage strategy is headquartered. That axis, it adds, will be known as “the Islamic Center.” Islamic centers -- just like the one at Dar al-Hijra, just like the one planned for Ground Zero -- are to become “the ‘base’ for our rise,” the memo says. They are to be the focal point of education, preparation, and the “supply [of] our battalions.” Battalions are small cells of fighters. In Muslim Brotherhood ideology (i.e., Islamist ideology) it is assumed that, at a certain mature point, when Muslim forces are strong enough, violent jihad will be effective, so Islamists prepare for it.

Quite the opposite of assimilation and toleration, the memo envisions each Islamic center as a “seed for a small Islamic society” and a “House of Dawa.” Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the spiritual guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, has proclaimed that dawa, the stealth form of jihad, is the method by which Islam will “conquer America” and “conquer Europe.” As I noted in a column last week, when it was released for Muslim audiences overseas, imam Rauf’s book (released in this country as What’s Right with Islam Is What’s Right with America) was called A Call to Prayer from the World Trade Center Rubble: Islamic Dawa in the Heart of America Post-9/11. In any event, the Brotherhood memorandum also foretold that Islamic centers would be hubs for networking and cooperation between Islamist groups. Dar al-Hijra has certainly fit that bill. Its website, for example, has helped viewers connect to the sites of CAIR and other Muslim Brotherhood tentacles.

We know about the Brotherhood’s 1991 memorandum because it was seized from the home of an operative named Ismail Elbarasse. And wouldn’t you know it: Elbarasse is a founder of the Dar al-Hijra Islamic Center so admired by the State Department. He is a close friend and former business partner of Mousa abu Marzook, currently the number-two official in Hamas -- and a man who ran that terrorist organization from his home in Virginia until he was finally expelled from the U.S. in the mid-Nineties. It was to Hamas that, according to the FBI and Israeli intelligence, Elbarasse and Marzook jointly transferred hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Elbarasse may also have listened to one too many of imam Abdul-Malik’s speeches about bridge sabotage: In 2004, he was arrested for allegedly casing the Chesapeake Bridge, driving along slowly as his wife filmed the span up and down, lowering their camera out of sight when passing police vehicles drove by. It was all a misunderstanding, of course. Just recording “scenery,” Mrs. Elbarasse told the FBI -- as her husband urged her to pipe down. But when the FBI reviewed the tape, they found it focused on “the cables and upper supports of the main span of the bridge, and also pan[ned] the east bound span of the bridge, filming the support cables and footings of the main span of the bridge. Portions of the footage zoomed in on the bridge joints of the main support span.” “It’s a crime to videotape a bridge?” the agitated Mrs. Elbarasse blurted. The government, for reasons unknown, decided not to pursue the case.

The Dar al-Hijra board has also featured Elbarasse’s friend and college roommate, Esam Omeish. Dr. Omeish, a surgeon, is one of the stars of “Eid in America.” In it, he coos about his community’s rich diversity (apparently meaning it features all kinds of Muslims). Alas, the film did not cover his college days -- when he headed up the Muslim Students Association at Georgetown -- or his term as president of the Muslim American Society, which is the Brotherhood’s semi-official presence in the United States. Nor was Omeish’s grim foray in Democratic party politics mentioned. He was forced to resign from a state immigration panel, to which he’d been appointed by Virginia governor Tim Kaine, after the emergence of videos that showed him lauding Palestinians for their resort to “the jihad way” against Israel. He later claimed to have been “smeared” by the publication of his own words, but Virginians weren’t buying it -- he was drubbed in a 2009 bid for election to the state house of delegates. Reports of a 2004 speech in which he urged Muslims to integrate but resist assimilating into the “evils” of American society were probably not helpful.

#page#Abdelhaleem Ashqar was also on the Dar al-Hijra board, but he is now serving an eleven-year prison sentence for obstruction and contempt after impeding a federal investigation of Hamas’s American support system. Dar al-Hijrah’s original president was Samir Salah, whose rèsumè includes (a) setting up Bank al-Taqwa in Lugano, known as a money exchange for al-Qaeda, and (b) partnering with Osama bin Laden’s nephew, Abdullah, to establish the Taiba International Aid Association, yet another Islamic “charity” that has been shut down by the government for bankrolling terrorism.

A “WHO’S WHO” OF THE JIHAD
Getting Dar al-Hijra built cost chump change compared with the anticipated $100 million Ground Zero mosque. It ran around $6 million. The Saudis have been underwriting the Brotherhood’s dawa efforts for decades. And thanks to Sperry’s exacting work, we know about Dar al-Hijra what we haven’t been permitted to find out about the Ground Zero mosque: how it was financed. Turns out that it followed the standard Saudi/Brotherhood pattern.

#ad#The Falls Church land on which the complex sits was purchased in the 1980s by the North American Islamic Trust. NAIT was established by the Saudis and the Brotherhood in 1973 for just this purpose. In 2003, the Center for Security Policy’s J. Michael Waller told a Senate committee that NAIT owns or controls the physical assets of about three-fourths of American mosques -- and its partner organization, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), controls their ideological content. Both ISNA and NAIT were identified as unindicted co-conspirators in the Hamas-financing case. As I mentioned in last week’s column, ISNA was behind the republication of imam Faisal Rauf’s Call to Prayer from the World Trade Center Rubble.

Dar al-Hijra has sported imams that make Johari Abdul-Malik look downright tame. Most infamous was Anwar al-Awlaki, the al-Qaeda terrorist now believed to be holed up in Yemen. From there, Awlaki is said to have inspired Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be Christmas bomber who tried to blow up a plane over Detroit. But that’s just a footnote. While imam at Dar al-Hijra, Awlaki ministered to at least two of the 9/11 hijackers. And it was at Dar al-Hijra that he met U.S. army officer Nidal Hassan. Though Awlaki beat it out of town ahead of the 9/11 investigation, he kept up his correspondence with Major Hassan, who, at Fort Hood in 2009, murdered 13 of his fellow soldiers while screaming “Allahu Akbar!”

Other Dar al-Hijra imams have included Mohammed al-Hanooti, a former director of the aforementioned Islamic Association of Palestine. He was the mosque’s prayer leader in the troubled mid-Nineties period after Marzook’s deportation. Hanooti prepared for the Dar al-Hijrah gig with a stint running another Muslim community “axis,” the Islamic Center of Jersey City. There he frequently hosted the Blind Sheikh (Omar Abdel Rahman, whose cell bombed the World Trade Center in 1993). According to the FBI, he also raised millions of dollars for Hamas. Yet, Sperry reports, the State Department often asks Hanooti to be one of its messengers to the Muslim world. It sponsors his speeches, which are featured overseas by the Voice of America network.

And then there’s Mohammed Adam El-Sheikh, a Sudanese member of the Muslim Brotherhood who served as Dar al-Hijra’s imam from 2003 until mid-2005. In his spare time, he was the Baltimore regional director of the Islamic American Relief Agency#...#until 2004, when the Treasury Department designated IARA a global terrorist group, because it had “provided direct financial support” to Osama bin Laden. El-Sheikh was a founder of the Muslim American Society. Shaker Elsayed, who has served as Dar al-Hijra imam in more recent times, also ran the Muslim American Society for several years.

With so motley a crew of founders, backers, and prayer leaders, it is no wonder that Dar al-Hijrah’s worshippers include a “Who’s Who” of the jihad. Marzook was a fixture, as was Major Hassan for a time. And besides the mosque’s being attended by 9/11 hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi and Hani Hanjour, the center’s phone number was found in the Hamburg apartment shared by the 9/11 ringleaders Mohamed Atta and Ramzi bin al-Shibh.

Other congregants have included Abdurrahman Alamoudi, a terrorist financier who is now serving a 23-year prison term. Before his various shenanigans caught up with him, Alamoudi -- a public supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah -- was a U.S. government Islamic-affairs adviser and vetted chaplains for service in our armed forces. Another notable Dar al-Hijra attendee was Omar Abu Ali, the valedictorian of the Class of 1999 at the Islamic Saudi Academy in northern Virginia. He is now better known for his post-graduate work: joining al-Qaeda, plotting mass-murder attacks against the United States, and conspiring to murder Pres. George W. Bush -- for which he is now serving a life sentence.

ONE PIECE AT A TIME
Dar al-Hijrah started out as the only mosque in town, so it attracted hundreds of worshippers. Now, after two decades, it draws thousands, overrunning the once-quiet Washington suburb. On Fridays, and especially during Ramadan, the faithful are known to block streets, driveways, and fire hydrants with their parked cars, trampling across neighborhood yards while approaching the mosque on foot. If the true meaning of jihad is to struggle for personal betterment, as apologists like Obama counterterrorism adviser John Brennan maintain, one wonders why manners would degrade as Muslim numbers increased.

But wait: If jihad is actually about struggling to implement sharia as the necessary precondition to Islamicizing a society, it all makes perfect sense -- and it fits the 1991 memo’s design. The overflow parking situation in Falls Church became intolerable, and to ease it somewhat, neighboring churches offered the Islamic center the use of their lots. Predictably, Abdul-Malik accepted this ecumenical gesture as a concession. “If Islam really catches on in the area,” he smirked to Sperry, “maybe the neighborhood churches will come over lock, stock, and barrel, and we can all share our parking lots.”

The Brotherhood is happy to expand its American enclaves one piece at a time. That may be fine with the State Department and Mayor Bloomberg, but most Americans are not likely to agree.

— 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.

With the disappointingly soft jobs report for July, and a faltering recovery overall, is Team Obama getting ready for some sort of new, liberal-left, Keynesian, big-bang stimulus package? Will they be desperate to “do something”?

Already there are rumors of an August surprise (to use the phrase of business columnist Jimmy Pethokoukis) where Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac forgive underwater mortgages held by millions of Americans. And with state and local government jobs having fallen 169,000 year-to-date, perhaps the Democratic Congress and the White House will seek an even bigger spending plan for teachers and Medicaid workers -- on top of the $26 billion plan that just passed the Senate.

#ad#Or maybe the Democrats will come up with a new infrastructure-spending bill, perhaps for green technologies and whatnot. Or maybe they’ll extend unemployment benefits even more. My liberal friend Robert Reich is even talking up the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), where the government employed millions during the 1930s.

With the announcement this week that Council of Economic Advisers chair Christy Romer will leave the White House to go back to teach at Berkeley, it looks like the center of economic gravity will shift leftward inside the West Wing.

Meanwhile, over at the Fed, it seems ever more likely that the FOMC meeting next week will produce a much more dovish policy statement, one that will lengthen the “extended period” near-zero-interest-rate language and hint at new cash purchases of Treasury and mortgage bonds to increase the central bank’s balance sheet and expand the basic money supply. Already, in recent weeks, the dollar has been plunging.

Of course, Republicans will push harder to keep the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy -- as they should. But Democrats are now trapped by Treasury man Tim Geithner’s statements that extending low tax rates for successful earners, investors, and small businesses would actually imperil economic recovery. This is his war against investment and capital formation.

Maybe the Democratic revolt in favor of keeping all the Bush tax cuts will gather steam. But Democrats are more likely to push for greater spending than investment tax incentives. They’d rather take your money than let you keep it.

The GOP also should call for lower corporate tax rates, including full cash expensing for businesses. But so far they haven’t made much noise on this, despite the fact that cash-rich businesses are mostly avoiding new hires in the face of the Obamacare regulatory threats and the uncertainty about future tax burdens.

The bottom line? Panic over this stalled economy may be setting in.

The unemployment rate is hanging stubbornly at 9.5 percent and economic growth looks to be slipping to only 2 to 3 percent. In order to get unemployment down significantly, the economy has to grow by at least 4 percent.

Inside July’s jobs report, small-business household employment dropped by 159,000 jobs -- a very bad sign. In the three months to April, this survey produced 417,000 new jobs. In the three months to July, it fell by 151,000.

At the same time, private payrolls in the corporate survey rose by only 71,000 in July, compared with an expected gain of 100,000. In the three months to April, payrolls gained by 154,000. Over the past three months, payrolls have increased only 51,000. They need to grow at a better-than 200,000 monthly pace in order to reduce joblessness.

So just like the overall economy, the jobs recovery is faltering. It isn’t a double-dip recession. But the story is moving in the wrong direction. And if the Democrats in power push for a big-bang summer surprise that seeks even more failed stimulus spending, they will do much more harm than good.

The Intrade pay-to-play investment parlor already shows a 60 percent likelihood of a GOP House takeover this November. That’s the ultimate silver lining in this story.

-- 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$.

It’s been a bad week for Obamacare.

On Tuesday, Show Me State voters fired a shot across the bow of the administration, with a stunning 71 percent of those casting ballots supporting a referendum opposing the centerpiece of Obamacare -- the so-called “individual mandate.” That’s the requirement that every citizen and legal resident of the United States purchase government-approved health insurance.

The Missouri vote came on the heels of a decision by a district court judge in Virginia denying the administration’s motion to dismiss a case challenging the constitutionality of the individual mandate in court. The lawsuit, brought by Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli and others, will therefore proceed to trial in the coming months. Moreover, the judge’s statement accompanying his denial of the administration’s motion made it abundantly clear that this is anything but a frivolous exercise. It seems to be dawning on more than a few people, in and out of the legal profession, that if the federal government can do this, it can do almost anything.

#ad#Obamacare’s apologists have always glossed over the burden the individual mandate would impose on average Americans. To hear them tell it, Obamacare is another great government giveaway, providing health care for one and all, at no cost to anyone save for the very rich.

But the reality is far different. At the heart of the new law is an onerous and costly obligation, one that allows Democrats now in power to claim they had passed “universal coverage” while hiding much of costs of the massively expensive exercise behind another unfunded mandate. The mandate will be especially burdensome to the low- and moderate-wage households Democrats claim they want to help. They will be forced to accept one-size-fits-all coverage that is more costly than what many of them are signed up for today. And if that coverage is coming from an employer, all of the costs will get passed on to them -- without any additional federal support.

Ironically, the Democrats were so desperate to say they had finally “covered everyone” that they were willing to create guaranteed revenue and profits for the despised insurance industry. Private insurers acquiesced in the Democratic takeover of the health-care sector because they calculated that the individual mandate would generate enough revenue to offset the costs imposed on them. Under Obamacare, private insurers don’t have to work to earn their money -- it will come to them automatically, courtesy of governmental coercion.

Recently, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said that Americans will like the new health-care law once they have it explained to them. It is apparent that Missouri voters beg to differ. They were told Obamacare would cover the uninsured while miraculously cutting costs for everyone else. But when they took a closer look at what was actually in the law, what they found was costly regulations, taxes, and mandates. And, like voters in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts before them, they made it abundantly clear that they want no part of it.  Citizens in other states are sure to do the same at the first opportunity.

Opponents are right to focus their initial attacks on the individual mandate, as it is the soft underbelly of the entire Obamacare beast. If the individual mandate is nullified, either by court ruling or a political uprising, the rest of the Obamacare edifice will become increasingly shaky -- increasing Republicans’ chances of knocking it down after the November elections.

Let us compare the Volkswagen and the “Voltswagen.”

The original Volkswagen was intended as the “people’s car” (that’s what Volkswagen means). The idea of a cheap, safe, reliable car for the working man was popular before Adolf Hitler embraced it, but as a self-proclaimed man of the people, he made the idea his own. Whereas industrialists and aristocrats didn’t think the common man needed a car (“The people’s car is a bus” was their refrain), Hitler sided with one of his heroes, Henry Ford, arguing that everyone deserved his own ride. He ordered the German Labor Front, the union arm of the Nazi party, to start building a people’s car. When it looked like the car might be too expensive, the Labor Front created a savings program that promised a car for even the poorest workers.

#ad#At the 1934 Berlin Motor Show, Hitler proclaimed: “It is a bitter thought that millions of good and industrious people are excluded from the use of a means of transport that, especially on Sundays and holidays, could become for them a source of unknown joy.”

And then there’s the electric-gas hybrid Chevy Volt, a.k.a. the “Voltswagen.” At $41,000, about as much as the average American makes in a year, this is no people’s car. GM, owned by the government and the labor unions, is pitching it to affluent hipsters who don’t need a lot of space for a family. Deloitte Consulting says that the demand for such cars is from “young, very high income individuals” from households that make more than $200,000 a year, which is why the Volt will be rolled out in upscale, trendy urban markets. (Meanwhile the Chevy Cruze, the gas-only version of the Volt, has more room inside and is a mere $17,000.)

Because the Volt’s sticker price might be too high for even that crowd, the government is offering a federal subsidy of up to $7,500 (Californians have a state subsidy, too), which means that working-class people will be helping to pay for playthings for upper-income people.

“Like the EV1 that GM tried to peddle in the California market,” Kenneth Green, an environmental scientist at the American Enterprise Institute, says, “the Volt is a vanity car for the well-off that will be subsidized by less well-off taxpayers at all stages, from R&D to sales and to the construction of charging stations.”

Indeed, the Volt’s price is $41,000, but the cost is much higher. “Government Motors” is already selling the car at a loss. According to the blogger Doctor Zero, if you apply the subsidies that have gone directly into the car to just the first 10,000 vehicles, the cost is more like $81,000 per car.

Of course, electric-car boosters say this sort of thing is necessary to get the industry up and running. (Green responds: “Supporters claim that electric cars need subsidies because they’re still in their infancy. Electric cars have been around for over 100 years. That’s some infancy.”)

But would it be a good thing if we all switched to electric cars? The point is to reduce CO2 emissions, right? But in some regions, we get our electricity from CO2-spewing coal. The more electricity pulled from the grid, the more coal is burned, essentially replacing dirty oil with dirtier coal (which is why some coal backers see much promise in electric cars). Studies confirm that China -- which is allegedly “beating us” in the race to a green economy -- would produce vastly more greenhouse emissions if it switched to electric vehicles.

The expected response to that is that we need stuff like CO2-free windmills to generate electricity. Don’t get me started on the Volkspropeller.

Regardless, no matter how you crunch the numbers or the science, there’s no disputing that this is a political car, designed to meet the demands not of an economic market but of an ideological one, directed by the collusion of big business and big government. In this sense, the Volkswagen and the Voltswagen have a lot in common.

If the government weren’t taking taxpayer money and spending it on toys for upscale urban liberals (Obama’s strongest base of support outside of black voters and labor unions), there’d be no reason to care about the Volt. If rich people want to be “early adopters” and buy expensive gadgets that help them preen the plumage of their political sanctimony, that’s great. It’s not so great when the government gets involved in wealth redistribution, and it’s outrageous when it involves redistributing wealth upwards.

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

A letter popped up the other day. I will reproduce it in toto and verbatim:

Mr. Nordlinger,

Read your comment about racism being dead in this country. Sir you are delusional and out of touch with reality, at best.

What was this strange fellow, or gal (wasn’t clear), talking about? I will tell you, if you’re interested.

#ad#Last March, on the day “Obamacare” was passed, I received a letter from a reader. He said he had been struck by two stories in the national news. First, a man in the crowd at an anti-Obamacare rally had used a racial slur -- allegedly. Second, a 16-year-old kid had been arrested for making a bizarre racial comment over a Wal-Mart PA system -- something about how all black people had to leave the store.

Our reader wrote,

That these things are even remotely newsworthy leads me to one conclusion: Racism in America is dead. We had slavery, then we had Jim Crow -- and now we have the occasional public utterance of a bad word. Real racism has been reduced to de minimis levels, while charges of racism seem to increase. I’ll vote for the first politician with the brass to say that “racism” should be dropped from our national dialogue. We’re a good nation, among the least racist on earth . . .

I published that letter at the Corner, our group blog here at National Review Online. I publish a good many letters. And a lot of people didn’t like the one about the Wal-Mart incident, etc.

Keith Olbermann read excerpts from the letter on his television show. He had the words from the letter on the screen. And under the words, the viewer saw, “Jay Nordlinger, National Review.” Broadcast journalism at its finest. Olbermann said to his guest, James E. Clyburn, a black congressman from South Carolina, “Do people say this you suppose because they’ve never been personally the victims of racism? Do they say it to reassure racists that they’re not really racist?”

As I commented later, “If you can think and talk like that, you too can have a show on MSNBC, evidently.”

Clarence Page, the veteran columnist for the Chicago Tribune, got in on the act too. He quoted the reader’s letter. And he referred to its contents as “the Nordlinger thesis.” Swell that they give high perches to such people, right?

I wrote about all this for National Review, in an essay found here. Let me quote myself (obnoxious activity), if you don’t mind:

Racism will never die, of course, until the human animal is dead. But our letter-writing reader had a point: If an alleged N-word at a rally and an adolescent prank at a Wal-Mart are national news, haven’t we achieved some victory? Can we acknowledge racial progress when we see it? Are we terrified of complacency, so terrified that we can never put our racial dukes down? Are we too devoted to America the Racist -- a concept drilled into us (many of us) from the cradle -- to give it up?

That essay is called “Worst People,” by the way: “Worst People: Some notes on racism and anti-racism in America.” Why “Worst People”? After President Obama gave his State of the Union address last January, I had a long series of observations about him and that speech. One of them was, “Obama looks arrogant, whether he’s arrogant or not. I don’t think he can help it: It’s the upturned chin. When actors want to preen and so on, they turn that chin upward. Yikes.”

For that, Olbermann named me one of “The Worst People in the World.” My statement, you see, had been racist. More accurately, it had been “racist.” This country is plain bonkers. Certainly as represented by Olbermann, it is.

To be a conservative is to be called a racist, sooner or later. It’s written in stone; it’s baked in the cake. If you support colorblindness -- if you like the old motto E pluribus unum, “Out of many, one” -- you will be called a racist. Because race-consciousness is where it’s at, baby. The great Charlie Rangel called tax cuts racist, remember.

I have a feeling this is especially hard for David Horowitz, Linda Chavez, Abby Thernstrom -- people like that. Good old liberals and lefties who crossed over to the conservative side, while retaining, of course, their racial liberalism (and much other liberalism). But because they’re associated with the “Right,” they’re made to wear the scarlet “R” -- not for “Right” but for “Racist.”

A few years ago, Al Franken called Horowitz a racist. David popped him but good:

As it happens I marched in my first civil rights protest in 1948 before Al Franken was born. For more than fifty years I have supported minorities and defended their civil rights in public word and deed, and raised millions of dollars to help inner city minorities whom racism has scarred. In fact there is no single cause -- except America’s wars against totalitarian foes -- to which I have devoted myself more consistently than that of racial equality.

What ever became of Franken, anyway?

#page#There is someone who has probably been smeared as a racist more frequently than anyone else in America: Rush Limbaugh. Zev Chafets documents it all in his new biography. I was amazed and appalled as I read. About Limbaugh, you can really say and do anything. And people do.

Take the president of the United States, Bill Clinton. At the White House Correspondents Association dinner in Washington, Clinton noted that Limbaugh had defended attorney general Janet Reno, after Rep. John Conyers attacked her over the Waco disaster. The president said, “Do you like the way Rush Limbaugh took up for Janet Reno? He only did it because she was attacked by a black guy.”

Uh-huh.

#ad#Years later, journalists all over America quoted Limbaugh as saying, “Slavery built the South, and I’m not saying we should bring it back. I’m just saying that it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark.” A professor of journalism, Karen Hunter, went on MSNBC to claim that Rush had said the following: “You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor? James Earl Ray. We miss you, James. Godspeed.”

All lies -- vile, despicable, stinking lies. Limbaugh has endured much more -- again, it’s all laid out, in Chafets’s book. Many of these pages make for infuriating reading.

I will quote a passage that struck a chord with me; it may well with you, too. Here is Chafets:

Rush and I were both raised at a time of racial optimism and naïveté, when the goal of decent white people was an integrated society. We were taught that skin color shouldn’t matter, that we were all basically the same, that we should judge others not by their color but the content of their character. And if we didn’t achieve this in practice, or even try very hard -- and most of us didn’t -- it was, at least, the ideal that decent people subscribed to.

 

But things changed.

Oh, did they. Chafets writes,

. . . the American intelligentsia stopped talking in terms of an integrationist, national melting pot and adopted a tribal model, in which righteously disaffected minorities (blacks, women, gays, Hispanics, and Native Americans) made group identity the basis for their politics.

And Rush Limbaugh?

While all this was going on, [he] was in the studio spinning oldies or selling tickets for the Kansas City Royals. When he emerged, blinking, into the harsh light of political combat in the mid-1980s, he came armed with the belief in color-blindness that had been in vogue twenty years earlier. Mort Sahl once said that anyone who maintains a consistent position in America will eventually be tried for treason. Or racism.

I was reading something last night that reminded me of Mort Sahl -- and Chafets, and Limbaugh. In a recent New Republic, Leon Wieseltier wrote,

I have nothing against adventure, obviously, especially when it is an expression of dissatisfaction with oneself; but sometimes one finds oneself where one really should be, in a rich and deep place that demands and rewards toil, within defensible limits, with justified beliefs, and the meretricious course would be to move on, to take one’s instructions from the fickle world, to keep up. In our society, there is almost no greater apostasy than the refusal to keep up.

Yes. (For that complete essay, go here.)

#page#Earlier, I mentioned Abby Thernstrom, in a lineup of all-stars -- and I’d like to say something further about her now. Of late, she has been embroiled in a fight with other conservatives over this New Black Panther business: this episode of voter intimidation, and its treatment by the Justice Department. I am not a student of this case, though I have opinions about it. (What don’t I have opinions about?) Abby and those other conservatives -- they are students of the case. And I esteem them all. It pains me to see them at crossed swords. I like a good, healthful intramural debate as much as the next guy. I like good, healthful other debates, too! But I like the swords . . . I don’t know: swathed in protective rubber.

#ad#I first saw Abby in 1985 -- tough cookie. Wonderful, glorious cookie. Pretty, brainy, principled, bold, exacting, warm -- a woman of substance (as the phrase once went). I count it a great asset that she’s on our side. And by “our side,” I mean . . . you know: the National Review side, to use a shorthand. A few years ago, I reviewed a book she wrote with her husband, Steve -- Stephan Thernstrom, the Harvard historian. I’m going to quote a big old swath of that review. Hope you find it worth it. I began,

Odd that Abigail Thernstrom and Stephan Thernstrom should be considered big conservatives today. Mrs. Thernstrom spent the first part of her career as an earnest liberal, a civil-rightsy liberal. Mr. Thernstrom is a history professor at Harvard, and a winner of the Bancroft prize (the number-one award in the writing of American history). I don’t mean to shock you, but they usually don’t give the Bancroft prize to conservatives. And, indeed, the book for which Mr. Thernstrom won -- The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis (1973) -- is not exactly a conservative tract.

When I was a student under Mr. Thernstrom in the 1980s, I did not detect a rumbling conservatism. I recall that he said to me one day, “I see that you’re interested in conservatism, Jay -- have you tried talking to Ed Banfield?” (meaning, the great political scientist who wrote The Unheavenly City). But Professor Thernstrom was a fair and broad-minded historian and teacher, and he did assign one book by Thomas Sowell. He knew that his students should be familiar with that extraordinary man’s work.

It is, to me, the most touching thing about the Thernstroms’ current book -- No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning -- that it is dedicated to Sowell: “for his pioneering scholarship and unflagging courage.” It is a perfect dedication, in its wording and in its matching of book to dedicatee.

So, did the Thernstroms move right, or did American politics -- particularly the Left -- just go sort of crazy on them? Probably some of each. Reagan loved to tell audiences, “I didn’t leave the Democratic party -- the Democratic party left me.” That was a little too pat, but there was some truth to it. Both Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom took hard looks at the country as it stood in the ’80s and ’90s and found themselves roughly in the conservative camp.

And I make my usual point that it takes amazingly little to qualify as “conservative” these days. This couple has clung to their old values, in particular their love of E pluribus unum and their hatred of racial inequality. Their passion in this direction is probably more intense than ever. But their analyses and arguments are deeply offensive to the Left as it has developed, and they have therefore been made pariahs by their old crowd.

They have been very, very brave in what they’ve done. When you live in the Harvard community, you don’t just drift rightward and go merrily on. There are costs to pay. Others in the community don’t say, “Oh, gee, your pursuit of the truth led you to these particular positions? Very well then. Free for dinner next Tuesday?”

I’ll tell you something about my esteem for Abby. No one hates racial counting and assessing -- hates racial identification -- more than I do. Everything in me -- religious, philosophical, temperamental -- screams against it. The sight of those racial boxes makes me want to hurl. You know the boxes I mean: Check here for white, here for black, here for Aleut. I once wrote a piece called “Take Your Boxes and . . .: A nation of race rebels?” You can find it in the collection advertised at the end of this column.

It will not surprise you that I did not want to fill out my census form -- at least not the racial stuff. I like that age-old response: Race? Human. But no one knows more about this area of policy, politics, and life than Abby; no one has a keener sense of what is right in these matters. Earlier in the year, she wrote a piece admonishing us all to fill out our census forms. So I did. At least I plan to -- I haven’t done it yet. (Will I get jail for this?)

Some of my critics -- poisonous bloggers and their e-mailing readers -- say that I get my instructions straight from Israel. I like to reply, “That’s not true: I get them from the Israeli consulate in New York.” Actually, as you can see, I take my instruction from Abby Thernstrom.

I love some others involved in the New Black Panther fight. We can read them all and make up our own minds. “You pays yer money and you takes yer cherse.” Only, here on NRO, we don’t pay any money. (A problem, that . . .)

#page#You may have heard about the Iranian government and the octopus. Ahmadinejad denounced Paul the Psychic Octopus, a creature that predicted -- I’m not exactly sure how -- the outcomes of the World Cup matches. The Iranian ruler accused him of “spreading Western propaganda and superstition” and of standing for “decadence and decay.”

Iran, octopus -- I had a memory. About five years ago, I was in the presence of an important Arab leader, who was talking about the persistent problems of the Middle East. He said that the Syrian government, Hezbollah, Hamas, other entities -- all of these were mere appendages of Iran. They were like the tentacles of an octopus. You had to go after the head -- kill the beast at the head. And the head was Tehran. Do that, and all the tentacles would quickly wither and die.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have this confirmed?

#ad#In the last few months, I’ve taken to mocking the British press for its reporting on America. You remember that story that said Sarah Palin “seems to have ditched the staid and formal ‘hockey mom’ image she appeared to favour during her campaign . . .”? We had some fun with that one. It was from the Daily Mail. And now this paper has struck again:

Ferociously bright, Chelsea [Clinton] studied history at the Ivy League Stanford University before taking a masters in International Relations at Oxford . . .

Listen, it’s hard enough to write accurately about one’s own country . . .

A couple of days ago, I wanted some information about Michael Kelly, the brilliant and fearless journalist who was killed at the beginning of the Iraq War. Google took me to his Wikipedia entry, which begins this way:

Michael Thomas Kelly (March 17, 1957 -- April 3, 2003) was an American editor and journalist whose career was tarnished by the Stephen Glass scandal at The New Republic. He was also a columnist for the Washington Post. He died in 2003 while covering the invasion of Iraq, a conflict which he had supported in his writings.[1]

Um, does that strike anybody as a snotty opening, as it does me?

I like to tell you about Ann Arbor, my dear little lefty hometown. On Monday, I had lunch with two old friends who hail from that burg. One was talking about a little girl he knows, who lives there. She is nine or ten and plays on the school’s field-hockey team. (I believe it’s the school’s; this may be a summer league, not sure.) After a game, my friend asked her, “Well, how did it go?” She said, “We’re not allowed to keep score -- but if we were, we won 5 to 3.”

Ah, Ann Arbor. Ah, human nature. Even Ann Arbor can’t drum out the human, I don’t think . . .

A big issue in the music world at the moment is James Levine, the great -- the pantheonic -- conductor from Cincinnati. The Boston Globe began an editorial as follows:

James Levine has served the Boston Symphony Orchestra honorably, and deserves to continue as music director if his health bounces back quickly. If he’s not able to return to full strength in a reasonable time, he should resign and allow the orchestra to search openly for a replacement.

Let me share with you the closing of my June piece for The New Criterion -- my “New York Chronicle” for that month:

The Met[ropolitan Opera] is fretting, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra is fretting, about James Levine. He is music director at both places. He has recurring back problems, forcing him to forfeit many operas and many concerts. Managers at both places are thinking, “What’re we going to do?” Opera companies and symphony orchestras need conductors who show up in the pit or on the podium, dependably. A conductor on the disabled list is a huge hassle. Yet, if any conductor should be cut some slack, it’s Levine. I say (not that I was asked), take him when you can get him, and deal with the hassle, to the extent possible. Next season, he may be off the DL altogether -- which would put an end to the fretting. Until the time comes for his retirement.

Speaking of music, I’ll be in Salzburg for the next stretch, working at the annual festival. I’ll be writing criticism -- for NR and TNC -- and hosting the interview series of the Salzburg Festival Society. If you’re around, you’ll stop by, right? I am traveling, foreignly and domestically -- I know you’ll pardon my grammatical freedom -- until mid-September, I think. Impromptus may be very “sparse,” as a friend of mine says, crossly. But I will still be writing like a banshee, in most of the usual places. And I hope you’re enjoying a beautiful summer, wherever you are. See you soon.


#JAYBOOK#

Obamacare faced voters for the first time on Tuesday -- and was diagnosed as seriously ill.

By 71 percent to 29 percent, Missouri voters approved a referendum to invalidate any Obamacare mandate to purchase health insurance and any penalty for not doing so. Proposition C reflects growing momentum to repeal Obamacare, an increasingly unpopular federal sinkhole that the American people do not want and numerous state and federal officials are working sedulously to reverse.

Obamacare’s latest defeat did not occur in Mississippi, Utah, or some other right-wing bastion. Instead, it happened in Missouri, a swing state that then-senator Barack Obama of neighboring Illinois lost by just 3,903 votes in 2008.

#ad#Rather than accept responsibility for Tuesday’s setback, Democrats -- typically -- are faulting Republicans. “The numbers are totally distorted because of the lopsided turnout,” Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D., Md.) told the Associated Press, blaming heavy GOP voter participation. Of course, this coin’s flip side features Democrats so ho-hum about Obamacare that they failed to defend it.

Indeed, Obamacare’s performance lagged that of Obama himself in Missouri’s major Democratic cities. While Obama won 83.7 percent of St. Louis’s ballots in November 2008, Obamacare secured just 58.9 percent of that metropolis’s votes on Tuesday. In Kansas City, the analogous figures were 78.4 percent and 56.5 percent. Thus, even in key urban centers, Democrats are cooling on Obamacare.

The day before the Missouri vote, U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson ruled that Virginia may proceed with its lawsuit to overturn Obamacare’s individual mandate to acquire medical coverage. The Justice Department now must defend Obamacare in court.

“Unquestionably, this regulation radically changes the landscape of health insurance coverage in America,” Hudson wrote in his 32-page opinion. “While this case raises a host of complex constitutional issues, all seem to distill to the single question of whether or not Congress has the power to regulate -- and tax -- a citizen’s decision not to participate in interstate commerce,” Judge Hudson added. “No reported case from any federal appellate court has extended the Commerce Clause or Tax Clause to include the regulation of a person’s decision not to purchase a product, notwithstanding its effect on interstate commerce.”

As Virginia attorney general Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, who prevailed in this case, observed, “The government cannot draft an unwilling citizen into commerce just so it can regulate him under the Commerce Clause.”

Obamacare’s mandate redefines the individual’s relationship to Washington, D.C. If it can compel Americans to buy health insurance, why can’t it force each American to join a gym or eat a bran muffin every morning?

A constituent of Rep. Pete Stark (D., Calif.) asked him at a June town-hall meeting, “If this legislation is constitutional, what limitations are there on the federal government’s ability to tell us how to run our private lives?”

Stark’s answer encapsulated Obamacare’s underlying statist philosophy: “The federal government can, yes, do most anything in this country.”

Twenty different state attorneys general are in court battling Obamacare’s defining ideology, as embodied in the individual mandate.

#page#Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, 170 of the 178 House Republicans have signed Rep. Steve King’s (R., Iowa) discharge petition to bring repeal language to the House floor.

“Our goal is to have 218 signatures on the discharge petition to force Speaker Pelosi to unclench her fist and allow a vote to repeal Obamacare,” says Michael Needham, CEO of Heritage Action for America, a pro-repeal conservative advocacy group. “The fact that not one of the 34 Democrats who voted against Obamacare has signed this petition should lead voters to ask these congressmen if they now endorse Obamacare’s implementation.”

Americans increasingly would applaud such a House vote. A July 30–31 Rasmussen survey of 1,000 likely voters shows that 59 percent want Obamacare overturned, while 38 percent disagree. (Error margin: ± 3 percent.) Despite relentless Democratic preening over Obamacare, pro-repeal sentiments have risen from 55 percent (42 percent opposed) on March 23–24, when Obama signed the bill. The more Americans learn about Obamacare, the more they reject it. Concerning this law, familiarity breeds contempt.

#ad#If the American people hand Republicans the keys to Congress on November 2, they can smother this $2.5 trillion extravagance in its infancy. While a GOP repeal vote surely would earn a presidential veto, a Republican Congress could defund this law’s implementation.

Instead, Republicans should pass what Congress should have adopted in the first place: a simple, far cheaper program centered on “health stamps.” These vouchers would help truly uninsurable poor people purchase insurance, much as food stamps help low-income Americans buy almost any groceries they please, without capsizing the entire supermarket system.

Medical-malpractice reform, universal tax-free health savings accounts, and individual purchases of portable medical plans (all available across state lines) should compose the balance of the GOP’s antidote to Obamacare’s poison.

Obamacare’s ultimate demise likely will require a Republican chief executive to sign its death certificate. Until that joyous occasion, Americans should dream of the day when Barack Obama returns to Chicago to break ground on his presidential library.

-- Deroy Murdock is a nationally syndicated columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.

It’s safe to assume that Judge Vaughn Walker voted against Proposition 8 banning gay marriage in California back in 2008. Throughout the trial on the measure in his courtroom, he proved himself as zealously in favor of gay marriage as the plaintiffs petitioning to have it declared unconstitutional -- if not more so.

If he voted no a couple of years ago, Judge Walker wasn’t alone. More than 6.4 million Californians voted against Proposition 8. At 48 percent, that was almost enough to constitute a majority. But Judge Walker presumably got two bites at the apple: First in the voting booth, then from the bench when he invalidated the votes of the 52 percent of people who voted the other way. It’s nice to be judge.

#ad#Judge Walker’s decision is such a raw exercise of judicial imperiousness, he might as well have gone all the way and sentenced the defenders of Proposition 8 to suffer, Chinese-style, a parade of shame through the streets of San Francisco wearing placards emblazoned “I Support Bizarre and Retrograde Social Practices.”

The social practice in question is traditional marriage defined as a union between a man and a woman, which Judge Walker finds dangerously passé. Sure, it had a good run during the past couple of millennia or so, but in August 2010, we’re beyond age-old parameters of fundamental social institutions -- no matter what a majority of California voters might say, or the voters of the 29 other states that prohibit gay marriage in their constitutions.

From the first, Judge Walker made it clear that he didn’t want to rule on the legal merits of the case -- a relatively simple matter of issuing a summary judgment -- but literally to relitigate Proposition 8. Before he was smacked down by the U.S. Supreme Court, he planned to televise his court’s proceedings. Everything signaled, as Ed Whelan of the Ethics and Public Policy Center wrote, his desire “to turn the lawsuit into a high-profile, culture-transforming, history-making, Scopes-style show trial.”

In his decision, the judge issued 80 “findings of fact.” All said findings and all said facts happen to support his belief that Proposition 8 was so errant that a bolt of lightning should have struck it from the ballot. For the sake of argument, let’s stipulate that Judge Walker is right. In that case, he and like-minded people should come up with, say, Proposition 9 overturning the ban and persuade 50.1 percent of Californians to support it. How difficult can that be given that, per Judge Walker, every single fact is on their side?

But convincing the voters to change their minds would require some patience and respect for people’s moral sensibilities, both of which are in short supply among supporters of gay marriage. It’s far easier to convince one judge who doesn’t truly need convincing to mint a new constitutional right to gay marriage. The cost of this exercise is the outrageous high-handedness that it entails and that pervades Judge Walker’s decision.

He concludes that Californians had no rational basis to vote for Proposition 8. One wonders how he stands living among such a sea of bigotry. As self-appointed arbiter of what’s good and right about marriage, child-rearing, and gender roles, Judge Walker brooks no dissent. It’s “beyond debate” that gay marriage “has at least a neutral, if not a positive, effect on marriage.” It is “beyond any doubt that parents’ genders are irrelevant to children’s developmental outcomes.”

All of that has been settled, and if you don’t believe it, well, Judge Walker said so. He describes traditional marriage as “an artifact of a time when the genders were seen as having distinct roles in society and marriage.” Behold the boundless power of Judge Walker -- even gender distinctions can’t survive the awesome finality of his pronouncements.

If the audacious sweep of Judge Walker’s decision delights proponents of gay marriage, it also invites a reversal as the case heads inevitably to the Supreme Court. May it be swift and decisive.

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

In 1850 Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote an allegory about a series of small-town would-be heroes who the gullible public claimed resembled the Great Stone Face on the side of a New Hampshire mountain. The citizens assumed that these men would have a granite-like ability to stand firm against whatever dangers the people faced. (“About this time there went a rumor throughout the valley, that the great man, foretold from ages long ago, who was to bear a resemblance to the Great Stone Face, had appeared at last.”) The most confident and charismatic of these quick-fix characters -- Mr. Gathergold, Old Blood-and-Thunder, and Old Stony Phiz -- always in the end proved failures, as the people finally learned that they did not have the qualities they ascribed to the face on mountain.

#ad#When a once widely popular George W. Bush left office, he was polling about 35 percent approval and 60 percent disapproval. The country had two years earlier turned out the Republican Congress -- to the tune of promises from Nancy Pelosi (in the pre-transcontinental-jet days) to end the wars, end the culture of corruption, and end the power of special interests.

In 2008 Barack Obama ran as a moderate liberal, offering assurances on instituting sound financial governance, getting out of Iraq, repealing the Bush anti-terrorism protocols, and making government work for the little guy by taking over some private enterprise -- that is, offering government-run health care, subsidized student loans, and new and extended entitlements. A Newsweek grandee, Evan Thomas, declared Him “sort of God.” He caused another pundit, Chris Matthews, to experience leg tingles. And the world anointed Him a Nobel laureate for good intentions.

After 19 months, a once cool, laid-back Barack Obama -- beloved by Oprah in his mesmerizing ability to make the enraptured faint at his sermons -- now polls about 45 percent approval and 50 percent disapproval -- nearly a 20-point swing in less than two years. Currently, a generic Republican challenger enjoys on average a six-point edge in the polls -- quite a turnabout from the twelve-point spread that Democrats mounted in January 2009. Public approval of Congress ranges from about 10 to 20 percent -- the Democratic-led Congress getting even lower marks than the pre-2006 Republican one.

One might say the public has changed its opinion of Obama, but it seems more likely that the public is beginning to see Obama as it finally did Bush. The hard Right always felt about Obama as the hard Left did about Bush, but now independents seem simply to have rechanneled their Bush anger to Obama anger -- something that has bewildered Team Obama, who cannot gain any traction by blaming the current malaise on the Bush legacy. Voters apparently don’t see the corrective to Bush’s deficit budgeting in Obama’s yet higher spending and larger government.

#page#When the economy under Bush was good, the public was more worried about Iraq. When Iraq became quiet as Obama entered office, it turned its furor on him for the recession. Obama thought his popularity and charm could win the public over to his unpopular agenda; now he worries that his own growing unpopularity and lack of charm may make any agenda unpalatable. Any more “successes” in enacting a widely unpopular agenda, and Obama’s approvals will be in the teens.

What can we learn from all this?

#ad#There is a growing desperation among politicians that the populace perceives them as pretty much alike -- alike in the sense of not being appealing. In Obama’s case, the charge is doubly serious, because he made extravagant claims that our first community organizer and our first African-American to become president -- and our most purely liberal president in a generation -- would be different, as in bringing a new humility and competence to the office.

Instead, over half the electorate sees only hypocrisy. Obama initially called for understanding and patience with the BP spill, in a way he had not when demagoguing Katrina. He suddenly found Guantanamo, renditions, military tribunals, Predator assassinations, and Iraq to be complex issues, after assuring us that they were open-and-shut cases of simple morality. Bush’s deficit misdemeanors suddenly became Obama’s felonies -- after he ran on the theme that Bush had recklessly run up the debt. The 2008 campaign to highlight racial harmony by electing the symbolic postracial Obama has become a sort of nightmare in which the old, tired identity politics of the 1980s rage as never before, fanned by an unpopular president desperate to rev up his base.

The common denominator here is that a largely conservative electorate has always wanted lower taxes, smaller but more competent government, fewer overseas commitments, honest government, and officials who live like the public they represent -- and it can’t seem to find that package in any party or candidate being presented to it. Indeed, the Obama medicine is now seen as worse than the Bush disease, in that he less competently oversaw the war in Afghanistan, blew apart the budget, and lives more royally than any Republican.

The obsequious media have been left scrambling to explain this new Orwellian barn wall: Bush’s aristocratic golf is now Obama’s needed relaxation; Bush’s bumbling press conferences might explain why Obama wisely doesn’t hold many at all; Republican congressional corruption simply led to a “They all do it, even Democrats” narrative; Bush’s failure to articulate how and why we would win in Iraq suddenly morphs into Afghanistan as a baffling experience that confuses all of us. Obviously, even the most adept public-relations-minded journalist could not pull all that off, and so we are left with media now as discredited as they are loathed.

And where does all that leave us?

#page#The public is waiting for an articulate conservative reformer who will quietly keep promises to balance the budget more through spending cuts than taxes, close the border to illegal immigration, either win or get out of long wars abroad, respect federal law and apply it equally, and restore a sense of American confidence and American exceptionalism.

The odd thing is that the entire country senses how Obama could restore his ratings to over 50 percent in the same way Clinton did in 1995. He would simply call in Republicans to work out a deal to balance the budget, quit his two-year “Bush did it” whine, stop suing the states, reassure business that there will be no more tax hikes, praise the private sector for its ingenuity and competence, stop trying to appeal to his base through race and ethnicity, and get engaged on Afghanistan.

#ad#Because there is no chance that Obama will or can do that, we are witnessing another Greek tragedy as our chief executive slowly implodes.

So we, the American public, have become something like the anxious townspeople of Hawthorne’s morality tale. We keep claiming that our next national leader is some sort of monumental icon who will magically solve our crises, only to learn that in the flesh he turns out not to be the Great Stone Face on the mountain at all. (The Obama euphoria of 2008 was not unlike the Bush worship for a short while between September 2001 and early 2003.)

In the end, if we are lucky, we will end up with a workmanlike candidate similar to the Ernest of Hawthorne’s short story, someone nondescript from the community, someone like the rest of America, who through humility and competence avoids the vanity of high office, balances budgets, wins wars, cuts spending, restores American confidence, finesses the partisan rancor, and restores our global stature and competitiveness -- and slowly grows to resemble the visage on the side of the mountain.

-- 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.

 

For now, the Iranian government has suspended the death-by-stoning sentence meted out to Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, the 43-year-old mother of two who was convicted of adultery. There is a lesson here.

There is often debate in free countries about whether it is counterproductive to protest human-rights outrages committed by repressive countries. For most of the past decade, for example, while Hugo Chávez has cemented his relationship with Iran, he has made life for Venezuela’s Jewish community more and more precarious. More than once, regime thugs have invaded Jewish community centers and synagogues. These violent outbursts were accompanied by escalating anti-Semitic rhetoric from state-controlled media and from the president himself.

#ad#A debate erupted within American Jewish circles. Is it better to protest loudly and publicly or will this simply make the lives of Jews in Venezuela that much harder? Writing in the Miami Herald in January 2008, Dina Siegel Vann of the American Jewish Committee cautioned that “shouting and screaming from the safety of the United States may feel good to some, but the goal of the exercise is not to satisfy their needs [but those] of Venezuelan Jews who have repeatedly said that such behavior is likely to exacerbate the situation.#...#Many in decision-making positions in the U.S. government have rightly, if belatedly, concluded that public confrontation with his regime should be avoided when possible.”

Leaving aside the assertion that Venezuelan Jews preferred their American co-religionists to remain silent (many did not), and acknowledging that some in “decision-making positions in the U.S. government” preferred back-channel diplomacy (that would be the State Department), the call for “quiet diplomacy” sacrifices too much.

As we have seen in the case of Sakineh Ashtiani, international protests very much do affect the way even the worst regimes treat their people.

During the 1970s, Jewish groups around the world drew attention to the plight of Jews in the Soviet Union. Through demonstrations, letter-writing, organizing at synagogues and on university campuses, and even picketing the visiting Bolshoi Ballet, activists highlighted the fact that Jews in the U.S.S.R. were not only second-class citizens but prisoners as well. Of course, all citizens of the U.S.S.R. were prisoners. But only the Jews had an international cheering section. Bill Buckley wrote at the time that he hoped the Soviets would release every Jew who wished to emigrate -- except one, so that the protests would continue.

The agitation on behalf of Soviet Jewry came at a time when the West was deeply wedded to the idea of détente, which in practice did not simply mean “live and let live” but was thought to require self-censorship on our part. It became bad manners to call too much attention to the spirit-crushing tyranny behind the Iron Curtain. The Jewish protesters embarrassed the State Department and other “decision-makers” within the U.S. government. But they won. In 1974, Congress passed the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which linked “most favored nation” trade status to freedom of emigration. As Richard Perle, one of the drafters, recalled later, “It had a galvanizing effect on millions of Soviet citizens -- Jews and non-Jews -- who understood that people in the West#...#were willing to stand with people seeking freedom.”

Natan Sharansky, who was a “prisoner of conscience” in the gulag when President Reagan delivered his “evil empire” speech, spoke of its effect. “It was the great brilliant moment when we learned that Ronald Reagan had proclaimed the Soviet Union an evil empire before the entire world.#...#That moment made it impossible for anyone in the West to continue closing their eyes to the real nature of the Soviet Union.”

Ashtiani, who has already received 99 lashes in the presence of her teenage son, was facing “imminent” stoning -- a method of execution that is really torturing someone to death. The Iranians have carried out such sentences -- most often on women (you can find pictures on the Internet if you can stand it) -- many times in the past. Never before has an international outcry been triggered. But Ashtiani’s two children have gotten the message out, and protests have erupted across the globe. Eighty prominent people including Condoleezza Rice, Robert Redford, the president of the European Parliament, Robert DeNiro, Bernard-Henri Lévy, and three former British foreign ministers signed an open letter in the Times of London condemning the regime. The president of Brazil, lately a pal of Ahmadinejad’s, was even moved to offer the woman sanctuary in his country.

The public shaming of the Iranian regime has possibly saved Ashtiani’s life. We are left to imagine what sort of electric effect a strong show of support from our current president might have on the rest of Iran’s suffering people.

-- Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2010 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Last week, a draft memo surfaced from the Homeland Security Department suggesting ways to administratively circumvent existing law to allow several categories of illegal immigrants to avoid deportation and, indeed, for some to be granted permanent residency. Most disturbing was the stated rationale. This was being proposed “in the absence of Comprehensive Immigration Reform.” In other words, because Congress refuses to do what these bureaucrats would like to see done, they will legislate it themselves.

Regardless of your feelings on the substance of the immigration issue, this is not how a constitutional democracy should operate. Administrators administer the law; they don’t change it. That’s the legislators’ job.

#ad#When questioned, the White House downplayed the toxic memo, leaving the impression that it was nothing more than ruminations emanating from the bowels of Homeland Security. But the administration is engaged in an even more significant power play elsewhere.

A 2007 Supreme Court ruling gave the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to regulate carbon emissions if it could demonstrate that they threaten human health and the environment. The Obama EPA made precisely that finding, thereby granting itself a huge expansion of power and, noted the Washington Post, sending “a message to Congress.”

It was not a terribly subtle message: Enact cap-and-trade legislation -- taxing and heavily regulating carbon-based energy -- or the EPA will do so unilaterally. As Frank O’Donnell of Clean Air Watch noted, such a finding “is likely to help light a fire under Congress to get moving.”

Well, Congress didn’t. Despite the “regulatory cudgel” (to again quote the Post) the administration has been waving, the Senate has repeatedly refused to acquiesce.

Good for the Senate. But what to do when the executive is passively aggressive rather than actively so? Take border security. Sen. Jon Kyl (R., Ariz.) reports that President Obama told him about pressure from the political left and its concern that if the border is secured, Republicans will have no incentive to support comprehensive reform (i.e., amnesty). Indeed, Homeland Security’s abandonment of the “virtual fence” on the southern border, combined with its lack of interest in completing the real fence that today covers only one-third of the border, gives the distinct impression that serious border enforcement is not a high administration priority absent some Republican quid pro quo on comprehensive reform.

But border enforcement is not something to be manipulated in return for legislative favors. It is, as the administration vociferously argued in court in the Arizona case, the federal executive’s constitutional responsibility. Its job is to faithfully execute the laws. Non-execution is a dereliction of duty.

#page#This contagion of executive willfulness is not confined to the federal government or to Democrats. In Virginia, the Republican attorney general has just issued a ruling allowing police to ask about one’s immigration status when stopped for some other reason (e.g., a traffic violation). Heretofore, police could inquire only upon arrest and imprisonment.

Whatever your views about the result, the process is suspect. If police latitude regarding the interrogation of possible illegal immigrants is to be expanded, that’s an issue for the legislature, not the executive.

#ad#How did we get here? I blame Henry Paulson. (Such a versatile sentence.) The gold standard of executive overreach was achieved the day he summoned the heads of the country’s nine largest banks and informed them that henceforth the federal government was their business partner. The banks were under no legal obligation to obey. But they know the capacity of the federal government, when crossed, to cause you trouble, endless trouble. They complied.

So did BP when the president summoned its top executives to the White House to demand a $20 billion federally administered escrow fund for damages. Existing law capped damages at $75 million. BP, like the banks, understood the power of the U.S. government. Twenty billion it was.

Again, you can be pleased with the result (I was) and still be troubled by how we got there. Everyone wants energy in the executive (as Alexander Hamilton called it). But not lawlessness. In the modern welfare state, government has the power to regulate your life. That’s bad enough. But at least there is one restraint on this bloated power: the separation of powers. Such constraints on your life must first be approved by both houses of Congress.

That’s called the consent of the governed. The constitutional order is meant to subject you to the will of the people’s representatives, not to the whim of a chief executive or the imagination of a loophole-seeking bureaucrat.

-- Charles Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2010, the Washington Post Writers Group.

First lady Michelle Obama’s latest overseas jaunt is getting all the headlines, but President Obama’s money-grubbing junket to Chicago may cost taxpayers far more in the long run. With his Gaultier-clad wife sashaying around the Spanish seaside, the lonely fundraiser-in-chief returned to Illinois to take care of some birthday-week business. Job One: filling the Senate-campaign coffers of his corruption-tainted political protege Alexi Giannoulias.

Mission accomplished. Obama’s Thursday afternoon campaign event for Giannoulias, the beleaguered state treasurer of Illinois, reportedly raked in $1 million. Lagging behind his GOP opponent, liberal Republican Rep. Mark Kirk, Giannoulias has coveted one-on-one, grip-and-grin time with Obama for months.

#ad#In addition to the cash, photo-ops, and video from the Obama fundraising event that Giannoulias will milk from now until Election Day, the White House has dispatched Vice President Joe Biden, White House senior adviser David Axelrod, and White House campaign-management guru David Plouffe to boost Giannoulias’s bid. Plouffe proclaimed Democrats “all in” for Giannoulias, whom he described as “a great progressive champion.”

Obama gave his own personal seal of ethical approval, telling deep-pocketed donors this week: “I appreciate his strong sense of advocacy for ordinary Americans. You can trust him -- you can count on him.” Uh-huh. And I’ve got a bridge to Hope and Change to sell you.

What would Giannoulias know about “ordinary Americans”? Giannoulias, 34, befriended Obama during pickup basketball games with an elite group that also included Michelle Obama’s brother, Craig; Chicago edu-crat Arne Duncan (now education secretary); and hedge-fund manager John Rogers (the ex-husband of the Obamas’ ex–White House social secretary, Desiree Rogers). He spread his wealth and influence around early and often to support Obama’s fledgling political career. He pitched in $7,000 in 2003–2004 to Obama’s Illinois State Senate bids. He hosted fundraisers for Obama’s U.S. Senate campaign in 2004 and for his presidential campaign in 2007.

Where’d the cash come from? Giannoulias’s Greek-immigrant family founded Chicago-based Broadway Bank, a now-defunct financial institution that loaned tens of millions of dollars to convicted mafia felons and faced bankruptcy after decades of engaging in risky, high-flying behavior. It’s the place where Obama parked his 2004 U.S. Senate campaign funds. And it’s the same place where a mutual friend of Obama and Giannoulias -- Obama fundraiser/slum lord Tony Rezko, who was convicted on several counts of corruption in 2008 -- used to bounce nearly $500,000 in bad checks written to Las Vegas casinos. This week, the Chicago Sun-Times revealed an additional $22.75 million Broadway Bank loan to a Rezko-owned business in 2006. Giannoulias held an ownership stake in the bank at the time.

Giannoulias served as a Broadway Bank vice president and senior loan officer for four years. According to the Chicago Tribune, during Giannoulias’s tenure, some $27 million of Broadway Bank’s funny money went to mob crooks Michael “Jaws” Giorango and Demitri Stavropoulos. Giorango is a hustler who fronted a nationwide prostitution ring and was sentenced to six months in prison; Stavropoulos is behind bars for operating a multistate bookmaking ring. Giorango ran the $400-an-hour call-girl operation out of high-rise luxury apartments in Chicago with the infamous “Gold Coast Madam,” Rose Laws. Giorango and Stavropoulos used their Broadway Bank loans to start their own risky lending business for nontraditional borrowers unable to secure traditional bank financing.

Despite Giorango’s criminal record, exposed by the Tribune in 2004, Broadway Bank approved massive mortgages for him. Giannoulias’s brother, Demetris, explained that, as a “relationship bank,” Broadway wouldn’t just throw someone under the bus because of a “bad article.” Instead, the bank went ahead and rubber-stamped a September 2005 loan for $3.4 million to buy a 32-unit Los Angeles apartment complex. The application falsely stated that the borrower, Giorango, had “not been convicted of a felony.” Giannoulias oversaw the servicing of such shady loans totaling $11 million. Remember: He was no low-level staffer. He was, as he reminded supporters when he needed to deflect attention away from his youth, top management at Broadway Bank.

In January 2010, the bank entered a consent decree with federal and Illinois regulators. It required Broadway Bank “to raise tens of millions in capital, stop paying dividends to the family without regulatory approval, and hire an outside party to evaluate the bank’s senior management.” The city’s former inspector general blasted Giannoulias and his family for tapping $70 million worth of dividends in 2007 and 2008 as the real-estate crash loomed. Broadway Bank was sitting on an estimated $250 million in bad loans. In late April, federal regulators shut it down. Cost to taxpayers: an estimated $390 million. Giannoulias refused to drop out of the race -- and instead used the company failure to argue that it made him more qualified to serve in office: “I have a renewed vigor and a new perspective on just how horrible it is out there for so many people.”

President Obama agrees: Abysmal failure should be rewarded with promotion. He’s leaving no shady banking buddy behind.

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

Will higher tax penalties on investment really spur jobs and faster economic growth? Most commentators would say no. It’s really a matter of economic common sense. But Tim Geithner says, Yes!

Speaking to a group in Washington this week, the Treasury secretary said that extending tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans would imperil the fragile economic recovery. He argued that government needs the revenues from those top-end tax hikes. So failure to raise taxes would harm growth. And then he went on to say that the trouble with the wealthy is that they save more of their tax breaks than do other groups.

Okay. Are you confused now? Most people would be.

#ad#Let’s start at the top. The coming tax bomb would raise the top marginal tax rate on capital gains from 15 to 20 percent, on dividends from 15 to 20 percent (or perhaps all the way to 39.6 percent), and on top incomes from 35 to 40 percent. Meanwhile, the estate tax could go as high as 55 percent.

Now, it is indisputable that cap-gains, dividends, and estates are essentially investment. What’s more, most successful earners who pay top personal tax rates are by near all accounts the folks who are most likely to save and invest.

But Mr. Geithner is suggesting the economy doesn’t need more saving. This thought was echoed by Jared Bernstein, a top White House economist, who told me in an interview that the saving and investment multipliers for economic growth are way below the stimulative effects of government transfer payments, such as more aid to state and local governments and further extensions of unemployment benefits.

Echoing that thought, the Senate this week voted to approve $26 billion in aid for state and local governments -- partly funded, by the way, by an $11 billion yearly tax increase on the foreign earnings of U.S. multinational corporations. Here, too, a tax on profits is a tax on investment.  The Senate also rejected an amendment by South Carolina Republican Jim DeMint that would extend all the Bush tax cuts.

In effect, pulling all this together, the position of the Democratic party in power in Washington is that transfer payments (taxing and borrowing from Peter to pay Paul) are good for growth, and that investment is bad.

Go figure. I guess it’s a battle between the demand side and the investment (or supply) side.

#page#The great flaw in the thinking of the Democrats is that they are ignorant of the economic power of saving and investment. Saving is a good thing. Stocks, bonds, bank deposits, money-market funds, commercial paper, venture capital, private equity, real estate partnerships -- all that saving is channeled into business investment. And whether that capital goes into new start-ups or small businesses or large firms, it finances the kind of new investment in plants and equipment and software and buildings that ultimately creates jobs and family incomes. And that, in turn, spurs consumption.

#ad#But pulling out just one dollar from the private sector and rechanneling it through the government as a transfer to someone else creates nothing. At best it’s a safety net. At worst it may damage private-business activity and actually reduce employment.

Without saving there can be no investment. And without investment there can be no enhanced productivity, which is the ultimate source of long-term prosperity and wealth.

Now, there are some Democrats who understand this. Senators Evan Bayh and Joe Lieberman, among others, support an extension of the upper-end tax cuts precisely to increase investment incentives that will create jobs. Bayh and Lieberman often refer to the John Kennedy tax cuts that lowered marginal rates across-the-board for successful earners and businesses. They correctly worry about small-business job creation in this process. And they have moved from the demand-side of today’s Democratic party over to the supply-side of the John Kennedy era.

Bayh and Lieberman have the story exactly right. And Treasury man Geithner has it fundamentally wrong.

Geithner tries to make a deficit-reduction argument, saying that extending tax cuts for the wealthy will cost $700 billion over the next ten years. But the real debate in advance of the Erskine Bowles deficit commission, which will restructure budget and tax reform, is about a one-year extension of the Bush tax cuts. That’s priced at $30 billion by the White House, about the same as the new bill to aid state and local governments. Which policy would help growth more?

My answer is to keep the incentives for investment. Or, find spending cuts immediately to cover both options. That would restore even more confidence.

We might also be surprised when the growth-and-revenue-increasing benefits of lower investment tax rates pay for those tax cuts in the future -- just as they have in the past.

-- 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$.

It has been clear since before the beginning of the year that Judge Vaughn Walker of the U.S. District Court in San Francisco was on a mission to establish a federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage and thereby to overturn California’s Proposition 8, a constitutional amendment passed by the people of the state in 2008. 

From his decision to have a “trial” of the “facts” in the case rather than proceed straightaway to legal arguments about the constitutional issues (a choice that surprised even the plaintiffs’ attorneys) to his attempt to stage a nationally televised extravaganza (brought to a halt by the Supreme Court) to his unconcealed bias in favor of the plaintiffs in virtually every aspect of the proceedings (ably summarized by NRO’s Ed Whelan here), Judge Walker has been preparing us for a baldfaced usurpation of political power for quite a while.
 
#ad#What Walker did not prepare us for is the jaw-dropping experience of reading his sophomorically reasoned opinion. Of the 135 pages of the opinion proper, only the last 27 contain anything resembling a legal argument, while the rest is about equally divided between a summary of the trial proceedings and the judge’s “findings of fact.” The conclusions of law seem but an afterthought -- conclusory, almost casually thin, raising more questions than they answer. On what grounds does Judge Walker hold that the considered moral judgment of the whole history of human civilization -- that only men and women are capable of marrying each other -- is nothing but a “private moral view” that provides no conceivable “rational basis” for legislation? Who can tell? Judge Walker’s smearing of the majority of Californians as irrational bigots blindly clinging to mere tradition suggests that he has run out of arguments and has nothing left but his reflexes.
 
But the deeper game Judge Walker is playing unfolds in those many pages of “fact finding” that make up the large middle of his ruling. There, through highly prejudicial language that bears little relation to any fact, the judge has smuggled in his own moral sentiments -- in precisely the part of his opinion that would normally be owed a large measure of deference in the appellate courts. To take one example: It is hardly an incontrovertible fact that “Proposition 8 places the force of law behind stigmas against gays and lesbians.”  But there it is, as finding No. 58. With “facts” like these, and appellate judges disinclined to question them, Judge Walker plainly hopes to propel this case toward a gay-marriage victory, regardless of how transparently weak his legal conclusions are. 

But the judges who ultimately take up this appeal -- the justices of the Supreme Court, not the feckless Ninth Circuit -- should not be buffaloed by Judge Walker’s invented “facts.” Still less should they confirm the specious legal conclusions he has extracted from them.