Commentary has just posted the highlights of its June issue. The lead article is Victor Davis Hanson's outstanding "Lessons of the war." Key paragraph: "The real question remains whether, in the wake of Iraq, any of the normal ways of doing business are going to change. As far as the United States is concerned, one might hope that our face-to-face confrontation with and utter defeat of the Baathists—coupled with the evidence of their barbaric rule, documentation of which keeps turning up as we sift through abandoned Iraqi government offices and torture chambers—will lead to a renewed appreciation of what Israel has been up against in its own struggle with an enemy that adopts similar strategies and displays a similar mentality. If nothing else, the trouncing, removal, and humiliation of Saddam Hussein should remind us that wars of self-defense and national survival need to be pursued to their logical conclusions in military defeat of the aggressors and change of regime. Rarely if ever do interrupted conflicts end by means of imposed peace processes, road maps, or UN-brokered armistices—all of which perpetuate and reward the illusion that defeated aggressors can recoup politically what they lost militarily—but rather by the elimination and replacement of the conditions that prompted the conflicts in the first place."

If Caroline Glick is correct in saying that President has betrayed Israel by insisting on the road map for peace (see my post below), then hasn't Ariel Sharon also betrayed Israel by accepting the road map? It is true that Sharon accepted it only under pressure from America, but the pressure was merely verbal. If the acceptance of the road map, in itself, manifestly jeopardizes Israel's security, then it was a betrayal for Sharon to have agreed to it, and the people of Israel should no longer trust hiim. But the notion that Ariel Sharon would betray Israel is highly implausible. In this piece from the Jerusalem Post, Hillel Halkin an astute Israeli analyst whose work frequently appears in Commentary magazine, explains why Sharon has done no such thing and why, contrary to suggestions by the Labor party, Sharon need not ask for forgiveness at the grave of Yitzhak Rabin.

Far be it from us to kick the New York Times when it's down. But along with the issues of corruption, plagiarism, fabrication and bias, the Times has serious problems with simple competence. This item from yesterday's Corrections section is illustrative:

"A sports article on Sunday about the history of Roland Garros, the tennis stadium where the French Open is played, misstated the year in which the Germans began using it as a prison camp for Jews. It was 1940, not 1939."

Not so long ago, pretty much anyone would have known that World War II started in the fall of 1939 with the German invasion of Poland, and that Germany followed up in May of 1940 by invading France. Even the French were not so feeble as to allow the Germans to use their stadia as prison camps a year before they were invaded.

Presumably editors at the Times read this stuff before they publish it. Maybe it's a sign of the decline of civilization; maybe just a sign of the decline of the Times.

Bret Stephens of the Jerusalem Post on the Jayson Blair and Rick Bragg capers. He finds that while the Blair caper reinforces what we already know about racial preferences and the ability of cheaters to flourish, the Bragg affair contains some new lessons about the parlous state of journalism at the Times and elsewhere. Stephens' conclusion is this: "As job applicants routinely inflate their CVs, employers price this reality into their decisions. Ditto with political candidates and the public that elects them. With l'affare Bragg, some of us may now learn to do the same with the venerable New York Times. Take the story, divide by two, and you'll have something like the truth. Or is that by four?"

I’ve finally had time to read and consider the piece Trunk posted a few days ago by Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post called “Washington’s Betrayal.” Glick argues that President Bush has betrayed Israel by forcing Ariel Sharon to endorse the road map for peace. She contends that, as a result, “the president’s credibility as a friend and an ally of [Israel] is necessarily in doubt” and thus that “we can no longer blindly trust [his] intentions.” Glick concludes that “as presently constituted, the Bush administration’s Middle East policy is hostile to the national security interests of the State of Israel.” Glick's column can be found here.

Is Glick correct? In part, I think she is. The Bush administration has pressured Israel into actions that Israel would not otherwise be taking and that are not the actions that maximize the security of its citizens. The administration has done so largely in the pursuit of what it perceives to be the U.S. interest in placating certain Arab states and Arab public opinion in general. Thus, it has shown not only a willingness to place U.S. diplomatic interests above Israeli security interests (as it might be expected to do), but also poor judgment about where U.S. interests lie. Glick is correct, therefore, that Israel should not blindly trust President Bush’s intentions – it should never blindly trust the intentions of any U.S. leader or politician. And she is also correct that the president’s credibility as a friend is subject to doubt – no one can be certain what positions he will take (and pressure Israel to take) as the parties proceed down the bunny trail that is the road map.

I disagree, however, with Glick’s claims that Bush administration policy is hostile to the national security interests of Israel and that the administration has, in fact, betrayed Israel. If Bush insists on specific Israeli concessions that jeopardize Israel’s security while Palestinian terrorism continues unabated, then Glick’s claims will have merit. So far, that hasn’t happened and, although the State Department would no doubt advocate such a betrayal, I do not assume that Bush will accede; indeed, my guess is that he will not. In short, there has been no betrayal and it is impossible to know at this point whether one will occur. Glick's concerns are justified but overstated.

Glick raises one particularly troubling point, however. She notes that Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas (upon whom Bush’s hopes for peace seem to rest) has made it clear that he will not take any action against the terrorist infrastructure. Instead, he hopes to persuade Hamas and Islamic Jihad to cease its violence against Israel for the time being. The fear, of course, is that these terrorist groups will use the cessation of hostilities to grow stronger and then, after a Palestinian state is established, renew their attacks on Israel. Personally, I question whether (a) Mahmoud Abbas will be able to so persuade Hamas and Islamic Jihad and (b) a new Palestinian state would promote or countenance attacks against Israel that could cause Israel to attack it. However, Glick’s scenario cannot be discounted completely, and it is another reason why I think Bush is wrong to be pushing the road map. At the same time, I believe that most Israeli Jews would settle for two years of freedom from terrorism followed by the creation of a Palestinian state, even with some risk of renewed hostilities thereafter. Although for me and for Glick that deal is not good enough, I don’t think President Bush can fairly be accused of betraying Israel for promoting a plan that creates a risk most Israel Jews probably are willing to accept.

E.J. Dionne is not a very insightful columnist, even for a liberal, but his columns often provide an unintended entertainment value. Yesterday's effort was a classic expression of the current, woebegone state of America's Democrats:

"President Bush's signature on his big tax cut bill Wednesday marked a watershed in American politics. The rules of policy-making that have applied since the end of World War II are now irrelevant. A narrow Republican majority will work its partisan will, no matter what.

"Until now, Congress was a forcefully independent branch of government....With a very slim congressional majority, Bush would have been expected to seek genuine compromise--under the old rules. But Washington has become so partisan and Bush is so determined to push through a domestic program based almost entirely on tax cuts for the wealthy that a remarkably radical program is winning despite the odds against it and lukewarm public support.

"This is a shock to congressional Democrats, most of whom came to political maturity under the old arrangements that placed a heavy emphasis on comity and the search for the political center."

Yes, that's been the Democrats' downfall, all right--not that they've discredited themselves with voters by being too liberal, but that they stay too close to the center. And, of course, they're too polite.

At least Dionne is now willing to give some credit to the man who keeps clobbering the Democrats, President Bush: "With ruthless brilliance, the White House is wielding power through the fierce imposition of party discipline." In a few short months, President Bush has progressed from bumbling stupidity to "ruthless brilliance." Not bad; it took Ronald Reagan years.

We posted a few days ago on the woman who has sued the state of Florida, with the assistance of the Florida Civil Liberties Union, claiming that her Muslim religion requires her to wear a veil in her driver's license photograph, which renders the photo useless as identification.

So I couldn't help being struck by this photo of Miss Egypt, who is currently participating in the Miss Universe pageant:

It's a small point, of course, and I suppose she could be a Copt. But still, I can't help feeling that the Florida case is another instance where the remarkable good will of the American people is being taken advantage of by our adversaries.

The alleged failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has given critics of the Administration hope that their attacks on the President will finally gain traction. The chorus of criticism is now swelling.

Just as, prior to the start of the Iraq war, there was no shortage of retired generals willing to criticize the Administration's strategy, retired intelligence officials are now coming out of the woodwork to critique alleged intelligence failures. Reuters headlines: "U.S. Insiders Say Iraq Intel Deliberately Skewed". Reuters' story begins: "A growing number of U.S. national security professionals are accusing the Bush administration of slanting the facts and hijacking the $30 billion intelligence apparatus to justify its rush to war in Iraq."

Congresswoman Jane Harman, ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, has called for an investigation, saying that "President Bush's contention that America went to war with Iraq to rid Saddam Hussein of hidden biological and chemical weapons 'could be the greatest intelligence hoax of all time.'"

Amid the controversy, a new team of more than 1,300 experts is being sent to Iraq to step up the hunt for banned weapons.

President Bush took the right approach yesterday, rejecting the assertion that the U.S. has failed to find evidence of weapons of mass destruction:

"You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They're illegal. They're against the United Nations resolutions, and we've so far discovered two. And we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong. We found them."

We don't know what other evidence of Iraq's programs has been accumulated not only through searches of suspected sites, but more important, through interviews of Iraqis familiar with the weapons programs. It is certainly possible that the Administration has more evidence that, for the time being, it is keeping to itself. The Democratic Presidential candidates may fear that this is the case, as so far they have mostly avoided joining in the chorus of criticism. But this issue has the potential to badly undermine the President and his effort to combat terrorism if more evidence of Saddam's banned programs fails to materialize.

On Wednesday of this week Minnesota's new Personal Protection Act went into effect. The law vastly expands the right of Minnesota citizens to acquire licenses to carry guns, a right formerly subject to the unfettered discretion of local police chiefs or sheriffs. The new law would not have passed without Republican pickups in the Minnesota legislature and in the governor's office in the last election, and has of course been the subject of daily hysteria in the local press.

Praying devoutly for voter backlash, Democratic legislators prevented any revision of the statute to remove a potentially troublesome ambiguity after it was passed. They want to keep their powder dry for firing at the next election.

Today's Minneapolis Star Tribune carries an entertaining profile of David Gross, a supporter of the new law. Gross is a Jewish attorney who packs heat at weekly Sabbath services at Bet Shalom Temple in suburban Minneapolis. The story is "For attorney David Gross, 'conceal-and-carry law' came none too soon."

The Washington Post has an interesting portrait of Tom Daschle cranking up his re-election machine in our favorite red state: "Democrat in Bush country." Key fact: "[Daschle] said he plans to raise at least $10 million -- enough money to purchase heavy air time starting this summer or sooner, and running straight through Election Day. South Dakota television markets are among the nation's cheapest, so voters are likely to watch another 18 months of political ads."

Good as it is, the Post story does not cover all the relevant angles. Daschle's race cannot be understood without frequent consultation with the blogs Inside South Dakota and South Dakota Politics. There Daschle's relationship with South Dakota's dominant political reporter has been the subject of recent posts, as well as Linda Daschle's lobbying work for Schering-Plough -- today's entry in the corporate scandals department.

Reuel Marc Gerecht is a former CIA officer who served in Iran. Know Thine Enemy is the book he wrote (under the pseudonym of Edward Shirley) about his experience as an agent in Iran, and it is excellent.

The cover story in the new issue of the Weekly Standard is Gerecht's "The Mullah's Manhattan Project." The article is mandatory reading. Gerecht brings his professional experience and analytical abilities to an exploration of the al Qaeda connection to Iran, the significance of the Iranian government's nuclear weapons development program, and the appropriate course of action for the United States. It is an understatement to say that the article is troubling.

In attempted preemptive self-defense the Pentagon taped Paul Wolfowitz's interview with Sam Tanenhaus, the author of the Vanity Fair article decried by Rocket Man below. The Pentagon's public relations Web site has posted the transcript of the interview. Click here for the transcript. Here is the relevant passage:

"TANENHAUS: Was that one of the arguments that was raised early on by you and others that Iraq actually does connect, not to connect the dots too much, but the relationship between Saudi Arabia, our troops being there, and bin Laden's rage about that, which he's built on so many years, also connects the World Trade Center attacks, that there's a logic of motive or something like that? Or does that read too much into--

WOLFOWITZ: No, I think it happens to be correct. The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason, but . . . there have always been three fundamental concerns. One is weapons of mass destruction, the second is support for terrorism, the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people. Actually I guess you could say there's a fourth overriding one which is the connection between the first two. . . . The third one by itself, as I think I said earlier, is a reason to help the Iraqis but it's not a reason to put American kids' lives at risk, certainly not on the scale we did it. That second issue about links to terrorism is the one about which there's the most disagreement within the bureaucracy, even though I think everyone agrees that we killed 100 or so of an al Qaeda group in northern Iraq in this recent go-around, that we've arrested that al Qaeda guy in Baghdad who was connected to this guy Zarqawi whom Powell spoke about in his U.N. presentation."

In the issue of the Weekly Standard out this morning, Bill Kristol comments that what has occurred is "that Tanenhaus has mischaracterized Wolfowitz's remarks, that Vanity Fair's publicists have mischaracterized Tanenhaus's mischaracterization, and that Bush administration critics are now indulging in an orgy of righteous indignation that is dishonest in triplicate." Kristol's editorial is "What Wolfowitz really said."

The transcript irrefutably establishes that Wolfowitz did not say what he is said to have said. Moreover, everything he did say is scrupulously true and consistent with the Bush administration's stated reasons for undertaking the removal of Saddam Hussein. But should Wolfowitz have given the interview to Sam Tanenhaus knowing it was to be used for an article in Vanity Fair? I'm sure that in retrospect Wolfowitz agrees with Rocket Man.

The Volokh Conspiracy has steered us to this interesting article from the Chronicle of Higher Education on blogs in the university setting: "Scholars who blog." At the end of the article is a list of representative blogs and information regarding the sites. But how did the Chronicle miss the keystone of the Northern Alliance of Blogs?

Before the first Gulf War, someone asked Bill Clinton how he would have voted on the Senate resolution concerning the war. He replied that he would have voted with the majority (in favor of the war resolution) if the vote was close but thought that the minority had the better arguments. At the time, this chillingly cynical statement about a question of war and peace seemed like something new in American politics. It sounds more familiar now, inasmuch as many Senate Democrats adopted a similar approach to the second Gulf War in 2002.

But lest we conclude that anyone, even Al Gore, is as prone as Clinton to cynicism and outright dishonesty on national security and defense issues, I present this piece by Paul Greenberg via Town Hall and Real Clear Politics. Greenberg shows that, while Clinton is now trumpeting his "support" for President Bush's war effort, the fact is that Clinton "attached more reservations to his support than a deadbeat dad." And even shortly after Baghdad was liberated, Clinton said he was "totally angry" that we attacked Iraq without giving Kofi Annan and Hans Blix more time.

Greenberg sees this as another case of Clinton positioning himself on both sides of the issue to preserve his ability to say he was right regardless of the outcome. Greenberg is not wrong, but I think there is something more going on. Clinton's statement in 1991 was less a calculated attempt to hedge than a potentially damaging admission of a propensity to hedge. And this time he continued to waffle about the merits of the decision to go to war even after the war ended.

Clinton's slickness, then, does not stem solely from political calculation and a lack of regard for the truth. In addition, I believe, there is a desire to flaunt his abiility to calculate and his lack of regard for the truth, as well as a desire to tell his audience what it wants to hear. All of this occurs in the context of an astonishing lack of seriousness, and is driven, perhaps, by the need to tell the world to shove it, while still being loved.

...has no goddam business giving interviews to Vanity Fair or similar magazines. Just because liberals are now listing him as an influential "neoconservative" is no reason for Wolfowitz to go Hollywood. And no matter how much he may claim to have been misquoted, it is simply inexcusable for him to have said anything that could be translated as: "bureaucratic reasons" caused the administration to use weapons of mass destruction as the justification for attacking Iraq. We need minor functionaries like Wolfowitz to shut the hell up and do their jobs, not set out to become celebrities like David Stockman. In other words, if Vanity Fair calls for an interview, just say no.

That's Glenn Reynolds' formula, and it fits what happened when a crazed Australian--not a terrorist, it turned out, just a nut--went berserk and charged the cockpit on a Qantas flight, attacking a flight attendant. The Sydney Morning Herald has a nice account of the incident.

"I just thought, 'You're not getting in there to the flight deck'," said flight attendant Greg Khan, fighting back tears. "So I took him on, I suppose."

The flight attendant drove the madman back into the main cabin, where passengers helped to subdue him. The flight attendant, who was wounded in the attack, said he "was not surprised passengers leapt to his aid to fight the hijacker: 'No, not since September 11, no one is going to put up with that anymore,' he said."

The era of airplane hijackings is over.

Courtesy of Real Clear Politics and Town Hall, here is the latest from Michelle Malkin on the Muslim hate crime myth. It seems that several prominent Muslim "victims" perpetuated "hate crimes" against themselves. In some cases it was a hoax, in others a scam.

Frank Gaffney brilliantly elaborates the point I made last night regarding the adverse effects of the "road map" on American security: "A road trap for America too." And Charles Krauthammer does likewise: "Let's hear talk of peace in Arabic too." (Courtesy of RealClearPolitics.)

Mazin Qumsiyeh is a professor of genetics at the Yale Medical School and a rabid hater of Israel. Earlier this week the New York Sun reported an incredible story by James Kirchick regarding Qumsiyeh. According to Professor Qumsiyeh, the alleged overlap of Jewish student members of Yale College Students for Democracy and the Yale Friends of Israel revealed the existence of a "Jewish pro-war cabal."

Qumsiyeh circulated the names of the students (several of them erroneous) by e-mail to the listserve of the Yale Coalition for Peace. Qumsiyeh's e-mail bizarrely advised that the Yale College Students for Democracy "subscribes to the same Straussian theology that the no-cons [sic] around Bush have been pushing [Wolfowitz, Perle, Wurmser, Kristol, Feith]. I think you will find the list informative. Note that there is significant overlap of this list with the ‘Yale Friends of Israel’ list serve."

The story was unavailable online, but FrontPage has picked it up and included it among its roster this morning: "Are all Jewish students part of a 'pro-war cabal'?"

Caroline Glick makes a powerful case in her Jerusalem Post column that the Bush administration's adoption of the "road map" is deserving of harsh condemnation from the standpoint of Israel's security: "Washington's betrayal." She concludes by stating, "We must accept the truth. As presently constituted, the Bush administration's Middle East policy is hostile to the national security interests of the State of Israel." If her case is sound, the policy would also be hostile to the national security interests of the United States. Is that possible?

Hugh Hewitt has brought a multimedia punch to the recent saga of Robert Scheer. Today his site links to Scheer's latest outrage in the Los Angeles Times and the blogospheric reaction to it.

Today's most outrageous news story originated with London's Financial Times, which headlined a supposed scandal: "U.S. Faces Future of Chronic Deficits." The story begins: "The Bush administration has shelved a report commissioned by the Treasury that shows the US currently faces a future of chronic federal budget deficits totalling at least $44,200bn in current US dollars....[T]he Bush administration chose to keep the findings out of the annual budget report for fiscal year 2004, published in February, as the White House campaigned for a tax-cut package that critics claim will expand future deficits."

The Financial Times story spread like wildfire through the electronic press today, and will no doubt be headlined in most newspapers tomorrow. Here, for example, is CNN's report: "White House Scrapped Deficit Story." And here is the typically hysterical and irresponsible BBC spin: "Bush 'Buried' Critical Report." The BBC elaborated on the Financial Times' original story by claiming that the "buried" report "advocated tax rises." For those who missed the point, the BBC adds that "Those [tax] cuts, the opposite of what was reportedly recommended in the Treasury study, were signed into law by President George W. Bush on Wednesday." Other news sources have written that the "buried" report advocated a 66% increase in income taxes.

But the report in question isn't exactly buried; it is available here, on the web site of the American Enterprise Institute, where one of the report's authors is a visiting scholar.

The report, by Jagdeesh Gokhale and Kent Smetters, is highly technical and certainly has not been read, let alone understood, by most of the reporters who have used it as another pretext to bludgeon the Administration and to discredit tax cuts. The point of the report, titled "Fiscal and Generational Imbalances: New Budget Measures for New Budget Priorities," is to propose a new method of measuring the federal government's long-term budget obligations. The Administration did not include this paper or its findings in the 2004 budget report; instead, it included the 75-year projections for Medicare and Social Security which have been used by the federal government for a number of years. In other words, the current budget used exactly the same projections that have been used in past years, rather than adopting the new measure argued for by Gokhale and Smetters. Some scandal.

The claim that the report advocated tax increases is also false. The report says that the present value of the federal budgetary shortfall, projected in perpetuity, is approximately $44 trillion, virtually all of which is attributable to Medicare or Social Security obligations. This projection assumes that those programs are not reformed. The authors say, on page 5, that if there were no cuts in projected spending, payroll taxes would have to be increased by 17% of total payrolls, forever, or income taxes would have to be increased by two-thirds, forever, to correct the fiscal imbalance they project.

What the authors recommend, however, is not tax increases which on their face are out of the question. Rather, they advocate reform of entitlement programs. In particular, they argue for establishing personal retirement accounts to replace the current Social Security system; see the discussion beginning at page 13 of the report.

The author of the Financial Times article, Peronet Despeignes, can be forgiven for failing to understand the Gokhale-Smetters study. She cannot, however, be forgiven for failing to report correctly on what the authors of the study told her. The text of her interview with Kent Smetters is available here, and it negates the entire thrust of the article that she wrote and other news sources have slavishly copied:

"Smetters:...But the thing is Lindsey went, O'Neill went. It's perfectly reasonable that the new guys came in, they're hit with this, and they need some time to think about it. The Boston Globe article was written by two brilliant economists. But, in my opinion, that piece maybe made it sound too much like some kind of a conspiracy to kill honest accounting in order to save the tax cut, or something like that. It really wasn't. The new guys said, hey, this is something that could go to press within a week, and this is just a completely radical new way of looking at the budget.

"FT: So there wasn't any high-level conspiracy?

"Smetters: No, there wasn't. This point has to be really emphasized. In fact, if you look at this framework, the tax plan looks great....This is hardly stuff the Administration would kill because they're afraid of the tax plan looking bad."

So the thrust of the article published by the Financial Times, and elaborated on by CNN, the BBC, Reuters, and, no doubt, just about every newspaper in America by tomorrow morning, is the precise opposite of what the Financial Times reporter was told by one of the authors of the supposedly "buried" study.

One more thing: the just-enacted tax cut of $350 billion represents approximately .008 of the $44 trillion shortfall projected by Gokhale and Smetters. So if liberals think that entitlement reform can be avoided by negating the small tax cuts now in prospect, they are sadly misguided.

is contained in this piece by Donald Lambro chief political correspondent for the Washington Times. Lambro reports that Democrats are losing support among black and Hispanic voters. He points to survey results showing that only 63 percent of black voters now call themselves Democrats, down from 74 percent in 2000. Ten percent now identify themselves as Republicans, as opposed to 4 percent in 2000. Moreover, the Republicans are believed to have captured a record 35 percent of "Hispanic" voters in 2002. Democrats also continue to lose support among labor union rank and file.

I can't dispute Lambro's figures, nor do I want to. However, I question some of his explanations for the trends he reports. Lambro thinks that Republicans are picking up support among black voters because of President Bush's support for school choice, privatization, and money with which to combat AIDS in Africa. I am more inclined to attribute the increase to the fact that it's nearly impossible for the party of a popular president to be limited to only 4 percent support from any segment of the population except perhaps college professors and New York Times editors. To be a bit less cynical, the evidence suggests that Republicans are doing well among young voters generally, and there is no reason why it shouldn't be making inroads with young black voters. The mixture of myth and reality that caused black voters of a certain age to support Democrats unconditionally surely has far less resonance with younger black voters.

Lambro attributes the erosion of Democratic support among Hispanics in part to the Democratic filibuster of the Miguel Estrada nomination. I would like to believe this, but I'm skeptical. The Hispanic population is incredibly diverse and it strikes me as improbable that, given meaningful competition, either party could capture and hold onto much more than 65 percent of that vote for long. President Bush, of course, is competing hard for the Hispanic vote.

At the end of the piece, Lambro seems to suggest that the Democrats, having lost control of the presidency, both houses of Congress, and the majority of governorships and state legislatures, and now facing the erosion of its base, may be headed for extinction. This strikes me as implausible. The Democrats are not that far removed from 50-50 status and they have made inroads among important groups (suburbanites, professionals, etc), as documented in the book The Emerging Demcratic Majority. The evidence Lambro points should be of concern to Democrats. However, modern politics in this country tends toward equilibrium, and the Democrats face no danger of extinction unless they get too far on the wrong side of the national security issue.

A few weeks ago we posted Mark Steyn's terrific tribute to Bob Hope in contemplation of Hope's 100th birthday. Today on Hope's birthday S.T. Karnick does the honors with a fine overview of Hope's career: "Hope's memories."

Rocket Man, I have to agree that Saddam Hussein was certainly acting like a guy with something to hide. If he was "clean," why didn't he let the U.N. inspectors talk to his scientists at will? Why, for that matter, were the inspectors expelled in the late 1990s? However, if it all turns out to be a big misunderstanding, I suggest that Saddam (if he's still alive) come out of hiding and accept our apology.

Liberal news organizations both here and in England lay low briefly after the successful conclusion of the Iraq war to give people time to forget about their dire predictions of "quagmire," "massive civilian casualties," etc. But now they're back in full force, trying to deprive the Bush and Blair administrations of credit for their successful policy.

The effort to retrospectively discredit the Iraq war takes a number of forms--the claim that the special forces' rescue of Pfc. Jessica Lynch was a fraud, CBS News' recent story asserting that a bunker bombed by the U.S. at the beginning of the war in an effort to kill Saddam Hussein never existed, and so on. But the left has fastened most gleefully on the alleged failure to find weapons of mass destruction. The claim that "no such weapons have been found" is repeated constantly in the press. While that claim is untrue--some such weapons have in fact been found--it certainly appears to be true that so far, these discoveries have been less substantial than expected. Whether this is because the weapons were destroyed at the outset of the war, or were moved to Syria, as Debka File says, or are still in Iraq and simply haven't been found yet, is unclear. In the meantime, however, the left is doing all it can to use the absence of definitive WMD discoveries to discredit the war and to cast doubt on the motives of the American and British governments.

The BBC joined this chorus today with this article, titled "Iraq weapons dossier 'rewritten'". The allegedly sensational news reported by the BBC is that--according to an anonymous British official--the "dossier compiled by the government on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction was rewritten to make it "sexier." The BBC is trying to drum up support for the claim that "the US-led coalition had effectively gone to war on a false pretext." But its own report demonstrates how lacking in substance that theory is.

Even the BBC's own anonymous source concedes that "Most things in the dossier were double source." In fact, there is only one fact stated in the dossier that the BBC's anonymous official questions: the statement that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction could be "ready for use within 45 minutes." This statement was based on information from only one source, who was not considered reliable by the BBC's informant.

That's it. Everything else in the British dossier is conceded to be correct: "[T]he official said he was convinced that Iraq had programme to produce weapons of mass destruction, and felt it was 30% likely there was a biological weapons programme. He said some evidence had been 'downplayed' by chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix."

In short, there's a headline but there isn't any story. Which is typical of all of the "Where are the WMD?" stories. What, exactly, do these people think? Are they seriously trying to argue that Saddam didn't have any chemical or biological weapons? If that were true, Saddam would have pulled off one of the greatest hoaxes of all time, for no apparent purpose.

As of 1998, there was an inventory of substantial quantities of chemical and biological weapons that Iraq admitted possessing. For years, the U.N. tried to get Saddam to prove that he had destroyed those inventories, but he was unable to supply such evidence. Why would Saddam destroy his weapons and then perversely refuse to provide documentation, when his failure to do so kept the U.N. sanctions in place? And what about the chemical suits that U.S. forces discovered in several abandoned Iraqi military positions, along with written instructions for the use of chemical weapons? Do the liberals really believe that Saddam trained and equipped his soldiers to use weapons that he didn't possess?

The last word goes to Tony Blair, who says he is "still absolutely sure that weapons of mass destruction will be found." And to British Defence Minister Adam Ingram, who says: "The whole world knew what Saddam Hussein was up to in terms of the weapons of mass destruction and that's why we prosecuted the war and that's why we were right."

Dick Morris hails what he calls "an unparalleled act of political brilliance," President Bush's tax cut "compromise."

Morris notes that ordinarily, one problem with passing landmark legislation is that you lose it as an issue. Here, because the tax cuts enacted this year are slated to expire in 2006, "Bush can send refund checks of $400 for each child to 25 million households this summer, slash the tax on dividends and capital gains to 15 percent and reduce tax rates on all three brackets - all effective immediately - and still be able to base his re-election campaign on the need to preserve his tax cuts."

Morris' theory is that, while the constituency for cutting taxes is a thin majority at best, the constituency for raising taxes is close to non-existent. His view is that in 2004, "every Democratic candidate will have to answer the question: 'Will you support extending the Bush tax cut?'" The problem is that: "A 'no' will be required to win enough primary votes to get the nomination. But a 'yes' will be necessary to prevail in the general election. Bush has put the Democrats in an impossible position."

Let's hope he's right. Via Real Clear Politics.

The excellent John Fund has a piece in the WSJ Opinion Journal in which he argues that the Clintons are hurting the Democrats by "crowding out" and "inhibiting the development" of fresh, electable presidential candidates. Fund cites the grievance to this effect voiced by Democratic commentator and one-time Dukakis campaign manager Susan Estrich. To me this grievance is lame. The failure of the Democratic presidential contenders to impress has little if anything to do with the Clintons. In my opinion it stems from the fact that (1) few contenders seem impressive at this stage of the cycle (think of Bush in 1999 and Clinton himself in 1991) and (2) in this case the contenders are, for the most part, not very impressive. To blame the Clintons for the failure of the phlegmatic John Kerry to light any fires strikes me as absurd, but characteristic of Estrich, who probably still thinks that Dukakis lost because of Willie Horton.

Fund also cites Estrich's opinion that Hillary Clinton is unelectable. I disagree. In the post-9/11 environment (which may or may not endure) seriousness counts. Unlike most Democrats, Ms. Clinton is serious and seems to be working diligently in the Senate to become even more so. I think liberal and swing voters might well trust her more than any other Democrat to mend the economy and fight terrorism. Frankly, I would trust her more than almost any other Democrat on the terrorism front. Accordingly, in a "crisis" election, I think that Hillary is electable.

In yesterday's Bleat Lileks the Great responds to Hugh Hewitt's assignment to the Northern Alliance of Blogs to comment on the leaked John Carroll/Los Angeles Times memo.

HINDROCKET adds: My take on this memo is different from Lileks'. I think the memo is really quite astounding. The Los Angeles Times has long been regarded as one of the nation's most liberal, and most obviously biased, papers. It really appears that Carroll, for whatever reason, wants to change that reputation. Just look at what he says:

"The reason I'm sending this note to all section editors is that I want everyone to understand how serious I am about purging all political bias from our coverage. We may happen to live in a political atmosphere that is suffused with liberal values (and is unreflective of the nation as a whole), but we are not going to push a liberal agenda in the news pages of the Times."

Carroll's acknowledgement that the world inhabited by L.A. Times reporters is "a political atmosphere that is suffused with liberal values," and one that is "unreflective of the nation as a whole," is an unprecedented major media admission, as far as I know. As is his admission that the Times has, at least on occasion, "push[ed] a liberal agenda in the news pages."

And the frankness of Carroll's criticism is striking; at one point he quotes his reporter's article and says, "Seldom will you read a cheaper shot than this." That is a pretty remarkable thing for an editor to say about his own newspaper. It remains to be seen what effect Carroll's effort will have on the quality of the Times' writing, but there is no reason not to be pleased at his admission that the liberal consensus prevailing in the Times' newsroom has corrupted that paper's reporting.

In his Weekly Standard column Hugh Hewitt warns of California's impending giveaway of authority over real property including every "site that is associated with the traditional beliefs, practices, lifeways, and ceremonial activities of a Native American tribe." What's the problem with that? Hugh suggests that in addition to the obvious problems it creates for housing development, it is unconstitutional: "Gray Davis rolls the dice."

While all the papers this morning carry the announcement of a summit meeting in Jordan including President Bush, Prime Minister Sharon, and Daddy Mazen, WorldTribune.com reports that "U.S. threatened sanctions if Israel blocked roadmap." And the Wall Street Journal has a cautionary editorial: "Missing Mideast momentum." Also worth a look is Clifford May's "Slippery roads to peace."

As former teenage students of the "Playboy philosophy" -- Hugh Hefner's encylopedic exposition of his deep thoughts in a monthly Playboy column during the sixties -- Rocket Man and I should not have let Hefner's seventy-seventh birthday pass without notice. George Will makes up for us today in his column: "Hef the winner."

HINDROCKET adds: It's hard to avoid the conclusion that, for better or worse, Hefner was one of the most influential thinkers of the past century. Our musings on the rise of the Playboy Philosophy in American public life can be linked to at left under the title "Clinton." The article, titled "Perjury Penumbra," was originally published in the Orange County Register.

As we have noted previously, Donald Luskin has organized a truth squad to monitor the utterances of the increasingly desperate Paul Krugman of the increasingly desperate New York Times. In today's piece for National Review Online, Luskin explains how Krugman purports to find that Bush's policies are about to unravel due to deflation and the "liquidity trap." Luskin's refutation of Krugman's economic analysis sounds persuasive, but I don't really know enough about economics to opine with confidence. I will say that Krugman reminds me of certain Marxists I knew in my college days who, almost monthly, would seize on this or that piece of bad economic news and pronounce that the crisis of capitalism had arrived. Krugman has substituted the phrase "great unraveling" (the title of his new book) for "crisis of capitalism." It's just around the corner, folks.

The article by Larry Purdy posted below about the pro-quota brief filed by a small group of retired military officers in the University of Michigan cases is well worth reading. Buried in the middle of the piece is Purdy's critique of the officers' suggestion that the military needs black officers to provide leadership for black enlisted personnel. The implication is that blacks won't fight as hard unless they are led by black officers, or at least unless they see that blacks are represented in the officer corps to some pre-determined degree. This strikes me as either a slander against black enlisted personnel or a damning indictment of the quality of that personnel -- most likely the former. It would take more than the say-so of a few retired officers to convince me that morale is adversely affected by the absence of racially balanced representation among officers. As Purdy suggests, the discriminatory selection of officers who are less than the best is surely the greater threat to morale.

In the unlikely event that the implication of the retired officers' brief is true, the ex-officers should not be reinforcing, much less pandering to, these racist attitudes. Rather they should be thinking about some rather drastic reforms to combat the unacceptable attitudes they have described.

Dick Morris writes with an insider's perspective on Sidney Blumenthal's memoirs of his service in the Clinton administration. According to Morris, Blumenthal's book constitutes the authentic version of the gospel according to Hillary Clinton: "Sidney Blumenthal parrots Hillary's paranoid mutterings."

U.S. News and World Report has a compelling account of "the inside story of how U.S. terrorist hunters are going after al Qaeda": "Playing offense." (Courtesy of Right Wing News.) The story notes something I have long believed -- that when al Qaeda attacked the United States on 9/11, they thought they were still dealing with Bill Clinton. They expected us to do no more than to lob a few cruise missiles at a meaningless target.

The guys at Fraters Libertas only intimate the fun awaiting the new inductees into the Northern Alliance of Bloggers now that alliance Commissioner Hugh Hewitt has granted our petition for expansion of the alliance to include Shot in the Dark and SCSU Scholars.

Did the Germans seek to isolate and enslave American Jewish prisoners of war? I did not know that they did. How did their comrades-in-arms respond? Tonight public television broadcasts the enraging, inspirational Charles Guggenheim documentary "Berga," telling the story of Americans taken prisoner by the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge. None of the standard accounts of the battle tells this story. Learn the name of Hans Kasten, a peculiarly American hero, and remember his mighty deeds. Dorothy Rabinowitz has a characteristically excellent account of the show in the Wall Street Journal today: "Prisoners of another war." Click here for WNET's home page on the show, including access to highlights of the program and much additional information.

We predicted a couple of weeks ago that the crackdown on al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia and, especially, Morocco would make our own methods look very gentle. Today the prosecutor-general of the appeals court of Casablanca announced that the man who organized the recent bombings in Casablanca was capured on Monday, but unfortunately died in police custody. The prosecutor-general said that the terrorist "suffered from heart disease" and died while being transferred to a hospital. "His health unfortunately did not allow investigators to finish all the elements of the probe," the prosecutor-general told Moroccan television. I wouldn't be surprised if a number of terrorists start encountering health problems in Morocco.

Max Abrahms has a column in the Los Angeles Times whose principal virtue is concisely stating the implausibility of the scenario of a "road map" to peace: "Road map torn by ambiguity." Abrahms opens his piece as follows: "There is something intellectually dishonest about a 'peace process' that tacitly promises mutually exclusive demands to the Israelis and Palestinians by papering over their differences until they inevitably collide." What is the answer to this pointed observation?

National Review's Rod Dreher has come into the possession of an astounding memorandum from Los Angeles Times editor John Carroll instructing his section editors to knock off the blatant liberal editorializing by reporters on the news pages: "Hell freezes over." (Courtesy of Hugh Hewitt.)

Our friend Kirk Kolbo's law partner Larry Purdy -- both Kirk and Larry represent the plaintiffs in the pending Supreme Court cases -- has an outstanding, impassioned piece on National Review Online responding to the friend-of-the-court brief filed by retired military officers supporting the University of Michigan's "affirmative action" admissions policies: "Operation racial preferences."

As former users of the Blogger software, we never quite grew accustomed to the occasional site outages that felt like near-death experiences to us. Today was our first such prolonged experience with Hosting Matters, our current home base. We understand that a fire at the location housing our servers caused an electrical outage that shut them down and made us inaccessible from mid-morning until just now. Whatever it was we're glad to be back.

Saudi officials have announced the arrest of an unspecified number of al Qaeda members believed responsible for the recent bombings in Riyadh. One of those arrested, Ali Abd al-Rahman al-Faqasi al-Ghamdi, is a high-ranking al Qaeda member and is believed to have organized the bombings.

My favorite line in the Washington Post's report: al-Ghamdi was among three men who "were arrested in an Internet cafe in the holy city of Medina." Which neatly sums up the odd mix of medieval and modern that characterizes the Islamofascist terrorists.

In contrast to past investigations, most notably Kohbal Towers, American officials are describing the cooperation of the Saudi government as "superb."

FrontPage has posted Rocket Man's terrific item on the Cannes Film Festival. Here it is, once more once: "A festival of anti-Americanism."

We've been posting all the items worth reading on Sidney Blumenthal's memoirs of his service in the Clinton administration. This morning Robert Bartley devotes a magnificient column covering most of the Wall Street Journal editorial page to Blumenthal's book: "No wars, only scandals."

In our eyes, the most gifted as well as the most beautiful of the young conservative columnists is Michelle Malkin. If she were a Dowdy liberal instead of a brilliant conservative bombshell, she would have won a Pulitzer Prize for Journalism some time over the past couple years during which she has broken numerous big stories in her column.

It meant a lot to us when she followed our invitation to take a look at our then-new site with the words of encouragement we quote on the left border. Opening our inbox this morning we were therefore delighted to find this message:

"Happy anniversary -- or should I say, blogger-versary -- to you all. I continue to enjoy Power Line. FYI, here's a link to my latest column, which may be of interest: 'Myth of the Muslim hate crime epidemic.'"

Trunk, as something of a third party buff, I enjoyed your piece on the subject. The Perot campaign of 1992 is endlessly fascinating to me. What strikes me most about it is that, unlike nearly all third party candidacies of note, Perot ran his insurgency from the center. Moreover, he did this while running against a Republican president who was, at best, only moderately conservative and a Democratic candidate who was posing, for the most part, as a centrist. When John Anderson tried to run as a centrist in 1980 against Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, there was much more room in the center. Yet, if I recall correctly, Anderson gained only 5 percent or less of the popular vote. And Perot's success cannot fully be explained by "the economy, stupid." Things were not going particularly well in 1980 either. Nor can the difference between the success of the two third party candidacies be explained by pointing to the weaknesses of the first President Bush and the unknown candidate Clinton. Jimmy Carter in 1980 was about as lame as an incumbent could be, and the public had enormous doubts about Reagan, who was widely portrayed as an extremist warmonger and advocate of voodoo economics.

Perot, of course, commanded enormous resources in 1992. However, I think the main reason why Perot did so well is that, unlike John Anderson, he was an angry centrist. Perot managed to sound like he was "mad as hell and not going to take it anymore" without actually advocating anything that would tend to frighten voters. This was the perfect posture in a year when people were unhappy about a recession but understood that things weren't really all that bad.

I was on the road today and, while waiting in the Cleveland airport, picked up a stray copy of USA Today. A very foolish columnist named DeWayne Wickham has a piece called "How sweet it is: Respect for Clinton rebounds among Amercans." The column is based on a CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll which asked a sample of Americans to identify the "greatest" president. Wickham gleefully reports that 11 percent named Bill Clinton, and concludes from this that the "right" has failed to besmirch the Clinton legacy. Wickham acknowledges that "George W. Bush managed to tie Clinton for third place" behind Lincoln at 15 percent and Kennedy at 13 percent. Nonetheless, he concludes that Clinton's lofty rating "has to make conservatives squirm."

For this conservative, the thougt that even one American outside of his immediate family considers Bill Clinton our greatest president is mildly unsettling. However, on reflection, it isn't surprising that Clinton is so rated by 11 percent of Americans. First, he is enormously popular among African-Americans (such as Wickham himself). Presumably blacks constituted close to 10 percent of those polled. It wouldn't surprise me if something like half of the blacks polled picked Clinton. Second, Clinton is the only recent Democratic president other than Jimmy Carter. Carter's presidency was an abject failure, and he gained minimal support in the poll. President Bush, by contrast, had to share the vote of Republicans inclined to select a recent president with Ronald Reagan, who came in right behind "W" with 10 percent.

It could be argued that Clinton had to share the Democratic vote with Kennedy (who, as noted, pulled in 13 percent), but I don't think that was the case. Kennedy's popularity is explained by his status as an icon -- there can be no other explanation for why such a brief, relatively undistinguished presidency is rated above those of FDR and Reagan, to name just two, and even that of Clinton. Although Kennedy was a Democrat, he was by no means a liberal by today's standards (Eleanor Roosevelt didn't even consider him a liberal by the standards of 1960). Ideologically, though not sexually, his administration, with its emphasis on the global power struggle and tax cuts, resembled the current one more than Bill Clinton's. But Kennedy's support in the poll has little to do with Democrat vs. Republican or liberal vs. conservative. E.J. Dionne makes this case in today's Washington Post, and for once I agree with him.

In the final analysis, Clinton's presidency will not be regarded nearly as well as he hopes or as badly as his detractors wish. If the economy fails to rebound for President Bush, Clinton will be remembered more fondly than would otherwise be the case. But even in this scenario, I very much doubt that he will be considered an upper echelon president years from now, either in polls of historians or of the public.

None of us at Power Line have been big fans of the "Road Map" to peace in the Middle East. I've accepted it on the theory that I, like Ariel Sharon, trust George Bush. My impression is that the "road map" has plenty of wiggle room and doesn't commit Israel to anything unless and until the Arabs cease their attempted genocide. Which is, after all, the whole point.

But I am troubled by the fact that the Minneapolis Star Tribune has endorsed the road map, which it terms a "Promising new start in the Mideast." Endorsement by the Star Tribune is more or less a kiss of death. The Strib starts in a reasonable way, saying that "Promising steps in the past have often been followed by devastating acts of violence by Palestinian extremists." True enough. But the Strib continues with a truly stunning bit of moral equivalence: "Israel's settler movement, violent in its own way, will certainly oppose Sharon in the matter of withdrawing from occupied Palestinian territory." "Violent in its own way"? What on God's green earth does that mean?

Whatever it means, it was no accident. The moral equivalence continues: "Israelis doubt that Palestinian leaders will or can disarm the bombers; Palestinians doubt that Sharon will or can dismantle Israeli settlements in occupied land." So blowing people up with bombs is the same as building homes for one's family.

The Strib doesn't completely dissuade me, but only because I am very confident that George Bush doesn't share the rather bizarre worldview of the Star Tribune, the Palestinian Authority and others who can find only the most subtle kind of difference between blowing up other people, and being blown up.

And it looks like Yasser Arafat's view of the situation is closer to mine than the Strib's, as the Associated Press reports that he is doing his best to scuttle the upcoming "summit." Rather than comment further, it makes sense to say "stay tuned," as we will all know shortly what comes of the present effort by the Administration.

One of the advantages President Bush had as a candidate for president in 2000 was the formidable third-party candidacy of Ralph Nader as the Green Party candidate to the left of Al Gore. Nader attracted nearly 3 percent of the vote and almost certainly affected the outcome of the election. Will the Green Party run a serious candidate for president again in 2000, or endorse the Democratic nominee? Today's Washington Post carries an interesting story on the deliberations underway on this issue: "Greens consider standing behind Democratic nominee in '04."

In the spring issue of my favorite magazine -- the Claremont Review of Books -- Professor Andrew Busch of the University of Denver has an excellent review of Nader's account of his 2000 candidacy, Crashing the Party: How to Tell the Truth and Still Run For President. Professor Busch's review is "Going south."

For an upcoming issue the Review sent me a book to review that I would never have looked at otherwise, Micah Sifry's Spoiling for a Fight: Third-Party Politics in America, which has just been published in paperback. Here I want to consider the book briefly.

The resilience of America’s two-party system is a more or less constant source of frustration for those who like their politics pure. Sifry presents himself as an unabashed admirer of third parties, and an only slightly abashed proponent of the left variety of 100 proof politics. Sifry condemns the Democratic and Republican Parties as a "duopoly," but relegates the specifics of his condemnation of their "shared consensus" to an instructive footnote. In the footnote he specifies their joint agreement on positions (among several others) in favor of genetically modified foods and missile defense(!), and against the legalization of homosexual marriage and the adoption of clean needle exchange programs for drug abusers. His heart is frankly on the left.

The core of Sifry’s book is his account of the rise and fall of the Reform Party and of the rise of the Green Party. Sifry has endless patience for the nuts and bolts of party building and intraparty fighting, has done his homework, and has produced an account that is useful if not definitive. He traces the genesis of the Reform Party back to retired financial planner Jack Gargan and his provocative 1990 newspaper advertisements.

Capitalizing on popular frustration over the broken no-new-taxes promise of then-President Bush, a nagging recession, a growing deficit, and anti-NAFTA