China's Path to World Power

By Patrick J. Buchanan
http://www.vdare.com/
November 10, 2008

For decades, before a heedless congregation, some of us have preached the old Hamiltonian gospel.

Great nations do not have trade partners. They have trade competitors and rivals. Trade surpluses are superior to trade deficits. Tariffs on foreign goods are preferable to taxes on U.S. producers. Manufacturing, not finance, is the muscle of the nation.

Economic independence is vital to political independence.


Chinese toy manufacturing plant

Following Hamiltonian precepts, the United States grew from 13 rural and agricultural colonies into the greatest industrial power in all history, producing 42 percent of the world's manufactured goods. We were the awe and envy of mankind, the self-sufficient republic, maker of half of the armaments produced by all the nations in World War II.

That is the America we grew up in—that has now vanished.

Chrysler, Ford, perhaps GM, may be dying. Manufacturing has sunk to 10 percent of U.S. employment, a level unseen since before the Civil War. Europeans and Asians are to assemble in Washington this week to impose upon the United States a New World Economic Order like the one we imposed on them at Bretton Woods in 1944.

Such are the fruits of free-trade ideology.

Across the Pacific, a nation that studied how America rose, and watched as America declined, chose a different path. China adopted and pursued a China First policy of economic nationalism.
In July, Charles McMillion of MBG Services testified to the U.S-China Economic and Security Review Commission on China's progress. [PDF]

Beijing began its astonishing rise by devaluing its currency 45 percent in 1994, slashing the prices of exports in half and making imports twice as expensive. As America threw open her market and invited China to come in and capture it, China had erected a Great Wall around her own.

Results: China's worldwide trade surplus in manufactures, $31 billion in 2001, hit $401 billion in 2007, a 1,300 percent increase, and may reach $500 billion in 2008. China has shoved Germany aside to become the world's greatest exporter and now leads the world in the export of manufactured goods to Japan and the European Union, as well as the United States.

While running trade deficits with Asian neighbors like Taiwan, to tie them politically to Beijing, China is running record trade surpluses with the European Union and the United States, making America and the West as dependent upon China for our manufactures as we are on OPEC for our oil.

Chinese auto production has quintupled since 2001. She now produces more cars than Germany and may exceed the United States in 2009. While Chinese auto exports are still heavily in parts, finished cars are coming soon to a dealer near you. The Chinese will likely run the sword through the last standing member of America's Big Three.

Before 2004, China's manufacturing trade surplus with America was largely in textiles and apparel. But, since then, China's rocketing trade surplus in electronics, computers and parts has far exceeded her surplus in textiles and apparel.

China's trade surplus in computers and components rose from $8.1 billion in 2001 to $73.5 billion in 2007. In cellular phones and parts, her worldwide trade surplus grew from $3 billion in 2003 to $50 billion in 2007, and may reach $60 billion by year's end.

China still imports commercial airliners. But she now has a large and growing trade surplus in airplane parts. This follows the pattern in textiles, computers and autos. First, the Chinese learn by assembling parts in factories in China. Then, China begins to produce the parts. Then, China produces the finished products and goes out to capture the world market, while protecting her own by keeping her currency cheap.

On items the Commerce Department categorizes as advanced technology products, America began running a trade deficit for the first time early in the George W. Bush years. China now exports to us four times as much, in dollar value, in ATP items as we sell to Beijing.

As America mothballs the shuttle, relying on Russian rockets to get our astronauts back up to a space station we built, China is putting men into space and heading for the moon.

Since America ushered China into the World Trade Organization in 2002, Beijing's growth rate has been four times that of the United States, accelerating from an average 10 percent of gross domestic product to 12 percent in 2007.

With her immense trade surpluses, China's reserves have surged from $200 billion in 2002 to $2 trillion. Awash in dollars, Beijing now waits patiently, writes McMillion, to cherry-pick the crown jewels of America's industrial empire—"patents, talents, natural resources, brands"—at fire-sale prices in the global crash.

As America plunges into recession and our industry hollows out, while China is still growing at 9 percent, as the 20th century's greatest creditor nation now borrows from Beijing to pay for booster shots for its sick economy, may we hear once again the Bush-Clinton refrain about how the terrible danger we all face is from "protectionism."

- Patrick J. Buchanan needs no introduction to VDARE.COM readers; his book State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, can be ordered from Amazon.com. His latest book is Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, reviewed here by Paul Craig Roberts.

"Intellectuals"

By Thomas Sowell
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/
November 11, 2008

Among the many wonders to be expected from an Obama administration, if Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York Times is to be believed, is ending "the anti-intellectualism that has long been a strain in American life."


Adlai Stevenson (L) and Harry Truman

He cited Adlai Stevenson, the suave and debonair governor of Illinois, who twice ran for president against Eisenhower in the 1950s, as an example of an intellectual in politics.

Intellectuals, according to Mr. Kristof, are people who are "interested in ideas and comfortable with complexity," people who "read the classics."
It is hard to know whether to laugh or cry.

Adlai Stevenson was certainly regarded as an intellectual by intellectuals in the 1950s. But, half a century later, facts paint a very different picture.

Historian Michael Beschloss, among others, has noted that Stevenson "could go quite happily for months or years without picking up a book." But Stevenson had the airs of an intellectual -- the form, rather than the substance.

What is more telling, form was enough to impress the intellectuals, not only then but even now, years after the facts have been revealed, though apparently not to Mr. Kristof.

That is one of many reasons why intellectuals are not taken as seriously by others as they take themselves.

As for reading the classics, President Harry Truman, whom no one thought of as an intellectual, was a voracious reader of heavyweight stuff like Thucydides and read Cicero in the original Latin. When Chief Justice Carl Vinson quoted in Latin, Truman was able to correct him.

Yet intellectuals tended to think of the unpretentious and plain-spoken Truman as little more than a country bumpkin.

Similarly, no one ever thought of President Calvin Coolidge as an intellectual. Yet Coolidge also read the classics in the White House. He read both Latin and Greek, and read Dante in the original Italian, since he spoke several languages. It was said that the taciturn Coolidge could be silent in five different languages.

The intellectual levels of politicians are just one of the many things that intellectuals have grossly misjudged for years on end.

During the 1930s, some of the leading intellectuals in America condemned our economic system and pointed to the centrally planned Soviet economy as a model-- all this at a time when literally millions of people were starving to death in the Soviet Union, from a famine in a country with some of the richest farmland in Europe and historically a large exporter of food.

New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for telling the intelligentsia what they wanted to hear-- that claims of starvation in the Ukraine were false.

After British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge reported from the Ukraine on the massive deaths from starvation there, he was ostracized after returning to England and unable to find a job.

More than half a century later, when the archives of the Soviet Union were finally opened up under Mikhail Gorbachev, it turned out that about six million people had died in that famine-- about the same number as the people killed in Hitler's Holocaust.

In the 1930s, it was the intellectuals who pooh-poohed the dangers from the rise of Hitler and urged Western disarmament.

It would be no feat to fill a big book with all the things on which intellectuals were grossly mistaken, just in the 20th century-- far more so than ordinary people.

History fully vindicates the late William F. Buckley's view that he would rather be ruled by people represented by the first 100 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard.

How have intellectuals managed to be so wrong, so often? By thinking that because they are knowledgeable-- or even expert-- within some narrow band out of the vast spectrum of human concerns, that makes them wise guides to the masses and to the rulers of the nation.

But the ignorance of Ph.D.s is still ignorance and high-IQ groupthink is still groupthink, which is the antithesis of real thinking.

An Area of Darkness

By Jay Nordlinger
National Review Senior Editor
http://www.nationalreview.com/
November 10, 2008, 0:00 a.m.

Dear friends: Now and then, I expand a magazine piece in this column — and would like to do so again. In the October 20 issue of National Review, I had a piece called “When Knowledge Is Critical: Brief reflections on Middle East studies.” I’d like to reflect a little more here. Shall we just wade in?

The Cold War stretched from 1945 to 1991 — and, somehow, the West ended up on top. (It wasn’t simple.) One fine day — or one fine week, or one fine year — Soviet Communism gave out and gave up. Then we had our “holiday from history”: ten years of almost no concerns. Sure, there was a Khobar Towers here, a U.S.S. Cole there. (Not to mention a Balkan bother.) But Muslim terrorists were always acting up, weren’t they? They were something to put up with, like the weather.

Then came 9/11, and a new cold war — a new cold war, according to some.

In the original one, America and the West built up many institutions, aimed at countering Communism, understanding the Eastern bloc, and communicating with people under the lash. Have we done the same in the War on Terror? Not even close, as George Shultz stressed with me in an interview last January. It is a failing of these recent years — and we should get busy.

Be clear about something, however (and this is me talking, not Shultz): To understand someone is not necessarily to like or approve him. Understanding, in fact, may make you recoil all the more. But understanding is the best friend of anyone who wishes to be alert.

Professors of Middle East studies would be very helpful right about now. But they are, unfortunately, among the worst of the lot: among the worst in the American professoriate. A range of departments, of course, is the province of radicals and ideologues, rather than genuine scholars. But departments of Middle East studies may take the cake. Those wanting to read chapter and verse can turn to Martin Kramer’s book Ivory Towers on Sand.

In the old days, “Sovietologists” tended to sympathize with the Kremlin (to put it crudely, and perhaps McCarthyitely, but not untruthfully). Middle East studies men are apt to sympathize with the PLO and worse. And the China people are just as frightful.

Recently, I met with Jian-li Yang, the great dissident and scholar. Last year, he was released from a PRC prison after five years’ confinement. Despite that nasty interlude, he has considerable experience with higher education, particularly in America. He has two Ph.D.s: one from Berkeley, in math; and another from Harvard, in political economy. He lives in the Harvard community.


In October 1998, Yang Jianli, representing the China's dissident movement, attended the "Third Global Human Rights Conference" held in Warsaw, Potland and introduced the current situation of dissident movement in China at the conference.

And I asked him, “Do you ever have contact with Sinologists there?” He answered, no way: They’re impossible, because they simply toe the PRC line. “They’re as bad as professors in Beijing University,” he said. “No, worse!”

These are all children of John K. Fairbank and Edgar Snow, men responsible for tremendous harm. The children — like their fathers — exist not so much to study and explain Communist China as to defend and justify it. And they are corrupt, said Yang: awash in PRC money. Yes, I replied, but they’d do it for free, being true believers. He conceded that this was so.

Whether China scholars have more money from Beijing or Middle East scholars have more money from Arab rulers is an open question — but the safe betting is on the Middle East men. Some critics regard this money as absolutely corrupting. Others say, “No, they’d do it for free” — which is my view, and also that of Daniel Pipes, a Middle East scholar who is decidedly not the type to win an emir’s favor. (That would have to be one enlightened emir.)

(And, incidentally: Many Arabs, elite and ordinary alike, are grateful for clear-minded scholarship and commentary about the Middle East. Often, they have to be quiet about their gratitude.)

On one thing, almost everybody can agree: Money must play some sort of role, if only at the margins. A scholar receiving money from a particular government will naturally pull punches about that government. If a scholar is hesitant about whether to say something — money may tip him in one direction. If he likes to travel to a particular country, he may want to watch what he says about that country’s government.

At the same time, you don’t have to be bought to be wrong.

There was never much money in “Sovietology,” according to Richard Pipes, the father of Daniel and the eminent historian of Russia. He remembered this crowd in a recent conversation: “They resented you if you criticized the Soviet Union, the Communist party, and I was regarded as really way out, because I was so critical.” Why were others so uncritical? Well, “for one reason, they simply identified with the Soviet Union. For another, they liked to go there” — and Moscow wasn’t real good about letting you in if you were critical (or letting you out if you were critical and a Soviet citizen).


Richard Pipes

One day, Pipes testified before Senator Jackson’s committee about SALT. He took a hard, and realistic, line. Opposing him was an Ivy League Sovietologist who took the soft and unrealistic. As they were leaving, the Sovietologist said to Pipes, “I really agree with you, but if I talked as you do, I wouldn’t be able to go to the Soviet Union. They wouldn’t give me a visa.”

Pipes says that, on balance, the Sovietologists did more harm than good — misleading the public on a hugely critical issue. “They maintained, vehemently, that the Soviet government was stable, and popular with the citizenry. They said that, like it or not, we had to come to terms with this government — which meant that the kind of policies Reagan was pursuing were counterproductive and futile. These policies would simply bring another Stalin to power.” And the Sovietologists were “utterly wrong.”

Yup — but they just glided on, with hardly a backward glance. Today, many of them have “fallen in line behind Putin,” says Pipes, traveling to Moscow to attend conferences hosted by him. Sure.

Pipes told me a couple of other interesting things. Of course, the Sovietologists never said they were sorry or repented or anything of the kind. But one of them “simply stopped writing.” Also, one resentful scholar said that “Pipes was right, but for the wrong reasons” (whatever that means). Pipes quips: “Better to have been wrong for the right reasons!”

Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum. And he has paid a price for being out of step in this field — for speaking bluntly about dictatorships, Islamism, and related matters. He would not be welcome in most faculty lounges; he has had to have something of an “alternative” career. Moreover, he has received his share of threats — and not of the light kind, either. When you write about the Middle East — certainly in an honest way — you play with fire.

Despite the difficulties, Pipes has had a full and useful career, pursued bravely. He knows Middle East scholars at universities who must keep their heads down — until they have tenure, at least. And he has this worthy point about money — the role of Middle Eastern money in scholarship on the Middle East: It may not buy people who have no need of being bought — but it gives them a much bigger megaphone.


Daniel Pipes

You may wish to know how Pipes became a Middle East scholar. He wanted to be a mathematician, but thought better of it. (This was at Harvard, as an undergrad.) Then he thought of going into “area studies.” One area, Russia, was taken by his illustrious father; another, China, was taken by his roommate. So he fastened onto the Middle East.

And who was that roommate? Arthur Waldron — one of the most clear-eyed, independent, and fearless of the China scholars. That was one gutsy room, let me tell you.

There is an organization for orthodox scholars of the Middle East — that is, for leftist and politicized ones. It is called the Middle East Studies Association, or MESA. It is led by such men as Rashid Khalidi, the FOB (Friend of Barack) and occupant of Columbia University’s Edward Said chair. You also may have heard of Juan Cole, of the University of Michigan; and of Georgetown’s John Esposito. Men like this are the face of today’s Middle East studies. To say it as briefly as possible: Arafat would consider himself lucky — and probably did.

The late Said is the father of this MESA crowd, or at least an influential big brother. So much has been written about him, I will not add a word here. But I’ll give Paul Johnson one. In September 2006, he was contemplating a book to be called “Monsters.” And he wrote that he would include Said, “this malevolent liar and propagandist, who has been responsible for more harm than any other intellectual of his generation.”

Before 9/11, MESA was pretty much a joke, a Marxoid playground whose significance to the larger world was slight. It was hard to get a decent Middle Eastern education in the United States, but that was okay: We all have to make sacrifices. After 9/11, however, the joke was not so funny. There was a real need for soundness on the Middle East. You couldn’t just say, “Israel evil. America evil. Palestinians good. Hamas, Hezbollah, and mullahs misunderstood. Colonialism bad — left enduring scars. West bad. Terrorists driven to their acts by oppression. Arabs must unite, eschew factions — created by a scheming West — and win.”

No, that falderal was suddenly intolerable. As the Iraqi-American scholar Nibras Kazimi put it, “America and the world cannot afford to lounge around in the blissful lethargy of intellectual shallowness now that the jihadists of the Middle East . . . have declared their war and delivered their bomb-laden calling cards.”


Edward Said

Last year, an encouraging event occurred: the founding of a new organization, the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA). Their website is here. ASMEA was to be, in brief, what MESA should be, and almost certainly used to be. (The older group was founded in 1966, before the rot set in.) The new group’s chairman is Bernard Lewis, the great nonagenarian British-born scholar. On the academic council sits George Shultz — who, as I said at the outset, is so desirous of new and helpful institutions.Launching the institution, Lewis gave a typically learned, elegant address. Here are brief but potent excerpts:

I would like to begin with a quotation from the famous Dr. Johnson, one of his conversations recorded by Boswell. He says, “A generous and elevated mind is distinguished by nothing more certainly than an eminent degree of curiosity. Nor is that curiosity ever more agreeably or usefully employed than in examining the laws and customs of foreign nations.” A very interesting statement and . . . one uniquely Western — uniquely distinctive of this Western civilization of which we are the heirs at the present time. And I use the word “we” in the widest sense. . . .

Today we confront new obstacles in our study of the Middle East . . . One of them I have already mentioned: postmodernism. . . . The second is a combination of political correctness and multiculturalism — which combination established orthodoxies in the academic world, [instituting] a degree of thought control, of limitations on freedom of expression, without parallel in the Western world since the 18th century, and in some areas longer than that. I don’t need to tell you how careers can be furthered or destroyed by this kind of imposed orthodoxy. This, it seems to me, is a very dangerous situation. It has now made any kind of scholarly discussion of Islam, to say the least, dangerous. Islam and Islamic values now have a level of immunity from comment and criticism in the Western world that Christianity has lost and Judaism has never had.

Toward the end of his remarks, Professor Lewis said, “It seems to me that we are beset by difficulties” — this is understatement typical of him (and of his native country). And he spoke of “the deadly hand of political correctness.”

The MESA men have denounced the upstart organization — ASMEA — as, essentially, a neocon plot. Cinnamon Stillwell (have you ever heard a more delightful name?) recorded some of their comments at FrontPageMagazine.com (here). For example, Juan Cole said that ASMEA was “exclusively ideological” and “for people on the right.”

Speaking of this word “right,” let me say this: I never cease to be amazed that, in our present period, to desire liberalization in the Arab world is conservative, or “neocon.” Even to make noises about freedom in the Middle East is to be “on the right.” Not so long ago, “conservatives” were happy to deal with the existing despotisms, or were at least perfectly resigned to them: What could one do? Besides, these despotisms represented stability. And to be a progressive was to talk about, or at least desire, liberalization.

Funny old world.

At any rate, many people — not with MESA — have been calling ASMEA “a breath of fresh air,” and so it is.

Recently, it was my pleasure to talk with Professor Lewis, as it always is — and I asked him a bit about his education. He was born in London in 1916. What set him on his course as a Middle East scholar? He studied Hebrew, in preparation for his bar mitzvah. “I was very fortunate in that my teacher was a real scholar, a man who was able to inspire and guide me.” Even after the bar mitzvah, Lewis studied Hebrew — “and that led on to Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and the rest.”

Lewis might be said to have been ideal material for Middle East studies: His two great loves were history and languages — and after he was done with common languages such as French and Latin (common, that is, to Westerners), he was ready for things a little more adventurous.

He went to the School for Oriental Studies — now the School for Oriental and African Studies, or SOAS — part of the University of London. He earned both a B.A. and a Ph.D. there. Among his professors was the famed (and not uncontroversial) Sir H. A. R. Gibb. Another professor was Norman H. Baynes, the historian of Byzantium.


Bernard Lewis

I asked Professor Lewis whether it was possible, in this day and age, to obtain the kind of education he was afforded. He said this was “very doubtful.” Just as the Maoists took over Chinese studies, a certain crowd has taken over Middle East studies: which “are now, to a very large extent — how should I put it? — one-sided. They take a certain view of things, an orthodox Arab view. It is difficult to make a career unless you conform.” Moreover, “vast sums of money are pouring in from Arab governments, Arab princes,” and that makes a difference.

As you might expect, there are scholars who tell Lewis, privately, that they are in agreement with him. “They explain that coming out openly would be destructive of their careers, and they’re right — it would be.” Well, are they cowardly or merely prudent? That was what I wanted to know. Lewis was not inclined to pass judgment.

About ASMEA, he said, “I hope to be able to accomplish something” — and “a lot of people in the Middle East are with us. We in the West complain about these odious tyrannies, but they are the first sufferers, the first victims.”

Professor Lewis then told me something about Sadat. I will paraphrase, but pretty faithfully, I think:

“Sadat did not decide to make peace with Israel because he suddenly converted to Zionism. His reason was quite different. He was aware that Egypt was becoming a Soviet colony. I saw that myself, on frequent visits to Egypt. The Soviet presence was palpable — more obtrusive than the British presence, and I’m old enough to remember that. The Soviets were taking over, there were places where no Arab was able to set foot.

“I remember talking with a shopkeeper in Upper Egypt. He said there were no tourists coming anymore, which was, of course, very bad for business. ‘But you have plenty of Russians,’ I said, whereupon he spat into the gutter and replied, ‘They won’t buy a package of cigarettes, and they won’t give you a cigarette.’

“Anyway, the Russians were taking over, and Sadat saw that. He realized that, on the worst estimate of Israel’s intentions, and on the most generous estimate of Israel’s power, they were less dangerous than the Soviets. And the Israelis were not going to take over Egypt, that was clear. That was why Sadat decided to make peace. Fortunately, he found someone on the other side who would respond.

“We are moving to a similar situation now. Many Arabs have concluded, ‘Israel is not our main danger, our main problem.’ If you look at the Hezbollah war, in 2006, Arabs silently hoped that Israel would finish the job, and were very disappointed when they failed to do so. That continues now. Obviously, they don’t come out strongly in support of Israel — they wouldn’t do that. But there is, shall we say, a readiness to accommodate which did not exist in the past.”

Some time ago, Professor Lewis was paid an extraordinary compliment. One of his books was published in Arabic translation (unauthorized). It was published by the Muslim Brotherhood. At the same time, the book was published in Hebrew by the Israeli defense ministry — and, as Professor Lewis says, that is an interesting pairing: the Muslim Brothers and the Israeli defense ministry.

In his preface to the Arabic version, the translator said, “I don’t know who this author is, but one thing about him is clear: He is either a candid friend or an honorable enemy, and in either case is one who has disdained to falsify the truth.”An extraordinary compliment indeed.


President Anwar Sadat of Egypt at a military review parade shortly before he was assassinated by soldiers in the parade. October 6, 1981 Cairo, Egypt

I myself once thought of being a Middle East man. May I give you something autobiographical? I published the following in Impromptus a few days after 9/11:

When I was young, I was quite the little Arabist — cocksure, arrogant, wholly misguided. I grew up in Ann Arbor, Mich., and there were many Arab students — most of them Palestinian — in my high school. I befriended them, loved them. Was intensely interested in them. Some wore keys around their necks, and they claimed that these were the keys to the homes back in Palestine their families had been forced to abandon. I was mightily impressed. Later on, I knew to doubt the authenticity of those keys.

I remember one girl, who liked me, asking, “Jay, you’re not Jewish, are you?” She had to be reassured before our friendship could continue.

I was taught to believe that the Arab-Israeli conflict was very much like the American South: a civil-rights struggle. The Arabs were the blacks — the victims, the oppressed. The Israelis were the whites, the oppressors. Menachem Begin was pretty much George Wallace; his defense minister, Ariel Sharon, was Bull Connor (they even looked alike). Arafat, of course, was Martin Luther King. It seemed very clear.

In due course, I grew up, but it took a while. I enrolled in the Near Eastern Studies Department at the University of Michigan, where I took several courses, including the Arabic language. The department was dominated by extremists. The graduate assistants, certainly, were Arabs to the “left” of the PLO, meaning, they took Arafat and Co. to be sell-outs, untrue to the cause. There was no discussion of the legitimacy of Israel: It wasn’t discussable; Israel was illegitimate, and every worthy person knew it.

One day, we trooped into an auditorium to see a documentary on the conflict. I can’t remember the name of the documentary or of the documentary-maker, but I can see her, and she was on hand to introduce her film and to take questions. The film featured mainly radical Palestinians talking about dismembering Israel.

During the Q&A, a middle-aged white woman — a little fat — raised her hand and asked the following question: “These were such extreme voices. You’ve made a wonderful film, but couldn’t you have found some softer, more moderate voices?”

In the row in which I was sitting were several Arab students — older ones, graduate students — and one of them, in front of everybody, stood up and said words I will never forget. I won’t forget the words, or his face, or his relatively quiet, determined tone. He said: “I will kill you.” (This was directed at the woman who had asked the question.) His buddies got him to sit down.But that’s not the important part — what he said is not the important part. The important part is, no one said a word. No one reacted. We all sort of coughed, and looked away, nervously. We all pretended that what had just occurred had not, in fact, occurred — or that it was normal, acceptable. We simply ignored it.

Eventually, I took another path, both at the university and in my own thought. I could never be convinced that America and its influence were evil. I could not be convinced that Israel was illegitimate. And I could not accept the “I will kill you” and our complete cowardice, or complicity, in the face of it.

I sort of vowed, inwardly, that I wouldn’t be afraid, wouldn’t be intimidated, by Arab extremism. We all dance delicately around it. We tend to sweep it under the rug. We look away, all politically correct, and cough. I further vowed that, unlike my fellow white liberals, I would pay Arabs the compliment of treating them as full human beings, accountable for their words and actions, capable of good or bad, like everyone else — morally responsible. I wouldn’t treat them as children, unable to help a certain savagery. I wouldn’t “understand” that savagery, in the sense my teachers intended. I wouldn’t have double, or triple, or quadruple standards. All men were equal.

My lessons were hard, but they have lasted, and I believe they are right ones.

You remember the expression “scared straight”? This referred to drug use — if you saw the horrific effects of it, you were scared straight. And something similar happened to me in Middle East studies: I saw true radicalism, zealotry, and belligerence, and recoiled from it.

Tell you something else, too: One afternoon, a young professor of ours gave a kind of beer-hall speech. This was at a forum dominated by Arabs — grad students and others. Shouting and pumping his fist, the professor admonished the audience to forget any negotiating with Israel and not to surrender an inch. Stay true, stay true, he said. The audience cheered like crazy. Later, an older professor said to this younger one, “No one gets Arabs riled up like you do.” (The young professor was not an Arab, by the way.)

In the fullness of time, my guy became president of MESA — a perfect fit.

May I add something on Jimmy Carter? In my “Carterpalooza!” of May 2002, I wrote,

You who read Impromptus have heard me say: When I was growing up, I perceived the Arab-Israeli conflict as a great civil-rights drama. The white oppressors were the Israelis, and the black sufferers and innocents were the Arabs, in particular the Palestinians. Menachem Begin, I thought, was George C. Wallace, and his defense minister, Ariel Sharon, was Bull Connor. (This was in the early ’80s.)

Well, blow me down. I had never heard anybody else — a soul — say anything like this. But here is Carter, to Douglas Brinkley, Carter’s biographer and analyst: “The intifada exposed the injustice Palestinians suffered, just like Bull Connor’s mad dogs in Birmingham.”

The Carter-Nordlinger axis rides again (but, hang on, I’ve changed my mind — had “an evolution of thought,” as we say).

In due course, I was able to educate myself, which is to say, find sources beyond those provided by my teachers. I found Lewis, of course, and David Pryce-Jones, and Fouad Ajami, and others. You can always find such people — piercers through the fog. But you have to work at it, and how many people have either the time or the drive?

I once heard DP-J say, “I emerged from Eton and Oxford a perfectly nasty little leftist — and Commentary was my university.” That invaluable magazine helped him, as it would help me — a lot. Norman Podhoretz, who for 35 years was the editor, was extremely important to me, and so were the writers he presented.

I have related a great compliment paid to Bernard Lewis. Would you like to hear a great compliment paid to DP-J? Once, Edward Said condemned the “unholy trinity of Lewis, Kedourie, and Pryce-Jones.” (Elie Kedourie was the great Baghdad-born scholar of the Middle East.) David says to be put in such company fills him with humility and joy.

It would be nice if today’s Middle East scholars, in general, were more helpful than they are. The same is true of the China guys — and was true of the Sovietologists. But somehow we make do. And we are lucky to have the Middle East Media Research Institute — MEMRI.org. They are a top-flight education all by themselves.

Besides which, if you have 10,000 MESA profs on one side, and Professor Lewis on the other — it’s still an unfair fight, favoring Lewis

Happy Veterans' Day

By Robert Spencer
http://www.frontpagemag.com/
Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Not too long ago Ayaan Hirsi Ali was being interviewed by a Canadian tool (who ultimately went to work for Al-Jazeera), and he kept asking her why she didn't seem to think that American militarism and imperialism and such were just as dangerous as the threat of Islamic jihad and Islamic supremacism. Finally, after several go-rounds about this, she told him that since he had grown up with freedom, he didn't value it, or understand how seriously it was being threatened.

Arlington National Cemetary

And it was true: for him, and for so many in the U.S. today, Constitutional law, including the non-establishment of religion, is as certain as the air we breathe, and we cannot conceive of the possibility that anything could weaken the principles upon which this nation was founded. The freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, and the equality of rights of all people before the law -- all these things are unassailable, aren't they?

No, they are being assailed today by increasingly assertive global forces, even as many in the U.S. who once had been aware of the threat turn to other matters. Some have lost interest, others have decided that other issues are more important. Still others have even turned on former allies and comrades-in-arms, opting to pursue imaginary threats rather than actual ones -- or, maybe because they see the way the wind is blowing, they have switched sides. Very few people today are even aware of, much less interested in, the Muslim Brotherhood's "grand jihad" to eliminate and destroy Western civilization "from within, sabotaging its miserable house." And that unawareness and indifference allows this endeavor to proceed apace.

Today, then, we should remember and be grateful to those who gave their lives to secure and protect these freedoms for us -- as if our gratitude could ever be sufficient or adequate. We should ponder the fact that they had to give their lives in order to secure these freedoms. We should remember that if we are not willing to give our own lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor to protect the unalienable rights enumerated at the founding of this Republic, we will most assuredly lose both them and the Republic itself -- lose them for ourselves and for our children.

Let us never shrink from the task before us: the great struggle to defend human rights, human dignity, and freedom from oppression and injustice -- particularly the oppression and injustice, and assaults to human dignity that are enshrined in the Sharia that is coming, step-by-step, steadily and apparently inexorably, to a willfully ignorant and indifferent West.

Happy Veterans' Day.

- Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of seven books, eight monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including the New York Times Bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book, Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs, from Regnery Publishing came out this month.

Today's Tune: Echo & The Bunnymen - Lips Like Sugar

(Click on title to play video)

The Strangest Story in the World

An Introduction to the Writings of G.K. Chesterton

by Dale Ahlquist
http://gilbertmagazine.com/

The Everlasting Man


The Resurrection of Christ, 1612
Rubens

CS. Lewis was an atheist until he read G.K. Chesterton's book, The Everlasting Man, but he wasn't afterwards, prompting him to observe that a young man who is serious about his atheism cannot be too careful about what he reads.

Of all of Chesterton's literary monuments, this is perhaps his greatest, for he eloquently and concisely packs the whole human story between the covers of one book. He begins by pointing out that the main problem with the critics of the Church is that they are too close to it to see it properly. They cannot see the big picture, only the small picture that directly affects them. With their sulks and their perversity and their petty criticism they are merely reacting to the Church. What they need to do is back up. And that's what Chesterton has the reader do in this book: back up far enough and to see the Church in all its startling beauty and unexpected truth.

The book was written as a kind of rebuttal to H.G. Wells' popular book, The Outline of History. Chesterton said that Wells was like an author who disliked the main character in his book. Wells glossed over the two biggest points in history. The first is the uniqueness of the creature called man and the second is the uniqueness of the man called Christ.

What do we know about early man? The one thing we really know for sure is that he was an artist. The cave man left behind his drawings on the wall of the cave. The creature who made these drawings was truly different from all other creatures because he was a creator as well as a creature. "Art is the signature of man," says Chesterton. It is just one of many things that demonstrates that "the more we look at man as an animal, the less he will look like one." In addition to art are such artificial things as clothes and furniture and such unique reactions such as shame and laughter. And that other exclusively human thing called religion.

Religion is as old as civilization. And civilization is as old as history. Chesterton says that when we study history, the curtain rises on a play already in progress. He argues that it was religion that advanced civilization. It was religion that dealt with the meanings of things, with the development and interpretation of symbols, which advanced communication and knowledge, or what we call the arts and the sciences.

If we study any civilization, we see that after progress comes decay. Chesterton says men do not grow tired of evil, but of good. They become weary of joy. They stop worshipping God and start worshipping idols, their own bad imitations of God, and they become as wooden as the thing they worship. They start worshipping nature and become unnatural. They start worshipping sex and become perverted. Men start lusting after men and become unmanly.

The most ignorant of humanity know by the very look of earth that they have forgotten heaven.

But then something marvelous happens in history. And it also happens in a cave. A cave in Bethlehem.

Bethlehem, says Chesterton, is emphatically a place where extremes meet. It is where heaven meets earth. God comes to make a home in the world and finds himself homeless.

A mass of legend and literature has sprung from this single paradox; that the hands that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle. Upon this paradox, all the literature of our faith was founded—it is something too good to be true, except that it is true.

Chesterton says that if we approach the Gospel objectively we will see that it is not a book of platitudes. It paints a picture of a man who was indeed a wonder-worker, but who spoke in riddles and rebukes. His teachings were as difficult to accept in his own time as they are today. None of the critics of Christianity seem to appreciate the fact that Christ's teachings were not dependent on the social order in which he lived but transcended their time altogether.

The critics of course try to create a different Christ from the one portrayed in the Gospels by picking and choosing whatever they want. They always try to make him merely human, whether they make him a socialist or a pacifist or a madman. "There must surely have been something not only mysterious but many-sided about Christ if so many smaller Christs can be carved out of him."

But the main impression one gets from studying the teachings of Christ is that he really did not come to teach. What separates Christianity from other religions is that its central figure does not wish to be known merely as a teacher. He makes the greatest claim of all. Mohammed did not claim to be God. Buddha did not claim to be God. But Christ did claim to be God.

The story gets stranger still. All of Christ's life is a steady pursuit towards the ultimate sacrifice: the Crucifixion.

All the great groups that stood about the Cross represent in one way or another the great historical truth of the time; that the world could not save itself. Man could do no more. Rome and Jerusalem and Athens and everything else—Chesterton says that the strength of the world was turned to weakness and the wisdom of the world was turned to folly. For what could be stranger than the fact that the local execution of a minor revolutionary in an obscure outpost would become the central event in all of history? But that is where the Cross stands: at the center of history.

This central dogma of the Christian faith, that God died—that, in Chesterton's phrase, God was for one instant forsaken of God, that God sacrificed himself to himself—is more mysterious than anything, even the mystery of creation itself. And those who object to this dogma do so not because the dogma is bad, but because it's too good to be true. The Gospel story does not end with God's death; it ends with the most startling episode of all. An empty grave. And God again walking in a garden, as on the first day of creation.

It is this strange story that explains why Christianity has done something different than just survive. It has itself returned to life many times after having been apparently defeated. It has, as Chesterton says, "died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave."

Obama's Looming Energy Disaster

Special Report

By William Tucker on 11.10.08 @ 6:08AM
The American Spectator
http://www.spectator.org/

I subscribe to an Internet newsletter called Energy Central and the news is getting more depressing every week. Every time I scan the headlines I realize I'm looking at another piece of a gathering energy debacle.

Take last Thursday's edition. Right at the top of the page was the story, "Xcel Energy, eXco Join in Major Wind Farm Developments in Minnesota, North Dakota." It's like this every day. Wind farms of sprouting up all over the country like 65-story mushrooms. The North American Reliability Council estimates we will have 175,000 megawatts of new capacity by 2017 (that's the equivalent of 175 major coal or nuclear plants). Unfortunately, it admits, "only approximately 23,000 MW…is projected to be available on peak." That means these windmills will be idle most of the time. Coal plants operate at 65 percent capacity, nuclear rims at 90 percent. But at best windmills produce only 30 percent of their "nameplate capacity" and they are almost useless on torpid summer days. California has found its windmills running at only 3 percent capacity on hot summer days.

Never mind, we are forging ahead anyway. Right under the Minnesota story is a report that New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has laid down a "wind farm code of ethics" governing dealings between wind companies and municipal officials. It seems that several windmill manufacturers are following the tried-and-true pattern of bribing municipal officials by hiring them as "consultants" in seeking zoning and other approvals. Although you'd never know it, there are actually folks out there in the hinterland that don't like the idea of littering the landscape with these nearly useless monstrosities. However, those folks are being steamrolled in the march toward alternate energy utopia. As Attorney General Cuomo remarks, "Wind power is an exciting industry that will be a cornerstone of our energy future."

Next comes a story, "More Study is Ordered Before Savannah River Dredging Starts: An NRC Board Says the Environmental Impact Has Not Been Addressed." The Alvin W. Vogtle Nuclear Generating Station in Burke County, Georgia, has two 1,200-MW reactors sitting on the Savannah River, directly across from the federal nuclear processing facilities in South Carolina. Now Southern Nuclear, which owns Vogtle, wants to build two new 1,000-MW reactors as part of the nuclear renaissance.

Environmental groups have immediately taken up the challenge, arguing that dredging the Savannah River to allow barge delivery of reactor parts will damage the river. The Savannah was dredged regularly for more than a century until the Army Corps of Engineers gave up in 1980 because nothing much was happening on the river. Now environmental groups say a renewal will ruin the environment. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has nodded agreement and will require an environmental impact statement before early site clearance can begin. That will probably add three years to the project.

I hadn't been following Vogtle so I googled it and discovered a manifesto from the Women's Action for New Directions (WAND), a major anti-nuclear opponent. WAND was issuing a call to other organizations around the country to join their crusade. The appeal appears on the Community Blog page of "My Barack Obama," the campaign's effort to organize community groups in support of the candidacy.

IT'S EASY TO SEE where this is leading. President-elect Obama says he supports nuclear "in principle," but then so does the Union of Concerned Scientists, which has opposed reactors for 35 years. Obama also opposes Yucca Mountain, which is a shibboleth among opposition groups. Ironically, Yucca Mountain only became necessary when Jimmy Carter canceled nuclear fuel reprocessing in 1977, creating the so-called problem of "nuclear waste." France has pursued reprocessing and stores all its high-level waste from 40 years of producing 75 percent of its electricity in one room at Le Havre.

Rather than heeding this example, however, the Obama Administration is much more likely to do exactly what California did during the 1980s and 1990s -- stall both coal and nuclear construction while adopting huge subsidies and mandates for "renewable energy." Within a decade we could find ourselves where California was in 2000 -- saddled with huge quantities of expensive "alternate" energy while not having enough electricity to run its traffic lights.

Is this depressing enough? Well, try the next story on Energy Central, "Russia Offers to Cooperate With Brazil in Nuclear Sector." The rest of the world, you see, is forging ahead with nuclear power. France is already at 80 percent nuclear, Korea is planning 11 new reactors, China is building four plants with a Japanese technology named "Westinghouse." India is exploring thorium technology, France is penetrating the Middle East, Russia is powering Siberian villages with small reactors built on barges. Japan Steel Works, the only company in the world that makes steel reactor vessels, has a four-year waiting list. France, Russia, and Japan are all reprocessing. Now Russia is selling Brazil a whole package that will include uranium mining, small reactors for remote areas, and probably eventually reprocessing as well.

In 1982, President Reagan lifted Jimmy Carter's ban on fuel reprocessing but, given the climate in this country, American industry has never been willing to reinvest. In speaking before groups about the possibilities of a nuclear renaissance, I am often asked, "What would it take to revive reprocessing in this country?" In all honesty, I have to respond, "I think we'll have to ask the French to do it for us."

Reading the latest, I realize I may be wrong. It may be the Russians we have to ask instead.

topics:Barack Obama, Energy

- William Tucker is most recently the author of the new book Terrestrial Energy: How Nuclear Power Will Lead the Green Revolution and End America's Long Energy Odyssey (Bartleby Press).

We Blew It

A look back in remorse on the conservative opportunity that was squandered.

by P.J. O'Rourke
The Weekly Standard
http://www.weeklystandard.com/
11/17/2008, Volume 014, Issue 09

Let us bend over and kiss our ass goodbye. Our 28-year conservative opportunity to fix the moral and practical boundaries of government is gone--gone with the bear market and the Bear Stearns and the bear that's headed off to do you-know-what in the woods on our philosophy.

An entire generation has been born, grown up, and had families of its own since Ronald Reagan was elected. And where is the world we promised these children of the Conservative Age? Where is this land of freedom and responsibility, knowledge, opportunity, accomplishment, honor, truth, trust, and one boring hour each week spent in itchy clothes at church, synagogue, or mosque? It lies in ruins at our feet, as well it might, since we ourselves kicked the shining city upon a hill into dust and rubble. The progeny of the Reagan Revolution will live instead in the universe that revolves around Hyde Park.

Mind you, they won't live in Hyde Park. Those leafy precincts will be reserved for the micromanagers and macro-apparatchiks of liberalism--for Secretary of the Department of Peace Bill Ayers and Secretary of the Department of Fairness Bernardine Dohrn. The formerly independent citizens of our previously self-governed nation will live, as I said, around Hyde Park. They will make what homes they can in the physical, ethical, and intellectual slums of the South Side of Chicago.

The South Side of Chicago is what everyplace in America will be once the Democratic administration and filibuster-resistant Democratic Congress have tackled global warming, sustainability, green alternatives to coal and oil, subprime mortgage foreclosures, consumer protection, business oversight, financial regulation, health care reform, taxes on the "rich," and urban sprawl. The Democrats will have plenty of time to do all this because conservatism, if it is ever reborn, will not come again in the lifetime of anyone old enough to be rounded up by ACORN and shipped to the polling booths.

None of this is the fault of the left. After the events of the 20th century--national socialism, international socialism, inter-species socialism from Earth First--anyone who is still on the left is obviously insane and not responsible for his or her actions. No, we on the right did it. The financial crisis that is hoisting us on our own petard is only the latest (if the last) of the petard hoistings that have issued from the hindquarters of our movement. We've had nearly three decades to educate the electorate about freedom, responsibility, and the evils of collectivism, and we responded by creating a big-city-public-school-system of a learning environment.

Liberalism had been running wild in the nation since the Great Depression. At the end of the Carter administration we had it cornered in one of its dreadful low-income housing projects or smelly public parks or some such place, and we held the Taser gun in our hand, pointed it at the beast's swollen gut, and didn't pull the trigger. Liberalism wasn't zapped and rolled away on a gurney and confined somewhere until it expired from natural causes such as natural law or natural rights.

In our preaching and our practice we neglected to convey the organic and universal nature of freedom. Thus we ensured our loss before we even began our winning streak. Barry Goldwater was an admirable and principled man. He took an admirably principled stand on states' rights. But he was dead wrong. Separate isn't equal. Ask a kid whose parents are divorced.

Since then modern conservatism has been plagued by the wrong friends and the wrong foes. The "Southern Strategy" was bequeathed to the Republican party by Richard Nixon--not a bad friend of conservatism but no friend at all. The Southern Strategy wasn't needed. Southern whites were on--begging the pardon of the Scopes trial jury--an evolutionary course toward becoming Republican. There's a joke in Arkansas about a candidate hustling votes in the country. The candidate asks a farmer how many children he has.

"I've got six sons," the farmer says.

"Are they all good little Democrats?" the candidate asks.

"Well," the farmer says, "five of 'em are. But my oldest boy, he got to readin'  .  .  .  "

There was no need to piss off the entire black population of America to get Dixie's electoral votes. And despising cracker trash who have a laundry hamper full of bedsheets with eye-holes cut in them does not make a man a liberal.

Blacks used to poll Republican. They did so right up until Mrs. Roosevelt made some sympathetic noises in 1932. And her husband didn't even deliver on Eleanor's promises.

It's not hard to move a voting bloc. And it should be especially easy to move voters to the right. Sensible adults are conservative in most aspects of their private lives. If this weren't so, imagine driving on I-95: The majority of drivers are drunk, stoned, making out, or watching TV, while the rest are trying to calculate the size of their carbon footprints on the backs of Whole Foods receipts while negotiating lane changes.

People are even more conservative if they have children. Nobody with kids is a liberal, except maybe one pothead in Marin County. Everybody wants his or her children to respect freedom, exercise responsibility, be honest, get educated, have opportunities, and own a bunch of guns. (The last is optional and includes, but is not limited to, me, my friends in New Hampshire, and Sarah Palin.)

Reagan managed to reach out to blue collar whites. But there his reach stopped, leaving many people on our side, but barely knowing it. There are enough yarmulkes among the neocons to show that Jews are not immune to conservatism. Few practicing Catholics vote Democratic anymore except in Massachusetts where they put something in the communion wafers. When it comes to a full-on, hemp-wearing, kelp-eating, mandala-tatted, fool-coifed liberal with socks in sandals, I have never met a Muslim like that or a Chinese and very few Hispanics. No U.S. immigrants from the Indian subcontinent fill that bill (the odd charlatan yogi excepted), nor do immigrants from Africa, Eastern Europe, or East Asia. And Japanese tourists may go so far as socks in sandals, but their liberal nonsense stops at the ankles.

We have all of this going for us, worldwide. And yet we chose to deliver our sermons only to the faithful or the already converted. Of course the trailer park Protestants yell "Amen." If you were handling rattlesnakes and keeping dinosaurs for pets, would you vote for the party that gets money from PETA?

In how many ways did we fail conservatism? And who can count that high? Take just one example of our unconserved tendency to poke our noses into other people's business: abortion. Democracy--be it howsoever conservative--is a manifestation of the will of the people. We may argue with the people as a man may argue with his wife, but in the end we must submit to the fact of being married. Get a pro-life friend drunk to the truth-telling stage and ask him what happens if his 14-year-old gets knocked up. What if it's rape? Some people truly have the courage of their convictions. I don't know if I'm one of them. I might kill the baby. I will kill the boy.

The real message of the conservative pro-life position is that we're in favor of living. We consider people--with a few obvious exceptions--to be assets. Liberals consider people to be nuisances. People are always needing more government resources to feed, house, and clothe them and to pick up the trash around their FEMA trailers and to make sure their self-esteem is high enough to join community organizers lobbying for more government resources.

If the citizenry insists that abortion remain legal--and, in a passive and conflicted way, the citizenry seems to be doing so--then give the issue a rest. Meanwhile we can, with the public's blessing, refuse to spend taxpayers' money on killing, circumscribe the timing and method of taking a human life, make sure parental consent is obtained when underage girls are involved, and tar and feather teenage boys and run them out of town on a rail. The law cannot be made identical with morality. Scan the list of the Ten Commandments and see how many could be enforced even by Rudy Giuliani.

Our impeachment of President Clinton was another example of placing the wrong political emphasis on personal matters. We impeached Clinton for lying to the government. To our surprise the electorate gave us cold comfort. Lying to the government: It's called April 15th. And we accused Clinton of lying about sex, which all men spend their lives doing, starting at 15 bragging about things we haven't done yet, then on to fibbing about things we are doing, and winding up with prevarications about things we no longer can do.

When the Monica Lewinsky news broke, my wife set me straight about the issue. "Here," she said, "is the most powerful man in the world. And everyone hates his wife. What's the matter with Sharon Stone? Instead, he's hitting on an emotionally disturbed intern barely out of her teens." But our horn rims were so fogged with detestation of Clinton that we couldn't see how really detestable he was. If we had stayed our hand in the House of Representatives and treated the brute with shunning or calls for interventions to make him seek help, we might have chased him out of the White House. (Although this probably would have required a U.S. news media from a parallel universe.)

Such things as letting the abortion debate be turned against us and using the gravity of the impeachment process on something that required the fly-swat of pest control were strategic errors. Would that blame could be put on our strategies instead of ourselves. We have lived up to no principle of conservatism.

Government is bigger than ever. We have fattened the stalled ox and hatred therewith rather than dined on herbs where love (and the voter) is. Instead of flattening the Department of Education with a wrecking ball we let it stand as a pulpit for Bill Bennett. When--to switch metaphors yet again--such a white elephant is not discarded someone will eventually try to ride in the howdah on its back. One of our supposed own did. No Child Left Behind? What if they deserve to be left behind? What if they deserve a smack on the behind? A nationwide program to test whether kids are what? Stupid? You've got kids. Kids are stupid.

We railed at welfare and counted it a great victory when Bill Clinton confused a few poor people by making the rules more complicated. But the "French-bread lines" for the rich, the "terrapin soup kitchens," continue their charity without stint.

The sludge and dreck of political muck-funds flowing to prosperous businesses and individuals have gotten deeper and more slippery and stink worse than ever with conservatives minding the sewage works of legislation.

Agriculture is a business that has been up to its bib overalls in politics since the first Thanksgiving dinner kickback to the Indians for subsidizing Pilgrim maize production with fish head fertilizer grants. But never, since the Mayflower knocked the rock in Plymouth, has anything as putrid as the Farm, Nutrition and Bioenergy Act of 2008 been spread upon the land. Just the name says it. There are no farms left. Not like the one grampa grew up on.

A "farm" today means 100,000 chickens in a space the size of a Motel 6 shower stall. If we cared anything about "nutrition" we would--to judge by the mountainous, jiggling flab of Americans--stop growing all food immediately. And "bioenergy" is a fraud of John Edwards-marital-fidelity proportions. Taxpayer money composted to produce a fuel made of alcohol that is more expensive than oil, more polluting than oil, and almost as bad as oil with vermouth and an olive. But this bill passed with bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress and was happily signed into law by President Bush. Now it's going to cost us at least $285 billion. That's about five times the gross domestic product of prewar Iraq. For what we will spend on the Farm, Nutrition and Bioenergy Act of 2008 we could have avoided the war in Iraq and simply bought a controlling interest in Saddam Hussein's country.

Yes, we got a few tax breaks during the regimes of Reagan and W. But the government is still taking a third of our salary. Is the government doing a third of our job? Is the government doing a third of our dishes? Our laundry? Our vacuuming? When we go to Hooters is the government tending bar making sure that one out of three margaritas is on the house? If our spouse is feeling romantic and we're tired, does the government come over to our house and take care of foreplay? (Actually, during the Clinton administration  .  .  .  )

Anyway, a low tax rate is not--never mind the rhetoric of every conservative politician--a bedrock principle of conservatism. The principle is fiscal responsibility.

Conservatives should never say to voters, "We can lower your taxes." Conservatives should say to voters, "You can raise spending. You, the electorate, can, if you choose, have an infinite number of elaborate and expensive government programs. But we, the government, will have to pay for those programs. We have three ways to pay.

"We can inflate the currency, destroying your ability to plan for the future, wrecking the nation's culture of thrift and common sense, and giving free rein to scallywags to borrow money for worthless scams and pay it back 10 cents on the dollar.

"We can raise taxes. If the taxes are levied across the board, money will be taken from everyone's pocket, the economy will stagnate, and the poorest and least advantaged will be harmed the most. If the taxes are levied only on the wealthy, money will be taken from wealthy people's pockets, hampering their capacity to make loans and investments, the economy will stagnate, and the poorest and the least advantaged will be harmed the most.

"And we can borrow, building up a massive national debt. This will cause all of the above things to happen plus it will fund Red Chinese nuclear submarines that will be popping up in San Francisco Bay to get some decent Szechwan take-out."

Yes, this would make for longer and less pithy stump speeches. But we'd be showing ourselves to be men and women of principle. It might cost us, short-term. We might get knocked down for not whoring after bioenergy votes in the Iowa caucuses. But at least we wouldn't land on our scruples. And we could get up again with dignity intact, dust ourselves off, and take another punch at the liberal bully-boys who want to snatch the citizenry's freedom and tuck that freedom, like a trophy feather, into the hatbands of their greasy political bowlers.

But are we men and women of principle? And I don't mean in the matter of tricky and private concerns like gay marriage. Civil marriage is an issue of contract law. A constitutional amendment against gay marriage? I don't get it. How about a constitutional amendment against first marriages? Now we're talking. No, I speak, once again, of the geological foundations of conservatism.

Where was the meum and the tuum in our shakedown of Washington lobbyists? It took a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives 40 years--from 1954 to 1994--to get that corrupt and arrogant. And we managed it in just 12. (Who says Republicans don't have much on the ball?)

Our attitude toward immigration has been repulsive. Are we not pro-life? Are not immigrants alive? Unfortunately, no, a lot of them aren't after attempting to cross our borders. Conservative immigration policies are as stupid as conservative attitudes are gross. Fence the border and give a huge boost to the Mexican ladder industry. Put the National Guard on the Rio Grande and know that U.S. troops are standing between you and yard care. George W. Bush, at his most beneficent, said if illegal immigrants wanted citizenship they would have to do three things: Pay taxes, learn English, and work in a meaningful job. Bush doesn't meet two out of three of those qualifications. And where would you rather eat? At a Vietnamese restaurant? Or in the Ayn Rand Café? Hey, waiter, are the burgers any good? Atlas shrugged. (We would, however, be able to have a smoke at the latter establishment.)

To go from slime to the sublime, there are the lofty issues about which we never bothered to form enough principles to go out and break them. What is the coherent modern conservative foreign policy?

We may think of this as a post 9/11 problem, but it's been with us all along. What was Reagan thinking, landing Marines in Lebanon to prop up the government of a country that didn't have one? In 1984, I visited the site where the Marines were murdered. It was a beachfront bivouac overlooked on three sides by hills full of hostile Shiite militia. You'd urge your daughter to date Rosie O'Donnell before you'd put troops ashore in such a place.

Since the early 1980s I've been present at the conception (to use the polite term) of many of our foreign policy initiatives. Iran-contra was about as smart as using the U.S. Postal Service to get weapons to anti-Communists. And I notice Danny Ortega is back in power anyway. I had a look into the eyes of the future rulers of Afghanistan at a sura in Peshawar as the Soviets were withdrawing from Kabul. I would rather have had a beer with Leonid Brezhnev.

Fall of the Berlin wall? Being there was fun. Nations that flaked off of the Soviet Union in southeastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus? Being there was not so fun.

The aftermath of the Gulf war still makes me sick. Fine to save the fat, greedy Kuwaitis and the arrogant, grasping house of Saud, but to hell with the Shiites and Kurds of Iraq until they get some oil.

Then, half a generation later, when we returned with our armies, we expected to be greeted as liberators. And, damn it, we were. I was in Baghdad in April 2003. People were glad to see us, until they noticed that we'd forgotten to bring along any personnel or provisions to feed or doctor the survivors of shock and awe or to get their electricity and water running again. After that they got huffy and began stuffing dynamite down their pants before consulting with the occupying forces.

Is there a moral dimension to foreign policy in our political philosophy? Or do we just exist to help the world's rich people make and keep their money? (And a fine job we've been doing of that lately.)

If we do have morals, where were they while Bosnians were slaughtered? And where were we while Clinton dithered over the massacres in Kosovo and decided, at last, to send the Serbs a message: Mess with the United States and we'll wait six months, then bomb the country next to you. Of Rwanda, I cannot bear to think, let alone jest.

And now, to glue and screw the lid on our coffin, comes this financial crisis. For almost three decades we've been trying to teach average Americans to act like "stakeholders" in their economy. They learned. They're crying and whining for government bailouts just like the billionaire stakeholders in banks and investment houses. Aid, I can assure you, will be forthcoming from President Obama.

Then average Americans will learn the wisdom of Ronald Reagan's statement: "The ten most dangerous words in the English language are, 'I'm from the federal government, and I'm here to help.' " Ask a Katrina survivor.

The left has no idea what's going on in the financial crisis. And I honor their confusion. Jim Jerk down the road from me, with all the cars up on blocks in his front yard, falls behind in his mortgage payments, and the economy of Iceland implodes. I'm missing a few pieces of this puzzle myself.

Under constant political pressure, which went almost unresisted by conservatives, a lot of lousy mortgages that would never be repaid were handed out to Jim Jerk and his drinking buddies and all the ex-wives and single mothers with whom Jim and his pals have littered the nation.

Wall Street looked at the worthless paper and thought, "How can we make a buck off this?" The answer was to wrap it in a bow. Take a wide enough variety of lousy mortgages--some from the East, some from the West, some from the cities, some from the suburbs, some from shacks, some from McMansions--bundle them together and put pressure on the bond rating agencies to do fancy risk management math, and you get a "collateralized debt obligation" with a triple-A rating. Good as cash. Until it wasn't.

Or, put another way, Wall Street was pulling the "room full of horse s--" trick. Brokerages were saying, "We're going to sell you a room full of horse s--. And with that much horse s--, you just know there's a pony in there somewhere."

Anyway, it's no use blaming Wall Street. Blaming Wall Street for being greedy is like scolding defensive linemen for being big and aggressive. The people on Wall Street never claimed to be public servants. They took no oath of office. They're in it for the money. We pay them to be in it for the money. We don't want our retirement accounts to get a 2 percent return. (Although that sounds pretty good at the moment.)

What will destroy our country and us is not the financial crisis but the fact that liberals think the free market is some kind of sect or cult, which conservatives have asked Americans to take on faith. That's not what the free market is. The free market is just a measurement, a device to tell us what people are willing to pay for any given thing at any given moment. The free market is a bathroom scale. You may hate what you see when you step on the scale. "Jeeze, 230 pounds!" But you can't pass a law making yourself weigh 185. Liberals think you can. And voters--all the voters, right up to the tippy-top corner office of Goldman Sachs--think so too.

We, the conservatives, who do understand the free market, had the responsibility to--as it were--foreclose upon this mess. The market is a measurement, but that measuring does not work to the advantage of a nation or its citizens unless the assessments of volume, circumference, and weight are conducted with transparency and under the rule of law. We've had the rule of law largely in our hands since 1980. Where is the transparency? It's one more job we botched.

Although I must say we're doing good work on our final task--attaching the garden hose to our car's exhaust pipe and running it in through a vent window. Barack and Michelle will be by in a moment with some subsidized ethanol to top up our gas tank. And then we can turn the key.

P.J. O'Rourke is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

Freedom now stands alone

By Melanie Phillips
http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/
Wednesday, 5th November 2008
http://www.melaniephillips.com/

So the answer to my question turned out to be yes, America really was going to do this. A historic moment indeed. The hyperbole for once is not exaggerated: this is a watershed election which changes the fate of the world. The fear however is that the world now becomes very much less safe for all of us as a result. Those of us who have looked on appalled during this most frightening of presidential elections – at the suspension of reason and its replacement by thuggery -- can only hope that the way this man governs will be very different from the profile provided by his influences, associations and record to date. It’s a faint hope – the enemies of America, freedom and the west will certainly be rejoicing today.

America has voted for change, apparently. Change from what, precisely? From Bush? But in the second term, Bush stopped being Bush. His foreign policy lurched from paralysis to appeasement (redeemed only by the strategic genius of Gen Petraeus – and what price Petraeus now?) As Frank Gaffney wrote in the Washington Times yesterday, Bush’s Treasury is about to open the way for sharia law to be imposed upon America’s banking system. And it was a Democrat-controlled Congress that helped provoke the sub-prime lending crisis that triggered the current financial meltdown.

What this election tells us is that America voted for change because America is in the process of changing – not just demographically by becoming less white and more diverse, but as the result of a culture war in which western civilisation is losing out to a far-left agenda which has become mainstream, teaching American children to despise the founding values of their country and hijacking discourse by the minority power-grab of victim-culture.

The reaction of conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic to this undoubted change – not just in the US but in Britain too – shows the intellectual disarray caused by these profound developments. They say politicians must stop trying to hold the cultural line and go instead with the flow of change. In Britain, the Tory party has adopted this strategy. Now there are Republicans saying the same thing.

But John McCain is a Republican who does not fit the old template, who does subscribe to some of this ‘change’ agenda on a number of issues. As a result, he was incapable of attacking Obama on the most important grounds of all: that he stood for values inimical to America’s founding principles. When he did venture into this territory, it was half-cocked and far too late, appearing merely like the desperate throw of a loser. The reason he couldn’t do it earlier was that he had no coherent platform of his own. So why vote for a muddled and erratic quasi-'progressive' when the real thing is a rock star? It cannot be said too emphatically -- the Republicans lost this election. Obama ran a superbly disciplined campaign and he was an impressive candidate, particularly in his calm and stately demeanour throughout. The Republicans screwed up in government, they selected a hopelessly frail and erratic candidate, he ran a shambolic campaign. They deserved to lose.

So now we are promised a change in America’s fundamental values. And they really will be changed. Obama has said in terms that he thinks the US constitution is flawed. America’s belief in itself as defending individual liberty, truth and justice on behalf of the free world will now be expiated instead as its original sin. Those who have for the past eight years worked to bring down the America that defends and protects life and liberty are today ecstatic. They have stormed the very citadel on Pennsylvania Avenue itself.

Millions of Americans remain lion-hearted, decent, rational and sturdy. They find themselves today abandoned, horrified, deeply apprehensive for the future of their country and the free world. No longer the land of the free and the home of the brave; they must now look elsewhere.

Hard Body Plays an Old Softie (Himself)

By DENNIS LIM
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
November 9, 2008

Jean-Claude Van Damme in “JCVD,” in which he plays a washed-up, aging movie star named Jean-Claude Van Damme

On the phone the other day Jean-Claude Van Damme, the martial artist and action hero known in his heyday as the Muscles from Brussels, was sounding anxious and apologetic. He had canceled a trip to New York — missing a host of engagements, including an in-person interview with this writer — to remain in Bangkok, where he recently finished shooting a movie. And he wanted to make clear that he had a very good reason.

“I adopted seven dogs here, and one of them had a heart attack,” Mr. Van Damme said. “I’m sleeping with him every night at the clinic. If I leave him, he’s going to go back into a coma. He’s a very sensitive dog.” The others — all strays, some disabled (he built “a little wheelchair” for one of them) — have been sent to his home in Belgium.

It might be odd to think of Mr. Van Damme, a veteran of steroidal exploitation cinema and a virtuoso of the bone-crunching split kick, as an old softie, but it is also perfectly consistent with the image overhaul implicit in his latest vehicle, “JCVD,” which opened on Friday. Directed by the French filmmaker Mabrouk El Mechri, it allows its namesake to reveal new facets to his screen persona basically by playing himself. A jokey hall-of-mirrors movie with a melancholic streak, it stars Mr. Van Damme — who turned 48 last month and whose last film to open theatrically in the United States was the 1998 flop “Knock Off,” — as Jean-Claude Van Damme, a washed-up middle-aged movie star.

Thanks in part to a widely circulating online trailer “JCVD” has garnered more attention for Mr. Van Damme than he has received in years. (The last time he made even a remote impact on pop-culture consciousness was when he appeared on “Friends” as himself in 1996 and boasted that he could crush a walnut with his buttocks.) “JCVD” was a word-of-mouth hit at Cannes, and it had its North American premiere at a raucous midnight screening at the Toronto International Film Festival.

The movie’s real-life back story is the familiar, even classic, rise and fall of Mr. Van Damme’s career. He got his break by impressing the Israeli movie mogul Menahem Golan with a kickboxing demonstration. His early films (“Bloodsport,” “Kickboxer”) were slapdash cheapies, often set in vaguely exotic Asian locales and revolving around mano-a-mano fisticuffs that show off his moves (especially those trademark splits, developed from studying ballet and karate as a kid).

In the ’90s he graduated to slicker studio fare like “Universal Soldier” and “Timecop,” often working with fellow expats who were just starting out in Hollywood (the German-born Roland Emmerich, the Hong Kong directors John Woo and Tsui Hark). But his personal life started to unravel: messy divorces (he has been married five times), an extravagant cocaine habit, an arrest for drunken driving.

He soon slid back down the B-movie totem pole. Before “JCVD” 13 consecutive Van Damme films had bypassed theaters in this country. With interchangeable plots and titles (“In Hell,” “Inferno,” “Until Death”), they were often shot in low-cost locations like Bulgaria and Romania.

The years in the straight-to-video ghetto took a toll on his pride. “I wanted to be back on the big screen,” he said. He sensed an opportunity when Marc Fiszman, a French producer, asked if he would consider playing himself in a meta-movie. (Mr. Fiszman’s previous film was the comedy “Jean-Philippe,” starring the singer Johnny Hallyday as a parallel-world version of himself.) A script was commissioned, eventually ending up with Mr. El Mechri, a young director who had some success with his first film, “Virgil” (2005).

“It was a ‘Die Hard’-ish kind of parody,” Mr. El Mechri said of the original screenplay. “It was just mocking, and it was obviously written by people who didn’t know Jean-Claude at a fan level.” Mr. El Mechri rewrote the script to incorporate a “Dog Day Afternoon”-like scenario — Mr. Van Damme’s alter-ego, after losing a humiliating custody battle, stumbles into a hostage situation — and drew liberally on the star’s biography and persona.

“JCVD” requires Mr. Van Damme openly to recognize the absurdity and indignity of being an aging action hero. “I still train every day,” he said. “I don’t think an actor my age can do what I can do physically, or even one who is 20.” But he added, “I’m 48 years old and to jump off a staircase and do three somersaults in the air — I will not feel the truth in that character today.”

Which is not to say that “JCVD” omits the wham-bam violence that fans term Van Dammage.

It opens with an over-the-top action set piece from a film-within-the-film, complete with gunplay, knife fights and exploding grenades that was shot in a single take and that visibly pushed the star to his limits. “I was completely out of breath to the point of anxiety,” he said.

Mr. Van Damme’s more sensitive side is on jaw-dropping display in the movie’s pièce de résistance, a soul-baring six-minute monologue with more emoting than in all his other roles put together. His eyes tearing up and his voice quavering, he reflects on his dreams and failures, and effectively head-butts the fourth wall. (“I truly believe it’s not a movie.”)

The scene came about when Mr. Van Damme, feeling apprehensive on the eve of the shoot, told Mr. El Mechri that he thought the film was still missing a deeper candor. Mr. El Mechri proposed a long, to-the-camera address. Mr. Van Damme said he felt “completely naked” while delivering his monologue.

When he watched it for the first time, he remembers thinking, “I didn’t lie.” He added, “It was scary for me to do it in French.” French is his native language, but this is his first French-speaking lead role, and he has been mercilessly mocked for spouting Zenlike aphorisms in Franglais on French television. (“Je suis aware.”)

Filled with whiplash digressions and weirdly poetic grace notes, the show-stopping speech is actually a fair approximation of how he really speaks. On his disillusionment with celebrity, he said: “I was so hungry for fame — not for fame, no — well, let’s be honest, hungry for fame, hungry for love. But then fame came, and it was not existing.”

On being engaged with his movies: “I want to be involved in that nine-month process. It’s like making a baby. You make love, and it’s the full way to delivery. How can I be mentally pregnant with the film all the way?”

His next film, which bears the most un-Van Damme-ian title “Full Love,” would seem to offer full-on mental pregnancy: he serves as actor, writer, director and producer. He will only say that it is set in 1960s Louisiana and present-day Southeast Asia and that it will have “a controversial message.”

The shift to directing is part of a larger attempt to reinvent, or at least reclaim, his career. Moving forward he would like to be seen as “an action character hero instead of an action star.” And he’s convinced that he has embarked on the right path. “It’s difficult to make a bad movie after an experience like ‘JCVD,’ ” he said.

He acknowledged the importance of personal stability. He remarried his second wife, the bodybuilder Gladys Portuguese, and is reunited with his children. After years in Los Angeles he now divides his time between Belgium and Hong Kong, where he has shot several films and feels wholly at home.

“I want people to see I’ve changed, that this guy is responsible,” he said. “I want to show my family Daddy’s back, like old times.”

Related

Trailer: 'JCVD'

Today's Tune: Townes Van Zandt - Tecumseh Valley

(Click on title to play video)